From his pocket he took the tag that bore the name “Songu.” He carried it up the steps, taking no effort to mask his footsteps.
Again, he was met on the stairs by the makipili Filipina. This time she had with her a bony old man. The woman crossed arms over her scrawny chest, holding the high ground of the landing. The old man stood behind her.
The woman said, “Turn around.”
Tal did not stop ascending. “Get out of my way.”
He stepped onto the landing. The makipili moved in his path to Carmen’s room. She spotted the wooden tag in his hand.
“Give me that.”
“Take it from me.”
“You,” she snapped. “You’re not in New York or wherever you think you are. She’s not yours. She belongs to the Japanese. I can have you shot.”
“You know where to find me. Now move.”
Tal advanced on the woman, with no plan except to go to Carmen. The makipili unfolded her arms, ready to scrap.
Behind her, the old man spoke. “Take Songu.”
The woman spun on him. “Shut up.”
“I’ve done too much of that. Step aside.”
“No.”
Tal had waited long enough. He moved into range of the old woman. She whipped a knobby fist at his head. He raised an arm to block it, she swung the other hand. Tal rushed her, clinching her blouse in both hands. He swept the woman onto her heels, driving her backward against the wall. She struck with a thud and hung from his fists.
His brought his face close. “You ever speak to me again, or if anything bad happens to either of those girls, I’ll throw you down the stairs. You understand?”
She dropped none of her contempt. “Yes, American.”
Tal put her on her feet. He moved toward the hall. She stayed pressed against the wall, seething.
Carmen waited outside her room. She pointed, shouting, “Tal!”
He mistook her purpose, thinking this a greeting. When the mop handle cracked the back of his skull, Tal whirled. Leaping faster than the old woman could retreat, he shoved with enough force to cast her into the air. She landed on her rump, skidding to the landing. The woman scrambled up. Her old Filipino moved to intercept her.
“Please, American. Leave her to me.”
“I don’t think you can handle her.”
“I can’t. I can only try to protect her.”
“Then keep her away from me.”
Carmen walked him to her room. He held up the drape for her to enter. Jazz from the camp loudspeakers drifted in her window.
Tal handed her the wooden tag.
“I brought it, like you said.”
Carmen took it, then gave it back. “Bring it to me again.”
“All right.”
“How is your head?”
He fingered the spot where the woman had thumped him. He’d have a lump.
“I want to kiss you.”
He kicked himself for this clumsiness. But the thought of saying that had been the only beacon he’d followed under the wire, through the brush, across the road, and past the combative old woman. He could have said a million other things, and every syllable would have been just one more obstacle to speaking those words.
Carmen blinked away her surprise. “All right.”
They came together slowly. Tal kept his eyes open. When their mouths met, he expected Carmen to delve deeply into the kiss, carry him away on it. She remained shy, careful. Tal was not sure how to propel matters, so he hesitated. They lingered on each other’s lips. Tal shut his eyes. Every sense in his body crowded to feel and explore the girl through this first true touch, until Carmen set her hand gently on his chest to push him away.
Tal almost lost his balance. She seemed unsteady, too. He put a hand against the wall. She left hers against his chest.
She said, “Not here.”
~ * ~
Chapter Sixteen
T
hey crossed the road together into the cogon grass. In khakis and T-shirt, Carmen looked like any Filipino boy out scavenging after dark. The Japanese at the gate took no notice.
They moved into the orchard. Carmen trailed her hand through the low branches as if through a waterfall, reveling in the dark greenery and the freedom to pass here unseen with the boy. She’d traded her lamp for the moon, her mattress for wild weeds and these trees. He’d come for her as promised. She’d have to return, but before that happened she would inhale and feel as much of this open night as she could.
“Come on,” he chided when she lingered too long in the orchard.
“Tell me where we’re going.”
“It’s safe and quiet. And it’s special, you’ll see. Take my hand.”
He led Carmen into a thicket of high grasses and bamboo. Blades swished at her legs tramping in Tal’s wake, until they emerged at the bank of a ravine. Above the rocky creek bed, a canopy of trees and vines blocked all but scraps of stars.
She asked, “Down there?”
Tal clambered down the steep slope. He supported her, following close behind. Halfway along the incline, a rock broke loose beneath her slipper, clattering to the bottom. A sudden quiet cropped up on all sides, a cessation of sounds she’d not been aware had been there.
Tal smiled up at her. “You see?”
Reaching the creek bed, the boy moved carefully, guiding Carmen in his footsteps. In the faint light through the trees, he picked their way. The noises of the ravine resurged. An owl piped up, something screeched far ahead, echoing across the jungle. A monkey scurried off a branch, shaking leaves that fluttered around Carmen and Tal.
He led her to a boulder resting near the bank. Both went barefoot. They sat against the great rock, dangling feet into a shallow pool.
Carmen took Tal’s hand, tracing around his knuckles. “Listen to them,” she whispered. The voices of the ravine were new to her, croaks and caterwauls, the whoosh of wings like witches at night, creaking branches, scampering in the trees. Man was absent in this place. In Manila, before Los Baños, Carmen heard nothing but machines, her family hawking wares, the bells of taxis, churches and horses; in the shuho, only the worst sounds of men and her own growling stomach, hymns from the camp, bombers above. Tonight, Tal had brought her here to show her nothing of man but him.
A mosquito buzzed her ear. Tal waved it away from her. She kissed him.
This kiss burst out of her. The boy raised both hands to her shoulders. She stood into the kiss, as if unbound from the shuho she did not fall but was drawn upward. He rose with her.
The boy’s lips pulled away. He stepped back, removing his hands. They stood in water to their calves.
“What?” she asked.
He hesitated.
She asked again, “What?”
“I’ve never done this before.”
She wrapped herself with one arm across her breasts, the other at her waist, the way she would stand naked.
“Do you care about me, Tal?”
“More than I can say.”
“Then I haven t done this before either.”
Carmen closed the distance between them. She gripped the hem of his T-shirt, Tal raised his arms. She swept the shirt up and away and tossed it onto a rock. She tugged off her own T-shirt. Tal reached to pull her brown breast against his pink skin but Carmen held him off. She unbuttoned his shorts and made him sit on the rock for her to take them off. She did the same beside him with her khaki pants.
Carmen stood in the pool. She drew him to his feet. In the dim light, every bit of his frame was angular, from big kneecaps above the water to sharp collarbones. The Tuck boy seemed whittled from hard ivory. One day he would fill out to be a breathtaking man.
She put a hand to his chest, whiter than any she had touched. She circled behind him, trailing fingertips over his skin. His flesh lacked the fat of an officer, the stink of a soldier. The boy fidgeted, like any boy. He had violence in him. She’d seen it flash tonight in the shuho. Nagata had not drubbed it out of him but pounded it in d
eeper. She’d seen this in the Japanese, their absorption of anger and the release of it on her body. Running a hand across the lean muscles of his back, Tal frightened her more than any of them because he was not a thousand, he was one.
He turned, not waiting for Carmen to finish her orbit around him. Carmen stepped back. She ran her eyes down her own bare length, matching herself to him. She was darker and just as poorly fed. She knew how they would fit together, and nothing else.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Another mosquito flew between them. Tal folded to sit. The water rose to his ribs.
“Come on,” he said, “take a seat. We’ll get eaten up if we don’t.”
Carmen lowered herself. The pool chilled for a moment. Her buttocks found sand and small pebbles. With cupped hands, Tal poured water across her shoulders to ward off the insects. She wet him, too, dribbling over his head until they both glistened. Around them the jungle stirred, accustomed to them now.
The boy quieted. He faced the stars. Droplets channeled down his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbed when he spoke.
“I want to say something.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“It’s important.”
“To you.”
She slid to him until their knees bumped. She set a hand on his leg. “You want to tell me you don’t care what I’ve been through.”
“That’s right. I don’t.”
“Tal, you can’t say that to me.”
“Why? It doesn’t matter to me, is all.”
“How would you feel if I said the same to you? I don’t care that you’ve been a prisoner for three years. I’ve watched you starve. I’ve seen you beaten.” Curling a hand behind his neck, Carmen drew closer. She traced his shoulders, the flesh mended soft. “What if I said I don’t care what you’ve been through? Then I’d be saying I don’t care about you. Because the whip will always be across your back and these years will always be stolen. You’ll never have a day that isn’t changed by Los Baños. If we live, and I want to love you, I’ll have to care. The same goes for you.”
Carmen floated across his body. She had no idea what her damage would be from Los Baños, probably greater than his. She would need help to carry it. She feared her shoulders would never heal soft.
She framed his face in her hands to kiss him and lay him back against the rock. Under the water, she spread her legs. In the kiss, against his lips, she said, “Gently.”
Carmen reached into the pool to guide him. Tal gasped against her cheek when she slid him inside. She sat tall, to take all of him. Tal’s jaw slackened. The pool rippled outward from them, pushed by her movements.
“Oh my God,” he said.
She bridged his lips with a finger. Words could do nothing in her life.
~ * ~
Chapter Seventeen
T
HE BOY returned before midnight. Remy stayed quiet while he climbed into the upper bunk.
In the morning, Tal slept while Remy and the others rose. Remy did not go with them for breakfast but lagged behind to stand beside the bunk gazing at his son. He looked for a grin, even sniffed the boy’s clothes, but found no secrets, just a wooden tag in his hand bearing a Japanese symbol. Curious, for it surely had something to do with the girl, Remy considered slipping it from Tal’s fingers but did not. He patted the bed and headed out for the morning meal.
Remy carried his food under the dao tree and ate by himself in the rising sun. He glanced over the barracks to Carmen’s empty window. He missed talking to Mac, then thought of Sarah, as he often did when alone. He had no one to share his sense of remoteness. Tal would be different when he woke. He’d be on a path all sons take that leads them finally away from their fathers, as they ought. Remy thought of his own dad, long dead in France. He couldn’t conceive of any advice from the old ghost, nor from his mother, whom he’d kissed goodbye twenty years ago and never seen again. Remy sipped his first mug of real coffee in six months. He wanted company.
Not far off, at the western gate, a dozen internees visited and traded with locals. The new guards prohibited Filipinos in the camp, but the rule had become relaxed everywhere but the eastern, main gate. Food and news continued to flow in behind the guards’ turned backs. Remy ambled over from the dao.
No Japanese manned the dirt pillboxes outside the closed gate. Meat, bananas, greens, coconuts, and money passed through the unguarded wire. The locals overflowed with gossip and news, claiming landings, fleets sighted offshore, bombardments and fighting everywhere. With the last pesos in his pocket, Remy chose a quiet boy who had six dead chickens dangling from his belt. Remy bought a half dozen eggs.
Handing over the money, he asked, “Tell me straight. What’s going on out there?”
The boy hitched his sagging belt. He had a different bearing than the others, restrained, observant. He was the only one carrying a weapon, a long pinuti bolo attached at his backside.
The boy stashed the pesos. He measured Remy with a slow nod. He backed away, saying only, “Today.” He walked off from the gate. The bolo hung behind him like a lion’s tail.
Remy headed for the barracks, to wake Tal with the promise of scrambled eggs since the boy had missed breakfast. Before he’d gone halfway across the field, forty bombers emerged above the western jungle. Remy stopped to admire them. The drone of an even larger flight of planes spun him east. The chicken boy seemed prophetic when the bombers on all sides released their whistling loads, the ground shivered, and the rumbles of rolling detonations rattled the camp.
Tal came outside, rubbing his eyes.
“Mornin’,” Remy said. “I got you some eggs.”
“Man,” Tal said, squinting into the morning sky at the waves of bombers. “That’s some alarm clock. Almost knocked me outta bed.”
“Big doin’s, all right,” Remy agreed. “So, look. Don’t tell me nothin’ you don’t want to. But how was your evening?”
The earth shook under their feet. His son beamed and clapped him on the back.
The boy said, “Feel that?” and no more.
~ * ~
Air raids intensified throughout the day. In mid-afternoon, the loudspeakers at their highest volume announced that a special broadcast was coming and all should pay attention. Even then, some missed the word and did not come outdoors, tired of the constant barrages and the trembling ground.
Remy sat on the back steps of his barracks. A hundred yards off, Tal and Carmen chatted on opposite sides of the barbed wire, where they’d been all day. Yumi lay with her head on Carmen’s lap.
The loudspeakers sizzled to life, Lucas’s voice boomed across the camp. In moments, they would hear important news.
All heads in the camp perked up at the first tones of the broadcast. At the fence, Tal raised a hand for Carmen to listen. Yumi showed no interest.
“This is KGEX, in San Francisco. This morning, January ninth, General Douglas MacArthur led a force of sixty-eight thousand men from the U.S. Sixth Army in an invasion landing one hundred miles northwest of Manila, at Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. Japanese defenders offered only token resistance. The battle to liberate Luzon has begun.”
No celebration Remy had heard from the camp rivaled the noise that went up. The announcement, even the bombardments, were drowned beneath the internees’ reaction. Tal and Carmen reached for each other vainly through the wire fences. Folks danced and threw their hats, Remy again tossed up his fedora. Little Yumi sat up applauding, likely without knowing why. The handful of guards kept plodding their slipshod patrols.
The rest of the broadcast was short on details, promising more updates as events developed. The loudspeakers went quiet. Remy stood from the steps, tempted to dig out Mac’s radio and scan for more info. But the boy was entranced at the fence with his girl, tossing her old Vogue magazines through the wire, and Remy couldn’t do it without his lookout and help sliding the big bunk aside. He fingered the pair of dice in his pocket, and went in search of a game of craps.
Remy set his plank in the shade of the dao. Journalist Owen fanned out a wad of pesos, claiming he’d been saving them for a rainy day. “Hell,” he said, “it don’t look like it’s gonna rain.”
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 19
