Remy reached for the cigarette on Tal’s lips, knowing in advance he could not stand the taste. His hands wanted something to master. He took a drag and spat afterward, handing it back.
“I keep thinking about Clem.”
“What about him?”
“A couple days before he got shot. He lost a lot at dice.”
Tal emitted a cloud of acrid smoke. “That don’t mean anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I haven’t lost ten games of solitaire in a row since I can remember.”
“You’ve only lost nine, you said.”
Remy tucked the deck into his vest pocket. “Forget it, I ain’t playin’ one more.”
He doused the lantern. Fuel was another vanishing commodity in the camp. With the electricity off, the guards kept the kerosene for their own lamps.
Remy lay next to his son, copying the boy’s posture, resting a hand beneath his head. He figured they had less than thirty minutes to curfew, maybe less before the bugs drove them inside. The leaves of the dao blocked the night sky. To the north, tall clouds shimmered scarlet, lit by fires and artillery from the assault on Manila.
“I’m hungry,” said Tal, in answer to nothing.
“Me, too. Did you hear what Nagata did today?”
“What now?”
“Cut back the milk ration for babies. Instead of one pint every other day, its one a week. What a sumbitch. Starving babies.”
Tal finished his ersatz cigarette. He tossed it without lighting another. “Bascom traded his fifteen-jewel Elgin to a guard. His grandfather gave him that watch. Killed him to lose it.”
“What’d he get for it?”
“Three kilos of sugar, two of rice. The sugar was short two-thirds of a kilo.”
“You know what the guards are doin’, don’t you?”
“Trading us rations out of our own stores.”
“That explains why Nagata’s got a stranglehold on our food. We can t buy from the locals, can t grow our own, so we wind up making trades with the guards for our own supplies. And he’s gettin’ a cut out of every trade in the camp, you know damn well he is.”
“Nagata,” Tal said with distaste. “I reckon he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
“I just hope it’s me that delivers it.” Remy knocked knuckles against the boy’s hip. “Or you.”
The two reclined quietly. Beyond the unlit fence, Boot Creek burbled with runoff from the day’s shower. The voices of animals and birds in the ravine reminded Remy how close wildness lay. The unwilling deck of cards, squawks from the jungle, the darkened camp, bloodred clouds on the horizon, the stench of burnt catnip on his boy’s skin, these made Remy restive. For a decade he’d earned his livelihood reading signs as small as a flinch or a blink, parsing mysteries, betting on what would come next. Tonight, he was stymied.
~ * ~
In the morning, in the rain, a guard’s throat was slit.
The assault happened at the western gate before sunup. Remy hadn’t seen the body but the word at breakfast was that the cut almost decapitated the Japanese. The wound had come from a bolo.
Nagata cancelled the morning calisthenics to lead a squad of two dozen armed guards into the bush. They hauled with them a pair of heavy machine guns. Through the morning meal, the camp listened to the shush of rain on the nipa roofs and the clap of potshots outside the wire.
In the dining hall of No. 12, Remy pushed at his steamed greens and portion of white rice. The slimy greens were the worst-tasting of the month, a mash of steamed tomato leaves, pigweed, and morning glory. Nagata had them eating grass.
Across the table, Herring, a land lawyer, flattened a palm over his stomach. The man had a worsening case of bacillary dysentery. Over the past two weeks, he’d withered. He was not going to be cured; with the electricity off, serums in the hospital refrigerator that might have helped were spoiled. Herring’s only chance, like the hundreds growing sicker by the day, was rescue. If Mac we’re alive, he’d have found the man an egg.
Remy asked, “How you holdin’ up?”
“I’m holdin’ up. Just not holdin’ anything in. You hear about that guard gettin’ his head near cut off?”
“Yeah. At the west gate this mornin’.”
“Someone’s gotta tell the guerrillas to calm down. I understand them wantin’ revenge and all, but so long as we’re the ones inside the wire, I wish they’d sit on their hands a little longer.”
Remy made no mention of what he’d heard on the radio over the last several days: more civilian killings in Manila, a slaughter at Palawan, the rescue by Army Rangers of five hundred half-dead survivors of the Bataan March from a POW camp in Cabanatuan. Every one of these actions was another spark to fire up the guerrillas. No sense enflaming passions and fears in the camp. That ugly pit by the dao tree had given the internees enough cause to worry. Add to it the murdered guard this morning. Remy was careful lately to spark rumors with only good news, to keep hopes buoyed. The bad he kept to himself. For now.
Poor Herring looked cadaverous. He was as good as dead in a few more weeks. Remy would build another bamboo casket. He caught himself measuring the lawyer, thinking like an undertaker. He pushed his half-eaten plate over to Herring and left the table.
The rain and the guards’ search for guerrillas around the camp delayed that day’s firewood detail. Remy lay in his bunk until the sky cleared and the Japanese returned. The soldiers trudged in the west gate scratched up and tired. They were a disorderly lot, out of step, drenched, and frustrated. Nagata was the only one with a martial air left to him, swinging his arms with a pistol at his belt.
Remy assembled along with the hundred others whose names appeared on today’s labor list for the firewood detail, doubled for the past three months. The work in the forest went tediously. The men of the detail eyed the great evergreens reaching to the top of the forest canopy. They walked past fig trees lush with fruit, coconuts on the ground, and snagged what they could without being caught. On the path, they pushed through lady slipper orchids and gossamer ferns dripping with morning rain. Remy and the rest of the internees imagined a guerrilla behind each broad trunk, every green fan in this paradise, some angry hornet of a Filipino ready to scrap with the dozen guards and get everyone killed in the crossfire. The guards, too, kept a wary eye out and rifles in their hands. Even with twice the manpower, the carabao sled held only three quarters of a load when time came to return to camp.
Remy plodded near the end of the line, exhausted and soaked from sweat and humidity. He fanned himself with his fedora. A mile from the main gate, the column encountered a procession of local merchants and their mule-drawn carrettas. The vendors pulled off the downhill path to set up shop for the passing internees. The guards, weary and seeing no threat, let the internees purchase fruits, vegetables, and plucked poultry. The guards themselves bought a few items.
Remy carried no money. He stood on the path, thirsty. He walked to the water cart for a drink. Far ahead, the water buffalo bellowed against the halt in progress. This beast was new to the traces.
A small woman, old with parchment skin, beckoned Remy to her cart. He waved her off, pointing at his empty pocket. She dipped a wooden ladle into a bucket, and it came up dripping a milky liquid. She motioned him over with fervor. Remy accepted a free drink of coconut milk.
The old Filipina did not reach for the drained ladle. A lean boy appeared beside her to take the ladle from Remy’s hand. He left behind a scrolled bit of paper, slipped into Remy’s palm. The boy dropped the ladle into the coconut-milk bucket, then faded into the jungle. This was the boy from a month ago at the west gate, the one with dead chickens hanging from his belt.
The long bolo dangling at his rear, like a tail.
~ * ~
Remy lowered the earpiece of the crystal radio. He lifted his head above the windowsill, to look over the roofs of the dark camp, northwest to Manila. The sky continued to flicker there, as if the two forces battled with lightning.
“Boy
.”
Tal stood with one foot in the hall, on guard while Remy worked the radio.
“Yeah?”
“C’mere. I want you to hear this.”
Tal entered the room to kneel beside the radio. Remy moved to stand watch in his place.
Remy waited, letting the Voice of Freedom news cycle in the boy’s ear. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had just concluded a secret meeting somewhere in the Soviet Union. The Allies had launched an offensive to reach the Rhine in Germany. The Red Army had liberated a Nazi extermination camp for Jews at Auschwitz, Poland. In the Pacific, American troops made tough progress in the fight for Manila.
Tal looked up, excited and pleased.
That ain’t it, Remy thought. He motioned for Tal to keep listening. The boy returned his attention to the earpiece.
After quiet minutes, Tal raised a hand to the top of his head. Remy watched and waited for his son’s stunned reaction. He fingered the scrolled message in his vest pocket.
When Tal lowered the earpiece, Remy indicated the hole in the floorboards, for him to hide the radio. After that was done, the two slid the bunk into place.
Remy said, “Let’s walk.”
He led Tal out of the barracks to the open field. Curfew remained a half hour off. Some internees strolled with lanterns fueled by coconut oil, others sat on blankets to watch the jittering northwest sky. Deep, rumbling detonations accompanied the flashes. Remy stopped on the grass far from others hearing.
“Two thousand,” he muttered. The same number of people in this camp. The words felt so inadequate for the stack of dead.
“How far is that from here?”
“Calamba? Seven miles.” Remy aimed his chin the direction of Manila. He wondered if some of the fiery glow of last night had come from the slaughter there.
The Voice of Freedom report had been graphic. Yesterday, in reprisal for the killing of an officer and five soldiers, Japanese troops herded the population of Calamba’s barrio into the town’s Catholic church. Soldiers gutted them with bayonets, choked them with hemp ropes. Women and children were among those massacred.
Tal gazed where Remy indicated.
Remy dug into his vest pocket. The little scroll was no bigger than a cigarette.
“Here.”
“What’s that?”
“I got handed this a couple days ago on the trail, when I was on firewood detail. It’s for you.”
Tal took the message. He rolled it in his fingers.
“Who’s it from?”
“Carmen.”
“Is this it? Is this the message telling us to get out of the camp?”
“No, it ain’t that message. This is somethin’ else. Just for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guerrillas want an internee to go to a meeting. They’ve got an American radio operator working with ‘em. Carmen said you’d be the one to do it. To be honest, I wasn’t gonna give this to you.”
“Why not?”
Remy shrugged. “Afraid of lettin’ you go. People gettin’ shot outside the wire, the guerrillas goin’ crazy. I figured, screw it, let ‘em get someone else. Then I heard that report about Calamba.”
Tal unfurled the message. “You didn’t have any right to do that.”
The boy tried to read the small page in the dark. Remy pushed his son’s hands down.
“Boy, you’re all I got. I don’t regret doin’ anything I can to protect you. But you know what?”
Tal stuffed the scroll in his pocket to read it later by a lantern. “What.”
“I came to the same conclusion Carmen did. There ain’t anyone else. You’re fast and you’re smart. You got guts. You gotta go.”
Remy imagined again the two thousand bodies in Calamba, the fires in the sky a pyre for them, another warning for the internees of Los Baños.
He said, “You remember how we agreed we’d survive, and we’d save the girl? Looks like she’s saving us instead.”
“When’s the meeting?”
“Midnight. Tonight.”
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-six
T
he curfew and shut-off electricity aided Tal’s exit from the camp. The patrolling guards relaxed their vigilance and the lanterns they carried marked their locations. Tal slipped behind the infirmary, under the wire, and into the ravine.
He followed the stones and trickling waters curving around the northern bounds of the camp. He stepped lightly, sticking to the larger rocks in the creek bed. The night creatures ignored him, pleased to see the boy move past quickly, sensing no menace. Thirty minutes after slipping under the fence, Tal scrambled up the shallow cliff beneath Faculty Hill.
The mission excited him. In every step he took he felt the joint venture with Carmen, both of them working with the guerrillas. Again, just as they had for months gazing at each other in the camp, she in her high window, him inside the wire, they did not speak but were linked. He didn’t know what was at stake with the meeting ahead but supposed it was all their lives.
He found the house quickly, a dimly lit bungalow behind a great willow. Tal circled through hedges to the backyard. He felt out of place sneaking across the grass to the rear door, not because he was an American escapee and it would be fatal to be caught in his company; he’d not entered a real home in over three years.
Tal tapped on a glass pane. He gazed into a crowded kitchen, beyond that to a room stuffed with books and pillowed chairs. A pretty Filipina rounded a corner to let him in.
She smiled through the glass, raven hair gathered in a ponytail. She worked a deadbolt, then pulled the door open.
“Hello,” she said. “Hungry?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come in. I’ll bring you something.”
She shut the door behind him with a glance into the night.
“Go inside. I’ll bring food.”
Tal wanted to pause in the kitchen to touch everything, pots and pans and soft fabrics, kitchen chairs. The woman urged him into the next room. In the den, all the curtains had been pulled and a hard-looking Filipino stood.
The man looked as much of a misfit indoors as Tal. At his belt hung twin pistols, the sleeves of his shirt had been ripped away, his khakis and boots were equally dirty. He needed a shave and a week of rest.
Tal extended a hand. “Talbot Tuck.”
“Gusto.” The guerrilla reached back.
Tal shook firmly to give the older fighter confidence in him. Gusto winced. Tal let go quickly.
“You all right?”
Gingerly, Gusto turned over his hand to show Tal the nails, all of them blue.
“I had a chat with the Japanese last week.”
The guerrilla indicated a chair for Tal, took one for himself.
“Thanks for coming. I know you’re taking a big risk. We heard about the shootings in the camp.”
The Filipina came from the kitchen with a platter of cheeses and bread.
“I’m boiling some eggs, they’ll be ready in a minute. I’m Magdalena.” She indicated Gusto. “He’s with Terry’s Hunters.” Magdalena set the platter between them. She returned to the kitchen, where steam curled from a pot on the stove.
Tal expected the guerrilla to speak first. When the man did not, his attention wandered to the room, cozy and book-lined, a teacher’s den. Unbidden, tears welled in Tal’s eyes to be in this space of safety and comfort, food at his fingertips, a cushion under him, though he would be killed if found here. Magdalena returned with a bowl of unpeeled boiled eggs. She set them in Tal’s reach. She rested a hand on his shoulder and waited.
Tal wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. He handed the bowl of eggs to Gusto. The guerrilla waved it off. “After you. Please.”
Tal dug into the warm shell of an egg. Magdalena arranged herself on a settee. She lifted the cheese plate to Gusto, taking none for herself. The guerrilla ate without greed. Tal noticed and slowed his own gulping, putting down a second egg.
Gusto said,
“The Americans are here.”
“We see them flying over the camp.”
“I’m not talking about planes. I mean the army is actually meeting with the guerrillas. We have a radio operator with us. Were making a plan to get the internees out. We know you’re in danger.”
Gusto paused, as if expecting Tal to ask for an explanation. Tal said only, “I know.” The guerrilla glanced at Magdalena, then continued.
He detailed a meeting from the day before, at the town hall in Santa Cruz, a nearby village controlled by the resistance. Commanders and fighters from all five guerrilla groups had attended, plus the American radioman. The purpose of the gathering was to consider instructions sent by the 11th Airborne, tasked with the rescue of the internees at Los Baños.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 25
