by Bowen, Peter
“I don’t think I have malaria,” she said.
“Everybody in the tropics has malaria,” I said, smiling, my heart in my throat. If the fever would just go down I’d not worry.
An hour later she was burning, so hot I took her to a hut and stripped her and bathed her with cool water, got by soaking a rag and whipping it through the air.
“Don’t make such a fuss, Luther,” she said. “I’ll be all right.” She smiled and comforted me. I was getting more worried by the minute. Her lovely blue eyes got dark half moons under them, and once in a while she shook. She was so chilled I took off my clothes to hold her and give her my heat.
Finally I decided that she had to go to Manila and damn the cost. There were a number of guerrilleros in camp and I said I needed a dugout and I’d paddle her to Manila across the Bay, and I offered gold, which they smiled at and wouldn’t take and in ten minutes flat we was racing down a trail to the east. The Bay was only a couple of miles from the camp, and there were several dugouts hid back from the shore. They picked the biggest one over my protests, and launched her and I carried Lucy in my arms and stepped in and eight of these boys who knew my kind only as killers and usurpers bent to the paddles and we shot across the water right quick.
Without their belts of cartridges and guns they looked like Filipino peasants. I quit worrying over them.
It was a good fifteen miles across the Bay to Manila, and we got there in three hours, with Lucretia protesting a little more feebly each time that she would be fine.
The boys dropped me off and turned and went along the shore, they had fishing nets up on poles now, and I carried Lucretia till I found a horsecab and told the driver to take us to the best of the hospitals. It was one run by a couple of Swiss physicians that catered to the traders and planters.
They was good. Lucretia was getting weaker by the minute and I suddenly realized that she was being slowly paralyzed. I was near on to hopping up and down in fear, but I mentioned the tick I had taken out of her scalp and both docs said “WHERE?” and I showed them and they shaved a patch of Lucy’s hair and then dug round with a scalpel and bodkin and come up with a little black speck on a square of gauze.
“These ticks leave part of their head in the wound,” said the doc, shaking his head, “and after three to six days it leaks a very powerful poison. If it is not taken out the patient will suffocate, for it paralyzes the breathing muscles, a horrible way to die.”
“I feel better already,” said Lucretia, grinning brightly.
“Balls,” I said. “How long will she have to recover?”
“We would like her kept here for two weeks. The toxin will attack the liver next. She will be very weak.”
“Two weeks!” yelled Lucretia, “I will not be stuck here for two goddamned weeks! Luther!”
“You want to see me again?” I said, glaring. “Then you stay put. I still have a couple things to do.”
“Bully,” she said. Her face went pale and she vomited off the side of the bed.
I stayed with her that night, bathing her forehead or holding her as the chills and fevers went back and forth. I left before dawn, buying new jungle clothes from the Chinese stall merchants, the Jews of Asia.
I bought two pairs of light cotton and rubber shoes, and let my boots find a new home by just standing them against a wall and looking away.
I barged into the palace demanding to see MacArthur, and a shavetail lieutenant said that would be difficult, he’d been relieved and that General Merritt would be in at ten. I didn’t like waiting four hours and said so, and then from the high main hallway a few doors away I heard Bill Taft.
“Don’t molest the peacocks,” he said. “Come and talk to an old hack Ohio politician never made an honest dime in his life and proud of it. What you need, my friend?”
“A few things,” I says. “Like a willing ear to start.”
I told him the Filipinos were a lot more determined than anyone thought to have their country to themselves. It was going to cost a hell of a lot of money and a great number of lives, and I didn’t think it was worth it.
Taft nodded.
I’d done my job and wanted to go back to America, and take Lucretia Sams with me.
Taft grinned.
“All in good time,” he said. “I have a message from Theodore, says send that damned Kelly to the Igorotes.”
“Islands?” I said.
“No,” said Taft, “tribesmen, in the hills north of here. They are proving an uncommonly resourceful foe. Killed two brigadiers and six colonels so far.”
“Hire ’em,” I said.
“You are to go look them up and chat,” said Bill Taft, a goddamned beaming walrus.
“Why is it always me,” I whined. “Always me.”
“You have an uncommon ability to come back,” said Taft. “And when you don’t come back we’ll find someone else.”
“Who’s gone to the Igorotes?”
“Six volunteers.”
“And.”
“They were sent back in installments.”
“I see.”
“Tongues first,” said Taft.
This sort of set me down, what with my love in the hospital maybe or maybe not doing well, and now I got to go look up a bunch of maniacal thugs probably lived on rat brains and fubu leaves, for Teethadore. I was unhappy, and said so by kicking a spittoon halfway to Macao.
“What the hell does he want with these damn Eye-gorotees? Why don’t he just have them all shot and save me the trouble.”
Taft steepled his fingers and rumbled like a big fat tiger. He smiled and slid his fingers in and out, like nested pitchforks.
“We plan to stay here a good long time,” said Taft. “Until our little brown brothers have the fruits of democracy and have forgotten that there were ever other fruits. Japan is a serious rival for the markets of China. Trade follows the flag.”
“These here Eye-gorotees sound unpleasant. If they live in the mountains why not leave ’em in the mountains?”
“They live by hunting, piracy, and banditry,” said Taft.
“Just like Americans,” I says. “I refuse to go.”
“One moment, while I summon the Provost Marshal,” said Taft. He rose.
“I’ll go.”
Taft sat back down and beamed at me. “Where was I before I was interrupted?”
I rang off a stream of cusswords in their pure and hybrid forms both. I cleared the record on Teethadore’s ancestors, and mentioned Taft’s lard.
Taft beamed, he complimented me on my blasphemies, and then allowed as how he was a busy man with much more to do than listen to the complaints of a National Disgrace like the one in front of his desk.
He asked if the Army could help me find the Igorotes, and I said, Gawd, no. I’d check on Lucretia and then be on my way, and I’d be back when I was done.
“Failing that,” said Taft, “I shall await your tongue, which I assume is black.”
I left, muttering imprecations.
Lucretia was pale and wan, lying there in the hospital, and I kissed her and we talked a bit. I said I’d be back in ten days to three weeks, and then we’d go to San Francisco and up to Chico, where old General Bidwell had given me a thousand acres of orchards and pasture. I was going to damned well get out of the trade I’d been in since the Civil War.
“I’ll miss you,” she said, reaching for my hand. I could see the blue lines of the veins in her palm.
I planned to go at dark, so I had time to fetch her flowers and some loose clothes and fruit and such, and at impulse I bought a pair of caged birds, mynahs, and a bag of seeds for them.
We talked of this and that through the afternoon. I wished that I could stay till she was well, and then reflected she’d want to go with me and there would be no stopping her—the fever had took away a lot of her bullheadedness, she was reasonable only so long as she was about half dead. I asked about Donald Sams and Lucretia said he was no problem. Off selling Krupp arms to the Chinese
. Neither one of them could recall just why they had got married, it was like a railroad accident that your memory is hazy on.
Dusk was settling, and I kissed her long and hard and then went away quick because my eyes was burning, must have been the citronella candles in the room, for the driving away of insects.
I struck up the road north, figuring on walking all night. I’d have rented a horse but the less bother and trail the better. The Igorotes would be easy to find—find the mountains and walk in and they’d be by right quick.
In the black middle of the night I rounded a bend in the road and saw a single figure standing there, and the gleam of starlight on the honed machete. I whipped out a pistol, and was checking behind me when the figure waved a hand and said, “Kell-Eee” and motioned me out of the road.
It was one of the eternal El Tigres, and he and his men had been watching me and I had some folks following me. He asked if I had arranged for it and I said, hell, no, I need to go and talk to the Igorotes and I don’t need no help with that.
El Tigre #5 or what have you whispered to one of his men and the feller scooted down the shadows and in five minutes or so I heard one yell, cut off. So that was that. Pretty soon a half-dozen guerrilleros come up, and they said the fools that was following me was Army officers, young ones, and all six were dead. There was not a lot left for discussion the way this war was going and I’d be damned glad to be out of it.
We went off the road and had us a conflab about this and that and El Tigre said he’d take me to the Igorotes himself, they knew the tiger-striped faces as friends, and me being white going up there alone would just mean my slow dismemberment. The soldiers had killed entire villages of Igorotes, shouting orders in Spanish, which the Igorotes did not even understand.
The Igorotes were a warrior people still enjoying their ancient religion and occupations, which was piracy, banditry, and lately kidnapping, politely asking if the relations of the victim wanted the whole contiguous victim or a prized part the first of every month. They was a jungle version of Sears and Roebuck.
A couple days later we rented burros and headed up into the North Luzon mountains, a place loud with parrots and other birds.
17
EL TIGRE #5 AND me left the others down below, as the Igorotes was known to dislike crowds descending upon them of a sudden. All sorts of arms, legs, heads, torsos, and innards was hung from the trees and black with kites and crows. I knew I would never be able to look at a bird feeder quite the same from this trip forward. The Igorotes was ugly customers and advertising it. If Lucretia hadn’t been back in Manila I do believe that I would have bought a canoe and paddled toward China and taken my chances on the pirates and the sea.
After we passed the trees all hung round with vulture food we come to a trail cunningly decorated with human skulls, each in a little niche hacked out of the trunk. Several of the skulls had gold teeth.
A couple miles past that we come to the shrunken heads. These was strung on twine much like children string cranberries for the Christmas tree. It warn’t Christmas. It warn’t festive at all. The hides of trespassers with interesting tattoos took up about a half mile of trail, them hides having been fashioned into lanterns.
“These folks aren’t at all mild-mannered,” I says to El Tigre #5.
“Oh, no,” he says, laughing. “Mean people. Hate whites.”
This information did not soothe me.
“I got letter from Aguinaldo,” he says.
“Good,” I says, hoping it’ll do.
“Only problem is I can’t read.”
“So?”
“I don’t think Igorotes read either.”
“So?”
“Maybe they don’t believe letter sent from Aguinaldo if a white reads it.”
Just no end of cheerful babble from this fucking tour guide. I was beginning to look about peckishly, one hand on my Colt. I was not in a good temper, I shouldn’t have come, I was going to turn this donkey around and take my chances on ... and about fifty little fellers in bones and grass leaped out from everywhere. I went sideways off the burro like I’d been backhanded by a gorilla, and I hit the ground and they all landed on top of me. They slit off my clothes, tied me up like I was a goddamn bobbin, and hung me upside down from a tree limb. An industrious Igorote was demonstrating how to make fire a foot under my hair. Others was demonstrating how sharp their knives was by slitting strands fine as frog hairs off leaves.
“El Tigre, gaddamn it!” I snarled. I was turning and I got a full round view every once in a while, long enough to notice El Tigre #5 trussed up like me, with the same damned show-and-tell going on.
El Tigre was talking a mile a minute in a lingo I couldn’t follow. The fire-building demonstration under me had worked, a pungent plume wound round my head and I sneezed and couldn’t stop.
Finally a headman cut El Tigre down and sliced off his bonds. I had some hope. Then I caught “gringo pig” and thought things were taking a bad turn.
I kept up with my slow revolving, and listened with real and honest interest to the conversation El Tigre was having with the chief or whatever.
The headman shouted and jumped up and whacked through the rope holding me and I thumped down on my head, fortunately the ground was matted in leaves, and then I crashed flat. More conversation while I watched a centipede a foot long go by an inch from my nose.
Jaysus Kayrist, Kell-ee, I thinks, about to give up. There are times when hope is simply painful.
I felt a cold knife run up my back, and the ropes fell off. I sat up, rubbing my neck, which had taken a bad crick. El Tigre thrust the letter in my face and stood ready to translate. The letter said I was not to be harmed, that I would be helpful, and the Igorote must tell me all the crimes that the Americans had committed.
The little headman sat down and began reciting a long list and El Tigre #5 translated it for me.
The Spanish had never bothered the Igorote after the first time that they crossed each other. Something about boiling a dozen priests alive. But the Americans had come, and they were marching along the big road, and saw Igorote women washing clothes in the river and they just shot them, dozens of Igorote women, and since then things had not been good between the Igorotes and the Americans.
So after the women were shot the Igorote warriors crept into the American camp and they slit the throat of every other man. When the camp woke up it was most enjoyable to watch how excited the Americans got. The Igorotes were very amused. The Americans weren’t, and they sent many soldiers and the Igorotes fought them but there were too many. Since the Igorotes never war on women and children, they sent their families to a small valley. The Americans shot them, and then dynamited the mountain down on the corpses.
“Imagine,” said the headman, “women and children. And they laughed while they did it.”
I’d heard this conversation more times than I liked.
I was plain flat furious, and not at the Igorotes who had been minding their own damned business. Days my country makes me want to puke.
“What I need to do here,” I said, “is find that place where the mountain was dynamited down on the bodies. I need to know just exactly where it is.”
So off we went, me in loincloth, Colts, and canvas shoes. It was maybe four miles from where I had been hanging around waiting on the chief.
Half a small mountain had been scooped out, leaving a reddish-yellow scar on the mountainside. The blasted earth had dumped down on a little bowl below and I knew I was in the right place because when I looked down at the ground between my feet there was a child’s mummified hand sticking out, and a few feet away a foot more adult-sized.
“El Tigre number five,” I says, “let’s us get back to Aguinaldo, I think I got a plan.”
My honest face and holy demeanor had charmed the hell out of the Igorotes, all they did was wave absently and go back to crying for their dead. They seemed real attached to their families, I said to myself, for niggers or wogs or whatever they are.
And I goddamned the whole human race and I much wished to go render down that fat Yale lawyer in Malacañang Palace. Grease the wheels of Empire. We hadn’t been at this business two years and we was as bad as the British, which is as bad as it gets.
Me and El Tigre #5 ran fast downhill—the trails was good—and no one had bothered with my money belt, as the Igorotes had no use for money and would have thought it a crude and foolish invention.
I expect I was something of a sight as I stalked into a trading store, which unfortunately had a number of bombazined missionary ladies in it, all of whom shrieked and fainted and then kept opening one eye or the other as I bought some clothes and seegars and trade gin.
Since El Tigre #5 had a price on his head I bought some food—smoked meat and such—and some of the coarse black chewing tobacco that he favored. I put the pants and shirt on right there at the counter, nodded to the trader who ain’t batted an eye all the way through this, and went out, to the sounds of the black-clad ladies reviving.
We trotted through the jungle till we come to a mountain spur had a rill of pure, clear water coming off it and we sat and ate and drank and smoked and got drunk as clipper hands just made port. After a few rousing choruses of something or other we boldly passed out beneath the tropic moon, and we woke early because the roots of our hair was growing and it hurt like hell. We stuck our heads in the rill and let the cool water stop the throbbing.
“No more gin ever,” moaned El Tigre #5.
I seconded that, plunging my head back into the stream. We got tired of moaning and whining and started off on the long trail back down to the Bataan Peninsula and Aguinaldo.
We run on to our first American checkpoint and patrol station at mid-afternoon. They was on a broad highway with too good a view both ways for us to sprint across and take our luck in the bush. We hid in some reeds in the barrow ditch and waited. There was quite a lot of firing on the other side of the highway, but that meant nothing at all, since the Americans were rich and would send a thousand bullets after a bush pig made too much noise.
