Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  Joker Solano looked annoyed. “I thought we were in NPA country. When the New People’s Army broke me out, I was taken here, and I remember you saying, Ka Eduardo, that government soldiers never dared come to these parts in threes or fours—they had to travel in platoons or even companies. Now not even the pigs and chickens are safe on the roads with all these truckloads of men tearing around.”

  “You have to understand, Ka Joker,” Froilan Quijano put in, the old Party organizer playing a peacekeeping role, “that Happy Man needs to feel that he is safe here. There are some things that you and Ka Eduardo may not know. You’ve heard, of course, about the attempts on Happy Man’s life recently, first in Laguna and then up in the Luzon mountains, at Balbalasang. The newspapers blamed the NPA for these attacks, so now the pro-government militias here feel that they have to show Happy Man that they can protect him from us. What you may not know is this: Happy Man is responsible for all those U.S. servicemen’s deaths.”

  Cristobal’s jaw dropped. “That wasn’t us?”

  “We got blamed for them in the press,” Quijano said, “but the government and military know better. Happy Man was, and still is, hoping to gather anti-American support around him by taking it away from us. Many people who don’t like the Americans don’t want communists, either. Velez thinks they will put him in power. If you think about it, it does not make a lot of sense—like some other things that happen politically. People use their hearts more than their heads. But Happy Man has some problems. The army generals don’t like him, but a lot of the junior officers do. Building up his local militias is Happy Man’s way of telling the generals not to mess with him. Because of us, the regular army cannot afford to clash with pro-government anticommunist local militias, no matter how corrupt they are. So Velez is working up anti-American sentiment. And the ones trying to kill him are the Americans. The government believes it’s a renegade American serviceman from Clark or Subic Bay, but Happy Man thinks it’s the CIA. The New People’s Army didn’t mount the attacks on his guards at Balbalasang. I’ve heard it was a CIA team of American Indians disguised as mountain tribesmen. They found arrows in some of the bodies.”

  Cristobal’s eyes were as round as saucers.

  Joker was less interested in Party headquarters gossip. “All this doesn’t put Velez in any better light as far as I’m concerned. He deliberately let the NPA take the blame for those Americans he killed, and plainly he aims to climb to power over our backs. Froilan, what’s the Party attitude to Happy Man?”

  “Hands off him for now,” Quijano said firmly. “We have no illusions about him, but as long as he continues to do things that work in our favor in the long run, we must let him be or even protect him if necessary.”

  Joker cursed. “Very well, we won’t touch Velez, himself, but he has to know who controls these sugarcane fields. We can’t afford numerous firefights with the militias in case they send regular troops in to support them. All the same, we can’t place a piece of Soviet military antisatellite equipment here in the fields if the Velez private army can go where it wants. We have to show Happy Man that we are in control and that he must keep his dogs on a leash. Ka Eduardo, those three hacienda managers you have been complaining about, does Happy Man know them personally?”

  Cristobal smiled. He was getting to like Joker Solano a little. He picked his M16 off the table as he rose to his feet. “They are going to be a big loss to him.”

  The little girl opened the door and looked up at the two men standing there.

  One of them said to her, “Tell your father his friends are here.”

  She ran into the house, leaving the door a little ajar, calling to her father.

  “What friends?” he asked grumpily.

  “I didn’t ask them their names,” she said.

  He was tired and not too happy to have to entertain someone or have problems from work brought to his home. He opened the door and saw two men, neither of whom he had seen in more than a year, when they had gone underground with the guerrillas. He saw the revolvers in their hands and the amused looks in their eyes. They had tricked him. They knew they had won. He tried to slam the door in their faces.

  The revolvers blasted.

  He felt the hot lead eating into his guts and chest, lost his balance, and staggered backward. He saw his little daughter and tried to shout at her to run, but no sound came before his face hit the floor.

  He believed in being an old-style hacienda manager who went about on horseback, a braided leather whip in hand. Any worker who talked back felt the leather snap near enough to his head, and if he was fool enough to persist, he felt that leather cut his skin or, at least, raise a heavy welt. A Colt .45 automatic pistol fitted snugly in a holster on his right hip, ready to settle any arguments the whip couldn’t win.

  He went on horseback where managers who relied on jeeps could not go. When he was young, there was no place on any of the plantations where the workers were safe from him. In recent years he had slowed some, but not so much that when any real trouble was brewing, they still sent for him. The Velez family knew he stirred the fear of God into the lazy peasants and that many a man who had stood up to him now lay in an unmarked grave. The young workers giving trouble today had grown up in terror of his name. In a funny way this was what had kept him alive. None of them cared to pick on him.

  But he was getting on in years, his children were grown, and his wife wanted to move to Bacolod, where two of their married daughters lived. He made promises and kept postponing things—he knew he would never go. What would he do there? No one would know him… back out of his way… bow to him… tremble when he spoke to them. It would be no life at all for him there.

  He looked at the youth riding the carabao in from the fields and checked the huge, lumbering animal to see if he could find any fault. The youth looked directly back at him in the insolent way of so many young people now. This boy’s father would have bent over almost double in respect, had he not died some years ago in a labor dispute.

  The hacienda manager’s hand dropped to his Colt as the youth on the carabao suddenly swiveled a shotgun barrel at him. He had the pistol more than half out of the holster when the load of heavy shot caught him full in the face and upper chest. The shot had not spread thin, and the closely spaced metal fragments ripped the features from the front of his skull and tore the skin from his shoulder and chest, leaving him flayed, bleeding, red meat.

  He toppled sideways off his horse as it bolted from the noise of the gun and stinging impacts of some stray shots in its hide. His left leg caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged along the ground, dust coating the grisly, bloody mess that had once been his face.

  The youth slipped off the carabao’s back to pick up the .45 pistol the manager had dropped. Taking this and the shotgun, he ran down a narrow side path through the sugarcane, leaving the carabao to find its own way home.

  Eduardo Cristobal was of the opinion that an NPA regional commander like himself should, every now and then, let the people see him in action. Such things made them respect a guerrilla commander. Besides, he missed the life of everyday action he’d had when he was a regular fighter. Nowadays he spent most of his time trying to keep track of things and arguing with people. He would go out on this one himself and send Happy Man a personal message by doing so.

  Not that Cristobal had any strong thing against Happy Man that he didn’t have against every wealthy plantation owner. The Velez family was rich, the Cristobal family was poor. In Negros Occidental that told the whole story. A man was born one or the other, poor or rich, and he died that way. There had been no social change down here in the sugar country for generations, and there wouldn’t be in the future, except at the end of a gun. It took an outsider like Joker Solano to come to this place and see things clear. Joker did not give a shit for Happy Man one way or the other. Joker’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had never labored as near slaves for the Velez family. Joker’s children, if he had any, would never cut s
ugarcane. Cristobal did have children, and unless he did something about it, his children would cut sugarcane—for the Velez family, and maybe their children after them. Unless Cristobal did something about it.

  So far he had gained nothing by violent means. But Froilan had explained to him that right up until the time the party got everything, it would have to put up with having nothing. The rot had set deep within the capitalist system. Like a tall tree with a rotten core, it would look like it might stand forever, until the fresh wind of change suddenly snapped its weakened trunk and the whole tree came crashing down. Froilan had a way of expressing himself that made difficult things easy to understand, and he didn’t mind Cristobal repeating what he said and then stealing credit for it.

  Cristobal took two men with him. Right about now the first hacienda manager should have died in his home, having quit work early, as usual. The second should have died on horseback as he took the animal to drink in the stream, which he always did at this time of day, being a methodical and inflexible man. Cristobal’s quarry would be checking that none of his foremen had cheated him. He was the kind of hacienda manager who worked late for the pleasure of it and kept men from their families until he felt ready to let them go, without paying them a peso extra for this time. Cristobal knew where to find him—down by the machinery barns.

  The regional commander and his two fellow guerrillas waited by the roadside until a tractor came along. The driver stopped when Cristobal held up his hand. All three men stood on the fixtures at the back of the tractor, and it moved forward again. The worker at the wheel did not know what they wanted, but he knew who they were and he asked no questions.

  Other workers in the yards were startled to see three men with M16s as the tractor passed them. When they saw who the three men were, it was as if the workers had seen a mirage and now it was gone. They went about their work or whatever they were doing as if this momentary hallucination had never taken place. Some workers did not even look. To them guerrillas were invisible. So, too, were the local militias and anything else that could quickly bring harm down on them and their families.

  Looking over the tractor driver’s shoulder, Cristobal spotted the man he was looking for. The hacienda manager was waving his fist at nine or ten cowed-looking workers. Cristobal had heard that equipment maintenance was an obsession with this man. A Velez goon, armed with an M16, sat at the wheel of a jeep.

  Cristobal nodded to his two comrades and pointed to the manager’s bodyguard. The manager was looking toward the tractor now, perhaps annoyed that its engine noise was drowning out his voice. The goon in the jeep gave the tractor a lazy look, like a cat not bothering to chase a mouse.

  The two guerrillas stepped off the back of the tractor. One fired a short burst from his M16. The bullets tore into the back of the bodyguard, and his head flopped sideways on the steering wheel. The second guerrilla covered the manager and workers, while the first walked over to take the guard’s rifle. The manager was not armed, and the workers were not protecting him. Cristobal stepped down from the tractor, stopped nearby, and handed his M16 to the man who had shot the guard.

  He walked toward the manager, who had backed up against the barn wall, made of roughly cast concrete with board marks showing. The workers had moved away to the sides, leaving him standing there alone to face the guerrillas.

  The manager knew this was the end. His eyes stared with fear, his upper lip twitched, and sweat rolled down his forehead. He was in his late fifties, gray, still powerful, but no match for the easy brute strength of Cristobal.

  The guerrilla commander walked slowly up to him, stooped a few feet from him, and picked up a rough stone that filled his right palm. He stepped closer. The manager stared him in the eyes, as if this could intimidate Cristobal.

  With the speed of a striking snake Cristobal rapped his forehead with the stone. It was not a powerful blow, but it opened a bloody wound above the man’s eye and cracked the back of his skull against the concrete wall.

  Cristobal took in a deep breath at the pleasure of the blow. Then he hit him again and again.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Aroused by the disturbance at first light, Ruben Montova put his dressing gown over his pajamas and padded in his slippers down to Happy Man’s suite of rooms. Ruben had a slight hangover, more to do with lack of sleep and too many cigarettes, he decided, than liquor.

  There were five armed guards in Happy Man’s suite. Two of the girls lay naked on his bed, blissfully passed out. Happy Man sat up between them, also naked and still drunk or stoned or something.

  “There is a black cloud floating over my head,” he told Ruben when he saw him come in.

  Ruben looked and saw nothing.

  Happy Man laughed his crazy, high-pitched, drunk cackle. “You are a very literal-minded man, Ruben, and I value you for that. Sometimes, however, I wish you were a little more imaginative.” He pointed above his head. “The cloud I was talking about is the curse that I feel hanging over me all the time.”

  “Old Apo the herbalist cures emanations,” one of the gunmen said in a reverent tone.

  Happy Man looked at him. “Is that old man still alive? I remember him when I was a child, and he was old then.”

  “He has the anting-anting,” the gunman said. These were spiritual powers associated in some ways with the old gods before Christianity.

  “Yes, he does,” Happy Man said. “My father used to visit him in the old days. He always said Apo was a great healer. I must visit him today.”

  “I’m going back to bed,” Ruben muttered.

  “Wait! Haven’t you heard? Ruben, you must come with me. Froilan Quijano, the communist organizer from Bacolod, is downstairs. You’ve heard of him, surely.”

  “He’s a friend of yours?” Montova was enraged.

  “No. I’ve never seen him in my life, except that time on television before he went into hiding. I come here for peace. What happens? Three of my managers are murdered within minutes of each other in three different places by the NPA. Then I am disturbed at dawn next day to hear that the best-known communist on the island of Negros is in my house and insists of talking to me.”

  “Why didn’t your guards shoot him?” Ruben demanded.

  “They didn’t know who he was. He came here in a car, which is parked outside. They thought he was some business associate, here because of an emergency. So they searched him and the car and told him to wait.”

  “Don’t see him,” Ruben said. “Call the militia and have him picked up.”

  “I have a feeling that any militia trucks headed this way right now will be ambushed,” Happy Man said. “I don’t need my militia. My house guards can hold him, if that’s what I want. I’m sure the NPA have taken that into account before sending him here.”

  “They’re animals!” Montova spat. “Stupid malingering beasts who need whipping, not talking to.”

  “Maybe you are right, Ruben,” Happy Man said. “So why don’t you come down with me to see him to make sure I don’t make a fool of myself.”

  Thus flattered about his importance by Velez, Montova went with him to see the communist. Before Happy Man would talk with him, he insisted on opening a bottle of iced champagne.

  “Communists love good champagne,” Happy Man observed to Ruben as Quijano sipped from his glass.

  “It’s the people who can afford to drink it every day that we don’t like,” Quijano said with a smile.

  Happy Man laughed.

  “But I am not here to pay a social call,” Quijano said. He pulled out a map and spread it on the table. “These are your properties. This line down the middle of your plantations represents a temporary truce line. To the west of that line no NPA guerrillas will operate. In return you will not send your militias or private guards east of that line. Your plantation workers may go where they please, as long as they are unarmed. In return for observing this truce line, no more attacks will be made on your military or farm personnel. Also, there will be no
more agitation for reforms in the immediate future. In addition to this the NPA offers to protect you from personal attack anywhere in its power.”

  “Who gets the sugarcane east of this line?” Happy Man asked suspiciously.

  “You do. It’s your property. As I said, we will press for no reforms on your plantations.”

  “Who do I have to support or endorse?” Happy Man asked.

  “No one. The NPA does not even ask you to remain neutral.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” Happy Man said. “What’s so important about the eastern half of my properties?”

  “Nothing. The NPA wishes to establish total military control of that part of the island. No one will interfere with your visits or with your workers. Just do not bring armed men in.”

  “What if the regular Army or Marines decide to pay a visit? I can’t keep them out even if I wanted to.”

  Quijano smiled tightly. “With your relations with the generals, Mr. Velez, I don’t think any military units will be sent to help you unless you ask for them. If the NPA decides that you have betrayed their agreement with you, it would be up to the regional commander to take action against you.”

  “Cristobal? The caveman with the stone.”

  “I know nothing about these matters,” Quijano said, and permitted Happy Man to refill his glass.

  “What do you think, Ruben?” Velez asked.

  “I think you should shoot this criminal and send his body by truck to Bacolod.”

  “Yes, that’s a good strong response,” Happy Man said, and gargled champagne. “Any comment on the truce line?”

  “The NPA is offering you peace in exchange for half your land,” Ruben said. “It may not seem this way at first, but sooner or later you will find your sugar revenues from that land going to them instead of you. I also believe they are up to something else. I don’t know what, but I sense it.”

  “Ruben is very good at rooting up hidden things,” Happy Man said to Quijano. “He really surprises people often by what he discovers about them. Is there anything else you want to add to your explanation of this truce line?”