by P. F. Kluge
“Harry Harding, sir,” he said, stepping farther into the room. “Uncle Harrison, my father died last week.”
Wingfield’s hands pushed into the mess of paper on his desk, burying themselves to the wrists, then withdrawing. “I see.”
He lifted himself out of his chair, which sighed in relief, even as the floorboard groaned in pain. The big man walked toward him. White suit, white shirt, black shoes, black tie. Smell of sweat, cologne, tobacco.
“I’m sorry,” Wingfield said, shaking his hand. “He was one of the originals. What a sense of timing!”
“He told me I should come here. You’d know what was happening, he said. And you’d know what to do.”
“It’s remarkable what an expert I’ve become lately. Come on, son, let’s have a walk.”
“I’m not taking you from your work, Uncle Harrison?”
“Hah!” Wingfield laughed. He padded over to his desk, gave the offending paperwork a fierce shove into the corner. “Confederate money, my boy. And this is the fall of Atlanta. Come along.”
Wingfield gestured to the servant. “You might as well drink. There’ll be time enough for tea totaling.”
“What are you having?”
“These chilly nights . . .” Harrison Wingfield loved the nip in the Baguio air. It meant fireplaces, sweaters. Home. To him, a shiver was a sensuous pleasure. It was hard to shiver in the tropics, hard to grow roses, hard to stage a credible Christmas party. These became important rituals. “I believe a brandy would go down nicely. . . . Attack the most expensive bottles first, that’s my policy. Scorched earth, empty bottle, so forth and so on . . .”
“I’ll have brandy too.”
“You know, I thought you were in Georgia someplace, son. It shocked me seeing you in my office. I thought of you as one of the people who’d be coming to our rescue sometime. Not as one of the trapped. Come on, let’s walk.”
Wingfield took him by the arm and ushered him out of the office, across the porch.
“Shouldn’t we wait for our brandies?” Harding reminded him.
“The servant will find us.”
“Oh . . .” Harding felt stupid, not knowing what servants were for. They went down the steps and out across the lawn. Behind the house, the property ended at a precipice, where there was a flagstone patio set in the rose garden. The 1941 Christmas tree was already in place. Maybe Uncle Harrison was an optimist. Or his servants hadn’t been told the war news.
“How’d you get here, Harry?” Wingfield asked. “I hear it’s bad along the main roads. They’re bombing everything that moves.”
“I didn’t come along the roads,” Harding said. “I walked through the mountains.”
“You what?” Wingfield gestured at the dark ridges beyond, the ranges upon which he’d feasted, pulling gold out of the ground.
“My father drew a map. It’s a map that—”
“Shh!” The servant approached with brandy, glasses, and a box of cigars. “Thanks, Nemy,” Wingfield said. “That’ll do for tonight.”
“Yes, sir.” The white-jacketed figure disappeared across the grass.
“You have to watch what you say,” Wingfield said.
“You don’t trust—”
“We’re talking about people who lived three hundred years with the Spanish. Then they had us for fifty years. Maybe they like us as much as they say they do. Maybe they love us. But your Filipino is a fellow who’s adaptable.”
“But Nemy’s been here since—”
“I like these people, son. I like them a lot. But liking’s one thing. Trusting’s something else. That makes me the opposite of your late father. He didn’t like anybody, but he trusted everyone. He lived, but he was lucky. I’m not counting on luck. You shouldn’t either.”
“Before he died, we had this—I guess you’d call it—argument,” Harding said. It was easy, talking to Uncle Harrison Wingfield. He adopted everyone he met, plopped them down in a chair, made time for them, never rushed himself or anyone. Words came easy, out here in the dark, Baguio twinkling down below. “I asked him whether he thought we’d win the war. He asked me who we was. He said that was one of the most important things, knowing the meaning of I and we and they. He told me to think about it.”
“God forbid I should ever agree with your father,” Wingfield said. He swirled the brandy around in his glass, inhaled, swallowed it. It all came together, the way he did it, touch, smell, and taste. Harding admired that.
“I know who I am,” Wingfield said. “I’m sorting out the we and the they.”
“Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, strumming on the old banjo . . .”
The next morning Harding awakened and wondered if the war had gone away. He was like a terminally ill patient who surfaces from a night’s deep sleep and, for the shortest moment, can’t quite remember why he’s sleeping in a hospital bed.
“and singing fee fie fiddly eye oh, fee fie fiddly eye oh oh oh . . .”
Uncle Harrison was preparing his famous lumberjack breakfast, a meal too important to be left to servants, who had learned to steer clear of shattering eggshells, clattering pots, spattering bacon and batter. Harding lay back in bed and savored the morning. The first rays of sun infiltrating the rose garden, glittering on the morning dew, marching toward fog that sulked among the pines.
“Five minutes, missionary boy!” Wingfield shouted up the stairs. “There’s a war on, you know.”
Harding wondered what happened while he was sleeping. How many had died? What was lost? A few more miles of coast? A stretch of road that led to Manila? Maybe it had been a good night, when the disease that was working its way through the American commonwealth rested and trifled, but Harding knew about good nights from watching his father die. He knew that every night, good or bad, brought him closer to the end.
He wondered what Uncle Harrison had in mind. It was hard to picture him waiting for the Japanese. Internment camp? Execution? Life in hiding? For himself, Harding was remarkably placid. If worst came to worst, there were always the mountains. He was convinced he could live forever in the mountains. He was young and healthy. He could shoot, fish, forage, ride. More than that, he had his father’s maps, which he believed in completely. Every time he studied the maps, he found something new, a notation, a connection, a pattern. Was there water in the mountains? There were springs, hot and cold, pools and lakes, rivers above and underground. Was there food? There were fish, and fish traps. He knew where. There were fowl. He knew where they swarmed and when they nested. He knew bees and honey and where the hives were. Coconuts and bananas, soursop, durian, mango. Were there friends? His father had marked down every visit to every tribe, hostile, hospitable, good village and bad, chiefs and headmen, herbalists and midwives, and half the villages were places that he alone had visited. Were there hiding places? There were caves, clearings, abandoned farms, played-out gold mines, campsites of his father’s own devising, some far in the mountains, others within a hundred yards of main highways. The curtain was coming down on America in the Philippines, a world was crumbling, and Harry Roberts Harding, heading downstairs, never felt better in his life.
Uncle Harrison was at the stove. Sometimes he missed his flapjacks altogether. Sometimes they clung on the edge of his frying pan before plummeting to the burners. A few he caught perfectly, and these were eaten.
“Good morning,” Uncle Harrison said. He gestured toward a kitchen table, where four Americans were seated. “Say hello to all that stands between you and the Army of the Emperor of Japan.”
There were just four of them, packing away Uncle Harrison’s pancakes like so many hungry boarders. Harding said hello.
“Howdy,” one of them responded, a brawny red-faced chap who was blowing onto a cup of hot coffee. “I’m Charley Camper.”
“Charley’s head of the men who got left behind to look after Camp John Hay,” Uncle Harrison said. “A skeleton crew, not that you could prove it now.”
“That fellow with his face in a pla
te is ‘Mean’ Meade,” Camper said. Meade was a country boy, athletic, laconic, and single-minded about feeding. He was spooning marmalade into his mouth, emptying a whole jar as if it were a can of pork and beans.
“And the movie star’s name is Sudul. Hold onto your wallet and lock up your daughter when he’s around.”
“Heard all about you,” Sudul said. Harding recognized his type from military school days: he was the kid who hid cigarettes and found drinks and claimed to know about women.
“What’s left over is named Polshanski,” Camper said, nodding toward a tall, slight, stoop-shouldered man with a narrow face and dark, melancholy eyes. A worried man, permanently displaced. That sad aspect made what he did surprising: he looked up from his pancakes and he winked.
“Delighted,” Polshanski said. “Misery loves company.”
“I have some news for all of you,” Uncle Harrison said. “The Japanese’ll be here tomorrow night.”
“That’s not news,” Polshanski said. “That’s weather.”
“Are you sure?” Camper asked.
“Absolutely,” Uncle Harrison said. He pulled over a stool and sat in front of them, a barefoot millionaire in a Chinese bathrobe. “It’s over here.”
“Well, Sudul, looks like you win the pool,” Camper said, wiping off his mouth and giving off a belch that sounded like a depth charge.
“We were hoping it’d be longer,” Polshanski explained to Harding. “We made bets.”
“Christmas, maybe, or even New Year’s,” Meade added. “Sudul knew better, of course.”
“Don’t blame me,” Sudul said. “Somebody had to win the bet.”
“We lose the war, he wins the pool,” Polshanski sighed. “You don’t even have time to spend the fifty bucks.”
“Want to bet?” Sudul rejoindered.
“What’s our plan?” Camper asked Uncle Harrison.
“For today, business as usual.”
CHAPTER 12
Charley Camper—Sergeant Charley Camper—was a truck driver, a horn-blowing, down-shifting, double-clutching race-truck driver who treated the Baguio roads as his personal grand prix. He was a sweating, farting, belching concatenation of bodily functions, whose personal gas tank, engine, transmission, and exhaust pipe perfectly matched the empty troop carrier he guided around the doomed resort city.
In a bigger country, someone like Charley Camper would already have made his getaway. But this was an island, a small island turning smaller, with time running out and no running away, so you drove faster and faster on the roads that were still open. They stopped at a stone gateway. Beyond, a white crushed-coral driveway curved off through ranks of evenly spaced royal palms.
“This the Pineda house?” Charley asked. A couple of Filipinos sat in front of a crushed-coral driveway that curved off through ranks of evenly spaced royal palms. They were squatting on their haunches, hunkered down. Harding had seen Igorots hold that position for hours, eating, waiting for game, sitting out a storm.
“Yes, sir,” one of them answered.
“Are you the guys?”
“Yes, sir, we’re the guys.”
“You got names?”
“Yes, sir,” the Filipino answered.
“Well, that’s nice,” Camper said. “What are your names?”
“His name is Serafin,” the Filipino said, gesturing at his companion. White cotton slacks and shirts, wide-brimmed hats. “My name is Flash,” he said. “Sir.”
“Well hop in back,” Camper said, turning into the estate. The driveway went on forever, curving over lawns, dipping into a wooded glen, then angling back up to the top of a hill.
“Uncle Harrison said you got raised in a mission,” Camper said. “Then they shipped you off to military school.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You ever had any?”
“Any what?”
“You could die for your country before you get your first piece of ass. A virgin soldier’s a hell of a thing. Wow! This is some cabin!”
On Sunday drives years before, Uncle Harrison delighted in showing Harding fragments of a country he had never seen. Baguio had hunting lodges from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Victorian three-stories from the Midwest, and—as he now saw —a porticoed, pillared plantation house straight out of Gone with the Wind.
“I wonder how the hell they got their money,” Charley Camper mused.
“Looks deserted,” Harding said.
“It’s okay,” Camper said, reaching deep inside a pocket for a handful of coins, screws, washers, contraceptives, and several sets of keys. “Let’s see. Pineda . . .”
He found the key, walked up the steps, and unlocked the door. “You go with Flash, cover the ground floor,” Camper said. “I’ll go upstairs with the other guy.”
“I don’t understand,” Harding said. “What are we supposed to be doing?”
“It’s simple. We’re a moving and storage company. We take whatever’s movable and worth moving and put it in the truck.”
“Then what?”
“There’s some mines back in the hills, way hell and gone. We’ve been putting the stuff there. We’ve emptied half a dozen places already. Just me and some of my boys, till today. Today’s a rush job, so we got some help. Which, by the way, you want to keep your eyes on.”
While Charley and Serafin rummaged around upstairs, Harding and Flash moved from room to room on the ground floor. The house turned them all into gawking peasants. Sometimes it was the marble floors, the flowered wallpaper, the sunken bathtubs, but at other times it was the little things they noticed, like soap that was shaped, colored, and scented like fruit. Equally puzzled, Flash and Harding lifted and sniffed the soap.
“Banana,” Flash said.
“Apple,” Harding followed. They stepped over to a sink. Harding turned on the tap, washed his hands. Flash did the same with his banana. They raised their hands to their noses and then they looked at each other and laughed.
“Hey, missionary boy!” Hefting a trunk full of paintings, Charley Camper stood in the doorway. Serafin was behind him, manhandling a piano bench. ‘You wash up after we get done working, not before. Come on, Serafin.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Flash shouted after them. “Why take the piano bench if you cannot take the piano?”
“Because we can carry the piano bench,” Charley retorted. “Now stop washing your hands. Damn, missionary boy probably flushes the toilet before he uses it!”
Flash and Harding worked well together, moving from room to room, joking about their discoveries. An archery set. A Victrola that filled the house with tangos. Harding came across a collection of pornographic postcards, which he regretted not keeping. Forty years afterward, he could still describe the way the woman on one of the postcards looked, not just her nakedness or sexuality, but the detached expression on her face, the slight pout of her lips, the way she seemed to look at him as if she were a little ahead of him on a road, wondering if he’d ever catch up. A virgin soldier, Charley Camper had said, was a hell of a thing. He tossed the postcard in a box, then joined Flash in the library.
“I was looking at the books,” Flash said. “Very many books. Some new. Some very old.’’
He walked along the shelves, running his fingers along the spines, as if reading the titles in Braille. Then he saw that Harding was waiting for him. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s all right,” Harding said.
He noticed the way Flash was studying him, as if he were asking: what kind of American are you? Are you a man like Harrison Wingfield, a patriarch businessman? Are you a cowboy drinker like Charley Camper? Are you something else again? Something unknown?
“I don’t know what this is all about,” Harding said. “Whether we’re helping these people, whoever they are, move out, or the Japanese move in. It feels funny.”
“The Pinedas are very wealthy,” Flash said. “They have a house in Manila. And a bank. And rice plantation in Tarlac. And tobacco in the Cagayan Valley . . .”
“Or much to keep . . .”
A horn sounded. “Let’s get a move on,” Camper shouted from the truck. “There’s a war on.”
“Do you read books, Flash?” Well meant as it was, it sounded as if he were asking if the man could read.
“I read books sir, yes,” Flash replied. “I’m a printer. Not that all printers can read but—”
“A printer? I thought you were off a plantation in Pampangas. Charley said you’d come up to talk to Mr. Wingfield.”
“I work with the farmers tenants union.”
“But you don’t have a farm.”
“Neither do the farmers.”
“What are you doing here?” Harding asked.
“I wanted to see this house,” Flash said. “The Pinedas are the wealthiest landowners in my province. I wanted to see this . . .”
The horn honked outside. Charley Camper was getting restless. “You guys don’t hurry, we’ll have to put this stuff back at bayonet point.”
“Why don’t you take a few books with you,” Harding offered. “I saw Charley lift some bottles of whiskey . . .”
“Thank you, no,” Flash said. “After the war . . .”
They stepped outside and, like that, their partnership dissolved. The two Filipinos hopped in back with the automatic obedience, verging on enthusiasm, of hunting dogs. The Americans shared the front seat.
“That Flash is an intelligent man,” Harding said.
“His union’s been giving Uncle Harrison a pain in the ass,” Camper said. “He says they’re Communists.”
Back in Baguio, Camper halted in front of the bombed-out marketplace, a pile of charred wood, crumbly concrete walls and twisted, corrugated metal. The vendors had moved across the road, into Burnham Park, where the softball field was piled high with corn, cauliflower, beans, broccoli, strawberries, with cheap shoes, bolts of cloth, goats and chicken, coconuts, tobacco. It was tempting to think that these people were beneath the battle, that while war swept back and forth these poor folk, the scratchers and hagglers, kept on living. But the market, not the mansions, was where the Japanese bombs had fallen.