by P. F. Kluge
“Yes?”
“Remember that business about the I and the we and the they? It’s in the story.”
“Sure. Your father’s question.”
“All my life that question’s been coming back at me. Sometimes I ducked it. Sometimes I came up with the wrong answer, probably. But I think of us . . . as a we. This is something we’re in together. I just wanted you to know that.”
You never knew about Harding, Griffin thought. He’d seen it on Corregidor, he’d seen it at the press conference in Baguio, and he felt it now, when Harding looked at him the way a father —his own father, possibly—looked at a son, waiting for his words to sink in. It was his special combination of awkwardness and inspiration, tongue-tied fumbling and savvy calculation, elements—conflicting elements—so deeply mixed they complemented each other. And captured you.
“I’m with you,” Griffin said. “In for the duration.”
“I want you to finish this job. I want you to promise. I don’t care what kind of mess you made of your life before this. And whatever you do after, that’s up to you. But you’re in this with me.”
“Okay,” Griffin said.
“Colonel Harding? Colonel Harding, please. Colonel Harding.” A voice sounded out over the public address system. The two Americans looked at each other and laughed: you’d have thought that the place was jammed with conventioneers.
“What the hell’s that?” Harding wondered.
“Maybe they never used it before,” Griffin suggested. The organist had stopped, halfway into “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” The waiters consulted. Even the sailors down on the beach looked up at the terrace, as though the next announcement might be a call to quarters.
“Over here,” said Harding, waving at the waiters. After another consultation—one talking to another, who checked in with a third—a waiter scooted off toward the lobby. The organist resumed. And two Americans threaded their way among the empty tables, over to where Griffin and Harding were sitting.
“I remember you!” Harding exclaimed, and for a moment Griffin thought that some shadowy comrades from years before had tracked him down. “You were at the press conference!”
“You bet I was.” It was the cowboy with the scarecrow body, square dance clothes, and passion for treasure.
“I forget your name.”
“Roach,” the man replied. “Like in cockroach.”
“Is Cock your first name?”
“No, sir. Around here they call me Cadillac Bill. The reason for that is parked outside. And this is my partner, Sammy Macias.”
Macias couldn’t have been past thirty, but life had cast him as a sidekick, a clown, a bit player, and part of that role had been to get as comically fat as he could, so now he wore an obsequious grin, a puffy stomach, and a T-shirt that proclaimed him a “Sex Machine.”
“We’d like to have a talk,” Roach said. “Okay if we sit down?”
Harding nodded. In just a few weeks, Griffin had come to admire Harding’s politeness with people who approached him. But these two were something else.
“We followed you all the way from Baguio. You crossed us up though. We thought you’d be heading for the mountains. You know, right in the direction of Kiangen . . .”
Roach paused, let the name Kiangen hang in the air, waiting for a reaction that didn’t come.
“Okay, play it your way, Colonel. You headed down this way, meandering all around. We said, he’s a shrewd one, throwing folks off like that, stopping in every little shithole barrio . . .”
“What do you want?”
“Same thing as you do, Colonel. The treasure. Yamashita’s treasure.”
“Oh,” Harding said. “Yamashita’s treasure. Is that all?”
“Sammy and me have been researching that yarn for years.”
“Why?”
“Why? Gee, Colonel, I’m glad you asked.”
It was a hobby at the start, Cadillac Bill said, but hobbies had a way of sneaking up on you; the farther you got into them, the farther they got into you. Guns, stamps, license plates, hubcaps, it didn’t matter. Go at it long enough, hard enough, and a dabbler became a killer. By now he’d read most everything that had appeared. The first stories suggested that when Yamashita retreated into the mountains he took along trunks of gold bullion from Singapore and Rangoon. During the fifties, the treasure mutated into jewelry, statues, paintings. After that came the most fanciful report of all: three gold Buddhas, sitting deep in the mountains.
“There’s been guys come looking over the years,” Cadillac Bill went on, “and some guys looking still. There were a lot of false sightings.”
“What’s that mean?” Harding asked.
“It means mistakes. There were dozens of gold mines around
Baguio. I don’t have to tell you that, do I, sir, tight as you were with Harrison Wingfield?”
That was a jolt. It was as though a character had escaped from their still-incomplete pages. Someone else had a line on Uncle Harrison and there was no telling how many other confidences and secrets would turn out to be in the public domain.
“Well, there was gold in some of those mines and some bozos claimed they’d found the treasure. Some other mines, there was like—household goods—stashed away. And folks shouted, ‘Eureka.’ And that was also bullshit, Colonel, as you well know. You of all people . . .”
Harding sat back, listening carefully, and it seemed he was almost enjoying himself. The beer and the sunset and the talk of treasure: he was feeling alive again.
“That’s the pattern. Folks show up, they look around, they make a little noise, and then they leave. The mistake they all make is looking for the treasure. I believe in looking for the man who had the treasure.”
“Not Yamashita.”
“No, sir. You. I’ve known your name for years, Colonel Harding. You were the man who knew the mountains. You were close to the man who ran the Baguio mines. You were the head of MacArthur’s Ghosts. You went into the mountains after Yamashita. You brought him out. You visited him in his cell the night before they hanged him! Goddamn, I’m pleased to meet you, Colonel!”
“All right,” Harding conceded, “I’m your man.”
“Damn!” Exuberant, Cadillac Bill signaled for a round of drinks and a platter of “horsey-derveys.” And he slipped two fifty-peso notes to the waiter.
“That first one’s for you,” he said, “and the other is for the Hammond organist.”
“What was it you wanted to hear, sir?”
“The sound of silence,” Cadillac Bill said.
He watched as the waiter walked across, dropped the fifty in a glass goblet that sat on top of the organ. The waiter and the organist whispered and the organist launched into “The Sound of Silence.”
“Shit!” Cadillac Bill shouted, slapping the table. “I love this country. Here, Sammy, take another fifty pesos and tell the guy to take a break.”
He turned to face Harding, star-struck as any movie fan. “Seeing you makes me feel like celebrating! I’ve got about a thousand questions, Colonel. You gonna make me ask them? What it is. Where it is. And why you waited so long. That’s the one that really gets me.”
“Gets me, too,” Harding acknowledged.
“You could’ve died. Had a heart attack, got hit by a car, slipped in a bathtub. Then where’d we all be?”
“I lived,” Harding said. “Just my luck.”
“I’m not begging for answers. I’m not pushing it. But if you’re telling the truth, you got problems, which maybe you don’t know about. Moving the stuff, shipping it, cashing it in. I figure the treasure’s up in the mountains, where the war ended. The Yamashita Pocket, the last Jap redoubt. Kiangen. Your mountains. But there’s other folks in the mountains now. It’s not just missionaries and tribes anymore. There’s the NPA, there’s the army, hit squads, lost commands, bandits, vigilantes, outfits like the Fun Bunch. There’s local politicians who run mini-empires. There’s multinationals, lumbering and mining and buildin
g dams. They all play hardball. Hell, I wouldn’t even trust the nuns up there.”
“And I can trust you, Cadillac Bill?”
“Yeah, I believe you can. I want you to keep us in mind.”
“I’ll do that,” Harding said. Then he explained what he and George were up to, retracing the events of the war, more or less in order, getting back in touch with the land, telling the story along the way.
“And the treasure,” Cadillac Bill said. “That’s the big ending, right?”
“Something like that,” Harding said. “I’m not there yet. But if I need you when I get there—when we get there, I should say —you’ll hear.”
“Fair enough,” said Cadillac Bill. He insisted on making an evening of it. He sent Sammy into the kitchen. “See what they have to cook and watch ‘em while they cook it.”
While they waited for their food, Cadillac Bill talked about himself. “What you see,” he said, “is what you get.” From his Coors belt buckle to his Old Spice aftershave, he was American through and through, born in West Virginia, raised in California, shipped to Vietnam. He had taken time returning from Vietnam, taken so long it now felt he might never make it all the way home. The Philippines was his place now, and the more you listened to him talk about it, the more sense it made. It was impossible to think of the likes of Cadillac Bill confronting a major culture, China or Japan, or surviving in a highly competitive city like Singapore or Hong Kong. The Philippines was just his speed: it was low-down and small-time, it was violent and talkative and fun. It was the sort of place that Cadillac Bill could learn and even master. By now he was an expert, and as if to show off his knowledge he talked about the history of the place, a chain of mayhem and betrayal that went on forever. He talked about assassinations, hits, “salvagings.” Killings in nightclubs, at cockpits, on airplanes, in hotel lobbies. Killings by bolos, gunshots, car bomb, garrote. He relished the famous assassination of a hoodlum who had fallen out of favor with Malacanang Palace; the bullets were spaced a few inches apart, up and down his legs, up and down his arms, one at a time, till finally he was shot in the mouth and dumped in the lobby of the five-star Makati Hotel.
“Hell of a place,” Cadillac Bill concluded. By then they were drinking Irish coffees. He reached into his pocket and handed over a card, which listed a half dozen businesses in Olongapo, outside Subic Naval Base, and Angeles City, next to Clark Field. “Was it always like this, Colonel?”
Harding shrugged. “Yes, but I didn’t always know it.”
“Well, damn it all, how could you stand to leave?” He asked it rhetorically; it came off as a joke. But he was a shrewd joker. His second question showed that. “And how could you stand to come back?”
Three times, Griffin placed the call to Manila. The third time, she answered.
“Susan Hayes . . .”
“Hello. It’s Backyard Faraway. Merry Christmas.”
“George Griffin! Where are you?”
“Closing in on Bataan. It’s early 1942 and the Japanese are looking strong. The Battle of Midway’s coming up in a month or so, but we don’t know that. No telling how long the war will last. How are you?”
“I’m fine. But it sounds like you’re in a time warp.”
“I am. Where have you been? I’ve been calling every half hour. That way I knew I wouldn’t wake you up.”
“Embassy Christmas party. We sang Christmas carols. We had a grab bag. I got a coffee cup. One of those things that’s just half a cup and says so on the outside. Some luck, huh?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“I wish you weren’t.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Not that I know you.”
“No,” she said. “That’s true. You don’t know me.”
“It used to be simple to get to know people. When you’re young, what is there to know? You sort of like the looks of someone, the style, whatever, and that’s it. Simple. You get older, you collect a history, and everything gets complicated. I’ve been thinking about you . . .”
“I see.”
“And I’ve been drinking . . .”
“Me, too! Wassail punch. I can feel it.”
“Irish coffees on this end. I wish you were here. It’s easy to say, over the phone. If you were here, what would I say then?”
“You’d think of something.”
“You know what I was wondering?”
“Yes.”
“You do? Let’s hear it.”
“All right. You were wondering if you stood a chance with me. You’re lonely and a little drunk and . . .”
She laughed that low conspiratorial laugh that Griffin had heard from her just once before, when she’d asked about his night out with the boys. It was a laugh that said that, in addition to all her other selves, diplomat and God knows what else, there was a congenial carnal spirit tucked away in there. She laughed again.
“. . . frankly, you sound horny. You must be the only man in the Philippines who is.”
“Is this a secure line?”
“We’ve both been drinking. It’s my only vice.”
“Only?”
“Well, there are some virtues I haven’t disclosed as yet.”
“What are you doing New Year’s Eve?”
“You won’t be with the colonel?”
“He’ll be with Charley Camper, an old buddy of his who lives in Olangapo. I thought I’d slip back into Manila.”
“I see,” she said. She paused. There was an odd, embarrassing, electric silence on the line. He wondered what she looked like while she considered. Griffin remembered Harding’s account of the pornographic postcard he’d found in the Baguio mansion, the expression on the woman’s face, not whorish or leering, but knowing and experienced. It was an expression that signaled to the missionary boy that the woman was ahead of him on a road someplace, a wise and willing traveler, waiting for him to catch up, and that was the expression he pictured on the face of Susan Hayes just now.
“I’m not making any promises,” she said. “You don’t know me. Remember that.”
“I was only asking for a date.”
“A date you’ve got,” she said, “Mr. Backyard Faraway.”
CHAPTER 26
“Sometimes,” Harry Roberts Harding remarked the next day, “the past is so real and near, it’s like I can reach out and touch it. Other times, I have to ask myself who cares? What happened, happened. So what?”
Memories were rough. When they came to you unbidden, in dreams or nightmares, they screamed for attention: drop everything and follow me. But when you went after them, they turned whimsical and dodgy, they stranded you high and dry in a place like Mariveles. The port on the tip of Bataan was a sad place, potholed roads winding through a shanty barrio, a scuffed-up fishing fleet pulled up onto an unkempt red sand beach. Women did their laundry on the grass next to the tablet that marked kilometer one of the Death March. You couldn’t blame Harding for asking himself: so what?
The drive north did nothing to lift their spirits. They passed through something called the Bataan Export Processing Zone, a realm of empty factories, shuttered offices, weed-filled parking lots. The sooner they got to Charley Camper’s place in Olangapo the better, Griffin thought.
“Stop here,” Harding ordered abruptly. They were on a stretch of Death March highway that curved close to the sea. On one side, rice fields leading toward Mount Samat, with its towering memorial cross. On the other side was a row of huts where people vulcanized tires and sold hot lunches and warm beers to truck drivers. “Meade died here.”
“Meade died.” It was eerie. It happened forty years ago, but what with Harding’s way of telling a story, it was news to Griffin. He was sorry to hear it.
“He’d be tickled they put up that cross on the mountain, worried as he was about dying in a hole someplace, like a sick animal that crawls away,” Harding said. “Too bad he couldn’t know. But we never do, do we? Those are the rules of the game. Shoot them all. Go
d will sort it out.”
“Well, we’re here. Sorting things out.”
“Let me ask you. I’m just checking. Tell me—based on what I’ve told you—what you think of Meade. Or what you think I thought of him.”
“Fair enough,” Griffin said. It was more than fair, he thought. It was moving. Here they were, weighing the character of a soldier who’d been dead for forty years. Where else did Meade live now, but in their talk of him? His parents were dead. His friends had forgotten him. Every woman he’d ever slept with was a guaranteed crone. All the things that kept a name alive, love and blood and property, had failed poor Meade. Except the missionary boy, who wanted to give him a fair epitaph. The missionary boy wasn’t counting on God to sort things out. He was hoping that he and George Griffin could get things straight.
“I think there was a lot about him that must have shocked you,” Griffin began. “The way he kept shooting at that Japanese soldier who was wounded in the water. The time he went for the fillings in a dead man’s teeth. The way he was with women. A cruel streak.”
“ ‘Mean’ Meade . . .”
“But there was more.”
“There was more. I was hoping I got some of it across.”
“The way he played the piano that night at the officers club. And cried, when he thought he might have to spend the war in the mountains, maybe dying in them. He seems like a bully who was afraid of the dark. Some of that must have touched you. Because, in the end, of all your men, he needed you the most.”
“Yes.”
In April, 1942, the surrendered peninsula was in chaos, prisoners, stragglers, skirmishes, surrenders, random butchery. The place was like a frying pan, and Americans were bacon. The burner was off, but the meat kept writhing in the skillet, curling, crisping, burning, spattering. The missionary boy kept them moving into the damn mountains. What bothered Meade was that the mountains weren’t real mountains like, say, the Rockies, that raised themselves up above the timberline, above the clouds even. These mountains were frauds. They were more of the mud, the jungle, the heat that plagued them down below. More of the same.