by P. F. Kluge
“It’s all right,” Harding said. “Bring them in. Tell them that I’m here.”
“This little shitty pitchfork gang takes longer than Yamashita’s army to come in,” Carpenter complained, after another hour of waiting. Just then they saw the first of the guerrillas. They must have come in along the river and then, clambering up the banks, assembled on the far side of the trestle bridge, four lines of twenty-five men (and women) each. The regulars crossed over first, as if to demonstrate that this was a people’s army. The leaders followed behind, Juan Olmos and some of the others, the man known as the Pirate, and the Birdwatcher, and the Hangman, and the woman known as Loretta, hair tucked under a cap. They marched past the schoolyard, past the shops, and stopped directly in front of the cathedral, where Harding and others stood next to the three canvas-topped trucks. They glanced toward the bullet-pocked municipal building they’d savaged a few months before. They surveyed the Japanese barracks, a wrecked shell that the locals had raided for wood and tin. They checked the Chinese shop, which was closed. They peered down the muddy lanes that led off the square, into the fields, and they were empty. They studied the schoolhouse and the yard in front, both deserted, and they squinted down the road to Manila, no traffic in sight.
“The sooner this is over with, the better,” Carpenter remarked.
“You’re right,” Harding conceded. “Where’s Eddie Richter?”
“Here,” Eddie replied, stepping out of the ranks.
“I want you to photograph this,” Harding said. “Lots of photographs.”
A moment of comedy: Eddie Richter, reconnaissance cameraman, now yearbook photographer, jamming the ranks together, composing orderly rows, one sitting on the ground, one kneeling, one standing in back. “Remember, everybody. If you see the camera, the camera sees you.” They saw the camera. But he couldn’t get them to smile. Not even Harding smiled. When Richter nodded and backed away, Harding stepped in front.
“This is hard for all of us,” he began. “After today, the war is over. I am not MacArthur’s Ghost after today. And you will not be guerrillas. All of that will be in the past. But we won’t forget the past. We’ll remember. And we’ll build on it. I want you to know that I’ll never forget you. No one fought better. Or longer, Or harder. No one.
“You saved my life. Now I return the favor. I stand with you as you give up your guns and begin a new life. I’ll stand with you today. I’ll be with you tomorrow, wherever you are. Always. I’ll accompany you to government offices, to courtrooms. I’ll stand outside election booths. I’ll speak. I’ll write letters. I’ll contribute. Anything to see that the victory you earned will never be denied . . . or forgotten.”
Contreras remembered it was just then that Carpenter looked at one of the other Americans and mimed the sawing motion of a violinist and whispered sarcastically, “Could we put this to music?” And it was also then that he saw something else, something he would not have seen if he hadn’t known to look for it: a cloud of dust from way down the Manila road, as from a truck, or a whole convoy of trucks, headed toward San Leandro.
“Now I want you to follow me,” Harding said, strolling over to where the trucks were parked. “And, one by one, stack your weapons in front and permit me to shake your hands and give you my thanks and my blessing . . .”
“Blessing!” Carpenter whispered. “I don’t believe this man. What’s he do? Walk on water? He a miracle man?”
“No,” Connie answered. “No miracles.” At any moment, he expected the Huks to run for it, to fire their weapons and race out of the square, back toward the rice fields and the mountains. The whole thing was so fragile, bound together by the frailest of bonds, ties of trust and friendship and belief, and yet there was a miracle. One last miracle. One by one, the Huks came forward, unstrapped their revolvers and pistols, sidearms captured from the Japanese, and stacked their rifles—a collection of Nambus, Arisakas, Springfields, Enfields, Mausers—which were a residue of all the armies they had ever fought. They dropped them off and shook Harding’s hands. Juan Olmos was the last.
Then it happened. Sleepy, empty San Leandro came to life. Some trucks and jeeps came down the Manila road and piled into the square. On the other end of the town, an armored car sat on the trestle bridge. There were Filipino police and soldiers jogging down the alleys, popping out of the church, the schoolhouse, and the battered old municipio.
“What is this?” Harding asked Lieutenant Carpenter. He didn’t answer. He turned to Connie. “What’s going on?” Connie didn’t answer either. He was looking at the municipio, at the front steps, where Harrison Wingfield was standing next to a white-suited, middle-aged Filipino whom Contreras later learned was Sylvester Olivares, San Leandro’s chief of police.
“What is this?” Harding cried out again. But Wingfield didn’t answer until the trap had fully sprung, until there were cops and soldiers all around the square, rifles and machine guns pointed inward. Then Wingfield nodded at Lieutenant Carpenter. Carpenter and half a dozen others went into the truck and brought out shovels, dozens of shovels, which they dropped in front of the Huks. For a moment, it looked like the surrender ceremony had been embellished with a symbolic trade of guns for shovels, swords into plowshares. Then the troops closed in, gesturing and shouting, forcing the Huks to pick up the shovels, then herding them toward the schoolyard just off the square. Harding rushed toward Harrison Wingfield, screaming. He was tackled and handcuffed before he reached the steps. “What is this?”
“This is about murder and theft and arson,” Uncle Harrison said. “This is about terror, banditry, and insurrection. This is about . . . keeping promises.”
Harrison Wingfield’s moment. Give credit where credit is due. He paused and looked past the guerrillas, who were prodded and taunted as they were led away. He looked past the town, over the fields, toward the mountains, and he quoted a poem Harding had first heard on the eve of the war.
“. . . for the angel of death spread his wings on the blast/And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed . . .”
Harding turned and faced Connie, whose hands were free. “You knew?”
“He said arrest,” Connie answered sheepishly.
“Arrest?” asked Uncle Harrison Wingfield. “Arrest means stop. I’m stopping them, all right. I’m putting them in the ground.”
Thus, the second Battle of San Leandro. Swords into plowshares, war into peace. In the midday sun, surrounded by police and soldiers, affable Filipinos, American boys, the Huks cut through the sod, their brand-new shovels glinting in the light.
When they were done they stood around, waiting for something —a sentence, a curse, perhaps a prayer. But sentence had long since been pronounced. The first fusillade of shots was light, casual, almost affectionate, like spray from a garden sprinkler, like water on dust, like a handful of rice tossed at a new bride. Though some fell dead, many many more were only wounded, grazed, winged, lamed, bleeding, screaming.
And now, just as Harding’s surrender had been turned into something else by Uncle Harrison, now Uncle Harrison saw his own ritual transformed by police chief Olivares. A believer in the personal touch, he joined his men on the playground picking up shovels and using them against the wounded, swords into plowshares and plowshares into what it had all always been about: clubs. They walked across the playground from side to side, across and back, practicing reverse triage, attacking the most lightly wounded first, then dispatching the mortally wounded, and lastly mutilating the safely dead. And that was the second Battle of San Leandro, Harry Roberts Harding’s last battle, which he didn’t fight at all, and fought a thousand times, and died fighting, the battle that summed up all the battles before it and promised more battles to come, the battle that ended everything and nothing, that changed things forever and guaranteed that nothing would change at all.
CHAPTER 47
“. . . a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, an
d a time of peace . . .”
“That’s it!” someone shouted. “A print. And a wrap!” Cast and crew cheered. The movie was in the can. Griffin looked around the tent. He hadn’t expected applause when he finished reading; it wasn’t that kind of text. And he wasn’t expecting Larry Wingfield to shake his hand or Cecilia Santos to melt into his arms. Silence was the most he could have asked for. And silence they gave him.
“So what about Yamashita’s treasure?” Hugh Beaumont asked eventually.
“That was Harding’s attempt to buy some insurance for Olmos and his men. A list of collaborators. It wasn’t such a clever idea. If anything, it backfired. It made them that much more dangerous. It condemned them. Then again, they were already condemned.”
“No gold, no silver, no jewels, no gems, no art? No secret weapons? No drugs?”
“Not in this story.”
“We went with a gold Buddha from Burma,” Beaumont offered, as though they were comparing notes. “They have it, they lose it, they get it back, they lose it for good in a swamp, in a patch of quicksand. One of the bad guys rides the statue down into the mud, a Jap officer. They sink together, the gold statue and the man. Glug, glug, glug, slurp, slurp, slurp. Terrific. Better than your story.”
“Yes.”
“Yours is so goddamned sad.”
“So goddamned true. There’s more . . .”
“No thanks,” Larry Wingfield said. “I’ve heard enough of this.”
“You sure? Want to know how your uncle died? April 29, 1949. Aurora Quezon, widow of late president Manuel Quezon, is riding through the province of Bulacan to dedicate a monument in her husband’s birthplace, the city of Baler. It’s a twelve-car convoy. They let her car go well in front to avoid the dust that kicked up off the road. The rest of the convoy fell back. About a hundred Huks opened up on the lead car, killing Mrs. Quezon and several others. It was a shocker. And puzzling. In many ways it marked the deterioration of the movement, a revolution going bad, turning sour, random, nasty. But Mrs. Quezon wasn’t the prime target. Someone else was riding with her that day. It was Harrison Wingfield they wanted. And got. It took him years, but Juan Olmos evened the score. Not that the score is ever evened. One man’s even is always another man’s odd . . .”
“Hold it,” Hugh Beaumont interrupted. “Didn’t I just hear you say Olmos was in the group that was executed at San Leandro?”
“He was. He went down wounded, shot in the arm. He crawled to the edge of the schoolyard, near the schoolhouse . . .”
“And got away?”
“And waited for one of the cops to come along for the coup de grace. People were screaming all around him. Blood. Brains. Teeth. He waited. Then someone came over. Olmos had his bolo ready. The cop went down, sliced ear to ear, and Olmos was up, acting like a cop, walking past the dead and dying, his own men . . . and women. Then he was into the schoolhouse and out into the rice fields. He was gone . . .”
“Fascinating,” Wingfield snapped. “I’m leaving.” He was almost out of the tent before he wheeled around. “So what! Harding fell in love with a bunch of Communist guerrillas. You really think this would have been a better place if they won it back then? Or now? You’d want to live in the People’s Republic of the Philippines? Hey! You like Pol Pot? You’d love the Olmos brothers. I don’t know, Griffin, maybe you expected me to break out hankies over some damn obscure, mini–My Lai in a war everybody’s forgot. What did you think? That you could rub our nose in shit and get thanked for it? I’ve got news. You make me feel better about this movie all the time. Because the bottom line is, while we were losing China and getting ready to screw up in Korea, this is one place we won one. I like that. It suits me fine. It’s my kind of story. My kind of film. Film? Scratch that. It’s not a film. It’s a movie, an American movie. It’s got lots of killing and chasing around in exotic locations and it’s got some exotic fucking too. It’s a movie—”
“So you’ve got your movie, Larry. I’ve got the book. Mine’s true.”
“Honest, Griffin, I’m not losing a minute of sleep over that one. Not a minute. Assume you find a publisher for this . . . sob story. You’ll still be riding on our backs. Piggybacking. The ‘real story.’ The story behind the film. Okay, you’re published. You sell well. So how well is real well? Thirty thousand? Fifty thousand? That’s one small town. Get it? You’re San Leandro. I’m Manila. We’re going to open in twelve hundred theaters. We’ll do better on our first night than your book ever does. Got it? It’s a democracy, Griffin, and I love it. Because I’ve got the votes. Ciao.”
Next it was Hugh Beaumont’s turn. “Well, I don’t blame you, Griffin. I don’t mind your telling it the way it was. But I have just one small bone to pick with you.”
“What’s that?” Griffin asked. He liked Hugh Beaumont without knowing why. An overweight oilman in a lime-green jump suit, a fat and happy Texas Republican who admitted that he hadn’t read a book since Kon Tiki.
“I saw Harry Roberts Harding in Baguio in May 1944. He was on his way to Kiangen. There was no reason for him to remember me. I just saw him walking through the Baguio market one day, and I saw how people came up to him, kids and hags and wounded soldiers, nuns, cripples, amputees, internees, how the whole world crowded in on him, for a look-see, a touch, a word. And I said to myself, this is something to remember. This is what we were fighting for. That kind of feeling. I’m not too sentimental, Griffin. But he was like nobody I ever saw. I’ve always had a feeling for him. Now, are you telling me I was wrong?”
“No. I’m not saying that.”
“Of course you’re not. You’re just saying there was more going on than I knew about. That it wasn’t so simple. That a grown up man like me, and rich besides, ought to know better. And I can’t deny you. But you know something? I like my version better.”
“I prefer Mr. Griffin’s version,” Cecilia Santos said. She was leaning forward, smiling. “Tell me, George, are you saying that you found Juan Olmos?”
“He found me.”
“Incredible.”
“Or rather, an associate of his did. General Nestor Contreras.”
God, you’re beautiful when you’re shocked, Griffin thought. If I could give you a surprise like this each night you’d be mine. But I’ll never have enough surprises for you. Just this. “Let me tell you about Juan Olmos . . .”
Who keeps score for the losing side? Who’ll remember the shifts and turns of a war that was fought in a hundred obscure places? Who can be relied upon to keep track of skirmishes, ambushes, betrayals beyond number? Who’ll maintain rosters of the names of men who were killed and dumped in unmarked graves, if buried at all, put under the ground or left to join it from above? Who except a thin, gaunt, middle-aged man who never forgave and never forgot?
For Juan Olmos’s brother, Felipe, the ending came quickly, when six Huk-backed congressmen elected in 1946 were denied their seats: their “no” votes would have jeopardized passage of the Bell Trade Act, a package of privilege and concessions the United States insisted upon as a condition of the Philippines’ already highly conditional independence. Felipe’s belief in elections had kept him from San Leandro—he’d been in Manila, organizing the campaign. It gained him very little else. Later he returned to the hills, an ineffectual warrior who surrendered, at his own brother’s urging, in 1950. Juan Olmos kept fighting, but by the early fifties he was fighting not to win, but to survive. He still maintained—he always would—that if the war had been wholly civil, it might have ended otherwise.
The Americans made the difference, supplying weapons, vehicles, airplanes, breaking the previously ineffectual Filipino forces into small mobile units that held what they captured, denied the Huks the towns, probed their mountain hideaways. The Huks were hunted, penetrated, betrayed. Olmos remembered all the men who never arrived at destinations, the rendezvous that were never kept, the once friendly villages turning sullen, the men, good men, who surrendered, induced by amnesty and promises of land in Mindanao. Brib
es, ploys, dirty tricks. Dead Huk soldiers, drained of blood, left out to intimidate peasants who were scared of vampires. Slowly, the shadow government, the magnificent underground network, broke into a thousand bleeding pieces and it was only pride that kept Juan Olmos fighting. And then, in 1954, he received an unexpected message from one of his most determined hunters. Colonel—later, General—Nestor Contreras sought a meeting with him, alone, on Mount Arayat. That was where, and then was when, Juan Olmos and Nestor Contreras formed their strange entente. The two men had one thing in common: neither one, it turned out, had forgotten San Leandro. And in Florida, sitting outside a motel office, up all night with his memories, there was a third man who never forgot.
“You mean,” Hugh Beaumont said, “General Nestor Contreras has this red terror tucked away in Mindanao?”
“His conscience. His idol. His dirty little secret. I don’t know.” And then it came to him. “His ghost.”
“So someday Contreras maybe follows Marcos. And America says, okay, a sonofabitch but our sonofabitch, he speaks our language, we can do business with him.”
“And he might turn out to be like every other man who ever made it to the top out here,” Griffin said. “Then again, maybe not.”
“One question, George.” It was Cecilia. “After you were done with Juan Olmos, you were returned to General Contreras. Right?”
“Yes.”
“And he let you go?”
“That was Cadillac Bill’s doing.”
“Cadillac Bill?”
“Wait a minute,” Griffin said. He stepped outside and surveyed the party Palm Tree Productions had ordered up to thank its local hosts. He caught the smell of barbecued meat, heard music, glimpsed what looked like a hydrofoil full of del Pilar Street girls. It took a loud shout and a vigorous wave to detach Cadillac Bill from a cornered guerrilla beauty whose surrender he had been negotiating.
“Howdy,” Cadillac Bill said, stepping into the tent. “You folks are missing all the fun.”