Ticket Home

by James Michael Pratt

  “Surely does. That it does,” she returned quietly.

  “Sounds like our boys are holdin’ up real good. Real safe compared to others. To think they are on General MacArthur’s staff. Running the trains and such.” Jason tried to lighten the mood.

  “I keep thanking God that they can send these cablegrams every week. That is mighty comforting. I don’t know how the families of the other boys do it without hearing from them. I only hope they will be able to stay assigned with General MacArthur’s headquarters staff, keep close to that machine that sends these,” she offered, holding the several cablegrams up.

  “I do as well. It sure is a blessin’. I’ll have to get back to the trains tomorrow.”

  “I’m glad you got those boys working with you, Mr. Parker.”

  “Me too, dear. Boys is about all that will be left. That and older men over thirty. The draft will take our young men away. Well, I guess I better be goin’. Sure you’re okay alone here? Patty at the corner store says she’ll come and stay with ya if you need company nights. I know with Harry gone and all, well, it sure must be lonesome.”

  “Thank you kindly. I do appreciate it. When things settle down a bit I may board this place up and head on back to Los Angeles. I still have a job offer there. Parents are there and all, too.”

  “I surely will miss ya if you do. I surely will,” Jason Parker said, shaking his head in anticipation of ending up in Warm Springs totally alone.

  She embraced him warmly at the door. “I’m not leaving yet. Don’t worry none. I will need some time is all. Let’s be happy for the boys. I surely do love them both.”

  Jason nodded, stopped, then turned to face her. “Mary Jane. I know this is none of my business, but if you wouldn’t have run into my son Lucian, and knowin’ how Norman feels and all, would you have married Norman if he had asked?”

  She smiled, blushed, and blinked at the sudden moisture to her eyes. “I feel so ashamed,” she said as a solitary tear streamed down her face. “Yes. I would have married him. Yes. I love both your sons, Mr. Parker. I hope you don’t think …”

  He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, daughter. You know he loved you too. It sure hurt both my boys to love the same woman, but I can’t see how they could’ve done anything else.”

  She held him tightly and wept unashamedly. “This is so hard, isn’t it?” she struggled to say.

  His eyes glistened as he headed out the door for a very silent Christmas night alone at the depot. “It surely is hard. Harder than all my life put together. It surely is.”

  “I wonder what Pa is doin’ tonight?” Norman remarked as they watched the sky from their position atop the half-track outside the train station.

  “He’s at Mary Jane’s, no doubt. Sure is hard to imagine that place without Harry. Sure glad they were able to get that cable through to tell us about things and such.”

  “Surely must be hard. I miss the old guy. Poor Pa, what with Mama gone, Mary Jane talkin’ about leavin’ too. Don’t suppose we will be back anytime soon,” Norman replied.

  “I’m not so worried about Mary Jane now that she’s hearing from us. I worry about Pa though, bein’ alone and such. Must just about kill him between runnin’ that steam engine alone and sleepin’ alone in that cold depot. I always thought we’d get the house rebuilt before we left for somewheres. Can’t be Christmas without Mama.”

  “Nope,” Norman agreed.

  “I sure do miss Albuquerque in the winter. Sometimes we get that light snowfall, ya know? Me and the boys would always head up to the hills and do some sleddin’. Turkey cookin’ in the stove. Mama’s homemade pies. No, sir. This does not seem like Christmas,” complained Johnny.

  “Well, Sergeant Parker?”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant Parker, sir.”

  “I’m gonna visit the latrine. Please do not allow the Japs to drop any bombs while I’m gone.”

  “Could be comical.” Johnny grinned.

  “Corporal Mead, you keep your eyes in the sky and shoot down the first bomber who feels inclined to interrupt my solitude,” Norman commanded as he jumped to the ground from the half-track.

  “Yes, sir.” He smirked, offering some unheard words that both he and Lucian quietly enjoyed.

  “Here they come! Ah, horse collar!” Norman protested, offering a string of military-learned expletives as he darted back to the half-track positioned behind the fortresslike thick walls of the Intermuros. Well within sight of the abandoned station he yelled to Lucian, “Open fire! They aren’t gonna get my train depot!”

  “Some Christmas party!” Johnny yelled above the firing of his recently mounted .50-caliber replacing the smaller caliber machine gun the half-track came with.

  “Fireworks and all!” Norman hollered as he started helping feed ammunition to both his brother and cousin.

  “We best keep this a moving target rather than a sittin’ one,” Lucian called above the din of explosions.

  Norman put the half-track into gear and rolled along the wall making it harder to hit, giving some protection to the crew as they fired just over the thick wall surrounding the old city at the oncoming fighters.

  “Merry Christmas you lousy Nip!” Lucian cried as both he and his cousin dueled point blank with an incoming fighter following the half-track. Tracers from the Jap Zero spit up the moist soil in their direction as the vehicle retreated.

  “Take that home to the emperor!” Lucian shouted as the wing of the fighter crumbled under the barrage of 75-mm cannon and machine-gun fire from the armored car.

  The enemy plane cartwheeled and exploded into the train depot a kilometer beyond them.

  “No! You lousy no good for nothin’!” Norman shouted, raising himself from his driver’s seat to witness the spectacle.

  “Well, we did kill the Nip,” Lucian apologized. “You could at least say thank you,” he added.

  “Ah hell, Lucian. Couldn’t you have shot his other wing off?” Norman replied, annoyed. “There are fields all around the depot. This is my depot!”

  “That’s war,” Johnny added as the skies developed the stillness that had enveloped them just moments before the sudden and furious air raid.

  “Wave number one. They are just saying, ‘Merry Christmas’ with that one. I’m sure they aren’t done. Let’s go check the depot and warehouses.”

  They were greeted with a devastating sight of body parts, gun emplacements blown apart on the other side of the station, and the warehouse on fire. “Some of the boys didn’t make it out of here it appears,” Lucian offered dryly.

  “Glad we got that last load of ammo out. A helluva lousy way to go,” Norman sighed as they jumped down from the half-track to run to the aid of a Filipino struggling to remove a fellow train station worker from the wreckage of the burning depot.

  “Lookie there, Lucian. That Jap pilot is still alive!” Johnny called out as he turned to see a shaken fighter pilot try to upholster his sidearm and get out of the mangled cockpit of his wrecked Zero.

  “He ain’t no more!” Norman declared as he walked toward the broken plane and turned his own army Colt .45 on the shaken, struggling enemy pilot.

  Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop … Norman rapidly pulled the trigger and unloaded his entire ammo clip on the man.

  “He surely ain’t no more. Merry damn Christmas to you, Mr. Tojo,” he spit out angrily, unashamed.

  Norman had just killed with hate and for a moment he was glad. It wasn’t good enough for the Japs to start the darn war, he thought. This guy just wrecked my station and was going to take the whole family out, too. Thank you too, Mr. Skully, he thought.

  “Hey lookie here.” Johnny smiled, holding a Japanese rising-sun flag up victoriously. “And a real Jap officer pistol, too!” he exulted as he picked through the mangled wreckage, pushing the corpse aside.

  Lucian was stunned at the coldness with which his brother had just killed the enemy flyer. Not that it was wrong, just that it was different. This wa
s face-up close and Norman did it with no more emotion than shooting a jackrabbit.

  “What are you lookin’ at?” Norman asked as he reloaded a new clip into his .45 and holstered it.

  “Something different. Something surely different, Norm.” Lucian checked out the injured Filipino while Johnny ambled back from the wreckage with his war souvenirs from the dead pilot.

  “I know you, don’t I?” Lucian asked the Filipino.

  “Si. You are the Americano who drives the train that first day of the war when we get the engineer killed.” The small man smiled. “I am Manuel. My friends call me Manuelito. Manuelito Salazar. Remember?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Norm. This is the guy I told you about. The little Filipino who became my fireman from Manila up to Fort Stotsenberg.”

  “Oh, yeah. I heard about you. Well, let’s get this injured man some medical help before he dies on us and find the best place we can to spend the remainder of Christmas.”

  The little Filipino chatted excitedly as he helped his injured friend to the half-track. “I want to fight, help, maybe work with you Americanos?”

  Lucian looked at Norman and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Where’s your train engineer?” Norman asked him.

  “Right here.” The Filipino pointed to the man lying near death on the floor of the fast-moving vehicle with Johnny at the controls.

  “Seems all you do is hang around dead train engineers,” Lucian offered in a morose jest.

  “Well, he ain’t your engineer no more. You are.” Norman pointed to him with a gentle jab to his chest. “Lucian, let’s go see what we can do about getting this man some training. Maybe we can help Captain Kerns see the need for us Oklahoma boys to take this thing over now. We have been pulling double duty as gunners and loading schedulers for this army pullout long enough. Time to run the train,” he said.

  “Amen to that Lieutenant, sir.” Lucian grinned.

  They raced through blacked out streets, over rubble, around ruins, bodies, to the aid station and army HQ in the Inturmuros and a change of assignment.

  CHAPTER 44

  Present Day, American Military Cemetery, Manila

  “So that is how my father becomes friends with you and your brother, Señor Parker?” Vincente Salazar asked after the hour of storytelling that had kept him totally engaged in the reminiscences of the weary man from Warm Springs.

  “Yes, that is how it was. Your father was a good man, and in spite of the hell raging around us in the war, it was easy to see he had a happy nature about him. Real likable, hard worker, loyal. You couldn’t find anyone more loyal than your father. No sir,” Lucian acknowledged.

  “Cemeteries always scare me. I can tell you, Senor Parker, this is strange, me finding you and us being here tonight. My mother never remarry no other man. She loved my father and her last words were his name. You believe that?”

  “Yes. Certainly I do. I can hardly believe myself that I could meet the son of my loyal wartime friend. Somehow I feel like Manuelito is watching, maybe my brother too. We are all back together again tonight,” he sighed, tired from the hours of sleeplessness the thoughts of this day brought.

  “Over there, about ten rows is the grave of another relative of mine. Johnny Mead. Brutally killed. Just eighteen years old too. I do believe God maybe heard my prayer and sent you to be with me tonight.”

  “I don’t go to mass much you know. But I believe God does strange things,” Vincente Salazar agreed.

  “Yes he does. But no more stranger than men do, Vincente. No, maybe men do stranger things, things they know they shouldn’t, but they stubbornly go ahead anyway.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Well the whole cotton pickin’ war for one was a nightmare; strange coincidences marked by terrifying moments one minute, punctuated by humor the next. Killing a man and feeling no remorse, then eating off his plate. That kind of stuff is curious. Only war could provide so many freak, crazy, out-of-the-ordinary events. Things no man would do in normal life.”

  “Maybe true,” the Filipino agreed.

  “Absolutely true. Do you think any man in his right mind would intentionally risk his life for someone else when he knew it was sure death? Suicidal? Oh, the stories I could tell you. All strange but true. Hating and killing one minute and yet out of those events is born also some of the greatest heroics and virtues a man can have or do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like love.”

  “Everybody knows about love. No, Senor Parker?” replied the diminutive fiftyish Filipino who looked half that age.

  “No, my friend, Vincente Salazar.” Lucian picked himself up from the poncho spread on the ground and stretched his tired back. “Not everyone knows about love. Men and women die never understanding it.”

  Looking up into the clear but moonlit sky he noticed the stars were far brighter here on the outskirts than in the city. He could see a dancing light it seemed. Streaks of lights moving from side to side, pulsating. They mesmerized him, the way an air raid would back then. “Do you see those strange lights in the sky?” he asked his Filipino companion.

  “Si, of course, Senor Parker. Those are searchlights from the waterfront. They use them for restaurants now. Making advertisements. You know. Stuff like that.”

  “Oh. Not many of them where I come from. None to be exact.” He chuckled at his lack of judgment. But they seemed to have him transfixed, hypnotized. They took him back to other Manila nights full of terror and of brotherhood.

  “No one knows love like a man fighting for his brother, his family, and country. And,” he interjected into the silence, “for the girl he loved.”

  Vincente waited patiently for the old man to go on with the story wherever he would.

  He sat down. “Now your father and me, we became real friends on those train runs out of Manila in the final days before our surrender. Yes, sir, right good friends.”

  CHAPTER 45

  January 1942, Retreat to Bataan

  “Manuelito! Come here fast!” Lucian yelled. “Johnny, you go and lock and load the .50-caliber and get the half-track over here! Pronto!”

  “Lucian!” Norman called, panting heavily from the dead-run he had been on from Clark Airfield nearby. He called out again above the noise and pandemonium caused by hundreds of soldiers and their machines scurrying over the destroyed army airfield and its neighboring army base, Fort Stotsenberg.

  The Japanese had just launched an artillery barrage hitting the American bases. The front lines, just miles away, were reducing daily. Now it was a matter of the remaining U.S. military and Filipino forces holding out long enough to get all the men and supplies they could into the Bataan Peninsula. There they intended to hang on until promised reinforcements from the United States arrived.

  “Lucian! Thank the good Lord—you’re okay. I thought I was a gonner. Where’s Johnny? He okay?”

  “Yeah. He’s fine. Those stubborn Filipino railroad bureaucrats won’t turn the rails over to us. I did the best I could. Showed them MacArthur’s orders and everything. I think we’re just going to have to steal a train.”

  “Steal a train, Senor Parker?” Manuelito asked, incredulous. He had just finished loading a truck with supplies from a storage room at a destroyed barracks building for transfer to the railroad at Capas junction, a few kilometers outside the fort and airfield.

  “That’s right,” Lucian observed. “Those Filipino authorities don’t want the train destroyed. They think if they’re in control the Japs won’t bomb it, or some galdarned thing. They are actually waiting for the Japs to arrive and take over and want to be in good with them.

  “I should have shot them on the spot but the general and his staff wouldn’t like it. But that was all that stopped me from tying those guys up and setting them out under that incoming Jap artirery.”

  “Lucian. We don’t have much more time. There is no way we are going to get all we could have. I just came from warehouses three and four,” Norman panted, s
till out of breath.

  “Yeah those regular army fellas who wouldn’t release the stuff two weeks ago with the paperwork from MacArthur’s HQ just verified,” Norman continued. “We’re cleared to load as much as we want, but now those birdbrains are going to have to destroy tons of rice, other food, and ammunition so the Japs don’t get it. The galdarned fools!”

  “A lot of people are going to die because of paperwork, I’m afraid,” Lucian observed. “We should have just taken it that night when we had the whole platoon up here with the trucks empty Now its just the four of us.”

  “Norm, we’re gonna have to take the train by force.”

  “Fine. Tell me your plan.”

  “Well you’re the lieutenant. But this is my idea. Manuelito here is gonna be our hostage. We are gonna put him in the cab at gunpoint while Johnny aims the .50-caliber gun at the railroad director’s office. You will fire a warning burst with the 75-mm cannon. Destroy something, a palm tree maybe, so they know we mean business. I’ll take Manuelito with a pistol to his head and …”

  Manuelito turned pale. “You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, Senor Lucian?”

  “Only if you turn traitor,” Lucian responded with a polite smile. For this plan to work he needed to have Manuelito fearful, exhibit it, be in doubt.

  “No worry with me,” Manuelito responded with a hard swallow.

  “Okay, Lucian. But look. We need to be able to do this pronto. The side rails to warehouses three and four haven’t been hit by artillery or bombs yet, so we can go ahead and get the train over there. But we got to do it quick.”

  “Done deal. Manuelito?” Lucian smiled as he pulled his Colt .45 from his holster.

  “Don’t use it. Okay, Lucian?” the diminutive Filipino smiled nervously using first names now. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Don’t make me use it,” he replied as he pulled him under his arm. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, holstering it. “Just don’t panic.” He grinned.