by J. E. Park
I shook my head. I could picture someone like Palazzo, our shop’s pornography addict, doing something like that, but not the lieutenant. Darrow spent a long time as a police officer in Olongapo, so I was reluctant to second guess his instincts. From where I stood, however, he was long on suspicion but short on evidence. There was not enough to make an official accusation. As much as I detested Krause, there was no way I was going to try to pin a jacket like that on the man unless I was sure it was true. “So, what are you going to do about this?” I asked.
“I’m going to try to get to the truth of the matter,” Darrow told me. “And I’m hoping that you’ll help.”
“Me?”
Darrow pulled a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “I could use some backup. The captain heard me out, and he’s suspicious enough that he wants me to look into it. He's particularly curious if that cocksucker has any ties to the prick his wife was married to. This is written permission for the two of us to hang out in Pagsanjan and look around. Not just for Krause, either. If we catch any Belleau Wood men out there, he wants us to give him what he needs to hang ‘em high. He has zero tolerance for that kind of bullshit.”
“Seriously? Just the two of us? Are we even authorized to do this kind of thing? This isn’t the US.”
Darrow shook his head. “No, we’re not authorized at all. My buddy in the Philippine National Police, Sergeant Tejada, is on board and willing to let us do it, though. He’s using it as an excuse to hang out for old times’ sake.”
I unfolded the piece of paper. It was indeed authorization for us to travel outside of the twenty-five-mile perimeter of Olongapo, signed by Captain Fleming. When I finished reading, my master chief asked, “So, are you in?”
I did not even hesitate. “Hell yeah, I’m in. Man, whoever said the best part of coming to Olongapo was the booze and the broads? They must never have had the captain’s permission to ruin the life of their division officer.”
*****
It was sixteen hundred before I managed to leave the ship. When I did, it was within an entourage that included Dixie, Metaire, Tony Bard, Rick Hammond, and Master Chief Darrow. Spanky Palazzo was a little ahead of us, but he gave up his place in line to join our group.
It took a while, but we eventually seized spots on one of the buses for the run to the main gate. To pass the time during the ride, I turned to Darrow and asked, “So what’s the plan today, Master Chief?”
Darrow grinned. “The plan? The plan is that I’m showing you all where the apartment is that I got yesterday, so you know where to go if you get into trouble. Then I’m going grocery shopping, getting some booze, and laying low.”
“You found an apartment?” Dixie asked.
“Yeah. I got a three-bedroom, so if you guys screw up and find yourselves out past curfew, you run to my place for the night.”
“You’re not going to be out with us?” Dixie asked.
The master chief shook his head. “Guys, I’ve spent a third of my career stationed in the Philippines. I’ve done it to death. The last couple of times I was here, I had a steady girlfriend that I should have married, but for whatever reason, didn’t. Me and her have a lot of history together. Truth be told, I still think about her all the time. Now, I’m on my third marriage and my final enlistment. I can’t afford another divorce. I cannot run into this woman while we’re here.”
Dixie laughed. “You mean the infamous ‘Olongapo Earp’ of the Armed Forces Police Department has to go into hiding to avoid the wrath of a woman scorned? What’s this world coming to? How tough is this chick?”
“Oh, she’s tough, all right,” our master chief told us. “She’ll hurt me. The problem is that she’ll hurt me in ways that I’m kind of into. Look, I’m not known for my willpower when it comes to women. It’s the reason I’ve never been very successful at marriage. My divorces were both preceded by a trip to the Philippines, boys. One of them ended over this particular girl. I’m telling you, I’m going into hiding. I’m staying off the street.”
There were some protests about Darrow keeping a low profile, but they were all good-natured. We even started coming up with ideas for stuff we could do with him that did not involve drinking binges through whore houses. “Hey, Master Chief,” Bard asked at one point. “I see they have a canoe trip that you can sign up for on the ship. It’s out in Pagsanjan. Isn’t that the place the lieutenant ordered us to stay away from?”
The master chief nodded. “Yeah, it is, but you’ll be alright on a sanctioned trip. Krause is right, there’s some twisted shit in Pagsanjan, but there’s plenty of normal girls to meet there, too. Take that trip. The river’s a hoot. The last time I went down it, the movie set for Kurtz’s castle was still there. It was eerie.”
“Kurtz’s castle?” Dixie asked. “From the movie Apocalypse Now?”
“That would be the one,” Darrow answered. “The movie was filmed on the Bumbangan River just outside of Pagsanjan.”
“Man, I might need to check that out,” Palazzo mused. “Can you still sign up to do that?”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Sexually speaking, ET2 Palazzo had some serious issues. He lost his position as the shop’s work center supervisor because he refused to obey the captain’s order to get rid of his smut. Triggered by the stress of his demotion, he suffered some sort of psychotic break that compelled him to masturbate incessantly. The man could not keep his hands off of himself. He got caught at it so often that Darrow and I tried to refer him for a psychological examination back in San Diego. Our previous division officer blocked it out of fear of losing our only IFF tech before leaving for Japan.
Having worked with Palazzo for over a year at that point, I knew he had very little interest in war movies. He would have had even less interest in a cerebral war movie like Apocalypse Now. He was into mindless stuff like Star Trek. If there was something in Pagsanjan that stirred Palazzo’s interest, it certainly was not a movie set. Nor was it something adventuresome like white water rafting. That left…
I shuddered as I tried to force that thought out of my mind. All Palazzo said was that he wanted to sign up for a boat ride. It was a massive leap for me to suspect that he wanted to act out on some pedophilic curiosity. All he had done was say something a bit out of character.
Palazzo was oblivious to it, but I caught myself staring at him for the rest of the bus ride. Was he capable of going to Pagsanjan and doing something so vile? Something so irredeemable? I assumed that he would be far more capable of it than Krause would. I did not think Palazzo was into kids, but he had a warped view of morality. If a girl initiated an intimate encounter, I did not believe Palazzo capable of thinking it wrong no matter how young she was.
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Palazzo was enjoying himself with the rest of the men. He was even fitting in with us, something he had struggled to do ever since he reported aboard. He was joking around, laughing, and having himself a good time. All he said was, “Man, I might need to check that out.” Then he dropped it. He did not dwell on it. He did not even follow up on it. It was a passing comment, and then he moved on. I was making far too much out of it.
When we disembarked from the bus, I lit a cigarette to calm myself down. I was still struggling to get my mind off Palazzo when I caught an awful stench that distracted me. “My god!” I called out. “What the hell is that smell?”
The rest of our group, all of whom had been there the night before, broke out into laughter. Master Chief Darrow put his hand on my shoulder and spun me around to face the bridge on the other side of the main gate. “That, Doyle, is the sweet aroma of the world-famous Shit River.”
“Oh, man!” I cried out. “I can taste it!” If the canal that separated the Subic Bay Naval Station from the City of Olongapo had an actual name, no one ever knew what it was. All we knew was that it was the main conduit for carrying excrement away from the shantytown built a half-mile upstream. I eventually found that it did not always smell that
bad. For whatever reason, though, that day it was particularly rank.
Across the bridge was a bustle of human activity. Jeepneys were rushing in and out to transport people along the standard routes. At the same time, trikes, which are motorcycles with attached sidecars, offered door-to-door service to wherever we wanted to go. There were also food carts lined up along the curb. Most were selling something called “monkey meat,” but it tasted more akin to teriyaki chicken than simian flesh. Scattered among the food carts was a mob of trinket vendors. There were also a couple of sketchy tattooed hooligans standing by in case anyone wanted to score dope. Darting in and out of the traffic was a small army of children looking to make a buck any way that they could.
Able to sense a newcomer by the look of bewilderment on my face, the street urchins mobbed me, begging me for money. To get them out of my way, Palazzo reached into his pocket and pulled out some peso coins he had left over from the night before. He whistled at the kids to get their attention, then tossed the change over the fence and into the river. The children left me in a mad dash to the water, throwing themselves into it to be the first to come up with the cash.
“What the fuck?” I stopped dead in my tracks and stared incredulously at Palazzo.
“What?” John asked, clueless about what I was so upset about.
“Did you really just throw coins into a goddamn sewage canal so that kids would dive in after them?”
“Wha…hey…Doyle…It’s not like that,” Palazzo stammered. “I was trying to help you out and get them away from you. Plus, they get some money too.”
“You telling me you were trying to help them? Seriously?” Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a handful of American change and threw it over the fence also, but I made sure it landed on the bank. That drew a bunch of the kids out of the water to look for coins on dry land. “If you wanted to give money to children to get them out of the way, that’s how you do it to keep them from catching cholera, you fucking ass clown. You think that shit’s funny, Palazzo?”
John’s eyes darted around the other faces of our group, looking for support. None was forthcoming. He had not done anything different than a hundred other men that day, so he did not understand why he was being called out for it. Still, he tried to apologize. “Hey, Doyle, man, I’m sorry…”
“Why are you telling me that you’re sorry?” I asked while taking a couple of steps toward him. “Why don’t you tell those kids that you’re sorry for being such a fucking prick? In fact, how about I chuck your fat ass into the water so that…”
I lunged forward and grabbed Palazzo by the shirt. Before I could follow through with my threat, however, Darrow came up and grabbed me from behind. He put himself between the gate guard and me so that the sentry could not see what was going on. Then he wrapped his arm around my neck and put me into a chokehold to keep me from decking Palazzo.
“Let him go, Doyle,” the master chief whispered. He put the squeeze on my throat just enough to make my breathing difficult. “You’re not even five minutes into Olongapo liberty, and you’re already risking getting restricted to the ship for the whole time you’re here. Settle down and back off.”
“But…but…” I tried to say as my face started turning red.
“But nothing. Turn him loose. Those kids have been doing this shit since they could walk. They were doing it before we got here; they’ll be doing it after we leave. Yeah, it’s shitty, but if those boys are going to get sick from this, I doubt that it’ll be this dive into the canal that does it. Let him go. Now.”
I released my man and watched him stumble backward a bit. Once he regained his footing, Spanky appeared like he was going to say something to me, but Master Chief stopped him before he had the chance. “Get out of here, Palazzo,” he snapped. “And if I catch you doing anything like that again, I’m going to be the one that kicks your ass. Got it?”
Spanky stared at us for a moment in disbelief, blindsided by what had happened. And crushed. A chronic outsider, Palazzo made great strides toward becoming an accepted member of the division. Over the last six months, he had received some mentoring from Rick Hammond to improve his technical skills. He embraced the fitness regimen offered by Metaire to get his weight down and took leadership cues from me to gain the respect of the men. All that progress was undone with a literal flip of a coin. With sagging shoulders, Palazzo turned his back on us and walked away, blending into the throng of people on the other side of Columban Road.
As I watched Palazzo disappear into the crowd, I began to suspect that I might have overreacted. Had Dixie or Metaire done something like that, I know I would have handled it differently. I would have told them to knock it off and stop acting like idiots. I would not have tried to throw them into Shit River. With my mind still hung up on Palazzo’s interest in Pagsanjan, my subconscious was probably looking for an excuse to lash out at him.
Unfortunately, that was a realization I did not come to until my blood was down. By then, Palazzo was long gone and back to being an outcast. The damage had been done.
*****
The apartment Master Chief Darrow had rented was perfect for a man going into hiding. It was about a mile away from the Magsaysay bars and as far northeast as one could get from the main gate and still be living in the city of Olongapo. Located off of Harris Street, the master chief’s flat was on the upper floor of a four-unit building divided in half by a shared courtyard. It looked perfectly suited to accommodate fifty drunken Belleau Wood men on a regular basis.
One drawback to the master chief’s new digs was that it backed up against a hill covered in thick jungle. Because of this, Darrow feared he would have to put up with monkeys getting into his garbage. The residents found that if they secured their waste bins well enough to keep the macaques at bay, the sanitation workers could not get into them either. Another problem was that there were no grocery or beer stores anywhere near the place. To stock up on supplies, the master chief was going to have to go to Magsaysay Drive anyway, the very place he was trying to avoid.
Still, it was a nice apartment, quiet and out of the way. It was precisely the type of place I could have used to straighten out my head for a while. After the way I had handled Palazzo earlier that day, I realized that I was still very much on edge. Considering it was barely a week since I had watched a man die in front of me, that should have been little surprise.
While Darrow and the boys packed into the bathroom to figure out how the shower heater worked without electrocuting the bather, I went outside to get a better look at the courtyard. I stepped out of the apartment and walked down the steps, discovering a beautiful little girl about seven or eight years old. She was drawing chalk pictures on the cement underneath the stairs. When she saw me, she looked apprehensive, but after I smiled and waved, she returned the gesture and said, “Halo.”
“Kumusta!” I answered back. “Kung ano ikaw?” How are you?
The little girl’s eyes opened wide and she giggled. She was delighted to see a foreigner trying to speak Tagalog and likely found how I was failing at it hilarious. When she stopped laughing, she said, “Ako ay mabuti,” I’m good. She then said other things that I could not understand, mistaking my Tagalog to be much better than it was.
It was difficult, but I got through to her that I knew just a little of her language, although I was trying to learn. She decided right then that teaching me new words was far more interesting than her chalk. Before I knew it, the girl had me by the hand and was leading me all over the courtyard, telling me the word for everything we came across. She was so chatty that my friends were already coming out of Darrow’s apartment before I got the chance to introduce myself. “Nagagalak akong makilala ka. Ang pangalan ko ay Doyle Murphy.”
“Ako si Mari!” Her name was Mari.
As my friends walked up, I thanked Mari for the lesson and told her that I hoped to see her again. I then waved goodbye to her as we left. “Paalam!”
“Paalam, Doyle,” Mari said before she went bac
k to her chalk.
“Jesus Christ,” Dixie said as he caught up with me. “Is there any language that you don’t speak?”
*****
We took trikes back to Magsaysay and had them drop us off in front of the grocery store that Master Chief Darrow needed to visit. After telling him that we would stop by his place later, we parted company and made our way to a bar called the Captain’s Mast. The Mast was a dive, everything you would expect a Third World watering hole to look like. Dark and smoky, the bar had no air conditioning, relying upon a battery of ceiling fans to keep the air circulating. The lighting consisted of strands of Christmas lights run throughout the rafters except for the stage, which used floodlights to show off the girls who stood upon it, swaying unenthusiastically to cheesy pop songs played on an ancient boom box. As lethargic as the stage ladies were, the women on the floor were bubbly and energetic, working hard to win themselves a date for the night. Stepping inside that place was the closest I ever came to knowing what a rock star feels like.
There were thirty women in the Captain’s Mast, each one more exotic than the next. Every single girl was a heartbreaker and insanely out of my league, yet they were falling over themselves to capture my attention. It was insane. As much as I was disgusted by the thought of paying for sex, I was ill-prepared for how difficult it was to resist. Dixie, who was not even trying to hold back, disappeared with one of the young ladies inside of twenty minutes. Claude Metaire was gone ten minutes after that. Being married, Rick Hammond did not want to deal with the temptation and left to seek other ways of entertaining himself.
I turned to Tony Bard and asked which one of the women he was shacking up with for the evening. He smiled wide and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what we’re doing here, and I came to the conclusion that we’re playing with fire. If you mess around with a different girl every night, it’s only a matter of time before you catch something you can't get rid of. As hot as these chicks are, I’m going back and getting the girl I was with last night. It's safer.”