Olongapo Earp (Tequila Vikings Book 2)

by J. E. Park

  Shaking my head, I said, “No, I’m not. I need to go to bed.”

  “Alone?”

  I nodded sadly. “Yes, Tala, alone.”

  “I no t’ink it good por you be alone tonight.”

  My hands were starting to shake now. Things were happening fast. “Trust me, Tala, I need to be by myself. Please. You don’t understand, but I have these things that get triggered by…”

  Tala reached out and put her hand on my cheek. She then leaned forward and pressed her lips up against mine. It was hard to explain, but it was a kiss almost devoid of sexual desire. It was just a connection. Through her lips, Tala was making me see that she knew something was deeply wrong with me, but she understood. Whatever was coming, she was going to help me through it. She was going to stay, no matter how damaged I may be. I was suddenly awash in this alien sensation of comfort, and I noticed that I was no longer shaking as I returned her kiss.

  With the thought of what had happened that day purged from my mind, I guided Tala into my apartment. Embracing each other and ignoring my roommates, we made our way into my bedroom. Then, once the door closed behind us, we made love. For hours.

  When we finished, Tala drifted off to sleep. I did not. I had never been so at peace than I was at that moment, and I needed to savor it. I realized that, as much as I had loved Hannah, there were things about myself that I had to keep hidden from her. If I ever showed her the violence I was capable of, the rages that allowed me to cripple monsters like Randy Green, I knew that she would leave me. And I was right. After watching me destroy the man that nearly got Macklemore and me killed in Mexico, she broke off our engagement and left, never to be seen again. She knew that she was better than me.

  Tala did not. In her mind, she was more tainted and ruined than I could ever hope to be. She was willing to accept any fault of mine unconditionally. All she asked in return was that I give her a chance and try to look past what she had to do to put food in her daughter’s belly.

  At that moment, I could. Tala was a good woman, and at least for that night, I did not think about what she had done before. I was able to see her as she was now, beautiful, nurturing, safe, and content.

  I was exhausted when I got back to the ship the next morning. After roll call, I went to my radar dome to get more sleep and confront the episode that Tala delayed, needing to get it out of the way. It never came, though. I slept hard for four solid hours. When I woke up, I went back to my apartment, made love to Tala again while Mari was at school, then slept for four more.

  When Mari got home, I treated us all to Jollibee. After that, we played board games until the sun went down and Mari went to bed. Then Tala and I went back to my room for the night. Again, there was no episode. The following day I had duty, but Tala and Mari stayed in my head the whole time I was on the ship. I went yet another day with no flashbacks or nightmares. The next day, we took Mari to the beach, and once more, there was nothing.

  I fell into this routine, where all I did, and all I wanted to do, was get home from work to spend time with Tala and her daughter. Krause became Darrow’s problem, and I could not have cared less about how he dealt with it. I stayed out of the bars and remained sober, save for a couple of beers at night. And the occasional drink pulled from the kiddie pool of gecko stew that still occupied our living room floor.

  For the first time in nine years, I went an entire week without thinking of my father and my murdered family. I even purged the thought of the girl in El Salvador from my mind. I forgot about Randy Green and what had happened to Macklemore and me in Mexico a few months before. I forgot about watching Hulagu get dumped into the ocean and the murder of David Miller. Even what happened at the Dirty Crow got pushed out of my head. I just saw a man bleeding out from a hole shot through his throat, yet I felt like it had never even happened.

  I was experiencing something that I had never known before: normalcy. I was finally doing something that most people did every day and getting a taste of what it was like to be ordinary.

  It was euphoric, but as the days ticked by bringing us closer to our time of departure, I grew uneasy. I wondered if the cosmos was giving me this gift only to make the pain I would feel when I left Tala and Mari as visceral as it could possibly be.

  *****

  Master Chief Darrow was standing up in the hired jeepney, trying to keep his balance as it bounced around atop the rough mountain road. “A couple of rules, gentlemen. I want you to keep in mind that not only are we going WAY outside of the quarantine area, but we are also going into a part of Luzon that is known for NPA activity.”

  “The communists?” Dixie asked.

  “Yeah, the communists,” Darrow answered.

  “Wait,” Bard started. “Are you telling us we’re going to a place that’s overrun with communists? You sure this is a good idea?”

  “It’s fine. Look, I used to come out here all the time. I’m pretty sure the NPA only calls themselves communist so that the Russians will give them weapons. I had contacts in the NPA that I used all the time when I was in the AFPD. They’re not very anti-American. They’re mainly anti-corruption, so as long as you’re not a crooked politician or a policeman, you’re pretty safe.”

  I looked around at us all seated in the jeepney. Besides Darrow and Lorna, there were Tony Bard and Anna, Dixie and Elena, myself, Tala, and Mari headed to the province of Pampanga. After Darrow commented about the NPA targeting corrupt police officers, I wondered if that was why Sergeant Tejada was conspicuously absent.

  The village Lorna was taking us to was somewhere near the town of Porac. It was so far out in the boonies that it was not even mentioned on a map. To hear her describe it, my master chief’s girlfriend grew up in a few wooden shacks built around the only electrical outlet within ten miles. As of 1992, they were still without running water. They drew it out of the ground with a hand-pump like in the American Old West.

  Master Chief Darrow continued. “I’ve never had trouble with the NPA out where we’re headed. That doesn’t mean they’ll hesitate to put a bullet in our heads and dump us in a ditch if we’re not on our best behavior, though. Mind your manners. Don’t discuss politics or religion. Don’t touch anybody on the head. Don’t shake with your left hand. If you’re offered food, you make sure you eat it no matter how gross it is. Actually, devour it with relish and compliment your host on her cooking. Men, these people are very poor out where we’re going. They don’t have much to offer, so refusing their hospitality is very insulting.”

  “Have you ever been to this place?” I asked Tala.

  She shook her head while combing her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “I no t’ink Mari ever be out in da country before. I never take her. I grow up in area like dat. I no want to go back.”

  I suddenly felt bad for asking her to come. “I’m sorry, Tala. If you don’t want to go, we can stop and…”

  “No, no, no. I go wit you. It pun when you no have to live dere. It be good por Mari too. She only know city and concrete. She can breathe good air. Presh air.”

  Switching to Tagalog, I asked Mari if she was happy to see Lorna’s village. She smiled and gave me a thumbs up. It seemed to me that she got excited about any change of scenery.

  Once out of the city and driving through the mountains, I was surprised by how green things were getting. It had been just over a year since Mount Pinatubo blew up. I had been under the impression that the surrounding area had been devastated. For most of our ride, though, there was still plenty of lush scenery to be seen. The only real evidence I saw of the eruption was in the rivers we passed. It appeared that the rain washed all the volcanic ash into the waterways and turned it into concrete. It made the jungle look crisscrossed with newly paved roads.

  It was a long drive. Mari got tired and dozed off in my lap. As I was so transfixed by the landscape flying by, Tala passed time by talking with Lorna. I tried to eavesdrop, mainly to improve my Tagalog rather than any desire to be nosy. Even with my poor grasp of the language, I
learned much about Darrow listening to the two women talk.

  I heard that Lorna’s father had hurt himself in the late 1970s, and she left her village to help support her family. With a great deal of naivete about how girls earned good money in Subic Bay, she was persuaded to work as a singer in one of the bars on Magsaysay Drive.

  Tala nodded knowingly. It was the way some of the girls got lured into the business. They first got jobs, such as singers, that paid virtually nothing. While they starved, the girls watched women pulling in more cash in a week servicing military men than what their parents could earn in a year on the family farm. Lorna was there for two days before she received her first tip. That was when ET1 Darrow slipped her enough cash to rent a room for a month. He told her that if she wanted to avoid a life of sorrow and violence, she needed to find another way to make a living. When Lorna confessed that she had no skills, Darrow pulled some strings and got her work bagging groceries.

  Lorna shined a light on what was one of the more obscure aspects of the Olongapo Earp mythos. Brad Darrow regularly intervened to save young country girls from getting sucked into the Magsaysay skin trade. It was low-key, but the man had an eye for picking out vulnerable young women on the brink of destroying themselves. He pulled them from the vortex and often redirected them toward legitimate work. If they were old enough, Darrow could even occasionally get them coveted, high-paying jobs on the military base. Most often, though, he accumulated favors among the locals and cashed them in when he saw someone in need.

  Grateful to Darrow for what he had done for her, Lorna reached out to him after she was settled. She wanted to see if she could help him help others. They began working together, discreetly to avoid the ire of the bar owners, to put young women at risk into a better situation than renting out their bodies to put rooves over their heads.

  Darrow’s girlfriend admitted that the man was no saint. When she met him, he was married to his high school sweetheart and had two young daughters who lived on base. Still, he had several regular girls in town that he would see. The bar girls all wanted to be with Olongapo Earp. If they had his attention, they enjoyed his protection. The bar owners, the gang boys, and especially their customers would not dare lay a hand on them if they were with him.

  Eventually, Lorna and my master chief became involved as well. Their relationship was the last straw for Darrow’s wife, who tolerated her husband’s other dalliances as meaningless trysts. When it became evident that there was more to what Lorna and Darrow had than just physical attraction, Mrs. Darrow packed up their children and left. Their divorce was brutal. After it was over, Darrow never had any contact with his children again.

  Olongapo Earp left the Philippines for the second time in 1980. He returned a few years later with a new wife but old habits. Lorna was not responsible for wrecking that marriage. Once it was over, though, she wasted no time rekindling their relationship. They had three years together before Darrow left again to report aboard the USS Belleau Wood.

  “All that time together, and he never married you?” Tala asked.

  Lorna shrugged. “There is no sense to marry a man like Bradley. I love him and will always love him, but I know what he is. He will never settle down. The best I can do is take all the time he is willing to give me.”

  I was still looking over the scenery, pretending that I could not understand what they were saying, when I saw Tala turn to look at me. She did not ask it, but in her eyes, I saw the question she longed for me to answer. “How much time are you willing to give me?”

  *****

  Driving into Lorna’s village, I began taking the threat that the New People’s Army posed much more seriously. The area looked almost identical to the scenery I saw in every Vietnam movie I ever watched in high school. There were rice paddies everywhere, green mountains in the background, and palm trees lining the dirt roads. Everywhere I looked, people clad in black pajamas and cone-shaped salakot hats worked the fields. Even the water buffalo looked the same. I would not have been surprised at all if someone pulled out a Kalashnikov and opened fire on us as we passed.

  Darrow must have seen the expression on my face. “Does it remind you of ‘Nam, Doyle?”

  “Doesn’t it remind you?” I answered.

  My master chief shook his head. “Not particularly. I was there. The people don’t look anything alike to me. This place probably reminds you of Vietnam because you’ve only ever seen it in the movies. And most of those movies were filmed somewhere around here. Or in Thailand.”

  When we finally arrived at the half dozen huts that Lorna grew up in, they were almost deserted. “Where is everybody?” Dixie asked as he jumped out of our jeepney. “Didn’t they know we were coming?”

  Darrow waved his arm toward the rice fields that surrounded us. “They’re around. They’re just out there at work, keeping their distance for a little while.”

  “Keeping their distance? From us?” Bard asked. “Do they think we’re a threat?”

  “No, not us. The NPA is a threat, though, and they don’t want to be seen getting too friendly with us until they know it’s okay.”

  I felt Mari squeeze my hand and point at one of the huts. She had spotted another little girl looking out of one of them who seemed to be her age. “Can I go see her?” Mari asked her mother.

  Tala looked at Lorna. “Of course!” Darrow’s girlfriend told Mari. “That is my niece, Clara! Go play with her.” Lorna waved at the little girl. “Halo, Clara!”

  “Halo, Tiya!”

  While Mari deserted me to play with her new friend, the rest of us got comfortable around the jeepney. We broke open some of the beer that we brought while Lorna told us all about the place she grew up in. At some point, an ancient Toyota pulled up to let an even more ancient man out of it. “Olongapo Earp!” the man called out in flawless English. “It’s good to see you again!”

  Darrow walked over and embraced the new arrival. “Paco!” The two men talked for a few moments between themselves before the master chief led him our way. “Guys, this man is one of the village elders around here, so to speak. He'll never admit it, but the word in these parts is that he was quite a prolific bandit when the Japanese occupied this area. I tend to believe the rumors. For an old peasant farmer who never had two nickels to rub together, he boasts the biggest collection of samurai swords that I have ever seen. That’s why we call him Paco Villa.”

  “Ah, whatever,” Paco said, brushing off the master chief’s flattery. “We all did what we had to in the war. I did alright after it too. I’m just poor because everything I got, I passed down to my people.”

  I grinned. That sounded Marxist enough for me to wager that Paco was the NPA man, showing up to check us out.

  “What brings you back, Bradley? It’s been a long time since you’ve been here.”

  “I know. I wanted to see what’s changed since I left.”

  Paco looked around as I handed him a beer I pulled from one of our coolers. He seemed surprised by the offer but accepted it. “Why, thank you, young man! Well, as you can see, the place hasn’t changed much, just the people. When’s the last time you were here?”

  Darrow thought for a moment. “It’s been five or six years, for sure.”

  “Five or six years! Yeah, I remember that now! Things were getting crazy back then. You were out here when Colonel Honasan tried to overthrow Aquino. You had to go back. How come you didn’t return?”

  Darrow shrugged. “We weren’t allowed to. After that coup attempt, Aquino let General Ramos have his way with the NPA out here. Our command didn’t want us getting caught in the crossfire.”

  Paco sighed. “General Ramos. Now President Ramos. That son-of-a-bitch sent cutthroats against the people out here. Murderers. Rapists. Gangsters. And now he’s in charge of the whole goddamn country. Gahh! That man was a Marcos stooge. He hid in the north during the war, making up stories while we were down here making Japanese corpses!”

  Master Chief Darrow smiled but stayed silent. Sensin
g that he was not going to draw Darrow into any political discussions, Paco changed the subject. “The place hasn’t changed much, Bradley, but we have new people here now that you haven’t met!” Smiling, Paco turned to his driver. “Mariano! Why don’t you go tell Lorna’s people that their daughter is here with guests!”

  That seemed to be the cue that we were alright as far as the NPA was concerned. As soon as Mariano pulled away to collect people from the fields, a middle-aged woman emerged from one of the huts. She beckoned us to take seats at a long communal table out in the yard. Paco asked the woman, another aunt of Lorna’s, if there was anything she could get us to snack on. “Bagoong?” the woman asked.

  “Perfect!” Paco told her. “Do you and your boys like bagoong?”

  “Yes. We love it!” The slight crack in Darrow’s voice as he answered was a clue that we probably would not.

  Bagoong is a Philippine condiment made, as far as I can tell, with pulverized fish meat mixed with insane amounts of salt before being left to ferment. It smells like rotten fish and tastes like, well, very salty rotten fish. I learned that it is a staple in local cuisine. The Filipinos utilized it in the same way as aromatics would be in the West, but it could be used as a spread as well. In Lorna’s village, it was served to us heaped upon slices of mango.

  Our girlfriends went after the bagoong like it was any run-of-the-mill chip dip. We Americans were much more tentative. Still, we had all heard Darrow’s warning about how rude it was to refuse food. We gave it a try, suppressed our gag reflexes, and made sure that we did not deprive our girlfriends of their share. Rushing to get the ordeal over with, we got through the entire bowl in pretty good time. We tried washing the horrid taste out of our mouths with our beer. It didn’t work.