by J. E. Park
Surprised at how quickly the local delicacy had been devoured, Lorna’s aunt looked us over in amazement. “You like our bagoong?” she asked.
Aware that we were probably dining with the leader of a communist guerilla group, we all nodded in tandem. We faked sounds of delight while telling Lorna's aunt various versions of, “Delicious! Top Rate! Unique! Incredible! I’ve never eaten anything quite like it before!”
We might have overdone it. Delighted with our reactions and beaming with pride, Lorna’s aunt said, “I make it myselp! You sit dere! I bring you more!”
By the time the villagers began filing in to see Lorna and her friends, we were on our third serving. We were grateful for the excuse to leave the table, introduce ourselves, and pass out some of the beer we brought to the thirsty farmers. We met Lorna’s aunties and most of her uncles. There were also friends from neighboring fields and a mob of kids from all around. They were all curious to see the foreigners since Americans rarely made it out that far into the countryside. Mari was delighted by that and disappeared among them.
One little guy stole the show, though. Crying out, “Nanay! Nanay!” a little boy of about four years of age emerged from the gaggle of children and ran for Lorna as fast as he could. When he reached her, he threw his arms around Lorna’s neck and peppered her with kisses, which she returned with enthusiasm.
We were blindsided. I had been to Lorna’s place. There were pictures there of her parents, friends, and relatives, but no sign at all that she had a son somewhere. She never spoke of him, and never did she hint that she might have been a mother. She stayed quiet about it even when Tala and Anna spoke of their babies. It was not the fact that Lorna had a son that gobsmacked us, though.
It was how much that little Filipino boy looked just like Master Chief Darrow.
*****
We all saw it. Tala looked at me aghast, and I turned my head toward Bard and Dixie to gauge their reactions. Both of them were stunned. Like me, they were doing the math in their heads to figure out if Darrow was still in the country when that little boy was conceived. He was. Anna brought her hands up to cover her mouth, and Elena buried her head into Dixie’s shoulder to hide her face. Then we all looked toward our master chief.
Olongapo Earp was speechless. He was standing there with his mouth agape, trying to say something but unable to get the words out. He looked lost and, for the first time since I had known him, vulnerable. When he could finally speak, Darrow stammered for several seconds before he said, “Wh…wh…why didn’t you tell me?”
“I no gonna trap you, Bradley. I no was gonna tell you at all, but I t’inking to myselp no is pair por you to no know about dis. I no know how to tell you. I try but can’t. So, I show you. Is best way, I t’ink.”
“Why now?” Darrow choked back a sob, but the tear that rolled down his face broadcast what he was feeling anyway. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? We had all this…all this time…I could have been with him. I could have…” My master chief’s face twisted up in regret, and he finally let it out. It was now Tala’s turn to bury her face in my chest, and I saw that Anna had to turn away too to hide her tears.
“I don’t know, Bradley. I apraid I no know how you react. Maybe I selpish, but I apraid maybe you avoid me, and I want all da time prom you I can get.” Lorna was crying now too.
“Ano ang mali, Mama?” the little boy asked, wondering what was wrong with his mother.
After telling her son that everything was fine, Lorna turned back to Darrow. “I sorry, Bradley. I so sorry. I know I wait too long, but I no know you coming here to Olongapo again. I t’ink you gone porever. When you come back, I surprised and no know how to do dis. I do da best I can.”
Master Chief Darrow took a couple of steps toward Lorna and his son, then got down on his knees. “Can I see him?”
Lorna nodded. “Nais mo bang makilala ang iyong tatay?” she asked the little boy. Do you want to meet your father?
The boy's eyes opened very wide as his mother released him from her hug and set him free. “Ang lalaking iyon ang tatay ko?” the boy asked back, wondering if the big tattooed American man in front of him was really his dad.
“Oo, Bradley. Siya talaga,” she assured him, revealing to us that she had even named him after the master chief.
Darrow held out his arms, beckoning the little boy to give him a hug. Little Bradley took a couple of tentative steps toward his old man but then reconsidered and ran back to his hut, screaming in terror.
Paco Villa laughed and got up from the table, walking toward Master Chief Darrow. The elder then placed his hand upon my boss’s shoulder and said, “He’ll come around, Olongapo Earp. It will just take a little while for him to get used to you. He’s a good little boy.”
As the old man walked toward his beat-up Toyota, he turned to Darrow one last time and smiled. “I knew you would do the right thing, Bradley. I’m glad you accepted that little boy. It would have made me very sad if I had to kill you.”
We all laughed at Villa’s little joke, but as the elder drove away, I found myself wondering if he was actually kidding.
*****
It took a road trip to the closest sari-sari store to load up on candy and soft drinks, but Darrow won over his son. We passed out the sweets en mass to most of the children to lure them away from the huts. Our master chief coaxed his little boy back outside with a melting chocolate bar. After that, Darrow pressed a wad of peso banknotes into the palm of one of the locals, who returned a short time later with large strips of pork. We grilled that up and served it to everyone, allowing our master chief to give his son his very first lesson in barbecue.
After our meal, we hiked through the rice paddies. It was harvest time, so they were dry. That allowed Lorna to walk down in the fields instead of on the dikes like the rest of us. At one point, she crossed paths with an ulupong, a native species of cobra. She was startled so badly that she made what we estimated to be a four-foot vertical jump to join us back atop the dike. We were all impressed, both with Lorna’s athleticism as well as the size of the snake.
“They get bigger,” Darrow told us. “I got a call one time from base housing telling me a python was on the grounds making a meal out of some Marine sergeant’s pit bull. When I got there, I saw this thing was a fuckin’ monster! I had to shoot it because it could have swallowed a kid. When we measured the thing, it was more than twenty feet long. We preserved its skin and had it hanging back at the station for the longest time.”
Along our walk, we came across a little patch of jungle that we ducked into. Elena and Anna, both island girls, showed us how they could climb to the top of the coconut trees and throw down their fruit. None of the Americans could get more than five feet off the ground.
When we returned to the village, Dixie, Bard, and I went for a ride with our girls in a cart pulled by a water buffalo. Darrow and Lorna stayed behind and had a heart-to-heart talk. After the carabao returned us to where we started, we loaded up the jeepney. We then pulled Mari away from her new friends and took off back toward Olongapo. With us was Bradley Junior, sitting in his father’s lap and chattering away non-stop in a language that his father did not understand. Not that it mattered.
We did not go straight home. Not wanting to waste any daylight, we drove past Olongapo. We found ourselves a deserted stretch of Luzon's western coast somewhere around Pundaquit and played in the surf as the sun went down.
Having gone swimming in my street clothes, I got out of the water a little early to drip dry in the sand. Dixie fell onto the beach to my right and handed me one of the last cold beers left in the cooler. “I’m not going home,” he told me.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m not going home. Ever. I've never had a day like this. We drove through the most beautiful piece of earth I’ve ever seen. We drank beer with communist guerillas. I watched the toughest man I know cry like a bitch after finding out about a son he never knew he had. Now I’m watching the most gorgeous girls I’ve e
ver known play in the ocean together, silhouetted before a sunset that I’ve only seen on postcards. I can’t go back to Ohio after this. I’m going to reenlist.”
“You poor bastard,” I said.
“C’mon, Doyle! Do it with me.”
I laughed. “I can’t. The captain told me after the Mexico fiasco that my career in the Navy is finished. I’m getting out.”
“And doing what?”
I had to think for a moment about that. “I have no idea,” I sighed. I wondered how far the $50,000 I had in a Panamanian bank account would go toward setting me up in a place like Olongapo. “Maybe I could come back here.”
Dixie grinned. “Me too. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m doing my twenty years, then retire right here on my pension. Then you and me are going to spend the rest of our days on a beach like this. We'll watch beautiful bronze-skinned girls bouncing in the waves. We’ll make every day play out exactly like this one.”
I took a drink out of my beer and watched a wave crest over Mari’s head, knocking her down, laughing into the water. Tala was giggling herself as she helped her daughter up. A few feet away, Darrow was sitting in the surf. Bradley Junior was standing on his lap, looking around in wonderment, taking in the first time he had ever set foot in the ocean. Lorna was ankle-deep in the water, unable to take her eyes off of the master chief and her son. Tony Bard and Anna were further out, up to their necks, embracing each other and enjoying long, passionate kisses beneath an orange sky.
“Yeah,” I said to Dixie as I leaned back into the sand. “It has been damn near a perfect day, hasn’t it?”
It was a perfect day up to that point. I was still several hours away from knowing how imperfect it would unexpectedly become.
*****
CHAPTER 23
A t first, I thought I had been stabbed. I was jolted awake by a piercing pain deep within my bowels, forcing me to bolt upright and cry out in pain. Then the second wave hit. It was so intense that my entire body went rigid as I fell back to the bed on my side, curled up in misery. “Doyle!” Tala cried, startled awake. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I gasped through clenched teeth. Then a third wave hit, the one that felt like a large piece of broken glass tearing its way through my intestines. That was followed by some alarming gurgling noises bubbling up through my stomach. They were loud enough for Tala to hear.
“Is dat gas?” she asked, sounding dismayed and surprised.
“Oh, Christ,” I groaned. “Maybe, but it hurts!”
“Do you need help? Do you need to go to bathroom?”
“Aaaaarggh!” I snapped, growing irritated by Tala’s interrogation. “I don’t know what I need! Just let me…”
Suddenly it felt like that piece of glass in my gut found a ride on a bullet train down my large intestine. It was moving through me fast toward the exit, and before I knew it, it was pounding on the back door, screaming to get out.
I was hoping that Tala was right about it being gas, but there was no way that I was going to trust it. I rolled out of bed as fast as I could and bolted for the door, doubled over in agony.
Once I escaped the bedroom, I was surprised to find myself already a half-lap behind Dixie in a furious race to the toilet. “No!” I shouted out. “No! Kevin! Please…”
Dixie was in no position to negotiate. He was buck naked. With one hand clasped over his mouth and the other clutching his backside, he was holding on for dear life to keep himself from blowing out of both ends. There was no time for courtesy. He knew before I did that this was an every-man-for-himself situation. He ran for the head like his life depended on it, his wee white willy waving wildly in the wind as there was no time for modesty either. In as much distress as I was in, I had to let him go. When you cross paths with that flavor of desperado on a midnight trip to the loo, your instincts tell you to stay the hell out of the man’s way.
Before I could take two steps, Dixie was in the bathroom with the door closed behind him. I fell to my knees and pounded on the barrier between us. “Come on, Kevin!” I cried out. “Please let me in!”
My ears then registered two sounds together that should never be heard coming out of a single person at the same time. I instantly knew that our bathroom had just been rendered unusable. As I writhed on the floor outside of the head, I thought of every position I could reasonably expect the human body to contort into. There was no scenario I could come up with where Dixie could twist enough to purge himself from both ends simultaneously and make everything into the toilet. I knew I needed another option but was unable to come up with one. Frankly, I did not think that I could move any further than I already had without catastrophic consequences.
“DIXIE!” I yelled, pounding on the door one more time. “PLEASE! I’m begging you! I need in there now!”
Kevin tried to answer, but he sounded like a laryngitic wharf seal throwing up a flounder. It punctuated how hopeless my situation was. There were two very sick men in an apartment with only one toilet. All I could do was laugh, which turned out to be a horrible move. My intestines twisted up around themselves, constricting to expel everything inside of me. I doubled over again, grunting as I fought to keep everything in for a few moments longer. With my desperation overpowering my instincts, I had to go in. If I could not use the toilet, I had no choice but to go for the shower. I could just keep the water running and waffle stomp whatever came out of me down the drain. I reached out for the handle above me, twisted it, and pushed opened the bathroom door.
I immediately wished I hadn’t. Kevin was on his knees with his head heaving into the toilet bowl. It appeared that his melon had only recently made it in there as the entire commode was covered in vomit. His left hand appeared glued to the handle, flushing to get the contents of his stomach out of his face. Dixie’s right hand gripped the lip of a little garbage can that he was holding to his backside as tight as he could. He should not have bothered with that, though. The damage had already been done.
While Kevin was struggling to decide which end he needed to stick into the toilet first, his bowels made the choice for him. His posterior blew like canon shot. Bagoong-fueled waste blasted across the decorative towels and all over the shower curtain. The bathroom was destroyed. There was no way that I could use it. I had no time to find alternative accommodations, though. If I did not figure out something soon, we would all be spending the next day cleaning far more of the apartment than we ever intended.
By this time, Tala had thrown on a nightshirt before running out of our bedroom to help. She rushed to my side to get me off of the floor but screamed when she saw how Dixie had redecorated the bathroom. This woke up the rest of the apartment, with Elena emerging from the bedroom to check on her man.
Seeing the condition I was in, Tala knew that I needed to get to another bathroom fast. With strength I never expected to come out of someone so tiny, she lifted me back onto my feet. “WE NEED GO TO MY APARTMENT!” she screamed at me. “GET UP, DOYLE! RUN!”
But I couldn’t run—even the act of standing put more stress on my intestines than I could bear. By the time I hopped twice, I knew the battle was lost. I was ripping off my tighty-whities as Bard and Anna were stepping out of their room.
“Jesus, Doyle!” Tony yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?!?”
Anna figured it out. She saw where I was headed and screamed out in horror. “NO, DOYLE! NOT IN DA KITCHEN! NOT IN DA…”
I hopped again, but my underwear got tangled around my ankles, tripping me up and sending me crashing to the floor. Somehow, I still managed to keep everything contained. I rolled over and leapt to my feet with my back to the counter. Leaning back, I put my hands on the edge of the sink and lifted myself over it. The floodgates opened while I was still in the air, but I managed to keep everything off the floor. I also missed the area where we stacked the wet dishes. I was praying to God that I had at least picked the side of the sink with the garbage disposal, though.
“Nooooooooo!” Anna scream
ed as she watched me defile the kitchen. Elena screamed too, having finally seen what Dixie did to the bathroom. At this point, everything deteriorated into pure bedlam. Anna started yelling at Tony to do something about his shipmates. After finally tearing her eyes off of Kevin to see what I was doing, Elena began laying into me. Tala came to my defense and, in return, started yelling at both Anna and Elena.
The shouting was so loud that it woke up Mahal next door, who groggily stumbled over to our place. She let herself in to see what was happening. At this point, I was pleading for someone to bring me toilet paper. No one could hear me, though, so I turned on the water faucet and tried to run it over my backside while throwing up into the other side of the sink. “Oh my God!” Mahal yelled. “Doyle! Are you okay?”
After being reduced to dry heaves, I looked over at my neighbor and asked, “Is that a trick question?”
Tala’s roommate did not understand and took a couple of steps toward me. “We need get you to da bathroom! Why you no go use da bathroom?”
“Go look at it,” I told her before retching again.
“No! Mahal!” Tala pleaded. “Don’t! Don’t look into da bathroom!”
Mahal screamed. It was too late. She looked.
In a weird way, I was kind of proud of myself. I was constipated all through basic training because there were no stalls around the toilets. I could never drop a deuce with an audience. That night, though, I had five people in my living room screaming at each other and at me. Yet there I was, in the throes of a bagoong cleanse like I did not have a care in the world. At least I had nothing to care about until I saw Tony Bard start turning green.
“Hey!” I shouted out, trying to get everyone’s attention. “We’re out of plumbing fixtures! Someone's going to have to do something with Tony!”