by Gina Apostol
13
JED POINTED THE building out to me as we drove to Uncle Gianni’s soccer tournament: Holy Innocents’ Day—December 28—into a new year’s cheer!
“The Colonel’s residence, up ahead,” he muttered, driving on.
“Roxas is too busy,” I said, shaking my head.
“We’re not targeting him.”
“What?”
“I want the General.”
“But I thought—”
“I want the General. He’s the big, public fish. We want him.”
“But he’s dying anyway,” I said. “Let his heart kill him. Whereas the Colonel—”
“We want the big man.”
I was silent as we passed the white house, with its neat lawn. I saw a lumbering figure move on the far side of the garden. I turned away. I did not glance back at the Colonel’s house.
“By all means,” I said. “Bomb Tom away.”
“It was that bad,” Jed asked, though it was a statement. He was concentrating on the road and not looking at me. “You know what I think,” he said. He turned to me.
“What?”
“You really just don’t like that colonel.”
I didn’t speak.
He turned away, staring at the road, holding back a grin: “You know it’s not personal, Sol. You do know that’s not the point of the exercise.”
MY FATHER’S WAREHOUSE was close to the decayed parts of the harbor, which rambled on into the slums built by smugglers and sailors. Gnawed, Spanish-era residences, eminently decaying, were strewn along our path.
Once, from these homes, old traders smelled without cease the coming and going of their fortunes. They brought European brocade and fancy lingerie for Manila’s lost generations, the blight of emigrants after Magellan. It wasn’t just a Spanish scene: close to the water, Chinese settlers confirmed the rumor of their kinship with the globe whenever they sniffed the salt breeze. The heavy air brought junks—wind-driven receptacles of silks, lacquerware, sandalwood cabinets, chickens, which were exchanged regularly for far-flung goods. Silver from Acapulco. Mindoro’s birds’ nests. Butuan’s trinkets. Sulu’s pearls. Transubstantiation was the harbor’s theme: desire into doubloons. In this way, Manila, ancient stopping place, port of exchange, was a restless place for those who were only passing through. This might explain its wildly cosmopolitan hunger, even in the early seventeenth century, when Siamese chiefs and Muslim pirates were already part of age-old trade. My family’s business, deep into the twentieth, continued the city’s old preoccupations.
Jed drove through side streets following the shoreline obscured by tenements and commercial buildings. Soon we reached solid cement blocks, streets that seemed to consist of garages or walls. The shipping companies’ trucks were regular patrons of ghost-town streets, and pedestrians walked at their own risk; still, some homes thrived, displaying clotheslines and potted plants in the windows, and junkyards reached up to the roads, where kids played among old tires and rotting tricycle skeletons.
Down a long dirt road we turned into a sunken compass of green; the well-kept area could be turned into a double-decker soccer field overnight. On each side during the right season you’d find a pair of fluttering goals. Two games could be played simultaneously; not the full-length eleven-a-side, but maybe up to seven players each. It was a scheme I had had in high school, a century ago, to embellish my résumé for the schools I had planned to attend. Soccer for Scholars. To notch up points for the Ivy League, I rounded up a bunch of kids from different charities in Makati and hosted soccer clinics for a month, with a finale for the children and their families, a tournament, a spectacle, including medals, most valuable athletes, and a lot of hot dogs. It was a whimsical activity, of pure Uncle Gianni design. The Philippines, after all, is a basketball country, and soccer was an expatriate, anachronistic sport, in the past played locally mainly by the Spaniards, called coños without irony.
That was how the Mini-World Cup National Tournament came about.
Uncle Gianni had thought out all the trappings of my original event. My father had paid for everything, including the nets and uniforms, the construction of stands, state-of-the-art toilets. It was worth it, he thought. Uncle Gianni ended up using the field afterward for his own games. That, in full, was how he came to sponsor this holiday bash for his colleagues, friends and hangers-on. The day was a prologue to the smoke and debris of New Year’s, coming before the participants’ deep, well-deserved hangovers, a long weekend of revelry and stupor.
I had tried to warn Jed about it, but nothing could really prepare one for Uncle Gianni’s event deep in Manila’s bowels, a conceptual spectacle in the tropical heat.
The show had already begun, balloons were up, and far off in the grassy open-air plot a loudspeaker blared dance music, which we heard from as far away as the gravel parking lot. A few drivers loitered in the dust, but most were out on the fields: it seemed to me the drivers were the most avid fans of the games. From this distance, I could already make out Uncle Gianni’s voice—whether it was my radar imagining the tenor of past events or, in fact, his hoarse, actual presence, excited and conspicuous, publicly exhorting his friends. This muffled, mounting microphone bleat reached us up on the gravel.
Stopping on a height before we descended into the compound, I pointed him out to Jed; and as I said, nothing could prepare one for the sight in Manila of Uncle Gianni in casual array, with a wireless mic in hand, emceeing the event, this time, for a change, in complete Texan costume, knives glinting on his boots, a distinct, I hope ironic, ten-gallon hat, and, I could barely tell and yet I knew, a daintily folded kerchief on his sunburned neck.
They were all there, athletes and alcoholics, dressed in their sweats or in what passed for sportsman gear, these ghosts of the galleon trade. Milanese leather-goods makers, French attachés, German restaurateurs, English salesmen, American pharmaceutical agents, Spanish opportunists, African oilmen, Dutch beach bums, Canadian do-gooders, Japanese engineers, all the Filipino oligarchs who fed from their hands, and, at this event, a lost, blue-eyed Mormon, a sweaty gate-crasher whom we bumped into as we marched to the main fields.
People were arriving and strolling about. Many were seminaked: obese men in transparent shorts, fine-boned women in backless shirts; but this lone, scared-looking youth wore the white shirt, dark suit, and tight tie of his trade, his raw, scratched face sautéing in the sun.
“This is Mr. Fortunato’s party, isn’t it?” said the Mormon, who was a bit older than us, it seemed, but the onslaught of manhood had not treated him well. He had pustular pimples on his cheek. Repetitive welts also adorned his outsized Adam’s apple, phallic and repulsive.
We were hopping over the rope fence, and Jed strode ahead.
“He’s over there,” I said to the Mormon, trying to move away from him but not succeeding: he blocked my way past the gate. “There,” I said, “the man in the cowboy hat.”
“I see,” the boy said, looking a bit skeptical. “My friends told me he could introduce me to people.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think anyone came up here looking for redemption. Excuse me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he muttered, and he moved away and walked beside me, like a puppy terrified of being stranded.
“Well, then, maybe you can help me,” he said shyly. “May I ask what is your vision of the apocalypse?” He swallowed hopefully, and I stared at him.
Just ahead of us, I saw a seventy-year-old Belgian, practically naked, with his arm around a pubescent Filipino girl. Nearby, a bunch of drunken Englishmen were singing what they called the Irish national anthem, God Save the Queen, one of their favorite jokes. We walked past so-called, self-labeled coños, pink-skinned Spanish mestizos talking about their Jet Skis.
“Take your pick,” I said, waving my hand. “Here’s your latter-day set of apocalypse now.”
I regretted the statement when I spoke it. I did not want him to remember me. And the frenzy of these games, after all,
exhilarated me. I loved the purity of soccer—passion deliberately tuned and precisely, patiently enacted. But I was impatient, looking for Jed. I thought I saw his bag, an outsized sportsman’s Adidas; I thought I saw it on his shoulders, like a bulwark by the stands, behind Uncle Gianni.
“Thanks for sharing,” the Mormon said, mumbling. I watched the kid scamper away, his lanky, woolen legs fending off brambles and loose earth, up onto the curved, sliding grass, the main fields of the tournament.
“Joaqui!” someone squealed as I noted Jed talking to a blondish boy near the stands. His name was pronounced like that, “Wacky.”
A girl in shorts ran up and hugged Jed.
I recognized her. She had been a cotillion girl and cheerleader at our high school.
“Wacky! Where have you been, maldito!”
“Ramona,” Jed said. “Mong. How are you?”
And they kissed each other on the cheek, a bit exuberantly on Jed’s part, I thought.
“Bad, bad boy. Do you know I had my debut and you did not go? And you were in Manila pala ha. You did not answer the invitation.”
“You did? You turned old so early.”
She bumped her hip against his.
“You, ha. I had to settle for Pochie na lang for the first dance because you were not around. Maldito. Where are you hiding? Is it true you’re going out with—”
“Wacky,” I mimicked. “How’ve you been?”
Jed turned, still smiling as I approached.
The girl stared at me.
“Who’s she?” Mong asked, even though she knew.
“Victor, say hi. Remember Mong?”
“But that’s not your name. Aren’t you Soltera Soliman?”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “I’m a Danish scoliotic with a ruined brain. Pleased to meet you again, Mong. Ramona.”
She didn’t hold out her hand.
She turned to Jed.
“Well, see us again sometime, ha? We all miss you, Wacky. You haven’t been to a single Christmas party—ninguna. How bad you are. I’ve just flown back from New York, but everyone talks about you, you’re so snabero daw. Where are you hiding, ha? You didn’t even ask me—I have so much cuento about New York.”
“See you, Mong,” Jed said.
“Are you playing, Wack?” the vaguely foreign-looking boy called Pochie asked, looking at the bag in Jed’s hands. The boy had been doing stretches on the ground, one hand rolling on his hairless tummy and the other seeming to oil his calf, though both gestures were aimless, likely like his brain.
Jed shook his head. “I’ll watch you,” he said, as he tried to walk away. “Good luck. Ciao!”
“Ciao,” said the boy.
“Ciao, Wacky! Remember, Tuesday at Carmela’s, Wacky! Pochie’s going, too, aren’t you, Poch? Wacky! We called your mom. She knows. Sorpresa! Carmela’s having a baby shower! Can you believe? Before she even got to college! You should come—the shower’s going to be bigger than her debut!”
“Ciao, Mong,” Jed said, waving goodbye, but she was already bugging the boy Pochie about something.
“Where were you?” Jed asked.
“Yes, Wacky? What, Wacky?”
“Oh shut up. C’mon. Let’s go.”
ON THE EDGE of the sports barracks was one of my dad’s warehouses. A low-roofed set of adjoining buildings and the compound’s oldest tenement. To reach it, on normal days you had to go through the barred, tall gate by the road, usually guarded by a pair called Mundo and Al. They had been in our employ forever, like many of my parents’ faithful. On the day of the tournament, they kept these gates open. Mundo and Al stood sentry, a rather distracted one, I knew, at the covered path during the games, in the utilitarian area where the new toilets had been installed. Beyond that outpost, jutting more boldly onto the main grounds, there was an afterthought bar, which seemed the demarcation line between revelers and domestic staff, except for a few white-dressed nannies near the playing fields, obediently following tottering kids.
Rifles in hand, toothpicking and making serious bets, Mundo and Al were judging the nationalities of Team Malta, composed of a crew of Europeans, all non-Maltese—“O, Dutchman,” Al would say knowledgeably. “Look at bald head.” They commented on the fitness of their favored coños, who usually won, because they could claim players from a wider selection than any of the Belgians or Brits or even Japanese could. Al and Mundo were happily absorbed in this way, like a pair of boys engaged in ant bouts, heads to the ground inspecting their contenders, watching the thrashing, minute legs of their chosen beasts, their bets depending on optimistic intuition as the black and red ants raced to gobble each other up; they did not take their eyes away from the skirmish until the pushed, tangled bodies revealed the winner: in an ant bout, it was easy to tell which side won. The winners gobbled up the vanquished.
I knew Al and Mundo would be absorbed in this way, watching the soccer tournament without pause: there’d be no need to worry about them.
“Hello, Mang Al, Mang Munding.”
“Ma’am Sol,” Al said. “This year, Philippines will win.” Al had a childish face, because of the way his eyes seemed always smiling in a round plain. I used to think he was a sorry excuse for a guard, until once I saw him lift his gun to shoot at a sound on the grounds, a long time ago, when the soccer field was still brambles and weed. He shot a rat with one bullet, just like that. Muhammad Al, he was dubbed, flies like a butterfly, kills like a bee.
“Well, what did you bet?” I said.
“Nothing,” Mundo retorted, spitting. “Al is putting the money on Spain again.”
Every year, both Al and Mundo secretly hoped that the Philippine players would win the tournament, but, like true nationalists, they never bet on them.
“And you?”
“Belgium. This year, they have the two small Italians. Very good with the feet.”
I nodded. “Sounds good. Have you seen my dad?”
“He is out of the town, ma’am. Sir Gianni—he is over there.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Well, go ahead with your business. We’re just watching the game.”
I LED JED TO the windowless building up ahead leaning toward the street. It had large steel doors in the back, near the gates, away from the playing fields; but I walked up to the small side door, near the mess of weeds and dirty ground. A rooster, Al’s pet, made a ruffled sound. Its cage was set against the property’s natural boundary, a thicket of bamboo. Beyond the bird was the concrete wall surrounding the compound, hard to scale and difficult to compass. The rooster squawked at me. I opened the door on the rooster side. It crowed a warning as we went in, but it was an indifferent bird and made a useless, lackadaisical appeal. Anyway, no one was listening.
Jed followed me in. I had been inside a few times when I ran the soccer clinic. The equipment had been stored here: nets, balls, goal frames. When Uncle Gianni first set up his tournaments, it used to be my job to make sure the equipment was ready for use. But I had never gone into the innards of the buildings or walked about the crates that loomed as each door opened. Down by the first door, I settled my bags, oversized, with strongly seamed nylon compartments, chosen for the event. We went through a long hallway studded with wood, slats of shipment crates, wooden shavings, the pale, smooth paper of crate-stuffing. It smelled of dry packing, the crimped smell of bunched pulp, ticklish to the nose. I sneezed. Jed turned on lights for the next suite of rooms, veering to the right. The rooms interconnected and snaked; large, neat boxes were lined against the wall.
“Here,” Jed said, making a turn. “Look at this. He said it would be here.”
“Who said?”
“I have my sources.”
“Have you been pumping information from Manong Babe?”
Jed didn’t answer.
“Don’t you dare include him in this plot, Jed.”
In the room’s dark pulp, he stopped and kissed me: “I wouldn’t dare involve Manong Babe,” he said. “I love Manong Babe.”
“Stop it,” I said.
“There’s something about guns,” he laughed, clutching me from behind.
I giggled.
“Teargasm,” I said.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
“Right here?”
It was a secluded niche; I was ready before he closed the door. We didn’t wait to take off our clothes. Come to think of it, I liked sex in stupid places—where novelty matched my body’s surprise. It always shocked me, like electric wiring, the scratch of his shirt against my breast, his wet mouth—and the oddness of our placement between plaster wall and wood-shaving pile gave the gross grappling just the right pitch of madness in that creepy cave.
Later we almost missed it: a doorway to a dark, noncommittal space. I switched the light on for Jed. I sat on top of the crate. He began tapping on it. He took his sports bag from his shoulder and unzipped it. He was ready: he had wire pliers, pocketknives with different blades, a heavy-duty pair of scissors. Hammers and nails. All he needed to do was find the loot in one box.
I watched while he went through the first box, feeling the wrapped object.
“They should be locked and sealed in a metal bind,” Jed muttered. “This can’t be it: they wouldn’t be covered in paper.”
The fact is, the warehouse also had other goods. A harmless trade. Watches, toys and shirts: cuckoo clocks. We opened up several boxes. I hammered the tops shut when we had the wrong box. You had to look for the right-sized one; the containers were smaller than you expected.
Jed whistled.
“Ssh,” I said, walking over.
They were packed unassembled, with cartridge, trigger, and muzzle in separate wrap, like incoherent scraps. An expert, I imagine, could easily conjure wholeness from the loose parts, with that voodoo of knowledge like a snap of vision in a gun-lover’s heart. But I had never held a gun. Jed held out a part for me to hold. It was a bunch of metal, inarticulate, not even foreboding, surprisingly greasy, slippery, inert and senseless in my ignorant hands.