In time he became a poker partner of Doug MacArthur. The general lived in a wing of the Manila Hotel. When President Quezon commissioned MacArthur to build the Philippine Army, the general insisted his quarters be every bit the match for Malacañan, the presidential palace. MacArthur’s penthouse suite was constructed with seven bedrooms, the same as the palace, featuring a surrounding promenade for him to walk, ponder decisions, and put himself on display above the city.
Remy found MacArthur to be a congenial player. The general could not tolerate a conversation he did not command, but no one challenged him in this regard. He could nurse a scotch and water for hours. At home, the general didn’t smoke his famous corncob, his “battle pipe,” but constantly had at hand an old briarwood. In the study, surrounded by the man’s ten-thousand-volume library of military history, Remy was careful to make his own bankroll on the other guests. He did not hesitate to toss a few bets to the general every session.
MacArthur recommended to Remy an amah for young Talbot. The general explained that a Chinese nanny was better admired in the expatriate community than a Filipina yaya. The boy should also be enrolled in the American Catholic school in Intramuros. Though Remy would not take the generals money, he did accept his advice.
Talbot grew tall and lean like his mother. He wore his black hair longer than the fashion. Slowly, Manila began to drain the boy of his good nature. He became a poor fit for polo, golf, sculling, even baseball at Rizal Park, and the other recreations of his station and race. Talbot preferred more solitary pursuits: reading, walking the old city, sketching. He became an able student and a handsome lad, but friendless outside the home, detached and surly in it. Remy’s gambling pursuits held no interest for the boy. Tal’s ennui threw up a barrier that Remy did not know how to cross. He recalled the bush hut he’d built out of termite clay and manure, iron, and wood, for this boy. He resented his sons distance, and asked behind the boys back for the return of the cherished part of him that was Sarah. He believed that Sarah would love him through the boy, but somehow Talbot prevented this, cheating Remy. Just as Talbot did not warm to his father’s voice, the boy did not hear his mother within him.
Remy, popular away from home, found reasons to stay away. The amah cared well for the boy; he was eating and handling his studies. Remy lived and played in the company of the professional class of Manila. He had money, liquor, games, women brown and white, to keep him out nights. He saw his son less.
In late 1941, few believed the Japanese would, or could, invade the Philippines. Why anger such a power as America? Hadn’t MacArthur spent years preparing the islands to repel exactly such an attack? When Pearl Harbor was bombed, followed hours later by the destruction of the naval and air stations around Manila, the American community was shocked but confident the general would defend them. In the week before Christmas, the Japanese army landed forces on Luzon at Lingayen Gulf and south of Manila at Legaspi Bay. Japan expended little effort in overwhelming MacArthur’s numerically superior but poorly equipped and undertrained Filipino force. On Christmas Eve, when the general abandoned Manila for Bataan and Corregidor, most foreigners realized the time had passed for them to make their own escape. Manila was a besieged and cut-off city. On December 29, MacArthur came on the radio:
Do not follow the army to Bataan. Get together in groups rather than be taken as individual families. Destroy any papers showing a connection with the U.S. Military Reserves. Pour all intoxicating beverages down the sink. May God be with you. I shall return.
Remy, like all the Americans, had known few Japanese in Manila. There’d been the rare Rotarian businessman, polite and unoffending, or quiet employees in restaurants and private homes. No one could fully comprehend the tales of berserk Japanese soldiers raiding and pillaging across China, fueled on violence and alcohol. On New Year’s Eve, in the last hours before the Japanese rolled into Manila, Remy and the entire foreign community drank every bit of scotch, bourbon, rum, and gin they could tolerate. The rest they denied the enemy by smashing the bottles in the streets beneath the gleams of exploding fuel dumps at Cavite Naval Base. Tal, at fifteen, drank his first liquor and broke the bottle before passing out.
Remy and Tal were interned at Santo Tomas, a university in central Manila. The Japanese corralled seven thousand westerners on the campus, a space suited for half that. Remy continued to gamble, staying below the notice of camp administrators who’d banned the practice. He used his winnings to buy extra food from the camp bodega for himself and his son; the rest of the cash he gave to a ring of women smuggling money through the wire to the “battling bastards,” those captured American soldiers who survived the death march from Bataan and were caged in Cabanatuan.
In captivity, Tal flourished. He’d been freed from the constraints of school, though several academics in the camp had set up classes as high as university level. Tal’s quiet nature hid a steely willpower and icy nerve. The boy had grown into a young man with a poker face. Tal got involved with the folks smuggling food into Santo Tomas and messages out. He worked as a courier, slipping notes to the Filipino guerrillas who masqueraded in the camp as servants or suppliers to the Japanese. Tal learned the clever ways of chicanery and thievery. He snipped the corners of transported bags of rice so they would leak grains for him and his comrades to sweep up. He lured the commandant’s chickens over the coop wire. He tossed wet bamboo shoots into a cook fire deep in the night to make them crump, waking the guards with fears of gunshots. Tal lifted anything from the Japanese that wasn’t nailed down and ate it or sold it, adding the money to Remy’s stash headed to Cabanatuan. He became the one returning late to his cot in the administration building. Remy didn’t ask where the boy had been, avoiding the smooth lie his son would have told. Remy heard of Tal’s exploits mainly from the admiration, or scoldings, of others over dice and cards who called him brave and crazy.
Remy discovered that Tal had inherited his cool and Sarah’s single-mindedness. Though he’d never set foot in the States, the job at hand for all Americans was resistance against the Japanese. Tal, almost of a soldier’s age, fought in the only way he could behind barbed wire. He stole, he mocked, he refused their hold on him.
In May 1943, after sixteen months at Santo Tomas, the Japanese asked for eight hundred volunteers to transfer to a second, smaller internment camp seventy kilometers southeast of Manila, on an athletic field at the University of Los Baños, near the shore of Laguna de Bay. Unmarried men of good health were required to build the new camp to relieve the crowded conditions at Santo Tomas. Internees who inspected the new site declared it unfit for habitation, with impure and insufficient water, a malarial mosquito problem, inadequate medical facilities, and a lack of food resources in the area. The Japanese ignored these protests. Only 280 volunteered to go, Talbot among them. Remy added his name to stay with his son. The rest of the contingent was selected by lottery. Twelve nurses captured on Corregidor, the only military personnel in the camp, were sent also.
Los Baños emerged quickly. Thirty sawali-and-nipa barracks went up, three for use by the Japanese for garrison and staff offices, the rest for barracks, kitchen, garage, and a pair of chapels. The men boiled water until they could complete a deep well, suffered through an E. coli breakout, and burned more calories than the Japanese supplied them. By the end of the year, 1,400 more internees were transferred from Santo Tomas. Tal had worked as a carpenter, Remy in the blacksmith shop.
By the beginning of this year, 1944, the tide of war on the Pacific had turned against the Japanese. With every American victory, the guards enacted increasingly punitive measures. Midway, Guadalcanal, New Guinea, the Solomons, each ignited a new round of harassment, extra roll calls, tightening freedoms, cutbacks on food. Talbot, whippet lean, responded by studying every inch of Los Baños. He knew the vulnerable places in the wire, blind spots among the guard towers, the location of every bullet, bed, gun, vehicle, and morsel of Japanese food inside the camp. He continued his smuggling efforts and his thefts.
Also in March, the red-robed Filipina appeared in her window above the camp. She gave sex to the guards and any soldier passing through the village. Tal saw this with everyone else. Somehow he fell for her.
In July, Lieutenant Nagata arrived from Santo Tomas as the new Los Baños supply officer. His first act was to reduce the rations in the camp by 20 percent. His second was to restrict any commerce with the locals for the fruit that fell from the trees outside the wire. Nagata shut the two women down immediately, knowing nothing of the smuggling. Tal redirected his efforts to thieving from the Japanese.
In November, a typhoon swept across the camp. Tal snuck out in the night, dodging nipa fronds from the roofs flying in the hundred-mile-per-hour wind. The guards caught him in the commandant’s garden digging up vegetables. The Internee Committee stepped in to punish Tal, dodging tougher justice from the Japanese. The committee clapped him in the camp brig for ten days. While Tal was in the lockup, the final Sunday concert was played. The internee musicians announced they no longer had the energy to rehearse, despite the boost in camp morale their performances gave. In a final tweak at the Japanese, and a nod to Tal, the orchestra played “Prelude to the Thief of Baghdad,” “Orpheus in the Underworld,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” and “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack.” On his release, Tal was removed from No. 12, Remy’s building, and inserted into No. 11, branded by the guards as one of the troublesome boys.
Then five days ago, in the second week of December, the American fighter flew over the camp and dropped the cigarettes. Tal would not let them lie in the grass unclaimed. That was a courageous act, and hard-headed. That was, Remy was convinced, Sarah.
~ * ~
Remy shifted on the hard floor, taking in his circumstances. He measured the distance from where he sat to where he thought he’d be when he left the bayou twenty years ago. Remy was a prisoner in a foreign land, a gambler with a badly beaten son, a dead wife, no money nor home to return to, skeletal ribs under a shabby T-shirt, and sandals. He thought of his father buried in France, his wife under the rocks in Australia. Maybe his own mother had passed on in Louisiana; he didn’t know. Would he add to the family legacy, depositing his bones in the Philippines? Would Tal join him here, or would the boy die in yet another country?
Remy swatted at a mosquito. The action rattled the bunk at his back. Tal stirred. The boys would soon be coming back to their racks. They would certainly have things to say about the Filipina.
He whispered, “Boy?”
“Yeah.” Even in a hushed tone, Remy was struck by the man’s voice. The little boy had joined Sarah, both were gone.
“Remember. Close to the vest.”
“Okay.”
“How you feelin’?”
“I’m all right. Remy?”
“Yup.”
“I’m gonna kill him.”
Remy shook his head, forcefully enough for the boy to feel it in the bed frame. He turned to face his son. Tal stared straight up, into the bottom of the top bunk.
“Look at me,” Remy said. The boy did not. “You’re not killing anybody. What you’re going to do is survive. You and me both. We’ll leave Nagata and the rest for MacArthur and his boys. They’ll see to it, I guaran-damn-tee you.”
Tal seemed concrete. Remy had to hurry before his roommates pushed aside the sawali mat over the door.
“You don’t have to defend her honor, kiddo. That’s over, that’s gone. What she needs to do is exactly what we’re gonna do, and that’s still be alive when this place gets put to the torch. She’ll get it back one day, but not now and not here. You understand me?”
Slowly, still hardened, Tal brought his eyes to his father.
“Tell me we’ll save her, too. Tell me that.”
There was Sarah looking right at Remy, maybe not so gone at all. A job to do. Her two cool-handed men to do it.
Remy rested his back against the bunk. He’d sleep here beside his sore, bedridden, hard-assed son, so that neither of them got too lonely.
“Sure, boy. We’ll save her.”
~ * ~
Chapter Six
T
AL AWOKE from a dream of fire.
He had not been aflame in the dream, but others he did not know burned. None of the charred people ran, they stood in place like torches. Tal ran among them.
He sat up quickly. He did not think to worry if his scabs might stick to the mattress. When he realized he was upright in his bunk and had not torn his back open, he exhaled in relief.
Tal lifted the mosquito netting. Remy had gone, slipped out before sunup. The others snored in their racks.
Early dawn tinged the camp in gray half-light. The last hoots of an owl echoed in Boot Creek. Cool air drifted in the window across his bare back. Tal rose. After five hobbled days, he stood on his own.
He looked at his ankles, swollen from lying still so long, mottled with red bites. Bedbugs. The mites used the mosquito nets to travel from bunk to bunk.
He slid on his sneakers and, shirtless, walked away from his rack.
Others were awake in the predawn camp. Vatican City stirred early for morning prayer. Some folks got a jump on the rising sun to do what physical activity they could manage. Fifty men lined up at the gate for the days firewood detail in the Makiling forest. Cooks ambled to the kitchen to stoke fires, peel kamotes, hull rice, make ersatz coffee. Women worked in Toshiwara’s private garden; Nagata had shut down the internees plot in October. Two men strolled to tend the Brahman bull the commandant kept to haul the firewood sled in from the jungle. Every ounce of food that went down the big bull’s gullet was eyed covetously. A month ago, the internees killed their last dozen pigs. The animals had contracted anthrax. All the camps visions of butchered meat, chops, sausage, and scrapple went up in smoke. The internees, dashed and hungry, salvaged a few buckets of boiled blood for their evening lugao, rice porridge. Nagata refused to let the internees spend their own money or trade their jewels to replace the pigs.
The older men Tal passed winked to see him on his feet. They acknowledged the brown mantle across his shoulders as hard won. Each of them had some outer mark, the protruding bones of malnutrition, red lesions from pellagra, the indigo patches of beriberi. Tal drew himself upright at their nods, undoing the last of the cringe that had crept into his posture.
The best time to visit the latrine was always before breakfast. Tal’s insides had been twisted and tight since his beating. This walk had unraveled the blockage. Many pairs of barracks were connected by a six-hole outhouse. Tal entered to find four internees already in place. He dropped his pants, sat, and concentrated.
When finished, Tal stood outside the latrine, reacquainting himself with fresh air and the rising sun. Old McElway approached. The man limped a circle around Tal, whistling at the boy’s crusted shoulders.
“Sonny, you ain’t never gon’ get laid.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, no woman wants to climb in bed with a fella lookin’ all whupped up like that. That’s like sleepin’ with a lizard or somethin’. You got to be smooth and pretty, like me.”
“You played piano in a whorehouse. You had an advantage.”
“Still smooth and pretty.”
McElway was neither. He was fading from starvation. His eye sockets had deepened, taking on the dark of a well. Veins stood out in his neck, forearms, and forehead. Because he could not eat enough, something slow and hungry was devouring him instead.
Tal played along with the old negro’s patter. “I’m pretty.”
Mac twirled a long finger around Tal’s head. “Yeah, with your hair all down your neck. You pretty like a gal. But brother, you ain’t smooth.” McElway laid a hand on Tal’s arm. “Y
our daddy, you know. He talks about you like you Superman.”
“Remy’s okay.”
McElway nodded his agreement. “You Superman, Talbot?”
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 7