“Bascom. He’ll do it. He can make it.”
“He’s a good one. I’ll tell Lucas.”
“You got any idea for the third?”
Remy exhaled, resolved. From his vest pocket, he pulled the deck of cards he’d carried for a week. He shuffled and laid out a game of solitaire.
The cards told him quickly he would lose. With a practiced dexterity Tal could not catch, Remy cheated so the boy would see him win.
~ * ~
Through the night and into the morning, the western sky rumbled. During breakfast, a pair of U.S. Navy pursuit planes circled the camp before racing south. The loudspeaker announced the names of two more men who’d died before sunup. They would be buried in their bedsheets, no caskets for them. Remy spooned in the last of his thin lugao, finished the dregs of his ersatz coffee, and began to cough.
From across the dining hall, Tal hurried to his side. He patted Remy’s spine, asking, “You all right?”
Remy hacked. He pushed aside the plate of rice mush to lower his face to the table, covering his mouth with a balled hand. He coughed until his throat strained and his temples pulsed. Tal turned him off the bench.
“Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
The rest of the day, Tal and Remy stayed hidden in their room. One watched the hall while the other listened to the crystal radio. The Voice of Freedom reported on the Allies in Europe crossing the Rhine and the firebombing of a German city, Dresden. In the Pacific War, the attack on Manila continued with ferocity; the Japanese would not be pried out without a bloodletting. The marines readied to invade the island of Iwo Jima. Once the news cycled, Remy and Tal napped. On occasion, Remy coughed loudly. In the afternoon, Tal fetched their meal of green, meatless gruel. They played crazy eights for matchsticks and waited for sundown.
Two hours after the light died, the barracks filled. The Japanese had imposed a 7:00 p.m. absolute curfew. No one was allowed outside, including on the paths between barracks. Anyone violating the rule would be shot.
In his bunk, Remy resumed his racking cough. By nine o’clock, the others in the cubicle and around him in the barracks were relieved when Tal took him to the infirmary
Tal lit a lantern to head with Remy down the barracks steps. Aware of the curfew, several internees watched out their windows. Remy coughed for them, leaning on Tal. He doubled over, stumbled, adding a bad leg to the performance. Tal, holding the lamp, could only catch him with one arm.
He called to the boy standing in the doorway of No. 11. “Hey, Bascom. Come give me a hand.”
A watching guard waved the Irish boy over.
The two helped Remy along the paved road beside the wire. The lantern kept them visible for the Japanese. Remy’s loud hacks and limp got them past more guards without challenge on their way to the infirmary.
Inside the medical building, Remy sat on a cot, Bascom and Tal flanking him. Without electricity, white beds and walls were made yellow by lamplight; the infirmary smelled of kerosene. One of the navy nurses came to check on Remy. She was thin, like everyone. As she approached, Remy gave her a cough. The young woman looked him over and smiled.
“You look fine.”
“So do you.”
“You should moan a little. Sell it.”
She turned to leave him and the boys alone. Later, she’d need to be able to say she thought Remy Tuck was sick.
When she had gone, Tal said, “Okay.”
Remy drummed fingers on the mattress. He chewed his bottom lip and did not rise.
Tal, who considered himself the leader of this mission, cocked his head at Remy’s stalling. Bascom flipped his gaze back and forth between the two, not certain what was going on.
Remy took stock. He had a gambler’s nerve, a straight face and a steady hand with cards and dice. But the play tonight was not for cash, eggs, or tinned fruit, it was for life and death—not just for themselves, maybe the whole camp. Remy had to follow his son, something he’d never done before. To do it for the first time tonight, under the wire and into the dark, with the stakes so high, was hard. Remy had grown up without a father, and didn’t know when the time was right to switch places.
In the last month, Tal had left the camp three times. Remy never. The boy had Remy’s blank eyes, and a better nerve.
“Okay,” Remy said.
The nurse stood in the hall. Passing her, Remy slipped a hand around her waist. He kissed her on the lips. She stood still for it. He took only a moment for the kiss, not to embarrass her, but to carry it with him for luck. He grinned close, she returned a stare. Remy backed off. When Tal and Bascom followed, the nurse pulled each by the hand and gave the boys kisses, too.
Outside, they left the lantern behind, to creep around the corner of the infirmary. Crickets and croaking frogs throbbed in the bamboo grove and cogon grasses on the other side of the fence.
Tal put all his weight on the lower strand, slacking it. Bascom lay on his back while Tal and Remy lifted. Headfirst, the Irish boy shimmied under without problem. He moved to the second fence and copied Tal, standing on the lower wire to stretch it.
“You next,” Tal whispered. “Face up.”
Remy lay on his back. With his nose under the wire, he snaked his hips and shoulder blades to skid over the earth. A barb snagged his vest. Tal picked it loose.
Once they stood outside both fences, Tal strode away toward the high grasses. Remy paused, Bascom beside him. Remy gazed into the camp, like a soul outside its body, seeing how dingy, grim, and sick it appeared. Bascom dealt with his own silent revelations from this first taste of liberty in three years.
Tal marched into the weeds and grass rising around him, free night shrouding him. Watching, Remy wondered how, even with the girl and himself left behind, the boy could ever have come back inside the wire.
“Come on.” Remy poked Bascom to break his reverie. They hustled to catch up with Tal, who’d discovered their absence and waited in the middle of the field.
Tal led them to the rim of a gully, down a steep slope. He stayed in front, showing Remy and Bascom how to step carefully. As soon as they reached the stony bottom of the ravine, Bascom kicked an unseen can. The tin struck like a gong. Tal flung himself on the wet rocks, Remy and Bascom did the same. They lay under the flapping of wakened wings and swishing branches. Water trickled under Remy’s chin, his shirt soaked. When Tal rose and walked on, they followed. Bascom shrugged a moon-gray apology.
More times than he could remember, Remy had sat up on sleepless nights listening to the sounds of this ravine, hoots and monkey chatter, screeching birds, sometimes a roar. The voices had soothed him, sent him skipping past his Manila years to the outback again, where he’d been younger, happier, reliant not on luck but on his hands, family, and friends. In the city he’d had to gamble; in the bush he could build. Then came Los Baños, where he needed both to survive. Moving through this ravine, the shifting creatures and damp air seemed to welcome him back to the bush, to that better man he was.
Five minutes from camp, Tal halted. Remy and Bascom were surprised to find another had joined them.
“This is Emilio,” Tal said. Remy had no idea where the stocky, armed guerrilla had come from.
“We’re heading south,” the Filipino said, “three miles to Barrio Tranca. Stay quiet.”
Emilio set his feet on the slope of the ravine to climb out. Tal said, “Let’s go,” and fell in behind the guerrilla.
Bascom, older than Tal by a few years, muttered to Remy, “He’s quite the one for giving orders. Is this your doing?”
“You raise a kid someday. Then talk to me.”
Remy turned uphill. Another young guerrilla with a rifle and machete appeared out of the black with no trace of where he’d come from.
The five slipped across a dirt road onto a deserted coconut estate. In the vast grove, coconuts littered the ground under a dense ceiling of fronds. Emilio chopped several in half with powerful swipes of his bolo, handing pieces to the three internees.
> The path Emilio chose avoided roads, keeping to plantations and overgrown fields. By midnight, under clouds tufting the high moon, they arrived on the poor outskirts of Tranca. Approaching a dark copse of trees, to the smell of wood smoke, Emilio clasped another Filipino out of nowhere. Before Remy knew it, they’d strolled into a guerrilla camp.
Along with Bascom and Tal, he was abandoned in the middle of black tents and fat tree trunks. Two campfires burned in the middle of a hundred or more Filipinos sleeping on bedrolls, rifles cuddled between their dark knees, many of them barefoot. Every guerrilla had a bolo at his waist.
Out of the dimness, a white man walked up. He towered over the Filipino beside him. Remy gasped at the first American soldier he’d seen up close since 1941.
The guerrilla spoke first, extending his hand to the internees.
“I’m Colonel Romeo. You made good time, gentlemen. This is Sergeant Bolick.”
The soldier shook hands all around, explaining he was with the 511th Airborne Signal Company.
“Thank you, fellas. I know this isn’t easy. And there’s more to do. Just wanted to tell you don’t worry, we’re doing everything we can.”
Tal said, “Thank you.”
Bascom whispered to Remy, “Christ, he’s big.”
“Romeo here’ll take care of you,” Bolick said. “I’ll be seeing you soon. Good luck.”
The sergeant tossed them a Yank grin and receded into the camp. He took a while to disappear, large against the trees and silent guerrillas.
“Romeo,” Remy said, “how ‘bout somethin’ to eat.”
The young guerrilla sent another to fetch food. He led them to folding stools beside one of the fire pits.
“How are you holding up?”
Tal answered for all three. “Fine.”
“Good. In an hour, I’m sending you with an escort to the bay. Which one is going to Parañaque?”
Tal spoke quickly. “Me.”
“It’s fifteen miles by banca, all on open water patrolled by the Japanese. Then five more miles by foot through enemy lines. You know this?”
“Yes.”
Romeo addressed Bascom and Remy. “You’ll leave for Nanhaya and wait for word that he’s arrived. If he hasn’t made it in twelve hours, the next one will go. Whichever of you is left with the guerrillas will serve as a guide for the attack. Now tell me about the camp.”
All three described the layout of Los Baños. Bascom, a surprisingly able draftsman, crafted a map with pen and paper of the fences, guard outposts, gates, barracks, and paths, the surrounding ravine and Boot Creek. The last thing added was the pit that in afternoons lay in the shadow of the dao tree.
Next they detailed the guards and their routines. Morning exercises, the routes of their patrols, lanterns after curfew, gun placements. Bascom estimated the garrison at two hundred, never more than fifty on duty at a time. Remy contributed his low opinion of the guards as fighting men.
Romeo asked for the health of the internees. Remy described the climbing number of deaths from malnutrition and disease. Tal guessed that half the camp was made up of women and children, the ones in the best physical condition. The elderly suffered the worst.
Lastly, Remy spoke to Bascom. He figured the Irishman ought to know what was at stake. He described the massacres closing in on Los Baños, of Palawan, Calamba, and Bai, the atrocities in Manila, the rescue of Cabanatuan, of Mac’s crystal radio beneath his and Tal’s bunk, all of it leading to the belief that the Japanese were planning on annihilating everyone in the camp, soon. No one else could know these things while inside the wire. But this was the reason they had come. Bascom nodded soberly and shook hands all around, initiated now.
Three guerrillas arrived with fried duck eggs, rice, and filets of pork on banana leaves. Romeo passed around a bowl of fruit. Bascom needed no reminder to eat lightly, recalling his stomach distress six weeks ago during the short-lived Camp Freedom.
When they were done eating, eight more armed guerrillas approached. Each was a teenage boy, barefoot, with resolute face in the fires’ glow.
Romeo handed one the map Bascom had drawn of the camp. The young Filipinos surrounded Remy and the boys. The guerrilla in the lead looked them over. He said only, “Tumulin”
Romeo translated. “He says, keep up.”
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-nine
A
T THE edge of a dark stream, Tal kicked off his sneakers. The barefoot Filipinos, plus Remy and Bascom in sandals, continued into the shallow water.
Tal sloshed across, then sat on the bank to dry his feet. Before he could slip on his shoes, the guerrillas, with Remy and Bascom, had vanished up the inky jungle path. Tal cursed and leaped to his bare feet to catch them. The leader of the guerrillas came back for him, sour-faced.
The guerrillas didn’t slow. Tal tied the laces together to loop the shoes around his neck. He withstood stones and thorns under his soles without complaint, comparing himself to the guerrilla boys. He imagined they respected him for sharing their journey shoeless like them. Remy and Bascom raised eyebrows without remark. The Filipinos made no comment. After two miles, Tal regretted his bare feet. When the guerrillas halted at the shoulder of the national highway, Tal took the sneakers from around his neck. His feet were swollen. He plucked a nettle from his heel.
Remy whispered, “You done showin’ off?”
Tal bit his tongue and put on the shoes.
On the other side of the highway, the terrain changed. Jungle gave way to wetlands and endless rice paddies. Clouds blocked the moon, the watery land had little light to reflect. The guerrillas tightrope-walked across long, narrow dikes rimming the paddies. Tal strode in the slick footsteps of the Filipino in front of him. They all seemed to walk in midair above the vast black pools.
Bascom slipped first. He came up sputtering out of the waist-deep mud. The guerrilla leader hissed in Tagalog for his boys to haul the Irishman out. Bascom stood on the dike dripping mud and plant life. Tal fell in ten minutes later. When the others hoisted him out of the cool muck, all but the chief boy laughed quietly. Filthy and drenched, Tal pulled off his sneakers again. The barefoot Filipinos were not sliding off the dikes. Remy held up his sandals to show he’d already made that observation.
With dawn breaking, the party reached the shore of Laguna de Bay. Though Remy had not tumbled into the paddies, he wound up as dirty as Tal and Bascom from the constant murk and damp air. Fully dressed, Tal splashed into the bay, trailing silt. Bascom and the guerrillas followed. Remy set his fedora on the ground, then waded in.
The coast lay deserted in both directions. The sun promised to rise warm and clear. Tal came out of the lake to sit on the stony beach. Remy joined him. Bascom stayed in the water with the guerrillas, all of them stripping naked to wash their clothes thoroughly.
“I’m hungry,” Remy said. “You?”
“Always.”
“I reckon we’ll get somethin’ soon. Defeats the purpose to drag us out here, then starve us to death. Coulda’ stayed inside the wire if that was the plan.”
“Remy.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you came. It’s pretty brave.”
“That fella there.” Remy indicated bare Bascom scrubbing his underwear. “That’s your hero. He didn’t have to come. You and me, we knew.”
Tal lay back on the rough beach, out of sorts. He’d only been trying to compliment Remy. Why couldn’t the man have just said “Thank you” and let it go, instead of claiming the two of them had no choice, because they knew? And that comment earlier about “showing off” continued to rankle.
Tal thought about Carmen and what she knew. She stayed in the animal husbandry building, made the Japanese talk, did things, for information to save the camp. She was a hero, maybe more than Tal, Remy, Bascom, any of the guerrillas. They only risked death. She endured that life.
The party waited on the beach. Bascom remained naked, hanging his clothes over a driftwood log to dry. The gue
rrillas hunkered to themselves, passing cigarettes. Remy propped his fedora over his face to rest under the climbing sun. A breeze rose off the bay. Tal gazed northwest, over the horizon to Parañaque, his destination.
A pair of bancas under full sail appeared a mile to the east. They cut through the water well and in ten minutes bottomed out and dropped sails in the shallows in front of Tal. One Filipino skipper leaped over the gunwales of his boat to stride onto the beach. Bascom scrambled into his clothes. The six guerrillas in the sand stubbed out their cigarettes, gathering weapons.
Tal waited on his feet, as he thought proper. Beside him Remy stayed seated. The skipper spoke to the guerrilla boys first. They split into two groups, three and three, heading for the bancas to clamber over the sides.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 28