“Yes, he is.”
“Will you go with him if I die?”
“He’ll come for me and I’ll go with him, either way.”
“If I get the chance, I will shoot him again.”
She stroked his hair. From Yumi’s tin of candies, she put a sweet in his mouth.
“Of course you will, Kenji.”
Carmen peeked out her window. Smoke coursed past but the wind drove little of it into her room. Flames rippled out of half the bamboo structures below. Some had already buckled into cinders. Embers sailed from blazing roof to roof and the rest would burn soon. The Tuck boy was gone with all the internees and American soldiers. The camp had been abandoned by the Japanese, too, except for the few bodies sprawled in the dirt under sprinkling ash. Crashing rafters were the loudest sound. Heat throbbed on Carmen’s cheeks. The air rumpled above the fire.
She did not watch the camp vanish. The flames would rid only the earth of it. She went to Yumi’s room to take down the curtain and rip it apart, too. Kenji would need more bandages.
~ * ~
When killing Filipinos, assemble them together in one place, as far as possible, thereby saving ammunition and labor. The disposal of dead bodies will be troublesome, so either collect them in houses scheduled to be burned or throw them into the river.
—Manila Navy Defense Force
and Southwestern Area Fleet
Operation Order, December 1944
§
when killing Filipinos
~ * ~
Chapter Fifty-two
T
HE BULLET came out of Remy’s chest easily. An army doctor wiped alcohol over the bulge, slit the skin with a scalpel, and plucked it out with forceps. The doctor cleaned the bullet before dropping it in Yumi’s hand. She pocketed it and helped Remy sit up. The doctor poured sulfa powder into both holes, dabbed more alcohol, and stitched Remy up front and back. Remy grit his teeth at the doctor’s apology for the lack of a painkiller. Bandaged and in a sling, he walked out of the prison medical room on Yumi’s arm, the way he’d walked in.
Remy waited in line to register as “Released from Los Baños Internment Camp.” A nurse handed him two Hershey bars and a roll of Life Savers. He insisted space be found for Yumi, explaining only that she was Korean and had been a prisoner of the Japanese, too. The nurse promised shed find room. Remy did not go to his assigned cell but joined a chow line with a hundred lean faces he knew well. The people understood what Remy had done and showed it; they stood aside for him and the little Korean girl. He hobbled forward, still short of breath but, with his holes closed, better able to keep his feet. A soldier behind the chow counter filled two bowls of bean soup. He handed them over with fat slices of white bread.
Remy and Yumi found places at a table in the great concrete hall. The odor of antiseptic mingled badly with the body odors of the internees and the aromas of hot food. New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa had been emptied, scoured, and larded in preparation for the internees as their first haven from privation. The irony was not lost on them that they’d gone from a jail to a jail. After the amtracs had dropped them off in Mamatid and dashed back into the bay, a convoy of trucks and ambulances hauled the first fifteen hundred here. Banners festooned the ten miles of road to the prison, Filipinos threw petals in front of the trucks. The internees sped under bamboo arches reading “Welcome Victorious Americans and Guerrillas.” Arriving at New Bilibid, the ecstatic and famished internees were nourished, examined, treated, and interviewed.
Remy gazed into the piping bowl under his nose without touching the spoon. He stared at the empty bench across from him. Yumi scooped dripping beans to his lips. Remy took the spoon from her—he was no infant—and put it down.
“You eat,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
~ * ~
Remy did not eat the bean soup in the mess hall. Yumi carried the full bowl while she walked him to his scrubbed cell. The girl sat cross-legged on the stones holding the pan like an offering, silent and goaded, until he took up the spoon and finished it. The soup had gone cold and within minutes gave him gas. He lay sleepless on the hard bottom mattress of the bunk. On the upper bed Yumi snored lightly, making the sound of a sharpening knife.
There’d been no news in the mess hall and none afterward of the missing internees. Any number of bad fates could have befallen them between Los Baños and New Bilibid. Did the Japanese counterattack the camp? Were the amtracs on the bay right now fending off Japanese patrol boats? Did the amtracs even make it off San Antonio? Were there snipers, artillery, did the Tiger Division catch them on the point? Were they shelled from shore, were they sunk?
Why hadn’t Tal been behind Remy in the stairwell?
Through the barred window of his cell, the sunlight reddened. Remy’s shoulder and lung ached and he wanted whiskey, or some of Donnelly’s bomber lotion. The Aussie boy’s death and those of so many at Los Baños lifted Remy off the mattress. He put his face to the small window, where he stared like the prisoners who’d stood here before, at the fading light. Remy sucked through the pack of Life Savers, waiting.
After dark, Yumi dropped from the top bunk to her bare feet, nimble at the first rumble of transports. She grabbed Remy by his good arm to tow him out of the cellblock. The five hundred internees unloaded from fifty trucks, to queue at the registration tables and receive their first chocolate bars, candy, and cigarettes. Remy stood on tiptoes behind the crowd gathered to see the last ones rescued from Los Baños. Yumi bounced vainly. Remy lacked the strength to push through the wall of internees. Fresh aromas from the big prison kitchen swelled across the stone yard, under brick arches.
Toward the front, hugs and shouts began. Remy was bumped by internees pressing past, jolting his sling. Yumi scowled, unable to see over any of the shoulders. She held up a palm for Remy to stay put. The girl folded her arms to make herself smaller and like a weevil burrowed into the crush.
Remy removed his fedora. He held it as high as he could reach.
On all sides, the New Bilibid internees welcomed the last of their number. Remy waved his fedora despite the ache it caused him.
When he saw the tall top of Tal’s head weaving through the throng, Remy froze. He left his arm in the air, unaware that he had done so.
Yumi elbowed out of the wall of people, clearing a path for the boy. The two ran across the stones to Remy who dropped his raised arm around his son’s neck. Tal smelled of sweat and earth, smoke. Remy pulled him in as hard as one arm allowed. Tal embraced him also with one arm, the other cradling Mac’s crystal radio.
“You’re safe,” Remy said. He drew a breath too deep for his wounded lung and coughed, not letting go of his son until the pain bent him and made him back away. Tal supported him until the coughing eased.
When he straightened, Remy put on the fedora. Yumi moved beside him with a worried look. She tugged on Remy’s vest.
“Okay,” he said to the tiny girl. “Tal?”
“Yeah?”
“Where’s Carmen?”
~ * ~
Chapter Fifty-three
T
HE RUINS cooled slowly. Every seared timber and bamboo rod Carmen touched held the fever of the fire that had destroyed it. Smoke ribboned from smoldering embers.
In the fast-falling dusk, she stepped over blackened floors without roofs or walls, to search for trunks and stowage where food might have gone unburned. She covered herself in soot and was glad to have changed into her fatigues before rooting through the camp.
Not everything was scorched. Carmen found clothes, handmade toys, carpentry tools, books, and china plates on tables that had withstood the fall of flaming rafters. Carmen looked up to her own small room, where she’d been stripped of everything. In a seared crate she found a box of powdered milk and a forgotten cloth doll. She took both.
She hurried to beat the setting sun. The camp was too gutted and sharpened to be tramping around after dark. She snared a lantern from the body of a guard beside the barbed wir
e. He lay facedown with no marks on his back. She rolled him over, curious how he’d died and to see if she recognized him. She did. He was the young, scared one from two days before who had come for Songu to soothe his conscience, then warned her to leave the camp. Three bullet holes in his tunic told Carmen what she wanted to know. She rifled his pockets for matches and found them.
In the last strains of light, she picked through the barracks where Tal lived before he bunked with Remy. She knew the boys there were thieves like Tal and were likely to have a cache of food. Carmen crunched over wood made flimsy by the flames. She scrounged up a tin of Spam lying under a burnt and stinking mattress.
She hurried along the tarmac road to the untouched infirmary. Inside, Carmen rummaged shelves and drawers for gauze wraps and antiseptics. She found no supplies, taking instead two clean white bedsheets.
Passing through the main gate, her arms nearly full, Carmen paused at the trench the Japanese had dug beside her building. A dozen corpses lay in it side by side, orderly, as if waiting for inspection. This Carmen gave them, and selected the tallest of the bodies. She dragged the stiffening soldier out of the trench. She spent no time on his face or death, just the buttons and buckles. His uniform bore only a few small rips and no bloodstains. Carmen finished pulling off his boots and socks in the fallen dark.
~ * ~
She did not douse the lantern. She left it burning low through the night, so every few hours she could check Kenji’s bandages.
He slept bare-chested; shed managed to slide the dead guard’s pantaloons over his loincloth. Kenji wanted the boots and socks on also, an issue of pride for him, to lie wounded as a soldier. Carmen hid the pistol he’d brought.
The white sheets from the infirmary made better wrappings than the curtain. They tore more easily and betrayed blood instantly. Changing his dressing, Carmen looked into Kenji’s wound. The muscles inside had tightened. The puncture did not gape, blood spilled more slowly. During the late day Kenji had begun to sit up without wooziness, though his face blanched and he could stay upright only for short periods. Conversation filled little of the long silence. Carmen stood in the window or sat beside his moaning dreams.
Past midnight, she lay beside him. Her arm stretched across his ribs, over the white swath of bandage. Her open hand nestled in his armpit above the wounds. In the months she had known Kenji, he’d never been permitted to sleep in the shuho, that was the right of officers alone. Of the hundreds of nights she’d spent on this tatami, this was the only night when she rested her head on a man’s shoulder, the first when in the morning she would wash only her hands and face. Carmen raised her hand. None of Kenji’s blood marked her palm. Settling against him, she tucked the cloth doll close to her own chest.
Her sleep was shallow so she would not lose track of Kenji’s breathing. The animals of the jungle and ravine made little clamor, suspicious of the abandoned, moonlit camp. The burned grounds felt haunted below her window. The remnants of people were stored there like the heat in the blackened timbers: the moving sallow phantoms of guards along the wire, the dim glow of coconut-oil lamps in the barracks of the elderly, the Catholics always reading late into the night.
She lifted her arm from Kenji so as not to wake him. She sat up to a noise in the camp that was real.
Dimming the lantern, Carmen set aside the cloth doll and crept to her knees. She edged her eyes above the windowsill. A three-quarter moon had topped the trees. Pale figures in loincloths and bare feet moved in the ruins. They sifted through the remains of the camp police hut, the commandant’s office, and the guards’ barracks. They shoved aside tumbled walls and blistered frames to dig into the ashes for guns. Like Carmen, they stripped the dead for uniforms and boots. One man’s voice was unmistakable, his form unforgettable. Nagata.
Carmen sneaked across the hall to retrieve Kenji’s pistol from where she’d hidden it. Standing in her doorway, she pondered whether to wake him. Kenji sighed, not out of pain but like a man who in sleep senses someone missing.
Carmen entered her room. She put out the lantern.
She’d never held a gun before. She took it with her to the dark landing, to sit on the top step. The pistol required no special insight, the thing was designed to invite the hand. Carmen put her finger over the trigger and waited.
Her focus on the stairwell was so great she did not hear Kenji’s dragging feet until he lowered himself beside her.
“Kenji, you should not be up.”
“I heard them.”
“Nagata is alive.”
Kenji slipped his good hand down Carmen’s arm, to the hard nub of the pistol. “Is this for him?”
“If he comes.”
“I’ll tell him you saved my life.”
Even in the faint light of the stairwell, the whiteness of Kenji’s face stood out.
“I’ll protect you,” he said.
Carmen tucked the pistol in the waistband of her trousers. She stood behind Kenji to help him to his feet.
“Back to bed, Kenji.”
When she had lain him on the tatami, Carmen did not hide the pistol but set it near her on the floor. She struck a match and did not hold it to the lantern wick but to Kenji’s cheeks. His color was slow to restore. Another match at his armpit showed a coin of scarlet staining the bandage. Carmen would wait for him to gain more strength before changing his wrap. She stood in her dark window.
To the northwest, Manila rumbled and flared, still under siege. Nearby in the west, black Makiling rose into the night. The camp had returned to its charred hush. Kenji, at Carmen’s feet, asked for water she did not have.
~ * ~
In the morning, Carmen and Kenji ate the salvaged can of Spam. Kenji was able to sit up for a longer period and his color did not wane. He did not try to stand again. Carmen helped him urinate into the empty tin.
The fire had wiped out all electricity to the building. She twisted faucets that gurgled and dried.
She left Kenji with the last of Yumi’s candies. She told him to finish the sweets. He put one in his mouth as she left the room.
In the basement laundry, Carmen found a bucket. Leaving the building, she hurried through the cogon grass to the orchard. Tal had shown her this place six weeks ago on the way to the ravine. She kicked at rotten mangoes on the ground until two of them felt firm enough to take. The papaya and lemon trees had no edible fruit. In the ravine, she took off her pants and slippers to squat over the cool trickles. She urinated, washed herself free from the odor of soot, then dipped the bucket full. Returning, Carmen stayed careful to encounter no one. She passed close to the trench of dead Japanese. All the guards lay naked down to loincloths and bootless, stripped after midnight by the Japanese survivors. The bodies were no longer arranged neatly but had been tossed in a tangle to the bottom of the ditch. Carmen pinched her nose at a smell that would worsen and backed away from the buzz of flies.
In her room, Kenji dozed. She guessed he’d lost enough blood to fill half the bucket. She poured ravine water into her washbasin, then used some to mix with the powdered milk. Kenji awoke when Carmen unbuttoned his pantaloons to slide them and his loincloth below his knees. He tilted his head to watch her dip a cloth strip, then lay back while she swabbed his legs, penis, and waist. She rolled him onto his good side and did the same for the backs of his legs and buttocks.
She patted him dry and pulled up his pants.
“I have milk,” she said, “and a mango.”
“Help me sit up.”
Kenji squirmed against the wall, showing more strength than Carmen had anticipated. She peeled one mango. He ate with spills of golden juice onto his bandaged chest, like medallions. She poured lukewarm milk into a glass she’d found near Mamas mattress. Kenji gulped and left a mustache. Carmen wiped it away for him.
He sat upright longer than Carmen believed he ought. His cheeks sapped while she peeled the second mango and sipped milk.
“Will you do this for him?” Kenji asked. “Look after him?”
Carmen ran a wrist across her milk-wet lips. She pretended the Tuck boy was where Kenji sat, wounded and helpless. She saw Tal both young and old. Herself old, too. She tried to see herself beside him.
And there were the thousands, springing up when Carmen thought of love. They hovered between her and Tal, naked like the flyblown corpses in the trench, like they had been between her legs. Carmen had to fight through them to reach him, just as the Tuck boy had done in his return to her. She did not know if she could do it forever.
“I’ll try. Have you been in love, Kenji?”
“Before you, no.”
Carmen covered his hand with hers. “You’ll love again.”
Kenji slid down the wall. When he lay flat on the tatami, he gazed at the ceiling.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 40