“She doesn’t want to move from here?” David sneered, and shook his head. “It’s a goddamn dump.”
Crisanto had fallen behind as they approached, appearing hesitant. David looked at him over one shoulder.
“Mr. Translator,” he said. “I’m going to need you.”
At twenty-eight, Crisanto was ten years David’s junior but notably more masculine, with a pronounced brow and rugged jaw. At that moment, however, he appeared to have regressed many years, adopting the cowed demeanor of an uncertain child. Timid was the word that came to David’s mind.
“What is it?” David asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Filipino superstition. You wouldn’t understand.” Crisanto took a deep breath, then squared his shoulders, strode forward. “Let’s get this over with.”
She stepped outside as they approached the door, and David glimpsed inside the shack. A gloomy, small space, with things—indeterminate—strung from the ceiling. He caught a whiff of boiling meat and fat, or something similar. A bird fluttered within, probably trapped.
“Tell her to take off the shawl,” David said.
“She won’t,” Crisanto said.
“Tell her.”
Crisanto spoke in Waray, the tremor from earlier still evident in his voice. The exotic language could not disguise it. The woman—Dalisay Magana—shrugged or shook her head. She snapped a single word—“Diri”—that, coupled with her body language, needed no translation.
David crouched and stepped toward her, hoping to see her eyes; it was difficult to be charming—persuasive—without the benefit of eye contact. The shawl covered her face, dropped to her waist. The same gray fabric that blanked the windows. She was hunched, slightly twisted. Some spinal malady, David thought. She wore a long black skirt beneath the shawl. Her feet were bare, dusted with dirt.
“Ms. Magana, my name is David Payne. I’m a consultant at New Reality Land Development. I’d like to talk to you about—”
“Putang ina mo,” she cut across him, and something flashed behind the fabric. Her eyes, perhaps, but David couldn’t be sure.
Crisanto had backed to the edge of the woman’s property, appearing yet more childlike with the trees towering behind him. He looked at David and shook his head. In the distance, the harvesters ripped and buzzed.
“We’ll cut to the chase, shall we?” David met Crisanto’s uncertain gaze. “Please assure Ms. Magana that New Reality is sensitive to her position, but that our work is a lifeline for the community. Many jobs will be created. There’ll be an increase in tourism and a boost to the economy. With this project, we’re putting Palla back on its feet.”
Crisanto nodded. He spoke quietly, his head low.
The woman’s hands appeared from beneath the shawl. They were almost elegant. Pale skin and long fingers.
“Remind her that she signed a contract.” David held up the clipboard. “In so doing, she signed her land and everything on it over to New Reality and, as of June twenty-third, has been trespassing on property she no longer owns.”
Crisanto told her. Sweat dripped from the brim of his hard hat. The woman responded, her voice thin and strange. The angle of her body suggested she was looking at David as she spoke.
“She says she didn’t know what she was signing,” Crisanto translated. “The language was confusing. Written by idiots.”
“Tell her those same idiots have deposited a generous sum of money into an account in her name.” David smiled. He crouched again, trying to catch the flash of her eyes. “And she will be rehoused in a comfortable hotel until we can find something to her satisfaction.”
A brief exchange in Waray.
“She says she’s already satisfied,” Crisanto said. “And that she doesn’t want your money.”
“She has ten days.”
A mosquito latched on to David’s neck and drew blood. He slapped at it, looked at his palm, wiped the crushed insect across his pants leg with a grunt of both satisfaction and disgust. Another bug had landed in the basin of dirty water. David watched it drown, listening to the distant machinery and to the bird trapped inside the shack.
“Ten days,” David repeated, “then we’re coming through here, whether she’s in that shitty little shack or not. Make sure she understands.”
Crisanto spoke hesitantly, looking at his shoes.
No response from the woman. She drew away from him, her elegant hands snapping open and closed.
David wiped sweat from his brow. This meeting had not played out the way he had hoped. Still, she was one woman, virtually crippled, and if he had to drag her out of the shack kicking and screaming, he would.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Magana.”
“Birat ka nim iroy.”
Crisanto offered no translation. From the venom in her voice, David assumed she wasn’t bidding him a good day. She muttered something else, then disappeared into her gloomy home.
“Let’s go,” Crisanto said. “Please.”
David sneered. “I expected better from you.”
Crisanto walked away without replying. David watched the back of his high-visibility vest moving swiftly between the trees. He shook his head and followed.
“You want to tell me what that was all about?”
Palla loomed in the windshield like a boxful of broken things strewn across the ground. Palm trees rattled their fronds and twisted. Dust clouded the road.
“Sorry,” Crisanto offered.
“We have to be on the same page,” David said. “The moment you show these people any hesitation—any weakness—they seize it. Next thing you know, we’re involved in a drawn-out battle, losing money. And one thing I don’t like is losing money.”
They had driven from the site in silence. David had popped more Advil and tried to catch a ten-minute nap, but Crisanto’s odd behavior had irked him. He wanted an explanation.
“So?”
“Like I said before,” Crisanto said, running a trembling hand across the back of his neck. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” David said. “If I have to drag that old bitch out by the hair ten days from now, I’d at least like to know why you were so scared.”
Another silence. Tent City sprawled to the east, like some campground gone to hell. David saw people waiting in line for food boxes distributed from the back of an NGO truck. A few bony children played with a deflated soccer ball. Another child—maybe five years old—sat alone at the roadside, her brown body mottled with the exhaust from passing cars.
Crisanto applied the brake and pulled over, the rear tires raking through the grit and gravel. He dug through the detritus cluttering the center console and retrieved an open packet of dried mangoes.
“Come on.”
He stepped out of the car. David followed. They crossed the road and approached the child. Crisanto greeted her with a smile and said something in Waray. The little girl nodded. He handed her the dried mangoes. Her lips trembled.
“What do you think she’s most afraid of?” Crisanto asked David. “Hunger, perhaps? Or another typhoon?”
David shrugged. He had no idea where this was going. He shielded his eyes against the swirling grit. The heat—the stench—was terrible.
The girl devoured one of the mango pieces. Crisanto smiled, crouched beside her. “Let’s find out,” he said, and asked her.
She responded by lowering her eyes and curling her shoulders. Her mouth glistened through strands of dirty hair. Crisanto touched her arm gently, whispered in Waray. The girl nodded, then pointed in the direction of the rain forest.
“Aswang,” she said. Her eyes were wide, frightened.
Crisanto stroked her hair and said something that made her smile. She went back to her mangoes, holding them protectively to her chest so they couldn’t be taken away. Crisanto stood and looked at David.
“Every Filipino child grows up afraid of the aswang,” he said, and David detected the quaver in his voice, even now.
“It’s part of our folklore. Our culture. The equivalent, I suppose, of your ‘monster in the closet.’ ”
“Okay,” David said. “But that doesn’t explain your behavior.”
“It has various forms across the islands,” Crisanto continued. “Werewolf. Ghoul. Shape-shifter. Many people in Palla, and the surrounding villages, believe the woman in the forest is an aswang—a manananggal, specifically.”
They crossed the road, heading back to the car. David palmed sweat from his throat. His eyes were bloodshot and sore. Partly because of the alcohol from the night before. Mostly because of the swirling grit and acrid air. He was tired and irritable, and in no mood for fairy tales.
“Mah-nah-nan-gal,” Crisanto said, sounding the word out clearly. “There’s no direct translation to English. ‘To separate’ would be close—or a thing that separates. According to myth, the manananggal is a female vampire that grows wings and detaches herself at the torso. She leaves her lower half standing, while her upper half flies around in search of prey.”
David opened the passenger door and slumped into the seat. He lowered his face into his hands and shook his head. He wanted desperately to be home. Drinking Sleeman Cream Ale on his deck. Barbecuing Alberta livestock. Flopping into his recliner and watching the shows he had lined up on the DVR.
“They’re ravenous, bloodthirsty creatures,” Crisanto added, sliding behind the wheel. “They’ll eat anything with a heartbeat, although they have a preference for children and pregnant women.”
“I’ve heard enough,” David mumbled.
“They have extremely long tongues that they use to root fetuses from the womb.”
“And you believe this shit?” David snapped. “You’re a grown man. Highly educated. You speak four languages and write a regular column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Yet you believe the woman in the forest is some kind of . . . of vampire?”
Crisanto drove toward Palla. The cracked road vibrated through the seats.
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “But that childhood fear runs deep, and I saw enough today to unsettle me.”
Here was the broken edge of the city, like the frayed hem of something long-worn. He saw a woman in tears. A dead goat. The shattered hull of a fishing boat that had been lifted from the harbor a mile away. David didn’t believe in monsters, but the ghosts here were impossible to refute.
He closed his eyes and wondered what Angie was doing.
Her hair was tucked behind her ears and corn-colored, and she had that look in her eyes—that look, unique to her, to them—that felt like she was staring into both the past and the future. She unbuttoned her blouse. Unhooked her bra. David watched her, tilting the screen to minimize glare, praying the hotel’s Internet connection would hold out. Angie cupped her breasts and plucked at her nipples, occasionally flicking her eyes to the webcam. David showed her how hard he was and she grinned, slipped out of her jeans. “I miss you, baby,” she said, and David’s lips moved but he didn’t reply. “I miss you so much.” She rubbed her clitoris with patient, circular motions and her labia drooped heavily and she whimpered in a way that David knew. She spoke his name. Twisted her body. Lifted her hips. David masturbated with trembling legs, chest drumming. The room’s air conditioner hummed but his skin still shimmered with sweat. He came hard on his chest and showed her and played with it. Angie sighed and her eyes danced. She hooked her legs over the arms of the chair and came, too. Her orgasms were always short but powerful, as if someone had tightened every string inside her and then cut them at once.
He cleaned himself with a damp towel left on the bed. Poured three fingers of a Filipino whiskey called Calibre 69. Dropped ice into the glass and listened to it pop and settle. Angie had vacated her chair. David looked at the living room of his Toronto home, over eight thousand miles away. He saw the lamp they’d bought at IKEA just after they married, the edge of his recliner, most of their Danaë with Eros replica. He sipped his drink and thumbed sweat from the pockets beneath his eyes. Angie returned wearing a Maple Leafs sweatshirt. She fairly bounced into her chair and grinned.
“Did I tell you how much I miss you?”
“You did.”
“Feels like you’ve been gone forever.”
There was a notable sound delay that—even more than the look in her eyes—made him painfully homesick. It exposed the distance between them. She was to him, then, what the painting of Danaë was when sitting in his living room: a corn-haired girl who could be seen but not touched.
“I’ll be home soon,” he said.
“Soon?”
“I have some issues with a resident.” Another sip of whiskey. His heart still drummed but it felt good. “Hope to have them resolved within a few days.”
The clock on the nightstand ticked deeper into the night. Outside his hotel window, the street sounds faded to thin traffic. They talked about their neighbor’s dog, their gifted niece, upgrading their smartphones. David poured and sipped. Three fingers became six. Became nine. The screen softened at the edges. Thunder rippled in the distance.
“You look tired,” Angie said. “You should go to bed.”
“Yes.”
“We can Skype again Saturday.”
“We will.”
“I’m home all day.”
He drank the last of his whiskey and set his tumbler down. The room started to roll, then righted itself, as if it were counterbalanced. David touched the screen. He said, “How we left it . . .”
“No,” she said. “Let’s not discuss it now.”
“I’ve been giving it some thought—”
“Baby—”
“And I think we should keep trying.”
Angie smiled. “We’ll talk about it when you get home.” She touched the screen, too. “I promise.”
Thunder again. Nearer. More a thump than a ripple. Rain knocked on the window, stealing David’s attention. When he looked back at the screen, Angie’s image had frozen. Her smile was locked in place. Her left hand was extended, reaching for him across the miles.
“I love you,” he said, but she didn’t hear. The connection was lost.
Crisanto quit the following day. David asked for two weeks’ notice but he refused. He’d been offered a full-time position at the Inquirer, he said, and had to leave for Makati City immediately. David asked if his decision had anything to do with the woman in the forest. Crisanto shook his head, but the truth was in his eyes. That childhood fear really did run deep.
Torrential rain delayed clearing by three days, with several heavy-equipment operators also quitting as the work neared Dalisay Magana’s troublesome little shack. This bought her more time as David sought replacements for the workers he’d lost, which proved challenging—incomprehensibly so, in a region crippled with unemployment.
Word had gotten out that Dalisay Magana had refused to vacate, and it appeared nobody wanted to make her do so.
David gave her a final warning—a brief, simple notice that he pinned to her front door, with the date, HULYO 21, circled in red.
His irritation stemmed not from having to iron out wrinkles—that was the job—but from their ridiculous nature, and from having to delay his return to Canada. His mood escalated to rage when, on the morning of July twenty-first, he arrived at the site to find it abandoned. The machinery was parked in a cold yellow row, hulking and silent. Nothing in the field office but empty desks. David e-mailed his supervisor to inform him of this development and to assure him it was under control. He clicked send and then flipped over one of the desks and threw an electric fan against the wall. It was ten a.m. and he desperately wanted a drink—a serious head-fuck of a drink, more like a gunshot—but first, he had business to attend.
She had seen his final notice. It was screwed into a ball, floating beside the insects in the basin of dirty water. He called her name and thumped on her door. No reply. He waited, then thumped again. Still nothing. Bitch has gone, he thought. Vacated after all. Or maybe out sucking babies from
wombs.
Dull fabric flapped in the nearest window and David snatched at it, tearing it free. He looked inside the shack, hoping to find it empty of possessions—a sure sign that the woman had acceded. The meat smell was nauseating and he covered his nose and mouth. In the gloom, he saw a table and chair and a wood-burning stove with a few ashes glowing. There were several dead macaques strung from the ceiling by their tails. He saw a bucket with a hole in it. A straw mattress. A pair of legs upright in the corner with nothing above the waist.
David recoiled, inhaling suddenly. His lungs flooded with foul air and he turned away, spluttering. He went back to the window, looked again, saw long shadows in the corner and nothing more. One of the macaques twisted on its tail and it had no eyes but still stared at him. Something bristled across the ceiling, then a large bird—perhaps the one that had been trapped when he and Crisanto came here—broke for daylight and rose into the clear sky.
He spat in the dirt and backed away.
“Nobody home,” he said.
Good enough.
The keys to the heavy-duty machinery were in a lockbox in the field office. David selected one of the medium-size ’dozers and plowed a route through the forest. He didn’t hesitate when he reached the shack that once belonged to Dalisay Magana. It toppled in a cloud of dust and stink, ground into the dirt beneath the dozer’s continuous tracks. He scraped the trash up with the blade and rumbled over it again, feeling it pop and crack, like standing on a carton of eggs. His eyes were manic, delighted circles.
He gathered the debris again and looked at it—everything reduced to unrecognizable pieces. Half a truckload, no more. He nodded, satisfied. This particular wrinkle had been well and truly ironed out. Dalisay Magana was no longer an obstruction. Now, perhaps, the workers would return.
David turned the bulldozer around and rumbled away, and he heard, even above the engine’s snarl, a long, hurt sound from the treetops. Some rain-forest creature. Something that screamed.
Seize the Night Page 45