Box of Bones

by Bates, Jeremy

  Now tears did warm my eyes as I contemplated the possibility that I might never see my parents again. I tried to tell myself this wasn’t true. But I was only fooling myself, wasn’t I? Because I was trapped inside a goddamn coffin. I had no way of breaking out of it, let alone digging through the dirt stacked on top of it. My only hope would be for someone to rescue me.

  Who?

  Candy would know I was missing. I’d been out with her when I was…what…abducted? She’d tell her barangay captain, who happened to be her uncle. Nevertheless, he was a lazy know-it-all who would likely suspect we’d had a fight and I went back to Manila. Consequently, he’d do little more than patronize her with false platitudes until she convinced herself of the illogical scenario that I’d returned to Manila in the middle of the evening without telling her.

  My school would wonder about me come Monday morning when I didn’t show up for work. Yet they wouldn’t be concerned enough to do anything until at least Tuesday, or maybe even Wednesday, and by then it would be too late. I would already be long dead, starved of oxygen.

  In fact, it was already difficult to breathe. I had no idea how much air a coffin held, but I suspected it likely wouldn’t be much more than five or six hours’ worth. Presuming I’d already used up an hour or two—and it very well could be more than that—I was left with three or four hours at the most before I sank into a coma from the buildup of carbon dioxide.

  This can’t be happening, I thought desperately—angrily. Stuff like this happened to other people. It wasn’t supposed to happen to you.

  But of course why shouldn’t it?

  ▬

  After I’d graduated college I’d moved to Japan for a year to teach conversational English. I lived in the heart of Tokyo, near the Yamanote line. Despite Tokyo’s massive size, it was probably the safest city I’d ever visited. The Yakuza aside, the only crime perpetrated to any real degree was white-collar stuff. Robberies and murders were virtually unheard of.

  Having said that, a twenty-three-year-old female Australian teacher I’d met there, Janet Stanton, was raped and killed by a Japanese man. She taught him English outside of her regular teaching job at Nova, usually in cafés. On one occasion, however, they met at her apartment. It was a Sunday morning. She’d figured her two flat mates would be home—only they made last minute plans to go to Harajuku to check out the Cosplay scene. When they returned later that afternoon they found Janet’s lifeless body in the short, deep bathtub, naked and bruised, her head shaved.

  That same year I went to Thailand for a weeklong vacation and randomly bumped into two college friends, Amy Pierce and Crystal Branning, on Ko Phangan island. We spent the next few days hanging out on the beach and staying up late. After the September full moon party, I returned to Japan and they went to Bali—and were in Sari Club the night it was blown up. Amy had left early and was in her hostel two blocks away when the car bomb exploded (she’d told me the shockwave had shattered the window in her room). Crystal was dragged semiconscious from the rubble of the pub and died on the street.

  And then maybe three months ago, a friend of a friend, a German guy named Heinrich something, was shot dead right here in the Philippines, in downtown Manila, at eight in the morning while he was on his way to work. A car pulled up to the curb of a busy street, someone stuck a gun out the window, and then Heinrich was on the sidewalk, bleeding out like a stuck pig.

  The reason for the attack? He had been fooling around with the girlfriend of an “important” Filipino dude behind the dude’s back.

  ▬

  Even as I was thinking that stuff like this—buried-alive-in-a-coffin kind of stuff—shouldn’t, couldn’t, be happening to me, I also found myself wondering whether Janet and Crystal and Heinrich had told themselves the same thing in the moments before they died.

  ▬

  My fingers curled around a bone. It was long and curved, probably a rib—or part of a rib, because it had snapped, leaving a jagged edge along one side that tapered to a sharp point. I gripped it in such a way to work it like a saw to cut the band of zip tie between my wrists. After a few futile attempts, however, I conceded that the bone saw wasn’t going to succeed. It was too awkward to use behind my back; I couldn’t exert the needed leverage. I would need to get my hands in front of me.

  Was this possible?

  Looping my arms beneath my butt and then up and over my legs would have been difficult enough had I been lying on a green lawn under a blue sky. In the claustrophobic coffin, it seemed an impossible task.

  Nevertheless, I was short on options, and so I bent my legs until my knees touched the wood lid of the coffin, then I lifted my pelvis a few inches into the air. I pushed my wrists down my backside. They stopped short of the underside of my thighs.

  Come on, I thought, and pushed harder. I grunted with the effort. Perspiration trickled down my face. My shoulders screamed in protest, while my stomach muscles clenched so tightly they trembled.

  Then—I did it! My bloodied wrists were beneath my thighs.

  I scraped my knees along the lid of the coffin until they were pulled up to my chin. I stretched my arms as far as I could toward my feet, then I stepped backward over my wrists, one foot at a time.

  When both my arms were in front of me, I celebrated with a muffled laugh that might have been a sob.

  I immediately yanked the gag free of my mouth, leaving it hanging around my neck. I sucked back deep, stale breaths, sounding like someone suffering an asthma attack. I smacked my dry lips together until my saliva glands secreted some moisture.

  “Okay,” I said. The word came out a shaky whisper, yet it seemed very loud in the darkness. I rolled onto my side, shoving my butt against one side of the coffin and feeling around the bed of bones until my fingers brushed the splintered rib I’d used earlier. I gripped it in both hands and attempted to saw through the zip-tie again with an absurd jerking-off motion. This proved as ineffective as when I’d tried the same thing with my arms bound behind my back. I simply couldn’t generate any leverage.

  “Fuck!” I said, flicking the bone away. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  I twisted onto my back again and pounded the coffin lid with my fists.

  “Help!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “Hel—” My voice cracked. “Help,” I finished quietly, knowing no one could hear me.

  In frustration and desperation—and perhaps a degree of madness—I slammed the insides of my forearms against my hipbones, my elbows flaring out like chicken wings. I was hoping the lateral force would snap the zip-tie. I repeated this action several times, ignoring the pain in my wrists as the plastic carved deeper into my flesh.

  I gave up. I screamed and kicked at nothing and threw my weight from side to side.

  I’m going insane. I’m going freaking insane.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Help me! Please!”

  Silence. Deep, eternal.

  The silence of the grave.

  No, that wasn’t true. There was my breathing, and there was my heartbeat. I could hear it in my head, a whump, whump, whump that matched the rapid pace of my breathing, and I wondered how many heartbeats I had left, for it would be a reasonable number now, one I could count if I so pleased—

  No.

  I wasn’t going down that track.

  I wasn’t giving up.

  I pressed my wrists together. The lacerations beneath the zip-tie itched more than they stung. I pulled my arms in opposite directions, the left one toward my feet, the right one toward my shoulders. The zip tie slid off my right wrist but got caught on the back of my hand, still a good inch before my knuckles.

  There wasn’t enough slack—

  Slack.

  There was too much slack.

  I brought my wrists to my mouth. I bit the errant end of the zip-tie that stuck out from the locking mechanism. I jerked my head, pulling the zip tie tighter until zero slack remained.

  I counted silently to three, then brought my forearms down against my hipbones, the same
as I did before, using as much force as I could muster, not pulling short in anticipate of resistance but driving down through my hipbones, through the floor.

  The zip tie snapped.

  I probed my savaged wrists with my fingers, touching the slimy blood and deep cuts gently, hardly believing my arms were free of one another.

  “Okay,” I said to myself, my state of mind buoyed by the small success. “Think. Think. Think. Think.”

  But instead of trying to figure out how to now get out of the coffin, I found myself wondering how I got in it in the first place.

  ▬

  During breakfast this morning with Tony—or coffee, given I’d never bothered to reorder the “out of stock” omelet minus the mushrooms—Candy called to invite me to spend the weekend at her family home, which was in the far north area of the country, in a landlocked province on Luzon island called Kalinga. It was her father’s birthday on Saturday.

  I had yet to meet her parents, and I had no interest in doing so. Nevertheless, I was unable to come up with an excuse on the spot, Candy was insistent, and I ended up agreeing to go. We met at the Manila Victory Liner bus terminal that evening and boarded the eleven o’clock bus. We arrived in Baguio at five the next morning, where we switched buses for the final six-hour leg of the journey, which included a fair share of twisty and bumpy mountain passes.

  Candy’s hometown was a sleepy little place of roughly ten thousand people. With its cool mountain air, pine trees, and slow pace, it was a world apart from Manila, and I immediately liked it. There was still the typical poverty you found everywhere in the country—tumbledown buildings and barefooted children and loitering street-dwellers—but thanks to the abundant greenery it didn’t seem as depressing as when you saw it in bigger towns and cities.

  We flagged down a trike, loaded our luggage onto the roof, and crammed into the sidecar. The driver was a maniac, often driving on the wrong side of the road to skirt traffic, but he got us to the hotel I’d booked online in one piece. We checked in, cleaned up, then took another trike to Candy’s barangay. Her family’s house was a decent size, and it appeared her parents had gotten carried away trying to build a third floor some years before, because only one crumbling wall was ever constructed. It jutted from the original roofline, rusted rebar poking out the top of it.

  Butterfly wings beat in my stomach as we followed the beaten path to the front door. I’d heard enough stories about foreigners meeting their Filipina girlfriend’s parents for the first time to know there was way too much protocol involved. Tony, who’d lived in the Philippines for a number of years, and who’d dated his share of Filipinas, reassured me: “Just don’t hit on her mom, and don’t say anything negative about Christmas, and you’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t have to worry about either of these faux pas, as Christmas was still six months away, and Candy’s mother, it turned out, wasn’t hot. She met us at the front door, a plump and witchy looking woman with wild black hair and premature wrinkles. Her appearance suited her though, given Candy had told me she was a bona fide sorceress.

  Sure enough, Grace—that was her name—immediately commented on my dry cough, which I’d had for a while, a result, I believed, of my lungs struggling to adapt to Manila’s pollution. I told her I was fine, I was taking medicine. She boo-hawed this, led me inside to the living room, and produced from a cupboard the tools of her trade: a glass cup, a bamboo straw, a stone the size of an apricot pit, and a bottle of potion. She explained that she’d found the stone while swimming near a waterfall in the middle of the island when she was a young girl (this last point caused her great amusement, as if the concept of a young Grace was inconceivable), and a subsequent dream taught her how to use the stone to heal people, which she’d been doing ever since. In quick order she dabbed the potion on certain parts of my body, half-filled the cup with water, dropped the stone in it, and blew air through the straw into the water. The water turner murky—a sign, she said, that she was removing my sickness.

  Afterward I offered Grace the Belgium chocolates I’d purchased from a Marks & Spencer earlier in the day. She beamed. Filipinos love chocolate, and they’ve brainwashed themselves into believing if something is imported, it’s better than anything made in the country, so imported chocolate was about the best gift you could give.

  Candy led me to a cement area that served as the back patio, where her rail-thin and balding father, Fau, was sitting in a chair, drinking a bottle of beer. It was a little past noon, but his glassy eyes hinted that he was already well on his way to getting wasted. I said hello. Unlike Grace, he didn’t speak English and simply smiled at me. Candy got me a beer, told me to sit and relax, and went to the kitchen to help her mother with lunch. I sat in a chair opposite Fau, and we gazed out at verdant green jungle, sipping our beers in silence. Occasionally he would chuckle at something mysterious, or look at me and raise his bottle in cheers.

  I finished the beer quickly and joined Candy and Grace in the kitchen. Food was piled everywhere: fresh produce, fish that looked as though it had been caught that morning, chunks of meat cut from a recently slaughtered animal. When I mentioned there was only the four of us, Candy told me that some of her relatives would be joining us for dinner—and as I discovered over the next couple of hours, “some” meant thirty or so uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces.

  Candy delighted in showing me off to everyone. A gaggle of aunts kept asking us when we were getting married, which freaked me out because Candy and I had only been together for six months and had never spoken of this. They also barraged me with interview-like questions about my personal life and work. They asked the same questions over and over, and I was pretty sure they were testing me, trying to make sure I wasn’t making anything up.

  I escaped the interrogation and wandered over to Candy’s five uncles, who were huddled in a corner, sharing a bottle of Spanish brandy. They were all pretty drunk, and I heard a lot of “nauubusan English ko dito” (I’m running out of English words to say) or “nosebleed na ako” (a gag among Filipinos that they bleed from their noses when they use more of their mental capacity than usual).

  Dinner was a feast—and I mean fifteen-plus dishes on the long table at all times. Pork belly, barbecue chicken skewers, noodle stir fry, paella, greens with adobo, fruit salad, and so much more stuff I didn’t recognize.

  When the karaoke got rocking after dessert, I went out front for a smoke. The night air was brisk and scented with pine needles. One of Candy’s uncles—Calyx, the know-it-all barangay captain—joined me, and after some small talk mentioned he was running for election, and in a not so subtle way hinted at the cost involved, which he couldn’t afford.

  This was what I’d been hoping to avoid: the idea I was supposed to be financially supportive of Candy’s family, even if I barely knew them. I could support myself and Candy comfortably, but not her entire extended family. Tony had cautioned me that some family members would likely approach me for money. He’d heard it all before: “The roof blew off my house in a typhoon” or “The baby’s sick” or “I can’t afford the school fees for my children.” He had no sympathy, saying, “If you’re poor, don’t breed like bloody rabbits. If you can’t afford to feed, educate, and clothe your kids, that’s not my bloody problem. I’m not Filipino, and I don’t give a toss what they expect from me.”

  I sort of agreed. I was dating Candy, not her family. I wasn’t going to be their bank machine. I’d even told Candy this on the bus ride up here, and she’d understood.

  So I listened patiently to Calyx’s spiel, nodded non-committedly, then excused myself when my smoke reached the filter.

  I declined the karaoke mic, I couldn’t sing for crap, and eventually convinced Candy it was time we took our leave. I got hugs, kisses, and high-fives from everyone, then two of her cousins insisted they drive us to town on their motorbikes, regardless of the fact they were shitfaced.

  When we arrived at the hotel, it was still relatively early—eight p.m.—so Candy and I
went down the street to a busy bar. We got a table next to an open-air window that looked onto the hustle and bustle of the street. Young guys with their friends walking past shouted “Hey Joe!” to me. They’ve been calling Americans that since World War Two. It’s a derivative of GI Joe. It wasn’t an insult; they were just being sociable.

  I was pretty drunk from the seven or eight beers I’d had throughout the afternoon, so I nursed a Sam Miguel Light while Candy had a halo-halo (a dessert that literally means “mix-mix” and combines shaved ice, evaporated milk, boiled sweet beans, gelatin, and fruit).

  At one point I went to the toilet, which was located in an outhouse in the yard behind the bar. On the way back inside, I heard someone else in the dark, turned to look behind me—and woke up in the coffin.

  ▬

  I explored a lump on the back of my head with my fingers. It was tender and sore, maybe the size of a tangerine.

  So someone had attacked me out behind the bar. But who? And why?

  Was I robbed?

  Seized by a thought, I patted down my pockets. Mt heart dropped. No phone. I hadn’t thought about my phone until then, but now that I had, I realized it had been my only chance at escaping this death trap, my only shot at summoning help.

  I shouted for the countless time, driving my fists and knees into the lid of the coffin. I did this again. And again. And again.

  Oxygen.

  I didn’t care.