Box of Bones

by Bates, Jeremy

  Oxygen!

  I got hold of myself.

  I wasn’t breathing so much as I was seething.

  I squeezed my eyes tight—and realized I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t robbed. Robbers wanted your stuff. They didn’t give a crap about you. They certainly didn’t go to the effort of burying you in a coffin.

  That was personal. Something orchestrated with sick or vengeful malice.

  Yet I hadn’t pissed anyone off. I wasn’t Heinrich. I wasn’t dating some important dude’s girlfriend—

  Toto?

  Impossible. Candy’s ex-husband was a bastard—a crazy bastard—but he was in Manila. No way he’d followed us all the way to Kalinga, jumped me, and buried me in a coffin—

  Toto’s from here.

  Jesus Christ, it was true. It was how he and Candy knew each other. They’d grown up in Kalinga together. Candy told me they’d started dating in high school. When she was seventeen she went to Manila to find work, and he came with her. She got a job at a Jolibee fast food restaurant; he did construction. They got married. The next year she became a personal trainer at Fitness First. He quit construction, content to mooch off her, spend the days getting drunk, and occasionally beat her.

  Candy told me she would have divorced him, but she couldn’t. The Philippines was the only country in the world in which divorce remained illegal. She couldn’t seek an annulment either, because to do this she had to establish that the marriage was defective from the beginning, meaning that either she or Toto had to have been underage at the time, psychologically incapacitated, a carrier of an incurable STD, etc. These exceptions, however, did not extend to infidelity, physical abuse, or plain old “irreconcilable differences.”

  Consequently, Candy simply packed up her stuff without Toto knowing and moved to a different part of Manila. Not long after this she and I met at the gym where she worked. Toto eventually tracked her down and began showing up at her new place and harassing her. One night he came by when I was staying over. I answered the door holding a wooden spindle from a broken chair and told him to get lost, threatening to beat the shit out of him if he ever touched Candy again. He was surprisingly compliant, refusing to look me in the eye and sulking off without further aggression.

  Tony later told me I was an idiot to have confronted Toto like I did. “Last thing you want to do is make a Filipino lose face, mate,” he said. He went on to tell me what happened to his buddy, a US Marine, who used to rent a room in his duplex. After the Marine got off duty, they would often go to the sari sari store for a few beers and pulutan, or finger food. One night the Marine became loud and insulting toward the shop owner, who took the abuse stoically. The following week the Marine’s cocker spaniel went missing, and after searching the barangay without success, he stopped by the sari sari for a beer and pulutan—which, unknown to him at the time, was his dog.

  I didn’t take Tony’s allegory seriously—I should have, but I was still new to the Philippines then, naïve about how things worked here—and as a consequence I ended up in the public hospital with seven stab wounds and a tube sticking out of my side.

  I pressed charges, though Toto was never apprehended or arrested. He went into hiding long enough for the cops to lose interest in finding him, if they’d ever been motivated in the first place.

  I never went back to Candy’s barangay. Instead, she ended up visiting my place in the compound more and more, eventually moving in.

  The months slipped past. Candy and I didn’t hear from Toto again. I never forgot about him—my scars reminded me of the attack on a daily basis—but I ceased to consider him a threat. I figured he’d buried his beef with me.

  But he never had, had he?

  He’d been waiting quietly for another opportunity to finish what he’d started—such as when I’d be on his turf again—and there was no better turf than his hometown in a remote province.

  ▬

  The ringing of my cell phone caused me to sit up quickly, rapping my head on the lid of the coffin.

  The ringtone mimicked that military bugle call that’s played to wake soldiers at dawn, and for a moment I was completely disorientated, thinking I was in the army myself. Then I saw the pocket on my right leg lighting up. I was wearing flight pants that had cargo pockets on the front of the thighs. The pants were new, and I wasn’t used to the location of the pockets—which was why I’d overlooked checking them earlier.

  Now I jammed my hand in the ringing pocket and yanked out my phone. I held the screen a foot from my face, squinting at the fierce light of the display.

  It was Tony!

  I slid the touchscreen lock to the right and said, “Tony!”

  “Jimmy! Where…mate? Fancy…beer?”

  “I’m in a coffin!” I said, my words raspy. “This isn’t a joke. I’m in a fucking coffin somewhere in Kalinga, Candy’s province. In Luzon. Tony? Tony?”

  “Jimmy! Mate…hear me?”

  His voice crackled with interference. There also seemed to be a lot of people talking in the background.

  “Tony? Listen to me—”

  “Cutting up…the Fort. Get…ass… See you, mate.”

  The disconnect tone sounded.

  I cursed, at the same time realizing Tony cutting out didn’t matter. I could call someone else.

  I had my phone.

  The time and date read 3:06 a.m., Sunday, July 30. Which made it about six hours from when I’d been at the bar with Candy. Yet this didn’t tell me how long I’d been in the coffin. It could be anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours.

  The battery indicator was green and half-full. I said a silent prayer of thanks for the iPhone’s decent battery life. My last phone, some Chinese brand I’d bought from a used-phone kiosk, would have almost surely been dead by now, or almost dead.

  I had six missed text messages.

  I navigated to the inbox and discovered all the messages were from Candy, all since I’d vanished from the bar. They ranged from curious to angry to concerned. The last one was sent just past midnight, three hours ago. It read:

  Anak ng toka! Where are you, Jim? I’m worried. My mom is worried too. Call me.

  Anak ng toka was similar to the American expression “Son of a gun!” only it meant “Son of a tofu!” Candy often substituted “tofu” for “sweet potato” or “shark” or some other word that suited her fancy, and she only used the expression when she was seriously peeved off.

  I was about to call her, but I hesitated. Although the phone’s battery might not be a problem, my credit balance would be. I’d yet to sign up for a monthly plan with one of the country’s telecommunication carriers, which provided generous or unlimited talk time. Instead, I bought credit—or “load,” as they call it here—from convenient stores. It came in one hundred, three hundred, and five hundred peso amounts. Calling someone to talk ate it up in minutes, but if you stuck to sending text messages, which was what I did, it lasted a while.

  I had no idea how much credit I had remaining. I think it had been a week or so since I’d topped up. Yes, last Friday. I’d ordered a masseuse to my place for an hour and a half massage. She got lost in the maze of streets that made up my compound, and I’d been texting back and forth with her, giving her specific directions, when I got a “Message could not be sent” notification, indicating my balance was zero. The masseuse continued to text me, each message becoming more irked when I didn’t reply, until she finally called me. I remained on the phone with her until she found the place. She had not been happy with the ordeal, considering the paltry money she earned from the massage likely wouldn’t cover the credit she had wasted calling me. Needless to say, it had been a pretty half-assed massage.

  But, yeah, that was last Friday. I topped up my credit the next day. I think I purchased the five hundred peso load, and if so, I likely still had a good chunk left.

  At least, I hoped I did.

  So the question became: should I call Candy and risk running out of credit, or send a text messag
e?

  Jesus Christ, Jim! You’re buried alive in a fucking coffin! You’re not texting someone to come get you out!

  Okay, I would call someone. But who? Candy? How was she going to help me—?

  Ava Roberts.

  She was American, one of the few female Western expats I’d met thus far in Manila, and she worked at the US Embassy.

  ▬

  I’d been in the country maybe three days when a teacher I worked with invited me to a party thrown by two Filipino sisters from an affluent family. I didn’t know it at the time, but the party was an annual thing, the event of the year, and it attracted a massive gathering of expats: Americans, Brits, Aussies, Canadians, Kiwis—even an impressive number of French and Spaniards.

  The venue occupied the penthouse and rooftop of a tall residential building in downtown Manila. I’d been out on one of several patios, smoking a cigarette and taking in the panoramic night view of the city, thinking I would never be invited to a party like this back in Chicago, when Ava came over and said hi. She was maybe five ten, my height, and wore a canary-yellow, one-shouldered gown (the party had been fancy-dress). She was attractive with a slim waistline, milky skin, and a pile of golden curls stacked like a crown atop her head.

  “So you know Denise and Angela?” she asked me.

  “Who?” I said.

  “They’re sisters. This is their place.”

  “Ah, right. I think I met them when I’d arrived. You know Rick?”

  “Wolfie?”

  Rick’s surname was Woolfson, so I assumed we were talking about the same person. “Yeah, we teach at the same school. I came with him.”

  “You’re a teacher?” She sounded impressed, though I didn’t know why she would be.

  “I’m not really a teacher,” I told her. “I’m just traveling and teaching.”

  “Right.” She gave me a curious smile. “So you’re a teacher.”

  “I’m not a real teacher. I didn’t go to teacher’s college or anything.”

  “My friend teaches at ISM—she said it’s really tough to get hired there. You definitely need a teacher’s degree. Or at least CELTA or something?”

  “Well, that’s ISM.” Which stood for the International School of Manila. Tuition was about twenty-five grand a year. The students were mostly the sons and daughters of diplomats and the like, and a lot of them ended up going to Harvard or Yale. “I’m at the Korean International School. You’re supposed to have a teacher’s degree there too, but they’re a bit sketchy. I told them I was working on one during the interview last year, and that was good enough. They never asked again.”

  “Were you working on one?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. “Mind if I borrow your lighter?”

  I took my Zippo from my pocket and sparked the flint. She touched my hand, guiding the lighter closer to her cigarette. She bent forward, providing me a view of impressive cleavage.

  She stood straight again and exhaled. “Thanks.”

  “What do you do?” I asked her.

  “I work at the embassy.”

  “Neat,” I said, guessing this might have been the case. Most of the expats I knew were either teachers, suit-and-ties with international conglomerates, or embassy workers. “The American one?”

  “Do I sound British to you?”

  “Could have been Canadian.”

  “Yes, the American one.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a consular assistant.”

  “So you help people who get in trouble over here?”

  “Sort of. I’m more of a point of contact to the families of people who get in trouble.”

  We ended up spending much of the party talking to each other, and sometime in the early morning we went back to her place together. Thanks to her State Department housing allowance, she lived in a posh three-bedroom apartment in Fort Bonifacio, Manila’s newest and most expensive development. We had a glass of wine, a few more cigarettes, and ended up in bed together.

  We continued seeing each other for a while. We never went on one-on-one dates. Rather, we’d go out with our separate groups of friends and at some point during the night “bump into” each other. Eventually, however, I started to avoid venues where I knew she would be, and then I started to ignore her calls and put off replying to her text messages.

  My change of heart had nothing to do with Ava. She was a great person, and we were in fact quite compatible. Yet things were moving too fast, and I didn’t want a Western girlfriend. My mentality was that, while living overseas, I should be dating locals. You got to know a lot more about the country and the people and their culture that way. It’s why in Japan I only dated Japanese girls, and got fairly serious with one named Yumi before heading home after my one-year contract.

  Ava took the hint. We still ran into each other when we went out, as the expat community was tight for such a large city, and everyone seemed to end up at the same spot on certain nights, but we no longer ended up going back to her place, or mine.

  The encounters were always awkward, even more so after I began dating Candy. Ava heard about Candy through friends, of course. She asked me about her once, and she seemed pretty blasé about the whole thing. So much so I would have thought she was over us had it not been for the party she threw shortly thereafter, which was on the scale of Denise and Angela’s penthouse extravaganza—only Ava made a point to have a guest list, and not invite me.

  I scrolled quickly through the phonebook for her number. I found it and pressed Call.

  One ring, two, three—

  “Come on, come on, come on.”

  —four, five—

  “Hello?” Ava said. She sounded sleepy.

  “Ava! It’s me, Jim.”

  “Jim?”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “It’s a bit staticky. Are you okay? You sound—”

  “Can you call me back? Right now? I don’t have much credit, and it’s really important.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Call me back? Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Right now.”

  “Okay, Jim, what’s—”

  I hit End. I stared at the phone in the dark, the bright screen, the photo of Candy and I that functioned as the wallpaper. Her lips were puckered, kissing me on the cheek, while she looked sidelong into the camera, her bark-brown eyes sparkling. We took it in one of those video arcade photo-booths you can find in most major malls here.

  I counted the changing seconds on the phone’s clock.

  Seventeen…eighteen…nineteen…twenty…

  Why wasn’t Ava calling me back? Could she not get through? Had I been lucky getting reception before? Had it knocked out completely?

  I had one bar. I moved the phone to my right. Two bars.

  “Come on, come on—”

  The phone vibrated. I was already swiping the screen to unlock it when the bugles started trumpeting.

  “Ava?”

  “Jim?”

  “Ava, you have to listen to me. This isn’t a joke. You have to help me. Okay?”

  “Yeah—okay. What—”

  “I’m in Luzon, in Kalinga province. Candy’s hometown. Someone attacked me. I just woke up, and I’m in a coffin.”

  “What!”

  “Listen! You know the guy who stabbed me? Candy’s ex, Toto? I think he did this.”

  “Buried you in a coffin?” I could hear the skepticism in her voice.

  “I swear on my life this is no joke, Ava. I’m running out of air. I don’t know how much is left in here. I need you to help me. Contact someone at the embassy, tell them where I am. Kalinga—do you have a pen?”

  “One second…” I heard rustling, a drawer bang. “Yeah?”

  “Kalinga. K-a-l-i-n-g-a. In Luzon. Her hometown is Tinglayan.” I spelled it out as well. “Do you have that?”

  “Tinglayan in Kalinga.”

  “I was at Candy’s family home for her dad’s birthday,”
I said, the words spilling into one another. “We went to a bar afterward. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s on the main street. I went out back to the bathroom. Someone jumped me. I woke up in the coffin. Get the embassy to call Candy. Get them to find Toto. Shit! I don’t know his last name. But he did this. It has to be him. He grew up in Tinglayan too. He must have heard I was here.”

  “But why did he bury you?”

  “I don’t know! So no one could find me?”

  “All right. I’ll call my boss right now—”

  “Tell him to contact the local police. Get them to go to Candy’s house—and Toto’s. They have to find him. I don’t know how much air I have left.”

  “I’ll call right now.”

  “Call me back. Or get the embassy to call me back. I need to know what’s happening.”

  “Okay. Jim, God, okay.”

  We hung up.

  I exhaled a quivering breath. I should have felt better. Something was happening. Wheels were in motion. Nevertheless, I was still wigging out with adrenaline, my gut a hard ball of dread. Because this wasn’t the States. It was a sleepy rural province in a developing country. Were the police going to get off their asses and do something? Were they going to find Toto? Was he going to play dumb?

  It was 3:10 a.m.

  ▬

  The wait was interminable. I tried to slip into a meditative state to conserve oxygen, but this proved impossible. I remained as wired as if I were tripping out on an amphetamine high, my breathing stubbornly refusing to slow down. I kept checking my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a call that had failed to ring.

  Two bars reception.

  No missed calls.

  I moved the phone around, trying to get three bars. It dropped to one. Swearing, I kept moving it until I had two bars again—and I kept it there.

  I shouted for help, hoping above hope that I wasn’t buried beneath the ground, that Toto was just screwing with me, that the coffin was in his garage, or his backyard. After all, it would be a hell of an effort to dig a grave. Doing so would take several hours. It would have been very difficult for Toto to abduct me from the bar, drive me to where I presently was, dig a hole, and bury me, all inside of five or six hours. Not to mention finding a coffin—