Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  “He’s dead!” she shrieked. “It’s all over the papers!”

  “It’s on the radio,” said Taranta from behind the puka-shell curtains.

  The FBI had surrounded his hideaway boat with SWAT tacticians, but they were wasting their time. Cunanan didn’t even put up a fight. He killed himself. “He buckled,” Pig said.

  We nodded.

  “So what?” said Budoy. “Better to take your own life than be shot down like a wild boar.”

  “Too bad,” said Dadong. “I thought he was going to get away.”

  Junior spat at him. “Loko-loko, all of you. He deserved to die. They should cook him on one of Budoy’s spits, on a Swanie Roaster™. He’s just a criminal.”

  “Putang ina!” said Budoy.

  Junior reached for his Tokarev. “You want to stand up for your cousin?”

  “He’s not my cousin.”

  “He’s your cousin, all right,” said Junior. “Just like Joey is your son.”

  “Putang ina!” said Budoy, and he lunged for him.

  If not for Swanie, who knows what could have happened? She smacked Budoy with a copy of People’s Tonight and stared down Junior. No fury like a woman, especially one with the arms of a hog wrangler and the legal authority of a kapitana. That afternoon she had a mad look in her eyes, like a chicken that knows a rainstorm is coming. I had a gallina who looked just like her once—red-eyed, stiff-winged, stock still on a sunny afternoon.

  Junior took a sip of his basi, and Budoy sat down.

  “Now look here, Budoy, you’re coming home with me. Family council.” Kapitana Swanie was livid. “Taranta, can I see you tonight? I want to ask you a favor.”

  Aye-aye, Kapitana. All hail, Mayor Swanie Roaster™!

  We took another swig in her honor.

  I must admit I was disappointed by the headlines. He had his chance on the international stage, and he let us down. Dying like a coward in a ship’s hold. If he’d brandished a bolo, at least he’d have shown defiance, a Filipino middle finger at the FBI. What kind of a macho killer was this? Bakla. A homosexual death. But I felt the injustice of my judgment. Here was the story of a man, after all, in the throes of terror, flinching like Dadong before a gun, wracked by despair and inner torment I could not fathom. Who knows what lurks? Who was I to judge? What is a man?

  I don’t think Kapitana Swanie had the temperament—or, perhaps, the ability—to contemplate these questions. She was a woman of action and accomplishment. And for her it was simple: he was family. She had to show her solidarity with cousin Pidok in San Diego, America. He had sent out a plea in the Philippine Inquirer. Then she could wash her hands of the whole business and get back to her life. Basta.

  No one could ever quite figure out the chain of events, how our small town got dragged into a national story. Sure, if you think about it, all towns in the Philippines have their distinctions in the local heraldry. We all know about the red-shit residents of B___, producers of the best basi, and about the bolo-wielding wild men of C___, feared for their hotheadedness. They’re famed in their vicinity, within the radius of jeepney and bus routes that carried pigs and pesticides from town to town, but unknown along Patranco North, which cuts a swath across provinces too remote for our prejudice. Even San D___, our fair village, has acquired its own reputation: we’re known for our stupidity, for the morons and idiots in our midst. Maybe it’s because we have no public school, though Kapitana has threatened to build one. Still, we hear about it every day at the bus stop, when the porters leap up to snatch a bundle of chickens from the roof, or help widows off the middle bench of the jeep. The minute the jeep is ready for the next passenger, the yelling and posturing begin—all in good fun, of course. “Pula-pulang tae!” we shout. Red shit, red shit! “Mga bobo ng bayan!” the passengers reply. No-read, no-write! They put fingers to their temples to denote the source of our fame, and we stone them until they disappear, rattling and laughing like diesel hyenas.

  It was just after siesta, and we were gossiping about cockfights, Radyo Bombo, police calls, the election, and so on, when Budoy arrived with an announcement. He looked like shit, all stubbly face, bleary eyes, and dog breath, though he was dressed in a pressed polo shirt, cuffed pants, and church shoes, a black band wrapped around his sleeve.

  “Boys, you are invited to a wake for my cousin,” he said.

  “Oh!” Dadong said. “Sorry to hear. Who is it, bay?”

  “For cousin Pidok’s nephew. The guy who died in Florida.”

  “For Cunanan?” I asked.

  Junior made a loud grunt, as if to laugh.

  “Yeah,” Budoy said, looking down. “The Kapitana asked me to tell you.”

  “A wake for loko-loko—that killer?” Junior muttered, so only I could hear.

  “Ssh,” I said.

  Pig couldn’t stop smiling. This would score him big points with his friends in Manila. You want local color? Beat that! Mga bobo ng bayan!

  “But you don’t know him,” said Dadong earnestly. “You never met him. It’s like having a party for Madonna.”

  “If Madonna was a serial killer,” Junior added under his breath.

  Budoy grimaced. “It’s the Kapitana, bay. You know Swanie: when she has an idea . . . I didn’t want to do it. But he is my cousin, after all. And we’re roasting two pigs.”

  Not one pig—two. That was like begging for attention, flattering our dignity. We went.

  Cunanan’s wake wasn’t anything like the city papers reported: a huge fiesta, the whole town in attendance, fireworks. It was a sparse, lackluster affair, improvised at the last minute. Taranta was there, working in the kitchen as all three of her children ran around. (Her husband, the louse, was nowhere to be found.) The regular squad of professional mourners was there, looking just about ready to die themselves. There was the usual bunch of moochers, people who never missed a birth or a death or a saint’s holiday. And then there was us: the drunks and louts, the great men of San D___.

  The professional mourners had voices like pumice stones, gravelly and grating; I would carry them to purgatory just to shut them up. Flesh shriveled like coconut meat in the sun, they wailed lost names to a forgetful God. They were ordinary ladies, transformed by death into supplicants, holy though decaying. I took off my slippers and hat and ignored them. Like everyone else, I headed straight for the basi and the beer.

  Budoy lumbered about for a while, one hand offering sweetcakes as the other brandished the spit—a menacing steel skewer. Then he went off to assemble the Swanie Roaster™.

  When the first pig came through the door, stitched and stiff with the fruit in its mouth, lashed and wounded at the chest like a nude and tortured Saint Sebastian, the party perked up. Pig, the scholar, started strumming some Beatles song. Dadong stood and stretched his puny body, as if he were getting ready to sing. Junior fiddled with the karaoke machine. We reached the high point of the party, the pig in heat and karaoke in play. Junior and Dadong began their first duet. And in the middle of it all was Kapitana, in a black dress, black veil, and black shoes, as if she were going to light candles on All Souls’ Day. She wore a black band around her sleeve, and her face looked as if she hadn’t slept for weeks. I had already begun the first beer of the fifth round—or was it the fifth beer of the first round?—and I tried to remember what was going on.

  Had the Kapitana gone mad? She was wearing Ray-Bans, just like Donatella Versace, the sister. Except that Donatella probably didn’t have a porkbelly ridge swelling the georgette fabric of her clothes, or those stout arms—not unless she, too, trussed hogs for a living.

  In Milan, the Versace family had held a funeral filled with dark Italian veils, a high mass with Elton John. The society pages of Manila’s newspapers ran the photos as if it were the death of one of their own, Milan merely the capital’s anagram, and Italy a province along Pantranco South. The expanded territory claimed by the papers had grown as Filipino immigration became bolder and more versatile: fishermen in Penang, cabin crews in the Carib
bean, nurses in Denmark, translators in China, busboys in Brussels, telemarketers in Texas, housekeepers in Hollywood, phone technicians in Indonesia, basketball players in Dhahran. Even Italy was full of Filipinos dusting the Murano treasures of the rich. No wonder we felt the world was our home and Versace’s abattoir our boudoir. Filipinos were everywhere: in the bedrooms, the privies, the boiler rooms, the cocktail parties, the kitchens, the bowers, the staterooms, and the sewers of the idle rich. We could swallow the world.

  Thus, the newsmen in Manila should have scorned the festivities in Milan, to reflect the jaundiced eye, for instance, of an expatriate cook in a Roman home who can concoct all kinds of ravioli in her sleep but who dreams of adobo, who picks up Italian slang without a sweat but longs only for her humid home. Instead, there were articles about the funeral songs, the celebrities, and their exotic fashions. And then, later on, when they heard about the village of San D___—six ramps and a dust road off of the Southern Luzon Expressway—all they could muster was ridicule and cartoons. A wake for Versace’s killer? The Township of Stupid: that was us.

  “Boy,” Junior turned to me, munching on a rib. “I always knew it. This family is mad. How she won the last election, I don’t know, with that scandal over her bakla son, that girlie-boy Joey. They say he’s wearing women’s clothes on Roxas Boulevard, doing a show for the Japanese. Fake tits and sequins—bakla! Swanie screamed like a pig when she found out he had gone. She’ll be voted out in the next election, mark my words.”

  A globule of fat dribbled from between his teeth and he poured himself another drink.

  “And who are we going to vote for?” Dadong asked. “You?”

  Junior just laughed.

  “Ssh!” said one of the mourners, praying in another room. “Show some respect for the dead!”

  Kapitana kept coming and going, from the yard to the house and back again. Minding the spit, bringing more drinks. Behind the Ray-Bans, her face was puffy, and I imagined her eyes were red. Taranta kept returning to replenish dishes, looking around all the time for her husband, and I kept my eyes on her, feeling a dull basi desire. The professional mourners were eating now, chewing loudly, claiming earthly dues for their heavenly services. Budoy sat patiently outside, keeping watch over the second pig. He looked gray from all the heat.

  The Manila papers and Radyo Bombo and the pundits—they could laugh all they wanted, heap ridicule upon the backward people of San D___. But we knew we were separate from the rest of the world, separate from the Vatican’s mumbo jumbo about burying the dead, separate from the lives of the fashion models in Milan; separate, even, from the rustle of newspapers in Manila’s coffee houses, the rumble of trucks down Southern Luzon Expressway, the network of names along the tourist’s chain of tannery-towns and dreamlace-weavers. We were separate, obscure, worthless—everyone knew that, even Joey, the prodigal son. But we lived for adventure. Tago ng tago, life to the lees!

  As the wake wore on, and the ashen clouds of the roast yielded to the faint, sweetish smell of scorched vinegar and burnt fat, we moved outside, and even the professional mourners squatted with us, mixing Coca with their basi, chewing cigars, swatting flies. Songs regressed to a fevered languor, and Junior stood up to sing.

  “Cuando, cuando? Cuando, cuando?”

  Dadong banged on the guitar, trying to keep up with the karaoke.

  “If you see him tell me when—Cuando, cuando, cuando—Jooooeey! Every moment’s a daaay! Every day lasts a liiifetime! Oh my Joey tell me when!”

  Junior strutted around like Harry Belafonte, holding the microphone like a torch. We clapped.

  Then we saw, and we stopped clapping.

  Kapitana stood behind Junior. She’d come up from the house to check our food, our drinks. It wasn’t so much her sorrow that stopped us. There was something about seeing this fat, strong woman in Donatella’s lace veil, shaking with anger, behind Junior, red-faced from all the basi. When we saw Kapitana, we saw the wild, keening face of a blind prophet in Ray-Bans. And then we heard the shout.

  “Putang ina!”

  Junior stopped, and we ducked.

  We felt the shot more than we heard it—a whipcrack that split the afternoon in two. We scampered for safety, moochers and mourners alike, and we heard the reverberation like a blunt thud against a mattress spring. Chickens squawked in the bushes. In the distance, I thought I heard a bus groan. And when I looked up from my perch against a coconut tree, I saw benches overturned, the karaoke still spinning, sotto voce, and the splayed, shattered carcass of the denuded pig on its throne of banana leaves. Its gnawed ribcage was pierced through the center, where the absent heart would have been, but the head remained intact, the apple undisturbed.

  Junior had escaped unscathed, still holding the microphone.

  Budoy rushed in with ashes on his red face.

  Kapitana threw the Tokarev at Junior and wailed, “One more word about Joey and you die.”

  The karaoke cranked: “Cuando, cuando, cuando, cuando?”

  And I saw the headlines again: “Pig Shot at Killer’s Wake. Dateline: San D___.”

  Temporary insanity, we say now. Kapitana Swanie got carried away that day, spending all that money on a wake for nobody—a boy who was no man. Later we applauded when the second lechon arrived. A specter of grief in a roast pig, mouth open to grip eternity. We crunched into its flesh with praise, goodwill, and greed, and washed it down with basi.

  FASCINATION, GRAVITY, AND DEEPLY DONE KISS

  Lisa Asagi

  There was nothing at all significant that caused me to tell of this except for a sudden lapse in perception. How steam holds long enough to play against any conjured change in temperature, how a reaction can be so visibly shaken out of something as mundane as a shower in the middle of an ordinary evening.

  Perhaps it was an inadequate amount of ventilation. Whatever the case, I had never found myself before in a room so vividly filled with vagueness, instilling an inertia normally reserved for a slipping off a very steep cliff. It had nothing to do with contemplation. I simply turned off the water, parted the curtains, and found myself not being able to find my towel. So unlike me. No not nude. Naked. In a fog. It could have been a smoke-filled room and my last moment. I could have died. But instead I am alone and worried about it.

  There is a painting that hangs in a museum two miles from my apartment. It is a watercolor by Paul Klee. Smaller than what you’d expect from any book. Notepaper-sized. It’s strange how wood frames pronounce the empty space that emerges from thin lines and segments of color. When you see them all lined up on the wall there is a strange sadness in the insect lines, deserts, and he wasn’t even trying to be abstract. Some of them involve an image of a musical note called a fermata, which instructs a sustained pause, the prolongation of a tone, chord, or rest beyond its nominal value. He drew it on its side so it looked like a crescent moon. To musicians it is known as a bird’s eye because of this elliptical shape.

  LISA ASAGI is a writer and media artist. She is the author of two chapbooks—Physics and Twelve Scenes at 12 a.m. Although based in San Francisco, she is often found in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, and driving at odd hours around Honolulu, where she was born in 1966 and raised. At this writing, she is working on a book called Isola.

  Once, once I fell in love with a married woman. Once, I thought that this body she left me with was able to have her live within, absorbed like an ink bird on my thigh or some secret bullet. But this is not possible anymore because I cannot stop thinking about her. Cannot stop interfering with the nature of motion, have it grow out of me, let it envelop, encircle, then gradually expand until I am freed to be nothing but an atom already accustomed to the gravity in the next phase of its world. I stutter. I don’t stare long enough. I eat too much, then I don’t eat at all. I buy books and don’t read them. I borrow books and read them. I walk around the block and can’t decide the best time to cross the street. I practice falling in love with strangers. I practice falling in love with my frien
ds. I practice falling in love because I know that this is the only way out. That perhaps one day, I will find myself hopefully lost with the gravity of a situation like her again. And then I will know why this feeling is brick red. That it is not my imagination. Because I have been practicing. Because maybe soon I will be able to say why there is a difference between secretly falling within a building of thought and actually free-falling quickly, a bright glance, the figure of a hand stretching outwards, the length of a deeply done kiss.

  What’s important. What’s relevant. It always seems to depend on the minute of day or nonfiction to the point of some kind of rage. A storm in the eye.

  “She was talking about her soul. She was talking about the angle of her soul. The one behind hindsight, the dashboard. That walking sleepless giant chasing shadows across tables of universes, knocking over chairs, twisting forks, teetering glasses. An animate angle that sweeps islands and airplanes into lips at the speed of sound, and swiftly closes as if an eyelid. The speed of light. You smiled. She was talking about fascination. She was thinking about desire, how it can only grow vivid once it is left long enough to feel itself as one thing. Original.”

  The storm in the eye of my life.

  I know. It’s odd. But I should say that it never felt anything close to abrupt at the time. Maybe I had been in love with her for three years. And maybe those years threw themselves into a wall and broke for two weeks, the strongest and loudest that ever happened to me. It scattered molecules, feathers in an atomic living room of a slowly disintegrating, slowly regenerating physically political world.