By midmorning the air is heavy with promise, and the day begins much like Efrem’s beloved Ocampo Justice movies. Reynato summons Task Force Ka-Pow to the roof of the hotel where, free from prying eyes and perked ears, he goes over the finer points of their upcoming sting. They’ve come to Davao City to arrest a pair of bald and toothless shabu dealers—brothers, twins. The two run a low-profile operation, just a handful of corpses to their credit, if you don’t count the junkies in unmarked graves throughout the province, mangled from the inside out by the twins’ rotgut shabu. They also spread their earnings generously enough that the local police, the barangay sentinels, even would-be rivals have allowed them to operate with impunity.
“This ends today,” Reynato says, in an inspiring tone of voice. But no sooner has he spoken than his cell phone hollers madly. Charlie Fuentes requests his presence at a rally by the port, and tomorrow, at a town hall meeting all the way out in Zamboanga. He did promise, after all. Reynato hangs up, looking dour. “This ends shortly,” he says. Lorenzo and Racha and Elvis cheer. The bender is reinstated.
For days on end Efrem lingers in the plush safehouse while his fellow bruhos, unsupervised by Reynato, stretch long nights of boozing into mornings spent retching up their sins out the open hotel window. They bring home girls, and whores, and new friends who invariably become enemies by dawn and find themselves on the losing ends of elaborate fistfights. Lorenzo orders meals on rolling trays and sends them hurtling downstairs when the food is unsatisfactory or too meager. Elvis watches dirty videos on a VCR annexed from the front desk and twice defended from terrorized bellhops charged with recovering it. Racha, bleary with drink, stares into the bathroom mirror for hours, sometimes shouting in fright and anger, other times exclaiming, “It really isn’t that bad.”
Efrem doesn’t participate in this fun—as they describe it. He spends his days seated at the foot of Racha’s unmade bed, casting his long gaze out the open window. Though Reynato left him with no explicit orders, he keeps watch on the shabu dealers, emptying bottles of eyedrops into his hardening pupils, hoping to see something that will be of use when the time finally comes to arrest them. Elvis and Racha let him be, avoiding him almost instinctively. But Lorenzo mocks him, drunk or sober. “How did we ever manage a stakeout before we got this magic Muslim?” he asks no one in particular. “You guys remember all those hours with binoculars? Always having to hole up close by to the baddies, usually a shit nest with no air-con? Like the fucking dark ages! I bet you know all about the dark ages, don’t you, Mohammed? Growing up in some Basilan backwater, and all.”
Efrem ignores Lorenzo as best he can, concentrating on the task at hand. He spies on the distant dealers, reporting the domestic minutia of their lives into a little tape recorder. They have a cat that is well cared for. They are loving gardeners. They enjoy sugary drinks. In the afternoons they take naps on either side of a girl bound at the wrists and ankles with synthetic rope.
IT’S A FULL WEEK before the aggravating routine ends. Reynato returns from the campaign trail, appearing in the doorway of their safehouse suite with to-go coffees and a bottle of aspirin. Efrem has already taken up his watchful perch at the foot of the unmade bed, and Reynato looks at him with such pride and approval that Efrem feels as though his full lungs have crystallized. He helps Reynato apply heavy makeup and a fake beard, and then watches as he heads across town to meet the dealers. In a sting one week delayed, Reynato begs the twins to sell him millions of pesos worth of their finest shabu. Efrem presses his back against Racha’s bed and shoulders his Tingin, just in case the meeting goes awry. Racha, draped across a stack of dingy pillows, pays Efrem no mind. He whittles foot-calluses with a penknife, collecting the skin in a neat pile on the nightstand. Neither of them speak.
The discussion between Reynato and the dealers gets animated and Efrem wishes, as he often does, that he could read lips. One of the dealers gets up, walks around the table and sits down again. The other does the same. Reynato writes a number onto a little slip of paper and places it on the table. The dealers write another, much higher number. Reynato writes a number in between. They look at it for a long time. Slowly, as though stretching, Reynato puts a hand behind his back. He flashes Efrem, seven kilometers distant, a thumbs-up.
“Something just happened,” Efrem says.
“What?” Racha does not look up from his calluses.
“I think Reynato just made a deal.”
“Fuck, it’s about time!” Lorenzo’s voice booms from the bathroom. The door opens and he emerges in a thick cloud of steam, naked save a towel wrapped around his head like a turban. He takes no fewer than three hot showers daily and enjoys letting his naked body drip dry in the cool suite air. “I’m about ready to bust these fuckers, right Mohammed? I mean, a man as good as me can sit on an ass as good as mine for only so long.”
Lorenzo saunters over to a table by the open window where the coffees have been left steaming and begins eating the sugar packets and drinking the little plastic cups of creamer. “Be real nice to have the twins wrapped up by lunchtime,” he says, flicking each tiny piece of garbage down to the street below, the window a frame for his wet nudity. Spreading his legs and squaring his shoulders, Lorenzo jukes his hips so that his hanging genitals pendulate. They break Efrem’s gaze and he loses his view of Reynato and the dealers. “Jesus, Mohammed, quit looking at my balls.”
The phone rings. Lorenzo plucks a butt from the ashtray, lights it and sucks burning filter. He glances back at Efrem and despite a look that says: Reconsider, he continues. “They tell you about telephones on your island, Mohammed? If you pick it up, you’ll hear a man in there. Or, sometimes, a lady. Now that’s magic.”
Efrem stands. The phone lets out a broken gurgle as he pulls it, handset and all, from the wall. One hit to the back of the head cracks the phone and floors Lorenzo. Then two slaps with the receiver across his upturned face make his lips and chin split like the seat of a fat man’s pants.
Lorenzo looks even more naked when Efrem whips the coiled towel off his head and drags him across the suite. He tosses him out into the hall, closes the door and slides the deadbolt home. Racha, done filleting his feet, closes his penknife. Efrem can’t read his expression through the scar tissue. A lady guest shouts from the hallway and Lorenzo jostles the doorknob frantically. A playing card shoots under the door and slides to Efrem’s feet. It’s the jack of spades, giving him the finger.
Another telephone rings, this time Racha’s cell. “Yes, boss,” he says, “I know. Sorry. Your boy … Efrem broke it.” Racha looks at his watch, which got fused to the skin of his wrist some years back when he was left hogtied in a burning jeepney. “How long? The one by the bus station? All right.”
He hangs up.
“All right?” Efrem asks.
“Renny got his deal,” he says. “Wants us at the market in an hour. Also says you have to pay for the phone.” Racha crosses to the window and leans out. He looks down a few floors to where Elvis has made a nest of twigs and dried palm overlooking the suite of young honeymooners. “I see you there!” he calls. “Yes, you. Come up here.”
As soon as Racha makes space at the window a fat black hornbill flies straight in and performs a rough skid landing at the foot of the bed. The bird rights itself and cocks its head, looking around as though remembering past lives. Its feathers stand on end. A modest explosion plasters the walls and carpet with greasy down. Elvis stands at the center of the mess, all basketball shorts and rainwater. Efrem is still unaccustomed to this.
Racha glances at Efrem before unbolting the door. Lorenzo tumbles in with an empty ice bucket over his crotch and an inside-joke smirk on his dripping face.
“Fuck you buddy,” he says, “you got me good.” Efrem tenses as Lorenzo drops the ice bucket and claps him on the arm. “Won’t be so easy next time. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.” Racha and Elvis chuckle, but Efrem is sure to walk behind Lorenzo on their way to the elevators so he can check.
NOT LONG AGO he would have sneered at a claim like this—seen it for the empty boast it was. But in the short time since joining up with Task Force Ka-Pow his world has gone topsy, and now anything seems possible. He’d always imagined his curse to be unique—kept those bugged-out wandering eyeballs a secret from his few friends among the Boxer Boys. The curse had, after all, rendered him a freak back home, in the village north of Tubigan. Someone to be feared and avoided. And everybody did. Everybody except for the Holy Man.
Like Efrem, the Holy Man was not born on their island. He arrived during a hard dry season, when the whole jungle inland seemed to yellow and shrug. Efrem was eleven and the island had changed in the short years since he’d run ashore on the deadboat. The fishing lanes had filled with trawlers, their synthetic nets brimming. Village fishermen, freedivers with rubber-sling hand spears, paddled their bangkas far beyond the breakers and still came home with too little. Some took up with the trawlers as deckhands. Others worked construction on islands big enough to build things on, or tapped rubber on Basilan plantations. Children on the island saw this rot as proof positive that Efrem was deadluck. But they never said so to his face, and scattered when he approached, arms cradling their heads.
The Holy Man received an equally cool reception—the villagers deciding early on that he was crazy. His hopeless motorboat leaked and he arrived all dressed from head to toe in silly white robes. One of his arms was missing at the elbow, and he wore a thick beard that cascaded down to where his navel probably was. He kept his little round sunglasses on even after sunset and spent his first evening on the island shambling from hut to hut so he could mumble thickly accented greetings to the men, and boys. He pitched a heavy tent on a small strip of level sand below the huts. Suspicious villagers watched him wrangling the poles with his one arm, not bothering to tell him that by midnight he’d have cold tidewater as a blanket.
They warmed to him in the weeks that followed, but not because he acted any less insane. He gave money away. Just like that—a stack of coins or some folded, rotting bills passed to anyone who asked for them. All he demanded in return was that you listen to his ramblings; stories of made-up countries and their made-up wars. He’d raise his nub high into the air and tell the children about how Communists shot his arm clean off. Communists were enemies of God and he had fought them among the dusty mountains of his imaginary homeland. God, according to the Holy Man, had a lot of enemies. And so, therefore, did the Holy Man. For God’s enemies were his, just as God’s friends were his friends. “Of course, you’re all God’s friends,” he said. “And I’m happy about that.” Not all of the villagers were won over, and those who were took time. But everyone became attached enough to the crazy stranger that they didn’t ask questions when he suddenly broke camp and hid in the bamboo for days. They even lied to the Manileño soldiers that came looking for him, saying they’d seen nothing of a foreign fugitive.
Efrem avoided the Holy Man as he did everyone else. He spent his days atop the seaside cliffs, seated in a favorite little hollow overlooking the cove and huts below. By that time he’d already been to Davao City with his uncle, and from this perch he had an easy view out across the archipelago, beyond faraway Zamboanga City, past the cloud-speckled crater-peak of Mount Apo, out to the very dock in Davao where they’d tied off. His pupils, dilated to near hemorrhage, retraced the back-alley route his cousins once led him on to find the outdoor cinema. On some lucky afternoons he’d discover a new Ocampo movie showing—Charlie Fuentes in the title role, unloading his trusty six-shooter, Truth, into some liar. Efrem would watch as long as he could, struggling not to blink. He didn’t want to miss a thing.
But on the hot afternoon that the Holy Man followed him up the cliffs there was no movie showing in Davao City, and so Efrem sat alone, throwing rocks at crabs. He unearthed a small chip of granite, picked out a dusky little target on the beach below and let the granite fly. It arced high, peaked, and fell. It landed square on the crab’s back, throwing up a mess of yellow legs and eggs.
“A hit!” Efrem jumped at the voice behind him, a new stone already clenched in his little fist. “You are lucky boy,” the Holy Man said, kicking off his sandals and taking a seat beside Efrem on the rotting log. He ran his hand over the hard soil, fingers closing on a jagged bit of quartz. “My turn,” he said. “What do I aim for?”
Efrem stared at him. He pointed at a nearby branch.
“You are gaming on me? I mean challenge!” The Holy Man scanned the beach. “There,” he said. “Empty oil drum, down by the huts. You think my stone goes inside?” He paused and Efrem did not answer—he was unaccustomed to being spoken to. “You are skeptical? I will reform you!” He stood, pulled his arm back and threw. The stone landed a few meters in front of the drum, skipped across the ground and banged loudly against the base. “Close!” He shot his one fist into the air, a smile parting his beard. “Your turn. In the drum.”
Efrem threw his stone and it disappeared clean through the mouth of the drum. The Holy Man slapped his knee over and over like clapping. He handed Efrem another stone and told him to do it again. He cheered the second time, but not the third. Or the fourth.
“How are you doing that?” He sounded almost angry.
Efrem didn’t know.
“Can you throw farther?”
Efrem didn’t know.
The Holy Man stood and walked about. He found another stone, handed it to Efrem and pointed to a coconut at the far end of the beach. Efrem threw and it shattered wetly into shards of husk. The Holy Man pointed back into the woods where a spotted gecko nodded its head on a tree trunk. Efrem threw. The gecko was a smear of blood on pale bark. The Holy Man sat down and stood up again. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he handed Efrem one last stone and pointed at a pair of shearwaters circling above the cove.
“Which one?”
The Holy Man struggled to make words. “Whichever you like.”
Efrem considered which bird he should kill. He took his time because he liked the way the Holy Man was staring at him—with admiration. With a father’s love. Finally he threw. One of the birds—the darker, the drabber, the one that had not flown as high—stopped flapping as though caught suddenly between an invisible thumb and forefinger. It fell into blue waves. The Holy Man let out something between a laugh and a shout. Tears trickled out from under his dark, round lenses.
“How long have you been this way?” he asked.
Efrem didn’t know.
“That’s all right,” the Holy Man said. “That’s fine.” He patted the back of Efrem’s neck and returned down the cliff. He paused for a moment, on the beach, to poke at the dead crab. Then he walked to Efrem’s mother’s hut. She was atop the roof, mending thatching and did not seem surprised to see him. They had a short conversation.
AS MUCH AS EFREM GREW to love the Holy Man, he loves Reynato Ocampo more. He rushes to the Davao market and meets the hero of his childhood on the roof of a Christian butcher’s shop. Reynato leans against the back of a billboard to stay hidden from the market below, eyeing Efrem bemusedly. “Describe yourself to me,” he says. Efrem stares dumbly, sure that he’s misheard the question. “Imagine I can’t see so well,” Reynato says, “and tell me what you look like.”
So Efrem describes himself. He’s squat, and dark. His chin is narrow, his forehead broad. His black hair is short, but in the week since he’s left the Boxer Boys it’s grown past regulation. Reynato listens thoughtfully and then waves him off, as though everything he’s just said is nonsense.
“That’s not what you look like at all,” he says. “Not to me, anyway. When I look at you I see eyes as big as windows. So big, so clear that I feel like I could step through and walk around inside your head. And you’ve got this glow, like smoke. You stand out to me,” Reynato says. “That’s how I picked you out of those army boys.”
He pauses to suck his unlit cigar. He adjusts his fake beard and checks his reflection in an oversized pair of aviator sunglasses. “I sta
nd out to me, too,” he says, a little sadly. “I don’t look anything like my wife describes. I don’t see myself the way she does, or the way you do, I’m sure. But that’s my gift. I see bruhos like us for what we really are. I see special talents. I’ve got them, and so have the boys, and so have you. In this way, we’re family.”
Hearing this, Efrem swells. Families are loved, and needed, and to be loved and needed by Reynato Ocampo brings him to a point past joy. Reynato puffs his cigar smokelessly, and Efrem offers him some matches. Reynato accepts them with nodded thanks and tosses them off the roof.
They are silent. He pockets his cigar and checks his watch. To the south, beyond the skyline, heat-lightning blossoms. “Best leave your safety catch off,” Reynato says. He pats Efrem’s shoulder warmly. “You remember what to do?”
“Yes sir.”
“Enough with the sirs, I’m begging you. Now, if you see anything fishy?”
“I’ll call Racha.”
“And if anyone tries anything?”
“They get two in the face.”
“Or one. No need to show off. Just make them stop whatever they’re doing is the point. And remember, I can’t stress this enough, you save me first. Got it?” Reynato speaks slowly. “Me first. Others after.” He stands, lifts his stained shirt, pulls out his pistol and sets it down next to Efrem. “If anything goes wrong, if anything happens to me out there, I want you to have Glock.”
Efrem looks down at it. It isn’t Truth from the movies, but it’s still Renny-O’s one and only piece. He’s almost afraid to touch it.
“If anything … oh my, this is hard to say. If I die, then I want you to take this to my family in Manila. I want you to stand in our living room. I want you to put it in your mouth and pull the trigger because you fucking let something happen to me.” Reynato winks and swings himself over a utility ladder at the back of the building. Just before his head disappears he stops and looks at Efrem. “Me first.”
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