Suddenly the shadows of the wings lifted, and Chase thought he could see a barrio down the gravel road ahead. Deborah was standing near one of the palm-leafed huts holding out a package of cigarettes for him with teasing lips and laughing eyes.
I’ll walk 'till I get there. After a cigarette I’ll feel better.
CHAPTER 49
The Cabanatuan prison camp was built before the war near the foothills of Luzon’s Sierra Madre mountains. It had been a United States agricultural experiment station, covering about one hundred acres. Army barracks built for a Filipino army division dotted the camp.
The barracks’ roofs were made of cogon grass, and the walls were closed in with nipa. The floors had cracks between the bamboo slats to allow for air circulation. Several guard towers were stationed at intervals on the outside of the camp, and a high barbwire fence enclosed the prison compound.
This was the barrio that Chase could have sworn he saw on the Death March, although it had taken seven hours more to reach Cabanatuan. It had been seven hours of following a strange light and with his head buzzing. But he had made it.
Many times he wondered if the Death March had been worth it. For the first time in his life he was afraid. His own helplessness frightened him. He did not mind dying in combat like a warrior. But it was a depressing sight to see how the troops were. They had sore throats, bad colds, malaria, and dysentery. Not a single soldier was well. Chase’s own weight of two hundred and five pounds fell to one hundred and thirty. With his six-foot-three frame, he looked like a cadaver used in medical classes.
Hair and beards were matted from sweat and dirt. Most skins were pale, but Chase’s swarthy skin was a hue of gray. Everyone had puffy eyes. Spec could not wear his shoes because of the swelling in his feet and legs, caused by a lack of vitamin B known as beriberi. Many soldiers were simply too sick to get to formation for roll call each morning.
One of these was Rabinowitz. He had dysentery, and his stools were pure blood. And he could not make himself eat the things in his bowl of watered rice. Once Chase counted twenty-four items in his own bowl — mostly pebbles and worms. Since Chase was only seriously ill during the seizures of the malarial fever, each morning he would go look for Rabinowitz, who was housed in the separate officers’ quarters, to be sure the colonel was not in the pile of men listed for burial.
The damp, foggy, or rainy days that kept the men wet from lack of shelter were the worst on Chase. Once when he lay too weak in his bay to move, Spec showed up with quinine, something that Chase had been unable to obtain. "How’d you get that?” he mumbled through the fog of his fever.
Spec smiled. "Through the black market.” He took off his glasses and wiped the dirt off the lenses with his shirttail. "It’s a trick you learn best on New York’s streets. The stuff cost seven cigarettes.”
"There’s a Navajo word,” Chase rasped. "Ukehe. It means thank you — and is almost never said. Except in return for very great favors. Ukehe."
"It comes hard, doesn’t it, Red Man?” Spec asked. "Admitting that a white man might just be that—a man like yourself?” And he smiled again, showing the funny overlapping teeth. "But, God, I hope not. If I look like you right now, then I’ll bypass the human race.”
Chase grimaced and looked down at his long frame, seeing mostly bones, though there was a fresh scar, a two-inch purple welt just below his navel — engraved by a Japanese bayonet when he had not gotten into formation quickly enough. He knew his cheeks were sunken hollows and his eyes were deep sockets. Even his perspiration smelled different. That happened when the body underwent great changes.
But what was worse than the suffering of the body was the deterioration of the mind. Several men suggested that permission be obtained to use the books left in the Agricultural Station’s library and hold classes. Rabinowitz volunteered to teach finance and Hebrew; an A&M student, fruit production; a private whose father had been a pastor, the Bible; and so on.
While Chase realized Navajo was practically impossible for someone to learn who was not actually living in a Navajo village and subject to the daily activities, he did have a working knowledge of Spanish. This and the little Bicol he knew he taught in exchange for banking and finance from Rabinowitz and law from a lieutenant who promised his students that when, not if, they were freed from the prison camp they would have no problem in taking their bar exams and getting a degree.
One evening when the lieutenant was going over the Code Napoleon and its merits versus the Justinian Code, the conversation somehow got off on International Law and the Japanese breach of this law, especially in the two camps of Cabanatuan and Santo Tomas.
"What I wouldn’t give to be a civie at Santo Tomas,” a pimply-faced English private sighed. "It’s been so long I can’t remember what a round-eyed woman looks like!”
"You can bet, cobbers,” an Australian officer said, "that whatever looks a woman had are gone after a month at the Santo Tomas resort!”
The last thing Chase was interested in was a round-eye. He had been burned once by one of the most beautiful of the round-eyes, and for all he cared their kind could rot in Santo Tomas. But the nagging knowledge that Deborah might be in Santo Tomas, if she was not already dead, was like a vise — ever tightening on his brain. Sometimes he thought he would go crazy with the thought. Only when he was in the depths of malaria’s delirium was he free of anxiety. But the Australian’s comment roused Chase from his lethargy.
He was going to escape — and take Deborah with him, if she was at Santo Tomas. How, he did not know.
With the advent of Christmas Deborah was more than ever on his mind. While the other soldiers sat and talked about their families back home, wondering how they were celebrating the holidays, it hit Chase hard that he had no family —unless he counted Deborah (and every member of the Tahtchini clan). It was the loneliest he could remember ever being.
It was about this same time, when he had learned as much as Rabinowitz could teach him about finance — and the passing of the New Year of 1943, which he did not even bother to celebrate with the others —t hat Chase began to realize he was being watched.
He felt this most acutely when he was on water detail. He hated burial detail, though it did not require as much work, so he had opted for the hauling of the water. He went to the large artesian wells for about three weeks before he began to notice, toward the middle of February, that one particular Filipino came more often than the others at this same time to fill the large jugs. Chase scrutinized the monkeylike man. The little eyes never wavered under Chase’s penetrating regard. One day the small brown hand went up to the straw hat, removed it, and fanned the short, narrow face. More than once the fingers ran about the inside of the hat’s band.
It could be his imagination that the man wanted to speak with him. It could be a trick. But since Chase had made up his mind to escape, he felt he had nothing to lose. The next time the monkey man went through the same routine — two days later — Chase moved nearer, setting down the water jugs he supported on a wooden yoke.
At the same time the man dropped his hat. Chase took the initiative and bent to pick it up. No gunfire erupted from the towers, but his back felt terribly broad at that moment and exposed. He began to hand the hat back to the little man when the man’s eyes communicated with his. Chase looked inside the hat. In its crown was a folded, dirty piece of paper. Carefully Chase’s large hand concealed the paper within his palm as he passed the hat back.
Chase waited an agonizing three hours until he found himself alone at the rear of a barrack. The note was from Lelani. I can have parao for yu. Say to Hector wen yu nid it.
Slowly Chase shredded the note, feeling a deep sense of humility. His mind ticked off the people who had befriended him, none of them of the Dine’e: first Will; then Spec — the Yankee; Omaha — the Negro; Rabinowitz — the Jew; Lelani — a Filipino, and on and on. And then there were his own people, Blue Tail and steadfast Deborah.
Chase began to plan his escape. A small
sailboat like a parao would get him off Luzon but where then, he did not know. And he knew little about sailing.
The Japanese constantly patrolled the islands, shelling them and requisitioning what food the Filipinos were able to grow, since the mountainous islands of Japan did not supply enough food — and especially little food at wartime when much of the Japanese labor had been diverted to military endeavors. So escape from Luzon Island appeared hopeless. Yet Chase was determined.
The first thing he did was to arrange to exchange places for the garden detail. After the next rain he calculated it would be easy to dig under the barbwire. The following day he returned the note to Hector with instructions. At dawn after next rain, he wrote in Bicol, which he figured was as badly spelled as Lelani’s English, leave clothing at well. He’d worry about getting a sailboat later.
Taking someone with him could seriously handicap his escape, but nevertheless Chase decided to ask Spec and Rabinowitz, both of whom were on garden duty already. He went to them three days later as clouds billowed on the horizon. "I’m leaving tonight,” he told Spec. "Do you want to go with me?”
Spec moved along the row of sweet potatoes, camotes, giving no indication he had heard. But a few minutes later he said, "Man, I got a sure thing here —a roof over my head and food to eat, if you can call it that. Out there — ” he shrugged his bony shoulders, "it ain’t so sure. I better take my chances here and hope for liberation.”
When Chase asked Rabinowitz, who was on his knees weeding the rows, the colonel smiled wistfully. "Nothing I’d like better. But for every officer who escapes, the Nips execute another one. I can’t do that to the men, Strawhand.”
Chase was tempted to ask, "Do you think another officer would give you the same consideration?” but did not. He had learned that the possibility did exist.
"If anyone has a chance, you do,” Rabinowitz said. "You almost look like a Filipino. You could mix with the natives, except maybe for your height, but I’d likely be spotted right off.” The colonel looked around and deemed it safe to hold out his hand. "If you make it back — don’t let your distrust stand in the way of making something of your life.”
* * * * *
As Chase had hoped, the ground was soft enough following the evening rain to tunnel out. The guards were nearly asleep at their posts, and Chase half-crawled, half-wriggled until he had made it to the safety of the artesian wells. There on the stone ledge was clothing — a shirt of mosquito netting, ragged and patched white cotton trousers, and a floppy straw hat. Beneath the clothing was a bolo, a deadly-looking machete.
While Chase stripped in the shadows of mango trees, the little monkey man, Hector, suddenly materialized. "You will need a guide,” he announced to Chase in almost perfect English.
Chase concealed his surprise. "I’m going to Santo Tomas for a woman.”
Hector nodded his head sagely as if Chase’s plan of action was acceptable and even expected. "We have contacts there who will help us.”
After burying Chase’s clothing beneath the soft soil, the two set out at a trot in the predawn darkness, keeping the rising sun to their left as they made their way deeper and deeper into the lowland forests. Chase figured there were ninety miles more or less of jungle between him and Manila. Seven days between him and Santo Tomas.
That first day was the easiest. Chase judged they made twenty miles that day. Although Hector looked like a monkey, he did not chatter like one, and it was only through the occasional words exchanged between the two that Chase learned the man was an educated Filipino guerrilla. Hector found pineapple to eat, though the fruit was still a little green. And once, when Chase almost stepped on a cobra, Hector’s bolo neatly sliced away the head.
The second day the heat and the exertion began getting to him. They came across a farmer’s camote patch, and Chase ate the sweet potatoes so quickly his stomach began cramping. "You are suffering from protein poisoning,” Hector advised him.
That same night, barking geckos, or lizards, warned the two men of an approaching crocodile while they slept.
Toward the fifth day, as they dropped down into the rice paddies that marked the outskirts of Manila, they came upon more and more people making their way in carretas filled with abaca, rice, tobacco, and bamboo mats. Once they stepped off a main trail and flattened themselves against an earthen embankment as a troop of Japanese cavalrymen passed by. At a whim the Japanese officer arrested the Filipinos moving ahead of Chase and Hector.
Later that day they came upon a lone man in a carromata, a pony-driven cart loaded with lumber. Chase and Hector followed the man for nearly three miles, then when the man left the road to kneel at one of the lazy creeks that wound through the steamy lowlands, Chase watched as Hector took the hilt of his bolo and struck the man across the head. "Let’s go,” he said, grabbing at the pony’s reins.
With Hector pulling and Chase following behind the cart, they entered Manila’s outskirts, which was mostly nipa and bamboo huts with oyster-shell windows, then progressed past the business district and warehouses. After they crossed over the Pasig bridge, which teamed with Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, they were in the older, walled part of the city, the Intramuros, where lay the famed shopping district. Anything one wanted could be found there, from precious ice cream or dental work to prostitution.
Chase had no eye for the shapely girls in their slit silk dresses nor the painting of the strawberry ice cream on a storefront plaque. He shoved his way behind the cart through the crowds until Santo Tomas came into view. The internment camp looked like what it was — a university campus with ancient brownstone buildings crawling with ivy, a university older than any in the United States, twenty-five years older than Harvard.
Undaunted by the fierce-looking guards with their .27 caliber rifles, the little monkey man lined up with other carts, apparently bringing the daily food supplies. When their turn came, Hector rattled off something to the head guard, and the Japanese soldier pointed a finger at two isolated buildings.
"What did you tell him?” Chase asked after they had trudged on through the gates.
"I told him I was delivering lumber for the new barracks they’re building for the women.”
"How did you know they were building new barracks?”
"They’re not, but the guards don’t know that.”
Chase grunted, amazed at the man’s temerity.
The men and women they occasionally passed seemed in somewhat better condition than the Cabanatuan prisoners, though they still had the zombie, glaze-eyed look and were pitifully thin.
Hector stopped before the women’s dormitories and lit the stub of a cigarette, took two puffs, and rubbed it out on the pavement with a bare sole. "Getting in is not difficult,” he said. "Getting her out will be.”
Chase watched him, waiting. Soon, from the nearest building, an old Filipino woman, who was almost bald, hobbled out, using a bamboo stick for a cane. She bent and picked up the flattened stub, saying, "You should not waste anything, old man.”
Hector shrugged. "The day is too hot to smoke.”
The woman, whose face was a mass of lines, peered out at him. "It will not always be so,” she replied at last.
"We are looking for a woman,” Hector said more softly. "An American called Deborah DeBaca.”
The woman jerked her head toward one of the buildings. "She’s there. You want her.”
"Yes, get her,” Hector said.
The four or five minutes that Chase waited seemed the longest in his life. Then Deborah, dressed in a loose cotton shirt and baggy pants, crossed the lawn toward him, moving in slow steps that lacked her former gracefulness.
When she was closer, Chase realized her hair was not rolled atop her head but had been wacked off. She was terribly emaciated, as shriveled as the old woman, but there was an iridescent quality about her skeletal form, like an Indian who has fasted for a religious revelation.
She looked suspicious and cautious of the two men. When Chase shoved the floppy
straw hat back from his face and she was near enough to see, she halted as if frozen.
CHAPTER 50
"It is good to see you, little sister.”
Stunned, unable to move, Deborah’s great eyes looked at Chase through a shimmering mist in disbelief.
"We must go!” Hector said, snapping the dreamlike quality of the moment for the two who had traveled halfway around the world to meet each other again. The Filipino took his hat off and flopped it over Deborah’s head, and Chase’s large hands encircled the wisp of her waist and set her atop the load of lumber.
It was a tense moment as the wagon moved toward a different gate than the one they had entered by and halted at the checkpoint, but Hector simply told the guard they were hauling off the lumber. When he even paused to ask the guard for a cigarette, perspiration broke out on Chase’s forehead. He wanted to curse at the guerrilla’s rash bravado. But the guard merely replied, "Move along, old man!”
Chase never dared look up at Deborah who sat perched on the lumber like a little boy. Once out of the main part of Manila, they threaded their way through the crowds that jostled for room along the narrow streets that led down toward the spacious harbor. It was out along one of the longest piers in the world that Hector stopped before a barrota, a fishing boat, of about three tons with housing of thatched coconut palm leaves across its middle. Once again the little man talked to an old woman, this time a tao with a flat nose and broad lips. She nodded, pointing to the sailboat and talking.
"We’re going to Mindanao,” Hector said, as he helped Chase and a dazed Deborah aboard the sailboat, while the tao woman plodded back up the pier with the carromata. "A guerrilla there will see that you are well hidden until the next submarine out of Australia puts in — maybe a month, maybe more.”
Chase and Deborah sat braced in the barrota as Hector maneuvered it through the honeycomb of Japanese tankers and destroyers in the bay and past the prewar ships, looking like rust-streaked skeletons, wrecked on the reefs off Luzon’s coast. Out on the open sea now, the fresh salt wind hit the barrota’s three passengers as the craft swooped and dived over the waves of the Mindoro Strait.
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