Pacific Interlude

by Sloan Wilson

  “I think you better get some rest, lieutenant. Maybe you ought to check into the hospital again.”

  Without answering, Syl turned and walked stiffly to the street. Mary leaned across the cab and swung the door open for him as he approached.

  “He’s missing,” Syl said as he climbed in. “Everybody’s missing except me, but at least I know Willis is still alive somewhere …”

  “I’m sure they all are,” she said.

  “I need another drink,” he said. “Let’s go back to your room.”

  He woke up the next morning in Mary’s cot with a pounding hangover and his sheets drenched in sweat. Mary was not in the room. He had a flash of panic … he couldn’t remember anything since finding out that Willis was missing.

  “Mary?” he called out. “Mary, where are you?”

  He heard footsteps running up the stairs. The door opened.

  “Are you all right?” she said. “You must be feeling terrible!”

  “Did I do anything to make you angry yesterday?”

  “No … you just had a bad night.” She put her cool hand on his forehead. “Only the war makes me angry.”

  “I should go see the commander. He said to check in every day.”

  “And then Baguio?”

  “Maybe …”

  The commander’s news was no news about the Y-18.

  “We can go to Baguio,” Syl said when he rejoined Mary in her dilapidated truck.

  “Good! Now we have only one problem.”

  “What?” He thought he was going to Baguio to get away from problems.

  “Gas.”

  “Gas?” He repeated the word with a hollow laugh.

  “It is almost four hundred miles, there and back. It is almost impossible for me to get gas and the black market stuff is very expensive.”

  “My God, gas does me in again.”

  She didn’t immediately understand his sour voice.

  “Army gas stations will not put it in a civilian car. Neither will the navy.”

  “Maybe I could get a jeep from the motor pool,” he said.

  When he got to the motor pool garage he realized he was only a transient officer now and had no right to ask for a jeep for ship’s business. Unless he stretched the truth a little. What the hell …

  “I want a jeep with enough gas in jerry cans for about four hundred miles,” he said to the black master sergeant in charge.

  “Official business, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “What unit?”

  “The U.S. Army Y-18.”

  As he said that Syl had a picture of the ship lying on the ocean bottom, her tanks blown out. If it were true, this would be the last requisition ever written in her name.

  “I’ll have the jerry cans filled,” the sergeant said. “We’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  “Sergeant, how many Negros are there in Manila?”

  “Sir?”

  “I had a Negro seaman who went over the hill. It wasn’t his fault, really …”

  “I see …”

  “Is there any special place … I mean, any place he’d be likely to go?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t truck with deserters. Not even Negro deserters.”

  “All right, I’m sorry … but look, his name is Willis, Samuel Willis. If you ever hear of him, please try to get word that I want to help him. My name is Grant. You’ll see it on the requisition. He could get in touch with me through Coast Guard headquarters.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant turned and walked toward the gas pumps. Syl suspected the sergeant didn’t believe he was trying to help Willis. Well, who could blame him …?

  It was a bright sunny day, too hot, but the wind cooled them as they drove the jeep beyond the outskirts of Manila. Mary directed him to a macadam highway with dirt-filled shell holes. They passed burned-out tanks and trucks which had been tossed on their sides.

  “There must have been one hell of a battle here,” he said.

  “Many men died, many Americans, many Japanese …”

  He wondered if she mourned them both and suspected that she did. Well, who could blame her? Boy, he was really one open-minded wonderful sad ass … His head still ached but his hangover had subsided and he was able to enjoy the beauty of Mary’s face silhouetted against the cobalt sky, her long black hair flying in the wind.

  “I love you,” he said, surprising the hell out of himself with the words.

  “Don’t say that. The soldiers and the sailors, they all say that just before they go away and never come back.”

  “I’d like to come back, or maybe send for you—”

  “You have a wife?” She touched his wedding band.

  “I don’t think we want to lead the same kind of life.”

  “So you will divorce her and send for me?”

  “It would take time—”

  Her laugh was hard. “You are talking to the wrong girl.”

  “I thought you liked my dream about a boat—”

  “I like dreams, but not when they turn into lies. Do you know that opera, ‘Madame Butterfly’?”

  “Yes.”

  “My grandmother was a Madame Butterfly for a Spaniard. My mother was a Madame Butterfly for an American. I was almost a Madame Butterfly for a Japanese. I want no more Madame Butterfly. You understand me?”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “Everybody’s sorry. I will not be sorry anymore. I have a good life here. I have a restaurant and family. If you fall in love with me, I will disappoint you. You will be my Mister Butterfly.”

  “Then I’ll sing some damn sad songs,” he said with a smile.

  “Syl, you are a nice man and I need your help, but no more butterflies. Okay?”

  “Okay. I guess. If you insist … What kind of help do you want from me?”

  “I hope you will help my aunt the way Paul helped me.”

  And then she proceeded to tell him her story. Her large family, which contained few adult men, had for three generations run two small restaurants, the one in Manila and another in Baguio that they were now going to. When the Japs had come they had continued to operate them because they were afraid they’d be shot or starve to death if they didn’t, and also because they considered themselves Filipinos, not Americans, and had learned to survive by bowing before each of the three occupying forces over her grandmother’s lifetime. When the Americans came back, the patriots and “Huks” who had fought as guerrillas in the hills went looking for those who had collaborated with the Japs. They wrecked the restaurants that had served the enemy. That could not be helped, but the Americans were now denying permits to those restaurants which had been licensed by the Japs, and without permission to reopen her establishment her aunt and her relatives would starve.

  “Paul got me my license,” she said. “He saw a colonel who wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  “Do you know what he said to him?”

  “He said I was too young to be held responsible. They could blame it all on my mother and grandmother. They are both dead.”

  “But what can I say about your aunt?”

  “I will take over her restaurant, put it in my name, but there will be much red tape. American officers can cut through it much faster than we can.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “But I have no influence.”

  “That is also what Paul said. All American officers have influence.” She looked quickly at him. “Don’t misunderstand me. I also like you,” she said. “I am not a common girl, the way that big officer of yours thought.”

  “Mr. Buller tended to be a little cynical,” he said, again picturing Buller’s big face burned to the skull. “In some ways, though, he was a good man.” He was already falling into the past tense. And eulogizing the dead, for God’s sake. Snap out of it …

  “I could not be with you if I did not like you,” Mary said. “We can have a very good time without being butterflies.”

  “Good. They say that butterflies live only a day.�
��

  “That’s not true. My grandmother lived for seventy-nine years and my mother for fifty-one. She would be alive today if it wasn’t for the bombs.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Everybody is sorry, Syl.”

  He wanted to ask her if she still loved the Japanese who had almost turned her into a butterfly. Had he been killed, was he still fighting in the hills, had he committed hara-kiri when the Americans arrived, or had he caught a plane back to Tokyo? Did she still hope to see him again? Glancing at her quiet face he knew such questions would only hurt her. And ruin what they had together.

  “Life can still be good, Syl, if we just try to live it as it comes. It is not a time for big plans. I will give you a butterfly’s love, just one day. I hope it will be enough.”

  They stopped by the side of the road and he leaned over and kissed her. For a moment she clung to him while the sun beat down hot on their heads, sending the sweat trickling down their necks.

  “Let’s go on to Baguio,” she said. “It will be much cooler there.”

  CHAPTER 34

  THE ROAD NARROWED and wound up steep mountains to where the palm trees turned into pines. Through branches silhouetted against the sky like a Japanese print Syl saw the blue sea stretching out below.

  “See, it’s already getting cooler,” she said.

  It was almost dark before they reached Baguio, a cluster of shell-torn hotels and government buildings on a mountaintop which lacked the charm of its name despite the magnificence of the surrounding views. The streets were crowded with soldiers on crutches and in wheelchairs. The wounded were already being sent to Baguio to cool off in the mountain breezes, which were chilly enough to make Syl’s sweat-dampened shirt feel uncomfortable. As he stopped the jeep to allow a group of limping patients go across the street he saw a huge man with a bandaged arm on crutches and, of course, for a moment thought it was Buller.

  “We don’t have far to go now,” Mary said. “In just about three miles we take a little road to the right.”

  The road led into a dense pine forest, through whose darkening branches he heard rushing water.

  “The Agno River,” she said. “My aunt’s place is on a brook that runs into it.”

  “Is it a big place?”

  “Small for a restaurant but big for a house. It is a Spanish villa, maybe hundreds of years old.”

  The road wound down into a ravine and up the other side. At the summit they turned into a gravel driveway, which soon led to a large square building. Its white walls and red roof tiles gleamed in the last rays of the sun. The headlights of the jeep flashed across a tall, brass-studded mahogany front door that opened even before they stopped. A bent, gray-haired woman in a white dress ran out with childish eagerness, holding out her withered arms to embrace Mary. They hugged and murmured in Spanish and the old woman’s cheeks were wet with tears when she turned toward Syl.

  “This is Mary Montanado, my aunt,” Mary O’Brian said. “She is really my great-aunt. Almost everybody in my family is named Mary.”

  Syl remembered that his father had once told him, while they were studying a Madonna in a museum, that the name Mary was derived from a Hebrew word meaning “the bitter one.” The old woman’s ravaged face bore out the definition.

  “This is Syl Grant, the man I told you about. He is a kind man. He is going to try to help us.”

  The old woman smiled and extended her withered hand. “I’m glad to meet you.” Her hand felt incredibly fragile in his.

  “I have made a room ready for you,” the old woman said, and led the way through a formal dining room with naked tables to a courtyard in which flowers grew in borders around geometric beds of white pebbles that glistened in the twilight, and where a small pool reflected the dying glow of the rosy clouds above. A Japanese garden?

  “Nothing has been touched here!” Mary said. “They have not come?”

  “My old age protected us. I stood in the front doorway and would not move, so they just shouted at me and went away.”

  She led the way through a smaller dining room to a terrace with a spectacular view of a winding brook that plunged down a series of ravines, white and murmurous in the gathering darkness. In the center of the patio water piped from the brook swirled in a pool.

  “You can take a swim if you like,” the old woman said and opened sliding doors which widened the view. “You know where the bar is, child. Just ring the bell when you are ready for dinner.”

  Had Mary brought her Japanese friend to be entertained here? He hoped the shadows in the room were not full of old ghosts.

  She placed a small lamp in the middle of a low lacquered table. “What would you like to drink?”

  “Do you have the makings for a martini?”

  “Of course. This is a high-class inn. My restaurant used to be almost as good and will be better someday.”

  “I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as this,” he said, admiring the panoramic view.

  “This villa was originally built by the old Conquistadors,” she said. “The conquerors always come here.”

  “I don’t feel much like a conqueror,” he said.

  “Perhaps winning is not much until you know what it is to lose.”

  He wondered if she had identified with the Japanese so much that she still wanted them to win the war.

  She seemed to read his thoughts … “Americans never lose,” she said, “not for long. It is a good thing. The Americans are much more kind.”

  “The Japs you knew were cruel?”

  “Most of them, not all.”

  She gave him an expertly mixed dry martini in a champagne glass.

  “They raped and killed my sister,” she said, her voice without emotion. “She was a nun. Thank God I was not a nun.”

  He put his glass on the table and kissed her. She was responsive, but soon drew back.

  “We will take a swim first,” she said. “No one will see us by the pool. We can leave our clothes here.”

  She slipped off her dress and hung it in a closet. He caught her in his arms, but she twisted free and ran toward the pool.

  “After” she said with a laugh.

  “Before and after,” he said, running after her.

  “At least wait till we get in the water …”

  At the brink she paused, testing the temperature of the pool with her toe. In the glow of a rising half-moon her ivory-hued figure tensed as she dove, her dark hair flying into the foam. Catching a glimpse of her slender body outstretched, falling through the air toward the swirling water, Syl knew that this was one more image of her that would be engraved on his mind. He followed, splashing in beside her. They stood holding the polished bronze handles set in the stone. Her breasts seemed to be floating on top of the swirling water, bouncing provocatively, but when he reached for her she splashed away on her back to the other end of the pool.

  “Shallower here,” she called. “You can sit down.”

  There was a stone bench under the water. They sat there with water whirling around their waists and kissed.

  “Do you like this?” she said.

  “Like it? I’ve never been alive before.”

  She commenced doing all kinds of things with those marvelous hands of hers, exciting him under water. She sat astride his lap on the submerged beach, her gleaming body rising from the frothy water with more real beauty than any statue he’d ever seen of Venus rising from the sea.

  “How am I ever going to leave you?” he said.

  “By ship or plane,” she said, and nipped him on the ear.

  While they were dressing she touched a bell pull and an elderly maid no taller than a ten-year-old child served a Filipino dinner that tasted like Chinese food. The only part he remembered was the image of Mary’s right hand holding a tiny porcelain cup to her lips. Sliding another wall panel, she revealed a low double bed with black silk sheets. If this was a house of assignation, he envied the regulars.

  Mary’s lovemaking was different
now, not so passionate, but expert in ways that were altogether new to him. Before, he had always done his best to be a good lover. Relaxed and letting Mary play him like an instrument, he was a little shocked at first, but not for long. Lie back and enjoy her, he told himself … She brought him to his third climax, then sponged him off and fed him glasses of iced wine, and he could not help but wonder if she was deliberately turning away from romantic love to the practiced performance as a prelude to farewell. While giving him every possible pleasure, she now seemed to him to protect her deeper self, remaining somehow aloof while reducing him to spasms. The mood she created was joyful, but exactly not one that invited whispered intimacies …

  Afterward he slept for almost five hours, awaking suddenly in near-darkness, thinking he was back aboard the Y-18. The sound of the distant brook falling down the sides of the ravine sounded like the sea swishing past the sides of the old ship and the gasoline moving about in her tanks as she rolled. He lay rigid, his ears straining for the steady beat of the old Diesel, even said aloud … “Mr. Simpson, you there? Why has the engine stopped …?”

  “You are here with me,” Mary whispered, kissing him on the lips. “You’re not on the ship.”

  “How long?” Meaning how long before he had to go back to the ship.

  “You’ve been ashore a long time.”

  He came back then, remembered that the ship had sailed to Okinawa without him, had not been reported as arriving … Drawing Mary closer to him, he slept another six hours.

  When he woke up this time bright sunshine was streaming through the open side of the room overlooking the ravines. Wearing a short multicolored silk kimona, Mary was pouring tea into tiny cups, and in that wide-sleeved garment she really did look like a butterfly.

  “Good morning,” she said with a smile.

  “I don’t think I want this day to come. We have to go back …”

  “I can stay another day if you can.”

  “I have to see if there’s any news about the ship, and if you want me to see some colonel, I may need all the time I can get.”

  “Thank you for thinking of that.”

  “If Paul got you off for being so young, maybe I can get your aunt off for being so old.”