by Larry Farmer
Margaret led us up the bamboo ladder into her one-room hut. It was built and laid out much like Lois’.
“You at least have running water available,” Lois admired. “And the air is so nice here. So cool and crisp. It feels marvelous to get out of the muggy heat.”
“Running water?” Margaret groaned. “Pray tell, girl, what do you mean?”
“Your sink here,” Lois said pointing. “You have a hand pump in it.”
“So, what do you do?” Margaret inquired.
“Walk a mile carrying plastic containers,” Lois replied.
“My Lord, how do you manage? I thought I had it rough. Or inconvenient. I almost prefer being twelve miles from town to what you’re going through.”
“So, how do you manage?” Lois asked, sharing hardship stories. “You don’t have access to anything.”
“I have a nice vegetable garden. I’ll show it to you. But I do depend on town for everything else. It’s not so bad, really. A jeepney comes by once in the morning. Then the same jeepney goes back down in the afternoon. You passed through a couple of little villages—if that’s the word—on your way here, and there’s another one a couple of miles up the road. Then there’s the forestry office nearby. They’re always checking up on me. For security reasons, too. There’s enough need that we have jeepney service. Sometimes I get stuck in town when I go in. I could walk up the incline like Mississippi here, but I usually find a lodge for the night. And feel like I’m on vacation. So don’t pity me.”
Margaret drew water from her hand pump, got out some coffee beans, put them in a hand grinder, and processed them into a brew of coffee. “Listen,” she explained as she did so, “I only have this one hammock. Rhonda and Jennifer sleep on the floor. I have a large mat that you’ll have to share, if you don’t mind.”
“We don’t mind,” Lois returned.
Margaret looked at us and grinned. “Somehow I had the feeling you wouldn’t.” Lois blushed. I tried to hold back a smirk, but couldn’t. “Should I regret not having a spare room for you two?”
“Regret the hell out of it, Margaret,” I joked.
“I knew it,” Margaret teased right back. “So, when did this happen? I knew there was more to it than poor Mississippi, our resident ex-Marine, needing help from a sweet little Quaker girl. I saw it coming in Zambo. Even San Diego. Everyone did, except you two. Tell me all the disgusting details. This is better than the TV I don’t have.”
“Nothing to tell,” Lois said. She looked at me menacingly as if to tell me I should watch my mouth. “Nothing at all. Got it?”
My smirk broadened.
“There isn’t much to tell, Margaret,” I explained. “The angels did start singing, but we live far enough away from each other, and we have to do our jobs. But then again, we live close enough to each other, and there is desire inside.” I stared Lois down. I was going to speak my mind on this matter. “There is desire. But in this setting, we have to have discipline.”
“Desire, you say?” Margaret quizzed. “Not just flirtation?”
“Absolutely,” Lois and I said in unison. “Deep feelings,” Lois emphasized.
Margaret nodded at us with a look a mother would give. “I wish you both the best. Were something to come of this, all of us on Mindanao want to be a part. Especially me, Rhonda, and Jenny. You will hurt us if you leave us out. Do you catch my drift?”
Lois answered by a hand salute while straightening to attention.
“So, me and the other girls,” Margaret said, “are going to Davao tomorrow. You met those guys in the PCV group ahead of us before. The ones that live in Davao. The waterboys. We’re all going to meet at their house and tie one on.”
“You make it sound like an orgy,” Lois said with a grin.
“Well, I’m too old and too feminist to even contemplate something like that. I don’t know about Rhonda and Jenn, but they’ve never indulged yet, to my knowledge. But you know what I mean. If you didn’t have Mississippi here to unwind around, you’d go bananas. Come with us. We just want to have a few San Miguels, eat some chicherone, and some kinilaw.”
“I’m not into pork or raw fish,” I said.
“You’re kosher?” Margaret asked.
I nodded that I was. “Not fully, since there’s no rabbi around to prepare kosher meats. Technically, because there’s no shochet, that’s the rabbi that handles all the preparations, everything is treif. But I still don’t break the ban on pork and blood and such. I’m not super strict or I’d go vegetarian.”
“Who cares?” Margaret harped. “You like San Miguel. Eat what you want. We need a break. It’s great the two of you are here. It’ll feel like a party. I need a party.”
“What if we had come tomorrow?” Lois asked. “With all of this stuff. You wouldn’t have been here.”
“I know to leave it with the Ministry of Agriculture,” I explained. “They’re next door. They’d keep it for her.”
“I want to dance when we get to Davao,” Lois said. “I haven’t danced since Zambo. Do you dance when you go out in Davao?”
“There’s a place we all go,” Margaret assured. “Speaking of orgies, it’s at a brothel. And none of us indulge there, just dance. Maybe the waterboys do when we’re not there. But even if they do, they’re polite enough to wait until we leave. The dancing is wild there, and the drinks strong and abundant.”
“Just my style,” Lois said in glee.
It was the checkpoints that intimidated the girls along the way to Davao the next day. I had been through a few in Mindanao at times, but thought little of it. Seeing the revulsion and concern of the PCV women I rode the bus with, I began to wonder why those stops barely caught my attention before.
I had been through checkpoints in Communist Bulgaria. They checked my passport at every stop, in fact. I was in Iran two months before the Shah fell and the warning went out against Americans. I rode a bus through the Khyber Pass from Communist-held Afghanistan into Pakistan. I was in the Marines, in Okinawa, the day it reverted from American control back to Japan. I was issued my gas mask, rifle, and bayonet because of a Red Guard threat. I saw the aftermath of a terrorist attack on an Israeli highway. Somehow these little checkpoints in Mindanao seemed routine. Almost harmless. But the girls saw it differently.
“Those reptilian eyes.” Margaret scowled at the guards at the checkpoint, leaning toward us, almost whispering. “I hear they’re trained to just take people out.”
“The elite forces are trained to do that,” Rhonda concurred. “I heard they’re trained by our own Special Forces troops.”
“They might be trained by our guys,” I commented, “but that doesn’t mean they’re trained to just shoot any old civilian.”
The girls looked at me for a moment and then re-centered their attention on the checkpoints. I was showing my redneck to them again, somehow, I decided.
“Did you catch how cold and distant these soldiers appear when they scope you out?” Jennifer sneered. “No sign of life at all in them. Like some robot from Star Wars. Who’s a threat, who isn’t?”
“They’re doing their job.” I intervened yet again. This reminded me of my Vietnam era days. The military was the most guilty in the history of guilt as far as so many people thought. “There are suicide personnel coming at them, and there are groups of terrorists trying to make it through. Some with weapons. These guys are trying to do their jobs and stay alive too. They can’t fight off many threats. They’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night and are easily sitting ducks. And it’s their ass if some offender gets through.”
The girls stared at me again, but I didn’t care. I was no fan of the Marcos regime, and I even had sympathy with why some people didn’t want to keep things the way they were, but this was just paranoia to me, the way these girls talked. They didn’t know anything, and I was tired of being the bad guy. Still, I was aware I didn’t know enough of how things worked inside the Marcos military to take up for anybody very much. I was trying to pacify old wou
nds inside me more than anything.
Before the conversation could continue, the bus slowed to a stop. I saw Filipinos standing up to look out the front and sides of the bus near the driver. Suddenly, the bus doors opened and a military guard boarded. He said something in Tagalog and the passengers began to pick up their belongings and exit the bus.
“We’re being told to disembark from the bus,” Lois explained to us. “Up ahead, a jeepney has been hit by NPA guerillas. The highway is blocked. Another bus is coming to take us the rest of the way.”
“Was that Tagalog?” Jennifer asked Lois. “In my village it’s mostly Illacano, the dialect in northern Luzon where Marcos is from. I barely understood anything the guard said at all.”
“We speak Cebuano,” Rhonda said.
“Illongo,” Margaret said. “Not that I know any.”
We walked by the mutilated jeepney and did our best not to look at the dead bodies strewn outside on the highway and areas adjacent to it. As much as we wanted to see the extent of the attack, we were scared to look. Not just at the death and destruction all around us, but to not look more conspicuous than we already were as white-skinned Americans.
As we approached the bus waiting on us to continue our journey, armed guards inspected each and every one of us. Reptilian stares were again directed our way, guns pointed at our heads, as well as at the other passengers. Each and every one of us was frisked before we were released to board.
“I hope they never make a ride out of this at Disney World,” Margaret scoffed from our new seats as she lit up a cigarette.
I shook my head in frustration as I thought about what we’d just experienced.
“In Zambo and where I’m at,” I said, “they made a peace treaty with the Moslems. There’s still danger, but here there is open warfare with the NPA. Not even the pretense of a peace treaty.”
We had gone a few miles and were just minutes short of our destination in Davao when we heard a grinding noise behind us on the highway. Instantly, we jerked in our seats to see what it was. It sounded ominous. Five armored vehicles raced by our bus as we pulled over to let them pass. On top of each were six soldiers pointing machine guns in different directions, front and back. One on each corner of the tank and two in the middle. No one made a comment. What lay ahead of us? Was this to be a new version of PCV R&R?
We wanted to do nothing that night except relax when we finally arrived at the house where the PCV waterboys lived. At first we weren’t in the mood to talk about any of our adventures, due to depression and complete emotional exhaustion. As the waterboys pestered us, however, we couldn’t talk fast enough. I soon tired of it, though, and went to sleep on the straw mat on the floor near a bed that we reserved for Margaret. These new memories needed to find their way to reconcile with my old ones from previous years, and sleep was the cure for that.
Somewhere during the night I felt Lois lie down next to me. How I got so tired I’ll never know, but in spite of crashing early, I was also the last one up. And even then it was because Lois was bent over me, one hand on my chest, one stroking my cheek, as if worried about her little boy.
“The girls and I need to go shopping,” she said. “We need you to come with us. We need a male chaperone. There are military patrols around. Something’s going on, but the girls and I need to shop. So many of our clothes have been worn out from hand washings by coconut shells and stones. Come, darling mine. I’m even out of underwear, and my last bra is about finished, also. The girls know Davao and told me about an American kind of store here, the only one in all of Mindanao that has American clothing. It’s the only store that has a bra big enough for me. Surely, that should get your energy flowing again. Can you manage? We need you, sweets.”
I lay there silently a bit longer. Were my brain parts still processing? I couldn’t possibly be this tired, but I was. Finally, I opened my eyes and managed a half smile her way. I hated shopping, but I loved being needed.
To get a jump on the day, we decided to eat brunch during our shopping excursion. But it was all for naught. A jeepney on the street in front of our house was turned away by a military barricade that was forming. What now?
“What’s this about?” Lois asked one of the waterboys from the edge of their yard.
He shook his head and shrugged that he didn’t know. More military was coming our way. Then more. They were headed right for the house where we were staying. We almost wondered if they were coming to get us. Or perhaps to protect us. We knew that couldn’t be the case, but no better answers came in the confusion.
“I see what’s happening,” another of the waterboys said.
Before he could explain, we all understood. Right in front of us, what looked to be thousands of protestors approached from the nearby highway. They came in droves of vehicles, disembarked, and, for whatever reason, the very house where we were staying with our PCV Davao-located friends became the center point of a massive protest. What they were protesting we hadn’t a clue.
“That’s what we get for renting a house near the highway on the edge of town,” a waterboy said.
“How were we supposed to know?” one of his roommates whined. “This house is near the Water District offices, and it’s easy to do our projects in the farms nearby.”
“My God, they’re still swarming in,” Margaret said, gawking.
As the military, both troops and tanks, approached to confront the protestors, it was our house that was the battle line. Soon, without explanation or apology, the military contingent took over the yard where we stood watching. As the crowd of protestors got larger, missile launchers were brought, in addition to more troops and tanks being positioned in front of and near our house grounds, some right in our very yard.
“For God’s sake,” one of the waterboys exclaimed, “those two tanks are headed right for our house. Are they going to knock it down? My stuff’s in there. My personal stuff. Not just my possessions, but sentimental items. Damn this.”
The protestors kept coming also. Lines and lines of them. As they approached the soldiers themselves, some of them began climbing the shoulders of other protestors at the front, as if to block the military from going any further.
We were now being hurried back into the house by the soldiers. It was encouraging in that maybe they weren’t intending to demolish the house as we feared, but we still couldn’t be sure that commotion and gunfire wouldn’t damage the house and our goods inside. And perhaps us, too.
“I’m going shopping,” Lois said angrily.
“You’re crazy,” one of the waterboys said.
“It might be safer at the store,” Jennifer suggested.
“I’m not leaving my things,” another of the waterboys said angrily.
“I’m going shopping,” Lois repeated in an even more determined tone of voice. “Everyone but the Davao PCVs needs to get out of here. Bring along whatever you hold valuable, just in case the worst happens, but we need to leave. And actually, I don’t care who goes or stays. This is my day to be a normal person again, and no one, absolutely no one, is going to deny me.” She looked at me. “Come, Mississippi. Let’s go.”
It felt like an order, but I had no problem with it.
“How you going to get out of here?” one of the waterboys asked.
“Somehow,” Lois replied.
“You’re starting to sound like Mississippi,” Margaret said with a grin. “Bahala na it is, then. The great whatever prevails. I’m game.”
Lois, myself, and the girls made for the back yard. By now it also was full of military troops, but as yet no protestors.
“There’s the chief officer,” Lois said, pointing at an indignant, well-dressed officer at the front of the troops. “Look at all those ribbons and the fancy designs on his head cover. He’s got to be the guy in charge.”
As the rest of us inspected him to see if we agreed with her assessment, Lois walked straight toward him and pushed her way through those soldiers surrounding him. One of the soldiers readi
ed a pistol, but the officer of our intentions waved his hand to tell the guy it was okay.
Lois said something in Tagalog to the officer. Whatever it was seemed to work. He held out his elbow for her to cling to, motioned for the girls and myself to follow, and then walked us through the impasse and out into the street until we reached an area resembling normalcy. He waved down a jeepney for us and talked to the driver. Within minutes, we were at the store of our dreams. Lois could not erase her smirk of joy—until we got inside. Then her preoccupation with reality, meaning shopping, returned.
That afternoon we decided it might be safe to return to the house. When we arrived back, except for tank tracks in the yard and debris strewn everywhere, things looked sane again.
“What happened after we left?” Margaret asked the boys.
“It broke up just a few minutes after you left,” one of them answered. “I still don’t know what it was about, but there was no violence, and very little confrontation except for what you witnessed. I hope you got your shopping done. I’m ready to tie one on. Let’s get ready to boogie.”
It’s ironic that the freest any of us felt our entire time in the Philippines was that night at the brothel. I wasn’t going to condemn any PCV brethren for partaking at such a place. If it had not been for my relationship with Lois, I could imagine I might feel a need to unwind in such a way myself. What the waterboys did on their own time I didn’t know. This night was for dancing. Our PCV girls kept calling it ferocious dancing. A seeming desperation to unwind. To get out the bad spiritual air and breathe in something better. Poetically speaking, of course.
“Here’s what we do,” one of the waterboys explained. “Mississippi and the rest of us guys are going to buy Cokes for the prostitutes over there. This will pay our way for being here. You’re our dates, so let us be macho guys and pay your way by buying these ladies of the night their Cokes and making them feel they earned their keep. Dance with us, or with each other, or by yourself. Just unwind. This is your night on the town.”
He looked each of us straight in the eyes one at a time to make sure we understood the agenda. Then he said further, “And welcome to Davao.”