After the Fall

by Lisa Bingham

  “Hey, Mickleson, you got any paper?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I need it, that’s why.”

  The other soldier eyed him suspiciously. “Whatcha gonna do with it, wipe your ass?”

  Petey bent close, his eyes taking on a feral gleam that caused Mickleson to rear back. “Y’ got any paper or not?”

  “What if I do? Whatcha gonna give me in exchange?”

  Petey’s hands curled into fists. “I ought t' beat it outta you but…” He pulled his shirt aside to show a peek of two bananas.

  “Where’d you get those?” Mickleson asked, his gaze riveted to the fruit.

  “I know somebody who knows somebody.”

  Mickleson looked carefully around to make sure none of the other prisoners were watching. He licked his lips.

  Petey leaned in to ask him again, “Do…you…have…some…paper?”

  “No, but I know how you can get some.”

  “Tell me.”

  Mickleson’s brow puckered. “Do I still get the bananas?”

  “Only if I get paper. And a pencil.”

  “Shit, you didn’t say anything about a pencil.”

  “What good is the paper if I can’t write on it?”

  Mickleson scowled, then motioned for Petey to follow him. They skirted around the rough bamboo huts until they came up on the corner of the structure used by Tanaka’s interpreter, a short squat Jap that they’d nicknamed Putzy-sahn.

  “What the hell?” Petey asked. “You want me to steal from the Japs? You think I gotta death wish?”

  “Ol’ Putzy will never notice. Whenever Tanaka’s around, he can’t tell his ass from his elbow. Wait here until the boys come in with the goods from the garden. He’ll go up to inspect the cart and you can slip in and grab it.”

  “You’d better not be blowing sunshine up my ass, Mickleson.”

  “Hey, if you get caught, I don’t get the bananas.”

  They waited, Petey’s stomach twisting with nerves and dysentery until he feared he would have to make his way to the latrines. But finally, the cart rattled into view, the prisoners waiting at the gate while the guards searched them.

  Just as Mickleson had said, Tanaka jumped to his feet. Placing rocks on his papers to keep them from blowing away in the breeze, Putsy-sahn hurried after the officer striding toward the cart and the guard who accompanied the prisoners.

  “Now!” Mickleson whispered.

  Petey crept toward the desk, his heart thundering in his ears, his limbs trembling so badly he could barely move. He snatched the pen first—a pen, a real mother-fucking fountain pen!—shoved it into the pocket of his shirt, then reached for a piece of paper from the pile at the corner of Tanaka’s desk. But as he tugged a sheet free, the rock dislodged and the breeze caught at the flimsy papers, lifting them into the air.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Petey whispered, dodging back toward Mickleson and cover, throwing himself to the ground, praying that none of the Japanese would notice him as they rushed to capture the wayward pages. Then they scrambled to their feet and ran back in the direction of the hut. As they dodged into the relative shade, Petey began to laugh, a wild laugh filled with equal measures of glee and remembered terror.

  “Shit, Mickelson. You nearly got me killed!”

  “You all but sent up a flare to let ‘em know you were there, Petey.”

  The two of them looked at each other, then dissolved into giggles again. But soon, the merriment proved exhausting, so they sat in silence, eyes closed.

  “I hope it was worth the effort,” he said to Petey.

  Petey grinned. “Me too.”

  “Can I have my bananas now?”

  “Sure.”

  Petey unbuttoned his shirt and reached inside, paused, then began to giggle again.

  “What the hell, Petey?”

  Pulling his shirt aside, Petey revealed the crushed bananas.

  Mickleson’s face was a study in disappointment. But he ignored Petey’s laughter and said dejectedly, “What the hell. Hand ‘em over.”

  Chapter Six

  John glanced at his watch and sighed. He’d given Glory Bee ten minutes and it had been nearly twenty. They needed to leave. Now.

  He was about to turn toward the house and drag Glory Bee outside by her hair if necessary when the door swung open and she rushed outside, carrying the smaller of the suitcases in one hand and her make-up case in the other.

  He opened his mouth to insist she leave her make-up behind when she dropped the bags on the ground and lifted a silencing hand.

  “Before you start yelling at me for not following your orders, I made a dozen sandwiches with all the bread, meats and cheeses I could find and stuffed them in my make-up case. Once we’ve eaten everything, we can ditch it somewhere.”

  He grabbed the bag with her clothing and stowed it in the bed of the truck. “Put the sandwiches up in front with us. They’ll stay cooler there. Did you get the rest of the food supplies gathered up in the largest suitcase like I asked?”

  She nodded. “It’s inside the house. And it’s heavy. Really heavy. All the canned food weighs a ton. I also threw in some bags of rice, flour, and sugar…uh, matches, utensils, and a half dozen tin plates.”

  “Good girl.”

  John whistled to Esteban who stood a few feet away next to one of the other farm trucks. His wife Maria—who was nearly eight months pregnant—was already ensconced in the cab with two of their smaller children. Another three youngsters sat in the bed. Around them were heaped blankets and bags, two goats, and a crate of chickens.

  “Glory Bee O’Halloran, this is Esteban Morales, one of my fellow workers.” He pointed to the truck. “That’s Maria, his wife. She’s got Luis, who’s two, and Pepe, who’s three. In the back are the older kids, Estella, who’s six, Gabriella, who’s eight, and Angelo. He’s the oldest, at ten.”

  Glory Bee offered them a wave and a smile. “Hello, everyone. You can call me Glory Bee.”

  “Can you get the last of her luggage, Esteban? It’s in the kitchen, I think?”

  John cast his eyes toward Glory Bee for affirmation, and she nodded.

  “I dragged it to the doorway, but that was about as far as I could get it alone.”

  As Esteban hurried back to the house, John scanned the drive for any sign that there were more employees on their way to join them. But there were no telltale plumes of dust. Around him, everything was quiet. Too quiet. And that was nearly as unsettling as the Japanese planes that had flown overhead hours before. John was so used to noise—men, machinery, women singing, children playing. It was as if the farm had already become a ghost town.

  Realizing that they couldn’t wait any longer, John slowly went to the passenger door.

  “Get in,” he said, too curtly, most likely. After the way he’d treated her this morning, he didn’t suppose Wilmot’s guest would want much more to do with him.

  But, to his surprise, she touched his hand as she slid inside. The gesture was so simple, a moment’s connection, a wordless vote of confidence.

  John slammed the door shut, then moved to help Esteban lift the last suitcase into the truck. “Good god, Glory Bee,” he called out as he and Esteban staggered under the weight. “What all did you pack?”

  “Anything and everything I could fit inside,” she yelled back. He could see her grin in the side mirror of the truck. “We may have been exiled from the plantation, but I don’t aim to go hungry.”

  Esteban laughed, a huge rolling belly laugh. “Let’s go, padre,” he bellowed.

  John climbed behind the wheel. After checking the lane leading down to the worker’s huts, he shifted into gear and rolled away from the house. Even then, he couldn’t help taking one last look at the Wilmot estate as it grew smaller in his rear-view mirror.

  Why did he feel like he was leaving so much more than the house behind?

  • • •

  The hours soon became a blurred montage of sounds and smells that had hitherto
been unfamiliar to Rosemary. In the artificial cocoon of the operating room, she was cut off from any views to the outside world, so the passage of time was marked with the thick odors of burnt flesh and blood, smoke, diesel, and aircraft fuel. At times, she could hear the clang of alarm bells, the roar of engines, distant explosions, and over it all, a symphony of screams and moans.

  The surgical suite held its own orchestral arrangements as well. The rubbery squish and hiss of a blood pressure cuff, the clink of tools on the tray, the zzz, zzz, zzz of a saw cutting through bone.

  With only three surgeons available and about that many general practitioners, the medical staff was pushed to its limits, but still they plugged on, sensing that there were more men waiting in the hall, and even more beyond that. They’d filled the wards within the first half hour, the halls minutes after that, then the lobby, the veranda, and now the lawn beyond. Neighboring medical facilities had been contacted in a plea for help, but Clark and Stotsenberg weren’t the only bases that had been hard hit. More personnel would eventually come, but it could be days. In the meantime, Rosemary and her girls had to hold on as best they could.

  All thought to traditional nursing duties had long since been abandoned. Besides triage, her nurses were administering painkillers and anesthesia, cauterizing wounds—anything they could manage by themselves in order to help relieve the doctors for more serious medical procedures. Gauze and bandages were already running low, so Rosemary had sent a few of her nurses to neighboring barracks to collect towels, sheets, and whatever else they could find that would be useful.

  But even with the monumental efforts, the wounded continued to arrive until Rosemary had forced herself not to think about what lay beyond this room. There was only this moment, this patient, and she would do her best and move on.

  “Done,” she said to the corpsmen, motioning for them to take the latest amputee from the table and bring in the next one. This soldier couldn’t be much more than nineteen with a shock of red hair and freckles spattered over his nose.

  “I got hit,” he said when Rosemary bent over him.

  She offered him a reassuring smile. “We’ll take care of you, don’t you worry. Dr. Grimm is the best.”

  As she spoke, she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around the boy’s arm. Squeezing the bulb, she placed her stethoscope in the hollow of his elbow and listened, automatically watching the sweep of the second hand on her watch.

  “Ninety over sixty-seven,” she murmured to Dr. Grimm.

  “He’s going to need blood.”

  She checked the soldier’s dog tags, then shook her head. There was no blood available for this patient.

  “Put him out,” Grimm said wiping his forehead and rolling his aching shoulders.

  As Rosemary moved to place the mask over the boy’s mouth, he caught her hand.

  “If I don’t make it, tell my mom I did okay. And I love her.”

  Rosemary offered him a wide smile that she hoped didn’t appear too false. “You can tell her yourself. Once you wake up, you can write her a nice, long letter.” Then she quickly put the mask in place and began administering anesthesia. It wouldn’t be long before they would be out of that too.

  She squeezed the boy’s hand as his eyelashes fluttered. If there was one thing she’d learned in the past few hours, it was that the dying all offered the same request. They wanted their mothers, their wives, their sweethearts to know that they’d been loved.

  Reaching out, she laid a gentle hand on the redhead’s forehead, stroking his hair back from his clammy brow as she waited for the anesthesia to take effect. With a little luck, he’d get that chance to write to his mother.

  She could only pray that her own luck would hold and she’d see Gilhouley again.

  • • •

  Dust spewed behind them in a cloud as John and Glory Bee left the Big House behind. In order to make their way to the hunting lodge, they would have to travel north, then east.

  Without the radio in Wilmot’s office, John felt as if he were flying blind. The wireless in his own cottage had been full of news of the airbases being bombed, but John knew that the broadcasts were being carefully couched not to cause alarm in the outlying areas. For all he knew, a land invasion had already begun and the airstrikes were only a precursor to the day’s events. Without the short wave radio in Wilmot’s office, he’d been unable to check with the plantations along their route for a more accurate accounting. And so, with his hands tight on the wheel, he kept one eye on the road and the other on the horizon ahead, looking for the telltale smudges of smoke.

  “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” Glory Bee asked, breaking the silence. “I mean, I’m an American citizen. I could go to…I don’t know, the consul, the embassy, whatever they have here at Luzon. Or maybe I should go back to Stotsenberg. That’s where I spent my first—”

  “They can’t help you. Not now. They’ve got enough on their hands without worrying about stranded tourists.” Too late, he realized that his words had emerged much too harshly. Grimacing, he offered a gruff, “Sorry.”

  “No. Really. I appreciate your honesty. But I’m sure that you have…more important things to do as well.”

  For a moment, she looked as if she were on the verge of tears, and John hastened to reassure her. “It’s not a problem. Really. You’re a friend of Wilmot’s—“

  “A friend of a friend.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re with me. I’ll see to it that you’re safe.”

  He held her gaze for several long seconds, until finally, she accepted his words. Then he returned his attention to his driving.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” Glory Bee asked.

  He reviewed the route in his head, then quickly hedged his bets. “That depends on what conditions we find ahead of us.”

  “Do you think the Japanese could have already landed?”

  He heard the panic in her tone, but another quick glance assured him that she was outwardly calm. The last thing he needed on his hands was a hysterical woman. “I don’t know. But I doubt they mean to bomb us and leave.” Again, he skipped a quick look in her direction, wondering how honest he could be with her. “They need the Philippines. And judging by the attack at Pearl, they mean to take control of the Pacific.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugged. “The long answer is cultural: they feel a superiority, that their emperor is descended from deity and all of Asia should be under their control. The short answer is oil. Their fuel supplies have been cut off due to the recent embargoes and they need the rich reserves found further south. In order to get them, they have to make sure that no one has a toehold in the Pacific. So they take out the Americans by destroying the fleet at Pearl and the bases here in the Philippines. Then they push out the British and Dutch in the East Indies.”

  “It seems impossible,” she whispered. “They’re such a little country.”

  “Don’t underestimate the Japanese. Behind that ‘little country’ is a fanatical will.”

  He felt her gaze upon him. It was a disturbing sensation, like the caress of a hand down his spine. Too late, he realized that he’d cracked open the door to a part of himself that he didn’t want examined.

  “You sound as if you’ve had personal experience with that fanatical will.”

  John’s fingers tightened reflexively around the wheel and his jaw hardened.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I guess that falls under the heading of personal again. I warned you that I have a hard time keeping my nose out of other people’s—”

  “I was at Nanking,” John blurted, surprising himself with the outburst. But where he’d always felt shame in admitting that part of his life, this time, he felt…relieved. “I was at Nanking when the Japanese invaded,” he said again.

  He wasn’t even sure if she knew where Nanking was, let alone the significance of his confession, but her whispered, “Dear God,” reassured him that she was fully aware of the horrors suffered by tha
t city when the Japanese invaded. “The Rape of Nanking” the newspapers and newsreels had called it. And as horrific as the media had portrayed the event, the reality had been worse, so much worse.

  “How did you make your way here?”

  “The Church negotiated with the Japanese and eventually arranged for us to leave.”

  “Us?”

  He glanced at her only briefly. “I was a priest.”

  It was clear that she didn’t miss the past tense, but to his surprise, she didn’t press for details. Instead, she muttered, “You must think I’m a heathen.”

  John couldn’t help a bark of laughter. “Why?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I strip. I swear. I even drink on occasion. I’m sure you’re used to much more…refined company.”

  This time, he couldn’t help smiling. “Your company is more than enjoyable.”

  Glory Bee was less than mollified. “Let’s hope you think that once the Japanese arrive. Because if they get too close, I’m going to be cursing like a sailor.”

  • • •

  It was growing dark by the time they arrived at Wilmot’s hunting lodge. As she peered through the trees at her first glimpse of the building, Glory Bee discovered that it wasn’t nearly as grand as what she’d been expecting. The term “lodge” had given rise to visions of a huge log building decorated with animal horns and wagon-wheel chandeliers. But then, she supposed she should have known better. Wilmot was from England, where, evidently, the term meant something different.

  Instead, the drive opened up to a clapboard bungalow like dozens of others she’d seen lining the streets of Manila. Low, squat, and built on stilts to aid ventilation, it had once been painted a brilliant white. But the color had been dulled by time and the woodwork was in need of repairs. Nevertheless, the building looked sound, and as long as there was a bed, a bathroom, and bathing facilities somewhere on the premises, Glory Bee wouldn’t have cared if it was a bamboo hut.

  Their journey had probably not been terribly long if calculated in miles. But they’d had to traverse a series of roads that had grown increasingly more primitive, until the final stretch had been made on a track of wheel ruts etched into the earth. Even more disturbing had been the chaos of traffic. The attack had put the entire island on alert and the roadways had been cluttered with all manner of vehicles—carts, bicycles, and wagons. Horses and oxen had vied for space with luxury vehicles and rattletrap farm trucks, all of them intent on getting somewhere other than where they’d started. And there was no rhyme or reason to the migration. Some moved north, some moved south. Most brought only what they could carry and their desperate need to avoid an imminent invasion.