by Bowen, Peter
Kelly, I says to myself, here you go to another tribal war, where the one side’s too weak and the other’s too slow.
At night the wake glowed green from some sea creatures churned up by our passing. I drank rum and longed for a seegar.
12
MANILA BAY IS ONE of the world’s best and largest harbors. There’s a tadpole-shaped island in the mouth of the Bay called Corregidor and beyond the water the deep bright green of the jungle crawls up the mountains. All the navies of the world could anchor in the Bay and ride out a typhoon with plenty of room to swing on their cables.
A fair part of the Pacific fleet was anchored, and all their guns was trained and pointed north—to give fire whenever the enemy got within their reach. If the Navy has to protect the Army for more time than it takes the soldiers to storm ashore it ain’t a good sign. It means the two sides are fighting different wars, and there won’t be conclusions.
My traveling gear was mighty light, and I stepped up on the quay wearing it, only to find some pip of a second lieutenant waiting for me. He saluted me, distaste showing in his every gesture. I returned it real sloppy and then asked what witless peckerwood of a general had this unhealthful command.
“Major General MacArthur,” said the looey, “who is expecting you.”
“I doubt he’s expecting what he’s getting,” I said. “But you lead on anyway.”
“Sir,” the youngster said, “he believes that he knows you. Did you interpret for the Sioux chieftains at a peace conference?”
“I made sure all the lies was translated good,” I said, “but I don’t recall a MacArthur.”
“Very good, sir,” said the looey, “but I’d suggest you act like you know him. He’s ...”
“Thin-skinned and gives hell to subordinates,” I said. “I know the kind. I’ll take care of it.”
We walked down the quay and got into a horsecab and headed into the city to Malacañang Palace—it was a fair drive, took an hour of the horse’s slow feet to bring us under the porte cochere. The palace itself was ugly and too big, which delights the Spanish eye for some reason, like the German.
General MacArthur warn’t out front to greet me. I was led down long noisy halls and into an office. The doors was easy fourteen feet high, and to heighten the suspense I believe he had the servants pack sand in the hinges. The damn things sounded like the last page of an Edgar Allan Poe novel.
I threw a miserable excuse for a salute to him and flopped down in a handy chair. The legs was so long my boots barely got a hold on the floor. Everything in this stupid room was designed to belittle MacArthur’s guests or subordinates. His desk was large enough to pasture a mule on and there wasn’t a damn thing on it but an inkstand and a blotter. MacArthur sat in a huge wingbacked swivel chair, and he gave me a start, for he looked uncannily like Teethadore.
MacArthur stood and come round the desk holding out his hand, his dress sword beating time on his kneecaps. I smiled, too.
“Kelly!” he said. “Delighted. Been a long time since the Sioux delegation of sixty-nine, eh, what? We’ve a few years on us, eh?”
I allowed modestly that we did have a few years on us.
He offered me a drink which I refused on account of the heat, and then a seegar which I did have.
“I’m being mediatized, Kelly,” said MacArthur.
He then launched into an extended aria full of long words I had never heard even rumors about, and finishing with a flash of anger at McKinley’s administration, which had failed to supply him with enough troops to subdue the insurrectos. Seventy-five thousand was a police force, not an army. The damned nerve of it all. Stick him the hell and gone out here without the means to achieve the desired ends.
I took all this to mean that he was fighting a guerrilla war and I supposed if you put every man in America aged eighteen to sixty in the Army and brought ’em here things would be about the same only more so.
MacArthur went on at length about the vile plotters who were sabotaging his every attempt to wrest peace from the jaws of defeat.
I drew in the seegar smoke and wondered if perhaps he’d get to the point sometime before dawn. I was getting light-headed of the rhetoric. I never heard such loads of goddamned bombast in all my life, and ordinarily I’d have suggested he go boil his head, evil critters was sprinting through his brain. I still wasn’t sure what Teethadore and Miles was so all-fired enthused about my seeing. The one good look I had at the jungle, I wondered why anyone would want these humid and festering eyesores of islands. I’d bet there was funguses out there so big they could walk and eat hay off the top of the stack.
MacArthur finished with ruffles and flourishes and boo-kays of words cobbled together and I looked at this pompous ass and wondered how quickly I could escape his clutches.
“Drinks are served on the terrace,” said a soft voice, another lieutenant risen to butlerhood.
MacArthur led me there. I was still wearing high boots and twill pants, and though my shirt was cotton I was fair roasting. It was early evening; I could feel a sea breeze and took pains to stand in it. Someone gave me an enormous planter’s punch with lots of ice in it. I swallowed it eagerly, and the considerable rum made my ears ring.
I was a mite uncomfortable, but I felt real pity for the ladies, who was lashed into whalebone corsets, and though their clothes was all pure cotton there was a lot of layers of it. They dabbed continually at the sweat streaming down their foreheads.
The folks there was grouped into two bunches and not many went from one to the other. Curious, I took myself down the long marble terrace and wiggled in far enough to see the main attraction; it was William Howard Taft, all three hundred and fifty pounds of him. I knew him well, he was one of the kindest men ever born but terribly shy, had a fine legal mind, too. With all that fat he was carrying the tropics could kill him. He was dressed in soggy linen and two shrewd blue eyes.
“Luther!” he said happily, motioning me to come on over. “So good to see you! Nelson Miles cabled that we might expect you! Have a drink! Have a chair! Tell me of your life!”
We talked and such, remembering, for a while, and then Bill Taft—he was a man utterly without vanity and loved telling jokes on himself—related an exchange of cables between him and Secretary of State Elihu Root:
“ ‘It’s rumored you are not feeling well,’ ” Root cabled.
“ ‘Feeling fine and went horseback riding today,’ ” Taft cabled.
A pause of a day, and in the cable traffic the next morning:
“ ‘Excellent news. How is the horse feeling?’ ”
Taft roared with laughter, shaking his big belly and doing a merry jig—like so many huge men, he was some light on his feet.
“Who do you report to?” he said, suddenly serious.
“Teddy.”
“Good.” He nodded. “I’m afraid not much of what goes on here escapes the ears of our overornamented friend down to the other end of the terrace.”
I shrugged. Petty politics did not concern me and anytime anyone wanted to throw me off the islands I was more’n happy to go.
MacArthur was surrounded by shoals of underlings and their admirers—I was struck that those around Taft wanted to be there and were having a good time, and those around MacArthur were grim and silent as so many stones. Since I was to go out in the jungle and take a look at what was actually going on there, I supposed I’d be sociable enough so they wouldn’t bushwhack me first chance they got. Things had got very rough here, I could see the drawn looks of the junior officers who’d been out in the slop and were doomed to going back in.
“You seem to know Commissioner Taft,” MacArthur said, the words hacked out of block ice. “Whatever is he so amused with now?”
“An old private joke of ours,” I said, tweaking the popinjay.
I imagined the cable to the War Office: HE WON’T TELL ME THE PUNCHLINE! I’m used to epic displays of childishness in the mighty, but this was a bit rare even for me.
“Captain Tennant will escort you to the lines,” said MacArthur.
“I’ll find my own way,” I says, thinking I’d better get this settled right now.
“What?!” MacArthur shrilled. “Why you insubordinate bastard, you’ll go where I send you and with whom!”
“General,” I says, “let’s go cable the War Office. I wouldn’t like to see you cashiered at your age.”
MacArthur was looking like a walrus with apoplexy.
So we sent a cable off and in half an hour one came back, to MacArthur, who went from mauve to deepest purple.
“I was a bit hasty,” said MacArthur. “I ah um eh off ummm ...”
I just nodded and walked away. He was one of them fellers who reads about himself in the newspapers and acts accordingly.
“We all know which chair to sit in?” I says.
He nodded, looking sick.
I went back out to Taft. There was a number of lovely women around Billy—he liked the good things of life in large and frequent portions. One or two of the lovelies was giving me the eye, and I thought Manila might not be unbearable after all.
We was called in to dinner, there was places set along a refectory table a good seventy-five feet long, and the bunches of flowers each five feet gave off cloying aromas—I swear I could’ve spooned up limburger cheese and not have smelled it. When we was all seated the two halves of the tables turned away from one another, like kids over a jigsaw puzzle that wasn’t coming out right, and from then on there was a bellering match so it could be figured who had the best din.
Billy had thoughtfully seated me between two lovelies and across from two more, but in this case he’d done me no favors, as they was all trying to catch my eye and I only got so many. I decided to stick to this side of the table, and when I asked the one to my left what she thought of the evening she said “crap” very soft and ladylike and for some reason it struck me as so funny I roared till I damn near fell backwards out of the chair. I said it was my thoughts exactly.
The one on my right had decided the next feller up the line was more interesting than me, and all I could see of her was a tulle-swathed back and one earring, emeralds and diamonds.
“My name is Lucretia,” the lady said. “Mrs. Donald Sams, for the record.”
“And Mr. Sams?” says I, not having time for to pussyfoot.
“At his mistress’s house, no doubt,” said Lucretia. “You know how men are.”
Matter of fact, I did. This was some funny lady, smarter than whips, too, likely.
“Are you Yellowstone Kelly?” sez Lucretia.
“Only when I’m alone,” I said, feeling anger hot in my face. “I should have shot that little bastard Ned Buntline. I didn’t. I suffer some for it. He nicknamed me ‘Yellowstone,’ frinstance.”
“I read only one of Mr. Buntline’s books about you and it did not seem to me possible that it could be true. That, for instance, you killed fifty-six Indians in one day, one battle.”
“While reading Keats to my horse,” I says, looking sheepish. I always feel such a fool when anyone brings up Buntline, goddamn the little shit.
“Does your fair Indian princess wait for you?” said Lucretia.
For a moment I thought of Eats-Men-Whole, dead near forty years, but it wouldn’t have been fair to get angry over it.
“No, ma’am,” I said, “nothing like that.”
We talked through the supper, which was excellent, a curry of chicken and cashews and fish broiled with green peppercorns and fresh lemon. That was this end of the table; I supposed they were eating mulligan stew in the heat down there.
There were not, mercifully, any speeches after supper. The ladies filed out to the conservatory and the men went to one of two parlor/salons where there was brandy and seegars.
Bill come up to me, his merry eyes twinkling, and we strolled outside where it was a bit cooler.
“I’m ashamed of my country,” he said. “For the first time we grab land and the people on them when it isn’t necessary. We defeat the Spanish and the Filipinos love us as liberators. Then we announce that we are here to stay and extend the pleasures of democracy to our little brown brothers. Stuff and nonsense. We want the Philippines for the markets of China and to block Japan from taking them.”
“Japan?” I said, for I knew virtually nothing of Japan.
“Make no mistake,” said Taft, “Japan is soon to be a power. You know that Teddy told me of the first Japanese student at Harvard. The young man had won over ten thousand others, to come to Harvard. He studied himself to death. He wouldn’t eat or sleep. He studied till he died.”
“Purely crazy,” I says.
“The whole nation is crazy like that,” said Taft. “They have the fifth largest fleet in the world, and probably the strongest after America and Great Britain. For a people who didn’t know spit about what was going on in the rest of the world, they have come a long damned way since Perry opened the gates in fifty-six.”
By the map the Japanese were closer than anyone to the islands. I supposed I’d best look out for defensible positions, too. A map of the islands floated up in my mind, and I thought the only way to defend them at all would be the Navy. Once on land, an invader would be too dug in to dislodge.
“And this war is unspeakable,” said Taft, dropping a long ash from his seegar into a potted palm. “Our troops are sent on impossible missions, they watch their comrades die every day, and soon they are killing every Filipino within reach. It is a moral quagmire.”
He went on about how disgusted he was and what this was doing to the morale of the Army, and further what it was doing to America. We were supposed to be the great hope of nations, what with our democracy and free public education.
“I fear this place is going to teach us no end of a lesson,” he said, and then caught himself and apologized for his rude dwelling on the unpleasantries of the islands.
“Do you speak to any highly placed Filipinos who might have truck with the rebels?” I says.
“All of them do, I’m sure,” said Taft.
We were called to join the ladies. I had seen the biggest damned moth I ever have diving around one of the torches on the lawn, I swear it was a full foot in wingspan, and there were giant bats flapping by, about the size of beagles. Strange thrwarks and grooooiips and such sounded from a thousand throats hid in the shrubbery. And this was tame. I wondered what it was like out in the jungle. I suspected. I wondered for a moment if I couldn’t slither out of this, and then I thought, no, Miles and TR would just find a worse place to send me to.
After some idle chitchat with a couple other guests I come up on Lucretia who smiled and made room for me to stand, and she went on with her anecdote and bowed at the titters of applause from a handsome gray-haired couple.
They was the Martins, he banked and she painted the viscid jungle blooms. We chatted for a moment and then Lucretia and I went out for some air and an exchange of vital informations. She would call for her coach and go home. I would walk a mile or so in an hour, and the coach would be waiting for me on a side street.
Mrs. Sams went, and I wiggled through the throng to MacArthur and thanked him profusely for having invited me, twisting the screw since I had set up at Taft’s end of the table.
“A bit of advice,” I says to MacArthur. “I once was in a poker game with Bill there, and he won twenty-seven straight hands. He warn’t playing against nursemaids or fools.”
The general blinked and looked like something wet had just crawled up his leg.
William Howard Taft was beaming like a happy moon over the guests at his end of the room. I shook his hand and he gripped mine sudden hard.
“Not to pry, old friend,” he says, “but am I right in thinking you have a bunk for tonight which I don’t have to provide you with?”
“Yup,” I says, “why do you ask?”
“I had a wager that you would arrive ragged and lonely and by evening you would be in one or another bed, invited, shall we say?”
/> “Who was this here wager with?” I says.
“Our Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt,” says Taft.
We went to the cable room, and Taft sent a terse I WIN to Washington. I waited fifteen minutes and sent another cable: PAY UP. DELICIOUS HERE. MAY NOT RETURN.
The horse was snuffling and jingling the tack right where Lucretia said it would be. I got in and the driver chirred to the horse and off I went.
13
LUCRETIA’S HUSBAND MUST have been clean out of his tiny mind, all I can say about it. I began thinkin’ that Manila wasn’t so bad after all. And that it didn’t matter what I wrote in my report, no one would pay it much mind anyway.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, heading for the water closet, and felt her finger tracing the scars on my back.
“I felt them last night,” she said. “You’ve been badly hurt many times.”
“I lived,” I said.
When I got back she was laying there all naked, the sheets tousled around her. She looked very beautiful and I said so.
She nodded, thanking me, and when I lay down she turned me over on my stomach and started tracing the scars again.
“Where did you get this one?” she said. I said it was so long I couldn’t remember which one was which, some was of fighting Indians, some fighting Zulus and Shanganes, some fighting A-rabs, some fighting Mormons, some fighting outlaws, and a couple from being thrown through windows. Nothing particularly special about the collection, I could name fellers had lots more, even had lost hands, feet, and what-have-yous.
“You can’t convince me you’re a coward, Luther,” she said. “You are too much of a piece.”
Now what in the hell she meant by that I’ll never know, even if I’m told. I’ve run faster farther from more mean people than any other man on the face of the earth. All I got in my front is one bullet wound and a few scratches. I sang that song full-throated for a while and Lucretia kept silent until I had run down.
“Bullshit,” she said.