Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  Rafael finally turned to Dartley and explained. “I don’t understand everything they say, but since I knew some of this from before, I know what is going on. They think we work for the government, that you are an engineer or surveyor. Their men don’t want to kill us because that would mean that soldiers will come here. Some of them know me because they have seen me working in the forests here. Unlike some of the lumber men, I have always been interested in these people and tried to talk with them and see their point of view. They think you government men have hired me to guide you here and say that we may leave unharmed now, so long as we go empty-handed.”

  “Tell them we’re not government people,” Dartley said.

  “If they knew that, they would attack immediately.”

  Harry was beginning to sweat as he came to realize that the American was not going to back down and leave quietly. He thought about shooting him with his M16 or pistol, but he was not an expert with firearms, and the American was watching everyone very carefully, his right hand resting over the trigger guard, a cold smile on his face and a hard look in his eyes.

  “What else did the women say?” Dartley asked.

  Rafael answered, “The government wants to build four hydroelectric dams up here, which will flood many Kalinga valleys, which contain their homes, rice terraces, and ancestral burial grounds. I think’s it’s disturbing the dead that bothers them most—they worship their ancestors. The Kalingas managed to put their feuds aside and even joined with other tribes to fight the government on this. When the government moved in bulldozers, the women lay down in front of them, stole the ignition keys, vandalized things when government workers turned their backs, and so on—while the warriors stood and watched. The government wisely suspended work before anyone got killed. Now the Kalingas are giving us their government treatment. That’s all that’s saving us right now.”

  Dartley looked back at the women, who were watching his reactions with open curiosity. It was plain that they knew they had Rafael on the run; equally plain that they were worried by the way Dartley was holding his gun and smiling all the time. They, too, didn’t want to die.

  “Ask them what they think about Happy Man,” Dartley ordered Rafael.

  This brought a stream of comments from three of the women, which Rafael summed up for Dartley. “He is the one they blame for the dams, because he wants to open up and develop the area he thinks he controls. Those are their words. They know he has come back here and believe that he has sent you up into these hills.”

  Dartley decided it was time to stop arguing with these women. He said to Rafael, “Tell them I am here to kill Happy Man.”

  Rafael did. The women smiled and chattered excitedly among themselves. Several of them said the words Happy Man in English and chopped at their necks.

  “The Kalingas were headhunters until one or two generations ago,” Rafael explained in a low voice. “Some still may be. They want to know if you will give them Happy Man’s head.”

  “Happy Man!” Dartley shouted, and chopped at his neck. Then he walked forward, holding an imaginary head between his hands, and presented it to the prettiest woman. She smiled shyly and averted her beautiful dark eyes while the rest of the women laughed and made comments.

  “Tell them to leave the car alone and that I will talk with their men tomorrow morning,” Dartley said to Rafael. The women dispersed immediately on being told this by Rafael, and as they were leaving, Dartley thought to ask, “Do they know where to find us?”

  Rafael translated one woman’s answer: “Anyplace on these lands we go, they will find us.”

  The four men took two-hour watches through the night. Dartley’s watch was from four to six, and he was extremely cautious and vigilant, knowing that a dawn or predawn raid was a popular form of greeting strangers among forest peoples worldwide. But he heard nothing and saw nothing as the gray light of early morning lit up the mist floating through the trees. The fog was mostly in the broad valley below and did not obscure his vision at the campsite. Gradually the tree trunks, two tents, and backpacks became visible in the half-light. Across the clearing, less than ten yards away and directly in front of him, Dartley saw eight men sitting. They wore only loincloths and fur caps, each with a short machete in a sheath on his left hip. They held their five-foot steel-tipped bamboo spears vertical and looked expressionlessly at Dartley. He had no idea whether they had arrived during an earlier watch and had been sitting there all night in total silence, or whether they had managed to slip in during his own watch and form this picturesque group as if posing for a camera. Whatever way they did it, Dartley was impressed.

  He did not make any gestures toward them in case his actions would be misinterpreted. So he sat and solemnly looked back at them.

  “We got company,” he shouted to the men inside the tents. “Wake up. Come out with your gun, but act friendly. Rafael, for chrissake, get your ass out here and talk to these people.”

  The three men woke up real fast when they saw the spear-carrying group sitting across the clearing. Rafael spoke with them. “They want us to come with them,” Rafael said.

  “We have to eat first,” Dartley said. “Maybe they’d like to try some K rations.” He pulled out a gray-green plastic package of dehydrated spaghetti and meatballs and shook his head. “They might decide to kill us if we offer them this.”

  “They say we must eat sacred food with them.”

  “It’s probably hallucinogenic mushrooms before they sacrifice us,” Harry said.

  Benjael, the other Manila resident, nodded to show that he believed Harry was right. The eight Kalinga warriors crowded around Benjael to admire his tattoos. Rafael winked at Dartley, amused at how the two big-city slickers from Manila had completely lost their cool out in the sticks.

  M16s slung on their right shoulders, the four followed the eight Kalingas along a maze of trails deeper into the forest and farther up the hillside. Here there were no signs of logging, and none of the trails were nearly wide enough to allow a truck to pass. All the same, this network of trails was well beaten down through heavy use, and frequent horse droppings showed that not everyone went on foot. They heard what sounded like gongs in the trees ahead, then heard voices and smelled wood smoke. A very large, long hut was built in a clearing ahead of them. Children played in the clearing in front of the hut, and small pigs and chickens ran all over the place. The long hut had nine doors along one side, and meat was grilling over open fires in front of one door.

  Dartley and the others followed the eight Kalingas into this door. First thing Dartley set eyes on was a dead man strapped in a chair. He was in his late twenties, a Kalinga, with a small hole in his chest. The whole hut was built on a bamboo framework and constructed out of a weave of bamboo and palm leaves. As Dartley’s eyes grew accustomed to the semidark interior he made out many people. The hut’s ceiling was about twenty feet high, and ten-foot wicker screens served as dividers along its floor space. He guessed that it was a multifamily dwelling and that some of these dividers had been moved aside to accommodate the large number of mourners.

  A clear liquid was ladled from a big Chinese-looking pot with a soot-blackened coconut shell. Dartley was handed a container, and he drank it obediently. He recognized it as rice wine, like Japanese sake. He was immediately offered another, and he drank that, too, although normally he never took alcohol. He suspected that if he did not drink it here, it would be taken as an insult to the spirit of the dead man strapped in the chair. Pieces of meat were then given to them with much ceremony. Dartley had no idea what kind of animals the meat came from, and some pieces tasted a lot better than others. But he swallowed them all and followed them with some more rice wine. Harry and the others showed an equal willingness not to insult the dead man’s spirit, though all three tended to be slow about sticking these pieces of strange-looking meat in their mouths so early in the day.

  Rafael eased alongside Dartley and whispered, “This is called a canao.”

  “How lon
g does it go on?”

  “At least three days for a funeral. Sometimes weeks for a wedding. These people don’t have a Western sense of time.”

  “Get us out of here, Rafael. And find out what happened to the stiff. That looks like a high-velocity small-caliber bullet wound to me. Could be an M16. No fucking around. I want to know what happened.”

  Rafael talked to one of the men who had brought them here, and when they went outside, Dartley followed them, motioning to Harry and Benjael to remain behind to eat more meat and drink more wine. Harry was holding a rubbery, green piece of meat in his fingers and was thinking city thoughts about people who live in bamboo huts in the mountains. Still, both he and Benjael were from the Tondo section and knew the importance of showing respect to people with a cultural tradition of headhunting. Harry chewed and swallowed the meat and knocked back some wine.

  “Velez’s guards shot him yesterday afternoon,” Rafael told Dartley. “While Happy Man was away at his house in Laguna things relaxed up here, and some of the Kalingas hunted closer to the Velez house. When Velez came back, security tightened and they shot one Kalinga hunter.”

  “Was he on Velez land?” Dartley asked.

  Rafael got this information. “He says no. The government claims they own the land and that Velez bought the timber rights from them. But the Kalingas claim it is their land—or that they have traditional hunting rights on it no matter who owns it. This man says he is the dead man’s brother and that his brother was killed with a gun like ours. He saw the man who did it. The Kalingas here have guns—bolt-action hunting rifles—but nothing to match an automatic rifle. He wants you to go with him and kill the man who shot his brother.”

  “Not you also?” Dartley asked, surprised.

  “Not me. You.”

  “All right. Go inside and join the others.”

  * * *

  The Kalinga warrior trotted on his bare feet along the path, and Dartley found it difficult to keep up with him. On two occasions he lost contact with him and had to wait for him to come back and find him. Dartley was fit, and the heat and insects here were nothing compared to what they had been in the lowlands, yet moving fast along narrow paths in dense undergrowth was never going to be one of Dartley’s talents. The Kalinga man, like most of his people, was quite tall and well built, but somehow he managed to slide around in the undergrowth like a silent shadow while Dartley, doing his best to keep quiet, sounded like a stampeding buffalo.

  After more than an hour of mad downhill trotting on narrow paths through the forest, the land leveled out underfoot and the cover became thinner. They were at the bottom of the hill now, moving across the valley toward the Velez house. Dartley slowed his pace. The Kalinga did not understand, but Dartley could only move quietly by traveling at a cautious walking pace. The warrior sneered at him, thinking he was afraid. But his opinion didn’t concern Dartley. People were always trying to persuade Dartley not only to do what they wanted but to do it the way they wanted. He always made it clear that if he agreed to do something, he would do it his way, unless someone had a better idea—and he would be the judge of that. Like some clients back in the States, the Kalinga showed annoyance and impatience. Small world, Dartley thought as he carefully checked out the terrain.

  They came to a small dirt road. The Kalinga squatted down and made sets of complex gestures with his hands, which meant nothing to Dartley, who hunkered down beside him. After an hour it occurred to Dartley that these people had a different sense of time than Westerners and that maybe they would be here for days. He remembered the way this man and seven others had sat silently for part or maybe all the night at the campsite. Dartley could already feel cramps in his thighs and calves. He wasn’t getting any younger, but even as a kid he could not remain squatting motionless for long periods without his muscles seizing up.

  After crouching for more than two hours in silence, during which time the Kalinga did not twitch a muscle, Dartley heard a motor approach. It was a farm tractor towing a two-wheeled wagon, in which tubers that might have been large sweet potatoes were piled. One man drove the tractor, and two sat on the tailgate of the wagon, smoking and letting their legs hang. Dartley glanced at the Kalinga. The man’s face showed no sign that he saw anything pass on the road. Maybe he’s in a trance, Dartley thought. But these three men were unarmed and obviously tenant farmers or hired laborers. They had bodies shaped by too much toil and too little nourishment, and clearly belonged to the oppressed. Dartley shifted his weight to ease the ache in his left leg and rechecked his M16 for maybe the fiftieth time.

  Nearly another hour passed before the Kalinga moved. He turned his head to the left and looked down the dirt road, which disappeared around a corner into the forest a short distance from them. Dartley looked and listened. Nothing. The Kalinga grew increasingly tense. He pointed urgently at Dartley’s rifle. Dartley listened carefully to the forest silence but heard nothing except his own heartbeat. He crouched and watched, rifle raised to his shoulder, finger on the trigger.

  A man walked around the corner in the middle of the road. An M16 hung on its strap from his right shoulder, and he walked with his right hand resting easily on the weapon. To Dartley’s ears the man moved silently in his sneakers on the dirt road. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, open in front, and light cotton pants. He had tattoos on his chest and forearms, and Dartley decided that he had a Tondo look to him, like Benjael—a hired gun from Manila.

  Twenty feet behind him another man appeared. He, too, looked like he might have come from Tondo, and he also carried an M16 slung on his shoulder. Dartley waited. Sure enough, a third man showed up, another twenty feet or so behind the second.

  The first man was already passing their hiding place when it became evident that there was no fourth man. The Kalinga was busy gesticulating with his fingers, making no sense to Dartley, who wanted to know if any of these men had killed his brother. Dartley clasped his M16, and the Kalinga smiled. The first man of the three-man patrol was already past them. They were doing a professional job, not talking or smoking, keeping alert and maintaining space between them so they could not easily be wiped out in a single burst of fire.

  From their hiding place overlooking the narrow dirt road, Dartley pointed to the first man and touched the Kalinga’s bamboo spear shaft. Without waiting for a response, he faced left, directed the barrel of his M16 at the third man, and ripped off four shots on full auto. He saw the goon clutch at himself and pitch forward.

  Dartley swung the gun from left to right and pressed on the trigger again as the barrel was about to cover the middle man, now directly opposite him. The first two shots missed, and the target was spinning around to face him when the third, fourth, and fifth shots of the salvo ripped across his midriff and dropped him in a lifeless heap in the middle of the road.

  When he swung on the lead man, he found him already staggering around, clutching the bamboo shaft of the six-foot steel-tipped spear buried in his chest. The Kalinga must have waited for him to turn completely around before launching the deadly javelin at him. Dartley and the warrior jumped down onto the road and hauled the dying man by his wrists into the bushes. They went back for the two dead men and dragged them into the undergrowth and collected their rifles and spare magazines.

  Dartley wanted to move out fast, figuring that the two bursts of rifle fire were heard and that other goons could be on the way. But the Kalinga wasn’t going anywhere. He drew the long knife from the sheath on his left hip and went to work on the man with the spear in his chest. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t easy to listen to his screams, but he did not last long, being half dead already from the spear wound. Then the warrior began to hack off the spear victim’s head with the long blade.

  Dartley hauled the weapons back up the hill to the canao in the long hut with nine doors. Harry was leaning drunkenly in one doorway. He waved to Dartley, and then his eyes settled on the three heads the Kalinga was carrying, holding them by the hair, two in one hand, one in the other
. Harry vomited.

  CHAPTER

  10

  “Are you Nabokodonosor Solano, who people call Joker?” the man with hard eyes asked. He was sitting behind a table stacked with papers, along with two other men. All three of them were staring hard at Joker, none too friendly. He was standing alone in front of the table, and ten or twelve men sat along the wall behind him on folding chairs.

  “Yes,” Joker replied. He did not like the way this questioning was set up. It was more a courtroom procedure than a friendly interrogation by fellow rebels.

  The man with the hard eyes went through the details of his arrest, detention, and rescue, all of which Joker had to confirm.

  “You agree that you were tortured for a month before being sent to the prison camp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you also tortured in the prison camp?”

  “Mistreated but not tortured.”

  “Why do you suppose they stopped torturing you?”

  “They knew they couldn’t ‘salvage’ me because my lawyer had discovered that I was still alive and being held by the Army. There was a kind of battle going on between the civilian and military courts as to who had power and jurisdiction. I happened to be a pawn in that fight, and it saved me.”

  “But you lasted a month under torture?”

  “Yes,” Joker said.

  “You must have told them something to last that long.”

  “Everybody tells them something.” Joker’s face twisted emotionally. “Anyone who comes out of those torture cells and says he didn’t talk is telling you lies. Maybe some of the ones who came out a bleeding piece of meat in a coma—maybe they say nothing. The rest of us talk. You, yourself, wouldn’t do any better, or maybe you’ll find that out for yourself someday.”

  A look of anger crossed the man’s face. “I would not give them the names of my comrades,” he said furiously.

  Joker said nothing.