We found a bit of shade under the village pavilion where a wedding reception was in progress. The Filipinos had seen us walking past, called to us and, laughing and patting our sun-tendered shoulders, invited us in for a beer. We should have felt foolish attending a wedding reception in swim trunks, but their greeting was so warm, so unpatronizing, we felt truly welcome. It has been a long time since any stranger had a friendly word for us, and these short, happy people embarrassed us with their warmth. Beer and sweet greasy roast pig and purple rice and fried chicken were pressed upon us with champagne smiles. They were humbly polite, turning down the rented jukebox to introduce us to the milling crowd, but also shared their laughter with us, even at us in that fine way old friends have. An old withered man kidded me about my beer belly which had grown like a tumor since football season, and I returned the favor with a motion at his egg-bald head. His face disappeared into a mask of wrinkles, and a happy cackle flew from his toothless mouth. I shook hands with the now joined families, then with the slight, handsome groom and his shy bride who hid her smile with a dip of her head. I sailed once more into the tumbling maze of people. Each way I turned, smiles bloomed like flowers photographed in time-lapse; brown buds of faces burst into blossoms under the sun. I spoke with a man who claimed to know all about Texas, about cowboys and Indians, and when I told him that I was both a cowboy and an Indian, he laughed and laughed until tears rimmed his eyes. I didn't know what was so funny but I too laughed, even harder than he, so hard I abruptly sat down, and he wailed off again into breathless mirth. We ended both sitting and giggling and holding each others shoulders until the last seizure passed, then smiled and parted.
I rested at a table, sitting next to a white-headed Filipino. He looked to be fifty or so, but his hair was full and bushy, his face firm and his body held in a vigorous, controlled strength. He wore a starched light-blue pin-striped shirt like I remembered my father wearing before the war, and a dark-blue pair of trousers which obviously belonged to a double-breasted suit; but his shoes were brand new, a stiff almost metallic brown, and he had sat them on the bench next to him as if displayed for sale or trade. His dusty calloused feet, broadened and toughened by too many barefoot years to count, splayed across the packed dirt under the table. He nodded politely, but neither smiled nor spoke. He mixed a drink: one part Black Dog Gin, one part orange soda-water and one part beer poured into a thick water tumbler. He drank hunched over the glass, slowly, like a man on a long road between drinks. I watched him and his ugly feet which clawed the earth like stubborn toads, then finished my beer and walked away.
In ten minutes I was back, sitting across from him, smiling and inquiring, "How are you today, sir?" He had moved his shoes on to the table.
"Fine, thank you," he said, looking up. The voice was as worn and rough as the skin of his feet. "You are in the Army?" he asked. His tone was soft and deep and weary, his English exact.
"Yes, sir."
"That is good. I, too, was once in the army," he said, staring back into his glass as if time were telescoped there. "A very long time ago, during the war. The Japanese took my sawmill and I went to the hills to fight with Colonel Fergit on Mindanao. I was a major."
I wasn't surprised: I hadn't yet met a Filipino male born before the war who did not claim to be a guerrilla. (But no one had even heard of the Hukbalahap rebellion of the fifties.) A restaurant owner in Angeles, a woman, had told me, "They all lie. They hide in the hills and call it fighting. They should be a woman and learn about fighting."
The old man pulled a battered wallet from his pocket and showed me a picture of himself, three other Filipino officers, and General Douglas MacArthur. Other bits of tattered paper were taken from the leather sheath: his college diploma, folded and faded, showing his degree in civil engineering; pictures of the wife and children killed by the Japanese in '43, and his sawmill, and part of his outfit; his commission and various citations; a membership in an engineering society, dated June 2, 1936; a smudged dollar bill with the fuzzy red ink signatures of all the Americans in the band; a barely recognizable snapshot of Betty Grable's ass. He laid his very life out before me, faded, flaked at the edges, torn in the creases, scattered like wasted time around his new shoes. In a voice as ragged as the edge of a shell-ripped jungle, quiet from too much whispering, he explained how he had been cheated of his pay for the five years of fighting, shorn by crooked politicians and apathetic Americans. He told me, an American, but the blame and bitterness held a very dull, chipped edge in his voice.
"Ah," he sighed. "So long ago. So very long ago."
We both understood that he had just told me that he was a Huk, a member of one of the few remaining small bands of roving bandits who operated with little or no pretense of any political means or end to their banditry. I wondered if he had been on the raid the night before, wondered if those were his comrades we had killed.
He stowed the captured fragments of time in the wallet, then exposed his right calf. A mottled stitching of a machine gun wound scarred the leg. An old, smooth scar reflecting the unforgotten pain, pain compounded in nearly twenty years of running and fighting and dying after it was supposed to be (it had to be!) over. I remembered the blasted body of the night before, thought of wounds never healed to scar.
He and I talked until dusk, even smiled twice more together, then gravely shook hands as if over the coffin of a common friend. He tucked his gleaming shoes under his arm and walked toward the mountains in the sunset, his white hair waving like a flag of a forgotten truce in the strengthening breeze off the sea, and tiny mushrooms of dust puffed between his misshapen toes.
That night and the next day swept past like the waters of a rapids; our pleasure and peace leaping and laughing over any discontented rocks we might have brought to the beach. Once a fierce yellow sunset drifted into a delicate green, lime-aired dusk. The gentle surf crested in the quick darkness with swirling phosphorous fringes of tiny animals like liquid silver. Under the black water the shining protozoa loomed like little lights into our eyes, then curved away like speeding cars. Long careless daylight hours were spent watching the chameleon in the thatch of my roof, and he observing me with the same lazy indifference. I slept once in the window-box at the large hut, too drunk to walk, peaceful among the deep sleeping noises, the shimmering ribbons of light reflected on the slough. From the pavilion across the way laughter and the ingratiating whine of the jukebox wound over the dead water as Quinn, Morning, Haddad and some of the others danced drunkenly with the Billy Boys until fat John turned out the lights. A mosquito buzzed me, but a breeze off the gulf chased him inland. I must have slept through a shower, for when morning came my clothes were damp. I swam in the sunrise, disturbing for a second the still, perfect sleep of the sea, then washed from a sand well, and breakfasted on coconut and raw fish, and watched the sun creep like a sly snail up the early morning blue. I wondered aloud why anyone would ever leave this place.
That night we took the bus into town and went to a whore house.
It was a tall, nearly three-story shell of mud and straw bricks. The whitewash had peeled away like scabs to expose older and more flaky coats. The ground floor was open and cluttered with the usual assortment of cracked tables, bamboo chairs, bar, and bubbling jukebox. Over the back half of the room a jumbled maze of bamboo rooms climbed all over each other toward the roof. The small cubicles were stacked in a random association, each seeming to have no relation to any other, nor as a whole any connection with the outside walls. Halls and stairs and landings went off at every angle as if an abstract expressionist had decided to become a carpenter. A drunk might wander up there until he was sober and still be lost, passed from giggling whore to giggling whore forever.