that
want to convict and execute me are willing to go to such lengths to allow me
to dick around on my computer while I am awaiting my trial and death. He
exhales and says, "Thank god, at least I'll be able to get some work done."
Attorney Alejandro nods approvingly.
"Your girlfriend is waiting to see you," he announces.
"She's not really my girlfriend. What does she want?" Randy demands.
"What do you mean, what does she want? She wants to see you. To give
you emotional support. To let you know that you are not all alone."
"Shit!" Randy mutters. "I don't want emotional support. I want to get
the fuck out of jail."
"That is my department," Attorney Alejandro says proudly.
"You know what this is? It's one of those men are from Mars, women are
from Venus things."
"I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you
are saying."
"It's one of those American books where once you've heard the title you
don't even need to read it," Randy says.
"Then I won't."
"You and I see just that someone is trying to fuck me over and that I
need to get out of jail. Very simple and clean. But to her, it is much more
than that it is an opportunity to have a conversation!"
Attorney Alejandro just rolls his eyes and makes the universal "females
yammering" gesture: thumb and fingertips closing and opening like a
disembodied flapping jaw.
"To share deep feelings and emotionally bond," Randy continues, closing
his eyes.
"But this is not so bad," Attorney Alejandro says, radiating
insincerity like a mirrored ball in a disco.
"I'm doing okay in this jail. Surprisingly okay," Randy says, "but it's
all about keeping up a kind of emotionless front. Many barriers between me
and my surroundings. And so it just makes me crazy that she's picking this
particular moment to implicitly demand that I let my guard down."
"She knows you are weak," Attorney Alejandro says, and winks. "She
smells your vulnerability."
"That's not all she's going to smell. Is this new cell going to have a
shower?"
"Everything. Remember to put something heavy on the drain so that rats
do not climb up out of it during the night."
"Thanks. I'll just put my laptop there." Randy leans back in his chair
and wiggles his butt around. There is a problem now with an erection. It has
been at least a week for Randy. Three nights in the jail, the night before
that at Tom Howard's house, before that the airplane, before that Avi's
basement floor . . . actually it has probably been a lot more than a week.
Randy needs badly to get into that private cell if for no other reason than
it will give him an opportunity to vent that which is bearing down hard on
his prostate gland and get his mind back on an even keel. He prays to god
that he's only going to be seeing Amy through a thick glass partition.
Attorney Alejandro opens the door and says something to the waiting
guard, who leads them down a hallway toward another room. This one's bigger,
and has a number of long tables, with little familial clusters of Filipinos
scattered about. If these tables were ever intended to serve as barriers
against physical contact, it has long been forgotten; it would take
something more like the Berlin Wall to prevent Filipinos from showing
affection for each other. So Amy is there, already striding around the end
of one of the tables as a couple of guards pointedly look the other way
(though their eyes dart back to check out her ass after she has blown by
them). No dress this time. Randy predicts it will be a few years before he
sees Amy in a dress again. Last time he did, his dick got hard, his heart
pounded, he literally salivated, and then suddenly armed men were putting
handcuffs on him.
Right now, Amy's in old jeans ripped out at the knee, a tank top
undershirt and a black leather jacket, better to accommodate her concealed
weapons. Knowing the Shaftoes, they've probably gone to some very high
Defcon level, the one just short of all out nuclear exchange. Doug Shaftoe
probably showers with a SEAL knife clenched in his teeth now. Amy, who
normally goes for a low, one armed, sidelong type of hug, now throws both
arms up as if signaling a touchdown and crooks both elbows behind the nape
of Randy's neck and lets him feel everything. The flesh of his lower belly
can count the stitch marks in Amy's appendectomy scar. So that he has a
boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as
well have one of those long fluorescent orange bicycle flags lashed to the
shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.
She steps back, looks down at it, then very deliberately looks him in
the eye and says, "How do you feel?" which being as it is the obligatory
question of females, is hard to read deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?
"I miss you," he says, "and I apologize if my limbic system has
misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support."
She takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, "No need to apologize. It's
all a part of you, Randy. I don't have to get to know you in pieces, do I?"
Randy resists the impulse to check his watch, which would be pointless
because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of
world speed record here, in the male/female conversation category, for
working the subject around to Randy's own failure to be emotionally
available. To do it in this setting displays a certain chutzpah that he
cannot help but admire.
"You've talked to Attorney Alejandro," she says.
"Yeah. I assume he's imparted to me whatever he was supposed to
impart."
"I don't have much more for you," she says. Which on a pure tactical
level means a lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or
their salvage work had been somehow interrupted, she'd say something. For
her to say nothing means that they are probably hauling gold out of that
submarine at this very moment.
So. She's busy working on the gold salvage operation, to which her
contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information
to impart to him about anything. So why has she made the long, alternately
dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of
these fiendish mind reading exercises. She has her arms crossed over her
bosom and is eyeing him coolly. Someone is trying to send you a message.
He suddenly gets the feeling that she's got him right where she wants
him. Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his bag. It's a power
thing, that's all.
A big slab of memory floats up to the surface of Randy's mind, like a
floe calved off the polar icecap. He and Amy and the Shaftoe boys were in
California, right after the earthquake, going through all the old crap in
the basement looking for a few key boxes of papers. Randy heard Amy
squealing with laughter and found her sitting in the corner on top of some
old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a
huge cache of paperback romance novels, none of which Randy had ever seen
before. Bodice rippers of the most incredibly cheesy sort. Randy assumed
they'd been left behind by the house's previous owners until he flipped
through a couple of them, checking the copyright dates: all from the years
when he and Charlene were living together. Charlene must have been reading
them at a rate of about one a week.
"Ooh baby," Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but
sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with
a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female.
"God!" She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.
"I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits."
"Well, now you know what she wanted," Amy said. "Did you give her what
she wanted, Randy?"
And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over
his surprise that Charlene was a bodice ripper addict, he decided it wasn't
necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would
be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village,
Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an
egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling
trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more
and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and
more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated,
and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy
slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that
Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked
dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that
in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be
passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad
about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much
power, and just as much freedom.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It
generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when
one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.
Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice ripper
novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one.
Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not
have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school,
waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality
is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather
be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out of the way part of
the world, with her music by intelligent female singer songwriters to keep
her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.
"I love you," he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like, At
last we're getting somewhere. Randy continues, "I've been infatuated with
you ever since we met."
Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.
"And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do
anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you
were a lesbian."
Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.
". . . and later just because of my own reticence. Which is
unfortunately part of me too, just like this part." He glances down just for
a microsecond.
She's shaking her head at him in amazement.
"The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his
time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized," Randy says.
Amy sits down on his side of the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly
on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. "I'll think about what you
said," she says. "Hang in there, sport."
"Smooth sailing, Amy."
Amy gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to
the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking
at her.
He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.
Chapter 85 GLAMOR
A couple of squads of Nipponese Air Force soldiers, armed with rifles
and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay
seawall. If it comes to the point where they must stand and slug it out,
they can probably kill a lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they
are here to find and assist the Altamiras, not to die heroically, and so
they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur's circling
Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over
the ruins of a collapsed building, and calls in a strike artillery rounds
spiral in from the north like long passes in a football game. Shaftoe and
the Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing at how many tubes are
firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when
they think there's going to be a few seconds' pause in the shrapnel. Maybe
half of the Nips are killed or wounded by this barrage, but they are
fighting at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe's Huks are hit as well.
Shaftoe is trying to drag one of them out of danger when he looks down and
sees that he is stomping across a mess of shattered white crockery that is
marked with the name of a hotel the same hotel where he slow danced with
Glory on the night that the war started.
The wounded Huks are still capable of moving and so the retreat
continues. Shaftoe's calming down a bit, thinking about the situation with
more clarity. The Huks find a good defensive position and stall the
attackers for a few minutes while he gets his bearings, works out a plan.
Fifteen minutes later, the Huks abandon their position and fall back in
panic, or appear to. About half of the Nipponese squad rushes forward in
pursuit and finds that they have been lured into a killing ground, a cul de
sac created by the partial collapse of a building into an alley. One of the
Huks opens up with a tommy gun while Shaftoe who stayed behind, hiding in a
burned out car heaves grenades at the other half of the squad, pinning them
down and preventing them from coming to help their comrades who are being
noisily slaughtered.
But these Nips are relentless. They regroup under a surviving officer
and continue their pursuit. Shaftoe, now on his own, ends up being chased
around the foundations of another hotel, a luxury place that rises up above
the bay, near the American Embassy. He trips over the body of a young woman
who apparently leaped, fell, or was thrown from one of the windows.
Crouching behind some shrubbery for a breather, he hears a shrill keening
drifting out of the hotel's windows. The place is full of women, he
realizes, and all of them are either screaming or sobbing.
His pursuers seem to have lost track of him. The Huks have lost him,
too. Shaftoe stays there for a while, listening to all of those women,
wishing he could go inside and do something for them. But the place must be
filled with Nip soldiers, or else the women wouldn't be screaming as they
are.
He listens carefully for a while, trying to ignore the lamentations of
the women. A fourteen year old girl in a bloody nightgown plummets down from
the fifth floor of the hotel, thuds into the ground like a sack of cement,
and bounces once. Shaftoe closes his eyes and listens until he is absolutely
sure that he does not hear any children.
The picture's getting clearer now. The males are marched away and
killed. The women are marched off in another direction. Young women without
children are brought to this hotel. Women with children must have been taken
somewhere else. Where?
He hears tommy gun fire on the other side of the hotel. It must be his
buddies. He creeps around to a corner of the hotel and listens again, trying
to figure out where they are somewhere in Rizal Park, he thinks. But then
MacArthur's artillery opens up hell for leather and the world begins to
heave beneath him like a rug being shaken, and he can't hear trench brooms
or screaming women or anything. He has a view east and south towards the
parts of Ermita and Malate from which they have just come, and he can see
big pieces of debris spinning up from the ground over there, and gouts of
dust. He has seen enough of war to know what it means: the Americans are
advancing from the south now as well, pushing towards Intramuros. Shaftoe
and his band of Huks were operating on their own, but it appears that they
have inadvertently served as harbingers of a big infantry thrust.
Terrified by the barrage, a bunch of Nip soldiers stagger out of a side
exit of the hotel, almost too drunk to stand, some of them still pulling
their trousers up. Shaftoe disgustedly throws a grenade at them and then
gets the hell out without bothering to examine the results. It is getting to
the point where killing Nips is no fun anymore. There is no sense of
accomplishment in it. It is a tedious and dangerous job that never seems to
end. When will these stupid bastards knock it off? They are embarrassing
themselves in front of the whole world.
He finds his men in Rizal Park, beneath the shadow of Intramuros's
ancient Spanish wall, disputing possession of a baseball diamond with what
is left of the Nipponese squads that pursued them here. The timing is both
good and bad. Any earlier, and Nip reinforcements in the surrounding
neighborhood would have heard the skirmish, flooded into the park and wiped
them out. Any later, and the American infantry would be here. But Rizal Park
is in the middle of a deranged urban battleground right now, and nothing
makes any kind of sense. They have to impose their will on the situation,
the kind of thing Bobby Shaftoe has gotten fairly good at.
The one thing they have going for them is that the artillery is pointed
elsewhere for the time being. Shaftoe squats down behind a coconut tree and
tries to figure out how the hell he is going to reach that baseball diamond,
which is a couple of hundred yards away across totally flat, open ground.
He knows the place; Uncle Jack took him to a baseball game there.
Wooden bleachers rise along the left and right field lines. Beneath each one
is a dugout. Shaftoe knows how battles work, and so he knows that one of
those dugouts is full of Nips and one is full of Huks and that they are
pinned down in them by each other's fire just like Great War troops in their
opposing trenches. There are a few buildings under the bleachers, containing
toilets and a refreshment stand. The Nips and the Huks will be creeping
through those buildings right now, trying to get into a position from which
they can shoot into the dugouts.
A Nipponese grenade flies towards him from the direction of the left
field bleachers, making a stripping noise as it passes through the fronds of
a palm tree. Shaftoe ducks his head behind another tree so that he can't see
the grenade. It explodes and tears the clothing, and a good deal of the
skin, from one of his arms and one of his legs. But like all Nip grenades it
is poorly made and miserably ineffectual. Shaftoe turns around and uncorks a
spume of .45 caliber rounds in the general direction the grenade came from;
this should give the thrower something to think about while Shaftoe gets his
bearings.
This is actually a stupid idea, because he runs out of ammunition. He
has a few rounds in his Colt, and that's it. He also has one grenade left.
He considers throwing it towards the baseball diamond, but his throwing arm
is in pretty bad shape now.
Besides Jesus Christ! That baseball diamond is just too far away. Even
in peak condition he could not throw a grenade from here to there.
Perhaps one of those corpses out in the grass, between here and there,
isn't really a corpse. Shaftoe crawls towards them on his belly and
establishes that they are most definitely dead people.
Giving the field a wide berth, he begins working his way around behind
home plate toward the right field line, where his people are. He would love
to sneak up on the Nips from behind, but that grenade thrower really threw a
fright into him. Where the hell is he?
The firing from the dugouts has become sporadic. They have stalemated
now and are trying to conserve ammunition. Shaftoe risks rising to a crouch.
He runs for about three paces before he sees the door to the women's toilet
swing open and a man jump out, winding up like Bob Feller getting ready to
throw a fastball right down the middle of the plate. Shaftoe fires his .45
once, but the weapons' absurdly vicious recoil jerks it right out of his
lamed hand. The grenade comes flying towards him, perfectly on target.
Shaftoe dives to the ground and scrambles for his .45. The grenade actually
bounces off his shoulder and falls spinning into the dust, making a fizzing
noise. But it doesn't explode.
Shaftoe looks up. The Nip is standing framed in the women's room door.
His shoulders slump miserably. Shaftoe recognizes him; there's only one Nip
who could throw a grenade like that. He lies there for a few moments,
counting syllables on his fingers, then stands up, cups his hands around his
mouth, and hollers:
Pineapple fastball – Guns of Manila applaud – Hit by pitch
free base!
Goto Dengo and Bobby Shaftoe lock themselves inside the women's room
and share a nip from a bottle of port that the former has looted from a
store somewhere. They spend a few minutes catching up with each other in a
general way. Goto Dengo is already somewhat drunk, which makes his grenade
throwing performance all the more impressive. "I'm hyped to the gills on
benzedrine," Shaftoe says. "Keeps you going, but kind of screws up your aim.
"I noticed!" Goto Dengo says. He is so skinny and haggard he looks more
like some hypothetical sick uncle of Goto Dengo's.
Shaftoe pretends to take offense at this and drops into a judo stance.
Goto Dengo laughs uneasily and waves him off. "No more fighting," he says. A
rifle bullet passes through the women's room wall and digs a crater into a
porcelain sink.
"We gotta come up with a plan," Shaftoe says.
"The plan: You live, I die," Goto Dengo says.
"Fuck that," Shaftoe says. "Hey, don't you idiots know you're
surrounded?"
"We know," Goto Dengo says wearily. "We know for a long time."
"So give up, you fucking morons! Wave a white flag and you can all go
home."
"It is not Nipponese way."
"So come up with another fucking way! Show some fucking adaptability!"
"Why are you here?" Goto Dengo asks, changing the subject. "What is
your mission?"
Shaftoe explains that he's looking for his kid. Goto Dengo tells him
where all of the women and children are: in the Church of St. Agustin, in
Intramuros.
"Hey," Shaftoe says, "if we surrender to you, you'll kill us. Right?"
"Yes."
"If you guys surrender to us, we won't kill you. Promise. Scout's
honor."
"For us, living or dying is not the important thing," Goto Dengo says.
"Hey! Tell me something I didn't fucking already know!" Shaftoe says.
Even winning battles isn't important to you. Is it?"
Goto Dengo looks the other way, shamefaced.
"Haven't you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON'T FUCKING
WORK?"
"All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,"
Goto Dengo says.
As if on cue, the Nips in the left field dugout begin screaming
"Banzai!" and charge, as one, out onto the field. Shaftoe puts his eye up to
a bullet hole in the wall and watches them stumbling across the infield with
fixed bayonets. Their leader clambers up the pitcher's mound as if he's
going to plant a flag there, and takes a slug in the middle of his face. His
men are being dismantled all around him by thoughtfully placed rifle slugs
from the Huks' dugout. Urban warfare is not the metier of the Hukbalahaps,
but calmly slaughtering banzai charging Nipponese is old hat. One of the
Nips actually manages to crawl all the way to the first base coach's box.
Then a few pounds of meat come flying out of his back and he relaxes.
Shaftoe turns to see that Goto Dengo is aiming a revolver at him. He
chooses to ignore this for a moment. "See what I mean?"
"I have seen it many times before."
"Then why aren't you dead?" Shaftoe asks the question with all due
flippancy, but it has a terrible effect on Goto Dengo. His face scrunches up
and he begins to cry. "Aw, shit. You pull a gun on me and start bawling at
the same time? How unfair can you get? Why don't you kick some fucking dirt
in my eyes while you're at it?"
Goto Dengo lifts the revolver to his own temple. But Shaftoe sees that
one coming a mile away. He knows Nips well enough, by this point, to figure
out when they are about to go hari kari on you. Shaftoe jumps forward as
soon as the barrel of the revolver begins to move. By the time it is against
Goto Dengo's skull, Shaftoe has his finger stuck into the gap between the
hammer and the firing pin.
Goto Dengo collapses to the floor sobbing piteously. It just makes
Shaftoe want to kick him. "Knock it off!" he says. "What the fuck is eating
at you?"
"I came to Manila to redeem myself to get back my lost honor!" Goto
Dengo says. "I could have done it here. I could be dead on that field right
now, and my spirit going to Yasukuni. But then you came! You ruined my
concentration!"
"Concentrate on this, dumbshit!" Shaftoe says. "My son is in a church
right over on the far side of that wall, with a bunch of other helpless
women and children. If you want to redeem yourself, why not help me get 'em
out alive?"
Goto Dengo seems to have gone into a trance now. His face, which was
blubbering just a minute ago, has solidified into a mask. "I wish I could
believe what you believe," he says. "I have died, Bobby. I was buried in a
rock tomb. If I were a Christian, I could be born again now, and be a new
man. Instead, I must go on living, and accept my karma."
"Well, shit! There's a padre right out there in the dugout. He can
Christianize your ass in about ten seconds flat." Bobby Shaftoe strides
across the bathroom and swings the door open.
He is startled to see a man standing just a few paces away. The man is
dressed in an old but clean khaki uniform, devoid of insignia except for a
pentagon of stars on the collar. He has jammed a wooden match down into the
bowl of a corncob pipe and is puffing away futilely. But it's as if all of
the oxygen has been sucked out of the air by the burning of the city. He
throws the match away in disgust, then looks up into the face of Bobby
Shaftoe staring at him through a pair of dark aviator sunglasses that give
his gaunt face the appearance of a skull. His mouth forms into an 0 for a
moment. Then his jaw sets. "Shaftoe. . . Shaftoe! SHAFTOE!" he says.
Bobby Shaftoe feels his body stiffening to attention. Even if he had
been dead for a few hours, his body would do this out of some kind of dumb
ingrained reflex. "Sir, yes sir!" he says wearily.
The General composes his thoughts for half a second, and then says:
"You were supposed to be in Concepcion. You failed to be there. Your
superiors did not know what to think. They have been worried sick about you.
And the Department of the Navy has been positively insufferable ever since
they became aware that you were working for me. They assert, in the most
high handed way, that you know important secrets, and should never have been
placed in danger of capture. In short, your whereabouts and your status have
been the subject of the most intense, nay, feverish speculation for the last
several weeks. Many supposed that you were dead, or, worse, captured. This
distraction has been most unwelcome to me, inasmuch as the planning and
execution of the reconquest of the Philippine Islands have left me little
time to devote to such nagging distractions." An artillery shell rips
through the air and detonates in the bleachers, sending jagged fragments of
planks, about the size of canoe paddles, whirling through the air all around
them. One of them embeds itself like a javelin in the dirt between The
General and Bobby Shaftoe.
The General takes advantage of this to draw breath, and then continues,
as if he were reading this from a script. "And now, when I least expect it,
I encounter you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of
uniform, in a disheveled condition, accompanied by a Nipponese officer,
violating the sanctity of a ladies' powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense
whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum? Do you not believe
that a representative of the United States military should comport himself
with more dignity?"
Shaftoe's kneecaps are joggling up and down uncontrollably. His guts
have become molten, and he feels strange bubbling processes going on in his
rectum. His molars are chattering together like a teletype machine. He
senses Goto Dengo behind him, and wonders what the poor bastard can possibly
be thinking.
"Begging your pardon, General, not to change the subject or anything,
but are you here all by yourself?"
The General juts his chin towards the men's room. "My aides are in
there relieving themselves. They were in a great hurry to do so, and it is
good that we came upon this place. But none of them considered invading the
powder room," he says severely.
"I apologize for that, sir," Bobby Shaftoe says hastily, "and for all
of those other things that you mentioned. But I still think of myself as a
Marine, and Marines do not make excuses, so I will not even try."
"That is not satisfactory! I need an explanation for where you've
been."
"I have been out in the world," Bobby Shaftoe says, "getting butt
fucked by Fortune."
The door of the men's room opens and one of The General's aides walks
out, woozy and bowlegged. The General ignores him; he is gazing right past
Shaftoe now.
"Pardon my manners, sir," Shaftoe says, turning sideways. "Sir, my
friend Goto Dengo. Goto san, say hi to General of the Army Douglas
MacArthur."
Goto Dengo has been standing there like a pillar of salt this whole
time, utterly dumbfounded, but now he snaps out of it, and bows very low.
MacArthur nods crisply. His aide is staring darkly at Goto Dengo and has
already drawn his Colt.
"Pleasure," The General says airily. "Pray tell, what sort of business
were you two gentlemen prosecuting in the ladies'?"
Bobby Shaftoe knows how to lunge for an opening. "Uh, it is very funny
you should ask that question, sir," he says offhandedly, "but Goto san, just
now, saw the light, and converted to Christianity."
Some Nips on top of the wall open up on them with a machine gun. The
flimsy, tumbling rounds crack through the air and thump into the ground.
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur stands motionless for a long time,
lips pursed. His sniffles once. Then he removes his aviator glasses
carefully and wipes his eyes on the immaculate sleeve of his uniform. He
pulls out a neatly folded white hankie and wraps it around his hawklike nose
and honks into it a few times. He folds it up carefully and puts it back in
his pocket, squares his shoulders, and then walks right up to Goto Dengo and
wraps him up in a big, manly bearhug. The remainder of The General's aides
emerge from the shitter en bloc and view the scene with reticence and
palpable tension all over their faces. Profoundly mortified, Bobby Shaftoe
looks down at his feet, wiggles his toes, and caresses the linear scab
running upside his head where the oar clocked him a few days ago. The
machine gun crew up on the wall are being picked off one by one by a sniper;
they writhe and scream operatically. The Huks have come up from the dugout
and stumbled into this little tableau; they all stand motionless with their
jaws hanging down around their navels.
Finally MacArthur unhands the stiff body of Goto Dengo, steps back
dramatically, and presents him to his staff. "Meet Goto san," he announces.
"You have all heard the expression, 'the only good Nip is a dead Nip'? Well,
this young fellow is a counterexample, and as we learned in mathematics, it
only takes one counterexample to disprove the theorem."
His staff observe cautious silence.
"It seems only fitting that we take this young fellow to the Church of
St. Agustin, over yonder in Intramuros, to carry out the sacrament of
baptism," The General says.
One of the aides steps forward, hunched over in that he's expecting to
get a slug between the shoulder blades any minute. "Sir, it is my duty to
remind you that Intramuros is still controlled by the enemy."
"Then it is high time we made our presence felt!" MacArthur says.
"Shaftoe will get us there. Shaftoe and these fine Filipino gentlemen." The
General throws one arm around Goto Dengo's neck in a highly affectionate,
companionable way, and begins strolling with him towards the nearest gate.
"I would like you to know, young man, that when I set up my headquarters in
Tokyo which, God willing, should be within a year I want you there bright
and early the first day!"
"Yes sir!" Goto Dengo says. All things considered, it is unlikely he
would say anything else.
Shaftoe draws a deep breath, tilts his head back, and stares up into a
smoky heaven. "God," he says, "usually I bow my head when I'm talking to
You, but I figure this is a good time for us to have a face to face. You see
and know all things and so I will not explain the situation to You. I would
just like to submit a request for You. I know You are getting requests from
lonely soldiers all over the fucking place at this time, but since this one
has to do with a shitload of women and children, and General MacArthur too,
maybe You can jump me to the top of the stack. You know what I want. Let's
get it done."
He borrows a small, straight twenty round tommy gun magazine from one
of his comrades and they set out for Intramuros. The gates are sure to be
guarded, so Shaftoe and the Huks run up the sloping walls instead, directly
beneath that wiped out machine gun nest. They turn the gun around into
Intramuros, and plant one of the wounded Huks there to operate it.
The first time Shaftoe gazes into the town, he nearly falls off the
wall. Intramuros is gone. If he didn't know where he was, he would never
recognize it. Essentially all of the buildings have been leveled. Manila
Cathedral and the Church of St. Agustin still stand, both with heavy damage.
A few of the fine old Spanish houses still exist as hasty, freehand sketches
of their former selves, missing roofs, wings, or walls. But most of the
blocks are just jumbles of masonry and shattered red roof tiles with smoke
and steam seething out of them. There are dead bodies all over the place,
sowed all over the neighborhood like timothy seed broadcast onto freshly
plowed soil. The artillery has mostly stopped there being nothing left to
destroy but small arms and machine gun fire sound on almost every block.
Shaftoe is thinking he'll have to assault one of the gates. But before
he can even come up with a plan, MacArthur is up there with the rest of his
group, having scrambled up the rampart behind them. This is evidently the
first time that The General has gotten a good look at Intramuros, because he
is stunned and, for once, speechless. He stands there for a long time with
his mouth open, and begins to draw fire from a few Nips hidden in the
wreckage below. The turned around machine gun silences them.
It takes them several hours to make their way up the street and into
the Church of St. Agustin. A bunch of Nips have barricaded themselves inside
the place along with what sounds like every hungry infant and irritable two
year old in Manila. The church is just one side of a large compound that
includes a monastery and other buildings. Many of the structures have been
torn open by artillery fire. The treasures hoarded in that place by the
monks over the course of the last five hundred years have tumbled out into
the street. Blown all over the neighborhood like shrapnel, and commingled
with the bayoneted corpses of Filipino boys, are huge oil paintings of
Christ being scourged, fantastic wooden sculptures of the Romans hammering
the spikes through his wrists and ankles, marbles of Mary holding the dead
and mangled Christ in her lap, tapestries of the whipping post and the cat
o' nine tails in action, blood coursing out of Christ's back through
hundreds of parallel gouges.
The Nips still inside the church defend its main doors with the
suicidal determination that Shaftoe has begun to find so tedious, but thanks
to The General's artillery, there are plenty of other ways, besides doors,
to get into the place now. So it is that, even while a company of American
infantry mount a frontal assault on the main entrance, Bobby Shaftoe and his
Huks, Goto Dengo, The General, and his aides are already kneeling in a
little chapel in what used to be part of the monastery. The padre leads them
through a couple of extremely truncated prayers of thanksgiving and baptizes
Goto Dengo with water from a font, with Bobby Shaftoe taking the role of
beaming parent and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur serving as
godfather. Shaftoe later remembers only one line of the ceremony.
"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"
says the padre.
"I do!" says MacArthur with tremendous authority even as Bobby Shaftoe
is muttering, "Fuck yes!" Goto Dengo, nods, gets wet, and becomes a
Christian.
Bobby Shaftoe excuses himself and goes wandering through the compound.
It seems as big and crazy as that Casbah in Algiers, all gloomy and dusty on
the inside, and filled with still more La Pasyon art, made by artists who
had obviously witnessed whippings firsthand, and who didn't need any priest
spouting little homilies about the glamor of Evil. He goes up and down the
great stairway once, for old time's sake, remembering the night Glory took
him here.
There is a courtyard with a fountain in the center, surrounded by a
long shaded gallery where Spanish friars could stroll in the shade and look
out over the flowers and hear the birds singing. Right now the only things
singing are shells passing overhead. But little Filipino kids are running
races up and down the gallery, and their mothers and aunts and grannies are
encamped in the courtyard, drawing water from the fountain and cooking rice
over piles of burning chair legs.
A grey eyed two year old with a makeshift bludgeon is chasing some
bigger kids down a stone arcade. Some of his hairs are the color of Bobby's
and some are the color of Glory's, and Bobby Shaftoe can see Glory ness
shining almost fluoroscopically out of his face. The boy has the same bone
structure that he saw on the sandbar a few days ago, but this time it is
clothed in chubby pink flesh. The flesh admittedly bears bruises and
abrasions. No doubt honorably earned. Bobby squats down and looks the little
Shaftoe in the eye, wondering how to begin to explain everything. But the
boy says, "Bobby Shaftoe, you have boo boos," and drops his club and walks
up to examine the wounds on Bobby's arm. Little kids don't bother to say
hello, they just start talking to you, and Shaftoe figures that's a good way
to handle what would otherwise be pretty damn awkward. The Altamiras have
probably been telling little Douglas M. Shaftoe, since the day he was born,
that one day Bobby Shaftoe would come in glory from across the sea. That he
has now done so is just as routine and yet just as much of a miracle as that
the sun rises every day.
"I see that you and yours have displayed adaptability and that is
good," says Bobby Shaftoe to his son, but sees immediately that he's not
getting through to the kid at all. He feels a need to get something into the
kid's head that is going to stick, and this need is stronger than the
craving for morphine or sex ever was.
So he picks up the boy and carries him through the compound, down
semicollapsed hallways and over settling rubble heaps and between dead
Nipponese boys to that big staircase, and shows him the giant slabs of
granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next, year by year, as
the gall