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Sugarland

by Phillip Finch (more about this book and author)

Part 4: Chapters 16 - 20
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· 16 ·

     “Tell me about San Francisco,” Vangie said.

     We were in the front room of the hut, the next morning. She was clean and scrubbed. In more than one way, she shone.

     “San Francisco is a great city. I moved there in ‘seventy. The old-timers told me, You should've been here ten or fifteen years ago, before the hippies ruined it. Now, when I meet newcomers, that's what I hear myself saying—you should've been here before the yuppies took over. But it's still the same place. Nobody's going to ruin San Francisco.”

     “Oh.” A wistful breath of a word.

     “You'd love it,” I said. “I can see you over there. I can just see you.”

     I could, too. I saw her with me. I could imagine the sweet clangor she would make when she collided with the monuments of my history.

     “It's a peaceful place, isn't it?” she said. “Not just San Francisco. The States.”

     I had never thought of America that way before; but there, at that moment, “peaceful" was exactly the word.

     “Not a lot of shocks and surprises,” I said. “Nothing much gets in the way of living. People can pretty much go their own way. Figuring out what you want can be the hardest part. Somebody as smart and sharp and good-looking as you are, you could have anything.”

     Her head dropped and she looked to the side, out the window. I thought I'd said something wrong. Her upper lip seemed to tremble.
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     With a yearning that pierced me clear through, she said, “Peace would be enough.”

· 17 ·

Bembo and Franklin spent the day in Palo while a mechanic repaired the Cortina. Or at least tried repairs. On the way down, after they had picked me up, the engine overheated. It pounded us with hot waves that surged through the firewall, and we stopped at the garage. They had hard words with the mechanic. The argument lasted long enough for the engine to cool, and we drove back nursing it.

     We were supposed to have dinner together. But we didn't get to Bacolod much before dark, and Bembo didn't fight me when I said maybe I'd just have an early meal alone and go to bed early.

     I did have an early meal alone. I didn't go to bed. I caught a taxi in front of the hotel.

     Lacson Street I already knew. It was the main drag downtown, where it clipped off one end of the city plaza and skirted the provincial capital grounds.

     To the driver I said, “Do you know a street called Sorbito?”

     “Yes I know Sorbito. The north end of Bacolod.”

     “It crosses Lacson.”

     “That is true. Near the boundary of the city proper.”

     I hadn't told Bembo about the last note. I didn't want him to feel obliged.

     “What about a place called Danny Boy's?”

     “Ho!” he said, and his hands jumped off the wheel for a moment. “Danny Boy's! Ho! Floor show! Bold dancers!”

     In the Philippines they use “bold” for “nude.”
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     “You want to go to Danny Boy's?” he said.

     For a few seconds I peered at possibilities, reminding myself that I didn't have to do it, feeling poised at an edge.

     The driver waited for an answer.

     I said, “Look around a little, why not?”

     It was in the same dark district where I had walked the night before. In the midst of shadows and shuttered windows it was a pond of seedy life, loud music leaking out into the night, out front a furtive bustle of cars and taxis and men. The building was concrete block, decorated with a mural of a Folies Bergere chorus line, dancers huge-busted and blond. The mural was soiled, defaced by graffiti, including the word “rebolusyon” stroked across the row of long legs in fishnet stockings.

     The sign at the front door read: NO FIREARMS. Through a foyer, behind black curtains, was heavy cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer, a couple of dozen tables, a small stage with a runway where a young woman in a red negligee was doing stretches and splits to “We Are the World.” A hostess brought me to a table beside the runway. Everyone else in the room was a Filipino.

     I asked for a beer, and while I waited I looked and found eight or ten young women sitting at the back of the room, prim as schoolgirls at a junior prom, and some just that young. Others were with men at the tables.

     By American standards the place was a dive, the furnishings old and cheap, paint peeling on the walls. But in the Philippines you have to look past flyspecks and cruddy floors, and know what you're looking for. The beer ran twenty pesos, higher than at the Green Fields, and waitresses were carting it by the trayloads. The tables were mostly full with patrons who wore clean shirts and the same easy, smug expressions I'd seen on the two P.C. officers my first night in the country. At twenty pesos they were drinking a field hand's daily wages with every bottle: reason to feel smug, if you looked at it that way.

     And black clutch bags on every table.
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     The song ended, the dancer unfastened her negligee. She was naked under a spotlight. With earnest determination she began to do the same stretches and splits.

     I was watching her when a man's hand rested on my shoulder. It was a heavy hand, with a diamond solitaire in gold and a couple of bent fingers. At home I might have recoiled, a stranger gripping my shoulder, but here I was getting accustomed to touch. Filipinos like to touch—good friends, men, will hold hands in public.

     “That's prime stuff,” he said in my ear. “She's right off the farm, rural Cadiz. Six months ago she was planting cane points and pulling weeds in the fields. Her father would've cut your throat if you'd tried to kiss her. You don't have to worry about that now, I promise.”

     He dropped himself into the chair beside me, a thickset man about my age with a broad nose on a flat, squared-off face, narrow eyes that squinted between wide high cheeks and a low brow. A face like an Olmec head, I thought, and almost as baleful.

     “You don't object,” he said.

     “Please.” He was already sitting.

     “You're an American, right? I like Americans. We don't get many in here.”

     “Not many Americans around,” I said.

     “Some. More than you might think. Where do you come from in the States?”

     Without a reason to tell the truth, I said, “Portland. In Oregon.”

     “I know Portland. It's down the interstate from Fort Lewis, Washington. That's where I took Ranger training.”

     “You were in the U.S. Army?”

     “Philippines. Some of our officers go through the program. I was there in the winter. It wasn't as cold as I thought it would be, but it rained every fucking day.”

     He was watching the dancer while he spoke to me; I was watching, too. He said, “What brings you to Bacolod?”
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     “My father was here during the war. I decided to see it for myself.”

     “A little sightseeing, play around a little, I know how it is. Americans like the Philippines because they can do things here they can't do at home. I say be my guest.”

     He had a jovial tone but his face didn't move. A smile would've been like cracking stone.

     The dancer made quick, mincing steps to disappear behind a curtain at the rear of the stage. Another slinked out in a sequined gown. She wore her hair long, combed in a peekaboo style that was a parody of sultriness. She might have been a child plundering Mommy's closet.

     “That one,” he said, “that's another country girl. She's from down south, Binalbagan.”

     “You know them all?”

     “I should. This is my place.”

     “You're Danny Boy?”

     “That's me. I don't look like any fucking Danny Boy, do I? People hear the name, they think I ought to be singing in a choir.” He made a sound of amusement that came out like hacking phlegm. “It's been a long time since I sang in a choir.”

     Within arm's reach of us on the runway, the girl blinked into the spotlight and reached behind her neck. The gown shimmered down to the floor. She wore nothing else. I thought of the shapeless dusters that the women wore in Lanao from about age eight until they died.

     “She's young,” I said.

     “Fifteen. But I didn't tell you that. They're supposed to be eighteen to work. What can I do? She runs away from the farm, looking for a job, she comes in here—how can I say no? If I turn her down she'll end up blowing fishermen at the docks for ten pesos and a half a kilo of yesterday's catch.”

     “You like the country girls.”

     “They're fresh and clean. No bad habits or diseases. They aren't whores yet, if you know what I mean. I won't
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hire a girl who's been to Manila. Just off the farm they might be awkward, maybe they don't know all the tricks. But most men would rather plow new ground.” His eyebrows came up in increments, as if they were being cranked. “That one is Maricel, if you're interested.”

     “I don't think so.”

     “Don't get me wrong. She's not that awkward.”

     He left me after a few minutes. I saw that when the dancers were finished they would dress and return to the seats, either at the back of the room or to a customer's table.

     I stayed and watched for a while without knowing what I was supposed to be looking for. A couple of beers later, feeling a little heady, I paid and left. Danny Boy wasn't around when I went out.

     The place was well out of downtown; no taxis in sight. I went to the intersection. I was looking up and down Lacson Street, pacing. The music stopped, maybe the pause between two dancers, and in its absence I heard a girl's voice: loud, insistent, a strong note of fright.

     It seemed to come from behind the club. I walked down Lacson. An alley cut through and ran behind the row of buildings that included Danny Boy's.

     A white sedan was parked at the back door of the club, pointed up the alley toward me. One of its rear doors was open. Danny Boy stood near it. A girl was there too, and when she shook her head I recognized the dancer named Maricel, her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, dressed now in baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt, the way teenage girls dress in Bacolod when they have the money. She looked small. She was yelling at Danny Boy in the shrill way that a scared little terrier will bark from a corner.

     Maricel yelled, and Danny Boy yelled back at her. I saw what was happening: Danny Boy wanted her in the car, and she didn't want to go.

     Danny Boy spoke into the car, softly; somebody was
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in the backseat. Maricel started away from the car, and Danny Boy moved fast. He shot a hand out and grabbed her by one wrist. He spun her toward him, off balance, caught her and shoved her into the car before she could shout. The way he did it, I knew it wasn't the first time.

     He gave an apologetic shrug into the backseat: meant, I was sure, not for the girl but for whoever had received her.

     The sedan purred out toward me, picking up speed. I gave it plenty of room. It swung by me and paused only a moment before it turned out into Lacson Street. In that moment, though, I saw that the man in the backseat was Nonoy Paloma.

     Danny Boy may have been watching it, too, following it up the alley, because now he had noticed me. The impassive face showed nothing—annoyance, amusement; nothing.

     I was about to turn and go when someone stepped out from the back door of the club. It was a white man. It was Penney. He went up to Danny Boy and spoke, and looked my way when Danny Boy pointed his nose up the alley. I didn't raise my hand or say a word to Penney, and he didn't acknowledge me. The three of us stood fixed there for a few moments, united under the tropical night by questions and surmise.

     Though I assume they had more answers than I did, or more to hide; or else it didn't matter to them. Anyway, they broke off first. They showed their backs to me and went inside together.

     A cab came a couple of minutes later. I was glad to get away. At the hotel I almost made it across the lobby before the clerk spotted me and reeled me in.

     Holding an envelope.

     For you, sir. Yes, the shoe-shine boy, sir. Yes, if you're around, I'll stop him the next time I see him, yes sir.

     I took it up to the room, sat on the bed and opened it.
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LORNA RODRIGUEZ
ALMA SOLANO
TETCHIE SALVADOR
VIVIAN MAAMO

VICTIMS

“IT IS INDEED A REVOLTING SPECTACLE
WHEN SICK APPETITES ARE BEYOND
REPROACH”

· 18 ·

By day, those few days in the barrio, I basked in Vangie's glow. The hours tripped over each other in a rambling lope, sun-drenched and lambent. By night, in Bacolod, I pursued wraiths into dark corners and cringed at what I found—until morning when I was back at the barrio again, once more before her, like reaching safe haven. She was sanity. There was day and there was night, and they were separate and whole unto themselves, the way night and day are in the tropics.

     Back home I might call it schizophrenic, but in that place, that time, it made sense. I didn't imagine that night and day, Vangie and the wraiths, might overlap.

     Mostly my memories of the days are soft-edged and plush, like the recollection of a childhood lullaby. One incident stands out sharp and crisp, though. It was the Thursday of that week, about midday. Bembo and Franklin were in Palo again. Vangie and I had walked out toward the courtyard at the front of the barrio, and we sat a discreet distance apart on a halved-log bench, in the shade of a clump of banana trees. Beyond the trees were the high
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cane and the arc of the spur road through the fields, motionless under the high sun.

     Nine or ten women dawdled around the water well, chatting in gossipy tones while babies clung to their skirts. Half a dozen men perched on the steps of a hut at the edge of the courtyard, one of them—a hunchback in his twenties, with a crooked nose and jug-handle ears—singing soft a cappella. Elvis. “Love Me Tender.” A small dog, bare in patches, slowly crossed the courtyard, tail slowly switching at flies.

     Then a rustle of cane tops, movement near the front of the courtyard. A boy, a child, burst barefoot from the cane, dashed halfway across the hardpan clay, and stopped. I recognized him: the kid who had sold me the cartridge cases. I had seen him often since then. He hung around Vangie, jumping to do errands for her, entranced, as smitten as I. Alex was his name.

     He froze for a moment in the courtyard. His head swiveled back and forth, eyes wide as a rabbit pursued. He turned and took off running again, across the clay, to the nearest row of huts, a few feet from where the hunchback was singing. Outside one was a woven grass basket, a couple of feet across and about that high. He ran to the basket, took off the lid, stepped into the mouth and folded himself out of sight. The men at the steps, women and children at the well, Vangie and I—we all watched as a thin brown arm snaked out for the lid and pulled it into place over the top.

     The cane rustled again. The hunchback broke off his song; around the well the women stopped chatting and gathered up the babies. Vangie startled me with a firm push on my shoulder. In a schoolteacher's definite voice she said, “Jack, out of sight—behind the trees.”

     I did what she said. I stepped into the low cover of the banana trees, broad-leafed and cool. A heavier rustle off to the side, and half a dozen soldiers in green fatigue uniforms stumbled out of the cane, into the open. They were
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in a crouch, rifles ready, as if they expected to be fired on.

     One of the soldiers wore a master sergeant's chevrons. He carried a pistol, a G.I. .45. He walked out into the middle of the courtyard and spoke loudly, forcefully; Ilonggo, Filipino, I couldn't tell, but I caught the sound of a question. One of the men at the steps shook his head, no. So did another, and so did three women at the well.

     The sergeant crossed over to the huts. For a moment he seemed headed straight for the basket, but it was the men on the steps he wanted. He stood in front of them, bantering, cajoling, forced good cheer with a tint of menace. The men didn't smile. The sergeant's voice got more insistent as he asked a question. The men shook their heads. No. No.

     He brought the pistol up and put the muzzle at the head of the one nearest him—the hunchback—and shouted a question. The hunchback showed rotten teeth as he grinned a nervous grin and shook his head. The sergeant shouted again, a short, hammering series of syllables. The hunchback closed his eyes and shook his head. I watched from the trees, conscious of the pistol and the stillness in the courtyard, of the hunchback's fear and the pregnant basket.

     The sergeant thumbed back the hammer of his pistol; I could hear the click. The sergeant shouted his question. The hunchback cringed and shook his head, pistol's muzzle pressing into his temple, and the sergeant shouted again.

     I stepped from the trees, and in what I hoped was a friendly tone said, “Hey, amigo, if I knew what you wanted I'd be glad to help.”

     Every head in the courtyard turned toward me. I kept walking toward him, toward the pistol and the hunchback and the basket.

     I said, “I'm just a visitor, I don't know what I can tell you, but you never know.”
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     “An American,” he said. He lowered the pistol. I kept walking, and Vangie started to follow me.

     “They're chasing communists,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “They think one of them ran into the barrio.”

     “No kidding.”

     “There was an encounter down in Curba—that's a sitio a few kilometers south. An ambush. One of their squad was killed.”

     We were close to the hut now. I stood between him and the basket.

     “An American here?” he said. Astonished.

     “I'm courting this girl.”

     “Courting this girl …”

     “She's lovely, but she's giving me a hard time.”

     “Well, yes, the province girl is very hard to get. Not like Manila.”

     “I'm Jack Hart.” I put out my hand. He had to holster the pistol to take it.

     “Sergeant Emilio Segovia,” he said. My breathing was tight. I tried hard to make it smooth.

     “She says you're looking for communists.”

     “Yes!” This roused him again. “We are on patrol near Curba when the NPA ambush us. You did not hear the shooting? No? Well, the wind is wrong. Anyway, we chased them. One ran here.”

     “When?”

     “Now! At the present time! You did not see him?”

     I could feel all the eyes watching me.

     “Nobody came this way,” I said.

     “You are sure?”

     “I only know what I saw. I was sitting right over there.”

     “Maybe you aren't seeing very well. Maybe you're looking into the eyes of your girl.”

     “I wish. But she won't look at me.”

     “Yes, that's the way they work, isn't it? The more you
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love her, the more miserable she wants to make you. So you didn't see any NPA?”

     “Not a one.”

     “Okay,” he said, “no guerrillas here. My mistake.” He spoke to the troopers, and they warily lowered their rifles. He turned away, and took my elbow as he did—I nearly jumped at the touch—so that we were walking together toward the middle of the courtyard. He tugged at my elbow again, pulling me closer, and very softly he said, “Did they t'reaten you?”

     “Who?”

     “The NPA—they're here, aren't they? Did they put a gun to your head, to say that? Go ahead, you can tell me now.”

     “There are no guns. I didn't see any NPA.”

     He looked bewildered.

     “I was sure …” he said.

     “You were chasing them through the fields?”

     “Yes.”

     “The cane is tall. It would be easy to make a mistake.”

     “Yes.”

     “What happened in the field, I can't tell you. But I know what I saw—what I didn't see. I can tell you, defi' nitely, no guerrillas came through here.”

     He tried to digest this.

     “Truly?”

     “No guerrillas. Truly.”

     A reluctant shake of the head.

     “All right. No guerrillas. But you should be careful.”

     “Why is that?”

     “This whole fucking place is full of them!” He threw up his arms. “Guerrillas, their sympathizers, it's a snake's nest. They hate Americans, you know. Nobody has harm you?”

     “Everyone has been very warm. Everyone but the girl,” I said.

     “Yes, yes, the girl. My friend, some advice, let me tell
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you. Much better you take her virgin'ty soon as you can. Then she'll have to marry you, and you don't spend any more time up here. It's the best way.”

     “I don't think she'd like that,” I said.

     “She'll thank you for it later. That's how they work.” He looked back. To Vangie he said, “This is a nice guy, a nice American. Don't give him such a hard time.” More loudly, he said, “The rest of you, watch yourselves. You help a communist, you are a communist. How can I tell the difference?”

     They tramped off where they had come from. The cane swallowed them.

     Vangie went back to the bench. I followed her. We discussed the weather. The women started chatting again, and one of the men started singing, but it was artificial, strained. The basket sat and didn't move. One by one the men got up and went away, and gradually the women took their children and left. Nobody came to take their places, and we were alone, except for the mangy dog. And the basket.

     “It's hot,” Vangie said. “Why don't we go back?”

     We walked across the clay, past the basket, in among the huts.

     “You took a big risk,” she said when we had put the courtyard behind us.

     “Don't scold me. I had to do it. He would've pulled that trigger.”

     “Perhaps.”

     “Or the boy—they'd have gotten him one way or the other—they'd have killed him on the spot. I wasn't going to stand around and watch that. The one guy who might be able to stop it.”

     A whisk of bare feet behind us. Alex passed us at a run, this time a kid's playful lope. He showed me a grin and a thumbs-up, and dodged out of sight between huts.

     “I'm not being critical,” she said. “Not really. You were brave. You made friends today.”
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     We walked and I said, “After all, he isn't a guerrilla anyway. Is he? A boy that young?”

     Her answer surprised me.

     “No,” she said, then, “I don't know, it's hard to tell, nobody is really sure. It doesn't matter anyway, does it?”

     “I guess not.”

     “It doesn't matter to anyone here,” she said. “He's one of us, he belongs to the barrio, that's all we need to know. Nobody would have given him up. Not even at the point of a gun, did you see? We take care of our own. We have to. Nobody else will.”

     I didn't tell Bembo about the boy and the soldiers; didn't want to worry him.

     “The man should be shot,” he said that afternoon as we drove back to Bacolod. He meant the mechanic in Palo.

     Franklin's car was still overheating. The gauge was broken, but by sniffing the fumes coming up from the floorboard, he knew that the temperature was critical. Heading back to Bacolod, we crept up hills and drifted down in neutral.

     On the flat stretch between Hermosa and Palo the smell got acrid, like baking rubber. We stopped at a bridge. Franklin went down to get water for the radiator. Near Palo the smell got strong again, and Bembo said we should storm the mechanic and demand satisfaction.

     I said, “You can leave me out of it. Just drop me at the church if it's all right with you. Pick me up when you're finished.”

     “Why?” he said. Aroused.

     “I want to talk to the priest.”

     “Why?”

     I said, “Bembo, don't stand between a man and his confessor.”

     “What are you doing?” he said. And he said it again, What are you doing?, more emphatic with each word.
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     “There's just a couple of things I want to clear up with him.”

     “You told me, no more. You promised.”

     “It doesn't involve you.”

     “How can you say that? How can you insult our friendship?”

     “It's not something I need you for, that's all I mean. I can wrap it up on my own.”

     “You know, we are in partnership. And you promised me, you promised, that it was finished.”

     His sternness was softening, though.

     I said, “If you don't want me seeing the priest, I won't see the priest.”

     “Of course you must do what you must do,” he said. “How can I help?”

     “Nothing. If I needed you I'd say so. A few minutes with the priest, that's all.”

     They left me at the church. The windows of the little rectory were open, and Father Brendan, in gym shorts and a T-shirt, came to the door when I knocked.

     “I want to talk,” I said.

     “I would have thought you'd had an earful last time.”

     “Not that. You want to get around to that again, okay, I'll stick around for it. But later. Right now I want to talk about Father Dado.”

     He didn't say a word, but opened the screen door and stepped aside. I entered a room that was combined kitchen, sala, and dining area. Books, papers, dishes, a typewriter, a small phonograph and some LP's. Disheveled. A place where a man lived without company. I thought of the countless hours that he and others had spent alone between these walls. The endless nights.

     He was cooking dinner, rice and fish. He turned down the heat under the frying pan and took the rice pot off the burner, and he waited for me to speak.

     I said, “Something's going on around me. I don't know
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what it is, but it's so close I can almost touch it. I can't let it alone. I tried, but I can't.”

     His face lost some of its hard set.

     I said, “And not only that it's going on, but it's wrong. I don't care where we are, what language we're speaking. It's wrong.”

     I told him about Padilla, what he had said to me, and about Danny Boy's.

     “You should see these,” I said. The notes. I showed them to him; it was a relief to put them in someone else's hands. “This bastard, excuse me, this mystery man keeps sticking a needle in me to make sure I don't relax. It's like he's playing a game. He knows everything, but he won't tell me. That would be too easy. He's got to drag me by the nose the whole way.”

     He was reading the notes.

     He said, “This is a tortured soul. The language. ‘Monstrous excesses of the rich’—an anguished voice in the wilderness, if I ever heard one. ‘When sick appetites are beyond reproach.’ Whoever he is, he has seen too much.”

     Then he tapped a finger against one of the notes and said, “Her father was here last Sunday.”

     The finger rested beside the name Tetchie Salvador.

     “His name was Jesus. Jesus Salvador—how could I forget it? He had come to see Dado, all the way from Hinobaan, in the south, six hours by bus. They met last year, when Jesus came to Bacolod to bring his daughter home. They had had a falling-out, and she had gone to Bacolod, looking for work.

     “She was working as a prostitute. Conditions the way they are, how else can a girl from a poor family support herself when she leaves home? And with so many poor girls leaving home, looking for something besides a life in the fields.

     “It's a national scandal. Filipinas grow up believing that they're destined for one man and a family. They're taught to love and care. There are no better wives or mothers.
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One thing they aren't taught is hardness; the very quality a prostitute must have to survive. It's tragic for even one Filipina to end up whoring. But hundreds of thousands, great parts of whole generations—unspeakable.

     “Dado felt this deeply. Until he got the parish, he ministered to the girls in the streets and the clubs. It earned him some notoriety. There were jokes. You see, part of the tragedy is that whores are pariahs. They're forgotten and neglected, even by those who should know better. Dado had an administrative job in the diocesan office, but during his spare hours he was in the streets and the clubs. There was gossip. But I knew him. I knew he was doing it out of Christian charity. He even persuaded me to help out.

     “This is what Jesus Salvador told me. Last year he came to Bacolod to bring Tetchie home. At that time he met Dado. Tetchie wouldn't return with her father, but Dado persuaded her to write to her parents at least once a week. When the letters stopped coming, Jesus contacted Dado, and Dado tried to find Tetchie again. He couldn't. He told Jesus that he'd keep trying. When Jesus didn't hear from him any longer, he came here.”

     “Tetchie was working the streets?”

     “She was better off than that. Apparently she was a beautiful girl. She was in a club.”

     “I don't suppose Jesus mentioned which one.”

     His lips were thin.

     He said, “She was working at Danny Boy's, of course.”

     Bembo didn't ask me anything else. He didn't mention our dinner plans. For the rest of the ride into Bacolod, he gave me a verbatim account of the siege at the garage, which ended with the mechanic installing a new thermostat at cost.

     “A triumph of righteousness!” he said.

     But he hadn't forgotten. When I got out at the Green
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Fields he said, “I assume you have intentions tonight. I gather that. Do you want me to come along?”

     “No. It isn't much. I can do it myself.”

     “I would help if you needed me.”

     “I'd ask if I did.”

     “Do not be foolhardy. Please.”

     I took a cab out to Danny Boy's early, a couple of hours after dark. I told the driver to wait, went through the doors and stood inside the black curtain. The place was nearly empty. I didn't see Danny Boy.

     When the hostess came to me, I said, “I want Maricel.”

     She said, “Fine, sir, have a seat, I'll bring her to your table.”

     “I want to take her out.”

     She was a short woman in her fifties, with a thick neck and heavy lids that drooped over her eyes. They made her look as if she were ready to catch a fly on the end of her tongue.

     And she did poke out the fat tip of her tongue. She touched it to her upper lip while she formed what I took to be a suggestive smile.

     “Americans are always in a hurry,” she said.

     “How much?” I had my wallet in my hands.

     “We don't have carry-away service,” she said. “This isn't McDonald's.”

     “Don't tell me those girls are just for decoration.”

     “We're a nightclub. Our profit is in the drinks, and the girls' table fee.” The smile slunk out again. “What happens after closing is no concern of the management.”

     “But if nothing happens, the girl doesn't have a job for long.”

     Again the tongue peeked out.

     “We have few complaints.”

     “The table fee is how much?”

     “Sixty an hour.”

     “Say six hours. Two beers an hour, I make that six hundred pesos.”
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     “But we lose a dancer in the rotation.”

     “A couple of hundred to the hostess should take care of it.”

     She reached for it and said, “In a few minutes. She will change her dress.”

     She stuffed the money down the front of her blouse.

     “Americans hurry too much,” she said.

     I went out and waited. I didn't see anyone I recognized, until Maricel came out the front door, in jeans and T-shirt. She walked up to the taxi and got in beside me.

     “You ask for me,” she said.

     “My name is Jack.”

     “Maricel.”

     She sat straight against the seat. Her hands were in her lap. Her eyes went everywhere but to my face.

     “I wanted to see you.”

     She nodded stiffly.

     “We go to where?” she said.

     “I'm staying at the Green Fields.”

     “Yes.” An almost imperceptible moue. “I know Green Fields.”

     The cab pulled away. I thought I ought to say something more, but she didn't seem to expect it. She looked straight ahead and sat silent and still, tiny, lovely, perfect as a bisque doll. At the hotel I expected everyone to stare. She was so young. Nobody stared. Nobody noticed, I think, except for the hall porter, who wished me a very good night in a voice that was heartier than usual.

     In the room she stood by the bed. I told her to sit down and she did.

     “You will bathe?” she said.

     “I just want to talk,” I said. She looked at me for the first time. “Nothing else. Is that okay?”

     She didn't answer. I pulled up a chair in front of her.

     “I noticed you last night,” I said.

     “I see you also.”
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     “I'm wondering about Danny Boy's, do they treat you well?”

     She shrugged slightly; silent, ambiguous.

     “How long have you been working there?”

     “Running on five months already.”

     “There's four girls, I wonder if you know them.” I said their names without looking at the note.

     “Alma and Tetchie I know,” she said. “Tetchie lives with me in boardinghouse.”

     “Now? Tetchie lives with you in the boardinghouse?”

     “No. In the past.”

     “Where is Tetchie now?” I said.

     “Gone.”

     “What about Alma?”

     “Gone.”

     “Gone where?”

     “I do not know.”

     “They just left? They quit?”

     “Yes. Very fast.”

     “They didn't tell you where they were going?”

     “Very very fast.”

     “Fast, I don't understand. What do you mean fast? She was your friend, she must have told you where she was going.”

     “No. One night she works, next morning she is gone. She does not return.”

     “She went out with a customer, she didn't come back?”

     “Maybe.”

     “You don't know?”

     “I am also with customer.”

     “She never said anything? No good-bye?”

     “No good-bye.”

     I was trying to speak softly, slowly. I was trying to be gentle. But her eyes were looking wet. They smeared when she rubbed them, and she unfolded a small lace handkerchief from the pocket of her jeans.
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     I waited while she dabbed at the dampness on her cheeks.

     “She had clothes, right?” I said. “What did she do with her clothes?”

     “The next day Sir Orlando comes for her clothes. He says she is gone and he will send them to her.”

     The name hit me late. She had finished, and I was trying to think of the next question, when I heard what she had said.

     My voice sounded hollow when I said, “You know a man named Orlando?”

     She looked at me as if trying to discern the joke.

     “He is sitting with you last night,” she said.

     “That's Danny Boy.”

     “Yes. Sir Orlando. The owner of the club. Danilo Orlando is his name.”

     I had to get up. I walked around the room and tried to make connections. I saw Orlando and the two Padillas in the priest's room; killing the priest and Collins; and with Penney and Nonoy at the white sedan.

     Touching my shoulder. It knotted me inside.

     I sat in the chair again. She was holding the handkerchief to her face.

     “Tell me about the American, Penney.”

     “Friend of Sir Orlando.”

     “What does he do there?”

     “He visits there sometimes. They talk in the office of Sir Orlando.”

     “What about your customers? Do they treat you well?”

     “Some are good to me. Some are not good.”

     “The one last night, he isn't one of the kind ones.”

     She didn't answer. “Nonoy Paloma.”

     She kept her eyes down and said nothing.

     “That wasn't the first time you met him.”

     “He is there before.”
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     “You didn't want to go with him. You were with him before, you didn't want to go with him again.”

     She wouldn't look at me.

     “Girls are disappearing from Danny Boy's. Something's happening, isn't it? Tell me. You can tell me. I'll keep your secrets.”

     “Please sir. No more.”

     She put the handkerchief down to say this, and when she did I saw the dark flower of a bruise high on one cheek. She had covered it with powder. The damp handkerchief had wiped the makeup.

     She drew back when I reached to touch it.

     “Who did that?” I said. “Your customer? Nonoy?”

     She didn't speak, didn't move.

     “Why won't you tell me? Are you afraid?”

     No answer.

     I said, “I think Tetchie's dead. Tetchie and those others. You do, too.”

     “Please sir, my head is pain,” she said. “Very pain.”

     “I'm sorry.”

     “You have aspirin?” she said.

     “You want some?”

     She nodded. I went into the bathroom, got two tablets and a glass of water. When I came out the room was empty. The door was open.

     I walked to the head of the stairs, where the hall porter stood at his station.

     “Did the girl come here?”

     “Yes sir. She is gone already. That girl, she didn't steal anything, did she, sir?”

     “No.”

     “No problem with that girl?”

     “No. It's all right.”

     Back in the room, I shut myself behind the door. Maricel had left the handkerchief on the bed; I picked it up, wet and mascara-spotted. It seemed pitiful. The feel of it in my hand suffused me with sadness for her, for Alma
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and Tetchie and all the others, for the people and the place.

     I didn't know what was happening to me. I was never sentimental: never, never susceptible to the maudlin, for all my contact with other people's losses. How often had I fingered the tokens of tragedy—key charms, love letters, a child's stuffed toys—mundane relics that crime or accident had invested with poignancy—how often, without ever yielding to pathos? When it would have been so easy?

     Now the handkerchief and its banal dampness bore me down with a weight of grief. I told myself that this was to be expected. Too much time alone and lonely in a bizarre hot place.

     The handkerchief made a soft bump in the bottom of the wastebasket.

     I wished she hadn't left so quickly. I wanted to tell her: I'm sorry about your problems, I really am sorry, I went looking for you and that was my mistake, but I can't do anything for you—I can't. I can't. I can't.

· 19 ·

“Tell me about your wife,” Vangie said.

     “You mean now or then? I don't even know her now.”

     “Before.”

     “It was a long time ago. It feels like somebody else's life.”

     “What you remember,” she said. “Was she pretty?”

     “She was pretty. I won't say she was a knockout, but she took care of herself. Men would look at her when she walked down the street.”

     We were alone in the hut. It was the hottest part of what might have been the hottest day so far. I sat on a stool, holding a glass of tepid water.
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     Vangie was by a window, swishing a paper fan in her face. I saw that tiny wet droplets had formed below her ears, running down the underside of her jaw. I wanted to brush my lips there. I wanted her to pull back her hair, the way she did sometimes, so that I could see the curve of her neck and the hollow at her nape.

     “You loved her,” Vangie said.

     “In my way.”

     “Do you miss her?”

     “I don't think about her. It's finished. There's so much behind each of us now, it almost doesn't matter. Life goes on.”

     “But isn't she still a part of you? She must be.” I was already shaking my head. But she went on: “You were married for ten years. You raised a child. You must have feelings for her. How could it be any other way?”

     “I don't miss her. I don't think about her very often.”

     “I'm disappointed to hear that. It would be natural.”

     The fan stopped. She watched me over the top of its curve. She gave away little enough any time, but with most of her face hidden, just the steady eyes on me, that look could have been scorn or puzzlement or disbelief.

     “How did it happen, the divorce?”

     “It's not easy to explain. Two people, ten years, feelings change—is this important? I mean, if you're really interested, I'll do my best, but it's a long time ago and I can't see that it makes much difference.”

     “Not if you don't want.”

     “It would be just my side of it anyway. Something like this, there's always two sides. At least two. You asked her, you'd get a whole different story. I bet she doesn't sit around dwelling on it, either.”

     “Don't be sure,” she said.

     If she asks about your wife, she is yours, Bembo had told me a couple of days before, while Franklin drove. She will hold out as long as she can, because she won't want
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to admit that it matters to her. But if she truly cares, she will have to ask.

     The fan began to tick again. When it moved I glimpsed the speculative edges of her mouth.

     “You know in the Philippines we have no divorce.”

     “That's not the worst idea I ever heard.”

     “Therefore a woman has no second chances. Even if it were legally possible, once a Filipina gives her heart, it's gone forever.”

     “Filipino men don't get second chances, either.”

     “Men,” she said, “will always make arrangements to suit themselves.”

     It was a perfect opening for rancor, but she didn't let it in. She sounded wry, almost teasing.

     “It's awful to go through,” I said. “Even if there's nothing left in the marriage, it's still like cutting off your own fingers. When there's kids involved, it gets worse. If I ever get married again it will be for good.”

     Her eyes hadn't left me. They were big, soft eyes, delicate but deep.

     I said, “I understand more now. If I was married I'd be devoted to my marriage. If I had kids I'd be devoted to the kids. The next one would last.”

     “You're sure.”

     “If it went down, it wouldn't be for lack of trying. It wouldn't be me who ended it. I can say that.”

     I could feel hours and days departing with the sureness of a big bird rowing the air. The seamy weight of the last few nights had nothing to do with Vangie. The days were Vangie's, and I hadn't had enough of her—hadn't done what I intended, and was running out of time. I could see myself returning alone to the house, the emptiness embracing me like a wattled hag pulling a child to her bosom.

     “You say the right things, anyway,” she said. Somehow still keeping it light. She had that touch.

     “Let's not kid ourselves,” I said. “We've been doing a lot of dancing, a lot of round-and-round, that's fine. I'd
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rather do that with you than with anybody else I ever met. But what we're talking about is the two of us together. That's what it's been about all the time, and maybe we ought to face it straight for a little while.”

     Once more the fan stopped in front of her face.

     She said, “What?”

     “We both know. I'm out of here in a few days and I don't want to leave without you. I want you with me when I go.”

     “Jack, don't.”

     “I want you walking into America with me. I want you to hold my hand and walk into the house with me, and I want it to be our house. I want you there forever. Do you know how happy that would make me? Do you know what that would do for me?”

     “Please don't.”

     “Maybe it's not feasible, the two of us leaving together, not this time. But if we had an understanding. If you told me you'd be there, that would be good enough. I know if you said it, it'd happen.”

     “No.” With gentle feeling.

     “I want to change your life and I want you to change mine. I can be a good husband. I'm a good man. I've made mistakes but I can pull it off this time.”

     The fan had come down now. Her face was fluid. Hopeful, tortured, happy, fearful.

     “This is only the second time I ever asked anybody this. I know I'll never ask anybody else. Vangie, will you marry me?”

     “No,” she said.

     “I need you. You'd always have that to fall back on, the way I need you. It would be your security.”

     She said, “No.”

     “I want you to think about it.”

     “No.”

     “Why not?”

     She smoothed the housedress over her thighs. I had
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learned that it was one of the ways she bought time to compose herself.

     She said, “I told you at the beginning. Nothing will happen between us. I told you.”

     “We haven't had a lot of time together. I realize that. You must have a lot of questions about me. I wish we could do this right, spend all the time we need to find out about each other. But it isn't going to happen that way. If this is going to happen, we'll have to take some things on faith.”

     “Time isn't the problem.”

     “No?”

     “I already know you, Jack.”

     “Yeah? And what do you think?”

     She didn't say anything. All the hope and happiness had left her face. What was left looked like anguish.

     “What's the problem?” I said.

     She shook her head. A slow, mournful tolling.

     “Is it me?” I said. “You don't trust me, is that it?”

     She kept shaking her head.

     “Is it something else? What should I do? You can tell me. Whatever it is, you can tell me. I wish you'd tell me, I want you so bad, just tell me.”

     She put up a hand to stop me, and I did stop. But she kept shaking her head, tight-lipped, bleak, as if she had nothing to give me, not even answers.

     In the afternoons, Bembo and Franklin would come to the hut after they drove up. That day it was only Bembo, and he was late.

     He said, “The car is a casualty.”

     “It isn't here?”

     “In Hermosa. We experienced problems on the way down this morning. Franklin assured me it was nothing. This afternoon it gave up the ghost when we tried to climb the long hill out of town.”
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     “How'd you get here?”

     “The jeepney. Franklin is with the car in Hermosa, attempting repairs.”

     I stepped down out of the doorway.

     “That's just great,” I said. “We'll have to take the jeepney out of here.”

     He showed me the little pursed-mouth hesitation that he'd use when he wanted to say no without using the word: he hated to say no.

     “You don't want to take the jeepney?” I said.

     “This late in the afternoon, so close to darkness … they don't run very often when the sun goes down. Hardly at all. With good reason.”

     “We can't stay here.”

     “The bungalow,” he said.

     Vangie had come out to the door. In his grand way he said hello, and he told her about the car.

     “You shouldn't try the jeepney this late,” she said.

     “My opinion exactly, miss.”

     “Someone will give you a place for the night, if you don't mind a grass mat.”

     “We have arrangements already,” he said. He threw out an arm in a theatrical sweep toward the bungalow. “The alabaster palace.”

     Something tightened in her, I could tell.

     “It's all right,” I said. “We have permission.”

     She got Alex to show us a way through the fields. Something still nagged in her, it seemed to me. I could almost see her pushing it aside.

     She looked tender and melancholy when we said goodbye. I thought of the leaving I would take in a few days, when it wouldn't be just for hours, and it chilled me. I said good-bye and turned away fast.

     Alex brought us out the back side of the barrio, into a field of cane. We walked into it, single file, between rows. The stalks were tall. The leafy tops arched into a bower overhead, slashing across sun and sky.
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     A few minutes through the cane, we were at the foot of a forested incline that we began to climb, using a trail that ran through the trees, beside a dry gully. Maybe a quarter of a mile farther, the trees ended and we came out at the foot of the bungalow. A line of stone steps climbed up the little knoll, to the front door.

     Hector greeted us there like an innkeeper. He showed us to a room down the hall; it was big and bright, with a screened window that in a few minutes would have a sunset view. Down below the cutters were at work in a field, the edge of the cane standing like a wall, flaking off as the bright knives swung.

     Hector shut the window and turned on the air-conditioning.

     Vilma brought towels and soap, a razor and toothbrushes, and terry-cloth robes. The shower had walls of native stone. The fixtures were American, and the hot water worked—clouds of steam rolled out when Bembo showered.

     He emerged looking like a scrawny wet rat, lost in the terry-cloth. The air was cooling already, pumping out of grates in the floor; he pulled the robe tighter around his shoulders.

     The floors were the same polished slab as the sala .The bed was queen-sized, the dresser and table slick white wicker.

     The generator droned beneath our feet.

     “Rich men,” he said.

     After dinner we sat at the patio. Bats chased bugs, the night grew solid. Hector brought up a guitar and a two-liter bottle with a Shell Oil label. Tuba, he said; leaning hard on the second syllable.

     Now you're getting into the real Philippines, Bembo said.

     It was tart and astringent, with a lurking sweetness.
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     Tuba was supposed to be coconut beer, but it didn't taste like coconut. It didn't taste like anything I recognized, except maybe the undertones of motor oil. I drank one glass and Hector poured me another. He said a few words to Bembo, and Bembo said, “He tells you to be careful. It will knock you on your ass if you're not used to it.”

     The high was sneaky. Hector began to play the guitar and sing Ilonggo ballads. Before I could fight it, the tuba had slipped my legs out from under me, and the music was tugging off my shoes, and I was asprawl on a featherbed of strong drink and sultry night and weepy song.

     Hector filled my glass. I said to Bembo, “Back home I never drink this much.”

     “Back home you have no excuse to drink this much.”

     I said, “That reminds me. I've been thinking that you ought to visit the States. You've earned a vacation.”

     “Regrettably, the fare to the States is beyond my means.”

     “The company can handle it. You're a valued employee.”

     “I am a minor contractor, seldom-used and low-paid. Even if money were not a consideration, your government requires a visitors' visa. Only the well-heeled or the well-connected qualify. I am neither.”

     “You have connections now. We'll make a little end run around the embassy. The company has juice. They'll handle it. They'll pop for the ticket, too, when I tell them all you've done for me. If they won't, I will. When you get there you can stay with me.”

     “Don't make promises,” he said, and we both let it drop.

     We drank. Bembo matched me glass for glass. I had seen him drunk twice, and both times I'd been startled at that lupine surliness that seemed to come from nowhere, so unlike him. I should have noticed it coming on again; at least, I'd have been expecting it.

     Hector began another ballad and Bembo said, “This
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one is Cebuano, but it's still beautiful. Most Ilonggos understand Cebuano—they speak it on the other side of the mountains.”

     “What's it called?”

     “This song?” he said. “Usahay. Sometimes.”

     He was translating.

     “Sometimes I dream. I dream that we've fallen in love. Sometimes I'm troubled. Why am I alone in this life? Why does heaven jest with me?”

     When it was finished he said, “I used to court my wife with Usahay.”

     “I didn't know you were married.”

     “There are many things you don't know about me. But that's all right. She's dead twenty-two years. We had no children.”

     “An Ilongga?”

     “Yes an Ilongga, naturally an Ilongga, what else? I was thirty years old before I ever slept a night off this island. As it happens, she was from Hermosa town. I would come down at night to visit her. Sometimes it was right after a job. One night her mother gave me hell because blood dripped off my cane knife and stained the floor.”

     “The resistance, I've been meaning to ask you about that.”

     “Pfft. Nothing. Especially at that age—nothing. Isn't it odd, the way old men with so little life in them will cling so hard to it? While young ones with so much are so ready to throw it away?”

     “You must have some memories.”

     “We lived in the sticks and killed Japanese. They bled and died like anybody else. That's all. We were led by an American: there's a detail for you. He was a Navy ensign from the base in Cebu. An ensign. His boat had been torpedoed out in the straits, and he ended up with us.

     “We had Filipino officers, regular army, captains, even a major. But on the radio MacArthur's headquarters would talk only to the American ensign. MacArthur had
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the guns we needed. Excuse me, for a long time it was the promise of guns. Therefore the American ensign commanded us on our own territory. Shit. He couldn't have led ducks to a pond.”

     “I guess that's war.”

     “That's war all right.”

     I was on a woozy plateau; I didn't want to fight anybody.

     I said, “That song, it must have worked for you, huh? I'm thinking, maybe I ought to give it a try.”

     He cocked an eye at me.

     “Are we having difficulties with the reluctant Vangie?”

     “I don't understand what's going on. I know she likes me. You'd have to pay attention to see it, but I know. Everything goes great right up to the moment of truth. And she says no.”

     “Don't tell me!”

     “Not just no, but flat-out, forget-it, no.”

     “Brava for the Ilongga,” he said.

     “Thank you.”

     “In America, the girls just fall over when a desirable man walks by?”

     “It happens now and then, something like that.”

     “Not with Filipinas. They don't give themselves away. You know, a man here might court a girl for months without even bothering to ask the question. He knows it won't do him any good. You're here for a few days, you expect her to swoon so you can take her home like a trinket? Your souvenir of the trip?”

     To Hector, in English, he said, “The 'Cano has balls. Not much sense, but plenty of balls.”

     Hector held his guitar and nodded without comprehension.

     “I appreciate your support,” I said.

     “You don't need my support. You'll get what you want. Let the girl have her moment of self-respect. Let her pretend
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that she held out for a couple of days. Can't you give her that?”

     “I don't know what you mean.”

     “It's done. It's all over.” He was yelling. “Don't you know? It was all over the second you decided you wanted her. Think about it! You show up here with your pink skin, your pockets full of dollars, that glow, that goddamn prosperous glow. And an immigrant visa, the ticket to the land of milk and honey—every American bachelor over here has a green card to give away. Half of the people in this country would kill the other half to get an immigrant visa, and you have one to bestow on some lucky girl.”

     He stopped to drink. He was calmer when he put the glass down.

     “You've got it all. The skin, the dollars, the green card. My support, you must be joking. You've seen Lanao. You tell a barrio girl you want to take her away from that shit-hole, she's going. Believe me. If you want to bring her home with you, she's going.”

     “I don't see it happening. But if she does, it won't be for money or a visa. She's not that kind.”

     “Vangie's a treasure, don't get me wrong. She's a true Filipina, the best. And you're a nice guy. However, that is irrelevant. If you want her she's yours. It's a foregone conclusion.”

     He turned to Hector and said, “She truly is precious. He doesn't have any idea what he's getting. Isn't that the way? The ‘Canos take our very best, they flash their dollars and they've got it. Most of the time they don't even bother to say thank you.”

     I was turning it over in my mind. I was thinking that I didn't care why she went with me, as long as she did. In time I'd make it right. I was wondering if it might be true, hoping it was, when I heard what he had said.

     I told him, “Someday I'd like to know what you've got against Americans.”

     “You think you would like to know.”
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     “I'm sitting here. I'm listening.”

     “Listen all you want. It won't do you any good. What I feel is not in words, it is here”—he slapped his chest—“and the problem with you people is that you are crippled here, where it counts. You say the right things, you go through the motions, but in here, you are stunted.”

     “Okay, that's one.”

     “Don't do that! It isn't just one on a list! The heart is everything! What are you if you don't have it there? We have it, Hector and I, and Vangie, and the squatters, and even soldiers, and even guerrillas, we fuck up too often, granted, but not because our hearts are withered.”

     He leaned over the table. He looked straight at me. When he spoke again, his voice was dead calm.

     “Let's be fair. Your way is more efficient. Look at results—there's no arguing with results. Americans live in comfort. Americans walk on the moon, Americans win gold medals and drive big cars. You have hospitals and clean streets … you people can really do it. And we're proud of you for it! We are! It's like watching our cousins make a success.

     “That's it—you are family. For us there is nothing like family, and nobody like Americans. We can't get enough of you. We try to talk the way you talk. We want to live the way you live. If it says Made in U.S.A., we must have it. We are obsessed with you. You dominate us without even trying, and it is killing us. Still we love you. You sons of bitches, we love you.”

     Beside him, Hector was full of grave dignity; he did understand, after all.

     “We love you,” Bembo said, “and you hardly know that we exist. Can you imagine how that hurts? But we still love you. After the war, you rebuilt your enemies while you gave us next to nothing. It does you no honor to scorn loyal friends that way, but you don't seem to understand honor the way we do, so what can we expect? We still love you.”
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     He stopped and lit a cigarette in his careful, unhurried way, certain that I had no reply. He took a couple of drags before he spoke.

     “You don't mind if I get personal? Speaking frankly, when I met you I wanted you to be a jerk. It would have been much easier to take. But you treated me with decency, and I was pathetically grateful. To be treated with decency by an American. You had me. I would do anything for you now. It's obscene.

     “Every kindness you show me is a knife in my back. You just make it harder. I know I will never see you again. I will never hear from you. You are an American, after all, you are busy winning gold medals and flying in space. I will never hear from you again but I will think of you too often. I will remember our exploits with too much fondness. I will be like a jilted girl waiting for a long-gone Lothario. Already I hate myself for it. But that's how it is when you live in the heart the way we do. We don't discard our loves. They are too precious to us. We hold on to them long after they've stopped being useful.”

     I was about to speak. He stopped me with a raised hand, the butt of the cigarette pointed at my face.

     He said, “Don't say a word. I don't require assurance. I don't want to hear it.”

     He spoke a few words of Ilonggo, and Hector chorded the guitar and began to sing. Bembo filled our glasses and we sat listening to the songs, drinking until the tuba was finished, and then we went in.

     We took turns using the bathroom. I finished first and got into bed, and he came out a few minutes later, wearing boxer shorts big as bloomers. His bony little frame made no disturbance when he lay down on the other side of the mattress.

     He lit a cigarette and drew on it as he stared up at the ceiling.

     He said, “If you marry her here, you can't just bring her home with you. I looked into it today. Your Immigration
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Service won't allow it anymore. You file a petition from the States. The paperwork takes three or four months, and she must wait here until it is processed. The alternative is to help her get a tourist visa. You know someone at the embassy. With a tourist visa, she can fly tomorrow. Get her over there, then marry her. You can be together while you file for her green card. They frown on it, but it's legal. That's how I would approach it if I were you.”

     I said, “You really think Vangie will come with me?”

     “I don't know why not. You must be the answer to her prayers.”

     “I need her, too.”

     “You are smart to realize it.”

     “I'm sorry you don't want to visit me back home.”

     He was watching his smoke rise.

     “What I said was, don't make promises.”

     “I can promise to do my best. Does this mean that you'd like to make the trip?”

     He said, “What do you think?”

· 20 ·

The next morning was Saturday. Bembo and I walked together to the barrio, retracing the route that Alex had showed us: the trail down the forested hillside, down to the cane field, then between the cane rows until the field ended behind the barrio. Bembo stayed a couple of hours, trying not to get in the way, looking restless. Franklin still hadn't returned by then, so Bembo decided that the car must still be under repair in Palo. He left to catch a jeepney into the town, and promised to return with Franklin that afternoon, to pick me up.

     For most of the day it was airy and easy between Vangie and me. People were around, and that was a distraction;
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I didn't mind. In the afternoon, though, we found ourselves alone together. Somehow—I don't remember—one of us mentioned Tuesday morning. My flight out of Bacolod was Tuesday morning.

     She said, “When you get home, will you think about me?”

     “Does it matter?”

     “That's cruel.” I saw that she was hurt.

     “I'll think about you,” I said. “I'll never forget you. How could I?”

     She liked that.

     “If you were with me,” I said, “you wouldn't have to ask.”

     “No,” she said. Adamant. “Don't. Not again.”

     “You mean it.”

     “I meant it from the start. I told you.”

     “I'm not going to make you get into it again,” I said. “But what I would like to know—you don't have to answer me, but I would like to know—if there was no chance, why did you let me?” Before she could say a word, I said, “I know you told me. But you didn't stop me. You could have stopped me but you didn't.”

     Anybody else would have pretended not to know what I meant, or would have embarrassed us both with artificial apology. But Vangie was never coy when it mattered, and she was incapable of artifice.

     “It was selfish,” she said. “I shouldn't have. I was wrong.” She said it with such quietness; but it was a quiet like the stillness before a storm, the kind that makes you pay attention.

     It made me want her even more. Whatever she did seemed to make me want her more.

     “Don't worry about it,” I said. “I'm a big boy. But why?”

     Her hands twisted in her lap.

     “To imagine it,” she said. “To think how it would be. It made me happy.”
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* * *

     A little while later I left her. It was all too much, my desire set against the steady progress of time, Tuesday morning onrushing.

     I told her I wasn't feeling well, that I was going up to the bungalow to rest; I asked her to send Bembo and Franklin when they came.

     I took the trail through the cane. Before I reached the forest, the boy named Alex came running up behind me, calling Hey Joe. He had a note from Bembo, sent up by jeepney. Automobile still under repair; will return tomorrow.

     I wasn't anxious to stay. But I didn't know how to find Bembo in Hermosa, and I didn't want to try getting to Bacolod on my own—the jeepney routes baffled me. My clothes were rank, but Vilma took them while I was in the shower, and in a couple of minutes she had them washed, spread out to dry on the bougainvillea.

     I showered Filipino style, sluicing out of a bucket. When I was finished I didn't bother to use a towel, just closed the door and opened the window, lay down naked and wet and sleepy, letting the dampness evaporate, cooling me as I slept. An afternoon nap, naked and wet, is one of the tropics' carnal delights.

     The room was chilly when I woke up. The generator was running and the floor register was churning out cool air. I put on a robe and went out. Nobody was in the house, but on the patio Luis Correon sat alone, drinking scotch.

     He caught me looking, waved me over. I came out and went to the table. A bodyguard with a shotgun stood in the shade of a big mango tree; another leaned against a corner of the bungalow.

     “You're here!” he said.

     “My car broke down—”
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     “I know, I talked to Hector. Great. You'll be around for my little blowout tonight. Saturday night, you know.”

     “If you have plans, I'll get out.”

     “The hell you will, you'll enjoy my hospitality.”

     I wondered where I stood with him, how much he knew about what I'd been doing. Whatever he knew, it didn't seem to bother him.

     “I appreciate it,” I said.

     “Hector and Vilma, they're taking good care of you?”

     “Terrific.”

     “That's about how it went last night.”

     “Now you've seen my farm.” He had a cunning look. “You want to give me a hard time about it?”

     “I wouldn't do that.”

     “A gracious guest. But you've got your thoughts on the matter.”

     “It's a hard life,” I said.

     “Life is hard. You and me, we're privileged exceptions. Down there, that's how the majority of the planet lives. Americans don't get their noses rubbed in it. But it's a fact.”

     Vilma came out with my clothes. I excused myself and went in, and when I came out again, Luis had gone to his room, next to mine.

     I didn't see him again until after the sun was down. In that time Hector put out bottles of Black Label and a tub of iced beer in the sala. Vilma set platters of food on a table. Julio Ferrar drove up with Baby Correon; their bodyguards mingled with Luis's outside. Right behind them was a Toyota Land Cruiser, Luis's driver bringing four young women in gay dresses.

     They came in with loud whispers among themselves, flocking and giggling. I recognized two of them from the disco at the Green Fields; their eyes skimmed around the
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place to Ferrar and Baby and me, to the furniture, the food.

     When they appeared, Correon came out. He wore a fresh white shirt with the cuffs turned up, and pleated black slacks that hid his paunch. His hair was combed straight back. He greeted Ferrar and Baby from across the sala. He gave the girls the sort of up-and-down examination you might give to a fresh paint job on a fence, and he said, “Very good as always, I approve, but don't be greedy. We have a guest—Julio, you remember Jack from the States—so I want you to share.”

     He was standing beside me. He called over to the girls. One of them detached herself from the others and came to us. She seemed shy but she didn't hesitate.

     “I'm giving you a good one,” Correon said to me.

     He spoke to her in Ilonggo; first in the tone of a question, which she answered, then as instruction.

     “Her name is Lina,” Correon said. “I told her, she's yours tonight, she shouldn't leave your side, and above all she shouldn't let those lechers touch her.” He was enjoying himself. Louder, mock-gruff, he said to Ferrar and Baby, “You'll have to make do with three between you. It's more than you can handle anyway.” Back to me he said, “She claims she's never had an American before. Don't disappoint her.”

     I said, “She's yours—I wouldn't want my host to go without.”

     “Don't worry about me. I'm taken care of.”

     That was when another set of headlights rose up the knoll and crunched the gravel outside. The front door opened. Nonoy Paloma came in. He held it open. And Vangie walked in after him.

     That night, when I had time to think about it, I marveled at what guts it must have taken to enter the way she did: head up, wrapping herself in level disinterest as she stopped a couple of steps inside. What nerve, what enormous
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discipline. Because she knew I was there, knew I'd be watching.

     Only much later have I realized that it wasn't a question of guts at all, or nerve, or discipline. She had no choice.

     “Here she is,” Luis said.

     She wore the red dress from the first time I'd met her; but with a wide patent-leather belt that raised the hemline and gave it some form. Her heels seemed a little higher, and I didn't have to guess whether she was wearing makeup.

     Luis spoke a few words in Ilonggo, and she answered, and he went across the room to her. He had been beside me, so his path followed the line of sight between me and her. I watched her as he approached, and though her eyes seemed to be on him, I knew that at least part of her gaze was mine, and that some message for me was encrypted in the edges of her bland expression.

     I knew it was there but I couldn't read it.

     He reached for her hands. She put them out for him to hold, and he took them and leaned in and kissed her on the lips. He had an arm around her when he faced us.

     “You know Julio … this is Jack,” he said. “Jack is from the States. He's been in the barrio.”

     “I've seen him,” she said. “Hello, Baby,” she said. And to me, “Hello.”

     “Don't get any ideas,” Luis said. He wagged a playful finger at me. “This is private stock.”

     I endured the next couple of hours. Shock carried me part of the way. And I could occupy myself with the stultifying mystery of it; I had questions to pose, conversations to replay while I stood with a glass in my hand and looked at the two of them together; Luis touching, hovering, proprietary.

     I got close to her once. She was alone at the buffet table, putting food on her plate. I got up and stood beside her, filling my own plate. She wouldn't look at me, though, and I didn't know what to say.
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     It wasn't a rowdy party. (“Luis's blowouts are much more fun when she's not here,” Ferrar said to me at one point. “Too bad for you. Bad timing.”) It wasn't much of a party at all. We drank and ate. Baby picked up a microphone and crooned some Elvis Presley with a sing-along tape. There were moments when I forced myself to stop watching Vangie, and moments when I couldn't bear to watch.

     It ended fast. Baby and Ferrar arm-wrestled for the third girl, and while they struggled, Luis walked Vangie down the hall. She went along with him; all her modesty going down the hall with him, all her reserve and her beauty and her self-possession going, with a crushing readiness that made me wonder how often, for how long. She didn't look back. Luis did, though. He stopped and leered over his shoulder at me and said, “Remember we're neighbors; don't be too loud, but if you have to be loud, don't be long.”

     I watched the door shut behind them. Ferrar and Baby gathered up the others and took them to their rooms, across the hall from Luis's and mine.

     I was alone on a couch with Lina. I sat, immobile. I thought of Vangie and Luis behind the door. Lina was uncertain but patient. She had taken Luis literally: hadn't left my side. Three of the bodyguards came in for food, saw us there, and scurried. I imagined them out there in the darkness, lurking like hungry dogs.

     “You are American,” Lina said. Her first words to me.

     “Yes.”

     “Very nice, the States.”

     “Yes.”

     She held my hand and stood.

     “We go,” she said, and I let her pull me up.

     The click of my door sounded loud when I closed it. Lina went back to lock it. I sat on the edge of the bed, and when I didn't move, she turned out the lights and stood by the closet to undress. She hung her clothes up carefully.
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She opened the window and closed the air grate in the floor. I realized that she had been here before. Maybe with Luis, I thought.

     She went to shower, came back damp, in a towel. When I went in I could hear water running next door. I tried to imagine them on the other side of the wall. But their intimacy, the shapes it might take, was beyond me.

     When I came back, Lina was lying on the sheet, naked in moonlight. She had rich skin that was even darker against the white cotton. She was small, slim.

     She watched me as I came to the bed. The moon was bright enough that I could see her eyes, but there wasn't much to see. She was neutral. I don't mean jaded or bored or abject or even empty. She was just there, waiting.

     I took off my towel and crouched next to her on the sheet. She didn't move. I slid one hand along her body, over the flat of her stomach and the sharpness of her hips and the wispy crown of her mons.

     It was just automatic. I felt no desire. I kept trying to see Luis with Vangie in moonlight and shadow, then Luis with Lina. I was trying to see myself with Vangie. None of it worked.

     I moved over her in the offhand way you might cover a boiling pot or tie your shoes, when it is done before you think of doing it. She felt fragile under me. She put her hands on my shoulders, not in affection but to keep me politely at a distance. When I took her she turned her face away. I did too, and we each of us fled alone to private shames and sorrows.

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