Sugarland

     I watched her take the steps up the knoll, head up and shoulders back, climbing to where I stood. She stopped a couple of paces from me. She was in her housedress again, once more the provincial maiden.

     She said, “I have to talk to you.”

     “No you don't. We don't have to put ourselves through this again.”

     “Don't judge me,” she said.

     Who am I to judge? is what went through my mind. But I couldn't find the words. My hands just moved vaguely and dropped to my sides.

     “Not until you know what's involved,” she said.

     “I can guess. It's an old story.”

     She shook her head decisively.

     I said, “Hey, I've seen this place. I don't blame you for trying to keep your head above water.”

     Vilma came through the sala, stopped abruptly. Vangie said a couple of words to her, and Vilma went away.

     To me Vangie said, “It isn't a matter of choice.”

     “You don't have to go into it. What's the point?”

     She was just a couple of steps away. It was a chasm.

     “Try to understand. I don't want you to be angry.”

     “Angry, I've got no right.” My hands were trembling; my hands were always steady. I made fists to stop the shaking. I said, “The only complaint I've got, you should have told me. You could have done that. I mean, I see now, it all makes sense. I'm an understanding person, you could have told me.” The words chattered out, spontaneous, like the trembling of my hand. “It would have been better to know, to get the picture, some idea of it, before things got out of control. I wish you had done that. I wish you could have trusted me. You would have showed me some respect if you had trusted me that way. Before feelings got hurt.”

     “Jack,” she said, and she moved close to me. Closer

     “I knew he liked me. My father always had work. If there was just a single crew drawing wages, my father would be on it. Nothing was ever said, but we knew it was because the big boss liked me. He sponsored me through high school. My parents could never have afforded it. Tuition, books … the jeepney was two pesos each way to Hermosa, every day. My parents couldn't afford even that.

     “I knew it meant a debt, what he would expect. Nobody told me, but I knew. Sooner or later. I was surprised that he waited as long as he did.

     “The day after my graduation he sent me a gift. A watch. My Lord, nobody in my family, nobody in the barrio, ever owned a watch. The driver who delivered it said he'd be back at the same time tomorrow to pick me up. Very casual. My mother cried. But that's all. We'd had plenty of time to get used to the idea.

     “I wore my school uniform. It was the best dress I had. The car brought me here, and we had dinner. Luis can be a gentleman. He thought the uniform was amusing. He apologized for overlooking me, and the next day the driver brought me dresses and stockings and shoes. I don't want you to think it was a terrible trauma. It wasn't. We grow up fast here.”

     She said this as if it were a recitation. In the wake of passion her dry calm was jarring. I tried to find some bitterness in it, some catch of hatred or resentment; anything but this terrible resilience.

     I said, “That's monstrous, all of it.”

     “No, I was flattered. A hacendero doesn't have to go to all that trouble to get a girl on his farm. He can take what he wants. That's accepted. It's always been that way.”

     “He's been using you ever since.”

     “Don't pity me, Jack. I won't have it. In the barrio they don't pity me. I'm envied. It reflects well on me, that he

* * *

     Later she sat up in bed and cradled my head in her lap. She stroked my face and traced a line of soft kisses along my brow. It should have been splendid languor, but I kept thinking about Tuesday morning. Forty-eight hours, I'd be in Manila, ready to fly home, and I wanted her with me when I did.

     She wouldn't talk about plans.

     I said, “Are you afraid of him?”

     “I've never been happier than right now. Don't spoil this.”

     “Is that it? You don't want to leave because you're worried about what he might do?”

     “I've thought about it.”

     “He sees you once a month, I can't believe he would care. Not that he wouldn't be losing the best day of his month. But I don't think he realizes that. Once a month. It can't be that important to him.”

     “He doesn't think like most people.”

     “If he ever found out about us …”

     She laughed an empty, graveyard-at-night laugh.

     “He's in Bacolod,” she said. “Every Sunday at this time. Noon mass at the cathedral, with his wife and his son, he never misses it.”

     “Vilma and Hector.”

     “Vilma and Hector are from the barrio, and in the barrio we stick together, remember? Nobody will tell him. Nobody told you about him and me, the same reason. They're on my side. They want me to have a chance.”

     “But if he did find out. What would he do?”

     She twisted my hair into a ringlet around one finger, and she bent down again and kissed me full on the mouth.

     “I don't know,” she said. And, “I believe he would kill us both.”

* * *

     I held out the envelope and said, “You brought this for me today.”

     I could see the calculation go across his face. It settled into a dumb look and he said, “No sir, not me.”

     “It's no problem. I just want to talk.”

     He watched my hand go into my pocket, come out with a red bill. Fifty. He took it with reverence, folded it until it was the size of my thumbnail, and stuck it into a slit along the sole of one rubber sandal.

     “Maybe that's the one I bring.”

     “This one and some others.”

     “Maybe.” Guarded. “I'm not sure.”

     “I just want to know who gave it to you.”

     “A man. The same man each time. That's all you want to know?”

     “I want to know who he is.”

     By now it was mostly a matter of curiosity. Vangie and Tuesday morning had pushed the rest aside.

     But nobody wants to miss a punch line.

     “Ah, sir, I don't know his name, no kidding, I don't. I see him in Green Fields sometimes, but I don't know his name.”

     “If I had a name, that would be worth at least a hundred.”

     He was instantly tortured.

     “A hundred … if I knew … no kidding, I don't know who he is.” He brightened. “But I can find out.”

     “You do that,” I said. “That's a hundred.”

     “Plus expenses.”

     “Get me his name, we'll talk about expenses.”

     I went up to the room. Eddie was right behind me, with ice water. I drank some, and put the envelope in my back pocket before I dialed Bertina and Rogelio.

     A woman's voice answered, and I said, “Bertie.”

     She said, “I am not Bertie.”

just left her rooming house, a few doors away.

Police speculate that the two may have been victims of a new holdupper gang. However, the assailants did not remove Rojas's wallet, containing several hundred pesos.

· 22 ·

The funeral parlor is one American institution that Filipinos have never embraced. They abhor the idea that a beloved, newly jolted into eternity, should lie alone in a strange gloomy place.

     If there is family nearby, an undertaker will surrender the prepared corpse within a few hours, to stay in the sala until burial. There will always be light, at least one candle on the coffin; at least one of the living will always keep vigil, though most often the room will be bright and crowded. The vigil can last for more than a week, until relatives and friends have been summoned from remote provinces, and after a few days it may become as much a ritual of joyful reunion as of mourning. A flat coffin lid becomes a handy place to rest a bottle of beer.

     Or so I'm told. When I got to Rogelio and Bertie's house the undertaker had delivered Bembo's body within the hour. There was no joy, no drinking. About a dozen people stood in the room and around the casket, most of them looking stunned. I recognized Franklin and Rogelio, and Bertie, who sat weeping in a corner, consoled by two women I didn't know. Rogelio met me at the door and told me how Bembo had died, no surprise.

     The casket was on a bier. Behind it were three electric

     He was digging a piece of paper out of his pocket. It had been crumpled and smoothed.

MARICEL SOTO
2220 GATUSLAO STREET
WITNESS

“I MOURN THR DEMISE OF JUSTICE”

     “Who?” he said.

     “A self-righteous bastard who loves to play games.”

     “Why?”

     I shook my head and said, “The call, I don't suppose he said who it was.”

     Bertie blurted from beside the coffin: “I know the voice from before. I don't know the name, but I know the voice. He called you here. Remember? Perfect English.”

     I saw myself going to the telephone. It was breakfast time. On the other end of the line was Nonoy Paloma.

     Faithful retainer.

     “You must consider leaving Negros,” Rogelio said. “There is grave danger for you.”

     For me, I thought, and for everyone around me. “I can fly tomorrow.”

     “Last flight to Manila, ten-twenty,” Rogelio said. “Plenty of time.”

     Tonight, he meant.

     “I have to go to Lanao first.” I was looking straight at Franklin.

     “Not much time for that,” Rogelio said.

     “To go to Lanao, we must hurry,” Franklin said. “We must leave right away.”

     “You'll take me?”

     “No problem.”

     “They may be watching for me. They've got more reason

     My wristwatch said 7:02. I gave Rogelio a fistful of pesos.

     The coast road heads south from the airport. While Franklin drove I kept looking behind us. Several sets of headlights stuck with us as we overtook slower traffic. But when we turned off the highway, outside Bago, everybody else kept going south. We were alone, rapping toward Hermosa and the hills. My watch said seven-fifteen.

     We plowed past the tall stands of cane, and in the settlements we routed dogs and chickens from the roadside. The car kept chugging; the engine had a steady, throaty sound. Between Palo and Hermosa we met an improvised checkpoint, a couple of dozen soldiers and a row of boulders that they'd placed across the pavement. The passport and the papers blew us through; the soldiers rolled away one of the boulders and we were gone.

     The Cortina strained on the long uphill stretch outside Hermosa. I told myself that it always strained going up hills. Then we topped out the rise, and it sounded throatier again. We plunged on. The road was empty. After we left Hermosa we didn't see another vehicle.

     In the dark I missed the little cues that I had picked up on the daytime trips. But Franklin knew. He braked to turn, and we were headed down the spur road to the barrio before I recognized it.

     He parked in the clay courtyard and left the engine running. My watch said 8:29.

     Day or night, the barrio was a maze. The path to Vangie's was a series of juts and angles and narrow paths that I never followed twice the same. It didn't seem to matter, though. I always came out right as long as I kept heading for the far back corner of the settlement. That's what I did this time, and it worked again. I turned a corner and found myself in front of the hut. I recognized it from the potted

     Now it was her hands holding mine. Tight and secure.

     “I need time,” she said.

     “Time”—I gestured to the door, the darkness, feeling desperate—“I've got minutes, is what I've got.”

     “You have as much time as we both need. Go home, think about it. We'll both think. Write me some letters. Filipinas go crazy for love letters.”

     “I've thought about that. It scares the hell out of me. That distance. Not just the miles. You can't know how far I had to come to get here, how far apart we were. We'll never get over it again. I'll write you letters, fine, and you'll write to me. We'll think about each other, and we'll think we should do something about it. It won't happen, though. Not to be a pessimist about it, I'm trying to be plucky as all get-out, but I'm afraid if I walk out of here alone, it's the last I see of you. With all the best intentions, that's how it'll turn out.”

     Three or four times she started to speak—as if trying words in her mind, finding them inadequate—and then seemed to settle within. She said, “How long will you be in Manila?”

     “Only as long as it takes me to get a flight.”

     “Can you wait two days … no, three?”

     “Wait? For what?”

     “For me,” she said. “I have to get my mother out of here. Bring her to Bacolod, so that he can't find her at once. He may be upset when he hears that I'm gone. After a while he'll calm down, but she shouldn't be here when he finds out. I don't want to have to worry about her. I'll be so far away, after all.”

     “You're coming with me?”

     “Isn't that you want?”

     I said, “Let me get the picture. Three days, you meet me in Manila, we go home together, you marry me, we're never apart again, is that the size of it?”

     I had an image of myself standing at the airport gate. But Vangie wasn't in it. I was waiting at the gate, just waiting, disappointed, crushed.

     “I'll be at the Silahis hotel, if you have any problems, you want to talk.”

     “I doubt it,” she said. “I won't be near a phone until I get to Bacolod.”

     “This is happening fast,” I said. “I realize that. If there's any reason you might change your mind, just say so. Now's the time. I could take it if you told me now. But finding another way, I don't know, that would be too much. You sure you want this?”

     She said, “I've wanted this, I've wanted you, since before I ever met you.”

     She let me take her lightly in my arms, and I kissed her with more longing and tenderness and need than I ever knew was in me.

     She stepped back as the old woman came up to me. Rosita's frail hands came up and grasped my collar.

     “Take care my daughter,” she said before she released me.

     “Now go,” Vangie said, and I went.

     I told Franklin all about it on the way down. The Cortina kept running, and he drove it hard. The soldiers were gone, the boulders were out of the road. By my watch we had four minutes when we got to the airport.

     It isn't a big airport, and Franklin took me straight to the terminal doors, the Philippine Airlines counter on the other side. Rogelio was there with the tickets and the boarding passes.

     The jetliner was out on the ramp, engines alive and shrill. The only other planes were military, two Huey helicopters and a T-28 propeller fighter with rockets slung under its wings, guarded by sentries. Two ground handlers had begun to roll the stairway away from the jetliner's

   · 23 ·

I got a room at the Silahis, and the next morning I slept late. I ordered breakfast and called Dalzell's number at the embassy; the woman who answered the phone told me he wasn't in yet. Nearly ten o'clock.

     I said, “Are they by any chance playing ball in the States?”

     “That isn't a bad guess,” she said.

     I took a taxi up the boulevard to the go-go palace off Del Pilar. I walked again out of the heat into the cold air, again past the upturned chairs to the horseshoe bar where ten or twelve Americans watched the TV on the wall. It struck me, how little time had passed since the other morning here; and in that time, how much I had seen and felt, how much I had done.

     I sat on the stool beside Dalzell. He didn't turn around at first, and when he did he just said, “Hey, how you doin'? Back from the wars, huh?”

     “Made it.”

     Thousands of miles away the basketball zipped, zipped, arched and flipped the net.

     “Lakers,” he said. “Awesome. You get business wrapped up?”

     “As well as I could under the circumstances.” I had already decided that I wouldn't go into it. I figured he didn't care. If it got too complicated, nobody cared. I said, “This isn't America. You've got to adjust your standards.

     That's the spirit.

wait for hours in the sun and the rain, and we turn most of 'em down. Why should we treat you any different?”

     I leaned closer; it was noisy in Los Angeles.

     “Because that's them, and this is you and me.”

     He was beginning to grin.

     “You really would fit in over here.”

     “I know how piss-ant systems work.”

     “She has her passport?”

     I took it out and put it in front of him. He put it in his pocket without looking at it.

     “I hope you know what you're doing,” he said. “How long does it take?”

     “Rubber stamp, that's it. Once I get back to work. You at the same hotel? Tell you what, I'll get it back to you this afternoon.”

     “I appreciate this.”

     “We have to look out for each other, strangers in a strange land.”

     “Strange is one word for it.”

     “Jack,” he said, “I assume if you're taking this little dolly home with you, you won't be going back to Negros.”

     His breeziness had a firm undercurrent.

     “What's the difference?” I said.

     “Come on, man, don't yank my chain. I'm doing you a favor so you can go home happy. You want to screw around over here, you don't need that visa.”

     “I have no reason in the world to go back to Negros. I'm headed the other way, sooner the better.”

     “I'm glad,” he said. “That crap is all theirs. They're good at it. It's not for you and me.”

REBS, VIGILANTES TANGLE ANEW

Information has reached Bacolod of another major encounter between the Sacramentong

     I stopped to buy roses on the way to the airport, still got there early. The domestic airport, across the field from the international terminal, is about the size of a forties-era supermarket. The arrival area and the baggage claim are in an annex, partitioned from the rest of the building. Disembarking passengers cross the airstrip pavement, entering the annex by a single large door at the rear. The only exit is another door out onto the sidewalk with its hyperactive menagerie of drivers and porters and vendors. An airport cop guards the exit. I gave him twenty pesos and he literally looked the other way while I slipped inside. It had the ambience of a warehouse. Grimy yellow walls, bare concrete floor, a few benches; steaming hot.

     I walked to the open door at the back. From a bench there I could see the apron with several planes parked. I sat on the bench with the flowers beside me. It was two-twenty. Her flight would be lifting off.

     Three or four times planes came and parked, disgorged passengers and took on others, and left. There were no announcements, no video screens to tally the flights. At first I ignored the planes and the lines of passengers that came across the pavement, into the annex. Still too early. But at about a quarter after three a plane trundled up and stopped, the stairway rolled out and the people came off. This time I met the first of them at the door.

     “Bacolod?”

     “Tacloban.”

     At 3:20: “Bacolod?”

     “Davao.”

     At 3:25: “Bacolod?”

     “Cebu.”

     At 3:35, to a young woman in a linen suit, a Vuitton purse: “Bacolod?”

     At the ticket counter I found that the next plane was due at six; the next after that was the night flight that arrived half an hour before midnight. The ride from hotel to airport had been a grinding thirty minutes, and would be worse at rush hour. I decided to stay. Across the street was a coffee shop. I bought two newspapers and read and waited. The count of zombies' graves in Laguna had risen to two hundred. The customs chief denied allegations of corruption in his department.

     At a quarter to six the rosebuds were drooping on their stems. I left them in the coffee shop and went across the road to the terminal. The guard took my twenty pesos. In the gloaming outside the back door I breathed jet fumes and watched three planes pull up during the next half hour.

     “Bacolod?”

     “Baguio.”

     “Bacolod?”

     “Zamboanga.”

     “Bacolod?”

     “Yes, from Bacolod.”

     I stood close enough that I could see every face as they passed; could have counted them. I didn't see her. Even so, I went back in and looked them all over again and went out on the sidewalk to look around there.

     At the hotel there was no message. If she had gotten to Bacolod she could have found a phone, I thought. Therefore she did not get to Bacolod. I waited in the room, and around half past ten I took a cab to the airport. By eleven I was standing by the back door with a sense of weary duty. Only one plane came in.

     “Bacolod?”

     “Yes, Bacolod.”

     She wasn't there.

     The next morning's flights came in at eight and a little before twelve. She wasn't there. I went to the ticket office near the departure gates. I grabbed a ticket agent and gave

     “Tomorrow I will take you,” he said. “Tomorrow morning early.”

     “I want to go tonight.” He didn't say no. I pulled him off to the side, away from the others. I said, “This is important to me.”

     “It is a dangerous trip. Hermosa is a critical area. Daytime, maybe not so bad, night, very dangerous.”

     “I was just up there, two nights ago. You see, I got back okay.”

     “Is the barrio on a hacienda? Permission is required to visit a hacienda.”

     “I have permission. I have all the documents you'd need.”

     He took them under a bulb that burned at the entrance of the terminal. He looked at them closely.

     “I'll give you a hundred dollars.” He wouldn't earn that in a week.

     “U.S. dollars,” he said. “Not Australian.”

     “U.S.”

     He went back to the papers.

     “I bring you to the barrio and leave you?”

     “I don't know if I'll be staying. You might have to wait half an hour.”

     He returned the papers to me and said, “If it is worth one hundred, it is worth one hundred and fifty.”

     He was right. I said, “I'm ready to go. Where is your taxi?”

     “No no. My taxi is junk. We will use the car of my brother. He has a Mitsubishi, only two years old.”

     “Where is your brother's car?”

     “Very close,” he said. “My brother is a driver-for-hire at the Green Fields hotel.”

     It was a few minutes after eight, Thursday.

     I don't know whether I remembered the note, the time

AZUCAR ROOM
NEGROS PRAWN PRODUCERS ASSOCIATION 2 P.M.
SOCORRO FOUNDATION 7 P.M.

     “Joe. One hundred peso, Joe.”

     In a back corner of the lobby was a service bar for the coffee shop and the restaurant. It adjoined an anteroom that had a couple of tables and a booth. It was empty now. The action was in the disco, which was already shaking the walls.

     In the little bar I'd be inconspicuous. I could see most of the lobby and the doors of the Azucar.

     “Watch for him,” I said. “When you see him, I want you to go up to him. Ask him to come back here.”

     I went to the front desk. Two clerks. One of them said, “Mr. Hart. Back again.”

     “But don't tell anyone. It's supposed to be a surprise. I'm curious about the group in the Azucar Room. Socorro Foundation.”

     “Regular customers. They meet with some of our local planters.”

     “Are they a company?”

     “Agricultural assistance, I think.”

     “No,” said the second clerk. “Overseas investors. That's what I heard.”

     I told Ray Nobles where I would be, and I buried myself in the booth. Behind me a busy bartender filled orders.

     I watched the lobby and the doors of the Azucar. I listened to the clink of ice in glasses, the snap and hiss of caps coming off beer bottles, the voices in Ilonggo of waiters bringing orders. I was thirsty. After a few minutes I stood to ask the bartender for some water.

     From the other side of the bar the bellman, Eddie, said, “Mr. Hart, sir.”

     “Eddie.”

     “No, easy.”

     His hands were full. He beckoned with his chin and his pursed mouth.

     I followed him across the lobby and held the same door open for him. It put us in a service corridor, hot, full of kitchen smells. We went down the corridor to another door that I opened. I went in after him.

     It was a large, dark room; but narrow. Eddie crossed it and stopped at the far wall. He put the tray down on a table and motioned me forward.

     On the other side of the wall an American said, “These are the figures for the four-week period that ended last Saturday.”

     I walked over to Eddie—slowly, quietly. I saw that the wall where he stood was actually a heavy drape that divided a single larger room. We were in the Azucar.

     “Now the same sector, average figures for the identical period over the last five years.”

     Eddie parted the drape a couple of inches. “Yes?” he whispered. He let the panel drop, picked up the tray again and slipped through.

     I went to the edge of the panel that he had parted. I held it open, maybe an inch.

     The other half of the room was dim, too. Most of the light was from a slide projector that threw a bright rectangle on a screen to my left. Some dining tables had been arranged in the shape of an elongated U. Thirty or forty men sat at the tables. The projector was on a stand in the cup of the U, with the screen down at the open end. Currents of cigarette smoke dodged lazily through the projector's beam.

     Penney was standing at the projector. The voice was his.

     “I want you to note estimated tonnage lost to arson,” he was saying. “Down forty-two percent over the baseline figure. You can work out the pesos better than I can. Actual incidents of arson committed by the guerrillas or their sympathizers, down fifty-eight percent. And were

     “Shit, an F.N., that's expensive.” It was Ferrar, I think.

     “If you want to boogie you have to pay the piano player,” Penney said.

     I closed the door on their laughter and went back to the booth. I kept seeing Luis beside Danny Boy, and I felt the tangle of acts and events that snaked back to the afternoon when Collins and I had sat in Gilsa's office. I thought of how little we had known then. Our ignorance.

     I sat and waited. I wanted to be home again. I wanted to be ignorant once more.

     Ray Nobles came over twice to tell me soon, soon. The shoe-shine boy loitered near the front of the lobby, watching the double doors of the Azucar. And then the doors did open. A couple of men strolled out, chatting. Then a group of five, and four more after them.

     Penney was with the next bunch, five or six that turned toward the back of the lobby. I sank myself back in the booth. Luis came out, with Danny Boy and Ferrar; they walked up toward the front desk, where there were racks of cigarettes and candy and magazines, out of my sight.

     Nonoy Paloma walked out of the room alone—I hadn't noticed him.

     The shoe-shine boy, slouching by the front door, straightened and began to walk across the lobby. He walked straight up to Nonoy and said something to him and touched him on the wrist. They came over to me.

     The little bar was dark. Nonoy didn't see me until he was inside and right in front of me.

     “Jack,” he said. “This is dangerous. You should not be here.”

     “You,” I said.

     “Yes.” He sounded ashamed. Before I could ask, he said, “Things were going on, I wanted someone to know, an outsider.”

     “You had Bembo killed.”