The barrio teniente held a pet iguana on a string. Around its neck the lizard had a chain of gold with a crucifix. It raised its crest and hissed with each tug of the string and the cross sparkled against scales.
"This American sergeant has come from a great desert over the ocean to help defend your islands. He has been especially assigned to turn your patriotic young men into a great new Philippine Army. Listen to him, obey him, follow him, and the Philippines will never fall. Thank you."
The lieutenants stepped back. The barrio teniente hesitated, then clapped. Everyone else clapped, so softly it sounded like rain. The lieutenants saluted. Joe saluted and, at once, the recruits did too. But a week later the Japs didn't sail into Manila Bay: they wiped out the air bases at Clark Field and Iba, landed at Vigan and Legaspi, at each end of Luzon Island, and started marching towards Manila in the middle. Joe remembered one of his recruits who pissed on a bomb, a dud that had torn through the bell tower of a church. It was an act of frustration because the anti-aircraft ammunition was so old and corroded it detonated under 5,000 feet. Mitsubishi bombers flew at 6,000 feet and dropped bombs all day long. So the recruit stood on the edge of the hole this bomb had made in the sacristy and unleashed his personal torrent of scorn down on to the dud. He was big for a Filipino, in a loose shirt, shorts, American boots. Joe was having a smoke by the altar. Only it wasn't a dud, the bomb had a time-delayed fuse. High explosive expanded at about 10,000 feet per second (that's all explosions were, expanding gases), but Joe always believed there had to be some moment, however brief, of shock, understanding and disappointment in the boy's mind before he was dead. Before the bomb turned the church tower into the barrel of a gun and turned the boy into the projectile that was shot up through it. Some moment, some understanding. If brief, at least bright.
Across the mesa, an afternoon caravan of MPs moved slowly, avoiding each rock and possible snake. As the men and horses passed out of sight, Joe slipped out from under a pinon tree and down the chute of the Hanging Garden to the loading apron. He flipped a whittled stick in one hand. The control bunker was empty. He had thirty minutes before he was supposed to be at one of Oppy's rare parties back on the Hill.
When Joe had replaced the padlock on the magazine bunker months before, he'd left a key inserted which the scientists used and meticulously guarded as if they were carrying out strict Army security. He opened the lock with his own copy of the key, squeezed through the door, shut it, turned on a flashlight and set it on a shelf. On both sides were shelves of meters, gauges, film magazines, copper and alloy tubes. In a cage at the back was the high explosive. Joe could make out Torpex, Baratol, Comp B, Pentolite, all TNT-based explosives. Also cordite, Primacord, smoke pots, gelignite, primers and Navy powder. The cage went from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling and its door had a combination lock. He could reach over the cage top and nearly touch the high explosive.
From his pocket Joe took a buckskin strap and tied it to one end of the stick. When he was a kid, he and his friends used to hide along the Rio in the winter and trap juncos. The fat gray birds liked to flock on banks where the snow had melted. The boys tied horsehair nooses to willow branches above the river's edge and caught two birds at a time, singed the feathers off in a fire and ate them hot. Delicately, Joe slid the buckskin noose over a brick of gelignite. The explosive would go to Santa Domingo, a pueblo south of Santa Fe; there were some veterans among the Domingos, some real experts in explosives. The gelignite fell on its side. He shook the stick to draw the noose tight, gently lifted the brick clear of the shelf and brought it over the top of the cage to his free hand. It was cool as clay. The second brick slid loose as it came over the top and Joe caught it waist-high.
The New Mexico National Guard had arrived in Manila in September 1941. They were chosen, supposedly, because New Mexicans were brown and spoke Spanish and would mix well with Filipinos. Rudy Pena had volunteered for the Guard because of his brother Joe.
Joe hardly remembered Rudy. He was ten years younger, pudgy, quick to cry. His black hair stood up like rooster feathers. He was a wetter of the bed he shared with Joe. A longtime crawler, a late talker. During the worst winter, when the Army came through Santiago and threw from their trucks 50 lb sacks of dried milk that were frozen hard as cement bags, Joe dragged a sack in each hand while his little brother clung to his leg and bawled, his face a mask of frozen snot. The harder Joe tried to kick him off, the tighter he held on.
By sixteen, Joe had left the pueblo and all he saw of Rudy were the photos from Dolores: Rudy and rabbits, Rudy on a horse, Rudy in a tie; the soft and surly face developing into a stranger with dark, nearly Arab looks who was growing up in a world that, to Joe, consisted entirely of letters and pictures. After the years of fighting and music in New York, it was a shock to Joe to hear he'd meet his brother in the middle of the Pacific.
Joe was training the newly constituted Philippine Army, and when he got back to Manila the Guard had already rolled out to Clark Field. The history of the Guard was a huge and intricate joke. Coming from land-locked New Mexico, they were trained in coast artillery. On arrival they were given British First World War surplus cannons. Within a week of the invasion, they were fighting as infantry in the jungle. General MacArthur said the Philippines would never fall and President Roosevelt dispatched convoys of ammunition and supplies to Manila. But out at sea the convoys turned round and headed for Europe. And MacArthur slipped away one night in a torpedo boat.
Before Joe ever found him, Rudy vanished on Bataan. The New Mexico National Guard vanished on Bataan. Joe escaped. When he arrived Stateside and toured defense plants, the colonel in charge of publicity called him a walking advertisement for the Army, which seemed illogical to Joe, since he was one of a handful of men who got out of the Philippines while thousands didn't. Dolores seemed to agree with Joe. She wrote to tell him not to come to Santiago because as far as she was concerned her only real son, Rudy, was dead. So, instead of going home, Joe took the colonel's wife to bed and got shipped to Leavenworth.
One trick of the Japs was to tie themselves high up in the fronds of a coconut palm. A sniper would eat a handful of rice, then swallow water from a canteen to make the rice swell and the stomach feel full. A Jap could stay up in a tree for three days. But this Jap had been up for a week or more, tied so tight he couldn't come down. Swaying in the breeze and watching the world go by: planes, patrols, clouds. Joe wouldn't have seen him if he hadn't stepped on a rifle and looked up at the face staring down from the palm. The head was black as a coconut, holes for eyes, hole for a mouth, shirt and stomach burst open. A flying advertisement for Bataan.
Joe often wondered, when at night the Japs called "Hey Joe!", "Over here, Joe!", did Rudy Pena ever think there was some confusion, that they'd come for the wrong man?
Without even trying to be quiet, he closed the magazine bunker door, snapped the padlock shut and followed his flashlight across the apron towards the Hill. Joe figured he owed the Army nothing.
8
Oppy had taken over the house of the headmaster of the old Ranch School. It was a stone and timber cottage behind a stand of spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The sun had just set over the Jemez, leaving the sky bright and the mesa dark. Joe had strapped on his Sam Browne belt and .45. His guard post was the garden.