AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM THE UPCOMING NOVEL

It was midday when they reached Laguna, announced by a concrete arch on the highway, on either side of which the scenery looked exactly the same, a seamless flat stretch of rice fields fringed by coconuts. Walter had gone around enough to know that many parts of the country looked very different from this—and that there were Filipinos who grew up and grew old dreaming of mountains and oceans, of places like Paez on the far side of a big island—but he knew, in the same way, that you could drive for hours and see nothing but ocean on the one side and coconuts on the other, so large was this land, yet so familiar. Walter knew something else: that deep in those groves of coconut and bamboo, beneath the duhat and the tamarind trees, some people bore arms much bigger than his service .38, stewards and devotees of a stubborn faith in—what was it?—justice, or the future, or some such abstraction that never seemed to be worth another open-mouthed, fly-infested corpse in a ditch. He had seen a few of those along this same road the first few times he had traveled on it, although the last time—sitting in a provincial bus as a civilian—he thought he had seen them very much alive, sharp-angled shadows in the thorny bushes and the bamboo brakes. Even now, as he made a careful turn around a blind corner, pounding on his horn and with the engine keening, he did not know if he would be met on the other side by an Army carrier, or by a makeshift checkpoint—a fallen log, a 55-gallon drum—marking the temporary confusion of zones. That was what this country was all about: zones, boundaries, demarcations, reminders of where you belonged and where you stood. To forget these things was to invite disaster, and Walter had no intentions of going down that road again. Prudence was his watchword now, prudence and circumspection, the studious avoidance of unnecessary conflict—of which, as God himself knew best of all, there was entirely too much in Walter’s world.

This was why, when Walter steered the van into a rest stop he was familiar with, a place he knew would be good for a late lunch of mudfish stewed in a thick mustard broth, he could not and did not object when Rory let it be known, by declining to budge from her seat, that she had no interest in food or in the toilet. Walter excused himself and, forgoing the meal, took as little time as possible to use the bathroom and pour some water into the van’s radiator.

Pretending to be half-asleep in the front seat, Rory watched him flick his wrist and suck on his thumb as though it had been blistered by the radiator cap, as it probably was, because he could not know, and could not care, if she was looking. Despite herself, she stifled a smile, seeing him suddenly as a boy on an errand, for whom she was not making things any easier; but how could she and why should she, given how difficult her situation was, and how she needed for someone to feel and to share her pain, or at least to appreciate the seriousness of it? They were on a trip with the sorriest and most solemn of purposes, and the only thing to do was to get it over and done with as quickly and as efficiently as possible—although she was, truth to tell, getting awfully hungry, and had had to draw on a resolve she wasn’t even aware she had to suggest to her driver the bizarre impropriety of food at a time like this. It was what Soli would have thought and would have done, without a moment’s doubt. Still she felt glad to have taken a few bites of bread, dunked in coffee, before leaving Bagumbayani; the memory of those morsels lingered on her tongue, producing an unseemly wetness she struggled mightily to subdue. As Walter shuffled into his seat and backed the van into the road and the traffic, she almost screamed for him to stop, to confess that she was hungry and in need of some normal conversation, but the urge passed and they moved on, with Rory putting her sunglasses on, the better to keep to herself and leave SPO2 Walter Zamora to his own ruminations. She said nothing when, with an almost extravagant gesture, Walter bit open a packet of corn chips he had bought at the rest stop and poured a handful of them into his mouth as he drove, not even pausing to offer her any.

WALTER STARED ahead at the asphalt road that bored through kilometer after kilometer of coconut country. Now and then an oncoming jeepney laden to the roof with stiff-haired children, great, taut coils of green banana, and trussed-up chickens provided visual relief and nudged Walter back to alertness at the wheel. Rory had collapsed into her corner, yielding finally to the importunings of her shattered nerves, her hands clasping the handkerchief between her knees. Her eyes closed, and her breathing grew as regular as the throb of the van’s engine making steady time on a road in a landscape as fixed as the stars above at night.

Bizarrely, just as the van crossed a steel bridge into another town, Walter found himself slowing down for a procession of hired jeepneys and tricycles queued up behind a dirty gray station wagon; its rear top and seats had been sheared to make way for a vinyl flatbed, on which a child’s white coffin, stenciled with silver scallops, now rested. Walter inched his way along the shoulder past this sorry train, doing his best not to seem disrespectful of the dead, but drawing dark stares all the same from the family in the frontmost jeep, just behind the coffin. A small boy who may well have been the brother of the deceased waved at him and Walter smiled back; the boy dropped out of sight, wanting to play a game, but the van had gone on ahead. Rory slept through the interval, her fingers unclenching in their first new hour of repose.

THE SIGHT of grief brought Walter back to when his own father had died six years earlier. He was up in Baguio, having a beer on the balcony of the Mountain Park Hotel and looking out at the riot of sunflowers and gladioli in the shrubbery below. The girl Noemi was still in the shower and he expected her to come down soon to join him for dinner. Bessie would have insisted on finding a cozy restaurant on Session Road or around Burnham Park, one with real tablecloths and heavy spoons—she liked to make a point of teaching him about these things, and he had to pretend that he was learning from her and enjoying the experience—but Noemi was a stark relief, open to all possibilities, to plastic cups and pasty sausages, once he had won her confidence, as he was now almost certain he had. After all she had no other choice, and neither, he thought, did he: if he left her she would be destroyed, and the intensity of her need filled him with tenderness and determination. In truth what he was enjoying was the thrill of his first affair, his second honeymoon—in the same city, even—the trace of talcum between her breasts, the constant urge to hide his hand in one of her pockets and to feel her bone and cartilage beneath the flesh. Noemi, wisp of woman, an unexpected gift and ever-unraveling secret, but only to himself, almost: only his partner Julio knew that she was up there with him, and certainly not Bessie, who believed at that moment that he was down in Dumaguete, following up another lead in the Uyboco kidnapping. It’s the job, he would have told her—a job that will let me tell you only so much for your own good (even now), a job that turns me into other people and other things for my own good (even now), a job that’s nothing if it isn’t about saving the lost and the wretched from their own worst selves and tendencies (even now).

When he had first taken Noemi five weeks earlier to an all-night restaurant in Malate, he had no idea where it would lead, and all he wanted aside from a pot of wonton noodles at three in the morning was to envelop her in his wings, like any responsible officer of the law—or so he tried to persuade himself. She wept a little when he secured, through patience and cunning, her abject admission that she was seventeen and not the twenty-two she had first insisted on. After that—after the stern and comprehensive reassurance of his outrage and generous offer of protection—there were no more tears, only blushing gratitude and the soft-fingered gestures of an affection he hardly knew what to do with. And still after that the mad descent to bliss, down a spiraling waterslide into cold and bottomless exhilaration.

He was sipping the froth off his second beer when she came down in the orange sundress that only accentuated her youth, but his embarrassment at being seen with her had long been replaced by an insurgent pride and he reached for her outstretched hand without even looking at her, secure in the knowledge that it would be there. She bent down to whisper in his ear and he smiled in anticipation of some new endearment.

“The phone rang, and it wouldn’t stop, so I took the call,” she said, in a tone that might as well have been announcing the schedule of masses at the Baguio Cathedral. “Walter, your father’s dead. He had a stroke. They found him in the bathroom and it was too late.”

Walter said nothing for what seemed like a minute, although Noemi sensed a raggedness in his breathing as one realization raced and overtook another. When he spoke again, it was to ask, almost in a whine, “Who called?

“Your wife,” she said. “She called your office, and they directed her here.” She let go of the shoulder she had been kneading. “All I could say was—‘Thank you, I’ll tell him.’ And then I don’t know if I put the phone down first, or if she did.”

“You could’ve told her something else. You could’ve pretended to be the maid—”

“Walter, your father’s dead.”

“I know,” he said, trying to quell the panic rising in his chest, “I know that now.”

They had gone back up to the room, and barely had the door closed behind them when Walter was seized by the most powerful of urges, and he threw Noemi onto the bed and ravished—ravaged—her, bruising her with the friction of his anguish and anxiety. In the end he was crying and blubbering while she held him like a baby, although he couldn’t tell her exactly which loss he was grieving for; he couldn’t even tell himself.

It wasn’t until two days later that he came home, knowing that they would wait for his return, the good Filipino family, before burying his father. He used the time to collect his wits, to call his sister Gayla to tell her that the surveillance mission he was on was too critical to be left abruptly, and to ask about their mother, who was mumbling on and on about obscure events in 1957; Gayla said something about Bessie having excused herself from the funeral preparations, pleading the recurrence of sharp pains below her navel. Walter pretended not to hear this too well; it was bad enough as a lie and worse if it were true. Also, he used the time to place Noemi with some old friends in Sampaloc, where the locals seemed inured to distant uncles escorting their nieces home. And he used the time to buy even more time from the office, relieved that he could use a chunk of compassionate leave to make up for stolen and squandered hours, for the odd bit of paperwork and the verification of a rack of leads from wispy hints to bold suspicions and brazen lies.

And what of his own dissembling? It had become so much a part of his life that he could do it unthinking, like breathing in clean oxygen and expelling nicotine-coarsened air. Indeed, in his job, to lie well was to survive.
When they buried his father he wept all over again, as he and Gayla held their mother between them; there should have been four of them but their brother Elmer had died in a bus accident in high school. Walter had never been particularly close to his father, but people understood the crying to be the proper filial thing to do. Bessie finally appeared, with Paolo firmly tucked into her side, facing him across the coffin.

“The phone rang, and it wouldn’t stop, so I took the call,” she said, in a tone that might as well have been announcing the schedule of masses at the Baguio Cathedral. “Walter, your father’s dead. He had a stroke. They found him in the bathroom and it was too late.”

Within a few days he had moved back to his mother’s house, which the new widow thought was sweet of her first-born son. It would take another year for him and Bessie to speak again with some cordiality, even affection, especially from her side; she had since gone through the inevitable process of salving her wounds over heavily sugared cups of coffee with friends and novenas to Mary Immaculate, and she had come to the point of asking him—them—to start afresh in a new home far across the ocean: she would take up that nursing job and he could do whatever he wanted, perhaps learn a new trade having nothing to do with guns like woodworking or upholstery, and she would cook him his favorite dish of fish sautéed in a black bean sauce, while he helped Paolo with his lessons like the elementary school teacher he was supposed to be. Yes, Walter would tell himself many times afterwards, it nearly came to that, at least as far as the asking. When he demurred for the fleetingest of moments she quickly retreated into her injured silence, before he could explain his reasons, which to her could only be the one and the worst thing. He would have had so many things to say—he hadn’t seen Noemi, for example, in all those months, not that he never wanted to—but in the end Bessie left and in the end perhaps it was all for the best, because neither of them could have known then how lost he truly was and yet would be, what reserves of infamy awaited him around the corner. The soothing simplicity of Paez—a limbo-ish kind of afterlife, half punishment and half prize—lay even farther ahead.

“Where are we?” Rory stirred awake, bounced against the passenger door by a sharp turn around a cloverleaf into the expressway. The time was 12:49 on her wristwatch, and they had about 60 kilometers to run before the beeline of jeeps and cars and vans heading home from the southern beaches turned into a seething swarm. Rory could remember little of the view on either side of the road from her last visit to Manila, except that the ricefields seemed to have withdrawn into broken patches between all the new factories spouting cottony plumes of smoke and the new houses, arrayed like shoeboxes all of a Size 6 in teeming subdivisions ten or even twenty times larger than Bagumbayani.

“We’re getting there,” Walter said, taking the opportunity to light up a Philip with his Zippo. “Do you want one?”

“I just steal cars, I don’t sell them!” he had screamed as they wedged his pinky into the grip, and the next thing he remembered was a torrential rush of blood from that tiny finger to his brain.

Rory shook her head. Her eyes and nostrils were feeling sore from all the crying. Unlike Nick Panganiban, she had never been a smoker beyond trying a few puffs with the gang behind the Home Economics building in her senior year. It felt like someone had thrust a hot fork down her throat. She could abide it in other people—she had to, on the job—but it was one of those little things by which she convinced herself in the morning that she was, essentially and incontrovertibly, different. And yet she had to admit that, so roughly unmoored and far from home, she had never felt more tempted than today; the cigarette smoke curling over from the driver’s side had become a friendly smell, like an old scarf. Before them loomed the newly unfamiliar city, its only certainty the presence, somewhere in its recesses, of her own mislabeled blood. The only proofs of identity she had brought with her in her bag was an original birth certificate, a picture ID from her first year of college, and the word of her companion, whom she hardly knew and yet who was prepared to vouch for the indubitable fact that she was who she was, her own self, alive.

* * *

THE ONLY thing Jose Maria Pulumbarit ever wanted to be was a sailor. He had grown up in Olongapo, on the fringes of one of Asia’s largest American naval bases and home to its Pacific Fleet, and from the moment he saw his first American sailor step off the USS Belleau Wood in white cap and jumper, Jomar knew that a ship was the world’s best place to be—an ever-moving island in a planet of fixed addresses. An uncle of his was already out there, serving as a “steward’s mate” or messboy on an aircraft carrier that spent most of its time in the Atlantic, and Jomar eagerly awaited the man’s letters to his mother and the chocolates that came with them, or whatever reached him after his father and two elder brothers had rifled through the stash.

But his father had other plans for his sons, especially for Jomar who seemed fine-limbed and, to the old man, even effeminate, given Jomar’s delicacy of movement and his love of anything that had to do with travel and exotic places. Jomar hung around the real sailors whenever he could, running to light their cigarettes, doing errands for their girls, leaning into the open hoods of jeeps to watch mechanics replace distributor caps and fan belts. His two brothers signed up for base jobs, hoping to work their way onto the ships and then on to San Diego and the great American beyond.

Jomar filched blue-seal Philip Morrises and sported Ray-Bans, and at age 16 was caught by the base MPs at the wheel of a jeep filled with commissary-sized boxes of Hershey’s, Frito Lays, Folger’s, and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific. The local police beat him up and, when his father claimed him, Jomar got thrashed again—not because of what he had stolen, but because he had gotten himself caught, jeopardizing his brothers’ jobs. The caper cost Jomar a cracked tooth and a broken rib that took weeks to heal, but it also strengthened his resolve to leapfrog his way out of Olongapo and not get stuck digging ditches and painting rooftops like his brothers did. He would walk on water.
And he did, in a way; six months after getting his bones crushed, Jose Maria Pulumbarit was at sea in the white togs he had imagined wearing since he learned how to tie his shoelaces—albeit a size too large, for they belonged to Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Rufus B. Melnicki, who wasn’t even on that ship, but on the USS Cushing, back in Yokusuka from maneuvers in Subic. Jomar had slipped into the USS Abraham Lincoln in the great confusion that attended the evacuation of dependents when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo suddenly spewed megatons of mud and acrid smoke. The Lincoln was more than halfway to Guam when they found him in the galley, dazed from the heat and dehydration. Even so he spun his captors a story of childhood abuse at the hands of brass-knuckled uncles and the providential relief afforded by the volcano’s wrath. Instead of tossing him into the brig, they took him on a guided tour of the carrier and plied him full of Canadian ham and mashed potatoes. He had to remain on board the ship when it docked in Guam, but he had, in a way, achieved his dream, and when he took the captain’s gig to transfer to the USS Juneau for the trip back to Subic, he felt more hero than interloper, and used the time to learn about radio electronics and grades of engine oil.

And Jose Maria Pulumbarit’s life could have taken a permanent upturn from then on, but the first thing he did upon debarking in Subic was to swipe some warrant officer’s wallet to bankroll his next great exploit, an escape to another bay in another city 110 kilometers to the south, Manila.

THIS WAS the same Jomar Pulumbarit who, many stints in City Jail and a rack of tattoos across his back and around his thighs later, had sought refuge from the pelting rain under the Aristocrat’s awning, observing the diners as they streamed in. The impish glint in his eyes had long been replaced by a dull but unrelenting gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses; the insolent grin had turned into dry, sealed lips that resisted reading. He had learned to reduce his presence to near-vanishing point. Guam and the rolling ocean was a distant, even painful, memory.

The water was but a minute’s walk from where he stood, and where he lived in Pasay, he could have brushed the sagging lines of laundry aside to see the bay from his galvanized iron roof, and point out, had he wanted, the yolk-like sun to any of his five children. He could carry the small ones, too—his slender arms had acquired some strength from hoisting cast-iron car parts and jacking four-ton vehicles. Those arms bore scars—the cuts of blades, the imprints of hot metal and nylon ropes—but the one thing Jomar had retained from his youth was the softness and the precision of his touch. Two of his right fingers had been broken by a vise grip, but he had taught that hand to work with three, and had passed the rest of its wisdom to the left.

Today he was here on a mission for the Novaliches-based gang he had hired himself out to. They needed a van—not a new one, not a fancy one, and indeed the more nondescript the better. It would be used for the getaway in a plan to remove several objects of great value from a house in Corinthian Gardens, the exact composition of which he did not need or want to know, except that he was told they would involve a certain size and weight. In that case he needed a particular make and model, and when the Tamaraw emerged up the service road in the rain, Jomar knew that he had found his mark. Tamaraws plied the city in the thousands, left no lasting impressions on anyone who saw them, and ran reasonably well; all it would take was a length of wire to pop the locks and a bit of fingerwork with the ignition to claim temporary ownership of the machine. There were other vans and utility vehicles in the restaurant’s parking lot—a Ford Fiera had arrived earlier and would have done as well—but what clinched it for Jomar was the sight of a uniformed policeman stepping out of the Tamaraw; now the mission became a sweetly personal one, because Jomar loathed policemen, from the very first ones he met who cuffed him in the ear from a passing jeep and sent him sprawling on Magsaysay Boulevard to the one who applied the vise grip to his fingers and turned the screw, in a safehouse somewhere in La Loma, in the neighborhood that specialized in roasting whole pigs on a spit; the cop’s own fingers had been glistening with pork fat as they held him down and asked him to confess where the Mitsubishi Pajero was, or at least the money they had been paid for it. “I just steal cars, I don’t sell them!” he had screamed as they wedged his pinky into the grip, and the next thing he remembered was a torrential rush of blood from that tiny finger to his brain. When he came to, they put another finger into the slot and raised the same tiresome questions. In the end it was they who broke, not him, and Jose Maria Pulumbarit earned his professional moniker among the bukas-kotse gangs, “Boy Alambre,” both for his tool of choice and his own admirable resilience. He kept that tool—a thin coil of clothesline wire—on his forearm beneath the sleeve that also covered his tattoos; the other hand held an umbrella, the better to mask his moves; on dryer days it would have been a newspaper, or even a bag of groceries. A passerby might have seen a clerkish man dutifully waiting for his wife for their twice-weekly dinner out, and this was what Walter Zamora saw but failed to notice as he dashed back to the Aristocrat’s entrance to catch up with Rory after parking the van. Jomar had seen the girl, and she would have seen him, too, but Rory had a visceral dislike for men with glasses, and she focused instead on her rain-soaked driver, drawing a small hankie from her purse to mop his brow with.