Once an Eagle (60 page)

Tommy stopped laughing. “The only thing wrong with that is, the dogface soljer hasn't got an awful lot of influence on the promotion board.”

“My God, that's right.” He smote his forehead. “I'd almost forgotten.”

Tommy shied a hand at him. “You're incorrigible.”

“But if Brand's not guilty—” Donny began again.

“Stop up your ears,” Tommy commanded him. “Your father's fallen prey to the lure of the Islands. They've turned him inside out and rotted away his good sense. If he ever had any.”

Sam stared at her, laughing, mildly surprised—aware she was right. It was true: he'd been turned inside out. As they'd slipped up the channel past Corregidor in the old
Thomas
the first morning, the land breeze had reached him—an odor of orchids and wood smoke and cinnamon and a thousand other things he couldn't place. Bancas dipped through the green water, their lateen sails like exotic copper-colored seashells. Off the starboard bow lay Manila, flat and gray-green, with here and there the pink and white cubes of buildings gleaming in the hot, hard light. The Pearl of the Orient. After the dull years of stateside garrison, the close-order drill and classes and OD duty, he'd felt something stirring in him, straining, bursting out of its husk. It was a world full of wonders. In the markets the women held huge fish high above their heads, swaying rhythmically, crying songs in Tagalog; men in woven hats and loincloths padded along in a tireless dogtrot, the great loads at the ends of their shoulder poles rising and falling as if lifted on invisible wires; turbaned Arabs went by as majestic as the heads of state, ferocious-looking Moros drew up to him entreatingly, unfolding little squares of rag to reveal fantastic solitary jewels. “Sir, for you this magic pearl, for you this perfect gem! The only one of its kind in all the Islands—perhaps the world! Sir, for you, only two hundred pesos.” Turning it now, deftly, between thumb and finger, while the dull nacre came alive in a little rain of colored light. “Think of it, noble sir—a personal gift to my father from the Sultan of Palamangao! But for you, only one hundred
eighty
pesos … ”

Up in the valley the pace was gentler. Women moved through the rice fields, their long skirts tucked up around their thighs, bending, rising, planting the bright green sickle shoots, and deep in a wallow a ponderous carabao bull, immersed to his broad black snout and sweptback horns, languidly chewed his cud. In the evenings smoke rose from the barrios in pale blue spirals, and there was the light rubato of songs and laughter. The Filipino was always singing or laughing or gesticulating—his appetite for adventure, for wit, acquisition, exchange of views, was boundless. Sauntering along, barefooted, straw hat thrust to the back of his head, razor-sharp bolo swinging unsheathed by his naked calf, he looked ready for anything the world might offer. And there was more than that, too, Damon saw—there was a sturdy, unwavering sense of his individuality, his unique force and future as a man. If the Filipino was not perhaps all that he hoped for, he at least knew what he wanted to be.

Confronted by all this gaiety and strangeness and expectant ardor, Damon melted. He purchased cat's-eyes and bunches of bananas, he picked up a Moro barong with a horn handle for Donny—one day he even bought for Tommy a great prickly bomb of a
durian
fruit from a wizened old crone who assured him that any woman who ate of it would remain forever beautiful and young. Tommy told him the insides smelled like horse manure dipped in sulphur, said she preferred to grow old gracefully, and begged him to stop lugging home produce at odd hours. He acceded, but this fascinating, tempestuous end of the world had caught at his heart. Here, among these churning millions, lay the hurrying course of the future; he could feel it beating in the air around him. It was out of Asia that the new series of shock waves would come. He dropped everything else in his nocturnal reading and studied Forbes on the Philippines, Hughes and Anderson on the exploitation of China by the Western World, Rewi Alley's terrible accounts of brutality and death in the silk mills and match factories of Shanghai, where a million sickly children worked in the terrific heat until they fell exhausted among the machinery, and were thrown out to die; he read Sun Yatsen's stirring
San Min Chu I
and Latourette and Abend and Du Halde, he read Kawakami and Young on the rise of Japanese militarism, and Lea's ominous prognoses of a Japanese conquest of the Philippines from Lingayen Gulf. The West had rushed into a vacuum and exerted its force; and now the reaction was coming. The dumb, shackled giant had begun to stir, and look around him—for good, for bad. Here was where the great clash of swords would come, not just for the next war but for the next century. Asiatic man was no longer asleep, no longer powerless …

Up the line, swollen in the silence, he heard Jarreyl's high, hoarse voice, and then laughter. Calmly he looked at Brand. A man would be destroyed: this man. The blind, vengeful grinding of Army justice, the wanton fury of one outraged heart—spiraling down, each feeding on the other, to end at death or maiming. Another good man gone. The waste. The long, murderous waste … The only thing he remembered clearly about the boy was the afternoon Jack Folland, who was notoriously wild, had sent Brand flat on his face with an inside fast ball that would have taken his head off. Brand got up, dusted himself off, and promptly ripped the next pitch into right center field for two bases. He had scored later, too, on a close play at the plate. Yes, he was a fighter, all right.

“You think every man's hand is against you, Brand,” he said in a low, unhurried voice. “But you're wrong. Only every other man's. There's always a minority of silly bastards who, for various reasons, enjoy swimming against the current. Believe it or not, I'm one of them. And believe it or not, I believe in justice.”

“—
Justice,
” Brand said with savage scorn, “—I can tell you about justice, I can tell you things about the law that would shake you up good! …”

“That's right. But that won't prove that justice doesn't exist, or that it can't sometimes be reached.”

Brand's lip curled. “Talk.”

“Sure—talk. What have you got that's better? Taunting these stockade baboons into killing you? They'll do it, friend, in their own time and in their own way. They haven't anything better to do.”

He paused. “You say you're a fighter. All right. Let's give them one good battle over this. Why let them always have it their way? The next time McClain will be even rougher on someone—because of you. Because you didn't try to stop him now. Why not, Brand? But I can't give you a hand—nobody can—unless you tell me the story: all of it.”

The Indian gave him a quick, dark glance, started to say something—then stopped himself and pressed his fingers against his split cheek. Damon took out the pack of cigarettes again and offered it silently. It was touch and go for a moment, while several kinds of pride and defiance mingled and swayed. Damon watched him, liking him instinctively, emotionally, against the dry pull of reason, keeping his face perfectly impassive. It had to be up to the boy now.

“All right,” Brand said. He took the cigarette and put it carefully between his cut and swollen lips. “I'll tell you. All of it. In confidence.”

“In confidence,” Damon answered.

 

Your whole life
was chance. They could say anything they liked, they could tell you it was hard work or brute strength or being sharper than the next man or getting to know the right people, but all that was small potatoes. What ruled a man's life was lucky accident, and the power to read signs clearly, as his grandmother had told him. Some were false, some true, and it required the greatest wisdom to read them purely. Like the morning he'd been assigned as driver for Estelle Melburhazy. He had been out behind the maintenance shed, stuffing some rags into the waste bin, when he saw the thirty-caliber bullet lying in the dirt, nearly buried; he'd picked it up quickly. The shell had been drilled, the powder leeched out: it looked deadly but it was powerless. He was still puzzling over it when he swung by the big villa on Rizal Avenue.

She came out of the house and smiled at him as if she'd known him for ten years. Her eyes were wide and candid, flecked with amber; her skin had a dusty delicacy that fascinated him. He guessed she was about thirty-one or -two.

“What's your name?” she asked, after he had closed her door and started off.

“Private Brand, ma'am.”

“Brand. What a curious name. Have you been branded?”

“Not yet, ma'am.”

She smiled at that. “Are you of Mexican extraction?”

“No—I'm Indian.”

“Really? Full-blooded Indian?”

He nodded and said with some pride: “I am descended from Chief Joseph.”

“Oh yes. The Trail of Sorrows.”

He made no reply to this and they moved along the chaotic, crowded streets; she told him where to stop and wait for her. She shopped with an assertive indifference that astounded him—as though all these objects had been brought into being with such exertion and craft for her amusement alone. Thai tribesmen had wrenched the tusks from the mouths of dying elephants, naked men wearing bone plates over their nostrils and ears had plummeted down the murky ocean depths off Ceylon, women had squatted before huge looms hour on tedious hour, in order that Estelle Melburhazy might point a fine, immaculate finger and nod genially to the tradesmen. She bought silk scarves from China, a bolt of Madras cloth, a jade pendant, a tribal fetish of ebony from the Malay states, two copper pots, a little yellow rice bird in a bamboo cage. Whatever she liked she bought quickly, without debate or palaver, and moved on, to the consternation of the shopkeepers.

“They expect you to bargain with them,” he offered once.

“I know.” Her face looked much younger and prettier when she smiled. “But I don't want to.”

“And you only do what you want to do.”

“Of course!” She laughed; she had a way of tossing her hair back and raising her chin as if she were dismissing a topic, that intrigued him. “Isn't that what life's all about?”

“I suppose so.”

He had never seen anyone like her. She had just spent in two hours more money than he'd ever seen, and here she was asking him what kind of food he liked best, what his home was like, whether he planned to stay on in the Army after his hitch was up; or, suddenly dreamy and preoccupied, watching the turbulent wash of people in the streets, her fine blond hair close against her throat. There was in her movements the faintly amused indolence of the wealthy and experienced. Her father was connected in some way Brand didn't understand with both the import-export business and the Army; he was now in Mindanao. Her mother had divorced him and remarried someone in the movie industry. Estelle herself had been recently in Paris, and was going back there in a year or so, perhaps sooner. It was a pleasant pinnacle from which to view life …

The following afternoon she asked him to drive her up to Tagaytay Ridge. They wound their way up past the barrios, weaving around the carabao carts filled with nipa or coconuts or bamboo. On the flat rocks by the edges of streams women were beating their washing, calling to one another over the flat slap of the paddles, while the children played under the trees.

“What a way to live,” Estelle murmured.

He turned and looked at her. “They live very well. They are a proud people.”

“Well,”
she answered, and raised her brows. “I'm being rebuked, it seems. Do you know any Filipinos?”

“Of course. I know several.” He told her of evenings with Luis's family, the nipa hut crowded and smoky, the big iron wok full of pork adobo and rice, the glasses and gourds of calamansi juice or pale, emerald tuba, and the kids squatting in the corners crunching on sugarcane sections; the stories exchanged by sign language and fitful translation, the laughter.

“I wish I knew some Filipinos,” she said wistfully. “Besides the maids and houseboys, I mean.”

“Why don't you?” He threw out his hand. “There they are …”

“I couldn't do that,” she protested.

“Why not?”

“Well—it just isn't done, Joe.”

“Look,” he told her, “if you can buy out half the Quiapo markets in one morning you can go out to the barrios and make some friends …”

She found this amusing. “You're remarkable, Joe. You really are.”

“What's so remarkable about that?”

“You're so naïve. It's captivating.” A few minutes later they reached the summit and she told him to pull off into a grove, where the papaya trees threw down fierce, broad patterns of shadow. It was the most tremendous view he had ever seen. He was used to mountains, heights and awesome vistas, but this made you feel a little like a god. Far below them Lake Taal swept out and out toward the great purple mountains; bancas glided over its deep blue surface, their gold and scarlet sails like magic wings, and on the grass green, terraced slopes figures moved among the rice paddies, rising and stooping. The breeze blew strong in their faces.

“They're like toys,” Estelle breathed, “—tiny little toys of people …”

He passed his eyes down the giant emerald steps of terracing to the water's edge. “Imagine spending your whole life there,” he said. “Working that one plot, there. All your life.”

“That's all they're good for …”

He swung around, angry, and saw she was having fun with him. He smiled and tossed his head, watching her. One moment she was gazing at him, her lips parted, with that silky, amused expression—and the next she was in his arms, kissing him with desperate eagerness, her body trembling as if she had fever.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him. He had gone to the whore houses on Pinpin Street once or twice with some of the members of his company, usually when he was drunk, and hating the whole episode—the raw, bare rooms, the callous inspection of his genitals, the brief, heartless coupling and release followed by the chipped basin and small frayed towels; the incessant chatter among the girls. And—what repelled him most of all—the casual post mortems over beer. Lying with a woman ought to be a proud and secret thing, like prayer or maybe a duel; not the stuff of ball games and parades. And now, here, wonder of wonders, it lay before him in the person of this languid, wealthy girl who gripped him so urgently and moaned her need and her delight … Later, her head back against the car seat, dreamy-eyed, she told him about playing Vingt-et-un at Monte Carlo casinos, or riding a camel toward the Great Sphinx at Giza, or slipping into the harbor at Rio with the buildings rising like salt towers up the green slopes beyond the beach.