Authors: Phillip Finch
Santos was waiting for them when the four Americans cleared customs and immigration around 4:45 a.m. He had been awake all night, after working all day.
“Welcome back to the Philippines,” he said, and shook their hands in turn as Mendonza gave their true names.
This didn’t seem right. He felt uneasy, as if they had just disrobed in front of him. But it didn’t matter, he thought: apparently he wouldn’t be seeing much of them anyway.
He gave them the four telephones, along with tickets and boarding passes for Favor and Mendonza on the first flight to Tacloban, departing in about an hour from a domestic terminal on the other side of the airport property. Santos had brought two cars to the airport, one with a driver named Elvis Vega. Favor and Mendonza went with Vega to their flight, and Santos put Arielle and Stickney into his own car and drove them to their hotel.
They had reservations at one of the four-star monoliths in Makati, the city’s international business district. Santos insisted on helping them to check in. He took their passports to the front desk and waited
while the clerk made photocopies.
Santos brought Arielle and Stickney their key cards and check-in portfolios.
Arielle asked if he wanted to come up with them, and he did. They had spectacular suites, each occupying one corner of the top floor, at least triple the size of his own apartment.
They ordered breakfast from room service. Arielle asked Santos if he would stay and eat.
“Thank you, no,” he said. “I should be leaving.”
The truth was, he felt like a tour guide. There was nothing wrong with that—he had once been a tour guide, and a damn good one—but it wasn’t what he had hoped for now.
Arielle said, “I have something for you.” She gave him a Bank of America cash envelope.
Santos opened it discreetly and saw a slim stack of bills. They were U.S. hundred-dollar bills, new ones. Santos guessed about twenty bills in the stack.
It was far too much, and Santos was ready to tell her so. But he looked at the suites, and he thought about the private jet and about how they were operating so openly, not even really operating.
They were tourists, he decided. This made him a tour guide after all. And tour guides always know what to do with an overindulgent client.
“Thank you,” he said, and pocketed the money.
Favor followed Mendonza onto the stairway that the ground crew rolled out. Directly ahead, across an asphalt apron, was the trim white terminal building of the airport at Tacloban. Beyond the terminal he saw the sharp ridges of tree-clad hills. Clouds were breaking up against the hilltops, leftovers of a predawn shower that made the foliage glisten dark green in the light of the rising sun.
The airfield lay the full length of a narrow peninsula that jutted into Leyte Gulf. Tacloban lay near the far end of the peninsula, across a narrow bay, with the sand-colored steeple of a cathedral rising above the city’s low skyline.
Favor and Mendonza walked down the stairway. They had no baggage except what they had carried on, and they went straight to the sole rental-car counter in the small terminal.
Soon they were driving away from the airport, Mendonza behind the wheel. He followed a road that skirted the south end of Tacloban, an area of small homes and modest businesses. Mendonza had spent most of his childhood in the Philippines, and Favor thought he seemed happy and relaxed. A couple of miles from the airport, they turned south along the
coastal highway, putting the city behind them. The settlements became more sparse, grouping into small clusters a mile or more apart, tucked between the hills and the shore.
Mendonza was driving with a map and a portable GPS receiver. He slowed and turned off onto a strip of broken pavement that climbed a couple of hundred yards into the village.
About forty homes and huts, standing three and four deep, surrounded a concrete courtyard. The dwellings were all small and plain, seemingly built with whatever the owners had at hand or could afford to buy: nipa and corrugated metal, plywood and panels of woven coconut fronds, bamboo and concrete blocks. Men and teenage boys were playing basketball at each end of the courtyard while small children laughed and ran among them.
Mendonza got out and asked for Lorna Valencia’s home.
“That’s my mommy!” said one of the children, a girl of about ten, and she led Mendonza and Favor through the maze of dwellings, some so close together that they left only a shoulder’s width to pass. Most had small bare yards with chickens and penned pigs and goats.
The Valencia home was outside the main cluster of houses, at the edge of the forest: a small stucco cottage with a thatched roof. Lorna was outside, sweeping fallen leaves from the apron of packed clay that surrounded the house. She stopped and watched them as they approached. Her lower lip trembled as they stood before her.
“Alex?” she said. “Alex Mendonza, is this you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” Mendonza said. “And this is my friend and former coworker, Mr. Raymond Favor. We’ve come to help.”
At that moment, Ronnie Valencia was seated among more than a dozen strangers packed into the rear of a vehicle in a clot of morning rush traffic in Manila. He was wedged on a padded bench between two teenage girls wearing identical plaid skirts and white blouses, school uniforms. The girls were chatting to each other, speaking across him as if he didn’t exist. But Ronnie was painfully aware of them. Their thighs pressed against his thighs. Their hips rode against his hips. Ronnie’s heart was pounding. He had never been so close to a girl in his life, much less two at the same time. A grandmotherly woman faced him from the opposite side, staring at him through wire-rim glasses, a look of harsh appraisal. He wore
sinilas
—rubber sandals—and pants that he had outgrown several years and several inches earlier, and a T-shirt with the faded emblem of his high school. Ronnie knew that his shabby clothes made him look exactly like a country bumpkin overwhelmed in a big city, which he was. The vehicle accelerated suddenly, throwing Ronnie and the two girls even closer together, and the grandmother scowled.
The vehicle was a jeepney, the country’s most popular form of public transport. In appearance it is the bastard child of a station wagon and a farm truck. The universal design has two long bench seats fixed lengthwise on an elongated rear compartment.
Originally built from the stretched chassis of World War II jeeps, the jeepney is uniquely Filipino, reflecting three of the nation’s fundamental social traits: indifference to hardship, practical ingenuity, and an eagerness to surrender personal space.
In Manila, thousands of jeepneys circulated along a complex system of routes that Ronnie was now navigating for the first time. When he first arrived in the city, he had gone to the home of a family friend from San Felipe. The friend lived in the far southern suburbs of Metro Manila. He had given Ronnie a space to sleep and had drawn a map with a bewildering list of jeepney connections that would carry Ronnie to his destination.
Ronnie was heading for the Optimo headquarters. The address was on Amorsolo Street, in the Malate district of Manila. His next stop was the intersection of Taft and Buendia avenues, and he had asked the driver to call it out. But Ronnie wasn’t sure that the driver would remember, and he was trying to watch the street signs. The map was in a side pocket of his pants. Ronnie wanted to take it out and check it, but that would require sliding his hand down against the hip of the girl on that side. Unthinkable.
Manila was impossible: big and loud and abrupt and dirty and fast moving. Of course he had always heard this from those who had been there and returned, but now the words seemed laughably inadequate.
The jeepney shot ahead for about half a block and then braked hard at an intersection. The driver
yelled at Ronnie without looking back. “Buendia-Taft. Your stop, boondock boy.”
The two girls giggled at that, and even the grandmother broke into a grin. Ronnie’s face burned as he got up from the bench. He worked his way down the narrow aisle, through a thicket of legs and knees, to the exit at the back. He grasped a steel hanger bar and swung down to the pavement. As soon as he let go of the bar, the jeepney pulled away, enveloping him in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. He stepped onto the crowded sidewalk, out of the path of an onrushing bus.
He took out the map, studied it, trying to orient himself. He was at the intersection of Buendia and Taft avenues. The instructions said that he should cross Taft. But the signals weren’t working. Taft Avenue was a coursing river of traffic, three lanes in each direction. Somehow pedestrians were picking their way through, finding imperceptible gaps in the headlong flow.
The dash across the avenue seemed suicidal. Ronnie thought of how he had long wished to come to Manila, the adventure it would be. Now he wanted to be anywhere but here—anywhere but this sidewalk, with the instructions in his hand that said CROSS TAFT AVE.
Then he reminded himself that he was here for a purpose. This was for Marivic. He was going to clear up this Optimo bullshit.
He moved up to the edge of the sidewalk. He scanned the oncoming stream of vehicles, judging
speed and distance, and at the first blink of an opening he stepped out into the street.
“You don’t remember me,” an old man said to Mendonza. “But I remember you.” The man was no more than five feet tall, wispy thin. Mendonza was almost a foot taller, thick necked and burly. But the old man reached out and touched his cheek and fondly tousled his hair as if he were a child.
Apparently Mendonza had visited San Felipe with his mother when he was six years old. He didn’t remember it, but it seemed to be a vivid memory for everyone in the village who was alive at that time, and they had come out to see him now. More than an hour after they had arrived in the village, Favor and Mendonza hadn’t yet spoken to Lorna Valencia about her missing daughter. The first visitors had appeared before Lorna finished boiling water for coffee, and soon there were so many that Lorna moved them all outside. She put out chairs for Favor and Mendonza under the shade of a big tree, and the villagers gathered around them.
They were friendly with Favor, and curious, but he knew that they mostly cared about Mendonza. They fawned over him, they cooed over the snapshots of his wife and children that he took from his wallet to show around. And one after the other they all approached him to speak about his childhood visit and to discuss their mutual lineage. Nearly everyone in the village was related to everyone else. Mendonza, by being distantly related to one of them
through his mother, was in fact related to them all. As far as they were concerned, he was a child of San Felipe, and this was a homecoming.
Favor wondered how it must feel, that sense of belonging.
He got up after a while and went into the house. Lorna Valencia kept a neat home. It sat at the edge of a jungle and was surrounded by bare earth, but the furniture was spotless and the floors gleamed. Favor went over to a wall in the front room that was covered in family photographs. The photos were mounted on wood plaques and preserved under clear-coat varnish. Two children, a girl and a boy, dominated the collection. They appeared in various ages, usually together, toddlers through teenagers, with the younger children gradually appearing in the more recent photos.
Favor turned when he sensed movement at the door. It was Lorna, carrying glasses on a tray. She put down the tray and joined him at the wall.
“This is my family,” she said. She pointed to one of the photos, a man standing on the deck of a ship. “My late husband, chief mate on a freighter. Not so many photographs of him. He was gone so much.”
“And the missing girl?”
“Marivic is her name. Here. With Ronnie. My two firstborn.”
“Twins?”
“Yes, twins. They’ve always been very close.”
The most recent photo showed them as near adults, standing at the doorway of the cottage. She
was shy and pretty. Her brother was darker, sun bronzed, almost a head taller.
Lorna said, “They’re trying to tell me that she ran off. I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t do that.”
“I’d like to hear about it,” Favor said.
“Good,” she said. “Do you want to do it now?”
“That’s why we’re here.”
She went out and got Mendonza, and the three of them sat at her dining table while the curious villagers looked in through an open window.
“This is how it started,” she said, and pushed the Optimo newspaper ad across the table to them, handling it with a look of distaste. She told them about Marivic’s visit to the office in Tacloban, and then the phone call from Manila, and the bus ticket, and the text messages on her son’s phone, including the last one:
arrived.
“Are you sure about that?” Favor asked. The message was on Ronnie’s phone, now with him.
“He showed it to me the day before he left,” Lorna said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
She told them about her own visit to the Optimo office in Tacloban, the dismissive woman in the office there, the discouraging reaction of the PNP sergeant, and finally Ronnie’s dash to Manila.
“He isn’t usually hotheaded,” she said, “but he loves his sister very much. Now Manila has taken away both of my firstborn.”
“We’ll have at least one of them back here in a hurry,” Favor said. He wrote two phone numbers on the back of a business card, his new cell number and Mendonza’s, and gave her the card.
He said, “Tell him to call us. We have friends in Manila. They’ll take care of him tonight and send him home on the first plane tomorrow.”
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “And about Marivic?”
“No promises,” Mendonza said. “But we’ll do all we can.”
Mendonza asked her for photos of Marivic. She told him that the only pictures were those on the wall.
Mendonza always traveled with a good digital camera, a tool of his business. He removed it from his shoulder bag and took several close-up shots of the two most recent photos that Lorna pointed out to him.
Lorna stood by Favor at the table and they both watched Mendonza. He was intent, carefully framing his shots and checking the results on the LCD screen, reshooting them until he got what he wanted.