Dust Devil (49 page)

She nodded, her eyes wide and serious. "It doesn’t seem real, does it? We’ve come together on the other side of the earth to be marooned on an island
— sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson story, isn’t it?”

Her hand was small in his, trusting. He frowned, and she asked, "What is it?”

He shook his head. "Listen — a motorboat. Did your Swiss Family Robinson have Nippies for neighbors?”

As they began to wade ashore, he tugged at her hand, hurrying her. The waves slapped against their thighs and impeded their progress. The rumble of the motorboat increased. The forested shoreline was still too far away!
He shoved her into the water. With the ocean salt and Deborah struggling, it was almost impossible for him to keep the two of them submerged beneath the knee-deep water.

When
she stopped fighting him, he was afraid she might be drowning. He shot to his feet, jerking her up with him and expecting any second the bullets to riddle the water about them. Even as he tugged her limp body ashore, he cast a heartsick look over his shoulder, knowing that their escape had failed.

No military launch but an outdated, warped-looking motorboat rode the waves not a hundred yards from Chase. A lone man sat in the boat, watching. "Hey,” he shouted, "I been waiting for you. You late!”

The island of Mindanao lay only degrees from the equator, and Chase estimated that the temperature must have been at least a hundred and ten and the weather as sultry as a humidor. But the man, clothed only in an abaca breechcloth, wore on his head a Japanese aviator’s fur-lined helmet.

Deborah
was choking and gasping, and Chase grunted in relief that both situations had worked out so well. He staggered ashore with her in his arms and dropped her on the white, warm sand. Behind closed lids he could hear her next to him, breathing more normally, and the slap of oar paddles against the water; then the scraping on the sand as the man dragged the boat up out of the water.

Chase opened his eyes and looked into a young brown face. The man could not have been more than twenty-five.

"Where you been?”

"A storm,”
he managed and laid his head back down, then raised it again. He squinted at the man. "How did you know when to expect us?”

The man’s gapped-tooth smile was enigmatic. "The bamboo telegraph, it tells everything.”

"I should have known,” Chase said, smiling for the first time.

"What? What?”

"An old trick of my people,” Chase explained and laid his head down once more, closing his eyes. The year’s stay at the Cabanatuan Resort had cost him more in strength than he had realized.

"We go now. A patrol boat comes soon
— in two hours, maybe more, maybe less.”

"Just leave me alone,” Deborah moaned when Chase tried to stand her on her feet. "I want to sunbathe.”

The man, Herrera, looked at Deborah as if she had lost her mind. "She been in Santo Tomas, yes?”

"She’s always been a little crazy,” Chase said and swung her over his shoulder like a sack of sugar.

He followed the man, who carried a bolo in one hand and a carbine in the other, into the primeval forest that grew darker the deeper in they went, so that the bright March sun faded into a twilight. In places moisture dripped from the flower-crowned trees. Herrera hacked away with his bolo at the encroaching tangle of trees, shrubs, and creeping vines. It was a never-never land.

Then the three came into a clearing where stood on stilts a large nipa hut made of East Indian palm leaves. When Chase and Deborah followed the man up the bamboo steps to the veranda, a duck waddled out from beneath the hut, quacking at their trespassing.

"No eat Cebu,” Herrera said. "Him good duck. Make eggs.” He spit a stream of red betelnut juice over the bamboo balustrade, and the duck went flapping back under the hut.

Inside the hut mats served as both couches and beds, and a kerosene tin with a hole punched in its side was the lamp. Toward the rear of the small room netting draped from the ceiling like a circus tent. The hut was otherwise empty except for a couple of small sacks filled with staples
— tea leaves and rice — and a military boot with a hole in its sole which lay in one corner.

“A
merican pilot,” Herrera said, following Chase’s gaze. "Him here last. Maybe month, maybe more before sub come for him.”

Somehow the knowledge that other refugees had inhabited the hut not long before made the jungle hideaway seem less formidable. Still, as Chase and Deborah stood on the veranda and watched the mass of verdant trees swallow up Herrera, they became gradually uncomfortable in each other’s presence, as uneasy as two cats.

"Are you hungry?” Deborah asked, for lack of something else to say or because there was so much to be said that could not be.

Chase shook his head. "Just tired, I guess.”

Together they re-entered the sanctum of their hut. Chase stretched out on one mat and Deborah on the other, their heads at an angle to one another. Chase buried his face in his arms, and for a long while there was only the noise of the forest animals to fill the room.

He thought Deborah had drifted off to sleep, but she broke the silence, her voice coming lazily from the well of her arms. "Chase, you never ever told me what your secret name is, not in all the years we’ve known each other.”

He chuckled. "By this time I don’t guess the evil spirits can do any more to me if they know my secret name than they have already. It’s Black Wolf.”

He raised up on one elbow and looked at her scrawny, childsized body, and his heart cramped for the one person who had been his friend for so long. Except for the porcupine haircut, Deborah looked much as she had that first time he had seen her at the boarding school. All eyes in a doll-like body. Alone and frightened but smiling anyway. "What’s yours?”

She turned her head toward him and grinned. "War Dance. All good Navajo girls have to have the word war somewhere in their name, you know.”

"I know. I think my father’s mother’s secret name was War in the Face. Her face did look like a war hatchet had caught it.”

They laughed together, and the tension was gone. From secret names their talk turned to the secret ceremonies of the
Kachina
Dancers a boy or girl went to when they reached puberty. It was like a floodgate had been opened, and all the trivial memories of the past poured forth with laughter, and exclamations, and questions.

Neither Greg Red Bird nor Christina Raffin was mentioned.

The marathon talk went on steadily for a week while he and Deborah did nothing but intermittently rest and eat the eggs the duck supplied (Deborah called the female duck "Donald”) and the occasional fruit — mostly mangos and coconuts — found close to the hut, for Hector had warned them about straying too far in case of running into a Japanese patrol.

The talking was like a cleansing of the mind, like a visit to the psychiatrist’s couch where all the secret little fears and sins were confessed. Chase admitted to being afraid of closed- in places since his internment in Cabanatuan, and Deborah confessed to stealing another Indian girl’s tortoiseshell comb at boarding school.

With the cleansing of the mind returned the normal desire for the cleansing of the body. Although they feared being spotted by a patrol boat, they nevertheless made their way back to the ocean at the end of the first week.

Their skins and scalps were encrusted with a year’s accumulation of dirt that could not be easily scrubbed away, and the saltwater irritated their skin, already damaged by improper diet, especially Deborah’s whose texture was finer. "Oh, Chase, it stings!” she wailed as he held her head between his knees and knuckle-scrubbed her scalp. She shoved him off her and scrambled to her feet in the water. "My hair’s clean! I swear!”

Then she performed his ablutions with a scrap of cloth, scouring his body, which was clad only in tattered khaki pants. Chase lay lazily on the sand, half in, half out of the water, as he relaxed under the ministration of her caring hands. Her fingers softly traced the ropelike welt that scarred his belly. "Wouldn’t it be easier,” she said sadly, "if the only scars we had were the ones that showed?”

At the contact of her fingers, Chase’s stomach muscles popped like an electric wire had fallen on them.
Over his shoulder He shot her a lethal look.  "Don’t!”

She
looked at him with laughter in her eyes. "You’re ticklish!” Her fingers began to play along his ribs, but when he swiftly rolled away, laughing now, and came to his feet, she jumped up also, alert for sign of retaliation.

With only a week of fruit and eggs in her stomach, her full cheeks already glowed with color, her eyes shone, and her tiny body was once more filling out. Her wet hair was plastered in a gamine style to her small head. Standing warily before
him, with the wet cotton blouse and pants clinging to her breasts and molding her waist and hips, she had no idea of the tantalizing picture she presented.

The sudden desire that jangled
his senses surprised him . . . not only because it signified the return of his sex drive, but also because it dangerously signaled something else. The realization of what he was thinking flashed through his brain like a red alert light. "We better get back to the Waldorf,” he snapped.

The moonlight that night dappled the hut’s bamboo floor. It was a great tropical moon, the kind of moon,
he thought, that could not be seen anywhere else on earth. He and Deborah lay in the hut’s darkness and talked softly about more recent experiences, skirting the tales of horror each could tell.

"I feel so strange now,” Deborah said with a small laugh, "like not knowing what to do with myself. For a year now I’ve had other people tell me what to do, when to eat, when to bathe. You know, Chase, maybe once every month or so we were allowed a shower. There were women there
— mostly wives of foreign engineers who had operated the mines here before the outbreak of the war — some of those women lost so much weight they held their stomachs over their arms while they bathed! And after a while you could tell by looking at the legs who were the Caucasians and who were the Malayans, even though by that time we all had faded skin —the Anglo women couldn’t shave and all had long hair on their legs.”

Involuntarily
he thought of Deborah’s legs. Even though she wore the trousers, he knew they would be smooth.

"And after about three months, I stopped having my per
— ” She broke off, and he sensed her embarrassment. "How were things at Cabanatuan?” she asked softly. "We heard they were awful there.”

Like Deborah, there were some things too terrible to talk about, and
he picked the trivial. "About the same. Except we had no showers or baths. When the rains came, we’d run outside and stand. It seemed at the time that nothing could be more glorious than the rain. To beat the boredom we held races for the tics and leeches that crawled up the walls.”

They talked that night until dawn, letting the small talk bridge the gap of time and pain and act like a balm to the sore. Both admired and wondered at the other’s tenacity, the ability and will to survive under horrifying circumstances.

He told her how, when he arrived in the Philippines, he had tried to get in touch with her at the CBS Foreign Information office, but she had just left for Tokyo. And she related to Chase about Will’s letter telling her that Chase was also stationed in the Philippines.

* * * * *

Deborah did not tell Chase that it was only the hope that he might be alive and only miles away that kept her from taking her own life, as a few of the Red Cross nurses and engineers’ wives had during that time. Somehow it seemed perfectly right and natural that he should have rescued her — just as he had taken care of her when she was a child. Only she was not a child anymore. And she was disturbingly aware of Chase as only a woman could be.

The large orange moon, the heavy scent of the tropical flowers, the lulling sound of the surf pounding against the beach
— all the ingredients united into a bewitching potion too dangerous to taste. Deborah knew now the temptation of Eve — one drink and she was lost.

In her frantic effort to put Chase back into the perspective of her tribal brother, she said
at last the forbidden word. "Christina Raffin — are you still in love with her?”

In the silence that followed
Deborah could sense Chase trying to analyze his thoughts. “I haven’t let myself think much about Christina in over a year. I don’t know,” he answered cautiously,” and Deborah intuited he was trying to be honest. "I suppose it’s a love-hate feeling I have for her — something that I can’t get out of my blood any more than I can the damned malaria I contracted.”

Streaked by shafts of moonlight, he
turned his head to look at her. "And you — is that Navajo sculptor still in your wedding plans?”

"I suppose so,”
she answered with equal carefulness.

CHAPTER 51

It started out with trifling arguments. Three weeks of isolation — broken only by Herrera’s occasional visits to deliver what supplies he could scrounge up — had taken their toll on Chase’s and Deborah’s nerves.