The Caprices (16 page)

And then Jim remembered. He had accompanied Sergeant Vinci to the front lines. A thick rot wafted in with the evening breeze. While Sergeant Vinci was conferring with the officers, Jim had gone to find the source of the smell. Jim watched men passing him, to the right and close by, but no one seemed bothered like he was. He walked to the beach where the majority of the foxholes were. In the waves he could see dark clouds in the water, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dying light, he saw that they were bodies. The arms moved with the waves, animated like a child face down in the shallows who circles with his hands so as not to scare the fish. The waves washed on the shore and the
bodies bobbed. Jim backed away from the water. He could not be horrified. He did not have the time.

There was the scraping of a shovel in the dirt and with it the low muttering of Tagalog. He surprised the digging man by pushing through the bushes. A Filipino soldier was digging a grave. Beside the grave was the still body of a boy, maybe thirteen. The soldier leaned on his shovel. He was not crying but his eyes were full of grief. Another shovel leaned against the tree. Jim thought, Whose shovel is that? Was it the boy’s? Was he supposed to assist in the digging of his grave? Then Jim thought that he should help. Jim began digging and soon the hole was deep.

“Your friend?” asked Jim.

“My brother,” replied the soldier.

Jim thought he had been in the house with them for weeks, but it had only been two days. He felt better now. He said to his friend, whose name was Totoy, “I’m ready for the good news.”

“You won’t die. We stopped the diarrhea. We give you leaf from the guava tree.”

“And now I am ready for the bad news.”

Totoy shook his head. “I am sorry. You cannot stay here. They will find and kill you anyway here. And they will kill us.”

Totoy’s sister, whose name was Clara, was standing by the window. She was crying. She said something to Totoy, and brushed her face with the back of her hand, bothered by the tears. She was more angry than sad.

“What did she say?” said Jim.

Totoy took a deep breath. “She called me something. She says the Japs will kill you. She says we should keep you here.”

Clara said something else.

Totoy sighed. “She says we might as well hit you over the head with a big rock. That would be better.” Totoy shook his head. “Boss, you can’t stay here. Look at her, look at my mother . . .”

“I understand.”

“You are too sick to join the guerrillas.”

“What will you do with me?”

Four days had passed since Totoy had rescued Jim and now it was time for Jim to leave. Totoy and two of his friends loaded Jim into a water buffalo cart and covered him with old clothes. It was the only cargo Totoy could think of that would not interest the Japanese. Old clothes were thought to be crawling with disease. The cart rolled behind where the Americans and Filipino soldiers had marched, and there were bodies everywhere. Jim thought maybe one would get up and live again, as he had lived after dying. Totoy’s plan was to slip Jim into the camp, where he would at least be fed. It was only a matter of months before this war got cleared up, before MacArthur returned. Then they would have a big party. Totoy and Clara would come to pick Jim up, like parents going to get their kid at the end of summer camp. Jim went along with the plan and pretended everything was going to be all right. He had to believe it. He didn’t have a choice.

To get to Camp O’Donnell took a day and a half. They caught up with some of the stragglers from The March a half mile from O’Donnell and waited behind a clump of stripped papaya trees. Soon afterward, a GI began screaming for water. He was dead then, although he didn’t know it. His friends tried to calm him down, but the guards rushed at him and while the GI was beaten, Jim slipped into the crowd. He was half dead but standing, and in that was unremarkable. The water buffalo lapped its nose with its tongue and with a flick of its tail wished Jim good luck and goodbye. Totoy would not meet Jim’s stare. He feels guilty, thought Jim, but he should not. Jim’s pockets were full of guava leaves.

Jim thought of Clara in the camp, although they had not really talked. Her English was not bad, but she didn’t like her accent, so she didn’t use it. He had asked her, “What is
golly bear?
”

And she had conferred with her brother.

Totoy said, “It is American. Golly Bear. He is very big and is rescued by very small people. Like you. Very big. Like us. Very small. It is Clara’s name for you. Golly Bear.”

In his first few weeks at O’Donnell, Jim had daydreamed about the house near San Fernando. He wondered what it would have been like if he’d stayed there. He imagined himself growing strong, becoming a one-man army, a slaying machine who hid by day in the rafters, and by night picked off Jap after Jap. And Clara was a part of this dream, her soft hands and straight teeth. But after a couple of months, Jim only thought of food. The men were dying all around him. Beriberi. Malaria. Dark moods that made men sit down and never stand up again. He had seen a Japanese officer, the one they called the Frisco Nip because he had lived in California, decapitating Ned Thomas. Ned’s body had been on the ground draining into the earth through his neck. Ned would not get up and walk, as Jim had, but Jim wished he would. He tried to raise Ned with the power of thought, thinking that if faith could move mountains, hatred must do more. But Ned didn’t listen, just lay there. Jim imagined Ned’s headless body going after the Japs, demanding the return of his head. He imagined all the dead men coming back from the burial fields, all those GIs and the million Filipinos, rattling on the gates of the camp, demanding compensation for their lives.

Jim’s army of the dead coming to save him, take him away, had kept him alive. Now Jim found his dreams of salvation unsophisticated, even funny. He had been eighteen years old when Bataan fell. His idea of revenge was fed by comic books and movies. Jim had survived like a man, but had suffered like a child, bewildered and vulnerable. He had stopped counting the deaths of his friends when the number hit twenty. He had buried many more than that. He was lucky to be young, lucky that his brain could not fully comprehend the camp.

After O’Donnell, there was the ship to Japan. This was in late 1944, although Jim didn’t know what year it was at the time. In
the hold of the ship, ankle deep in water and excrement, Jim had made the journey to Japan. The light made its way into the hold only where rust had done its work. There was no place to lie down, no room to sit comfortably. The iron tub in the center of the room was used for water in the morning, as a urinal through the rest of the day. People died standing up, unable to rest even in death. Jim had no fear of boats in later years, but could not go to the movies. The darkness, the people packed so close, and the single shaft of light, took the breath out of him. Made him sweat and shake.

In Japan, Jim had worked in a steel mill in Honshu. The winter was cold and he had slept wrapped in a paper blanket. The men huddled together at night, sleeping like mice. The work details were long and many soldiers died with picks in their hands. The guards were armed with sticks. Jim thought there was something biblical about this labor. He remembered the Jews in Egypt, but thought he had it worse. The Jap supervisor was Sergeant Matsuo. Matsuo was tall and spoke in polite tones, but Jim never learned more than a few Japanese words. Matsuo oversaw the deaths of more than fifty men that Jim knew, but more somehow survived. And when word came that Japan had finally lost, these men rose up. Jim wondered what Matsuo’s final thoughts had been when he was overcome by his crew of skeletons, half naked, toothless, and gray with dust from working so long inside the earth. They had pulled Matsuo from his quarters.

Jim had not been a part of the mob. He’d watched with others from a close distance, but all he could see was a tangle of emaciated limbs. Above the groaning labor of the men, Jim heard the creak of metal. When the prisoners stepped back, Jim saw Matsuo impaled on a six-foot drill that had been used in the mine. The drill stuck through his chest. Two men arranged Matsuo on his knees, so that his legs formed a tripod with the point of the drill, which was protruding through his back. In this way, Matsuo could stay upright. The soldiers placed him at the
entrance of the mine, to keep watch, to guard that which he’d valued over all their lives. Sometimes Jim would dream of Matsuo propped on his drill watching over him, keeping sentinel on his life.

After the war, Jim got a job at a garage in Newburyport, just over the causeway from Plum Island. The first time he saw Peggy, he was pumping gas. She pulled up, with her boyfriend, in a brand-new, banana-yellow Buick convertible. Her boyfriend stepped out, needing to use the bathroom. He’d been drinking. Jim could smell that. The boyfriend had glossy black hair streaked with gray, but was probably only twenty-five. He had a slight limp. Peggy got out too. She stood a safe distance away and lit a cigarette.

“Your boyfriend’s got a nice car,” said Jim.

“The car’s mine,” said Peggy.

Jim wiped his hands on a rag. “Then why aren’t you driving?”

Peggy laughed. She looked at Jim appraisingly. Jim started to get nervous.

“What time do you get off?” she asked.

The boyfriend had tipped Jim a whole dollar. He seemed like a decent guy. Jim spent the next hour trying to get his hands clean. When the convertible pulled up again, Peggy was driving. Jim hopped in. He took her for ice cream at the stand down the road. It was summer and gulls were wheeling overhead. Jim and Peggy were the oldest people seated at the counter. Kids in bare feet, their hair bleached with salt and sun, made up the other customers. Jim bought Peggy’s cone for her.

He said, “I’ve got a dollar burning a hole in my pocket.”

Peggy didn’t talk much. Jim wasn’t sure why he was there. He remembered that the girls in high school had liked him, but it didn’t give him a whole lot of confidence.

“Was your boyfriend in the war?” he asked.

“Normandy,” said Peggy.

“Is he a hero?” asked Jim.

Peggy was silent for a minute. She looked over at Jim, then away. “Twenty-four hours a day,” she said. And that made Jim laugh.

Peggy was a hero because she married Jim, who had no money, whose only talent was fixing things. Her family set him up in his own garage. Peggy was educated, beautiful, and tough. She had smoked herself to death and never asked for pity. She’d married Jim because he was the biggest man she’d ever seen. She’d married Jim because of the reach of his hands and because of his huge feet with the gnarled toes that spread out like the roots of a tree. And he always let her drive.

This house on the island was Peggy’s, had been in her family for a hundred years. She had supervised the replacement of shingles, barking out orders while Jim balanced at the top of a ladder. And Jim had built them a bed—longer by six inches than most—in the cramped bedroom, since Peggy didn’t think it would fit through the door. Jim liked the island. He liked his garage, but the whole business of the camps was hard to forget. Jim had to consciously put all the deaths, the hunger, and the fear into the past each morning. This was a difficult task. Sometimes he felt he was living his whole life at once, in one moment, regardless of what was done with and what was left to do. Peggy didn’t understand but was kind enough to act as if she did. She went to all Jim’s reunions. She danced with his buddies, whose wives were dead, and then she died and no one danced anymore. They were in their eighties. They were all heroes because they didn’t die and some were heroes because they did.

Peggy was dead six months when Clara had called Jim up. How Clara had found him, he was not sure. Must have been some veterans’ organization. The connection was poor. Clara’s voice sounded distant and blunted. Clara was unconcerned
by the reach of years. She said, “I am so happy you are alive.”

And Jim had said, “Me too.”

Totoy was in San Francisco living in a hotel on Mission Street. He had come to the States for his veterans’ benefits, which were not enough, and now Clara was worried. She was living in an apartment in Parañaque, on the outskirts of Manila, with her kids and grandkids. Totoy sent her money every now and then, but her cousin (who lived in Daly City and was Totoy’s gambling partner) had written to her. Totoy’s tuberculosis was getting worse. They were scared he was going to die and that, because he was in the States and didn’t have enough money, they wouldn’t be able to send his body back to the Philippines. He would be cremated.

“He will be like an old cigarette,” said Clara. “What will God say to that?”

“I didn’t know he was in the U.S.” Jim had not seen Totoy since the day he’d been left at Camp O’Donnell. He’d thought of finding him after the war but hadn’t known his last name or the exact location of the house where Totoy had taken him. Also, Jim had not wanted to find out that he was dead. “I’ll go see him,” Jim said.

Jim flew to San Francisco and stayed in the Best Western in Japantown. He arranged to meet Totoy at a restaurant in Chinatown. Jim was momentarily concerned as he looked down at the sea of black-haired men that he and Totoy would miss each other, but Jim, even though he was eighty, was still over six feet tall. His hair was a vigorous gray and stood a good inch and a half high on his head. Everyone was noticing him. Totoy would too.

Jim sat on the booth side of a small table with his great hands folded on the tabletop and waited. It was noisy and Jim was left alone with his thoughts, because no one was speaking English. He saw a pair of old men standing in the doorway and realized, as he did every now and then, that he was old like them. Then
one man smiled. Totoy had cow eyes, like his sister Clara, and a broad shovel-shaped nose, and those were much the same as they’d been sixty years ago. Jim stood up. He recognized the work of years, but also what had been left behind. There was a nervous twinge in his stomach and he forced himself to nod and smile, as if he were at ease. Totoy was gray-faced. His hair was thin on his head and he’d made an effort to comb it over the bare spots. There was still black in with the gray. He was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt that was tight across his stomach. The muscles on his forearms were pronounced but his upper arms were thin, like Popeye arms. Totoy was very weak and leaned heavily on his cousin, who was similarly dressed; the two men wore identical black, thin-soled loafers.