MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  “Harry! Wake up!”

  It happened a hundred times, but Harding never got used to it: coming into a place at night, feeling your way in, not quite knowing where you were, or what it looked like, until you awoke—or someone woke you—at dawn and you saw a face that wanted something from you right away, and then you looked around and saw where the night had brought you. This morning it was Charley Camper begging him to awaken, and he saw the thatched roof of a lean-to and some rotted burlap sacks beneath. They had been his pillow. Outside, the sun was just coming over the low brown Zambales mountains. In a minute it would be too hot; the weak wind that rustled the bamboo would feel as if it came from the inside of an oven. The others had heard Camper wake him, heard the alarm in his voice. Reaching for their rifles, they looked out to see what he saw: that they were on an island in the middle of a rice paddy, a floor of mud covered by six inches of water, bounded by dikes that gave the place the look of a chessboard. With players. There were men on the dikes, all around them, some hunkered down in sitting position, others standing, all of them armed. Dark, wiry little men, dressed in shorts or trousers, half of them with bolos, half with rifles. Kinky-haired, black-toothed. Tattoos on arms and legs.

  “We’re surrounded,” Camper said.

  “We’ve been surrounded,” Harding said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Wait.” He glanced across the paddies. “For that.”

  They could see it coming from a mile away, across steaming paddies, through waves of shimmering heat, a mirage slowly turning into a parade. First came a couple of armed natives, others carried a chair in which someone was seated, and someone else held a black umbrella over the chair. It was the oddest thing in the world, a procession from out of a tiny kingdom, the umbrella like a reminder of death on a burning, cloudless, blue-sky day. The marchers followed the dikes across the paddies, picking their way, zigzagging, so that their approach was like a dance, left and right, forward and back, advance and retreat. At last the procession approached the island itself, and Harding could see who was in the chair, under the black umbrella. He was a tall, brown-skinned man, white-haired, white-bearded, with wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of a recording angel. The porters set down the chair and the old man rose to his feet, picked up a cane, and hobbled toward them. He stepped onto the island and passed in front of them as if they were on review. He took his time, staring at each of them, Harding last of all. Harding noticed a thin, scholarly head on top of a once-tall body that the years had warped and twisted. The man remained in front of Harding, studying him carefully, measuring, nodding.

  “We . . . are . . . Americans,” Harding intoned in the slow, careful English generations of American teachers, and masters, had afflicted on the islands.

  “From . . . America,” Harding repeated, gesturing toward himself and the others. Then he made walking motions, scissoring his fingers. “We go Bataan.” Then he raised his arms as if he were holding a rifle, pantomiming some shooting. “Fight Japan!”

  The old man kept staring, but now a small smile played around the corners of his mouth.

  “You didn’t fight Japan much last night,” the old man said, “when they chased you into the swamp. Seems that we did the killing. And you boys did the hiding.”

  “Who are you, mister?” Harding asked. The old man’s English was startling. It was smooth, slow, ironic, with none of the dips and flourishes with which Filipinos celebrated their fluency. “What are you?”

  “Around here, they call me Mr. Brown.”

  “Well, Mr. Brown, we need your help.”

  “I guess you do,” the old man acknowledged. “You come along.”

  Now the procession resumed, the chair, the umbrella, the natives—Zambals, they were called—and the Americans, not sure if they were guests or prisoners. They marched across the paddies, through the cane fields, then along the reedy banks of a muddy river that meandered out toward the sea. For a while, they were in a sea of salt grass, walking on logs that traversed muddy flats, picking their way over rickety bamboo bridges, until they came to Mr. Brown’s village, a collection of huts and boardwalks, ladders and landings, all on stilts. It was at the end and edge of everything, not quite land, not quite water, a brackish indeterminate place. Shells and shit smells, hags and babies, nets, boats, floats, coconut husks, cook pots, the beginning or the end of civilization.

  Old man Brown saw to it that all the guests were taken care of, washed, and fed. But Harding was his special guest. Cane in hand, he led Harding to a nipa hut at the far end of the village, facing out of the reeds like the prow of a ship. The hut sat on a split-bamboo platform that was like a verandah, with chairs and benches looking out across the grass. Inside, the nipa but was one room. There was no furniture, only some mats and a coverlet in one corner, a pile of books—school texts and an incomplete encyclopedia, and a dictionary that was as well thumbed as any Bible. That was unexpected, but the big surprise was against the wall, where clothing had been turned into ornament, art, even icon: the belts and boots, scabbard and hat, of a turn-of-the-century cavalryman.

  “Take a good look,” old man Brown said. “You won’t find many like that.”

  Harding reached out and touched the old Sam Browne belt. The relics of another army, lovingly preserved, property of a cavalryman who had ridden across the seas and not gone home.

  “That was a couple of wars ago,” Mr. Brown said. “Another century, almost.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh. That.” The old man came forward. They were face to face. “I deserted. I killed an officer. I changed sides. I ran from the white people. Then I ran from the brown. This is where I came. Here’s where I stopped running. So what do you think?”

  The old man watched Harding to see how his confession had gone. But it wasn’t what he’d done that got to Harding—desertion, murder, flight. It was the sheer passage of time. That he was here now. That he’d been here forever. A woman came with a pot of coffee, another with some fish and rice, sweet potatoes. A third rattled around inside the hut and emerged with some tin plates, knives, and forks, which they put on a small table and set in front of the two men. There was a quart-size beer bottle filled with a milky fluid Brown said was coconut wine. One of the women said a few words and went away laughing.

  “She said her pillow was your pillow,” Brown translated. “Have some wine.”

  He poured into a tin cup, which he passed over to Harding. When Harding was finished, he served himself and drank out of the same cup.

  “You mind sharing?”

  “Your cup is my cup,” Harding answered.

  “Your health, then,” Brown said. “Now you’ve had a while to reflect, what do you think of me? A fancy-talking colored deserter living in a swamp. Queer, huh?”

  “I suppose you had your reasons,” Harding said.

  “Everybody has reasons. Killers and victims. The people I chased and the people who chased me. The blacks and whites and in-betweens. The yellows too, I guess. There’s no shortage of reasons.”

  Old man Brown glanced down. Through the slats in the floor you could see the tide washing in across the mud. Land to sea, sea to land. Old man Brown had seen it change thousands of times, and through it all kept wondering. Everyone who knew his real name, who remembered what he’d done, everyone who’d looked for him, was gone. A new war was coming in with the tide.

  “So you’re going to Bataan,” Brown said.

  “Yes. And we need a boat.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The moments you remembered. They stood out like paintings on a wall, like dreams from sleep. Dancing with a long-haired woman in a musty officers club. The look on the Japanese orderly’s face as the Americans rode out from between the trees and commenced to slaughter naked, swimming soldiers. The sudden appearance of a sword above a line of figures kneeling in the Baguio cemetery. Climbing into Uncle Harrison’s white Packard: “To Bataan. Better make it snappy.” Meade whooping with joy a
s he drove the car into the sea. Old man Brown being carried toward them across the rice paddies. And now: the departure. A tide that was high and a moon that was mostly full and a tired little pump boat that had been putt-putting up and down the China Sea, from Lingayen to Olangapo, since before old man Brown arrived. And old man Brown watching them pile on board, telling them to stay close to the coast, travel only by night, keep an eye out for patrol boats. He stood there watching them turn into the channel through the reeds. Seeing him there, Harding felt that he had seen his father again. Here was another one of those odd, wise, solitary men who landed in unexpected places, spent years traveling in universes of their own devising, wrestling with enormous questions and answers they never shared. Tall, lonely, nocturnal men, self-impaled. What he never imagined, Harding said, was that he would become such a man himself.

  More pictures. Two nights along the coast and then a voyage across the wide mouth of Subic Bay, where a rainstorm protected them from patrols out of the captured U.S. naval base. When the rain lifted they were off the Bataan peninsula, a few hours before dawn. They could hear the muffled roar of artillery, distant thunder, an electric storm that had settled over the mountains.

  First landing on Bataan, halfway down the peninsula: dark mountains, bulky foothills muscling down to an inhospitable coast, all cliffs and rocks and, in the distance, the roar, louder by the minute, that told you you were sailing toward the end of the world. They left Mr. Brown’s boat among some rocks and moved inland. The war was well south of them—they could hear as much—but this ground had been contested. Up from the beach, on a grassy hill, was a blasted observation tower. Beyond, there were trenches and foxholes, shells and cartridges. Mess kits. Bandages. Mulch. They marched through burned-off cane fields and there were bodies in the charred stubble, fallen scarecrows, soldiers going back to earth. They had fallen, bloated, rotted, and now they were almost home, more earth than human, with helmets, dog tags, belt buckles left behind, personal effects of men taken into custody. Eyeglasses. Gold fillings.

  “I can’t believe that guy,” Sudul said.

  “I do,” Polshanski answered.

  Meade was in the cane field, on his knees, bayonet in hand, prising the gold fillings out of a dead man’s teeth.

  “It’s okay,” Meade said. “They’re Japs. I can tell by the helmets.”

  “Come on, Meade,” Harding said.

  Meade waved away a cloud of blowflies and kept digging away with his bayonet, pointing with one hand, pounding with the other. Harding drew his Colt and held it against Meade’s head.

  “Let’s go back to the boat, Meade. I can’t stand the smell.”

  “You wouldn’t . . .” Meade looked up and was surprised. “You would! Son of a bitch, missionary boy, I believe you would.”

  “I would.”

  Meade appealed to the others. “You guys . . .”

  “I’d feel bad about it,” Sudul said.

  “Me too,” Polshanski added. “For quite a while.”

  “Charley!”

  “Do what the man says,” Camper answered. “He got us this far.”

  Now Meade appealed to Harding. “Why?”

  “Because I’m a missionary boy. All right?”

  The next day, they came home. They rounded the tip of the Bataan peninsula. Ahead of them, a few miles offshore, lay Corregidor. On the left was the port of Mariveles. They sailed in through a soup of battered, ruptured vessels; it was like a dynamited fish pond, with a few stunned survivors swimming in a lake of broken bodies. Oil fires on the water, ammunition dumps exploding on land. Once ashore, they picked their way through crowds of wounded hoping for a boat to Corregidor; a field of stretchers, more coming in by the busload. The whole port area was a jumble of jeeps, buses, trucks, a junkyard in the making, resistance imploding into terminal collapse.

  The newcomers wandered around, asking for headquarters. The response was shrugs, curses, a gesture here and there. Frustrated, Meade burst out that they were looking for General MacArthur’s headquarters. That was the worst moment of the trip. A lieutenant pointed south. He was pale, rickety, filthy. Everyone was covered with bites and rashes, jaundiced and malarial. The whole world had diarrhea. How far south, Meade asked, for where the lieutenant had pointed was nothing but the sea. The answer was: Australia. Seeing them dumbfounded, the lieutenant asked where they came from. They told him. They had to report to someone, they insisted. The lieutenant wondered why. It was April 8, 1942, and in a few hours, Bataan was going to surrender.

  The Americans and Filipinos were beaten, chopped down as surely and steadily as cancer fells an athlete: it didn’t matter how big you were, or how good, at the start. Tomorrow they’d all be prisoners, saints and slackers, heroes and cowards. Who would ever sort it out? Harding remembered something a French general had once said, ordering wholesale execution of prisoners: “Shoot them all. God will sort it out.” When he’d first heard that line, he thought it was the epitome of cynicism. But here on Bataan, it sounded like a declaration of faith: God would sort it out. It was a faith Harding didn’t share. He pulled his men together and led them to the harbor, just in time for another defeat: the sight of their boat making for Corregidor, virtual flagship in an armada of rowboats, rafts, bancas, floats, and barges that were less like vessels than like the wreckage of a larger ship, Bataan itself, that had already sunk.

  “Hey, sonofabitch, come back here!” Meade bellowed, rushing down to water’s edge, shaking his fist.

  “Give it up, Meade,” Camper said.

  “You can’t blame them,” Polshanski said.

  “Red damn sails in the sunset,” Sudul added. Red sails indeed. A postcard sunset bent on illustrating the end of an era. “I hope they make it.”

  “Me too,” Meade said. “I hope they make it.” That amazing remark, that moment of sudden charity, stopped them all, and they probably never felt closer than they did in the silence that followed, watching their boat sail away and darkness fall.

  The Japanese artillery, coming into range, sounded like a monster lumbering across the ocean, landing randomly, then closing, bracketing, slaughtering. Light returned to the dark straits, the light of burning boats and fuel-oil bonfires, the sounds of screams and explosions coming into shore, boats sinking, men burning or drowning or both. The artillery heightened, pounding, pounding, a pointless stupid exercise, like sledgehammering boulders into rocks, rock into pebbles, pebbles into dust—only these were boats and rafts blown into boards and splinters, men blasted into chum and bait. Which the sharks did not decline.

  Part Five

  BEER AND MEMORIES

  CHAPTER 25

  “Do you know what day it is?” asked Harding.

  “Our third day on the road. That would make it . . .”

  “Christmas Eve.”

  “Damn! You could have fooled me.” Could have fooled almost anybody, Griffin thought. They were on the terrace of a rundown beach hotel outside Olangapo. It was another melancholy little corner in a country that seemed to have more than its share of them, a country where a resort hotel could go from splashy five-star pretense to shabby desuetude in a single season, without witnesses. Here, Tahitian-style huts sat alongside a stagnant man-made lagoon where backed-up sewage and paper festered. A broken catamaran was pulled up on the sand. A Styrofoam float, iceberg-shaped, sat in an algae-green swimming pool.

  “Christmas,” Griffin reflected.

  “I wanted you to have this,” Harding said, handing over an envelope. “Merry Christmas.”

  Out of the envelope came the photograph Griffin had seen in Harding’s hotel room, Harding and his guerrillas before something called the second Battle of San Leandro: young faces staring out from yesterday and one of them—the old man beside him—staring back.

  “I wanted you to have it,” Harding said. “Time we get done, it’ll mean something to you.”

  “It already does.”

  “We’re getting there,” Harding said. They were comfortable now
, alone together, drinking San Miguels and waiting for sunset.

  Out on the beach—the same beach where a soldier named Meade had driven a white Packard roadster into the waves—a half dozen sailors out of the naval base at Subic were emptying a case of San Miguel. They sat in a circle on the sand, a satchel-size tape player at the center, where a campfire might have been. Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, singing about endless love. Griffin and Harding could hear it from where they sat. So, probably could the organist they shared the lonely terrace with; nonetheless he belabored “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Sometimes the songs conflicted, sometimes they blended. No objections either way. Griffin wondered if Harding saw anything of himself in the sailors on the beach. Was there any connection between the missionary boy who’d led MacArthur’s Ghosts down this coast forty years ago and the brawny rock ‘n’ rollers who had ridden Hondas up from Subic, on the prowl for steak and cunt?

  “You’ve been patient with me,” Harding remarked.

  “They’re paying me.”

  “Is that it? I don’t think that’s it.”

  “No . . .” Griffin felt a little off-balance. “I was in bad shape before you came along, Colonel.”

  “So was I,” Harding responded. He hadn’t lost his shyness. His gestures at friendship were as tentative as a teenager’s. Griffin had normal social instincts and was used to gamely filling awkward pauses. This time he decided to wait.

  “It’s not easy for you, I know,” Harding said. “My story. My rules. Telling the story in order, moving through time, not giving you a peek at the ending. That must frustrate you.”

  “Sometimes,” Griffin admitted. He could hear Clifford Lerner suggesting he was a stenographer, not a reporter.

  “It’s the only way I can do this,” Harding said. “It’s not like I had a choice. It’s the only way. You’ll see why. There’s something else . . .”