MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  Charley Camper broke off and turned away, his fist in his eyes. He’d been talking fast, but the tears just ambushed him, came out of nowhere right in the middle of a sentence. Harding hadn’t even seen it happen. He leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, watching in his mind’s eye the story that Charley was telling.

  “. . . what I see is Polshanski, down on the raft, firing at the boat. The Jap with the megaphone is gone. The window in the wheelhouse is smashed and bloody, like after a car accident. The soldiers are crouching down behind the gunwales, firing and ducking, but a skinny man on a skinny raft isn’t the easiest target in the world, especially when he’s firing back. And Polshanski keeps firing. And the thing of it is, he takes time between his shots. Oh, how he takes time! You could light a stubborn pipe in the time he took. Those soldiers who are popping up to fire at him, he’s actually trying to time them! He’s watching for them, trying to guess, and while I’m looking on, he by God guesses right and drops a Japanese soldier over the railing. I must have shouted, because he looked over at me and he smiles, does Polshanski, a sneaky smile that says, see, I showed you something after all. I guess I was the last thing he saw on earth, because this time he waited too long. He got shot two or three times by soldiers on the boat. That was it for him. I think he died right off, even though the men on the boat kept shooting and the boat kept coming, bearing right down on him, like a destroyer ramming a submarine, running right over him. And that was the last I ever did see . . .”

  Another of these moments, Griffin thought, a moment that you wished was over and you wouldn’t have missed. You weren’t with them. What you pictured, vivid as it was, wasn’t exactly what Charley Camper saw as he talked. But it was close enough. You watched him cry. You saw him yank the bottom of his T-shirt up toward his eyes and wipe them. Then he dabbed at his nose with the same piece of shirt.

  “. . . the last I ever did see of my friend Polshanski. So.”

  A deep breath, a sigh of relief. The hardest part was over. Now he was only talking about himself.

  “We were in a clump of reeds, not much of a place, more roots and water than dry ground, and we fired at that boat. Then one of us got hit—Vernon Waters, it was—and the incoming fire was so much we couldn’t move, and they tossed in a grenade, and pretty soon it was going to be all over. This time we have no choice. We step out of the reeds, hands over our heads, and the boat’s about fifty feet away. The Japs make a motion like they want us to swim over to the boat. As we approached, though, it pulled away and the Jap soldiers—laughing, now—motioned that we should keep swimming. And we had no choice. The joke was on us all right. So was the movie camera. That was the gimmick. They were getting footage of the ending of MacArthur’s Ghosts.

  “The boat reached shore, tied up at some dinky pier. We’re still paddling away. They set up their camera on land and signal for us to come on in, come out of the water with our hands up and walk real slowly to the camera.

  “I remember I looked at Harding, and I confess, I kind of blamed him for all this. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was his fault. Where were his brains, his magic? Why’d we have to run out of luck now? And he looks at me and he says that I shouldn’t worry, everything was going to work out. He looks at me in a way that gives me the willies. ‘I promise,’ he says.”

  “How about it, Colonel?” Camper asked. Interrupting his story, he walked over to Harding, kneeled in front of him, like a player consulting with his coach. “Gonna tell me now?”

  “Not yet,” Harding said.

  “Ever? ‘Fore I die?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What you got to understand,” Camper said to Griffin, “is now we’re talking legend. Not legend that you hear about. Legend you see. I was there. I saw it. And the trouble is, I still don’t know. I don’t know whether this man was just trying to buck me up and make me feel better about surrendering or whether he knew what was going to happen. I don’t know. I told the story a dozen times. It made the papers in the States, later on. And I still don’t know the truth of it. How about it, Colonel? Give an old buddy a break?”

  Harding put his hands on Charley’s shoulders, patted them, drew him forward, into an awkward hug.

  “Charley . . .”

  “All right.” Camper lurched away abruptly. “Look at him, Griffin. Look at him good.”

  Blue eyes, narrowing somewhat when he knew they were watching. Hands steadying Charley, holding him close. The trace of a smile.

  “There,” Charley said. “Now you got it. He hasn’t changed a bit. That’s just the way he looked back then.

  “Well, there was a kind of double line, a gamut of Japs and cops, jeering, prodding, snapping pictures, and we had no choice but to walk that walk when I hear shooting, lots of it. At first I thought somebody was celebrating, but it kept up, and someone screamed. Then I see the line in front of us come all apart, there’s people down on the ground, cops and soldiers all tangled together, on their backs, on their knees, rushing past us, bumping us out of the way. Suddenly we don’t matter a bit, and I still don’t know what the hell goes on.

  “Then it’s over. There was still some firing now and then, here and there, but it’s the difference—you can hear it, I swear you can—between a battle, with both sides going like hell, and the end of a battle, which is a series of suicides and executions. The way it always ends. Mopping up, they call it.

  “When it’s quiet, we stand up and watch these soldiers come out of the village toward us. I saw they were Filipinos, dressed like peasants for the most part, though some had bits and pieces of different uniforms. Some had guns, some had bolos. But they all had one thing in common. You could see it in their walk. A certain something I’ve seen in barrooms and football fields and boxing rings: they were tired, but they’d won. They’d kicked ass. They’d taken some shots, but they’d given better than they’d gotten and in the end they’d won. You could see it in their walk.

  “They stand off and look at us, talking among themselves. Some go to the shore and slap water on themselves. Others are showing weapons they must just have captured, guns, packs, clothing. They must have stripped the losers clean. At last, one of them fellows separates himself from the rest and walks toward us. No uniform or rank or nothing, he looks like all the rest. He takes us in, the sorry-looking bunch we are, and then he goes straight for me, like he knows me, and maybe I should know him. He looks familiar, but I can’t place him.

  “ ‘Hey, Joe,’ he says, smiling but a little sarcastic. ‘Hey, Joe, you have a name?’

  “ ‘My name is Charley Camper,’ I say. ‘Sergeant Charley Camper.’

  “And he says, ‘My name is Flash.’ Can you beat it? The same guy I bossed around Baguio turns out he’s running a peasant army—the Hukbalahaps, they were called. Huks for short. And he saved my life! Talk about a world turned upside down. Or maybe, right side up . . .”

  “That’s it, Charley.”

  “A bunch of dirt-poor piss-ant peasants saved my hide,” Charley cried out, “and I haven’t forgotten that. Nothing I can do about it now but—”

  “That’s it, Charley,” Harding repeated, louder, and this time the big man heeded him.

  “That’s it, huh? I’m finished?”

  “You’re finished.”

  “But you’re not, are you, Colonel?”

  “No, Charley.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The next morning, Griffin was up early, light-headed from the beers and the Irish coffees. Ready to leave for Manila, he walked down to where he’d sat till just a few hours ago, Charley Camper’s hammock roost, barroom, barbecue pit. The big man was there, a mug of coffee in his hands, staring out at the bay.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Good morning,” Griffin answered. “Colonel Harding still in bed?”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re the one who should be tired.”

  “Somebody has to feed the pigs.”

  “Some view,” said Griffin. The neon was g
one, the city had receded. Now he noticed the curve of the mountains, the sweep of bay. There was something sensual about a harbor. Sailors talked about harbors the way men talked of women, flanks and thighs and coves. Secret places.

  “A piece of ass,” Camper said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I was?”

  “The country, I mean. Territory, nation, colony, commonwealth, whatever. I read about all these places that get their independence. They spit on the old flag, rename their streets and cities. It’s like a bad divorce. But this is different. They’re still our piece of ass. And we’re their John. The talk changes, the price goes up, but they’re still putting out and we’re still putting up.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Griffin said. “Take good care of the colonel. Maybe I’ll see you after New Year’s.”

  “I’ll be here,” Charley answered stoically. Then he warmed and added, “Come on back. I’d like that.”

  “So long, Charley.”

  Charley kneeled in front of his refrigerator, in front of a pile of empty beer bottles. He lifted one up, poured out a last few sour drops, deposited it in a wooden beer case for return to San Miguel.

  “See?” Charley said, gesturing to the bottles. “Dead soldiers.”

  Part Six

  A FURLOUGH FROM THE PAST

  CHAPTER 29

  MacArthur’s Ghost is heroic, solitary, melancholy. He is old and doomed. He is mysterious and historical, weighed down with feelings that torture him and with memories he dispenses to me a spoonful at a time. He enlists—somehow—the loyalty of everyone he meets. An aging flack like Eddie Richter. A beery pig farmer like Charley Camper. And me. I would follow him anywhere. I’ve enlisted. I’m in for the duration. Duration of what? Of a paper chase, a treasure hunt, a forced march down memory lane. He exhausts me. Does he ever get drunk? Did he ever fall in love? Does he have opinions about politics? Is he a Republican? A Yankee fan? Has he seen Apocalypse Now? When was the last time he hit someone? Or cried? He carries me along into the past. And when, as now, I tug toward the present, to a life I call my own, I still feel him behind me, in the dark hills over Subic Bay, waiting for my return.

  Outskirts of Manila. Rice fields yielding to a zone of factories and warehouses. Blocks of apartments, a ring of neon around the ground-floor shops, like the residue of an electronic tide: SAN MIGUEL BEER, GOODYEAR TIRES, BRUCE LEE LIVES. Plants, laundry, kids on every floor of high rises that look more like refugee ships than residences: which way to America? New construction, cranes atop towers, like great birds of prey. Clustered around building sites, like smaller birds picking crumbs, the huts and sheds the workers live in, campfires and cooking pots all pressing against the unfinished structure, as if the people who built things had claim to live in them.

  Now, Manila itself. Traffic. Horns. Music. Pall of smoke and diesel. Kids playing basketball on a raggedy asphalt court, five-foot-five-inchers scuffling and elbowing. First signs of America: franchise food places with familiar names. Pizza Hut and Shakey’s. Dunkin’ Donut. They’re like the mission stations the Spaniards built in California, fortress, church, and business all combined. Happy, sad little places, making promises that won’t be kept.

  I left my heart in a city by the bay, all right. Alleys of noise and fumes, hives of tin and tar paper, habitat of beggars, lawyers, whores, and pistoleros. City where all things are possible, anything goes. City where Americans strayed and stayed, a prodigal city for prodigal sons, westward outpost of American history, here where manifest destiny hits its dead man’s curve.

  CHAPTER 30

  Griffin walked into a fenced enclosure that appeared to be an open-air market, filled with stalls catering to tourists: herds of carved water buffalo and flocks of screaming wooden eagles; hammocks and tablecloths and T-shirts, ten-foot salad forks, wicker and rattan chairs and chests and cradles and bird cages, a maze of handicrafts through which he wandered, working his way toward a sound at the center of it all, heart of darkness herself, Donna Summer, singing how she wanted to be made love to, again and again, every which way.

  At the center of the bazaar stood a rickety nightclub, thatch-roofed, concrete-floored, with lean-tos and outbuildings converging on a stage where the Donna Summer clone was matching the original, beat for writhing beat, shimmy for shimmy, and from Donna Summer she went into what was clearly her finale, “Jungle Fever,” an equatorial lied that consisted mostly of moans, grunts, and adroitly simulated orgasms.

  “Too bad you missed Christmas,” Clifford Lerner said as he came up to greet Griffin. “You should see her do the Hallelujah Chorus. How are you?”

  “Tired. You?”

  “Never better,” Lerner said. “I’ve been running all over town, diddling your movie company, poking into people’s war records, the First Lady’s film festival. Know what I’ve learned?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you don’t. Well, the first is that this is a great town to be a journalist, a foreign journalist, I mean. It’s a dictatorship, but it’s a small, corrupt dictatorship, hot, tired, and worried, George, worried as a barmaid past midnight and on the wrong side of twenty-one. That’s the first thing.”

  “That’s plenty,” Griffin said. A midget fire-eater was onstage and a hefty German tourist was summoned to dance with her. The dance consisted of the little woman—Little Lucy, she was called—scooting between the Teuton’s legs.

  “The other thing is—is what really grabs me, George, makes me feel like a tiger. What I’ve found here is that everything connects. I don’t know why it is. The size of the place, or that it’s an island, the climate or the history. But here, nothing exists alone. Understand? You start poking around any subject, doesn’t matter how isolated, and before you know it, you’re talking politics, you’re doing history, you’re trading in names, and the names are always the same. I’ll give you an example. Take this movie that’s paying you . . .”

  There was a commotion onstage, a blare of horns and roll of drums. Lerner leaned forward excitedly. “I want you to see this,” he said.

  A woman in tights had dragged five customers onstage, each from different sections of the audience—an Australian, Arab, Japanese, German, and American. Across the stage stood a short, muscular Filipino with baggy pants and a pirate’s mustache. He was holding a cement block off the ground with a hook that passed through his tongue. When he turned his back to the audience, you could see his back had been made a target, with concentric circles of what looked like shoe polish. Bull’s-eye was right between the shoulder blades.

  “What is this?” Griffin asked.

  “The spirit made flesh,” Lerner replied.

  The hostess presented each of the men with a dart, steel-tipped, feather-tailed. Around the room, the emcee moved from table to table, revving up the action, as if this were an international competition, an Olympic demonstration sport.

  First up was the German, Dieter so-and-so from Dusseldorf, a precision tool manufacturer. The crowd applauded. Dusseldorf Dieter sighted carefully, the distance, the dart, the wind and the variables, and let fly a shot that hit the target at the right shoulder blade, where flesh was thin. As soon as the man flexed his muscles, the dart fell to the floor. The crowd hooted, the emcee made a joke about darts that fell out without achieving penetration, and Griffin wondered if you could do anything in Manila, clip a toenail, boil an egg, without the performance assuming sexual overtones. The Japanese, a Mr. Hirota on a special “Eros Tour” of Manila, was next. His dart landed feathers first and tumbled to the floor, and now the emcee talked about how all Japanese performances were sanitary and over quickly.

  “So much for the Axis powers,” Lerner whispered.

  Next was a man from Kuwait, a tall bearded Omar Sharif type in a white suit, “Mr. Ahmed, a regular visitor to Manila.”

  “I’ll bet he is,” Lerner said. “They have a couple hundred thousand Filipinos working for them. They go to the desert to work and he comes to the islands to play . . .”

&
nbsp; Mr. Ahmed hit the target all right, a hard stabbing shot that landed in the left buttock, a location that convulsed the audience. “Nice shot, Mr. Ahmed,” the emcee congratulated him.

  The Australian, a lumber industry executive, was a jovial pub-crawling sort, thoroughly pissed. He glanced back at his mates for encouragement and then sent a dart that implanted itself in the band that circled the target’s innermost ring. It was there to stay too: a single drop of blood attested Australia’s firm intentions. The dart girl hugged the Australian. Even the Filipino turned around and gave what was probably a grin, though the cement block suspended by a hook through his tongue made it hard to tell.

  “What a place,” Lerner sighed. “Decadence or decay, who knows? Anyway, I love it. Know what I’m going to call my article on your film? ‘Rouge on a Corpse.’ “

  “Who’s publishing?”

  “Would you believe it? I haven’t even thought about that yet.”

  “I thought you were cash-and-carry. You’ve really changed.”

  “Virtue is its own reward, my boy. Look out, here come the Yanks.”

  America’s hopes rested with a brawny, crew-cut serviceman from Clark or Subic. “Win one for the Gipper,” someone shouted, and everyone laughed. The American was an awkward, boyish chap, ill at ease onstage but by God determined to go for it. He raised the dart and aimed.

  “Oooh, what a hunk,” a voice from somewhere crooned. Concentration broken, the serviceman dropped his arm, laughed, mopped his brow, then took aim again. Part Eagle Scout, part Lieutenant Calley: it all depended where you put him. Griffin knew that the American would win. He closed his eyes and heard the cheering. When he opened them again, the dart girl was plucking the missile out of the target’s back, the man had removed the hook from his tongue and was beaming, the band struck up the “Halls of Montezuma,” and Lerner was ordering another round of drinks.