MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  The door opened and in a moment the girl emerged, walking directly to where Gibbins stood waiting for her. She leaned against him and slipped her hand around his arm: they made an intimate and ideal couple already. Gibbins was bewitched; he ran a hand over her hair, beginning at the top of her head, down the back of her neck, over her shoulders and back, over her buttocks, down as far as his hand could reach, and the hair streamed on. The girl smiled, looked at Gibbins, and said, “Hello, Joe,” and Griffin knew that World War II had not been fought in vain.

  CHAPTER 4

  Griffin wrapped a towel around his middle and pushed aside the sliding door to the terrace. The chair he sat in was still wet with dew, the concrete floor damp and cool beneath his feet. It felt good to preside over the city, half naked, from ten floors up, sober and alone.

  Manila Bay was dotted by dozens of ships. Far beyond was the Bataan peninsula, a hefty shoulder of mountains pushing into the sea. Corregidor would be out there somewhere too, he guessed. Right below was the Cultural Plaza, the Marcos showcase. To one side was the Coconut Palace, a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries, built out of all-native materials; the Pope had declined to stay there. To the other side was Mrs. Marcos’s Parthenon, the Film Center. Behind it was an artificial lagoon, complete with transplanted palms and trucked-in sand, a place for starlets and producers to cavort during the coming film festival. Easy for a certain kind of writer, Paul Theroux or one of those snotty Naipauls, to be strenuously droll about all this: another comical little hot-weather country, gobbling aid and gulling the masses while the postcolonial elite went California dreamin’. Manila was a feast for ironists. But that wasn’t Griffin’s trade.

  FARAWAY PLACES

  by George Griffin

  It is a dream, a very old dream at that, so old a dream we hesitate to confess it. In short, a cliché: the vision of an island, a palm-fringed island set in a vast blue sea. We’ve seen it in shipwreck cartoons, in soft-drink ads, in television shows and . . .

  And in my last column from Fiji, Griffin thought, yanking the paper out of his typewriter, crumpling it in a ball that, nonetheless, expanded in midflight and landed well short of the wicker wastepaper basket across the room. A miss at the beginning, a miss at the end. Very well then. Try again, old whore, for the perfect position. Tickle those keys . . .

  FARAWAY PLACES

  by George Griffin

  It is time—high time—the budget-wary traveler with a taste for something different takes a look at the Philippines, a friendly, stable, eager-to-please country that combines the exotic appeal of the Far East with the beachcombing Bali Hai charm of the blue Pacific. What’s more, English is spoken, dollars are welcome, and Americans are greeted as friends . . .

  . . . in this rickety, senile dictatorship, which deserves a Garcia Marquez to chronicle its vain excesses, its terminal spasms, its rococo conspiracies, but what it gets is George Griffin, who is having a harder and harder time separating the words he hides from the ones he sells, but if you are going to break down it might as well be here, far from home, in a city of dreams—bad, good, and wet. But come now, once more upon the mattress, the old proficiency. The eyes of the Sun Belt are upon you . . .

  FARAWAY PLACES

  by George Griffin

  We think of ourselves as a nation of winners and yet we cherish the memory of our defeats. That is why we revere our Valley Forge and make the Alamo a shrine. That is why we remember the Maine, remember Pearl Harbor. And that is why, forty years later, a handful of Americans, middle-aged and older, are making a pilgrimage halfway around the world to that certain island I can barely glimpse outside my hotel window, out beyond the shimmering blue horizon of Manila Bay . . .

  Now you’ve got it, Griffin thought, now you’ve hit the G-spot, better than anyone who’s faster, and faster than anyone who’s better. Look, ma, no hands!

  It’s a tiny island, rocky, nondescript, with no hotels, no shops, no beaches to speak of, No Bali Hai, no Waikiki. It was never fashionable, it is not in season. Honor and memory, not pleasure, bring us here. In the company of men who gave much more, we give a little of our time to the island called Corregidor . . .

  Got it! With the lead paragraph in place, the rest was easy. His audience, his loyal readers would be well-served. He often pictured them. He pictured them reading his columns during Sunday football games, or around a breakfast table piled high with store-bought donuts. Sometimes, traveling, he glimpsed them holding his guidebooks, checking his clippings. On the flight to Hawaii for instance: three and a half hundred of his faithful, blinding him with their flashbulbs and white shoes, crossing the Pacific watching Saturday Night Fever, spilling rainbow-colored drinks that looked as if they were mixed off a barber’s shelf, staggering over crushed macadamia nuts toward lavatories where the return-to-seat sign never dimmed. Pausing a day while waiting for the flight to Manila, Griffin had infiltrated groups of readers in Waikiki: sunburns and souvenir pineapples, monkey pods and muu-muus. They were his people, he their envoy. They were faithful savers in small accounts, fervent dreamers of cautious dreams, admirers of tropical flowers and goldfish ponds, tasters of tropical fruit and juice. On the beach, they waded in shallow, warm waters, tickled to death, and they limped arm in arm along the sea, while pagan surfers cavorted where the high waves broke. Many were old, many had waited too long. There were lots of widows, doing what he would have wanted me to do. At hotel-sponsored luaus they sat at long tables, accepting a sliver of mahi-mahi, a dab of poi, a paper cup of roast pork, all of it topped off with a hula lesson for the young at heart. And Griffin never knew whether to laugh or cry. He’d never decided. But he knew that his crumby columns dealt in dreams. Not his dreams, though. Then the phone rang.

  “So how’s the budding author?” someone shouted. “I saw your name in the paper, in the list of travel writers in town for . . . for whatever they flew you in for.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I say, I got that famous writer his first job, back on the Newark News. It’s Eddie Richter.”

  “Eddie?”

  “How long’s it been? . . . Your mother’s funeral, I guess. How long ago was that?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “That long? Damn, sometimes I look at myself and I say, what the hell are you still doing here, anyway?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ll come by and tell you. Hour from now, down in the lobby. And Georgie, I may have something for you. Something special.”

  “What’s that, Eddie?”

  “Same thing I got for you a million years ago, back in the Garden State. A job!”

  Griffin sat at his typewriter, staring at the phone. Eddie Richter, calling him as though childhood were yesterday, Manila an easy drive down the Garden State Parkway, in the general direction of Atlantic City. Richter was a flack. Not a PR man, not a public relations counsel, not even a press agent. He called himself a flack. An acquaintance of Griffin’s father, he had been an endless source of tickets for baseball games, circuses, ice capades. “How’s the budding author?” he would ask whenever they met. Griffin hadn’t thought of Eddie Richter for years. But mulling it over now, he felt guilty about having left the man behind. For there had been a time when Eddie was crucial, the time when George was chafing to set out in a writing career, and Eddie had made a phone call to a newspaper in Newark and arranged for a summer job as a reporter, and that was the beginning of everything. Eddie reminded him of the times of early promise, summer jobs, first bylines, when being a sharp student led to being a reporter, which led to being a writer. Just like that.

  “George. Over here!”

  Eddie Richter looked as if he’d just flown in from Miami: cherry slacks, white shoes and belt, pink T-shirt, and topping it all, a mesh-and-plastic golf hat that advertised something called PALM TREE PRODUCTIONS. Walking to him across the lobby, George saw familiar things: hairy arms, shrewd eyes, smell of cigars. That sense of being in on things, the inside track, the ground floor
, the straight poop.

  “Boy, did you get old!” Eddie Richter exclaimed. “How old did you get?”

  “I’m thirty-six now.”

  “Me, I’m closing in on seventy. Or seventy’s closing in on me.” And then as Griffin stuck out his hand, Eddie pulled him into a hug. “You carry me back, Georgie. You really do. So how’s the budding author?”

  “You know, if you read the papers. Where have you been these past years?”

  “I did what everybody else who makes sixty-two and six does, Georgie. I closed up shop and I moved to Florida. To South Miami Beach, if you can believe that. Where the garment makers and candy store owners and kosher butchers go to die. The longest six months of my life. Sitting around watching the fountain outside a hotel isn’t for me, kid, and eating supper at four o’clock so you can get the early bird special, complete dinner half price, choice of rice pudding or Jell-o for dessert . . . No, lucky I found out about this movie deal.”

  “Movie deal?”

  “Come on, kid,” Eddie said, urging him toward where a car and driver waited. “We’ll take a spin. We’ll talk. We got a lot of catching up to do. Catching up and moving on.” As he walked across the driveway, he reached up and tweaked George’s ear. That was another trademark. He was one of the generation that nudged shoulders, patted heads, chucked chins, was always throwing imaginary haymakers and uppercuts. Remnants of a time when all things were possible.

  “Manila is my kind of town,” Eddie announced as soon as they were under way. “I been to these other places you write about. Not for me. Hong Kong is banks and insurance companies, way over my head. Microchips. And Singapore is just a high-rise shopping mall dressed up as a country. No place for me. But here . . .”

  He gestured out the car window. They were in the Ermita district, along del Pilar, scene of last night’s debauch, and it was quieter by daylight but just as crowded: money changers, labor recruiters for the Arab world, armed guards, tourists. The bar girls sat out on the sidewalk in hair curlers and bathrobes. Manila by day: dripping air conditioners and movie magazines and rock and roll. If America conquered the world it would look like this.

  “Being here,” Eddie said, “I feel like I’m a character in an old movie.”

  “What kind?”

  “Sometimes I think it’s a western, with shoot-outs and robberies and outlaws. Other times, you read about what goes on in the provinces, it’s like one of those moat-and-castle jobbies, with princes and robber barons and dungeons. Or a western, with posses and guns for hire, hanging judges, that stuff. But mostly it’s like one of those old private eye things that had hookers and detectives and goons and bodyguards and bar girls and shoeshine boys and weird rich people and crooked cops and a plot that nobody could follow.”

  “And you like it?”

  “Like it? Hey, George, I’m as happy as . . . I don’t know . . . a horse in clover? A pig in shit? An outhouse rat? Anyway, I’m glad to be back.”

  “When were you here before?”

  “Forty years ago,” Eddie answered. “A bunch of us—”

  “Come off it! You? You waded ashore with Douglas MacArthur?”

  “Not me. I was onshore waiting for him.”

  “Christ!” It was amazing. Eddie Richter just didn’t figure to have a war record. He was more the sort of man you sent out to entertain the troops. Even now, he looked as though he ought to be filling out a card table with Mickey Rooney, George Burns, and Red Buttons at some golden-age resort. “So you were a guerrilla?”

  “I still am, kiddo. Which brings me to this job I got in mind for you. You’re not doing anything tomorrow are you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Now tell me this. Ever hear of MacArthur’s Ghost?”

  CHAPTER 5

  The veterans wore pastel jump suits, or shorts and polo shirts. Their wives wore polyester slacks and drip-dry blouses. They fussed with cameras, compared sunscreens, checked itineraries. They were Griffin’s people all right, K-Mart shoppers. They traveled heavy and they traveled scared and they traveled mostly to confirm that there was no place like home. Still, they intimidated him, this December morning. They had traveled someplace Griffin had never been: a war. Any other place, he could feel superior to them. No ticket they bought, he couldn’t get for free. But this was different. The war: that stopped him.

  A hovercraft cut across the bay, trailing spray and waves, turned into the harbor, where it cut speed, losing the pillow of air it raced on. It sagged into warm and oily water and bumped against the pilings. Crew members jumped onto the dock, warning passengers to watch their step as they came aboard. Was there any irony in being so gently ushered toward a battlefield?

  The Marcos shoreline of hotels and theaters disappeared. So did the polluted air, the eternal haze, the pall of sun-warmed smoke and fumes that covered Manila. Suddenly, the world came out in Technicolor, a true blue sky, water to match, everything clean and clear and endless. Far ahead they saw the green slopes of Mount Mariveles, the Bataan peninsula. Every minute it became more massive and more brightly green. Pretty soon there would be—would have to be—Corregidor.

  “You want my egg?”

  “Do I . . .” Griffin was facing one of the veterans, wearing a name card that identified him as WALTER FEDEROVICH of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Walter was a narrow, wiry Slav, with thinning black hair combed straight back. His nose was prominent, his skin cratered with blackheads he would take to his grave. His arms were hairy and muscular and you could see the sleeveless undershirt he wore beneath an aloha shirt. Next to him his wife was massive and patient; her muu-muu fit her heavyweight body like the tarps exterminators heave around houses before they throw in the termite poison.

  “You want my egg?” he asked again.

  “Thanks,” Griffin said. Around him, the veterans and their wives were belaboring the box lunches that came with their tour. Poking straws into paper cartons of orange drink, they looked like a class trip headed across New York harbor to the Statue of Liberty. Griffin tried to peel the egg, pulling away a tiny fragment of shell. Walter Federovich took the egg back, rapped it against his knee, removed the remaining shell in one piece, and returned the egg to Griffin. “There you go.”

  “I guess you were here before,” Griffin said.

  “Yeah,” Federovich answered and left it at that. Amazing, Griffin thought. A man like Walter Federovich liked boasting he could make it from Harrisburg to Miami in twenty hours. Maybe he wondered if California was all it was cracked up to be. But here he was, halfway around the world, not once but twice, scanning across the water, spotting a swelling just above the horizon, something that might turn out to be clouds, or heat waves, or nothing at all, except Federovich knew better. He winced and turned away.

  “Seen much of Manila?” Griffin asked. “This time around?”

  “Nope,” Federovich answered. “The hotel. Some shops and things for her.”

  He gestured toward his wife—Vera, by her name tag—and Griffin could see that she was worried about her husband. The color was draining from his face. He was nervously rubbing his sweaty hands on his knees.

  “It’s stuffy in here,” Griffin sympathized.

  “Yeah,” Federovich said, talking fast, as if he were searching for an alibi. “I forgot that. I thought I remembered . . . it all. Everything. But when I stepped off the plane . . . that whoosh of hot air . . . that sun. Comes up hot, goes down hot, we used to say. Nothing nice about the edges of the day. No dawn, no twilight.”

  He checked out the window and no doubt about it, there was Corregidor, a brown, rocky coast, cliffs and slopes, green knobby hills. Federovich stared, looked harder, looked away, as if he had recognized someone he didn’t want to meet and was hoping that they could pass each other by.

  “You’ll be fine, Walter,” his wife assured him. “It’s just an island now. Another place, is all.”

  “Sure!” He glared at her, resenting her having gone public with his distress. Then the anger passed and h
e patted her on the knee, as if apologizing for all the things that he could never tell her.

  The hydrofoil reduced speed as it came in to shore, dropping down into the water, so that what had been almost an airplane was now something less than a boat. Inside, passengers were stirring, anxious to leave. Some of them were already pointing out landmarks. Cameras were clicking.

  “This place,” Walter Federovich said. He hadn’t budged. The first veterans were already onshore, clambering onto tourist buses.

  “Walter, we’ll miss the tour,” his wife warned.

  “What a tragedy that would be,” Federovich snapped. His tongue was sharp. He just couldn’t move. That was all.

  “This place gives me the willies,” he said. “Always will.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” Griffin said.

  “How the hell would you know?” Federovich snapped back at him.

  “Walter!”

  “You get out, Mother. I’ll be along.”

  Vera Federovich climbed up the steps, onto the wooden dock. Griffin could see her pacing back and forth. He glimpsed the hem of her muu-muu, swishing back and forth outside the porthole.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. . . .”

  “Griffin. . . . That’s all right. I understand.”

  “The hell you do,” Federovich responded. There it was again, something stirring. What was it? A wound? An infection? A memory?

  “I guess I’m ready to show my face,” Federovich said, arising quickly, as though determined to get through with whatever punishment Corregidor had saved for him. “That’s what all this is—”