Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(58)
The back door opened and Tony walked in.
“Your gang’s here. They followed me from the panaderia. They can smell bread from a kilometer away, these little scamps. Feed them bread and get to work.”
I brought my prayer hands to my lips, sighed, and whispered, “Thank God for bread.”
Sponges slid against mesh from morning till noon. The kids and I inked enough paper and cotton to dam the Abra River, then Tony paid us with lunch plus a couple bottles of Coke. Sugar streamed in our blood; our fingers stung, our grins stretched from ear to ear. Tony packed us into the Land Cruiser and drove us into town, where we were to hang up posters. The T-shirts, he said, were to be given out the day of the motorcade rally. Still glucose-manic, my band and I hastened through the municipality, gluing paper to walls and posts, onto wooden planks, bamboo fences, and corrugated tin, covering the town with Norman’s ballyhoo. As the verve wore off, my breath slowed. Out of things to post, my body knew not what to do in a town that wasn’t my own. So I watched.
Warty pigs, stray dogs, chickens, dwarf palms, and cartfuls of green bananas lined the street. Potholes sank into areas touched by cement, and where the paving ended, grit spread. Children squatted on the sidewalk, writing in the dirt with rocks and sticks and breathing the dusty air rising from the ground. Half of them wore shorts and nothing else. Motorcycles zipped past, dodging the zigzag of chicks and children by a hair. I was close to thinking that Abra was much like Manila—poor people scattered here and there. But then I thought to look again, to squint and see what might really be.
Guns.
Villagers had pistols slipped into back pockets while the Tingguians tucked them into their loincloths. Motorcyclists rode with one hand on the clutch and the other curled around a trigger. Men playing cards shuffled their decks with a gun muzzle, while prepubescent boys sitting at their feet shined the spare. And on the dirt path, three-and four-year-olds hopscotched over silver shells. Abracadabra. Open. Open fire.
The mountain region decked itself with bush and bandit; I could hardly decide what kind of wilderness Mama and Norman had taken me to.
A mansion, similar to ours in size and shape, towered over the outback and the rice terraces. On the side of the mountain it hung, spangled and taunting the dearth of village life.
“Valera clan,” the shorter one of my original two playmates informed me.
“Who?”
“Governor of Abra. Many years. Long time.”
“That’s who Norman is running against? That’s the army you were talking about?”
He pulled out his imaginary gun one more time. “Yes. Bang-bang. Bang-bang for jobs, bang-bang for money, bang-bang for land, for food, for goat, for chicken. You not serve Valera, you not eat. You die. You—you and family—crazy.”
“You could say that,” I said, exhaling. “Now how do I get out of it?”
He shrugged. “No way out. We all too hungry.”
I thought of what Papa once said: People only band together when they have a common enemy. The villagers and the Tingguians banded together because they lived in an impoverished, isolated part of Luzon. Tony and the men who had been living in the mansion fixed their hope on the next guy who promised change because there were no jobs in the Middle East, no jobs in the provinces, and no jobs in Metro Manila. And now the commies were doing the same: they were committing themselves to the next new thing, say, a half-American man from New Jersey, with truckloads of guns and goons, trailed by rumors of a mansion and money elsewhere, and a wife who resembled the Virgin Mary.
This was our Common Enemy: death by hunger.
“Boss Tony is calling,” the shorter one said. “Time to go.”
The Land Cruiser brought us back to the safe house, where about forty had gathered. Tingguians, commies, children, Tony’s men, Norman, and Mama sat around a campfire—a scene so foreign, I had to be startled out of stock-stillness with a beat of a gong. Gangsa, the Tingguians called it. I jolted every time they beat it. The banging took me back to a time when Paolo and I played army, when I had thrown a baby-powder grenade over a fort of pillows—our talcum bomb exploding on the top floor, he and I cackling at the destruction we had caused. The tribesmen flitted to the music, amplifying the tune with the swish of feathers tufted from their turbans. The women and children clapped to the beat, and the commies pounded their gunstocks against the ground. The louder they got, the more nervous I felt.
Dizzying, dizzying, falling.
“You,” Norman summoned. “Inside.”
He and Mama led me through the back door and up the spiral steps.
Mama spoke as she walked. “I’ve done such a great job with you: smart, strong, resourceful. They said you would never make it, and yet here you are, running a campaign with me. Now what we need is for you to write a speech. Write us something convincing.”
“Don’t fuck this up, Strong Will. I didn’t come back to this godforsaken place to get screwed over. I’m here to win. And you’re here to help me. And if we succeed, you might even get a weekly allowance,” Norman said. “Now get to work.”
They left me at the landing where I had met Father Balweg earlier that week.
As they walked away, I whispered, “I will fuck this up, Norman. Like you fucked us up.”
I sat on a gun crate, next to a desk with a pen and paper, and wrote by lamplight all that I knew. I knew that people from my class had hurt people below us, and that my people remained at their stations because others chose to devote their lives to our service. I knew that when my parents lost everything, it was Elma and her family who’d chosen to protect me, to feed me, to teach me, and to be my kin. I knew that the children of Abra were at stake, as my friend, the shorter one, had tried to tell me.