fiction

from Killing Time in a Warm Place
by José Y. Dalisay Jr.

Dream of Lizards

I COME FROM A COUNTRY without snow and without raspberries. Instead we have pounding rain and coconuts. When the typhoons come the coconuts fall in a rain of their own. I know; as a boy of ten I spent the summer in my home-town of Kangleong, in the Visayan islands, and I remember how, early one morning, I rose to the shriek of the wind and what I imagined to be a stampede of heavy-footed horses among the groves. It was the sound of many coconuts falling into the brush-padded mud, full-grown nuts torn loose from the treetops by slashing wind. At daybreak I hurried to the groves with the other children, and we gathered up the coconuts, and we dragged, rolled and kicked them over to the bucayo maker’s shack. She paid us five centavos for every coconut we salvaged from other people’s farmlots, and we lingered while she grated the white flesh and steeped the cakes in a deep iron panful of simmering molasses. I remember that well: the exhalations of the wet earth and the overpowering sweetness of sugared coconut. Later that morning I walked up to the seashore to see how large the waters had become; and they were large, indeed, and ugly, flicking at the edges of Kangleong in a dirty brown froth, throwing up blackened logs, palm fronds, pieces of rope and stranged triangles of colored plastic on the beachfront bordering the coastal road.

It was a day without shadows, late into our summer, which begins in March and ends in June. It was as if the rain had come to leave everything clean and to render all objects in their most vivid states, in colors made all the more turgid by the grayness of the sky. On my way home I passed by the tall kapok tree whose lower branches reached out beyond its owner’s fence into the street. The ground was littered with hard brown pods which I knew yielded, when cracked open, the cottony fluff that kept life jackets afloat in the ocean. I had learned that it was simpler to strip and lash two coconuts together and to tuck a pair under each armpit; coconuts were incredibly buoyant. The kapok pods were too dull to attract me, but somewhere among them was a shiny lump that turned out to be a baby bat. It was grayer than the sky and when I folded its wings it fit neatly into my palm. I brought it home and put it in a coffee jar in a bath of rubbing alcohol, in the hope of preserving the body and its fine-haired sheen―a futile gesture, I was to find over the week that followed, a week of soggier and then drabber mornings, over which the bat turned darker and began to come apart. I wanted to keep the slender bones but my grandmother threw the jar away, and I can’t even remember if I was saddened by what she did, or simple relieved. That summer was soon lost in longer and thicker shrouds of rain. No more coconuts fell. In mid-June my uncle managed to put me aboard an Air Force C-47 that had stopped by our island on its way to Manila. It was a bumpy flight and I nearly cried from the pain in my ears, but for the thought that I was with soldiers, I occupied myself by staring out the window to search for some horizon. I saw ragged clouds and a leaden sea, until the deep green mass of Luzon appeared, its plains awash in floodwater. We lurched into a city shipped by rain.

And now, thirty-six thousand feet above the black Pacific, I ask for coffee without sugar, giving in to sleeplessness. Perhaps over Hawaii I’ll shut my eyes and see nothing for the next ten hours, and awaken to Manila flooded in that memory from twenty-five years ago. And I would be a boy again, and my father would come for me at the airport in a hastily-borrowed jeep, not expecting my arrival for another week. It was Mandoy Imoy, I would tell him; he put me on this plane, to save himself the foat fare. What a stupid thing, Tatay would say, to fly you in this weather; well, that takes care of the shirt I’m sending him for Christmas. I had a good time, I would tell him; I wanted to stay.

But it hasn’t been two hours since we took off from San Francisco. It’s a 747, and in these stormless heights it hardly seems to move. There’s a man on my right, an American of about fifty. His hands mimic two pinking crabs as they chase across his tray after peanuts dropped from their foil packet.

“It’s a whole new war,” he’s telling me over his beer. I think he means the business war with the Japanese, but he folds out a brochure for an avionics company, touting a missile-guidance system for the year 2000. “The pilot could be dead, these babies just keep flying. And all it takes is a piece of hardware the size of your fingernail. Do any work with computers?”

“Word processing.” The flight attendant brings my coffee. “Salamat.”

“What’s that you said?” the man asks.

“Salamat.” ―thanks. It’s in our language―I’m Filipino.”

“Oh.” And then: “Does everyone speak English in the islands, like you do?”

“Just about,” I say, although it’s something of a lie. “I had some special training,” I say, and he seems satisfied.

“Orientals―you’re hard to figure out. Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese. Damn if I can tell you apart, just by looking. You sure look Chinese to me.”

“My grandfather was part-Chinese.”

“I knew it. Had to be something. Me, I got some German in me somewhere, with a name like Weiskopf, you know, W-E-I-S-K-O-P-F. Larry Weiskopf, by the way.” He offers me his hand, and I can feel the stoutness of his blood.

“Noel Bulaong. Boo-LAH-ung.” Noel Ilustre Bulaong: my name, a name with enough room among the vowels for people to step into and misread, mishear, misspeak as it suits them―for their entertainment but to no one’s lasting grief, certainly not mine, because it is only my name, a sound of bright mercurial amplitudes: “No-wail, No-well, Ill-luster, Ill-astray, Bull-y, Boo-ly―Billy Young―”

“Beaulah Wong.”

“Yes.”

So―are you going home, or just visiting?”

“I’m not sure yet. My father died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks.” He shuffles his papers, embarrassed by the stillness. “It’s about time I went home, anyway,” I say. “What about you?”

“Business. I’m helping set up a silicon-chip factory in―Mactan―is that how you say it?”

I think of islands and a glassine beach. All that would change, would have changed, like my father, even as I fly.

Sometime that boyhood summer in Kangleong I learned that it was possible to cheat time. I had scavenged around town for the young green mango or papaya aborted by its parent plant, and I had put them all in a can that had once held Graham crackers. They were the prettiest things, the perfect miniatures of their sturdier siblings, with a delicacy of breath and yet an insistent fullness of body peculiar to their age and size. But when you bit into them they were bitter―nothing there but the hard white flesh, a trace of seed and bone. They seated in the can until they yellowed, and then they tasted just as badly. My grandmother taught me a better way of ripening them. She took my green fruit to the kitchen, where ash had gathered beneath the woodfired clay stoves to the depth of a man’s hand from fingertip to wrist. She dug a hole in the impacted powder and buried the young things in it, covering them over with ash. This way, she said, they could be saved. They would get no larger but at least they would earn some sweetness, in good time.

When I think of water I remember the outhouse and the fish in Kangleong. Whenever the toilet in the house where I stayed was occupied, I had to walk about a hundred yards across the street, into a grove of buri palm and bamboo and down to an estuary where an outhouse had been built on stilts above the brackish water. It was the simplest of structures, a wooden box with a hole in the floor. I would squat over the hole and let go. And then an incredible thing would happen: three or four fish would dart into my circle of view, throbbing in the greenish water like thin blue cigars with a yellow glow at the tips. They would hover there in wait for the next crumb, the next flake, eyes and mouths in rapt attention, hungering for me. They were stranger than the bayawak, the chicken-eating lizard I met on a riverbank in the interior, where there were no toilets, not even an out-house. The bayawak had stared as I brushed myself clean with coconut husk. I laugh when I think of how I must have looked to these animals.

I last visited Kangleong shortly after I returned from my first trip to the United States, and it was during this visit―a pleasant one, given to beer with distant uncles and fanciful accounts of 42nd Street and Atlantic City―that I came upon a photograph of my father as a young man in flowered polo shirt and loose gray pants, in the fashion of the time. He looked like a clerk on his way up the civil service; at that point, he probably was. My father was to hold many jobs : policeman, inspector of motor vehicles, senior clerk, ward leader. My mother kept an album for each of the three of us, so we all had pictorial histories quite distinct of the others, but only in a way: we posed at the zoo, one after the other, before the same giraffes and peacocks, and mine opened to a chocolate-brown picture of my father in his police patrolman’s uniform, standing at parade rest at the foot of a swirling staircase, saber in hand. My father said that he had gone to the police academy in Manila, having had to quit Pre-Law for lack of money, and that he had bunked with another trainee who was to become, forty years later, a brigadier-general in the national police and the President’s confidant. My policeman-father figured in the newspapers once, during a riot at the city jail; a prisoner had tried to escape at the height of the melee and my father had shot him in the leg. My father had lost the clipping when he told the story to me, but I believed him without a doubt; he was a good man, with a kind heart and a head for words and figures well beyond the circuit of Kangleong, a chess player and a Reader’s Digest reader and an Engliah crossword-puzzle solver, a coconut farmer’s son whom all the town’s schoolteachers delighted in because he was, in the intensity of his ambitions and in the muscle of his talents, so much unlike the others who would be tenders of carabaos and foragers at low tide all their lives, my distant uncles who would mix beer and gin and Coke on special days, for special guests who reeled at a sip of tuba, the sweetish orange-pink froth that, given more time, would turn to coconut vinegar.

“Your tatay,” Mandoy Imoy said as I staggered to the gate on his arm that night in Kangleong, “he was a bright boy, what a brain the guy had! We went to the same school, did he ever tell you that? He memorized the whole multipication table when he was five, and he knew English words nobody had ever heard of, things like, uh, ‘fagelistic’ or ‘runcimian,’ you ever hear words like that? What a brain. But he didn’t know money. You’re okay, you have a nice job, you go abroad, I think your brains are all right. But your father―ay, he should’ve made real money, maybe he’s not so smart after all, eh? Maybe he was, uh, fagelistic, ha-ha-ha!”

Tatay wanted to become a lawyer, failing in which he became a lawman―a secret agent, even, with a silver-plated badge, enameled with the crest of the Motor Vehicles Office, clipped into his wallet. My brother and I would ride on buses and jeepneys with him and when the conductor came around to give us our tickets my father would simply whip out his wallet and flash his badge, which seemed to cracke in the air and sting the conductor right between the eyes so that he staggered away to attend to his commoner duties down the aisle, all of this without a word, very gently.

My father later became a senior clerk at the head office of the Highways Ministry, through the intercession of our province Assemblyman, whose speeches my father wrote. He was given a desk full of pencils―red on one end and blue on the other―and a large swivel chair which creaked mightily when he moved. He bought a slim leather portfolio and had his initials gold-stamped onto it. The Assemblyman presented him with a huge gray curve of marble―our province’s major export―with his name engraved in the sort of script you find in old Bibles and diplomas, and it was impressive enough to me, as it was, apparently, to the faithful from Kangleong who would drop in on my father with straw baskets full of mangoes and eggs and the invariable request always graciously expressed and as graciously received, for one favor or other: a letter, a call, an appointment, a sponsorship for a wedding or a baptism, a donation for the fiesta, a banner for the volleyball team.

It seemed all the more impressive because Tatay, for all his vocabulary, had never finished college, and refused, to his afterlife’s credit but to his perpetual misery, to employ the services of the architectural dropout on Arlegui Street who graduated people from the university of their choice, with a hand-tinted cap-and-gown portrait thrown into the bargain. Like this man, my father would survive ingenuously and even manage to achieve a fair level of prosperity, by hometown standards―a civil service job, an apartment but no car, a TV set, a Baguio summer, a family with kids who could speak grammar-perfect English in school and hepcat Tagalog at home, “blue-seal” Chesterfields smuggled in from the south, an anciently unopened jar of Maxwell House Instant Coffee awaiting the VIP, a foil-wrapped bottle of Chanel No. 5 for my mother;s 30th, a Christmas calendar from the Assemblyman an his family, autographed and beaming on the kitchen wall, across the Last Supper lithograph in the dining room, a modest library of Condensed Books, LIFE, a Hammond Atlas, Webster’s Collegiate, Erle Stanley Gardner, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Last of the Mohicans, the Current Events Gazette and Chess Blitz Puzzles No. 8.

“You could be our Mayor, and maybe, who knows, even our Governor! You leave strategy to me, I’ll manage your campaign,” Mandoy Imoy cried at me through his beer-gin-Coke, one afternoon during that visit. Mandoy Imoy, a former councilman and a cousin of my father on his mother’s side, had once served for five months as Kangleong’s Acting Mayor while the incumbent marked time in a Quezon City hospital for complications following a burst appendix; by the time the patient returned, Mandoy Imoy had amassed sufficient evidence of fiscal chicanery to persuade the man to prolong his recuperation and to contemplate retirement in the comfort of his stucco-and-marble mansionnette. The Mayor filed an extended leave of absence and pondered his options. Mandoy Imoy snuggled in the palm of the public’s love and flirted with the notion of pursuing his own candidacy in the next election―notwithstanding his abject illiquidity and his fall from grace with the PNR, the Party of the Newly Risen, among whom even opportunists observed a practical decorum, which prescribed in this case that Emigdio Bulaong had no rightful claim to power because he had failed to pay his dues. Mandoy Imoy had never until then owned more than two carabaos and his shack in the breadfruit shade, but there were over two hundred Bulaongs in the hillside district alone whom Mandoy Imoy spoke for as a patriarch of sorts, and for their votes the Mayor had tacked a Bulaong onto the ticket; and so I became, in my uncle Imoy’s estimate, the logical successor to his brand-new baronetcy. We were conjoined, he said, not merely by blood but by privileged experience: both of us had traveled abroad, and not even my father had done that.

It was one of Kangleong’s stubbornest tales: how, sometime in the thirties, bachelor Emigdio had stowed aboard a trans-oceanic steamer that had berthed in Tigbawan Harbor during a fierce typhoon.

“I sold them coconuts and live chickens,” he said, “I rowed out in the storm to make a fortune. I thought they were Americans, or Spaniards. I saw some black sailors but they were mostly white people, some of them with red bushy hair like that Protestant McDonnell who taught math in the provincial high school―whacked me on the head once, he thought I was cheating, and maybe I was, but I hated being laughed at, so I waited after school and spread a thin film of molasses on his saddle, it was all brown and he didn’t see a thing, and everyone yelled, ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ as he rode off…. There was a priest aboard that ship but I couldn’t make out a word of what he was saying, I couldn’t even tell what religion he was a priest of, exept that he wore a collar and a silver crucifix on a chain and spoke in the feeblest voice, as if he hadn’t been fed for a week, and who knows if that wasn’t true! They weren’t Americans, they weren’t Spaniards, they offered money for the goods but it was money I’d never seen before, pretty money, with galleons and horsemen engraved in red and purple on the bills, and the amounts, of course, were written out in a strange language with a lot of V’s and H’s but I could read the figures, hell, I was no idiot, figures were universal things, and I picked out the money with the most zeros, the highest denominations, certain that somewhere, maybe in Santa Prisca but surely in Manila, there was a major bank with clerks who were familiar with all the world’s currencies which they probably had samples or at least pictures of on file, to match my stash against. I was providing for my future, I knew it at that moment. I resolved to sell my boat, the shack, everything, to buy a ticket to Manila, where I would exchange the foreign money and go into the refreshments business on the boulevards, where my half-brother―your Tio Torio―was doing nicely with a fruitstand. But then I thought, as I cracked coconuts for these visitors, damn the ticket, you wifeless sonofagun, you’re right here, don’t let it leave without you, and I didn’t. I saved myself a chicken and, on the pretext of showing my wares around the ship, I promptly lost myself in a dark but very warm corner near the engines, and I hid there until the ship moved, maybe two days later.

“They would never have found me, but it grew unbearably hot when they started the engines, so hot that my chicken, which had, of course, died by then, sizzled when I pressed it against the metal wall, and I nearly choked from the smoking feathers. I tried to fan the fumes away with all the money I had, but the bills had turned soggy from the sweat on my chest and hands, they were no good, the fact was, they were turning black from the soot that was flaking off the pipes and the broiling chicken―and then I thought, hey, what a smell, what a feast, what a chicken―and so they found me because of the chicken, it drove everyone belowdecks insane, but by the time they caught me I had finished off the meat and was nibbling away at the finger pads, and they were furious, but we had sailed well out of this stupid country at that point, and I was convinced that very soon we were going to reach America, or France, or wherever these people came from, somewhere across the Pacific.”

“You’re such a liar, Mandoy,” I said, filling his glass, as my other uncles grinned at the clouds and at hollow snails and at the gritty mud between their toes.

“As I was saying,” Mandoy Imoy pressed on, “As I was saying, I was going to America. That’s what I wanted, that’s what I thought, but no, it was never to be, and oh, the disappointment of it stabs me even now, especially now that I look at you, my pride and envy, what lucky fingers you have, what rosy nipples they must have pinched, and tell me, honestly, what color of hair did they―”

Red. I would have, should have said red, but it was never really red, the way it was explained to me; they would say “red, Jenny has red hair,” but then I would look and see caramel and straw or some marmalade hue but never the true corpuscular red that swarmed through coral and anthuriums, the redness of certain clays, Chinese, impermeable, vital. Jenny was red-haired in the American sense but she objected to being called, saying that it was fictive shorthand for a prostitute or an adulteress. I told her that I liked red, that friends said that it went well with my skin, but we were talking about completely different colors.

I told Mandoy Imoy, for the sake of his bleary happiness, “Blue.”

“There’s no such thing, don’t take me for a fool, now, I’ve seen some pictures of the girls in America―”

“There’s no such place, I was only kidding you, I’ve never traveled farther than Mandaluyong. I’m sorry, I lied, too.” I giggled but Mandoy Imoy scowled and spat.

“Then you can’t be mayor,” he said. “You need experience.”

Five months after he took over the mayorship, Mandoy Imoy yielded the job back to the incumbent. There was a brief ceremony on the steps of the municipal hall, and then Mandoy Imoy retired to his new hollow-block bungalow along the seafront, in the backyard of which we had these drinks, this conversation.

“We landed in Japan. Yokohama. They dropped me off. I met a girl. We had a language problem, at the beginning, but we got along. I lived with her for nearly a year until a homebound ship came by.”

“Why did you leave Japan?”

“I had bigger dreams. I wanted to be something. I fished for roundscad in Yokohama.”

Once or twice I had asked my father what he had done during the war, and he said that he, a teenager then, had served as a watchman along the shoreline, alert to camouflaged flotillas of battleships and carriers passing in the night, none of which appeared, none that he saw, and he was bothered by the possibility that the Yamato had actually slipped past him at an odd moment, a time perhaps when my mother―who was studying in Manila and whom he had yet to marry―crossed his mind. As far as I could determine, Kangleong itself had had only one ragged encounter with the war, when a Zero was shot down over the Kalawit Channel and the pilot bailed out and landed in the soursop trees behind the Home Economics building.

“I remembered enough Japanese to amuse him,” Mandoy Imoy said, apropos of the parachutist. “He said he was twenty-two. He said he came from Kasumigaseki, and I was startled out of my wits, because that’s about as close to Yokohama as nose hair is to a booger. But anyhow, they took him away and shot him, after some argument, because they didn’t know what else to do with him except try to feed him with papaya, which he refused, protesting he was full. It took three shots to kill him. We had only one gun and they had to take a vote to decide his executioner. He didn’t know a thing, Koichi, his name was, I think, he was too busy talking to me, and I didn’t know it either, until they led him away to the bushes, where they had him strip, and they laughed because his shorts, if you could call them that, were the funniest thing, and then he must have known because he started quaking and jumping and shitting and talking so fast I couldn’t translate enough, my Japanese was so bad. Kami, kami…. I wondered why ‘hair’ was so important to him, except that he was shaven. I still think about it, sometimes. Tell me, my genius nephew and fellow imaginer, what could be so remarkable about hair?”

“Well, Mandoy, I believe that it’s the last thing that goes, when we die, aside from the bones, of course. In fact it clings to the bones, to the skull when the scalp dries, you’d think it gew from deep in the brian. It’s incredibly strong.”

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