Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Still. “I don’t want a hero,” says Milagros, closing her eyes. “I want a son.”

“Fair enough.” Naz gets up to leave her be. “I didn’t bring a card, or sweets,” he says. “Here’s what I’m good for. I’m just a dirty aging hippie, but I want to help.” A scattering, like beads, on the nightstand; she remembers the magic soybeans from his play so many years ago. She thinks of rosaries, the hippie turned religious in his old age.

When she opens her eyes, there’s a mound of small bright pills on the nightstand. Nothing to lose. She swallows them down with a glass of water Vivi must have left for her. It tastes like river murk, as if Billy Batanglobo has been here again. She drifts awhile, staring at the ceiling. Then the sky. Her son dancing on the clothesline outside. Jaime! She swoops him up and they fly high above the house until the town and then the country is a speck, one in a swirl of a million carnival colors.

There is only one other way — short of Billy’s solution — for Avalon Row and Jim and all these years to grow so small and far. She reaches under the mattress. She pauses over the forms before writing — in pencil, in case of mistakes — her first, her maiden/middle, her last name. Later she’ll confirm the right answers in ink, erase the rest.

1984

After they had parted ways in their twenties, Milagros saw Naz only once. He didn’t see her. She’d taken the children shoe shopping, in Quezon City, before the school year started; then to the Social Security building, where their father was covering the assassination hearings. Before they reached the steps, Jackie on Milagros’s hip and Jaime walking ahead, carrying his own new shoes, they heard a sound to chill the blood. One scream, and then another — wracked with torment, like a demon being dragged from its host. She clutched her children close and folded to the ground. By then the news had trained her for shootings and bombs, spontaneous fires.

Jaime pointed at the foot of the steps. It was only a show. A papier-mâché vampire — with a familiar chignon and butterfly sleeves — was drinking the People’s blood. There was no mistaking Naz even in a dress, his face painted all white. He’d moved his plays off campus and onto the street, she later read. Lightning dramas, so called for all the time they took. By the time the Metrocom cars arrived, the actors had dispersed, and the water cannons’ afterspray soaked her children instead.

“I don’t get it,” said Jaime (as lots of viewers said regarding Naz’s plays, if she remembered right). “Why would the police stop a show?” He tried to rescue his new shoe box from a hole in the drenched paper bag while Milagros pat-dried Jackie — who was squealing with delight, no less than if they’d stumbled on an open fire hydrant on a humid day — with her own shirt. When Jim came down the steps, she felt glad to have chosen him, again, over someone like Naz. No mistaking Jim’s prose for poetry, whether he wrote it under his own name or not. Code names like Mama and Papa, Ate and Kuya, were the closest he came to metaphor. Day after day this past year he’d sat in on these hearings, listening to experts and eyewitnesses, studying bullet trajectory and blood samples so that his readers wouldn’t have to. Tomorrow, he’d cover the parliamentary campaigns, interview candidates and voters, report the final tallies. When he wrote it all down, he would call it copy, nothing more.

February 24, 1986

Billy Batanglobo’s at her window when the radio signal goes out. Feedback and static. He looks her way, tries to fiddle with the dial. “You’ll make it worse,” Milagros tells him, as he drips water on the speakers. She can’t hear radio static and feedback without remembering September in this house, 1972, the smell of Biscuit-colored paint making her dizzy. The more things change, she thinks. The party’s over. She imagines the President, back on their TV tonight. What proclamation number are they up to now?

“We don’t need it,” Billy Batanglobo says, turning the radio off. “I’ll tell you what I saw. Thousands camped outside the rebel gates, ready to block the army tanks when they come.” Billy goes on: buses parked crosswise in the street, tires set ablaze, makeshift altars. As if any one of them could stop a tank, or a gunship raining missiles from the air. Yet colonel after sergeant has defected to the rebel side. Billy lulls Milagros to sleep listing their names and ranks, accompanied by trickling river water and radio static.

By morning her neighbors have gathered in the living room again. Her mother worries her way through the rosary while Jackie plays with her jackstones. On TV, the President looks to be sweating. Complete control of the situation. As for his former defense minister and army chief, the constitution will deal with them. The law of the land does not allow rebellion.

The jaunty horns of “Mambo Magsaysay.” Milagros rushes back into the bedroom. Billy Batanglobo looks up from her bed, its sheets soaked through.

We need more people at the barricades, the radio announcer says. Our brothers and sisters have been teargassed around Camp Crame.

“Can you believe these army boys?” says Billy. “For years they marched in loyalty parades and shoved civilians around. Now they have the nerve to ask us to protect them.”

Billy’s the first, since Jaime’s been gone, who seems to need her consolation, rather than the other way around. She reaches for his cold, prune-wrinkled hand.

Helicopters descend toward Camp, the rebels braced for rocket fire. But the airmen come out waving white flags, their fingers flashing L-for-LABAN. Civilians cheer. The rebel leaders come out for a hug. Then the chief commodore of the navy defects. On the Pasig River a boat about-faces its guns onto Malacañang Palace.

If you’re listening, and healthy, we want you at EDSA.

I have a personal message from the general: you are needed at the barricades.

“Part of me does want to be there,” she tells Billy — something she would not admit to anyone else. “I started a union once, you know. Yelled into a megaphone, all that. I don’t mind marching for the right cause. I could be one of those people at the barricades, easy.”

“I see you more as one of the rebels,” Billy says. “Sergeant Major Milagros Reyes, defecting to the U.S.A. You just haven’t told your commander yet. Or, like these guys, you’re planning to surprise him.”

“It’s not defecting. I just can’t live here, and stay alive. What other way is there?”

He grips her hand and pulls her to her knees at the bedside. He glares, through river silt and seeping water.

“I can’t do that,” she says. “I have a daughter.”

“What good will you do her, abroad? We still have no idea what kind of country you’re leaving her in. EDSA could turn bloody any minute. But the generals will probably get off without a scratch. Like you. They don’t care what happens to the sheep, as long as their own hides are saved. The lambs, I should say.”

“You’re wrong about me,” says Milagros, and to prove it she stands, pulling away from Billy Batanglobo. But his grip is tight, his eyes and the soaked bed, standing in a pool of water on the floor, compelling her to join him. She pries off his fingers, soily around the nails and cuticles, and goes to the living room.

“Jackie.” Milagros crouches beside her daughter.

Jackie looks up from her rubber balls and plastic stars, a game she still is young enough to think was named for her. The TV’s still on, but Vivi’s in the kitchen now, her mother doing laundry out back, the neighbors gone.

“Your brother isn’t coming back,” says Milagros.