Sabina Murray - The Caprices

Mrs. Garcia is cutting slices of bibingka for herself and for her cousin. Then she remembers Jose and cuts a piece for him, since it is his favorite sweet. Jose watches her cut the third piece out of the corner of his eye. Then. Then the knife falls to the floor. What has frightened her? Why are her eyes so wide with fright? Jose hurries to the kitchen, his crooked body swinging on its cruel axis. He feels the strain of speed pulling at his spine.

“Ma’am. What is wrong?”

She is shaking her head. She is pale as a ghost. He would like to hug her then, tell her not to worry. He would like to take her by the hand to sit her in a chair in the living room.

“Ma’am,” he says again, “what is wrong?”

She sees him finally. In a quiet voice she says, “We must take the early bus home.”

Shori has his gun. What is there to be afraid of? Not that he cares what this child thinks. This American had better be where she says he is. It’s one thing to send a man over, it’s another to have to go on your own. The ridiculous thing is that none of his men were available to apprehend this American because they were all out searching for him. Some would find that funny. Shori doesn’t. At one point this was probably a beautiful house. There are paintings of fruit and flowers in the corners of the ceiling, but the ceiling is rotting. Everything rots in this country. The furniture is heavy and ornately carved, much of it with the letter G —that much he can recognize. There is a layer of dust on everything, and the corners are blunted by thick deposits of cobwebs. He follows the twin pigtails and narrow shoulders. Where could she be leading him? They walk through the kitchen. The floorboards creak beneath his weight. The child raises her two dark, round eyes and meets his in a most impolite and disquieting fashion. Shori sniffs. He achieves the nonchalant look of the truly uncomfortable. The child swings open the door. A staircase swoops down into the darkness.

The child raises her arm. She holds Shori firmly in her gaze, then gestures him downward.

“Bring him here,” says Shori. He’s not sure if the child understands the Japanese. Shori gestures up and out of the basement. He holds his ground.

The child looks at him, wide-eyed, angry.

Shori peers into the basement. He can’t see an American down there. In fact, the basement’s so dark that he can’t see anything in there at all.

He feels two small hands hard at the base of his back.

He is plunged into darkness and his ankle is sending him distressing waves of pain. He is sitting on a dirt floor. What happened? There is no reasoning in this hellish country. He hears the jangle of a key trying to find resistance in a lock. Shori finds his gun and he points it about him; he can only articulate his fear in Japanese.

“I have a gun. I have a gun,” he says to his invisible menace, the harsh breathing. This darkness makes the sound of his own breathing too loud, too harsh.

Mrs. Garcia is sure she saw Auring standing in the kitchen. Auring, her old nanny, who has been dead for close to a month. She stood clear as day there in the kitchen. She was wearing a faded pink dress that Mrs. Garcia remembered her favoring around the turn of the century. She said, “Baby, go home.”

Mrs. Garcia waves a fly from her nose. It settles on her hand. She waves it off again, this time more vigorously, and watches it spiral upward toward the ceiling of the bus.

“Jose, why aren’t we moving?”

“The driver’s putting water in the engine.”

Mrs. Garcia feels fear in the bottom of her stomach. She closes her eyes and watches the slow pools of purple erupt in the blackness. She would like to sleep for a year. She is that tired.

Shori’s eyes struggle to focus. His ankle feels icy. The blood is pulsing in his ears. He holds his breath and hears a movement on the floor. A rat, maybe. This terrible country is full of them. He widens his eyes and, slowly, nameless shapes begin to emerge from the dark backdrop. His nostrils are dilated, like a wild animal’s. He could be dead any second now. He could be killed, his guts ripped neatly from his belly by an angry, skeletal American right here in the bowels of this evil house. Shori can make out a doorway about ten feet from where he sits. Brighter shadows outline the rectangle of the door. Shori has never thought of darkness possessing degrees. He watches the shape slowly change as the door swings open on singing hinges. A small chair leans on the wall by the door. Shori wonders if he should get the chair to use as some form of protection, to use as a barrier between him and the unknown. Suddenly, the chair moves and begins creeping along the wall. Shori has lost it in the darkness. He hears the soft, light breathing of the figure. He raises the gun in the direction of the sound. Then, without warning, the figure appears between him and the doorway — a moment of revelation. Shori hears a crisp popping sound. He’s moving across the floor, scooting back, still sitting. He breathes heavily. His right arm swings in wide arcs. Then all is quiet. His left hand is closed in a painfully tight fist. His right hand is closed around the gun. How many times has he fired? He isn’t sure.

This is just a bus moving along a road flanked by rice fields. This is just an old woman with her disabled houseboy. She has been visiting her cousin, and is now rushing home. She will find her granddaughter dead in her basement. Shot. Two bullets in her head. She will find four other bullets pressed into the walls and beams of the basement. There will be a knife on the floor.

People will speculate for years. The kalesa driver will never forget the look on the girl’s face, such determination. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. Why would this little girl want to lure Shori to the basement? What did she hope to achieve? Of course, Shori denies being there at all. The woman will not insist. She will not want the memory of Shori in her basement. She will not need that particular someone who took the life from her little granddaughter. She has enough villains to stand up for all her pain.

The bus rounds a curve, passes farmers and water buffalo. The sun hangs unblinkered in the sky. The dust clings to everything. The woman holds her bag in her lap. She covers her mouth with the back of her hand and blinks. A cold trickle of perspiration drips down the back of her calf. There is grit on her tongue and dust filming her teeth. The bus hits a bump, awakening her servant. He looks around, self-consciously. He wipes the saliva off his chin. In response to this, a young woman tugs at her skirt, forcing it to cover her knees. This bus juggles the passengers over bumps, around ditches. The driver clears his throat and sends a bulb of spittle flying out the window. He checks his rearview mirror. The image presented is the clear curving road, blue sky, green fields. This could be peacetime.

This could be any bus en route to any provincial town.

IN THE WANING MONTHS of 1944, Harry Gillen found himself in Singapore, a resident of the prison camp at Changi. The camp had a dusty assembly area, several low-ceilinged, rat-infested barracks, and an overflowing pit of a latrine, where the fly population nested and hatched, rising to meet each new visitor with a cacophonous buzzing that reminded Harry of a brass band. All this was contained within a perimeter of chain-link fence topped with a coil of barbed wire. The guardhouse was raised by the gate, barring exit, which in turn was facilitated — in one sense — by the hospital. A Japanese colonel named Takashi lived in a whitewashed wooden bungalow bitterly watching as the war dragged on and he lost opportunity after opportunity for distinction. It was rumored that Takashi spent his evenings drinking copious amounts of confiscated English gin, but rumors were all Harry had to go on.