Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“How much you get—I mean, you personally?”

“Not a fuckin’ lot, after the lawyers’ bite was took out of it. About enough to buy a little cracker-box house in Levittown, out on Long Island. But then my old lady divorced me and got the house. So here I am again, a working stiff for Uncle Sugar.”

About then their flight was called. As they shuffled to the door of the bar, a marine who’d been listening caught Culdee’s eye. He was a real jarhead, this one, with a shaved skull like Yul Brynner in the movies and gunny-sergeant stripes on his khakis. The gunny nodded toward the hard hat’s back. Culdee nodded back. When they got out the door, the marine shouldered the hard hat around the corner, and Culdee grabbed his arms. They hustled him behind the Quonsets and took turns pounding him. They left him unconscious and bleeding into the coral dust.

“Where’s Mr. Krieger?” a flight attendant asked, counting noses before takeoff.

“His orders got changed,” the gunny said. “His company needed him there on Wake.” They took off.

Later, in his own POW days and often afterward, Culdee thought of the hard hat and what he’d said—government setups, sacrificial lambs. Now, as the Venganza left Wake squatting scruffily in the sea far to the northwest, he thought of it again. Turner and the abortive break at Brigadune. The shit the navy’d dropped on him when he got out later. Maybe the whole thing had been a setup—a North Vietnamese massacre of brave American sailors, unarmed and subject to torture as POWs, just at the time when the new isolationists—the long-haired antiwar protesters—were about to turn all of America chicken. By God, they had, hadn’t they?

Suddenly he wanted a drink, wanted one bad. Instead, he threw knots, faster and faster, deep into the night. There on Wake, he thought, that was the first time I ever fought side by side with a jarhead, not against him. And the last.

Freddie, at the helm, heard Culdee laughing up on the hatch cover, under the stars. Crazy old coot, he thought, and laughed along with him, not knowing why.

SIXTEEN

GOD IS MY COPILOT read the plaque above the jeepney driver’s head. Let’s hope so, Curt thought. He was hanging white-knuckled from the overhead grip as the vehicle careened north from Pershing Square, quadruple horns blaring, bald tires screeching, narrowly missing trishaws, carabao, bicycles, pedestrians, free-ranging chickens, and what seemed like a million other equally suicidal jeepneys. A tape deck in the dash was blasting “My Little Deuce Coupe.” Curt leaned forward and yelled—shrieked—to the driver to stop at Pasonanca Park.

“You got it, Joe!” The driver turned to grin—a wild golden glare—and sawed the wheel’s necker knob blindly. Curt slammed his eyes shut and gulped hard. Judging by the clench of his butt muscles, the pucker factor must have been well off the scale.

By the time the jeepney squealed to a halt, Curt’s knees were guava jelly. He reeled like a drunk as he grubbed through a wad of pesos from his pocket. He peeled off the fare and noticed that the big chrome stallion on the jeepney’s hood was literally prancing in place, eager to be off again. Puffs of steam spurted from its nostrils. But it was just engine knock and a chronically overheated radiator. The driver grinned his double-wide thanks and burned rubber back out into the traffic without checking his side mirror. Horns blared louder for an instant, then muted to the incessant din that shivered every Filipino thoroughfare every moment of every day and night, lacquered steel roosters crowing from dawn to unconsciousness. The charm of the islands.

It was quieter in the park, though, cool beneath the banyan trees, with bougainvilleas in perennial flame and the smell of blossoms thick on the silky air. Little kids of all colors splashed happily in the self-proclaimed wee-wee pool. Zamboanga was a fragrant city.

“Psst, hey Milikan!” At first Curt thought the kid in the bushes was calling someone else, and he looked around. Then he remembered what Chalmers had said— Milikan means American down here. The kid stepped out, looked around furtively, then flashed a small cardboard container. REGULAR GUY INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH SUPPOSITORIES, it said on the box. What was this? The kid opened the box and shook out the ends of four thick hand-rolled cigarettes.

“Zambo Zowie,” he whispered. “You like? Only a hundred peso apiece.”

Zambo Zowie, Curt thought. Bombers at five bucks each. They ought to grow some potent grass in this climate. He hadn’t smoked in a long time—when you’re in the business, it isn’t a good idea to enjoy the product—but out of professional curiosity he took one and sniffed it.

“What the fuck is this, cloves?”

“No, man,” the kid said, “Zambo Zowie. Big bruddah to Maui Wowie, daddy to Matanuska Thunderfuck.”

“That’s cloves, kid. And I don’t have a toothache. But keep up the good work.”

He tousled the boy’s hair and walked on. Then he heard a click—switchblade?—but it was just an old priest taking his picture. The kid straggled along after him, at a distance. Curt waited at the crosswalk while a caravan of Philippine Army deuce-and-a-halfs rolled past, the soldiers leaning bored on their M16s on the plank seats in the beds. Then he crossed over to the Zamboanga Plaza Hotel.

Plenty of time in hand for the appointment. The barter market on the hotel grounds was open, and he strolled slowly through its clamor. Wheeler-dealers gabbled in every tongue known to East Asia. Smuggling had always been a way of life on the Sulu Sea, the glue that bound Mindanao and the southern Philippines to nearby Borneo, Sabah, and Sarawak more tightly even than Islam. For a long time the Manila government fought against the smuggling, then realized it was hopeless and recently had legitimized the barter markets. There was another one, even bigger, down by the Hotel Lantanka, near the docks where Curt’s boat was moored. You could trade anything there, from pigs and poultry and rare Gloria Maris seashells through antique Moro brasswork and Chinese porcelain to Volvo Penta engine parts, Mitsubishi air conditioners, and Thai opium. Provided you greased the right palms.

Curt bought a bowl of the spicy noodles called sotanghon from a vendor, then sat on a bench in the shade and washed them down with cold beer. He flirted briefly with a pretty Moro girl, until her father, or maybe it was her husband, gave him a dirty look and shifted his bolo higher on his hip. A church bell pealed from a distant tower. Four o’clock.

“Captain Hughes?” A short, wide-shouldered Filipino in white duck trousers and a long, loose barong tagalog shirt smiled as he rose from a couch in the lobby and stuck out a hand. “I’m Billy Torres. It’s crowded in here. Shall we go out to the pelota court? Or would you prefer the casino? It’s quite a good one—air-conditioned and strictly legitimate.”

Curt glanced around the lobby. There were perhaps half a dozen people in what looked like a parquet-floored acre, listlessly reading the Zambo Times and sipping beer or coffee.

“I’m no gambler,” he said.

“Then we’ll just watch the jai alai,” Torres said, and they headed out the door. Torres had a long red scar across his cheek and a piece of his ear missing. The stitches still showed. His eyes were flat and green, odd in a Filipino.

Two of the men in the lobby got up and followed at a distance. Big Filipinos, all muscle and a yard wide.

“Yours?” he asked Torres, nodding back at the followers.

“I’m no gambler either, Captain,” Torres said. He smiled up at Curt and took his arm at the elbow, as if they were on a date.