Song of Magsaysay

John Parras

With Alipato imprisoned and the rebels defeated and the nation at peace, Jejo resigned from his post at the AFP Eighteenth and returned to Lingayen, the tolerable port town in northern Luzon where his life had begun, to raise chickens. He had his army pistol (he wasn’t giving that up) and fifty pesos in his pocket and ten years of war to account for, three against the Japanese and seven against himself. He would score his trespass, scrape together enough fowl to start a small business, and maybe find another Red, the gamecock who had kept his pockets full in ’49 and nearly gotten him killed in 1950. He’d loved that steadfast rooster almost more than his own wife for a time, loved him for the life he enabled Jejo, those wild nights of coconut wine and outrageous bets and girls on the side and bold, furtive meetings in the jungle with men reeking of boar fat and gun oil and cash counted in the head. Back then he could reckon how many pesos in a wad by glancing at the edges of the dirty bills rolled together and tied with jute. He’d take the string off the bills and stuff them in a front pocket and use the string to tie the double-edged gaffs to Red’s feet. The cock would judge Jejo with his yellow eyes, wary and fearless at once, and tense his strong wings. Beautiful, ragged, wine-black wings. Wings like those of the angels Jejo had witnessed at the Battle of Urdaneta in ’43, when the Rikugun Taisa slaughtered the sitio of Balaoen and tossed the bodies into the Agno. Blood-black wings, hardboiled in the cauldron of war, brought now to the dirt pit of a squalid village cockfight.

Red’s opponent that night was a haughty rooster by the name of Boy, a newcomer from the barrio of Bayambang, larger than Red and younger and likely quicker, with an ebony head and ocher feathers as lustrous as polished balsa and a reputation whose grass-fire spread seemed to have summoned the entire underworld of Rosales to the sabong. The arena bleachers creaked with feral anticipation as all those fools, hypnotized by Boy’s meretricious strut, placed their hard-earned centavos into the brokers’ hands. All across the islands it was a time of recklessness and seeming plenty. The new democracy had seeped like alcohol into the blood of the people, given them hopes of self-determination. As long as you weren’t a tenant farmer pathetically locked up in the feudalism of the past, you had a peso or two in your pocket to wager on the future, which hovered like the prize ring on the amusement-park carousel—and here it was, brother, in Boy’s gleaming feathers and brusque martial swagger, right in front of you.

Even Lamar, Jejo’s second, faltered there in the back room. Jejo was annoyed at Lamar’s slumped posture, at the fright in those averted eyes. It was irksome and uncalled for, and on impulse Jejo reached into his pocket and pulled out the thick roll of bills. Give this to Old Titan, he said, stretching out his arm to Lamar.

But Lamar shook his head. That one looks smart, he said. I heard he beat every cock in the Villasis sabong, to say nothing of Bayambang.

Well, we’re not in Villasis or in Bayambang, Jejo said, we’re here in Rosales. Give Titan the money before it’s too late.

Lamar put out a limp hand and let the bills be placed in it. Are you sure? he said.

Jejo turned away and crouched to tighten a knot on Red’s foot. He pressed his thumb softly against the gaff, sharper than a razor. He laid a warm hand on Red’s warm wing.

Give him the goddamn money, Lamar.

Lamar turned and left. When he was gone, Jejo took Red in both hands and held him up to study his eyes, two roving, citrine gems with their own inner light. He was sure. And a few minutes later when he stepped out into the pit he was sure. The fellow from Bayambang was already out there in the loud, smoky air. His name was Maol and he had the look of an essentially destitute man on the string of many successes. Boy was crooked in his arm like a brand-new trophy and for just a moment Jejo doubted. He thought about the astronomical sum of money he’d put on the fight—he even turned to see if Lamar had given Old Titan the money yet, all the money Jejo possessed save for the fifty pesos buried in a jar in the ground beneath the ageless tamarind, all the money he’d risked his life for messing around in the jungle in the middle of the night selling Garands or gasoline or rice or information, then turning around and selling it back to the other side, his side—though he wasn’t sure which side he was on half the time. He knew only that his veins craved what the world gave him whenever he found himself in that in-between space where people took you for what you appeared to be and what you appeared to be was what you did. And Jejo could do a lot, even more since the previous ACP¹liaison had been caught napping on duty and sacked, and he, Jejo, made regimental documenter in his place—all due to Magsaysay, a man who Jejo had by then come to recognize could do more than anybody else.

And then he wasn’t doubting anymore, he was squatting in the pit dirt with Red in his hands squaring off with the fellow from Bayambang and his beautiful cock. He couldn’t hear what with the betting’s deafening din but saw the pit master’s lips move and loosed Red into the pit with Boy, Red looking scruffy beside that golden cock and sluggish beside that cock’s evident dispatch. Boy moved his head up and forth, back and down, side to side, sizing up Red’s threats and weaknesses. The crowd’s cacophonous cries thundered throughout the arena. Men who three hours earlier had been begging twigs at the edge of fallow fields now stretched out fistfuls of money and screamed feverishly as the cocks made zigzag feints, lifting their feet delicately, darting their delirious eyes, and with their gaffs nicking small cuts into the packed dirt of the pit, little letters of an alphabet no one could understand. The gold cock raised his head high, shot out his wings, and rushed forward like an ocean wave, Red rising at the same time not quite as high and lifting both his feet and striking out as Boy came in. Shouts surged in the smoky air. Wings flurried faster than the human eye. The two cocks were a violent knot of dust and movement at the center of the fight pit then of a sudden separate again, two roosters eyeing one another warily while a few stray feathers floated down onto the dust like discarded memories. The crowd swooned and hushed and the arena floor seemed to tilt. For Jejo it felt as though the entire island, the whole beleaguered key of Luzon had been lifted on the giant swell of a tsunami, and in that surreal and quiet weightlessness he heard his wife’s voice calling to him from the kitchen, listened to her dip the bamboo spoon into the crock, hearkened to his son’s small, high pleasure at the miracle of dinner. He realized it was over. The cock from Bayambang lifted one foot and, as if not wanting to step in his own blood, couldn’t find a place to put it down again. He tumbled onto his side and stretched out one wing and retracted it and twitched his head three last times.

Jejo was already moving forward. He swept his rope-soled shoes across the pit dirt and scooped Red up even before Boy’s eye had ceased its seeing. The bettors roared and surged, clambering from the rickety benches down onto the dirt floor of the pit and across to collect or mourn their money, the fellow from Bayambang all the while waving his arms and yelling something through his rotted teeth. Jejo shoved himself rearward through the throng of men, keeping Red tucked protectively under one arm, and went out back beneath the bleachers to the coop. Old Titan would give him the money later. He patted Red as much to calm himself as the cock and quickly untied the gaffs and put them in his pocket. He placed Red in the cage and checked the water and the feed and latched the door and then Lamar, out of breath, was at the chicken wire saying, Jejo, there’s something wrong. Jejo could hear a gang of men yelling and shoving their way underneath the bleachers to the coop. He hurried down an unlit corridor and out a back door and considered escaping across the dark, empty lot when Red’s brave orange eye blinked as if in Jejo’s own mind and stopped him. He had the money coming to him now and he could do what he wanted. He looked at the empty lot with its weeds and broken glass and at a row of battered palms in the distance and at the shards of stars overhead, and instead of fleeing he turned and walked slowly around the sagging stadium, back into the electric lights out front.

Men were streaming from the arena talking loudly and shaking their heads and grabbing each other’s shirts and buying bottles of beer from a smart peasant set up outside the stadium. Jejo went over and bought a bottle himself. The bottle was green and the beer American and nothing he’d call cold. Get yourself more ice, he said to the peasant, tossing him a few centavos. The peasant took the money and put it in his pocket. Jejo moved over to a streetlight and leaned his back against the pole. Above the halo of electric light muddy shapes swooped down from the night and snapped at the flying insects. Bats. That was when Maol emerged from the stadium with some of his friends and one of them pointed at Jejo. They strode over and stood around him, one behind him to his left and one behind him to his right and another behind Maol’s left shoulder. Maol was wearing a white T-shirt with a big hole in one armpit and his mouth hung open like an ugly black wound.

I know what you did, Maol said. Thin muscles rippled on his bare arms.

What did I do? Jejo said.

I know what you did, Maol said again.

What? Jejo said.

Motherfucker, Maol said, the gaff was long. No way Boy would lose to that hen of yours, not.

Take it up with the sentensyador, Jejo said. His name is Don Titan.

I know, Maol said. So why you rub the tracks out then? Why you run off with your hen and untie the gaffs before anyone see?

The gaffs. Jejo had them in his pocket and he reached in and grasped one delicately with the fingers of his right hand.

It was a fair fight, Jejo said, unlike this one, but which I won’t lose either. He took a draft of his beer, raised the bottle to Maol, and said, Why don’t you have one? And from his pocket he pulled the gaff out into plain sight. Have a beer, Jejo said, it was a fair fight.

The tendons in Maol’s neck flickered and the fraught constellation of men with Jejo at its center seemed to quiver. It was a country accustomed to great, unimaginable violence. Violence was a taste in the air like the too-sweet scent of jasmine, murder a hunger gnawing at the Philippine soul. The islanders had learned it in Bataan and Corregidor, at Malaga and Balangiga, at Lonoy and Tupas Cebu and on Mactan and before, in the aboriginal rites, the ghoulish ceremonies honoring the ancient poltergeists. Jejo sensed those spirits of the other world press in around him, greedy for another man. He felt his body grow tight like a bow drawn back and was ready to hurl himself at the mark.

But the world shifted and torqued. Time curved, and the spirits withdrew as an engine rumbled into earshot and a truck pulled up. Its brakes gave a short, loud squeal and several soldiers jumped down from the back of the truck and headed for the beer cart. Sergeant Castro recognized Jejo immediately. The sergeant approached in a slumped swagger, swinging his heavy rifle low, and was about to smile when he saw Jejo staring at Maol and read Maol’s sweaty glare, full of the hatred of a man who thinks he’s been wronged or was wronged, there was no difference. Maol’s men were already gone, disappeared into the dregs of the crowd, and Maol too was about to leave with a last look of bitter scorn when Castro called out to him.

Hey, you.

Maol turned, his face dull with hostility.

Your papers, Castro said, flicking his fingers toward him and glancing at Jejo conspiratorially.

I have none, Maol said.

Money then, Castro snapped.

Maol just shrugged.

No papers, no pesos, Castro sang in an evil voice, glancing around to make sure he had the attention of his audience.

Jejo had seen this type of thing—one man waving a gun at another with vicious glee—too many times before, and somewhere in his mind one time was one too many. But a couple of the privates grinned at the little drama Sergeant Castro was putting on for them, pulling at their beers and happy that the universe had arbitrarily granted them power and seeming immortality.

Maol hung his arms down like two wasted puppets.

You’re a sympathizer! Castro said loudly.

Maol shook his head.

You like them, don’t you, Castro hissed interrogatively, prodding Maol in the ribs with the barrel of his rifle. The Communists.

No, Maol said.

Castro circled around, a hyena taking its time. Jejo could see the sweat on Maol’s forehead. Maol suddenly seemed familiar, a face in the jungle dark just beyond the firelight.

No? Castro asked. You don’t like Communists?

Maol shook his head.

Say they are scum.

They are scum, Maol said.

And you are scum, Castro said.

Maol shook his head.

Say it!

They are scum, Maol said.

Castro looked over at Jejo for a cue. Jejo wanted it finished. He inclined his head slightly to one side. He would, he suddenly decided, use the money he’d won to leave this abysmal place. Get off the islands altogether. Go to America and work on the railroad.

Get the fuck out of here, Castro said to Maol, waving the rifle, and Maol was gone.

Castro poked a thumb over his own shoulder. Fucking bandito, that one, he said with a grin and a shake of his head.

But Jejo was looking at the soldiers crowding around the beer peddler’s cart. He said, Tell your men to pay for the beer, Castro.

Are you kidding? Castro said. We were on patrol over in Nogales all afternoon and barely had time to eat a rice ball before we were ordered over to Cubao just after sunset. You know what it’s like over there? We had to bulldoze and burn. The men worked hard. We’re on our way back to base.

They should pay, Jejo said.

Not on our salary, Castro said, and it was as though Magsaysay had heard him, Jejo remembered afterward, as though the secretary could eavesdrop on the multitudinous whispers coursing across the archipelago. For not two months later the law was drafted in Magsaysay’s own hand on a yellow-paged legal pad and typed up by an assistant and passed on, and on 15 September 1950, word reached the Rosales garrison that soldiers’ daily pay was to be raised from thirty centavos to one full peso, effective immediately, with the caveat that any soldier hereafter caught confiscating or demanding food from peasants without compensation would be punished to the full extent of the military code. But the soldiers merely smiled at one another and winked and shrugged, because who would tell on them? And they laughed like children and punched one another on the shoulder and grinned because they could finally afford some whores the likes of Niñita, the Chinese girl who worked at Madame Tin’s place off the plaza and had volcano-shaped breasts and was rumored to have such a sweet spot she could squeeze the juice out of your pingo without thrusting—but pay for food? Never.

The soldiers chuckled for a few weeks, until the next order was passed, an unthinkable one declaring that from this day forth until further notice all citizens of the islands, from Luzon to Mindanao and from Palawan to Samar, including especially the destitute and the illiterate and specifically all landless peasants, migrant agricultural workers, indentured servants, and small-time merchants, were hereby empowered to send telegrams of complaint free of charge from any postal office directly to the Department of National Defense. And by November it was already clear that the telegrams didn’t go straight to scissors, nor were they piled in a bin and left to fade and rot. There was an entire room in Malacañang Palace with a full-time staff scrutinizing the messages and filing each telegram and cataloging each offense, with the worst abuses passed on to the inestimable Magsaysay himself and read by him and acted on, with well-tuned army jeeps pulling up at dawn in even the remotest backwaters of the islands unloading Magsaysay’s devout minions, smart young officers with ironed uniforms and heavy metal clipboards who poked around asking questions and took the peasants for their very word, swear to God Almighty.

Jejo had heard, for instance, of a farmer in Conception, half a day’s walk from Rosales, who was given a hog after his own had been confiscated by a squad from the Fiftieth Regiment and slow-roasted in a shallow pit. And now that squad had been removed to Davao and was said to be clearing trees and filling swamps from sunup till midnight for forty days straight, forty days of penance for a pig. But the pig—even that paled if you believed the rumors about Davao, for whispers had been circulating among the palm fronds and rice fields of the provinces, whispers of promise and generosity, whispers that the government was giving away land on the island of Mindanao. Of course, it couldn’t be true. Could anyone, could even Magsaysay care enough about the peasants to give them land? When Jejo considered the idea and found himself half believing, he scoffed for being such a gullible fool. He prided himself on being a man not easily taken in, something his father had taught him one long-gone afternoon with a stick and a coin and a bucket of water, his father who’d swept the schoolhouse every morning and gleaned the pastor’s field and weeded the cemetery every Sunday for twenty years and refused to sign papers he couldn’t read and so signed nothing and lost nothing, unlike the peasants who marked the church papers with a charcoal X legal as taxes and saw their little huts and their pitiful fields of grain and even their skinny livestock sequestered until they had nothing but rags on their backs and ten years of work to pay for what they didn’t own anymore. Jejo, though he’d escaped such fate thanks to his father’s strong head, didn’t see that the world had changed much since then.

Still, now there were Magsaysay’s free telegrams and impromptu inspections, and the peasant reimbursed a hog in Conception. Those things had happened. So, Jejo thought, why not land? Rising up inside him and gaining clarity, the idea broomed the future clean, opening up possibilities neither Jejo nor the country had ever before considered. Land for Arms—the slogan was so simple, so beautiful and elegant, and it’d been Magsaysay’s idea, it was Magsaysay who’d heard the grumbling of the destitute, Magsaysay who was sending the army to the south to clear land for the peasants—or so the winds were whispering.

There were many whispers by then and, like Magsaysay, Jejo had his ear keenly trained to them. There were whispers about loads of American money trucked into the PDD² by night, legal tender as green as fig leaves. And it was said that in the presidential palace there existed a red Bakelite phone wired directly to Washington, DC, and that every evening at 8:00 p.m. sharp the phone rang and Elpidio Quirino picked it up and was forced to listen to President Truman’s folksy but stern convictions on the politics of Pakistan and China, and now Korea, until his ear hurt. More menacingly, Truman spoke the word “atomic” often, and sometimes the adjective “hydrogen.” Elpidio was chilled by how casually the American president uttered such words, for Truman spoke them as if he were conversing over coffee and biscuits, and Elpidio, feeling as though the moisture of the evening jungle were seeping into his bones, would motion to his aides to shut the grand palace windows.

In coming days it was noted that an unannounced military advisor, pale as a ghost but cougar strong and wily, had begun haunting the hallways of Malacañang Palace. Magsaysay’s white shadow, the people called him. So pale, like a vampire. And like a vampire, capable of unspeakable acts. In the same breath came talk of something called joosmog³ being crated off the destroyers in Subic Bay, though what it was was anyone’s guess. Unmarked crates unloaded by gargantuan cranes in the early gray mornings, innumerable wooden crates the size of coffins, still reeking of pine and sticky with resin. Juice magg, someone murmured. Special feed for the horses, because a cavalry was being prepared for an assault up the plains and into the Baguio pass. Jusmag incendiary to defoliate the heavy palms and creeper vines enshrouding Mount Arayat, and they would dry up the Candaba Swamp with the sponge of the dead foliage. Jussmug: propaganda designed by Madison Avenue admen to brainwash the enemy, bulletproof armor, undepletable energy, the ability to see at night. The seagulls careening above Subic Bay decried and laughed above the ships, the monkeys on Corregidor bayed sorrowfully from their trees, the Pasig floated rumors upstream into the artichoke heart of Luzon where the Huks around their campfires, looking up at the coconut moon, hearkened carefully, full of skepticism and cunning; hungry, idealistic men fortified and made realistic by their convictions.

Those Huks, they looked up at the same seashell moon Jejo admired walking home after Red’s sabong and the aborted fistfight with Maol, but the rebels were in the jungle, sprawled beneath banana leaves amid swarms of mosquitoes, while Jejo retired to his grassroofed Bontoc hut beside the river on the edge of town and drank whiskey from a bottle, just enough to give him a little push into the night, Josephine Baker at low volume on the radio. With his winnings he would leave for America, soon. He ate bread dipped in leftover adobo sauce and flipped through an old issue of Time, now and then lifting his eyes to gaze at the glamour shot of Lee Miller he’d clipped from a newspaper and slipped into an edge of the mirror frame, the beautiful Lee Miller sitting in her daddy’s lap, her face sculpture perfect, her prim black dress boding ferocious sensuality. Right now she was in a New York skyscraper, just roused from peaceful sleep by sunlight reflecting off the East River, a long way away, Jejo mused, more than a world away from Rosales and its ignorant wooden shacks, its dark peoples, its common violences. He thought of Red crouching in his cage in the darkness behind the arena and of Maol driving back to Bayambang with Boy dead on the floorboard, how the headlights would be cutting through the darkness and edging along the blackness of the trees on either side of the road, the pine trees at the edge of the forest where the Hukbo Magpalaya ng Bayan were gathered in small bands, tending their fires and cleaning their weapons, then lying down on the ground to listen to the wind in the brush and to the spirits as ancient as darkness slipping through the trees and sleep.

Jejo too. He turned off the radio and snuffed the lamp and lay down on the mattress with his arms behind his head. July mosquitoes buzzed at the sleeping net and Jejo covered his feet tightly with the sheet to keep the asuangs from the scent. Those supernatural creatures were the ghosts of men and women and children murdered by the Japanese Army at Balaoen and thrown from the Santa Maria Bridge into the Agno River. After midnight on moonlit nights their busted skeletons, the bones blackened with mud and hardened by the cruelty they’d suffered, would clamber from the river seeking reprieve from their watery purgatory. Drawn to the sour redolence of human sweat, they would steal into your bedroom and grasp your ankle with a bony hand, and if you reached for a lamp there’d already be another skeletal hand on it so you were forced until morning to bear their hissed whispers telling you of gold they had buried and would you dig up the gold for them in the dead of night to pay for their passage out of purgatory? Because the afterlife was just as greedy and unfair as the Manila slums, and the murdered, though they had the sympathy of the living, were scorned by the dead and spat on and their sufferings scoffed at, for the spirits held the souls of victims and oppressors both vile. The Catholic Church was wrong and those who believed the scriptures would be miserable in the afterlife, where the spirits were more ancient than the Bible and darker and deeper than the blackest depths of the Philippine Trench.

Nearby a woman let out an eerie shriek and Jejo flinched—but it was just his neighbors bickering. He laughed at himself, and someone next door slammed down a pan and the night was quiet again. Wind whispered in the tamarind outside, a truck sighed by on the road and was gone, a night bird clucking in the brush nearby seemed to say, “Magsaysay, Magsaysay” softly. Outside the province of Zambales the name was then but a murmur, the vague promise of a future that would probably never be, like a lover’s vow sworn in the innocence of youth. Jejo himself had made such vows and made them in perfect sincerity. But Magsaysay. Wasn’t there song in the name? It wouldn’t be until later, after he’d witnessed the village of Camposan razed to the ground and had himself been carried along on a river-swift current of military might, that Jejo would understand the name was no soft melody but more like the undertow in Lingayen Bay, vicious and unrelenting and vain to resist.

In the morning he arose late. He considered heading over to collect his winnings from Don Titan, but thought he should check in at the military base first. Army Civilian Personnel had some degree of autonomy, but there were limits. He’d been made regimental documenter after all. He had black coffee and cassava and walked to the center of town, making his way along the shade of the stone buildings in the old quarter to the wide, flat, sunny steps of the Spanish church. Horse traps vied with Fords and vendor carts at the circular fountain in the crowded square, and on the main pedestrian thoroughfare, flagged with tan lava cobblestones, mestizos in dark suits had their shoes shined at the newspaper stands and ladies dressed in Spanish dresses shopped for hats. A single trolley line ran from the church along the avenue to the other side of town, then more freely out past the seamstress factories and tobacco plantations toward the garrison. Jejo stood on an outer platform and hung with an arm swung round one of the poles, taking in the scenes as they passed, the urbane Castilian quarter, the shabbier shops surrounding the central marketplace, the shameful poverty of the shanties at the edge of town, then the green fields and palm trees along the farmland and haciendas just before the garrison, where the trolley looped back to town in a teardrop turnaround. At the garrison gate a food vendor had set up his empanada cart and, a bit to one side, in the shadow of a tree, a clump of beggars held out their hands and implored Jejo for a few centavos. Jejo thought again of the winnings he’d collect from Don Titan and realized he was due a pile of cash bigger than he’d ever amassed in his lifetime. He patted his pockets for spare change and handed a beggar a few coins, then showed his ID to the guard and went in through the garrison gates.

The Eighteenth Battalion grounds were jeep-busy, the soldiers marching at quick clips, the telegraphs at the comm stations clicking like castanets. Over at the arms depot, Sergeant Castro was supervising the unloading of a shipment of wooden crates.

Hey, Jejo.

What’s going on?

Something big, my friend. Castro nodded at the crates being carried off the transport vehicles. Enormous shipment from Manila. And the coms are powwowing in the main office, blinds drawn. There’s brass in there, and two Americans.

Americans?

White as ghosts.

Are they officers?

Uniformed but unranked, the sergeant answered.

They both knew what it meant that the Americans had shown up. The AFP was preparing a major assault into rebel territory.

That Bondoc, Castro said, did it. That mayor.

Who killed the girl? Jejo said.

I mean their stringing him up by the heels in San Luis. That can’t go unpunished.

But, Jejo said, the little girl. Wasn’t she American?

I don’t know about that, Sergeant Castro said.

If she was American, well …

Don’t you see, Castro said, the Communists killed Bondoc because he was sloppy, because they needed the jeeps themselves, not for murdering the girl. But it’s the girl who’s got the Americans all riled up. Her death.

Revenge for her death, Jejo said.

Because the Communists forced his hand, forced him to kill her. Only he got caught.