Devil's Keep (9 page)

“Just you? Can’t be.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s me. Name a song. I know them all.”

She thought for a moment. One of her favorite songs was a Tagalog ballad by Freddie Aguilar, the Filipino folksinger. “Anak” was the name of the song: “Child.” It had a lilting melody that soared and dipped—almost impossible to whistle, she imagined. She decided to test him.

“ ‘Anak,’ ” she said.

Seconds later, the first bar wafted in over the wall. Perfect tempo, perfect pitch.

She squealed with delight.

The melody stopped and he said, “Marivic, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, don’t stop!”

He picked up right where he had left off.

They passed the evening that way, Marivic throwing the names of songs over the wall, and Junior sending back a beautifully rendered melody. After a while the lights went out in the rooms. Junior and Marivic chatted for a while, until Junior got sleepy and said good night.

Then silence from the other side of the wall.

Marivic couldn’t sleep. She lay awake in the darkness, watching the fan turn above her. She tried to imagine what lay beyond the walls. That afternoon she had noticed indirect sunlight coming in over the top of one wall. She knew that wall must face outside.

If she could somehow climb up, she might be able to peer over the top of the wall, through the wire-mesh grille that ran along the top.

Was it possible?

The walls were several feet higher than in an ordinary room. Standing on the chair wouldn’t get her close. Even standing on the table wouldn’t get her high enough. But the chair on the table…

She moved the table into the corner formed by the outside walls, then placed the chair on the table. She climbed up on the table, then carefully onto the chair, balancing against the wall as she stepped up. The top of the wall was now at forehead height.
She placed both hands on the lip of the wall and stretched up on the tips of her toes.

Now she could just see over the top. Through the wire grille, she looked down on a moonlit hillside that fell down to the ocean. A path led from this building, through a stand of trees. About halfway down the hill was a broad clearing. The path skirted this clearing and ran down to a dock.

A white speedboat was tied up there, bobbing in the water. She could hear the wash of waves against rocks, the swish of palm fronds in the wind.

At first she didn’t see anyone. The path down to the dock was clear, and she got a wild urge to escape. Only the grille stood between her and freedom. If she pushed it out, she could climb over the wall, run down to the boat, drive it far away.

She grasped the grille and shook it. The grille didn’t move. She pulled and tugged at the grille. It didn’t budge. She looked closer and saw that heavy screws secured the base of the grille to the top of the wall. It wasn’t going anywhere.

The urge faded.
Crazy,
she thought. She didn’t know how to operate a speedboat, and even if she could get it to work, she didn’t know where she was, which way to go.

Then a tiny flare of red light got her attention, about halfway down the hillside. The glare revealed the face of a man. He was striking a match, cupping it in his hands as he lit a cigarette. The match died, replaced by the glowing tip of the cigarette. Now she could make out his dark form seated under a palm
tree, looking out over the water. A gun, a rifle, was cradled in his lap.

The armed man was facing out toward the ocean. He didn’t seem worried about anyone escaping. He wanted to keep others out.

She realized that her calves were aching. Too long up on her toes. And she had seen enough. She stepped down from the chair, off the table, back down to the floor. She quietly moved the chair and table back where they belonged, and she lay in the bed, staring up for a long time at the fan turning overhead, until finally she fell asleep.

Several days passed uneventfully in the little cell. Marivic was puzzled. She knew that she must have been brought there for some reason, and although she dreaded it, she wanted to know what was supposed to happen next.

Nothing happened.

The days followed an unvarying routine. About an hour after sunrise, the lock turned in the steel door, and the two foreigners entered. They removed the dishes from the previous evening’s meal, took out the chamber pot and the water pitcher, brought in fresh water and a clean chamber pot. They worked quickly and never spoke a word, in and out in less than a minute, and when they left her cell they went to Junior’s and worked just as quickly and silently.

Around midday the lock turned again and the two men entered once more. A woman was with them this time. They stood and watched as the
woman checked Marivic’s pulse and blood pressure, listened to her lungs through a stethoscope, and took her temperature.

Marivic tried to speak to the woman in English, telling her “I’m not sick, I feel fine. Why are you doing this to me?” as she unwrapped the pressure cuff from around Marivic’s arm. But the woman didn’t answer. She just led Marivic out of the cell, down a short corridor to a shower stall. The woman stood outside while Marivic bathed Filipino style, dipping cool water out of a bucket. When Marivic was finished, the woman handed her a towel and a clean gown and took her back to the cell, where a meal was waiting on the table.

In the evening came the third visit of the day. This time it was just the two men, bringing food and water.

Junior Peralta in the next room got exactly the same treatment: the meals, the shower, the checkup. And the same oblivious attitude. “Like I’m not even there,” Junior said.

Marivic didn’t feel threatened. She felt ignored.

The three visits left gaps of long hours when she was alone in the cell. Long conversations with Junior helped to fill the time, and in the evenings he would amuse her by playing the human jukebox, whistling the tunes that she called out. But inevitably he was ready for sleep before she was, and she would be left awake in the silent darkness, unable to avoid her thoughts any longer.

She didn’t want that. Thinking led in just two
directions, one frustrating, the other painful. There were the questions about her situation:
Why was I brought here? What is this place? Who are these people? What happens next?
All good questions, but impossible to answer, so that when she pondered the possibilities she felt as if she were running blindly into the high concrete walls—again and again and again.

Then there were the thoughts of her family and the village, all that she had left behind when she stepped onto the bus that early morning beside the gulf. But these memories and visions were unbearably poignant, impossibly distant from the reality of the cell. She couldn’t dwell on home; it hurt too much.

“Marivic! I’m leaving! It’s my turn to go.”

Junior was calling to her over the wall. It was the morning of Marivic’s fifth day on the island, and she was eating breakfast. The silent man and woman had been in her cell already, the usual routine, and they had gone into Junior’s cell after they left hers.

“Marivic, did you hear me? I’ll be leaving in two days.“

“Did they tell you that?”

“No, they didn’t talk. Of course not. But they took some blood from my arm. Then they gave me an injection. That’s it. They’ve started the treatment.”

This was what Wilfredo had called it. The Goodbye Treatment. Fredo had been on the island for a month, in the cell that Marivic now occupied. During that time, two different inmates had come and gone in the adjoining cell. Each time there had been
a break in the routine, a new pattern.

Day One: During their morning visit, before delivering the meal, one of the two foreigners would draw a blood sample and give an injection.

Day Two: An injection and blood sample in the morning, both repeated in the evening.

Day Three: Before dawn, one last injection. Then the men took you out the door. Gone, just that quickly.

That was The Goodbye Treatment. Now it was starting for Junior, and he was excited: “My God, finally. I’m so tired of this hole. I can’t wait to get out.”

“I’m glad,” Marivic said. But she didn’t sound convincing, and Junior caught the hesitant tone.

“Marivic, I don’t mean it that way. I’ll miss you. I’m just so tired of being here. You understand.”

“I don’t blame you for wanting to be gone.”

“Don’t worry, your turn will come soon.”

But Marivic wasn’t sure that she wanted her turn to come. Blood samples and injections—all just to leave the island? That and the daily medical exams, the concern about their health. What was that all about?

An instinctive suspicion nagged at her, just the way it had that early morning when she stepped off the bus and confronted the
matrona
and her thuggish companion.
Something’s not quite right here,
she wanted to tell Junior.
Don’t you see it too?

But there was a difference, she thought. At the bus terminal, she could have acted on the instinct. Refused to go with the
matrona
. Turned and fled, if it came to that.
Run like hell. She could have saved herself then. Not any longer. She couldn’t help herself now, and she definitely couldn’t help Junior.

“I’m happy for you,” Marivic said.

“You don’t sound happy.”

“I am. Really.”

“Good,” said Junior from the other side of the wall. “Don’t be jealous. You won’t be here much longer, either, I’m sure of it.”

The Goodbye Treatment continued for Junior, exactly on schedule. The second morning, an injection and a blood sample. The evening of the second day, again a blood sample and an injection. Junior and Marivic didn’t talk much after that. Junior was going in a few hours. They both understood it.

Marivic lay in the cell and tried to make sense of it all. Junior was going. But where? For what purpose? Why now instead of yesterday or tomorrow? Why were they even here at all? All this—the plane and the boat and the buildings and the guards—did all this exist just to provide a way station between Manila and some ultimate destination for a few unfortunate captives?

It didn’t make sense.

As she lay in the darkness, she thought about the glimpse of the island that she had gotten that first night as she peeked over the wall, through the wire grille. She remembered the path that ran past her cell wall, down the hill, to the dock.

Whether by boat or by floating plane, the dock
seemed to be the point of entry and departure. This meant that Junior, when he left, would be on that path soon.
If
he was leaving.

She spoke in the darkness: “Junior? Are you awake?”

“Yes, Marivic, I am awake.”

“When you leave the island, you’ll walk past this building. Past my cell. You’ll know it: the concrete block wall. It’s the last building before you go down the hill to the dock.”

“If you say so.”

“When you pass by, I want you to let me know that you’re there. Don’t say anything. Just whistle ‘Anak.’ Make it loud so I’m sure to hear it. Will you remember that?”

“Sure, I’ll do that,” he said.

“Please don’t forget. It’s important.”

“Like a last good-bye. Until we meet again.”

“Something like that,” she said.

They came for him before dawn. The light went on in his room and she heard his door opening, the low voices, getting him up.

He said, “Good-bye, Marivic. Don’t worry, I remember. ‘Anak.’”

From outside the building, somewhere in the sky, she heard a noise. It sounded at first like the snapping of a flag in a hard wind. It grew louder. A white light briefly swept through the grille above the wall.

She knew from the sound that it was a helicopter, coming in to land.

“You see, Marivic?” Junior shouted. She could
tell that he was out of the room now, in the short hallway outside the cells. “That’s for me. They’ve come for me.”

The helicopter’s beating grew louder and lower, until it was no longer dropping. The noise began to subside. It was on the ground.

Marivic moved the table to the corner of the room and placed the chair on the table, its back against the wall. She climbed up and looked over the top.

The helicopter had landed in the flat clearing about halfway down the hill. Floodlights bathed the area.

She wondered if they had really come for Junior. Was it possible?

A door opened on the helicopter as the blades did a last slow turn to a stop. From the shadows outside the floodlights came a man pushing a wheelchair. He helped someone down from the helicopter, into the chair, and he began to push the chair up the path. Who was this? Was some new occupant being brought in to fill the cell that Junior had left?

As they got closer, she saw that the figure in the chair was a white man, plump and jowly. She ducked her head down so that she wouldn’t be noticed, and when she looked up again the chair was gone, out of sight. He didn’t come into the cell, and she knew that they must have brought him back into the unseen buildings.

For the next ten or fifteen minutes she waited for Junior to come by, whistling “Anak” as he passed,
on his way down to the helicopter. But Junior didn’t appear. Down in the clearing, someone was refueling the helicopter from a cylindrical tank that sat on pipe-stand legs at the edge of the clearing. After a while he removed the nozzle from the helicopter and wound the hose back on a reel beside the tank, and he climbed into the helicopter and shut the door.

Still no Junior.

The helicopter whined; the blades began to turn. The helicopter lifted off with a clatter, airborne and climbing. When it was gone, the lights went out in the clearing.

The hillside was dark and still.

Marivic climbed down, took the chair from the table, and returned the table to where it belonged.

She stayed awake, stretched out on the cot, listening. She waited to hear “Anak” floating over the wall, telling her that all was well and that the prisoners in these cells really did leave the island.

Daybreak: no “Anak.” In the morning, the two attendants came in as usual, then left. As the day wore on, a couple of times she heard low voices outside, and she hurried to climb up and look over the top of the wall, thinking that maybe Junior was being escorted down to the boat and that he was so excited to leave that he had forgotten his promise. But each time it was just foreigners on the path, faces and bodies that were now becoming familiar.