Dust Devil (48 page)

Chase waited an agonizing three hours until he found himself alone at the rear of a barrack. The note was from Lelani.
I can have parao for yu. Say to Hector wen yu nid it.

Slowly Chase shredded the note, feeling a deep sense of humility. His mind ticked off the people who had bef
riended him, none of them of the
Dine’e
: first Will; then Spec — the Yankee; Omaha — the Negro; Rabinowitz — the Jew; Lelani — a Filipino, and on and on. And then there were his own people, Blue Tail and steadfast Deborah.

Chase began to plan his escape. A small sailboat like a parao would get him off Luzon but where then, he did not know. And he knew little about sailing.

The Japanese constantly patrolled the islands, shelling them and requisitioning what food the Filipinos were able to grow, since the mountainous islands of Japan did not supply enough food — and especially little food at wartime when much of the Japanese labor had been diverted to military endeavors. So escape from Luzon Island appeared hopeless. Yet Chase was determined.

The first thing he did was to arrange to exchange places for the garden detail. After the next rain he calculated it would be easy to dig under the barbwire. The following day he returned the note to Hector with instructions.
At dawn after next rain
, he wrote in
Bicol
, which he figured was as badly spelled as Lelani’s English,
leave clothing at well
. He’d worry about getting a sailboat later.

Taking someone with him could seriously handicap his escape, but nevertheless Chase decided to ask Spec and Rabinowitz, both of whom were on garden duty already. He went to them three days later as clouds billowed on the horizon. "I’m leaving tonight,” he told Spec. "Do you want to go with me?”

Spec moved along the row of sweet potatoes,
camotes
, giving no indication he had heard. But a few minutes later he said, "Man, I got a sure thing here —a roof over my head and food to eat, if you can call it that. Out there — ” he shrugged his bony shoulders, "it ain’t so sure. I better take my chances here and hope for liberation.”

When Chase asked Rabinowitz, who was on his knees weeding the rows, the colonel smiled wistfully. "Nothing I’d like better. But for every officer who escapes, the Nips execute another one. I can’t do that to the men, Strawhand.”

Chase was tempted to ask, "Do you think another officer would give you the same consideration?” but did not. He had learned that the possibility did exist.

"If anyone has a chance, you do,” Rabinowitz said. "You almost look like a Filipino. You could mix with the natives,
except maybe for your height, but I’d likely be spotted right off.” The colonel looked around and deemed it safe to hold out his hand. "If you make it back — don’t let your distrust stand in the way of making something of your life.”

* * *
* *

As Chase had hoped, the ground was soft enough following the evening rain to tunnel out. The guards were nearly asleep at their posts, and Chase half-crawled, half-wriggled until he had made it to the safety of the artesian wells. There on the stone ledge was clothing
— a shirt of mosquito netting, ragged and patched white cotton trousers, and a floppy straw hat. Beneath the clothing was a bolo, a deadly-looking machete.

While Chase stripped in the shadows of mango trees, the little monkey man, Hector, suddenly materialized. "You will need a guide,” he announced to Chase in almost perfect English.

Chase concealed his surprise. "I’m going to Santo Tomas for a woman.”

Hector nodded his head sagely as if Chase’s plan of action was acceptable and even expected. "We have contacts there who will help us.”

After burying Chase’s clothing beneath the soft soil, the two set out at a trot in the predawn darkness, keeping the rising sun to their left as they made their way deeper and deeper into the lowland forests. Chase figured there were ninety miles more or less of jungle between him and Manila. Seven days between him and Santo Tomas.

That first day was the easiest. Chase judged they made twenty miles that day. Although Hector looked like a monkey, he did not chatter like one, and it was only through the occasional words exchanged between the two that Chase learned the man was an educated Filipino guerrilla. Hector found pineapple to eat, though the fruit was still a little green. And once, when Chase almost stepped on a cobra, Hector’s bolo neatly sliced away the head.

The second day the heat and the exertion began getting to him. They came across a farmer’s
camote
patch, and Chase ate the sweet potatoes so quickly his stomach began cramping. "You are suffering from protein poisoning,” Hector advised him.

T
hat same night, barking geckos, or lizards, warned the two men of an approaching crocodile while they slept.

Toward the fifth day, as they dropped down into the rice paddies that marked the outskirts of Manila, they came upon more and more people making their way in
carretas
filled with abaca, rice, tobacco, and bamboo mats. Once they stepped off a main trail and flattened themselves against an earthen embankment as a troop of Japanese cavalrymen passed by. At a whim the Japanese officer arrested the Filipinos moving ahead of Chase and Hector.

Later that day they came upon a lone man in a
carromata
, a pony-driven cart loaded with lumber. Chase and Hector followed the man for nearly three miles, then when the man left the road to kneel at one of the lazy creeks that wound through the steamy lowlands, Chase watched as Hector took the hilt of his bolo and struck the man across the head. "Let’s go,” he said, grabbing at the pony’s reins.

With Hector pulling and Chase following behind the cart, they entered Manila’s outskirts, which was mostly nipa and bamboo huts with oyster-shell windows, then progressed past the business district and warehouses. After they crossed over the Pasig bridge, which teamed with Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, they were in the older, walled part of the city, the Intramuros, where lay the famed shopping district. Anything one wanted could be found there, from precious ice cream or dental work to prostitution.

Chase had no eye for the shapely girls in their slit silk dresses nor the painting of the strawberry ice cream on a storefront plaque. He shoved his way behind the cart through the crowds until Santo Tomas came into view. The internment camp looked like what it was — a university campus with ancient brownstone buildings crawling with ivy, a university older than any in the United States, twenty-five years older than Harvard.

Undaunted by the fierce-looking guards with their .27 caliber rifles, the little monkey man lined up with other carts, apparently bringing the daily food supplies. When their turn came, Hector rattled off something to the head guard, and the Japanese soldier pointed a finger at two isolated buildings.

"What did you tell him?” Chase asked after they had trudged on through the gates.

"I told him I was delivering lumber for the new barracks they’re building for the women.”

"How did you know they were building new barracks?”

"They’re not, but the guards don’t know that.”

Chase grunted, amazed at the man’s temerity.

The men and women they occasionally passed seemed in somewhat better condition than the Cabanatuan prisoners, though they still had the zombie, glaze-eye
d look and were pitifully thin.

Hector stopped before the women’s dormitories and lit the stub of a cigarette, took two puffs, and rubbed it out on the pavement with a bare sole.
"Getting in is not difficult,” he said. "Getting her out will be.”

Chase watched him, waiting. Soon, from the nearest building, an old Filipino woman, who was almost bald, hobbled out, using a bamboo stick for a cane. She bent and picked up the flattened stub, saying, "You should not waste anything, old man.”

Hector shrugged. "The day is too hot to smoke.”

The woman, whose face was a mass of lines, peered out at him. "It will not always be so,” she replied at last.

"We are looking for a woman,” Hector said more softly. "An American called Deborah DeBaca.”

The woman jerked her head toward one of the buildings. "She’s there. You want her.”

"Yes, get her,” Hector said.

The four or five minutes that Chase waited seemed the longest in his life. Then Deborah, dressed in a loose cotton shirt and baggy pants, crossed the lawn toward him, moving in slow steps that lacked her former gracefulness.

When she was closer, Chase realized her hair was not rolled atop her head but had been wacked off. She was terribly emaciated, as shriveled as the old woman, but there was an iridescent quality about her skeletal form, like an Indian who has fasted for a religious revelation.

She looked suspicious and cautious of the two men. When Chase shoved the floppy straw hat back from his face and she was near enough to see, she halted as if frozen.

CHAPTER
50

"It is good to see you, little sister.”

Stunned, unable to move, Deborah’s great eyes looked at Chase through a shimmering mist in disbelief.

"We must go!” Hector said, snapping the dreamlike quality of the moment for the two who had traveled halfway around the world to meet each other again. The Filipino took his hat off and flopped it over Deborah’s head, and Chase’s large hands encircled the wisp of her waist and set her atop the load of lumber.

It was a tense moment as the wagon moved toward a different gate than the one they had entered by and halted at the checkpoint, but Hector simply told the guard they were hauling off the lumber. When he even paused to ask the guard for a cigarette, perspiration broke out on Chase’s forehead. He wanted to curse at the guerrilla’s rash bravado. But the guard merely replied, "Move along, old man!”

Chase never dared look up at Deborah who sat perched on the lumber like a little boy. Once out of the main part of Manila, they threaded their way through the crowds that jostled for room along the narrow streets that led down toward the spacious harbor. It was out along one of the longest piers in the world that Hector stopped before a
barrota
, a fishing boat, of about three tons with housing of thatched coconut palm leaves across its middle. Once again the little man talked to an old woman, this time a
tao
with a flat nose and broad lips. She nodded, pointing to the sailboat and talking.

"We’re going to Mindanao,” Hector said, as he helped Chase and a dazed Deborah aboard the sailboat, while the
tao
woman plodded back up the pier with the
carromata
. "A guerrilla there will see that you are well hidden until the next submarine out of Australia puts in — maybe a month, maybe more.”

Chase and Deborah sat braced in the
barrota
as Hector maneuvered it through the honeycomb of Japanese tankers and destroyers in the bay and past the prewar ships, looking like rust-streaked skeletons, wrecked on the reefs off Luzon’s coast. Out on the open sea now, the fresh salt wind hit the
barrota’s
three passengers as the craft swooped and dived over the waves of the Mindoro Strait.

Chase watched Deborah, the bridge of his hawklike nose furrowed with worry. Her face was ashen as if she might be seasick. But that was not what troubled him. She treated him as if he were a stranger. She kept her face averted from his gaze, looking instead out toward the islands the outrigger skirted as it sailed southward.

It was a perilous journey of eleven days. The wind and salt burnt their skin, and waves washed over them. They went without food and water for as much as three days one time, for Hector did not feel it safe to put in at some of the islands they passed for fear of Japanese patrol boats.

Deborah did not speak much. Once, the rig was caught on the edge of a typ
hoon that lashed at the
barrota
like it was a leaf in a dust devil. Deborah choked under the onslaught of wind and water, and he could see the fear on her face. But for the first time she smiled. "It’s not exactly a pleasure cruise, is it?” she shouted at him.

Toward the end of the tenth day
he was ready to order Hector to put in at one of the islands, it did not matter which one, and surrender. They were blistered, bleary-eyed, and hungry. Then on the eleventh day, when they were passing through the Bohol Strait into the Mindanao Sea, Hector informed them that part of their journey was nearing its end. "The guerrilla force operates in Mindanao under Colonel Herrera. He will see that you are kept hidden until the rescue sub arrives.”

As they neared the shore the
barrota
tacked endlessly. The coral reef sucked and hissed around them. When they were within a half-mile of shore, Hector put them out. They were inside the reef where the water was quiet. Chase shook Hector’s hand and thanked him. Another man, not a Navajo, had helped him.

H
e and Deborah watched with something akin to despair as Hector put out to sea again. When the craft was a speck bobbing on the waves, Chase turned to Deborah. He held out his hand. "Ready?”