Rebound (18 page)

A clear liquid was ladled from a big Chinese-looking pot with a soot-blackened coconut shell. Dartley was handed a container,
and he drank it obediently. He recognized it as rice wine, like Japanese sake. He was immediately offered another, and he
drank that, too, although normally he never took alcohol. He suspected that if he did not drink it here, it would be taken
as an insult to the spirit of the dead man strapped in the chair. Pieces of meat were then given to them with much ceremony.
Dartley had no idea what kind of animals the meat came from, and some pieces tasted a lot better than others. But he swallowed
them all and followed them with some more rice wine. Harry and the others showed an equal willingness not to insult the dead
man’s spirit, though all three tended to be slow about sticking these pieces of strange-looking meat in their mouths so early
in the day.

Rafael eased alongside Dartley and whispered, “This is called a
canao.”

“How long does it go on?”

“At least three days for a funeral. Sometimes weeks for a wedding. These people don’t have a Western sense of time.”

“Get us out of here, Rafael. And find out what happened to the stiff. That looks like a high-velocity small-caliber bullet
wound to me. Could be an M16. No fucking around. I want to know what happened.”

Rafael talked to one of the men who had brought them here, and when they went outside,
Dartley followed them, motioning to Harry and Benjael to remain behind to eat more meat and drink more wine. Harry was holding
a rubbery, green piece of meat in his fingers and was thinking city thoughts about people who live in bamboo huts in the mountains.
Still, both he and Benjael were from the Tondo section and knew the importance of showing respect to people with a cultural
tradition of headhunting. Harry chewed and swallowed the meat and knocked back some wine.

“Velez’s guards shot him yesterday afternoon,” Rafael told Dartley. “While Happy Man was away at his house in Laguna things
relaxed up here, and some of the Kalingas hunted closer to the Velez house. When Velez came back, security tightened and they
shot one Kalinga hunter.”

“Was he on Velez land?” Dartley asked.

Rafael got this information. “He says no. The government claims they own the land and that Velez bought the timber rights
from them. But the Kalingas claim it is their land—or that they have traditional hunting rights on it no matter who owns it.
This man says he is the dead man’s brother and that his brother was killed with a gun like ours. He saw the man who did it.
The Kalingas here have guns—bolt-action hunting rifles—but nothing to match an automatic rifle. He wants you to go with him
and kill the man who shot his brother.”

“Not you also?” Dartley asked, surprised.

“Not me. You.”

“All right. Go inside and join the others.”

* * *

The Kalinga warrior trotted on his bare feet along the path, and Dartley found it difficult to keep up with him. On two occasions
he lost contact with him and had to wait for him to come back and find him. Dartley was fit, and the heat and insects here
were nothing compared to what they had been in the lowlands, yet moving fast along narrow paths in dense undergrowth was never
going to be one of Dartley’s talents. The Kalinga man, like most of his people, was quite tall and well built, but somehow
he managed to slide around in the undergrowth like a silent shadow while Dartley, doing his best to keep quiet, sounded like
a stampeding buffalo.

After more than an hour of mad downhill trotting on narrow paths through the forest, the land leveled out underfoot and the
cover became thinner. They were at the bottom of the hill now, moving across the valley toward the Velez house. Dartley slowed
his pace. The Kalinga did not understand, but Dartley could only move quietly by traveling at a cautious walking pace. The
warrior sneered at him, thinking he was afraid. But his opinion didn’t concern Dartley. People were always trying to persuade
Dartley not only to do what they wanted but to do it the
way
they wanted. He always made it clear that if he agreed to do something, he would do it his way, unless someone had a better
idea—and he would be the judge of that. Like some clients back in the States, the Kalinga showed annoyance and impatience.
Small world, Dartley thought as he carefully checked out the terrain.

They came to a small dirt road. The Kalinga
squatted down and made sets of complex gestures with his hands, which meant nothing to Dartley, who hunkered down beside him.
After an hour it occurred to Dartley that these people had a different sense of time than Westerners and that maybe they would
be here for days. He remembered the way this man and seven others had sat silently for part or maybe all the night at the
campsite. Dartley could already feel cramps in his thighs and calves. He wasn’t getting any younger, but even as a kid he
could not remain squatting motionless for long periods without his muscles seizing up.

After crouching for more than two hours in silence, during which time the Kalinga did not twitch a muscle, Dartley heard a
motor approach. It was a farm tractor towing a two-wheeled wagon, in which tubers that might have been large sweet potatoes
were piled. One man drove the tractor, and two sat on the tailgate of the wagon, smoking and letting their legs hang. Dartley
glanced at the Kalinga. The man’s face showed no sign that he saw anything pass on the road. Maybe he’s in a trance, Dartley
thought. But these three men were unarmed and obviously tenant farmers or hired laborers. They had bodies shaped by too much
toil and too little nourishment, and clearly belonged to the oppressed. Dartley shifted his weight to ease the ache in his
left leg and rechecked his M16 for maybe the fiftieth time.

Nearly another hour passed before the Kalinga moved. He turned his head to the left and looked down the dirt road, which disappeared
around a corner into the forest a short distance
from them. Dartley looked and listened. Nothing. The Kalinga grew increasingly tense. He pointed urgently at Dartley’s rifle.
Dartley listened carefully to the forest silence but heard nothing except his own heartbeat. He crouched and watched, rifle
raised to his shoulder, finger on the trigger.

A man walked around the corner in the middle of the road. An M16 hung on its strap from his right shoulder, and he walked
with his right hand resting easily on the weapon. To Dartley’s ears the man moved silently in his sneakers on the dirt road.
He wore a short-sleeved shirt, open in front, and light cotton pants. He had tattoos on his chest and forearms, and Dartley
decided that he had a Tondo look to him, like Benjael—a hired gun from Manila.

Twenty feet behind him another man appeared. He, too, looked like he might have come from Tondo, and he also carried an M16
slung on his shoulder. Dartley waited. Sure enough, a third man showed up, another twenty feet or so behind the second.

The first man was already passing their hiding place when it became evident that there was no fourth man. The Kalinga was
busy gesticulating with his fingers, making no sense to Dartley, who wanted to know if any of these men had killed his brother.
Dartley clasped his M16, and the Kalinga smiled. The first man of the three-man patrol was already past them. They were doing
a professional job, not talking or smoking, keeping alert and maintaining space between them so they could not easily be wiped
out in a single burst of fire.

From their hiding place overlooking the narrow dirt road, Dartley pointed to the first man and touched the Kalinga’s bamboo
spear shaft. Without waiting for a response, he faced left, directed the barrel of his M16 at the third man, and ripped off
four shots on full auto. He saw the goon clutch at himself and pitch forward.

Dartley swung the gun from left to right and pressed on the trigger again as the barrel was about to cover the middle man,
now directly opposite him. The first two shots missed, and the target was spinning around to face him when the third, fourth,
and fifth shots of the salvo ripped across his midriff and dropped him in a lifeless heap in the middle of the road.

When he swung on the lead man, he found him already staggering around, clutching the bamboo shaft of the six-foot steel-tipped
spear buried in his chest. The Kalinga must have waited for him to turn completely around before launching the deadly javelin
at him. Dartley and the warrior jumped down onto the road and hauled the dying man by his wrists into the bushes. They went
back for the two dead men and dragged them into the undergrowth and collected their rifles and spare magazines.

Dartley wanted to move out fast, figuring that the two bursts of rifle fire were heard and that other goons could be on the
way. But the Kalinga wasn’t going anywhere. He drew the long knife from the sheath on his left hip and went to work on the
man with the spear in his chest. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t easy to listen to his screams, but he did not last long,
being half dead already from the spear wound.
Then the warrior began to hack off the spear victim’s head with the long blade.

Dartley hauled the weapons back up the hill to the
canao
in the long hut with nine doors. Harry was leaning drunkenly in one doorway. He waved to Dartley, and then his eyes settled
on the three heads the Kalinga was carrying, holding them by the hair, two in one hand, one in the other. Harry vomited.

“Are you Nabokodonosor Solano, who people call Joker?” the man with hard eyes asked. He was sitting behind a table stacked
with papers, along with two other men. All three of them were staring hard at Joker, none too friendly. He was standing alone
in front of the table, and ten or twelve men sat along the wall behind him on folding chairs.

“Yes,” Joker replied. He did not like the way this questioning was set up. It was more a courtroom procedure than a friendly
interrogation by fellow rebels.

The man with the hard eyes went through the details of his arrest, detention, and rescue, all of which Joker had to confirm.

“You agree that you were tortured for a month before being sent to the prison camp?”

“Yes.”

“Were you also tortured in the prison camp?”

“Mistreated but not tortured.”

“Why do you suppose they stopped torturing you?”

“They knew they couldn’t ‘salvage’ me because my lawyer had discovered that I was still alive and being held by the Army.
There was a kind of battle going on between the civilian and military courts as to who had power and jurisdiction. I happened
to be a pawn in that fight, and it saved me.”

“But you lasted a month under torture?”

“Yes,” Joker said.

“You must have told them something to last that long.”

“Everybody tells them something.” Joker’s face twisted emotionally. “Anyone who comes out of those torture cells and says
he didn’t talk is telling you lies. Maybe some of the ones who came out a bleeding piece of meat in a coma—maybe
they
say nothing. The rest of us talk. You, yourself, wouldn’t do any better, or maybe you’ll find that out for yourself someday.”

A look of anger crossed the man’s face. “I would not give them the names of my comrades,” he said furiously.

Joker said nothing.

“You gave them the names of three members of the Philippine Communist Party. They were picked up during the first week of
your arrest. None of them have been heard from again. They weren’t as lucky as you. Or maybe they didn’t talk. Maybe they
didn’t betray other comrades, which is why they are dead now. We know you gave names, Joker. You were the only
person they knew who had been recently arrested. You knew all three of them, although they did not know each other. Do you
deny this? Claim it was a coincidence?”

“No. I named them.”

“You admit it?” the man shouted.

“They had to be sacrificed,” Joker said in a low voice.

The man with the hard eyes jumped to his feet. His face was flushed. “Sacrificed! They had to die so you could live? You stand
here and tell me that, you filthy dog? I’ll shoot you myself.”

Joker spoke calmly with a newly cold edge to his tone. “I had to give the torturers something. I had one secret that I had
to make sure they did not learn. The only way I could hold back that secret from them was to tell everything else I knew,
so they would think they had broken me fast. I gave them other names besides those three, but they already knew about those
people. I told them everything I knew except one thing.”

The interrogator sat down once more. “Was that thing you held back worth the lives of three young men?”

“Yes.”

“I will be the judge of that,” the man said in a contemptuous voice. There was little doubt what his judgment would be.

“No, you won’t,” Joker told him. “I will tell it to Narciso Cojuangco. Find him.”

“He was killed two weeks ago in an attack on an army post. I took over from him. My name is Eduardo Cristobal.”

“I never heard of you,” Joker said.

The man looked stung. “I can make it so that you never forget my name, if you should live so long.”