Gone to the Woods Read online

  The plane made one more circle back and over the ship, then the engines sounded lower, more choppy, and the plane glided down so gently and peacefully that the boy thought: He’s going to do it. He’s going to land smoothly right on the water. Like there’s a runway.

  But no.

  The ocean looked completely flat, calm. But there was a little swell and when the plane at last touched down—it seemed to hang in the air and take forever—it did not hit evenly. The end of the right wing clipped the water first, then grabbed deeply and seemed to slam-jerk the plane around, to the right, but the energy was too great and the plane broke, separated in back of the wings and turned into two pieces and the rear portion started to sink immediately.

  It was then the boy saw that the plane had been filled with people—mostly women and children—and they seemed to explode out in a shower of tumbling figures into the water around the sinking plane.

  The lifeboat and men were headed for it as fast as they could but they were still a good distance away and seemed to be moving slowly.

  So slowly.

  The plane had landed so that it was about a quarter of a mile from the ship, close enough so the boy could see that the people in the water were wearing bright yellow inflatable life vests and floating upright. The front of the plane was sinking but much more slowly and some of the people and kids were trying to get back on the wings, which were just at or slightly beneath the surface.

  The boy had been on the far side of the ship, away from the side where the plane had landed, but he made his way across the ship through an opening until he was at the rail leaning out from the side. From this position he could see a little better and hear as well and the people were yelling and trying to help each other.

  As he watched, he saw, or really sensed, motion in the water near the ship and he looked to see large gray shapes leaving the stern and streaking in the direction of the plane and within what seemed like only moments the people in the water began screaming and thrashing at the surface and some of them jerked and went under, came up and were jerked under again.

  “Sharks.” A soldier standing at the rail near the boy had been watching. “The devils follow the ship looking for garbage and they’re going after the women and kids…”

  From that moment on, it became something close to a nightmare but the boy could not take his eyes away. He did not know anything about sharks, or how many there were, but even as the lifeboat reached the sinking plane and the men in the boat started pulling the people out of the water, he could see that the sharks were not giving up. They hit the legs and feet of the women and kids while the men pulled at their tops to get them clear. It seemed like everybody was screaming—shrill, ripping screams as they got hit—and even at this distance he could see the red froth of blood in the water near the boat.

  In a time that seemed to be forever, at last, the men had saved everyone who had not been pulled under and came back to the ship and they started lifting and carrying the women and kids from the lifeboat on the side of the ship.

  The boarding stair-ladder was on the side of the boat away from the plane—which had now disappeared completely as it went down—and the boy ran back across the ship to the top of the stair in time to see the first of the survivors being carried aboard.

  There was an unbelievable amount of blood. It had mixed with seawater and covered the sailors carrying the wounded, dripped onto the deck, covered the wounded themselves, some women, some children, and many of them had been hit by the sharks, had tears and rips in their sides and legs and arms. The boy saw Ruben there, meeting them, trying to give them first aid as the sailors carried them inside the top cabin of the ship.

  And more than that he was stunned to see that his mother had apparently fought off the seasickness and had rolled up her sleeves and was helping Ruben working with the injured, wrapping bandages tightly over the wounds trying to stop the bleeding.

  He had never thought of her this way and he felt proud that she could do this … this help with these really awfully, horribly wounded people. He had himself leaned over the side, or tried to lean over the side, and vomited when he saw one boy whose stomach was ripped open. And here she was, like she’d been doing this all her life, following Ruben into the large central cabin where they laid people out on the deck and chairs, going from one to the next, talking softly. Softly. And while he watched he saw her push some hair out of a woman’s face and say something soft to the woman, and the boy was certain the woman died at that very instant with her upper chest torn open so he could see … so he could see.

  It was, finally, too much.

  He made his way out onto the deck, trying to not see, did not want to see such a thing ever again, and found sailors hosing blood-water off the deck and made his way to the stern. The ship had started moving again and he looked down and saw the gray shapes in the water, following the ship, and he tried not to look at them but he did. He did look.

  And then he sat quietly on the deck and leaned back against the sun-warmed steel of the mast housing and stared out at the ocean and tried not to think on all that he had seen, and heard, and smelled. Hot, thick stink of blood and blood-screams and salt water. The sea. The blue. The giant blue and the shiny airplane and the sharks. Gray death.

  New thoughts. Some quick, new, good thoughts before his brain was filled with the horror …

  Edy and Sig. Wonder what they were doing and how could he have been there a few weeks ago, been in that wonderful place, that place where everything was beautiful and made sense and be here now?

  Here.

  How could that be?

  With people torn to shreds and blood and guts and screams and his mother, his mother, his mother …

  And he curled up on the warm deck and closed his eyes and slept.

  MANILA

  In some strange manner he could not find anything wrong with Manila. It had been nearly destroyed, gutted—often literally—by the Japanese army during the occupation. Blown apart, torn to pieces, burned …

  And yet.

  And yet he came to love it.

  The ship had stopped briefly in Honolulu and left the survivors from the plane wreck, where—God help them—they would have to get back on yet another plane and return over the same ocean to the United States.

  And then the ship stopped at some other islands to put off small bits of military supplies, but the boy hardly noticed they had stopped.

  After the plane crash he only returned to the cell to sleep. And indeed, did not always do that but slept in various places on the deck and became a wild thing, sleeping when he felt like it, eating when he felt hungry. Ruben had introduced him to the galley on the ship and the cook, who was also Filipino. He was a big man and liked the boy and would give him a roll or a sandwich or a bowl of rice with a can of sardines dumped on top whenever he felt like eating.

  The large central cargo hold was essentially sealed off with bolted hatches but he had the run of the rest of the ship, and in the remaining two weeks of the trip there wasn’t really a part that he didn’t see, although—except for a quick look—he didn’t spend any real time on the bridge. Captain Rigs was there most of the time and didn’t seem to want to spend a great deal of effort caring about or knowing the boy.

  But the rest of the ship was like a playground to him, filled with nooks and crannies and hidden places.

  His mother had returned to her seasickness as soon as she stopped helping with the plane crash survivors and the boy had stockpiled a good supply of comic books and candy, although any chocolate bars had to be eaten soon as they always melted in the heat. But the peanut bars seemed to last better and he found a cubby near the stern where he would sit and eat candy and read comics.

  He did not spend any time looking over the stern. The sharks followed in a weaving pattern and when he did look he could not see them without thinking of the gray streaks heading for the people in the water.

  So no looking back.

  But the sea seemed
to take him. He loved the color of it, the way it rose in front of him, pulling at him, beckoning, and he was never bored with it. He could sit and watch it, wondering at the immensity of it, and in fact was doing just that on an early morning when they reached Manila.

  He had been in the galley before dawn and the cook gave him some toast with canned strawberry jam on it and he went outside on the deck to sit and eat it when he looked up and saw there was a looming dark landmass to the side. The air had a heady smell, a rich almost green tang, a mix of plants and animals and mustiness and heat and moisture. He had heard nothing from anybody that they were even close to someplace, and now the ship slowed to a crawl and turned in the new dawn light and worked its way toward a huge pier and he could see an enormous city in back of the pier.

  As the sun rose the light grew and he could see more and saw that there were swarms of people, thousands of them who seemed to be rushing somewhere and made him think of an anthill on Sig and Edy’s farm when Sig kicked the top and the ants came boiling out.

  Just everywhere. And they seemed to be moving toward the ship. The boy ran to the side to get closer, to see more, and he saw a soldier standing on the pier with one hand on his hip casually holding a Thompson submachine gun butt-propped on his other hip with his right hand on the pistol grip and index finger across the face of the trigger guard. When he saw the boy, the barrel of the submachine gun slid slowly to the side until it was aimed directly at the boy’s face. He would find later that wherever this man looked, the barrel of the gun followed, centered, held.

  The boy thought at first it might be his father but when he looked closer he could see that the man in no way resembled the tinted picture he had seen. Thinner face. All angles. And from what he could see, his eyes looked … looked cold. The boy started to turn to go for his mother but she appeared suddenly and grabbed him by the arm and took him below where a small door was opened onto a gangway the sailors had placed across to the pier.

  “Come on!” She hissed the words. “Let’s get off this tub onto some dry land.”

  Without giving him a chance to say goodbye to Ruben, she dragged him down the ramp of the gangway until they hit the pier and then she let him go and began looking frantically up the pier through the milling crowds of people.

  The man with the machine gun came forward. Eyes and gun barrel looked up and down his mother, then down to the boy. The barrel of the machine gun looked like a cave.

  “I’m Sergeant Cramer,” the soldier said. “Your husband has duty and couldn’t get away. I’m to pick you up and take you to your quarters.”

  Voice cold, flat. Like it came from night somehow. Not from him, exactly, nor out of him but around him. “I’m to pick you up…” Wasn’t a request but an order and when he finished he turned and said something fast and hard to a Filipino man in back of him in a language the boy couldn’t understand, then back to his mother, gun barrel on her face. “He’ll get your baggage.”

  “How will he know…”

  “He’ll know. Come this way. I have a jeep waiting.”

  And he turned and was gone. His mother grabbed the boy by the arm again and followed. Cramer moved so fast they nearly had to run to keep up until at last they threaded their way through people to the head of the pier and the boy saw an olive-drab jeep sitting there. He climbed into the back seat and his mother took the front passenger seat and the Filipino man brought two suitcases and stacked them in the rear seat next to the boy. The man did not try to get in the jeep but turned and seemed to disappear in the crowd and Cramer started the jeep and they took off.

  Almost literally.

  Cramer seemed to have only one speed—wide-open, with nothing even resembling a seat belt—and the boy and his mother were nearly thrown from the vehicle.

  “Shell craters in the road,” Cramer said. “Hang on. It’s better to get over them fast or we’ll sink in too far…”

  They seemed to go right through the middle of the city and in the end Cramer had to slow the jeep to get through the crowds of people so the boy could see some of what they passed.

  It looked in many ways like a wasteland. Bombs and artillery and mortars had blown everything apart so that he didn’t see any undamaged standing buildings. One ancient ornate Spanish building that the boy thought might have been a church had an enormous round hole blown—it must have been forty feet across—through the middle so you could see completely through the whole building.

  It was like somebody insane had tried to hurt an entire city.

  And had succeeded. The damage was there, the hurt.

  But there was another side the boy saw. As they drove through the crowds it seemed that most of the men he saw were dressed in shorts and loose white or khaki shirts. The women wore either tight skirts or loose wraparound skirts and blouses. Although some of them shouted or made rude gestures at Cramer for his dangerous driving, almost everybody they passed seemed to wave to the boy and smile. Seemed to have joy. Joy amongst the wreckage of their city.

  And the joy made him think suddenly of Edy when he first arrived at their farm and she came to meet him in the driveway when he was faced—he thought—with the threat of the geese. The happiness he felt then when he recognized her.

  And here. It was the same here. The feeling here was one of invitation, of cheer, of being recognized, known, and he thought immediately that he belonged.

  That it was for him, of him. He could not know anything of the city except what Ruben had told him now and then on the ship. But he had been hurt, frightened, hurt in some ways the way this city had been hurt, and now they smiled. Waved. Called to him. Greeted him.

  As if he belonged.

  Belonged to Manila.

  He knew nothing but one thing.

  One thing was certain.

  He wanted to see more of this place, know more of the city and how the people could have such Edy-like joy.

  He must know more of Manila.

  STREET RAT

  But first …

  It seemed that his whole life to date was a series of those “but firsts.”

  Before he did this, he had to do that. Before he came across the ocean, somehow he had to go through chicken pox. Before he saw Edy and Sig, he had to sing in bars in Chicago and help his mother meet men who were not his uncle.

  And now first, he had to meet his father.

  Which proved to be if not exactly pointless at best boring.

  Cramer drove through a military gate and took them to their new house, which was all screens, no windows, and—the only thing really interesting—a ceiling covered with small lizards that horrified his mother and she was going to sweep and kill every last one of them until a servant named Maria said they were not to be killed because they were good luck and ate mosquitoes. Apparently the house came with with two servants—Maria and a young man named Rom. His father called them his house girl and house boy, which made no sense to the boy as Maria and Rom were both grown-ups, not children. Maria had long black hair that hung down her back and a small, slight body that made her seem almost tiny though she was nearly as tall as Rom. She had huge brown eyes and always wore flowered wraparound skirts and white shirts that looked both wrinkled and very clean. The boy learned she had a child, who she brought to work sometimes, and Rom had lived in the center of the city of Manila in a ramshackle hut made of wooden ammunition boxes and roofing tin.

  Along with lizards and servants the house came with rattan furniture, a small kitchen, and a mat covered with Japanese letters on the floor. The Japanese soldiers had taken all the houses when they occupied the Philippine Islands, along with everything else.

  The boy was sitting on a rattan couch reading a comic book—somehow his stash of comic books had come with the suitcases—when his father came in.

  He was tall and thinner than in the picture the boy remembered and wearing a uniform so starched it looked like it would hold him up.

  He glanced at the boy and the boy thought: Captain Rigs.

 
; Just a mere glance. No touching. No hugging. Nothing even remotely close. Not even a smile. The boy could have been—and this would hold true for the father’s whole life—somebody else’s child. The father looked once, turned away, and ordered—not asked, but ordered—Maria to bring him a drink.

  And the mother had a drink.

  And that was it. Welcome home, the boy thought.

  And then more drinks.

  And finally they were drunk and fighting, screaming at each other about other men and other women, his mother throwing dishes and ashtrays at his father, and the boy curled into his bunk in the alcove that was supposed to be his room and tried to not listen, not hear, not know. And would not and could not even imagine that they would be here for just under three years and every night that the boy was in the house—and in the end there would be many nights when he was not—they would be the same.

  One drink.

  Two drinks.

  Then more.

  Then fight.

  Impossible to see, to do, to be this. First night screaming, drunken fights and then more and more …

  No joy here.

  Maria and Rom took pity on the boy when they saw how things were in the house. Rom told him that Maria had been hurt herself and horribly used by the Japanese but still she tried to help the boy all she could, making extra sticky rice for him to eat with a can of sardines she opened and put on the rice with a salty, special sauce.

  Sardines. Oily, packed tightly in the small cans with a windup lid, smelling when he first opened the can like, well, canned sardines. Fins, guts and all.

  Rom had a family in the city, with children—the boy never quite knew how many there were since the number always varied because Rom fed any street child that showed up at his door—but he always seemed to have time to help the boy. Rom had an old fat-tired Japanese military bicycle with a strong rack on the back that would hold the boy and anytime the boy wanted to go somewhere, Rom would put him on the back straddling the rack and take off, his long thin arms roped with muscle steering them down one street after another.