Rebound (15 page)

Benjael ran alongside the flagellants and settled on one. He shouted at this man, who either didn’t hear or see him or was
too far gone in his torments to bother about him. Some of the townspeople pushed and shoved Benjael for bothering one of the
penitentes,
and he returned to Dartley and Harry.

“I think they would have attacked me if I had lifted the
kapirosa
to see his face,” Benjael explained. “But I’m sure that was my cousin.”

“You think he’s going to be in any shape to come with us after all this?” Dartley asked doubtfully, not caring for the idea
of having to nurse someone with a flayed back.

“My cousin is like a carabao,” Benjael boasted. “In a few hours, after he has repented his sins like this, he will be in good
shape again. We will follow them now, and I will talk with him after it is over.”

Dartley couldn’t see how the man would even be able to ride in a car seat because he could not rest his back against it, but
he decided to be patient and go along to see what happened.

One of the
penitentes
picked up a huge wooden cross in the square, hooked it over one
shoulder, and dragged it along at the head of the procession.

“He has made a
panata,”
Benjael said with approval, and glanced at his watch.

Harry made a face of disgust. “A
panata
is a vow or promise if something is given to you,” he explained to Dartley. “I suppose you can guess what the vow was.”

Dartley nodded. He asked Benjael, “Is that your cousin with the cross?”

“No, no,” Benjael said. “My cousin is only a
flagellante.
He is not crazy.”

They joined in at the end of the crowd of chanting townspeople and followed the procession out of the town toward a bare,
dusty hill. The crowd gathered around the summit of the low hill, the chanting men in cloth hoods at the middle. Ceaselessly
lashing their backs with the leather thongs holding shards of glass, they cleared a small area in their midst. Two men dug
a hole with a pick and a shovel. Four others placed the cross flat on the earth. The man who had made the
panata
willingly lay on the cross. First one man held his right wrist while another hammered a nail through his palm into one extremity
of the wooden crosspiece. Next they nailed his left hand. They placed one foot over the other and used one nail through both
to attach them to the upright. All six men raised the cross and placed it in the hole. The church bell in the town beneath
struck twelve times. It was midday.

The crucified man, who was in his early twenties and already gone to flab, did not squirm. His face wore a dull look of anguish,
and his
eyes were half closed. His body weight began to pull the nails through the flesh of his palms. The nails seemed likely to
tear upward between the fingers and caused him to fall face forward from the cross, so he was hurriedly lowered and the crowd
began to disperse, making way for the
flagellantes.
These men had now stopped whipping themselves and supported one another and talked together, like a football team leaving
the field after a hard-fought game.

Benjael approached his cousin and spoke with him. This man raised his
kapirosa
to show Benjael his face.

Benjael came back to Dartley and Harry with a silly grin on his face. “That wasn’t him. My cousin didn’t come this year. But
he told me where he lives.”

A pregnant girl, eighteen or nineteen years old, opened the door of the little stucco house. She was pretty but sullen-looking.
Benjael asked for his cousin. She shouted back over her shoulder, and a man came out of the dark interior of the house. He
was about thirty, unshaven and bleary-eyed. His face broke into a smile when he saw Benjael, and the two men embraced each
other.

“I go to Manila all the time to visit you,” he said to Benjael. “At last you come here to see me!”

“We thought you would be in the
penitensya.”

He glanced at the pregnant girl beside him and laughed. “This year I am a sinner. Next year I do penance for this year’s sins.”

They all went inside the house, and over
coffee Benjael’s cousin told them stories of his days as a logger in the northern provinces. He had worked several times near
Balbalasang, always for lumber companies owned by Happy Man Velez. There was not much logging in those parts nowadays, he
said, because of local troubles there and attacks by the New People’s Army. He agreed to act as their guide in the area.

“I’ll pay you a thousand U.S. dollars per week,” Dartley told him.

The smile disappeared from the man’s face. “Why?”

Dartley was pleased to see that he was no fool. He looked around to make sure the girl could not hear before he said, “I want
to kill someone.”

“What do I have to do?”

“For a thousand, be our guide. For anything more I ask you to do, I will pay extra.”

Benjael’s cousin sighed. “All right. But I make a
panata
for next year.” He held his arms out in the shape of a cross.

The small girl waved the huge carabao, which loomed over her, toward a bank of earth on which her two little brothers stood.
When the giant animal with swept-back horns lumbered close to the bank, its huge shoulder muscles rippling beneath its hide,
the little boys leapt onto its back and held tightly on to its hide hair. The enormous brute then obediently followed the
small girl along a path between two sugarcane fields. The children waved to men cutting cane with long-bladed knives resembling
machetes.
The men paused at their work to wave back, then wiped the sweat out of their eyes and made a few hopeless slaps at the countless
mosquitoes and other insects swarming around their bodies in the sticky equatorial heat of Negros Occidental.

The path wound through more sugarcane fields and descended to a marshy area too waterlogged to cultivate. The girl’s father
had noticed fresh swamp grass here the day before, which would provide good grazing for the family’s carabao. As she bossily
brought the animal to the patch of new grass she considered best for it to eat, something caught her eyes in a patch of tall
reeds. Something cloth… She pushed the reeds aside and looked. A dead man lay there with dried blood caked all over his body.
She screamed and backed away.

She stopped only to beckon her two little brothers from the carabao’s back. They slid off expertly, hit the ground with a
parachutist’s roll, came to their feet, and were running, all in a single, smooth movement. The three barefoot children charged
back along the path between the cane fields, leaving the carabao contentedly munching grass behind them, unconcerned about
the mutilated human corpse a few feet away from it.

When the little girl saw the men at work in the field, she called to them. Her brothers also shouted at them to come, not
knowing why but happy to imitate their older sister’s urgency. All five men came with them when they heard what she had to
say. She and her brothers led them to the marsh, and she pointed out the patch of
reeds. The carabao lifted its head and gazed placidly at them, chewing the cud.

The men looked through the reeds at the corpse. The clothes were no more than tattered rags stuck to the skin with dried blood.
Knife punctures covered the man’s body and four limbs, and blackened areas of skin showed where he had been burned. His eye
sockets were empty. His cut-out tongue was placed carefully on his right thigh. His cut-off penis was stuffed in his blood-caked
mouth.

“Don’t touch him,” one man said, warning the others. “The body may be booby-trapped.”

“It’s that lawyer fella who came down here from Manila to work with the militia against the rebels. I seen him in town twice.
They warned me to pretend to be a half fool if he ever questioned me.”

“What is that paper with writing on it?”

“Get it. We have to find out what it says. Maybe it puts the blame on us.”

One man stepped carefully through the reeds until he could reach for the paper. The sheet of paper was attached to the skin
of the corpse’s chest by a large safety pin. He pulled at the paper and it tore, leaving a patch still held by the safety
pin. But they got all the writing. Each of the men held the paper and looked seriously at the writing. None of them said anything.
Then one of them took it to the little girl, who stood some distance away.

“Read it to us,” he said.

The girl drew herself up self-importantly, held the paper up, and cleared her throat. “It’s not very neat handwriting,” she
pronounced
judgmentally. Then she read, “’This man lied to our comrades in prison camps. He said he could help them. He was a spy. The
New People’s Army brought justice to him. Do not be a government spy.’”

The men took the paper from the girl and stood to one side to discuss things.

“We have to move the body from here.”

“I say we don’t touch it. Call the militia.”

“If we do, they’ll blame us. Maybe shoot us. Or burn our houses down.”

“You think anyone in our village had anything to do with this?”

“No! If any people from here did, they would not have left the body on our village lands.”

“The militia should understand that. But they won’t. They’ll take it out on us because the body turned up here.”

“That’s why I say we have to move it. Dump it somewhere else.”

“Those bastards in San Ramon always think they’re better than we are. This would bring them down a notch or two.”

“Maybe we should just bury the body.”

“Then the New People’s Army would come after us! They want this body found with this message attached. They don’t care whether
it’s found here or in San Ramon, but if we bury the body, they will think we hid it because we are pro-government.”

“Simplest thing is to wait till dark, pin this paper back on, and leave it in San Ramon.”

“Those people there are real bastards.”

“They’ve had this coming a long time, they way they look down on us.”

Hidden on a jungle ridge dotted with coconut palms, some of the New People’s Army guerrillas finished their morning meal of
wild cabbage stewed in coconut milk over rice. Others washed in a stream, collected clothing that had dried overnight on bushes,
and cleaned weapons. The men went about their tasks and unhurriedly broke camp. They never camped two nights in the same place
and carried all their equipment and possessions. Living like this for months on end had hardened them into methodical, disciplined
survivors who wasted nothing, neither things nor time. When they were ready to move out, their leader called them together
and explained the plans to them. Some of the men asked questions, some made jokes. The leader went over everything several
times to make sure everyone understood.

The men moved out in two platoons of eleven each, plus five scouts. They had no uniforms. Some were barefoot, though most
wore sneakers. Each carried an M16, and some had sidearms as well; two carried M79 grenade launchers.

They hit the village first. The eleven men of one platoon first climbed higher up the hill and then turned around to descend
among the houses, M16s at the ready. Most of the men and many of the women had already gone down into the valley to work in
the fields. This was what the guerrillas wanted—the four men they were after spent little time in the fields. A pair of
men went to each of four houses while three covered the village. Two came outside, dragging an old man between them. He was
the village headman, a known government sympathizer who encouraged the young men of the village to join the region’s paramilitary
civilian home defense force to fight the New People’s Army. Another man dragged from his home was a member of this local militia.
The other two pairs drew a blank—the men they were looking for were on a patrol looking for
them.
They put the two men before a row of coconut trees and cut them down with M16 fire. The men touched off fires in the four
palm-thatch-and-bamboo houses with matches, but they did not try to prevent women and children from escaping the burning houses
or from carrying out their possessions. As smoke from the four burning houses rose into the air the guerrillas fired volleys
from their rifles.

The government soldiers at the prison camp saw the smoke and heard the gunfire. The lieutenant in command ordered the sergeant
to put an armed group of men together and investigate.

“It’s a trap, sir,” the sergeant said. “They’re trying to draw us out of here so they can either attack the rescue party or
storm the camp here while we’re gone.”

“We can’t stay put here and let the guerrillas burn down villages right under our noses,” the lieutenant pointed out. The
sergeant was four years older than him and had three times his experience in the field, so the lieutenant listened carefully
to what he had to say. But it came down to this: An enlisted man’s advice was
mostly to stay put and keep his head down, while an officer was trained to send men out, even when he stayed behind himself.
“If they attack us here while you are gone, we can hold them off with our machine guns. Take enough men with you in case they
decide to ambush you.”

So the sergeant, who wanted to stay put, had to take the men out, while the lieutenant, who thought something should be done,
stayed put. To make his point the sergeant took ten of the fourteen soldiers garrisoned in the camp, leaving the lieutenant
four soldiers, eight prison guards, and a hundred and forty-three inmates. Two of the five rebel scouts spotted the sergeant
and ten men heading for the village and radioed in their codes. This was the signal for the platoon to abandon the village,
swing south of the approaching soldiers, and head for the position of the scouts.

The platoon near the prison camp waited fifteen minutes, then attacked. The camp was ringed by a barricade of felled coconut
palms and topped by rows of sharpened bamboo stakes, which made it impossible to scale the defenses. Two M60 machine guns
were emplaced among the palm logs to the north and south and could be moved where needed. The eight prison guards were trained
to use M16s, and all of the inmates were under lock and key in the concrete cell blocks. This was a holding place for political
prisoners only, its existence and precise location a military secret, and so the authorities did not have to concern themselves
with such things as exercise and visiting facilities. There were few
outsiders in the backcountry canefields of Negros Occidental.