In the Country (39 page)

I may not be able to talk to you again after this.

“We weren't quick enough,” Jim said. No capture of the death itself, the shooting. Only the lifeless bodies afterward: Kuya's, and nearby the man gunned down seconds after him, pegged as his murderer.

The Betamax tape they got hold of later that week said
DUPLICATE COPY
. A label, a command. Just before they pressed play, the children came into the living room. Jaime holding Jackie, new to walking, by the wrists, stooping to help her toddle forward. “Can we watch too?” he asked.

Milagros and Jim exchanged a look. Agreed without words, as they often had at Camp. The newspapers had been there at breakfast: Kuya's body on the tarmac, at the kitchen table in between the white cheese and warm
pan de sal.
No doubt the Ateneo priests at Jaime's school would say something, if they had not already, about their fallen Eagle, at morning chapel or assembly. And whatever parents said on phones and in kitchens in Batanglobo Village would be overheard and then repeated on playgrounds and at recess. Far better for the Reyeses to get ahead of what the kids would learn by accident.

Besides, children were also citizens.

“This is not a movie,” Milagros began, in her hospital voice. “It's real, and might upset you. Do you understand?” She'd seen enough needles at City give the lie to
This won't hurt a bit.
“A man has died,” Milagros said. “Someone shot him with a gun at the airport last Sunday.”

Jaime recognized his name from lawn signs and the news and Ateneo. “Who shot him? Why?”

“We don't know.” Jaime sat beside his mother, latching on to her elbow with both his hands, as frightened at age ten of the TV as he'd been at three of underbed monsters. His scalp, to Milagros, smelled innocent. “There were many people in this country who liked him. Some liked him so much they wanted him to run for President. But not everybody did.”

These were the euphemism years, when the dead had
disappeared
or been
salvaged,
when Presidents had
allergies,
not autoimmune diseases; when people were in
safe houses,
not
prisons.
Papa's habit of renaming was the one issue on which she'd seen Jim lose his cool.
Words have
meanings, she had heard him say, his voice almost cracking.
You can't just slap a sign on hell and call it paradise.
Between their parents' lottery-ticket dreams and the First Lady's poetry about
the Good, the True, and the Beautiful,
frankly, the Reyeses were down on euphemism.

The four of them watched Kuya rise from his plane seat, shake hands with khakis who had come aboard to greet him. Jovial as before, perhaps a little rounder in the cheeks. (Did three years of American food do that to him?)
Hi, boss,
you could make him out saying to one of the soldiers. The khakis braced him on either side and led him to the exit.

The door shut behind him, on the other passengers. A perfect ending, in a way. Shadows of his entourage banged on the exit. Weak, wifely voices.
Hoy!
After that, nothing. Only the disembodied shouts, and shots, outside. Only his body on the tarmac afterward.

Jim was rewinding the tape and pressing play again. Jackie had planted herself on the floor in front of the TV, the silhouette of her thin pigtail straight as an antenna against the screen.
“Hoy!”
she shouted with the entourage, pointing at the exit door closing behind Kuya.

“Can we watch something else?” asked Jaime.

They changed the channel.
The Greatest American Hero,
Jaime's favorite. A clumsy superhero, another crash landing.

“It's a hell of a strategy,” Milagros said.

“Every Catholic loves a martyr,” said Jim.

Their Kuya had studied his nation's history, the lives and deaths of Lapu-Lapu and José Rizal and Christ himself. He smiled and strolled exitward, as though accompanied by old drinking buddies. As if he knew his fate, and the country's future. That he would die. That afterward, people would untie the yellow ribbons from their trees and tie them around their heads, warrior-style. That they'd take to the streets.

She smuggled transcripts, copied tapes. As a family they followed Kuya's funeral cortege along Times Street, with two million others, in time to military drum taps. Jackie threw a bitter tantrum, wailing and kicking Milagros in the ribs, when Jaime and her father went forward to view the coffin without her. Kuya's body still dressed in his bloodstained shirt. Jaime, for his part, fainted.

At home, Milagros went back to managing the Little Golden Books and puppy kennel, while Jim traveled to Bulacan to visit with the alleged murderer's family. They'd watched in August as military men took him—son and father, petty criminal—four days before Kuya's homecoming. Milagros should have known then that she and Jim had seen, in the same tape, two different stories. They both saw Kuya leave the plane. They both saw his body splayed across the tarmac. But only she was haunted by the weak wifely voices in between, crying out
Hoy!
Only she had imagined her own fist banging against the exit.

February 23, 1986

Naz, her old college boyfriend, of all people, arrives at the house. So her mother's taking all comers now.

“I meant to visit much sooner,” he says. “The traffic—it's like Christmas Eve out there. Everybody wants to get to EDSA.”

Milagros doesn't raise her head from the pillow. “You'll forgive me, Naz, for not playing hostess.”

“Of course,” he says.

“I'm surprised you're here and not there.”

“I just came to pay my respects. I have a son too.”

A refrain, from so many well-wishers:
I have a son too.
This time she doesn't change the subject. “About that son, Naz. What's his name?”

“Oscar.”

“Let me ask you something. If you were made to choose between Oscar—”

“Don't do that.”

“I want to know. Someone told me men stay men while women become mothers first. Is that true?”

“I suppose it depends on the man. And woman, for that matter.”

“Gun to your head, what would you choose?”

He shakes his head, lets out a puff of air. “My son. I'd choose my son.”

What had she hoped to hear? “So you'd stop,” she confirms. “If they threatened you. You'd quit the lightning protests. No more street theater.”

“Gun to my head, yes.” Naz crouches at the bedside. “But there is no gun to my head. And you didn't marry me, Milagros.”

He says this so gently she knows he means well. They're not backstage at their college theater, Naz spitting out the words
Serious Career.
He's older now. They all are.

“Most of the people out at EDSA aren't activists, or revolutionaries,” says Naz. “They just don't want to miss a party. But there'd be no party without Jim. People like him made it happen.”

In an instant Milagros sees her house from the outside, her family all aglow with Historical Significance. From far away it is still a beautiful thing. Her younger self would approve: Milagros hasn't lived a small life, not since the nurses' strike. She felt important then, at twenty-two. A human chain, they called her and her friends, at the doors of City Hospital. Small potatoes compared to what's happening now. A barricade, they're calling this sea stretching from Camp Crame to Camp Aguinaldo. Not just bodies but cars, buses, felled trees, streetlamps. Even garbage—that perennial Manila problem—conspiring in the movement.

Still. “I don't want a hero,” says Milagros, closing her eyes. “I want a son.”

“Fair enough.” Naz gets up to leave her be. “I didn't bring a card, or sweets,” he says. “Here's what I'm good for. I'm just a dirty aging hippie, but I want to help.” A scattering, like beads, on the nightstand; she remembers the magic soybeans from his play so many years ago. She thinks of rosaries, the hippie turned religious in his old age.

When she opens her eyes, there's a mound of small bright pills on the nightstand.
Nothing to lose.
She swallows them down with a glass of water Vivi must have left for her. It tastes like river murk, as if Billy Batanglobo has been here again. She drifts awhile, staring at the ceiling. Then the sky. Her son dancing on the clothesline outside.
Jaime!
She swoops him up and they fly high above the house until the town and then the country is a speck, one in a swirl of a million carnival colors.

There is only one other way—short of Billy's solution—for Avalon Row and Jim and all these years to grow so small and far. She reaches under the mattress. She pauses over the forms before writing—in pencil, in case of mistakes—her first, her maiden/middle, her last name. Later she'll confirm the right answers in ink, erase the rest.

1984

After they had parted ways in their twenties, Milagros saw Naz only once. He didn't see her. She'd taken the children shoe shopping, in Quezon City, before the school year started; then to the Social Security building, where their father was covering the assassination hearings. Before they reached the steps, Jackie on Milagros's hip and Jaime walking ahead, carrying his own new shoes, they heard a sound to chill the blood. One scream, and then another—wracked with torment, like a demon being dragged from its host. She clutched her children close and folded to the ground. By then the news had trained her for shootings and bombs, spontaneous fires.

Jaime pointed at the foot of the steps. It was only a show. A papier-mâché vampire—with a familiar chignon and butterfly sleeves—was drinking the People's blood. There was no mistaking Naz even in a dress, his face painted all white. He'd moved his plays off campus and onto the street, she later read. Lightning dramas, so called for all the time they took. By the time the Metrocom cars arrived, the actors had dispersed, and the water cannons' afterspray soaked her children instead.

“I don't get it,” said Jaime (as lots of viewers said regarding Naz's plays, if she remembered right). “Why would the police stop a show?” He tried to rescue his new shoe box from a hole in the drenched paper bag while Milagros pat-dried Jackie—who was squealing with delight, no less than if they'd stumbled on an open fire hydrant on a humid day—with her own shirt. When Jim came down the steps, she felt glad to have chosen him, again, over someone like Naz. No mistaking Jim's prose for poetry, whether he wrote it under his own name or not. Code names like Mama and Papa, Ate and Kuya, were the closest he came to metaphor. Day after day this past year he'd sat in on these hearings, listening to experts and eyewitnesses, studying bullet trajectory and blood samples so that his readers wouldn't have to. Tomorrow, he'd cover the parliamentary campaigns, interview candidates and voters, report the final tallies. When he wrote it all down, he would call it copy, nothing more.

February 24, 1986

Billy Batanglobo's at her window when the radio signal goes out. Feedback and static. He looks her way, tries to fiddle with the dial. “You'll make it worse,” Milagros tells him, as he drips water on the speakers. She can't hear radio static and feedback without remembering September in this house, 1972, the smell of Biscuit-colored paint making her dizzy.
The more things change,
she thinks.
The party's over.
She imagines the President, back on their TV tonight. What proclamation number are they up to now?

“We don't need it,” Billy Batanglobo says, turning the radio off. “I'll tell you what I saw. Thousands camped outside the rebel gates, ready to block the army tanks when they come.” Billy goes on: buses parked crosswise in the street, tires set ablaze, makeshift altars. As if any one of them could stop a tank, or a gunship raining missiles from the air. Yet colonel after sergeant has defected to the rebel side. Billy lulls Milagros to sleep listing their names and ranks, accompanied by trickling river water and radio static.

By morning her neighbors have gathered in the living room again. Her mother worries her way through the rosary while Jackie plays with her jackstones. On TV, the President looks to be sweating.
Complete control of the situation.
As for his former defense minister and army chief, the constitution will deal with them.
The law of the land does not allow rebellion.

The jaunty horns of “Mambo Magsaysay.” Milagros rushes back into the bedroom. Billy Batanglobo looks up from her bed, its sheets soaked through.

We need more people at the barricades,
the radio announcer says.
Our brothers and sisters have been teargassed around Camp Crame.

“Can you believe these army boys?” says Billy. “For years they marched in loyalty parades and shoved civilians around. Now they have the nerve to ask us to protect them.”

Billy's the first, since Jaime's been gone, who seems to need her consolation, rather than the other way around. She reaches for his cold, prune-wrinkled hand.

Helicopters descend toward Camp, the rebels braced for rocket fire. But the airmen come out waving white flags, their fingers flashing L-for-LABAN. Civilians cheer. The rebel leaders come out for a hug. Then the chief commodore of the navy defects. On the Pasig River a boat about-faces its guns onto Malacañang Palace.

If you're listening, and healthy, we want you at EDSA.

I have a personal message from the general: you are needed at the barricades.

“Part of me does want to be there,” she tells Billy—something she would not admit to anyone else. “I started a union once, you know. Yelled into a megaphone, all that. I don't mind marching for the right cause. I could be one of those people at the barricades, easy.”

“I see you more as one of the rebels,” Billy says. “Sergeant Major Milagros Reyes, defecting to the U.S.A. You just haven't told your commander yet. Or, like these guys, you're planning to surprise him.”