When the Elephants Dance (5 page)

“Baron,” Roderick says to our dog, “get up.” He shakes him. “Jando, is he all right?”

I do not point to the red wound near Baron’s neck or the dried blood and
thin pieces of shrapnel around his chest. I press my eyes to force back the tears. Baron was my dog. He followed me home from the market one evening, always careful to stay a few meters behind. If I stopped, he would retreat a few steps and hunch his head. I reach out a hand and pet his nose. It is still moist. “He sleeps now. Let him sleep.”

“Yes, he sleeps now.” Roderick’s voice is raw. He walks quickly ahead of me. His shoulders shake soundlessly.

Our house when we enter is dark and abandoned. The crickets call out to us. Roderick clutches at my arm. We crouch low, our knees and hands touching the floor. We scoot forward, feeling with our palms until I find the metal latch. When I try to close my fingers around the handle, pain shoots through them like a thousand needles ripping into my hand. I grit my teeth at the sharpness and pull up quickly. The sound of the wood and the metal makes a loud disturbance. We peer down into the cellar.

“Alejandro,” I hear my mother gasp as I put one foot down the ladder, searching for a step. “Alejandro, we thought something had happened to you.” Mama is weeping. She covers her face with trembling hands. My father pulls me off the ladder and holds me to him.

“They took the cigarettes. The soldiers,” I try to tell them. I cannot face the others. I bury my face in Papa’s chest. Roderick shifts his feet.

“Shh …” Father grips my shoulders. He reaches out an arm and holds Roderick. “You have come home safely. That is all that matters. I should not have let you go. The fault is mine.” Father’s eyes are red. I cannot look at him.

I feel embarrassed as the others watch. I have failed. They cannot hide their disappointment. Most of them look away as Roderick explains how we lost the cigarettes. “Jando was caught by the Japanese soldiers. They tied him by the thumbs.” Roderick points both thumbs in the air.

“You frightened your mother,” my mother’s friend Aling Anna says, but she bows her head and looks away quickly before I can respond.

Our neighbor Mrs. Yoshi pats my hair gently. “You boys must not go out again. It is too dangerous,” she says. “One of the grown-ups should go next. Me, I will go next time.” A few of the men protest the idea of sending a woman out. She ignores them and comes to me with a damp rag and pats my neck gingerly to clean the blood. “You are a brave boy.” She holds my face. Before the war she used to wear a special powder on her face that made her skin appear paler. I remember the sweet chalky scent of it as she stands near. “He will be fine, Louisa,” she tells my mother. She puts her arm around Mama and holds her close for a moment.

Mama places a hand to her chest as she reaches out to touch me. Papa takes
my hands and looks at my thumbs. He breathes heavily and stares at them quietly. He says nothing for a long time. He swallows with difficulty and avoids our eyes. Then finally he says,
“Salamat sa Dios
.” Thank God. “You are home safe.”

“I cannot move my thumbs,” I tell Papa.

Mama falls to her knees and kisses my hands. She holds them to her face and sobs into them. The others watch quietly.

Papa rests his palm on my back. “I will clean and wrap them. Then we will pray for God to heal your hands.”

“They killed Nesto Aguinaldo,” I tell them. They nod solemnly without asking how. “They almost killed me.” My legs shake beneath me and I sit.

“But you are here now, with us,” Papa says. “That is all that matters.”

“Your sister has not yet come home,” Mama tells me.

My sister, Isabelle, is seventeen and my mother’s pride. She was to study medicine at Santo Tomas University before the war broke out and the university was made into a prison for the Amerikanos. My mother and Isabelle fight a lot.

“Ate
is not home yet?” I ask, using the term for “big sister.” I look to my father. “Should we not send someone to find her?”

Everyone looks around nervously when I say this. I tell Papa of the tanks we saw earlier this morning, and he nods quietly. I remind him how Domingo told us we must help the Amerikanos when they arrive.

“Domingo is a reckless fool,” Mang Selso, my father’s friend, chides. “He cares nothing of his own life. We would all be killed. How can we fight without guns?”

“I will take my chances in this cellar,” Aling Anna declares. “Why look for trouble? As long as we stay out of the Japanese’s way. They will have no reason to harm us.”

“We cannot hide forever. We must find food,” Papa tells them. “Domingo is right. We must band together and help the Amerikanos. It is our only hope.”

“If only we could be assured the Amerikanos will win this one. But how can we have faith when they did not win the first time?” Aling Anna asks. “They failed in their defense of our islands. They let those savages in.”

Our basement is filled with our neighbors. This is the way it has become. The Japanese have commandeered the nicer houses for themselves. It is common to have four to five families crowded into one house. Our house has four families, and a few without families, thirteen people and two small children. We have been together now for two years. It was not so bad when we slept upstairs in the house. But the bombings and Japanese accusations against the citizens
have driven us down to the cellar to hide. Most of the houses in our area are too small and unwanted by the Japanese. Half are deserted. We make ours look abandoned. In the beginning of the Japanese occupation, many people fled to the countryside, but we had no second home to run to. And now we are too weak to move very far. Tempers are hot here in our basement.

We are all shoulder to shoulder in our small cellar, and the air is thick and stale. If someone lets out a bad smell, it soaks into your clothing for a long time. I wish we could go upstairs so that I could lie in my cool room with the thin mosquito nets. The cellar is small. It would fit six coffins. When we sit we try to pull our knees close, so we do not kick one another. The floor of our cellar is dirt. We have sticks and stones where we build a small fire to cook. We open the top latch to let out the air when we do this. When it is time to sleep, some of the others go back into the house. Since the gunfire and Amerikano tanks rumbled the ground twenty days ago, more people have been sleeping in the cellar with us.

We sleep side by side, and often in the night someone rolls off to the side and takes my blanket by mistake. Roderick likes having all the people here. He used to go from person to person to see if they would play cards. He stopped doing that after Tay Fredrico, the old Spaniard, shouted at him and shook him until Papa came and pulled Roderick away.

Domingo’s wife, Lorna, looks at me. She clutches their infant daughter, Alma, and their six-year-old son, Taba. “Alejandro,” she says, and I can hear the shaking in her voice, “did you see Domingo?”

I nod at her.

She will not let me look away. “What did he say?”

“He said that we must all stand together and fight the Japanese. We must not let them divide us against one another.”

“Easy for him to say,” Mang Selso grumbles. “He is a guerrilla commander. He can perform his hit-and-run missions while we civilians must bear the retaliation from the Japanese. We have no place to hide.”

Mang Selso is my father’s best friend; they worked together before the war, making rattan chairs. His wife and father, Tay Fredrico, are here with him. His father is very old and rarely speaks.

Ate Lorna ignores Mang Selso’s comments. “Is he on his way home?”

I cannot answer her.

Aling Anna brings a wrinkled hand to her brow. Her gold rings catch my eye.

“Please, Lorna, do not invite him back here. Your husband will bring danger
to this household. If they find we are harboring a guerrilla, they will chop our heads.”

Mang Selso nods at this. “Yes, Lorna. You must warn him not to return here.”

Ate Lorna ignores him. “Alejandro, is Domingo on his way back?”

“Shh, all of you.” Papa reaches for a bowl with a small portion of rice and fish. “Let Alejandro eat. There will be time for questions later.” He hands the bowl to me.
“Jando, itó anák, kain na
.” Here, son, he says in Tagalog, eat now.

“Here, Alejandro, Roderick. You boys add this to your bowls.” Mrs. Yoshi breaks her fish into two portions and gives each of us a piece. “I am full. Go on. You boys need it for your strength. Eat.”

I sit down slowly. My body is so tired, so sore. I cannot even lift the bowl.

My father takes my hands; again he is silenced by the sight of them.

“Manga hayop,”
he curses. Animals.

There are tears in his voice. I pull my hands away instantly. The cuts are deep, I can see my bone in several places, and my skin hangs off my right thumb. The moment Papa touches the skin to pull it back over the bone, I shout.

He prepares a heated cloth and splashes alcohol onto the rag. I begin to sweat and I want to run from the room. He splashes rubbing alcohol on one hand and I grit my teeth, then shout. He wraps the wounds with clean strips of cloth. He takes my other hand and I pull away. I cannot stop crying. His face is the last thing I remember.

W
HEN
I
WAKE
a few hours later, there is a loud roaring outside. We crowd together.

“Oh no,” Ate Lorna says.

“Airplanes.” Roman, the newspaperman, comes down the ladder with an excited face. “The Americans will finish them off.” He talks like an Amerikano, this Filipino newspaperman. He says the letter
g
when he is amazed at something and “shoot” when something does not go right. He has studied abroad, in the United States. He said if I studied hard enough, he would help me go to the United States. He did not say if he would help me pay for it. He is another of our neighbors. My father took him in when the Japanese confiscated his family home.

“We have almost used our entire supply of rice,” my mother whispers to Papa as she spoons a second small serving into my bowl.

My father’s friend Mang Selso hears this and looks to Aling Anna. “Aling
Anna, everyone has contributed. It is time we trade your jewelry, the ones your sister left you. We must sell those.”

“Those are not for selling,” Aling Anna snaps, pulling her velvet blanket close.

“Of course.” Mang Selso looks away with disgust. “What did I expect?”

Mang Selso likes to tease all the time. Before the Japanese arrived, he was a heavy man and shaped like a pear. Now he has a skinny neck and a saggy belly. My mother calls him “Gung-gong,” which is like when the Amerikanos say “Dumb-dumb.” He likes to pull candy from behind our ears or tie strings to paper money. When you go to pick it up, the money runs away from you. Roderick always falls for that trick.

Mama has promised to ask Aling Anna to trade a few of her belongings for rice. She says that Aling Anna just likes to do things in her own time. Papa said that if Aling Anna does not share, he will put her out on her backside “in her own time.”

Aling Anna is a very rich woman who owns the biggest house on the hill. Of course, the Japanese took that house first. Most of the neighbors will not speak to her. They call her cheap and stingy. She always speaks loudly, as if she is angry with you. She never says hello in church, and she gives only one or two coins for prayer indulgence. She gives less than the peasants.

My father once joked that Aling Anna would need all of her money to make it into heaven, and Mama became very angry with him. She does not like jokes that sound as if they are making fun of God or any of the saints. Mama pities Aling Anna. She believes that Aling Anna has great hurts inside. She thinks Aling Anna is like a wounded animal that growls so that no one will hurt her. I do not like her. One time, when Mama and I visited her house, I broke a small music box and she pinched me so hard that I bled. She is here only because of Mama. Aling Anna came with two suitcases of clothing, two large bags of sugar, and a blue canister of tea. We had to leave it all upstairs because her belongings took the space of two people, and the others began to complain.

Papa tells us that the guerrillas have been attacking the food supplies again on the way to Manila. He says that many of the Amerikano internees at Santo Tomas and Bilibid prisons have died from hunger. My cousin Esteban claims that the Amerikanos rescued the internees yesterday, with great big tanks. One tank, he claims, had the words
Georgia Peach
written on the front, and
Battlin’ Betty
. Esteban says the tanks crashed through the walls, but he likes to tell big stories. Papa says he will wait for a more trustworthy person to tell us the story before he believes it.

Esteban keeps looking up toward the ladder.

“You shall stay here tonight,” my father tells him.

“But Tito …,” Esteban protests to my father, his uncle.

“Esteban, hah, it is too dangerous to be alone. They could mark you as a guerrilla. You have already seen what happened to Jando.”

I watch Esteban. He sits twisting the clasp of his sandals. He has to run out to use the bathroom many times. Esteban has dysentery. He has been eating grass again. Papa says that Esteban’s rear end now runs as much as his mouth.

My father tries to hide his coughing. Mama is very worried that he also has typhus fever, which is very common, because of his red rashes and bad headaches. The flies and mosquitoes carry the diseases.

“Tay ka muna,”
Father says thoughtfully. Wait a minute. “Tomorrow I shall go to see that warehouse I heard the others talking about a few days ago. The Japanese are giving away two bags of rice to each family, for an hour’s worth of work.”

“It may be a trick,” Mama protests. There have been rumors that people do not return from these places.

“Let me go instead,” I offer. Papa does not look well enough yet.

“No, the head of the family should go. Are you the head of the family now, Jando?” Papa teases.

“No.” I grin.

“I thank you for your help,
anák
, but you must rest.”

Mang Selso and his wife are angry at Aling Anna because she will not share her belongings to trade for food; they keep making snorting noises and mumbling to each other about her.