Out of the Pack

By F. Jordan Carnice

In the heart of Calcetta was a small wooded area where Fred’s mother once said she and her friends had searched as children for firewood and the stealthy, fist-sized tarsier. “But they’re nowhere near here already,” she said of the primates that had lived in great numbers in the hills. “They’ve moved. They always do.” She would always end this story with an affected smile, something Fred and his older brother Jaden would respond with eyebrows raised. “It’s dangerous in there,” their mother added about the forest before telling them to go to bed. She would always repeat these words each time the two planned to wander deeper into the wild.

Her sons had practically lived and grown in this greener part of land, their house away from the flurry of the main city but not too distant to be considered pastoral. Next summer, Jaden would be pushing twelve and Fred seven. Curiosity was swelling in their blood.

This was very true for Fred, now that he noticed the strange heat and throbbing in his private regions when seeing Tonio. This he was embarrassed to talk about with the neighbors his age. Tonio was this tall, tanned lad, one of his brother’s classmates but two years older than everybody else who visited Jaden every weekend afternoon. His presence always caught Fred’s attention.

He eyed how Tonio walked, how he talked, how he ran, how he volunteered to cut the weeds in the garden for a small amount of pay and leftover chicken sandwich, how he carried boxes of clutter from the attic his mother had decided to dispose of, how he climbed up a tree to pluck his brother’s slipper wedged in the gutter of their house when another kid threw it after losing in a game of tsinelas-lata. Fred felt he had another brother with him constantly around. Only closer. Sometimes Tonio would headlock him with a thick arm, brushing his bowl-cut hair with a fist, saying Fred would be a future heartbreaker. He always said the most adult of things, and Fred did not understand many of them.

There were other things in Tonio that fascinated Fred. The boy wanted to know more about him, but he thought it was terrible to feel this way, even improper. Sometimes, the malaise of confusion summoned nightmares in his sleep, crept up to him in the middle of the night, and made him scream and cry in bed. Other times, he simply blushed. So he usually kept to himself in the kitchen with his mother or, if he felt more daring, settled for a good breadth of space between his brother and Tonio when they played basketball, siyato, dakpanay or spider battles with the other children and he would watch them do their eventual roughhousing. Distance was safety. And then one day he believed venturing into the woods would make him feel better, braver, like how a real, big boy should be. He thought of it hard. All he needed was the perfect excuse.

Jaden taught Fred it lived in a variety of conditions in an array of imaginable places. It could be found inside their very own house, inside the dark hollow of a tree, inside the dry folds of every genus of plants. “The harder it is to find, the better.” Jaden shared with authority that the kaka, or spider the size of a fingernail used for fighting another arachnid on thin wooden sticks, would be tougher and fiercer that way, especially if it would come from the crevices of a rock or from the tight coiling spirals of a makahiya. Jaden had learned this wisdom from Tonio, Fred eventually found out, and he took to heart all the details he could remember. In some indirect way, Fred believed he had learned something from Tonio. Also in his head, this would come in handy in future games of spiders.

This led to a scheme that Jaden found brilliant. Go deep into the forest and claim the strongest fighting kaka. Pride surged within him; finally, his older brother had agreed on something he had suggested. He thought of himself lucky that he did for he now had the chance to prove his gallantry in the wilderness.

The following afternoon, Fred and his brother were sitting on a fallen electric post at the end of a rough road, a walking distance from their house, while waiting for Jaden’s friends. A few more steps and they would reach the first underbrush of the forest. A couple of minutes passed and Tonio arrived, saying the others would catch up. Slung over one shoulder was a small, sheathed bolo, the length of his arm, its wooden case designed with carvings of unrecognizable vines and flowers.

Tonio had biked his way here. Wet patches stained his grey shirt’s undersides, and when he realized Fred was looking at them, he approached him and jokingly attempted to headlock him once again under a sweaty armpit.

Fred leapt away from him, embarrassed, and looked at the other side of the road, staring at the crowns of germilinas peeking from the slopes. The trees’ small globular fruits were curiously redder than yesterday. They seemed ripe and ready for the picking, but Fred knew better. They were bitter, poisonous.

The hike to the basin, an area Tonio called for its sunken, open space of carabao grass with a scattering of stunted guava trees, was short to the surprise of Fred and Jaden. They did not break a sweat at all. The two, though, were wary of their surroundings.

“Is it true? The sigben frequents this place?” Fred asked Tonio, picking a long, dead twig along the way.

“Ma said our father had seen it here before,” added Jaden.

Tonio paused for a moment. “What was he doing here?”

“Looking for it, actually,” said Jaden. “Ma said it gives wealth to anyone who will capture and own it.”

“So our father went here to catch the sigben,” shared Fred. “Put it in a jar.”

“It has the size and face of an ugly, common dog,” said Jaden as if with expert knowledge.

“No, it looks like a kangaroo with sharp teeth,” said Fred. “It’s big.”

“Then how could you put it in a jar?” snapped Jaden. “If it’s big and looks like a kangaroo?”

“I don’t know.”

“And have you seen one?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know what it looks like.”

“But. . .”

“Anyway, it couldn’t be true,” said Jaden.

“Ma said the sigben loves to eat the young flowers of a squash!”

Tonio turned to them, laughing in between his words. “You see, there’s no squash around here. That means there’s no sigben in here. I mean, there’s no sigben at all. You’re right, Jaden. It’s not true. You of all people!”

“But Ma said the forest is full of them,” said Fred.

“Full of what?” asked Tonio.

“Full of sigben, wakwak, agta, kikik, di ingon nato. ”

Tonio continued laughing. Jaden did not speak any further, trying to focus his attention on a plant that had clumps of small, bright yellow fruits. Fred, on the other hand, was looking defiant behind Tonio who was now searching for glints of silken web in the shrubs.

Fred believed it was true, the sigben among many other things. His mother had told him and Jaden that on the second day their father was searching for the sigben, his mother waited all day long in the living room for his return, glancing from time to time at the windows that faced the edge of the forest. She said their father had completely packed that day, prepared and all too ready to leave. Night came and not a shadow of his father was cast under the moonbeam. A few days passed and still she had not seen their father. She wept for a week or two. She told Jaden and Fred they were too young to remember. The sigben, she finally said to them in one Sunday dinner, had abducted their father. “It’s dangerous in there,” her mother would always say.

That afternoon in the basin, Fred believed her all the more, and that was why deep inside him he was angry at Tonio for laughing at the sigben, which, in turn, was laughing at his mother. It was the first time he was angry with Tonio.

While walking towards the threshold of a climb at the edge of the basin, Fred’s loathing ebbed away. He was distracted by the whoops and claps of Tonio whenever he found the smallest hints of a spider’s dwelling. Finally, he found one. Jaden emptied a pack of corn chips he had brought along with a bottle of water and proposed they keep the spider in it. Fred was designated by his brother as the keeper of this plastic. He met this with hesitation.

“Don’t be such a coward!” said Jaden.

“But why can’t you be the keeper?” asked Fred defensively.

“Little children take care of little kakas.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Talawan!”

“I’m not!”

“I should’ve bought an empty matchbox,” said Tonio to himself. “I thought you’d bring two boxes, Jaden.”

“I forgot,” mumbled Jaden. Fred stuck out his tongue to Jaden’s humiliation.

“Let me have that,” suggested Tonio, reaching for the packet in Fred’s hand. Seeing Tonio disappointed, shoulders drooping on the sides, he changed his mind.

“I’ll do it.”

“Do what?”

“I’ll be the keeper.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Tonio walked up to Fred, messing his hair as what he usually did. He grinned, showing his lower set of teeth slightly crooked at the front. “Of course, you little one. This is an important task.”

The three continued trekking uphill. They were only a few meters away from level ground when they heard a rustling in the bushes, frantic and brash, just right behind them. As the disturbance inched closer, the three stood close to each other. Fred clutched the plastic tightly in his hand, the other tugging at the hem of Tonio’s shirt. He thought this would be a sigben or something else. Something that was more vicious.

Suddenly, more movements surrounded them. In every direction a bush would crackle, as if it would collapse from some unknown weight. Though dread had washed all over him, palms cold with sweat, Fred managed to make out the disturbances. There were four of them, the sigben or something, rounding them up in the middle like hapless preys.

There was one violent shaking of a bush, and this was enough to make Fred set off in panic. Unable to stop himself, not looking where he was going, Fred tripped on loose rock. The thong of a slipper snapped, outward hands flailed in the air. When he realized at the last second the packet with their first sole spider would be crushed, he instinctively twisted to the right and skidded his side on dry, rough earth. His fall was quick and hard. The child writhed in pain.

At the first sign of whimper, the perpetrators fled out of their hiding places, their eyes wide in horror. After a few seconds of shock and silence, one of the four giggled which was then followed by the rest of the group.

“That was not funny!” Tonio said in a raised voice. He could not help it and slapped the back of one boy’s head. He faced the other three who were almost the same age as Jaden. “Look what happened!”

Jaden approached one of them, calling him Edmund, a squat boy with an angular face, and whispered something in his ear.

“You know something about this?” Tonio asked Jaden in a serious tone. He picked the left slipper of Fred and fixed it.

“No, of course, not!”

Before Tonio could respond, one of the four boys whose face was so small as if his features were all mashed in the middle squealed, “It was Lolong’s idea!” He was referring to the boy Tonio slapped.

“Do you want this slipper in your mouth, Junito?” said Lolong, whose face was ridden with pimples. He shook in his tall, wiry frame.

Jaden, Edmund, and the other one named Alfonse laughed. The latter laughed so hard his large belly shook while snorting in between.

“Maybe he wants my slipper, Long!”

“Keep your mouth shut, Alfonse! I can smell your lunch from here,” said Edmund. Laughter rang throughout the hills.

“Your mother wouldn’t like this, Jaden.” Tonio said. He gave him another stern look before he approached Fred who was still lying on the ground. He put down his bolo, knelt beside the boy, helped him get up, and handed him the slipper.

“What did I do?” Jaden shrugged.

“Your face was funny.” Edmund turned to Jaden.

“You were really scared,” said Junito.

“I was not!”

“You were,” said Lolong, rubbing the back of his head. “Especially your brother.”

Once again, Alfonse laughed the loudest. “Talawan!”

“If you keep that up, I will leave you all here. In fact, I think we should leave now, Fred,” said Tonio, dusting off dirt on Fred’s shirt and checking his side. “Wound’s not deep but it needs to be cleaned. Give me your water, Jaden.”

“I’d be thirsty!”

Tonio stared at him without saying a word, hands on both knees. Jaden handed him the bottle without any question.

“I don’t want to,” Fred finally spoke after his fall, wiping the last trace of tears on his sleeves. He was still holding the packet.

“What do you mean?” asked Tonio, uncapping the bottle and pouring water on Fred’s wound. The boy winced a bit.

“I don’t want to leave. Let’s not leave,” said Fred. “See, we already have one kaka here.”

Tonio stopped himself from laughing. “Well, you did save that one.”

“Yes!” said Fred proudly. A few feet away from him and Tonio, the five other boys were arguing. Fred heard the name of a woman and something about breasts.

“Let’s have a deal here,” Tonio said to Fred at eye level. “We’re not leaving only if you don’t go running so suddenly next time, all right?”

“Okay.”

“You run only when everyone else runs.”

“Okay.”

“You run only when you have to.”

“Okay.”

“And you run whenever I say you run.”

“Okay.”

“Good.” Tonio untied a knot of white towel from his scabbard and patted Fred’s wound dry. He stood up to his full height and warned the group. “If you’re up to something again, I’m making sure it would be your last. And you guys better keep your voices down.”

The sun was setting, its downward beam pushing through trees, bushes, and wild tall grass, casting crooked shadows all over the side of the hill. Fred already had six spiders inside the pack. He felt grim after falling for the gag of his brother’s classmates. He felt worse when he noticed that even though Tonio was not amused by their act earlier he was now jollying up at their jokes, cracking his own brand of humor that was met with a lot of mirth and high fives. Tonio would then remind each of them to hush a bit.

“Who are we disturbing? The birds?” said Alfonse, rubbing his stomach, boisterously laughing and snorting.

“Maybe the kakas would scuttle away,” whispered Edmund to Jaden, mockingly.

“Maybe we just don’t want to get any attention,” said Lolong, his eyes in slits.

Tonio shrugged at them. He rested under a towering talisay while Fred sat on a slab of stone nearby, scratching the area around his wound. The others started peeing on whatever tree they had found within the vicinity.

“Don’t do that,” said Tonio.

Fred looked up to Tonio’s face whose features darkened under the tree’s shade.

“Don’t scratch that. It could get worse.”

“But it’s itchy.”

Tonio took one glance at his shoulder and started wandering around. Fred thought he lost something. Soon, he returned with a handful of young hagonoy and guava leaves. He popped them into his mouth one by one and chewed, his face sporting a look of contorted mastery as he masticated the leaves with practice. He spat them onto his palm. “Here,” he said, offering the pulp to Fred, “place this over the wound.”

Hesitant, Fred was taken aback by the recommendation, the thought of slime on his cut repulsive. But upon seeing the others seemingly unbothered by the idea, now surrounding and eyeing them with interest, Fred gathered the paste off Tonio’s palm and rubbed it on the gash.

This brought a lot of jeering from the small crowd at once, including his brother, all stomping their feet on the ground with gusto. Alfonse said he feels like throwing up.

“You’re acting like little kids,” Tonio said, shaking his head albeit with a lips curling into a smile.

Fred was surprised at Tonio’s remark. Little kids? Would this mean his brother’s friends were no longer little kids? But why are they searching for kakas with him? Was a he little kid in Tonio’s eyes? Questions spun in his head.

“It’s all right,” Tonio spoke to Fred. “My grandfather taught me that remedy when I was about your age. It works.”

“Really?”

“Like magic. Heals and protects you from anything.” He gave him a wink and rumpled his hair.

Fred trusted him. He wiped off the remaining bits of pulp on his shorts. He knew his mother would scold him once again, that the pulp stain would give her a hard time on laundry day. But it did not really matter this time. Because Tonio said it was all right, because it was like magic.

All their life Jaden and Fred were told they had to take good care of things important to them. And most especially, love them. This was their mother’s advice when they arrived home from school and chanced upon her crying by the kitchen table. She stood up from her chair and drank a glass of water from the tap. She hugged her sons and went straight to her bedroom, leaving on the table a folded yellow piece of paper peeking out of an envelope.

A wave of seething emotion hit Fred. He believed this was a letter from the abat, the malicious hag that owned the sigben, the creature that abducted his father. He remembered her mother’s words that the sigben would never attack unless threatened, disturbed or commanded by the abat. Fred was sure it was the latter, especially with his father’s attempt at claiming the evil woman’s pet. When he tried to take the letter, Jaden held and stopped him. His older brother just shook his head, told him there was still time to play siyato outside.

The memory made Fred grip the opening of his little plastic pack tighter. He had to prevent the spiders from escaping since these were important to him, since he had claimed to be the keeper of the kakas. At this moment, failing Tonio on this task was his utmost concern.

Based on the color of the sky, Tonio said it was nearing five. It was the perfect time to spread out since the spiders were now easy to spot coming out of their nests and starting to repair their homes with their aerial spinning dance. The five boys agreed to separate while the other two, Fred and Tonio, remained by the talisay tree to wait for them.

“Marka uno!” Alfonse soon announced over at Jaden’s far right, describing a spider famous for a white blotch that resembled the number on its back.

“There’s another one here, too!” shouted Junito from the opposite side.

Above the towering fronds and shrubs, laughter was audible.

“You should see this, Long!” called Edmund out of nowhere.

“Wait, I’m coming over!” Two voices said the same thing.

A couple of meters away, Jaden thought he found a spider in a loop of makahiya. Not daring to dip his hands into the prickly creeper, he called Edmund.

“I’m here!” drifted a voice that was a stone’s throw away from him.

Jaden was about to poke a stick into the vines when Edmund appeared by the bend and stood next to him, smiling.

“Hey, what did you find?” he asked.

Somebody screamed. Loud, prolonged, and suddenly cut short.

“What was that?” asked Jaden, worried.

“What did you find?” Edmund repeated, as if he had not heard anything.

Not too far away, Junito reached Alfonse just as he tried to scramble for a spider that had escaped from his fat fingers. “This damn little thing!”

“Let me help you,” said Junito, crouching under a log that leaned over a boulder. Somewhere in the distance, he got wind of a voice that was exactly the same as Alfonse’s. This was then followed by his signature snorting. He found himself trembling under the dead tree.

There was another scream, more horrified, desperate.

Back in the main spot where the group would eventually meet, Tonio tried to situate where the bellow came from. Fred inched closer to him.

“You stay here,” he told Fred.

Before Fred could protest, a terrified and breathless Lolong came running to them, pushing through brambles and vines.

“Something’s not right!”

“What do you mean?” asked Tonio.

“I was talking, I was talking to Alfonse. . .”

“And?”

“And then there was Alfonse standing next to Junito!”

Neither Tonio understood nor Fred who kept looking at his back, sweat beading on his forehead and above his upper lip.

“There was Alfonse, I mean, there was another Alfonse! I just ran away and left him, the one who was with me!”

Soon after, Jaden came sprinting from the east side, followed by Junito from the west, and then Alfonse. They shared gibberish in unison, cautious of each other at the same time.

“Who are you!?”

“Someone, something’s playing tricks on us!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Turn your shirts inside-out!”

“Tell him what you saw, Junito!”

“She’s after us, the abat,” blurted Fred above the din. “The sigben’s master!”

“Who are you!?”

“Reverse it now!”

“I’m Alfonse! What’s wrong with you?”

“The sigben will abduct us!”

Edmund finally caught up with the boys who were now in commotion, all trying to pull their shirts over their heads while cursing and reversing them. Tonio said doing so could break the spell of being gi-mino. The ruckus died down for a moment, until Edmund appeared running towards them, screaming for help. Another Edmund.

“Run!” someone yelled. The boys split and fled in different directions.

Everything happened in a blur. Fred was the first to spot the second Edmund coming towards them as the others began shouting in panic. The sound of feet pounding the earth filled the humid air. His mind went blank, froze like a stone. Unable to move, he felt relieved when someone dragged him by the wrist. It was Tonio.

Everyone ran mindlessly until all of them soon congregated on a plain with three unusual tracks at other end. At the center was a wide path, clear and obviously frequented. At the left area was a narrow but equally beaten trail. At the right was a wide track but obstructed by arching twigs and knee-high weeds.

Alarmed, Tonio set off to the path on the right without thinking, without even telling anyone the shirts had failed, that the enchantment was still in effect. The mino was strong. “Run!” he told Fred, a hand firmly holding his.

Fred’s heart was beating fast. He was still clutching the plastic, could not let it go, when it was caught by a branch and was ripped open. Multicolored spiders broke out of the pack, crawling on his fingers and then on his arm. To Fred, they even looked more menacing than ever. Too much was happening he could not even scream. He tried to wave them off, now calling Tonio’s attention as they sprinted faster and faster forward, but he had no plans of stopping. Suddenly, he felt the sting of tears brimming in his eyes again, but he continued running.

The voices not far away were still clear and anxious. He ran like he had never run before, with things sharp and clingy lashing his arms, legs, cheeks, the smallest patches of naked skin. Both never dared to look back.

And the two boys found themselves back in the basin, in the glade where they had discovered their first kaka. A burst of light from beyond the hills blinded Fred, white-yellow spots blotting his vision. He shielded himself too late with a hand, and when things came into clarity, he felt the hair on his arms and nape bristling, a thousand needles piercing his entire body like spiders on skin. He saw himself, another version of himself, sweating and holding his left arm, with a smile unmistakably his. He jerked away from him and turned around only to find himself alone. He passed through the wilderness without Tonio.

In the heart of Calcetta was a small wooded area from which a boy emerged looking frayed and exhausted but ready to trudge back home. In his hand was a pack torn and empty of spiders. On his right shoulder was a wound drying under the last rays of a melting sun, flecks of green peeling off like old skin.