The Little Wars of Filemon Sayre

By Lemuel M. Torrevillas

Old Fil decided he was going to take it easy that day.

‘“It’s seven minutes to news time!” squawked the on-board technician over the intercom and Filemon Sayre hardly even looked up from his Underwood at Pio, the technician who took over the console at 12’oclock flat.

Fil had finished transcribing the international news transmissions half an hour ago, and now he only had to take care of composing the headlines.

“Eight!” said Fil into the Squawk box.

“Seven!”

“Make it seven and a half, seven and twenty five.”

“Agreed.”

“Twenty three,” Fil said chuckling.

“Hah, hah, hah,” said Grace, the other transcriber, for lack of anything else to say. She had finished cleaning up her four local items, turned them over to the anchor newscaster, and was preparing to leave for lunch. She was still in college, working part-time, a petite, sneaker-shuffling kid with a high piercing voice. “Hah, hah, hah,” she said, slamming her cabinet shut with a boyish jab.

“Bye,” the technician-on-board told her over the intercom.

“I’m off,” she called, her hand doing its characteristic dissolve from an “okay” circle of the thumb and forefinger, metamorphosing into a “that-way” sign. Fil saw her aim her forefinger at the front door as one would aim a 22-caliber revolver.

Fil whirled fresh newsprint onto his typewriter roller.

‘Bye, little girl, he thought, I hope you never grow up.

Fil had always thought of himself as a small man, and it had seemed to him, lately, that he had grown half an inch shorter in the two years since he went past retirable age, in some kind of a diminishing return.

He had amused himself once by conjuring up an imagery age-height graph of himself, with the growth bar curiously dipping downwards, in inverse proportion to his age. Gone berserk, he heard his own dramatic voice-over “The game’s over,“ which, on second thought, he changed to, “Fil was here,” and still later, melancholy-struck, “What A Friend We Have In Jesus…”

He had no family and kept house alone. One of his meager suppliers of respect and affection, outside of the staff at the radio station, was a pair of two farm children a little boy and his younger sister, who would shout whenever he went past their hut along a rice field, “Mister Sayre! Mister Sayre!”

“Salute!” the little boy would call out, snapping a handsome salute.

“Salute!” Fil would answer.

“Salute!” the little girl would say.

“Salute!” Fil would answer, and the exchange done, he would go on his way. One morning when he went to work he also heard the children exclaims at the sky, “Boeing! Boeing!” Fil looked up in the sky above the chittering field sparrows, and saw twin-streaking exhaust fumes of a jet plane chased by its own sound.

A junk-food commercial went on air, and Fil heard some very noisy music being cued in one of the studios.

“Chow time!” Grace said, popping back in.

“Chow time, yes,” Fil answered. “You still there?”

She nodded glumly. “Yup. Just like you.”

He had been working at the radio station back in the days when it was university property; and later, when its overseas subsidy was cut off — forcing the station to go commercial and thus operate off-campus — Fil continued working as a transcriber because that was what he was good at.

He had never finished high school, but read enough, on the side, to get heated up whenever the news supervisor threatened to flood the hourly bulletins with national news agency dispatches; he loved coffee, stayed up late nights, guffawed at a joke long after everyone had gone silent; he rode a bicycle, and he was considered by the local circle of media people to be the fastest news transcriber of all time.

His two hands were poised like a pair of single-toothed cobras — he typed only with his index fingers — ready to punch at the half-erased keys on the vulnerable Underwood; just then, Bobby, the disc jockey, who was still inebriated with punk rock, came in end jammed the doorway through which Grace was scooting. Bobby had a turkey laugh that went through acoustic boards. He cackled when he bumped into Grace and they went out together, Bobby half-stepping, to match Grace’s short stride. They stopped in their tracks. Max had just come back unexpectedly from downtown.

Max was not Fil’s greatest opponent, but he was Fil’s supervisor, and they had one or two rather uncongenial encounters. Max was a small man, too, but he was only half as old as Fil. Fil knew him to be a mean-spirited man whose woods matched his ungenerous stature, the one staff member who could be relied upon to be grouchy, grumpy and gruff, and his mere presence was enough to make one’s day murky. Fil was certain from long experience that he could see, much less, feel Max grouching even in a dark room.

“Get back inside,” Max snapped at Grace, and Bobby, who was her pseudo-boyfriend, also executed a to-the-rear march. “Kick the lead off your feet.” Max kept his nasty guns trained on Grace. “One more minute in the newsroom won’t make you starve to death.

Sometimes, Fil thought, Max had a certain doggie look. Not hang-doggie. Mean-doggie. Max owned a dog that made the newsroom smell for days.

Having demolished Grace’s day, Max turned his attention democratically upon Fil. “Where are the file copies?” he asked.

Pio the technician snatched a moment from firing his commercials squawk, “Six!” through the box.

“We know,” Max fired back through the newsroom squawk-box. “It’s 1209. Thanks for the time check.” Pio was a big man with a falsetto voice, and Max did not respect him, not that he respected anyone. His bushy dog fought off three neighbor-hood mutts one Holy Friday, and Max talked about it for three years.

Fil suggested, “Why don’t you take care of Grace’s batch first. She and Bobby have to go.”

Max was unmoved. His hand, held out waiting for the copies, did not waver. “The file copies.”

Fil wondered what it took to sweeten Max’s disposition.

Yet Max was sometimes prone to a certain incalculable gregariousness, telling snide little jokes, so it was hard to tell whether Max was kidding. He would say, “You guys don’t know how to laugh at a joke, hee, hee, hee. You know I always take care of you. You are nearer to my heart than my tummy is.” Then he would hold out a hand to the offended serf. Usually the offended serf was Fil. Fil was the only one in the newsroom who bothered to stand up to Max. Max could see when Fill’s dander was up. Fil had thick white hair which he combed flat to the back of his head with the help of pomade — the Pal brand; it was still cheap and easy to find. There was a quite unexpected menace in Fill’s voice when he was hiding something, or when he was on the defensive.

Fill had been a USAFFE scout during the Second World War. He could not boast of any Jap-shooting heroes because his assignment had been with the Signal Corps. Even in those days his superiors had seen what his best asset was, and they put it to use — transcribing the radio news from BBC or Radio Japan. There was a time during the war, he told Max, when he threatened to throw a typewriter at an ordnance officer who bullied people once too often.

Max leafed through the papers. “Okay, I’ll get to you after I’m through with Grace,” said Max, lighting a cigarette from the butt of his old one. He always smoked his cigarettes down to the butt, Max did.

Goodbye, boat people, Fil said secretly. You’re not making it to the headlines this time. Maybe tomorrow.

“I have one cultural events story,” Grace volunteered, “and a municipal sports feature.” The supervisor went over her file copies. “I followed up the — “

“Follow-ups don’t count,” he said.

“Now, look here — “ The tomboyish protest died in her throat.

“Follow-ups,” said Max in a slow growl, “don’t count.”

“Actually, boss,” the old man said, “the girl has five stories all in all.” Glynda went overtime again this morning making it a point not to look at Max’s would-be victim, knowing she’d repay the favor later.

“That vendor thing again?” the supervisor asked superciliously.

“City Hall’s been promising to rid Colon street of sidewalk vendors since last week — “ she recited defensively.

“Counted,” Max said quickly. “Counted,” he added, as though the redundancy would somehow erase the unmistakable tincture of pique, that barely perceptible quiver of pricked pride in the voice of one who has made a mistake and is caught in the unwilling process of admitting it.

“You yourself sent her out — “ Fil said, giving in to the impulse to rub it in.

The supervisor out him off. “I already said, counted — “

“Five minutes!” said the squawk box in triumphal fanfare.

Max did not bother to look up at the grinning Squawker through the glass booth panels. He said ominously, “I never liked being harassed.”

There was one good thing Max had in his favor, Fil thought, trying to be fair, and it was that Max was extremely loyal to and protective over his own outfit. Just now Max was announcing that their financially beleaguered management had just decided to cut down the work load of Lorelei, the assistant clerk. Some of the technicians had been asked to double up and traffic personnel. During their last staff meeting, the now assignment had made the already-balky technicians a little bit more cantankerous. “I’ll take this up during the next general meeting,” Max was saying. “Overloading you people doesn’t do any good.”

“And what about the bonuses?” Bobby sneaked that touchy question in, keeping the hopefulness out of his voice.

“We’ll think about that. First we have to get this JVC fixed.” Absently he patted the bulky cassette recorder, Fill’s squat mechanical Sancho Panza. “It’s really hard on Fil.”

Fil gave a grave little nod of thanks.

“Get your lunch, cowboy,“ Max told Grace. “Good work.” Bobby cackled as he and Grace got jammed in the door again.

The supervisor’s unannounced before-lunch resurrections always meant unnecessary complications for Fil, and at times, a set-back in his little wars. It meant that Max would decide what stories made the headlines; deciding the sequence of the news was Fil’s job when Max was not around.

The national news was no problem. Fil had as little interest in it as Max had for music. And even Max himself had once made and off-hand remark about the “propaganda” content in the wire-service national news agency scripts.

In his growing alienation through the years Fil found that national reports were better rendered by foreign news correspondents. But perhaps that was only, as Grace had once bantered gently, because Fil never liked the local scene to begin with. Grace was the station’s local-news specialist. Fil believed that the sworn by the that-dog-dying-on-the-steps-of-Boston-Times-was-more-interesting rule in journalism; and arguments with her always ended in an uneasy draw at best.

But he was sure he was a localist himself. He grew up in Mindanao, the southern island of the archipelago, where repression was reported mutedly by word of mouth. He fought as all heroic exiles fought; the only difference was that his wars were waged in his own little way, over an imaginary territory that was real only over the airwaves, news from distant lands that he sifted from the welter of sounds invisible and glorious in the sky, separating the births of kings and the falls of villages from the crackle of static, listening and pounding at his typewriter day after day. Sometimes it had gotten so that he felt he was a keeper at the gates of some moldering outpost, watching and writing for signals that might never come, the way the watchers on Mount Ida waited for the beacon flares from Marathon and Troy, the way he’d heard of it over the BBC history features.

Fil sighed. This morning, for one, he had prepared the news items for today’s lunch-time news, giving special importance to the refugee problem in Kampuchea. He thought it justifiable to down-play an election contest, no matter how important that ramifications affecting the diplomatic ties between two countries, or the news of the suspension of economic aid, no matter how large the amount, in order to give way to issues he thought were more pressing and more essential. He thought angrily of the desperate, hungry and God knows how many of them — and old Fil was determined to make it up to them somehow, have the boat people make it at least to the headlines. And he’d do it, even if it meant Max murkying up his skies for three days out of a working week.

Today he had the boat people up on the number two slot — the item was about an official statement which Thailand had released, The Thai spokesman expressed his concern over the decreasing number of countries that were interested absorbing Kampuchean refugees; fewer countries were accepting refugees this year than in 1982.

Max was rifling through the news releases noisily.

“Nakasone re-election,” Max drawled and puffed on his cigarette, “Make that number one.”

Fil obediently marked the item number one.

“Reagan accepts responsibility for the Beirut truck-bombing attack, number two.”

The pen of Fil slowed down.

“Absentee Andropoy fails to answer roll call — three… US pulls out of UNESCO — let’s make that number four, no maybe….”

Fil listened.

“Maybe this Thai statement…”

Fil remembered that today he wanted to take it easy.

“On the other hand, South Africa convicts a naval officer for espionage — make that number four. And finally number five is… the last one is…”

Fil had his last chance.

“Yup,” Max said. “Of course. Holmes takes on Goetze for twenty five million dollars.”

“Three minutes!” bleated Pio the grinning Squawker.

“You have three minutes to beat the deadline, Fil. Pump it, will you?

“You got it.”

Oh, well, Fil thought. Boat people. Next time. But his heart was not heavy. There were countless insignificant molecules in the cosmos. And today’s defeat was one of them. And there was Max, oblivious and ignorant to the little wars no one knew. Only old man Filemon Sayre in his secret sieges.

His single-toothed cobra hands did not even hesitate fractionally before going down on the typewriter keys. There were the days when Max failed to resurrect before lunch time news, and this was not one of those days. He listened to the supervisor’s 80-cc Yamaha yawn and scratch away on the dirt road, and saw it raise dust.

In the past Fil Sayre had wanted an 80-cc Yamaha of his own to ride on, so he would not have to pedal-push along on his old bicycle which needed, among an endless list of miscellaneous cycle concerns, grease, paint and incantations to keep it going. He had been told that those “fun” motorcycles could even go up mountain trails, and he, Mr. Sayre, had hoped only to get as far as the golf course, at most, some sunny Sunday. So he started saving up. But a letter arrived one day, explaining to him (he could hear his brother’s voice-over), that things had gone worse in the south and their family farm was being foreclosed by some rural bank. Today he sat behind his typing desk and listened to muffled exhaust honks from his supervisor’s motorcycle, crossfading into the newsroom’s murky indoor-ambiance sound-effect.

So the US pullout from UNESCO was number six, and boat people, number seven. Far far down from Fil’s number two. You can’t win ’em all; lose some, win some. Fil thought inadequately if philosophically, wondering whenever, or whatever would be the next time, that he’d be fighting the Maxes over. He’d lost for Afghanistan — that was such a far place halfway round the world. He didn’t do too badly on Poland. Maybe they’d declare martial law in Tunisia, maybe… He caught himself up with a sense of consternation. What a way to pass the time, he thought, hoping for disasters, wishing martial law on distant, unsuspecting places just so he could even up the scores with Max

Still, Filemon Sayre and the boat people had a slim chance. Fil could try having the story on the boat-people aired right after the commercial break at the newscast halftime. During a meeting, once, they discussed the way a story would seem to attain a quantity of “headline-ness,” of enhanced importance, if it followed a commercial break. Well, he himself had not been sure about that, but a visiting lecturer from the US quoted someone’s thesis over the sir and the theory seemed acceptable.

Fil only needed a human interest story for this noon’s edition to be complete. If he could smuggle in the boat people, that meant he’d have to compress the lead stories. The stories subsequent to the headlines would automatically move up just as long as some details of the lead stories were crossed out. That would open up enough space for the human interest stories — thank God, thought Fil — which were supposed to provide the noonday listener with a great sense of relief after an array of grisly news.

He turned around to find DMT standing behind him. DMT was the newscast anchorman. He had walked into the newsroom himself to get the script for the headlines. He only had under seventy seconds to review it. “Thanks,” he said when Fil was typing the last item.

“I have a good one coming up for the last item.”

“Is it funny or sad?”

“You’ll see.”

“I’ll do the crossing out then, during the commercials.”

“Please.”

“Good,” the anchorman said. “Are you still transcribing it?”

“Yes. Don’t worry, there’s time.”

“Don’t rush.”

“Very well,” Fil said to the anchorman, who left for the announcer’s booth, looking twice at his wristwatch as he went in the booth.

DMT was a tall man. He drove a Suzuki GT500R to school, where he was an instructor in speech and drama. Aside from also disliking Max, he disliked being distracted while he read the news live. Especially when the distractor sometimes turned out to be Max. He had no trouble with Fil.

The insides of DMT’s head clanked with the jazz of Bob James, Brubeck and Quincy Jones, including something that, he told Fil, was Handel’s Water Music. Fil did not care too much for the sounds, but once, cornered with Bob James’ “Brighton By The Sea,” he admitted, quite truthfully, and even to himself that he was sadly reminded of his own coastal town. Later that day the anchorman did not seem to mind Fil’s distractions when it came time to insert an item on additional developments in Afghanistan.

The old transcribe took a cassette tape out of his drawer He had already recorded a human interest story on it, following a hunch, and kept that particular tape to use as a fall back at times like this when he had to resort to little machinations; like during time, for instance, when Max turned up unexpectedly. It meant extra work, but that was nothing. Just hurry up and get lost, punk, he would tell Max internally.

He had two fairly fresh human interest stories on hand. One was about a live triangle in India and the other was ac Chinese panda story. He opted for the panda, because pandas were surely related to dogs, and this might help somehow if he got snarled at by Max. He finished typing the panda story in less than seven minutes. When he snatched the paper from the typewriter roller went r-r-r-r-r-t.

Chasing stories to the announcer’s booth always heightened his sense of vicarious thrills. DMT was not enthusiastic about this “run! run!” system, because, not having read the text beforehand, he was bound to misread the script. DMT was superstitious about his routine. But there were time when “run! run!’” had to be resorted to; and Fil always found these times to be a high point on his life.

When Fil went inside the booth to hand in his story DMT did not even look up. He just put his pen down, and with his eyes still on the corrected script, made an “okay” sign with his hand at Fi;.

Fil returned the signal with his hand, and in an economy of motion, shifted the “okay” sign into an “that-way” sign and held his finger pointed at the front door as one would fire a 38-caliber pistol

Inside the newsroom he wiped his eyeglasses, turned the monitor on and listened to what was going on air and then he started putting things away.

The commercial for the computer company was just beginning to fade out; Fil did not bother listening to the news anymore. He just flicked the radio off. He knew his boat people were on next.

As he went outside the main door he looked at the radio station garden, its antiquated 300-foot antenna and its buildings dilapidating gently in the noon sun. All along the paths the single-petal portulaccas bloomed redly, planted there by Roger, the elderly taciturn gardener. Fil sometimes thought that the plants bloomed in inverse proportion to their surroundings as the radio station deteriorated the plants flowered more profusely.

Fil walked towards where his trusty Sonnet was parked in the cavernous depths of a low quonset-like structures that had fallen into disrepair and was now used as a storehouse and a shed. He wondered if Max would ever catch him out, sneaking in the boat-people and moving Afghanistan to second place. Fil though not. As he wheeled the bicycle out, his eye was caught by the jeweled flash flesh of the peacock’s tail, the bird standing like an arrogant potentate oblivious to its tawdry cage. He’d often wondered about the peacock, and why the American founder of the station had brought in a peacock and its mate to breed in his southern Philippine town, so far from the bird’s home — in India, Fil thought dreamily, or Arabia.

No, he decided, the boat-people were safe from Max today. What else would you expect from a place where they kept peacocks in dirty cages to breed, then forget about them…

The old man pedaled home. He was hungry, and the sun was hot. His stomach was growling. I could use a bowl of soup. Damn if that stove’s not catching fire again. It was time he bought a new gas range. The only catch was that now at the station the program department decided to launch a go-to-the-masses program, for which the station had to buy a baby console. That meant Fil’s bonus had to be deferred — by golly! — because a bunch of local officials had fast-talked the station into believing that the local scene was where the sin roses and set. That was another of Filemon Sayre’s many, many wars.

But then, he thought, these little wars of his were not all that costly. To win or lose them, he only paid with a slightly, quickened heartbeat, or played the part of a chance audience to some frightfully home-sick tunes; and at times he lost, at other time he won. Yet, then again, he could only sit quietly down whenever Max murked up his day and stuck out Fil’s number two item and left in a trail of dust and disregard. Still, the boat-people coming in after the commercial was good enough consolation. Good enough for him.

He pedaled thoughtfully under a blue and perfect sky. He did not hear whether the two little children called out to him this time. There were days when they were not around, and this one of those days; and Fil had forgotten about them until he went past their hut. Then he remembered. He looked all around him, twisting around on the worn saddle, to see if someone was watching. When he saw there was no one he saluted and chuckled a few seconds later, thinking about what he had just done.

Now as he hurried home there were other things on his mind, more consciously major and crucial Will there still be mud in the pothole around the corner? Two hundred strokes always takes me home after the highway crossing; that men in a cart over there looks like hi is hungry too; push, push, push, I’m flying smoothly on this sturdy and strangely affectionate piece of machinery; push, oh, push, thought Filemon Sayre as he pedaled home, and the whistling and chattering of his un-greased, imitation-D.I.D. bicycle chain dissolved, as in magic, into the pliant and tensile calling of the field sparrows that skittered open-high in the airwaves of the sky on a blue endless day.