Vietnik

By Cárlos Cortés

Eemee, our village idiot, loved to party. He could smell a feast a mile off and had the knack for showing up, barefoot and in raggedy short pants, at the most embarrassing moments.The day the mayor’s daughter got married, Eemee crashed the reception at His Honor’s big house. How had he gotten in? No one knew. It must have been while we were all engrossed in watching the bride maneuver her long satin train out of the beribboned, flower-bedecked white Mercedes-Benz. Flashbulbs were popping, skyrockets whooshing up, and there he was, right in the center of the courtyard, Eemee again. Surrounded by guys ribbing him. This was Mandaue after all, the small town to the north of Cebu City, a place famed for such delicacies as bibingka and tagaktak, a place where everyone knew everyone.

Eemee was now bedazzling the crowd with his antics. The groom, scion of a wealthy Chinese mestizo family from the city, wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be the surprise number in the program. The bride, who had never looked more beautiful, was too well-bred to show her discomfiture. She kept on smiling sweetly, as if this sort of thing always happened at wedding receptions. Eemee had a lighted cigarette in his mouth and was working it, with only tongue and teeth, until he got it inverted: filter end poking out, lit end inside his mouth. Then he puffed a few times, cheeks ballooned, showily exhaling smoke through flared nostrils. The crowd loved it. Eemee was squinting, his eyes smarting from the smoke, but still he kept his hands away from the cigarette. Then, wall-eyed face going into contortions as he worked teeth and tongue, he got it flipped over again and there it was, still glowing. He took it by thumb and index finger and delicately tapped off the ash. By this time the mayor had signalled to an aide, who hustled Eemee out of sight to the dirty kitchen in back. There he could eat his fill. The guys in the drinking circle there passed him the glass. Eemee gagged on the imported Scotch whiskey, so they mollified him with a slice of wedding cake.

Eemee got around quite a bit back then, in the sixties. He set a kind of standard: a soirée did not become a real shebang until Eemee showed up to grace it with his presence. There were those who drove him away unfed, people who didn’t know better. They always found out it was bad luck to do that; something or other invariably went wrong with their shindigs.

In the seventies I saw less of Eemee, not that I was keeping track of him. My interests were broadening, and Mandaue was booming. By the eighties it had become a big city. In the mid-eighties I migrated a few miles east, to Mactan Island. By the end of the decade Mandaue had officially become a highly urbanized city with an annual income of 53 million pesos and a population of 180,283. I guessed these estimates to be conservative. The real figures, the way I could feel them in my gut, were probably twice or thrice those. Mandaue was filling up with strangers. I could no longer recognize the passersby when I hung out at my parents’ house. Fields where I used to suck stolen sugarcane were sprouting huts and shanties. Bamboo groves had stopped swaying and solidified into highrises. Land that used to sell for a few centavos a square meter now went for several thousand pesos per.

What I couldn’t understand was how everything could grow big faster than I could. The Mandaue of my earliest memories was not too different from the small town my father knew, yet my nephews and nieces (for my own children will no longer call it home) seem fated to think of it as a dusty metropolis where gridlock chokes them up every time a brownout kills the traffic lights.

In the sixties Mandaue was much more genteel, or, if you prefer, backward and provincial. As a little boy, I could climb any tree I fancied. It didn’t matter whose backyard it was. They all knew my father, although he was nobody special, just another neighbor. In those days Mandaue, before it became a chartered city, was a “municipality.” That must have sounded better than calling it a “town.” On the other hand, Cebu City was “the city” and we always called it simply that, as if mentioning its proper name were superfluous. (Calling it “Sugbu” as the old folk did was considered unchic, while the single word “Cebu” meant the whole island.)

These were words we took up in school. None of my teachers ever acknowledged the truth of the matter, that in fact Mandaue was virtually a mere suburb of The City. True, it had its own mayor and was too far away to be annexed; it was what might be termed today an exurb. All I knew was that it lacked every­thing. Nothing could be done but that you had to go to the city for it. I even had to be born in the city. Things had changed in one generation; expectant parents no longer called for the village manghihilot to act as midwife, and so I could not be born in my father’s house the way he had been born in his father’s house. Came my time to enter this world, my parents had to hail a taxi and rush to a hospital in the city.

School, too, meant Cebu City. Shopping, seeing a movie, dining in a fine restaurant — all of these meant going to the city. We might as well have moved to the city and saved ourselves all that commuting. But my father’s land was in Mandaue. His family had been in Mandaue since pre-Hispanic times, and it was unthinkable for him to live, or die, anywhere else.

Growth accelerated after the mayor decided to keep Mandaue’s business taxes lower than the city’s. The San Miguel Corporation established a brewery and a glass plant in Mandaue, and that set the trend. The Lahug Airport at the city’s outskirts was closed down and commercial air traffic moved across to Mactan Island and the fine runway the US Air Force had built there. Mandaue, smack between the city and the offshore islet, was caught in the middle. Its growth rate became, for a time, the nation’s highest.

By now, old enough to read the newspapers, I had become an avid space buff. I worshipped the astronauts and hung on their every word. “All systems GO,” I’d say, whenever my uncles and their smart new wives asked me, at family gatherings, how I was.

I also read the stories on the Indochina conflict. The US Presi­dent was escalating involvement there even as he underwent a gallbladder operation. (I was then too young to appreciate the irony of how having the gall to make up an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin could cause one’s gallbladder to get sick.) Later, at his Texas ranch, Johnson lifted his shirt to show the press the incision, a long gash down the convoluted topography of his paunch. A cartoonist made a classic out of it: LBJ lifts his shirt, points to the flesh thus exposed. Even with all the bandages, the scar is clearly a map of Vietnam.

At the Mactan Airport, my father’s business trips were less and less on propeller aircraft and more and more on the new jets. Once, taking a midnight flight because of its cheaper “Mercury” fare, he led us, my mother and I, to the viewing deck for a few minutes before he boarded. He pointed to the far end of the runway. There, he told me, on the apron connecting the far ends of the runway and the taxiway, look sharp now. Then I saw them: two huge B-52s, dwarfed by distance, blended into the night, momentarily exposed by the headlights of the gas truck. Part of Operation Arc Light, my father said, Mactan being just the right distance for a refuelling stop between Guam and Vietnam.

Some of my neighbors, fresh entrants to the job market, began looking for work in Mactan rather than in the city. One of them reported seeing Eemee over there, hanging around with the workers at the airbase. The cryptic words we heard around this time, codes like Arc Light, Young Tiger, Linebacker, or Bullet Shot, must have meant nothing to him. But the USAF servicemen got a kick out of the cigarette stunt. It seemed to work even better with blue-seal cigarettes. They’d give Eemee some free chow every now and then, and the poor fool, always eager, would do odd jobs for them, manual labor, nothing hazardous, loading bombs on their B-52s or something — probably the first time Eemee had ever done real work. He must have found those Ameri­cans good company. They were cool guys, down-home farmboys or “Aw, shucks” yokels, ethnic Italians, blacks, Jews, Poles and Chicanos, a pretty tolerant bunch, no nasty rednecks. They’d ask Eemee to choose between seven Lincoln pennies and a single Roosevelt dime. Eemee always took the handful of cents. They’d laugh, but it didn’t matter all that much, the way we saw it. The moneychangers didn’t care for coins, either. They only took greenbacks.

In Mandaue we razzed Eemee another way. We’d ask him about the time he undressed a woman. He got as far as her panties, then took those off, too. And then? Well, he tore off the garter, so he could make a slingshot with it.

Mandaue became a chartered city at the end of the sixties, but even in the early seventies we still had to go to the city to catch a movie or dine in a fancy place. The mayor would not allow moviehouses in Mandaue. He felt movie sex and violence would cause a deterioration of the city’s moral standards. I didn’t buy that view, because anyone could go to the city and see all those movies there. But of course my opinion didn’t count. It was years before I could vote. Besides, the Catholic Women’s League, the Jaycees, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Mandaue Lions and the Knights of Columbus were all solidly behind the mayor on this issue. So, no movie theaters, no motels, no swanky restaurants. It was obvious that a city without the first two didn’t need the third.

For all that, Mandaue was proud of its mayor. Once, a town in the north asked if they could borrow him for a term or two. Perhaps their roads would get paved then. After his triple bypass operation in the United States, the mayor expressed a desire to step down. Mandaue wouldn’t hear of it. There really was nobody else in those years. None of his political opponents looked remotely capable of unseating him in the forthcoming elections. I didn’t even know who his predecessor had been. I knew his father had been mayor himself, in his time, but no one could recall who had kept the seat warm in the interval.

When the President, still in his first term, announced that the country would send a contingent to Vietnam, my father snorted. Marcos, he said, was a puppet of the Americans. To emphasize its noncombat functions the contingent was called the Philippine Civic Action Group, or the PHILCAG. My father called it the PHILCAGeron, working in the Visayan word for “mangy cur.” The first batch included an Army engineer from Mandaue. The day he left for Manila enroute to Da Nang, the whole town sent him off in a motorcade, sirens wailing all the way to the Mactan Airbase. This was before the Bridge had been built. Crossing the Mactan Channel, our vehicles filled up the big barge. Mandaue was going to war, but in a modern, humanitarian way. Our engineer would not bloody his hands. American napalm would do the dirty work.

Down in Mandaue I did my thing, but kept it simple. I toured my hometown on my first bicycle. I went past the borders and saw Consolación, Banilad, and Lahug. This was my world, and a whole wide world it was. Nothing much happened in it. Things happened only in the papers. Men from earth were going to the moon. Before the decade was out, as JFK had promised. Elsewhere, people were tripping on angst. In Paris, students were out on the streets protesting — what, I never really figured out. In San Francisco, too, they were demonstrating. Make love, they chanted, not war. In London, John Lennon returned his MBE.

It was all so far away. Most of the time it seemed unreal. Still, we were picking up the patois and the counterculture as we took to wearing bellbottom jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and shoulder­length hair. Everyone sported beads, loved flower power, gave peace a chance, turned on to Jesus or became a yogi, and said, “Wow, man, that’s groovy, I dig it.”

A cousin of mine, Monching el tisoy, a bearded UP undergrad, came over for the summer. One of the girls (it must have been Odette or Arlynne) learned his birthday was on the morrow. We plotted a surprise party. At the appointed hour we sprang up with placards:

HAPPY BOURGEOIS BIRTHDAY, YOU MALE CHAUVINIST PIG

or

DOWN WITH US-MARCOS IMPERIALISM AND BIRTHDAYS

or things like that.

The best piece came last: a papier-mâché figure of the celebrant, hanged by the neck, eyes popping out, tongue swollen. Thus did we burn him in effigy. Then we sat down around a bonfire and roasted wieners and marshmallows on bamboo sticks. We had a cooler of beer and two guitars, and we sang rock ballads and folk songs far into the night.

On my third bottle I noticed that one of the girls, the one named Arlynne, had her eye on me. She was my elder by two years, an impossible gap. Jing Mercado, who was alternating with me on one of the guitars, pointed her out.

“That one’s got the hots for you, man,” he whispered. “Bet she wouldn’t mind if you made a slingshot with her garters.”

“If she’s so hot,” I retorted, “why don’t you go after her yourself?”

“Look who’s talking! Why me, of all people? Doesn’t he know it’s him she’s got eyes for? Can’t he see that?”

It was his shift to the third person that convinced me. In Visayan, that’s done for emphasis.

And so I went, in my fumbling way, after her. One afternoon during the siesta hour, on a fallen log shaded by gumamela bushes in their yard, I was just getting to second base when one of the guys called out.

“Hey, come on! Everybody!”

With that we piled, hastily buttoning up, into Ben Yeh’s Jeep. Another motorcade, Jude Mayol said. On the way to the Ouano Landing, two more of the gang, Bador Ngoho and James Dean Otikits, flagged us down, ran alongside, clambered aboard and squeezed in. The mayor, Judyboy repeated, had received a telegram. From some general. No, not RP, but a goddamn USAF general. It notified him of the arrival aboard MATS aircraft of someone from Da Nang. ETA Mactan AFB 1600H.

“What kind of plane?” Arlynne asked.

“MATS,” Judyboy said. “Military Air Transport System.”

“Who’s the VIP?” I queried.

“We don’t know yet,” Ben Yeh said.

“Probably PHILCAG,” Judyboy said.

“No,” Bador Ngoho said, “Vietcong.” His harelip made it sound like “Nyet-tung.”

“Right on, man,” James Dean Otikits said, “after all, some of those Vietcong look like they’re from Mandaue, too.”

“Could be a beatnik,” Arlynne said.

“Vietnik,” Jing Mercado said.

We sped down the Pusok highway, our sirens and motorcycle es­corts bullying all other traffic off to the road shoulders. Past the airline terminals, we drew up at the airbase gate.

American MPs spoke briefly with the mayor in the lead car, examined a piece of paper, then let us all in. A camouflaged C-130 Hercules flew low overhead. “Hey, man, psychedelic!” Bador Ngoho exclaimed. A black master sergeant escorted the mayor to the edge of the field. The brass band from the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes Barrio Association fell into formation.

We watched the C-130 touch down and growl to a stop at the far end of the runway. Only its tail could be seen in the distance as it turned into the taxiway. We paid no attention to the mayor’s men running and rolling out a red carpet they had borrowed from the tall, balding American quartermaster. The Herc grew bigger and noisier as it drew near, and we all plugged our ears with our fingertips. The ramp marshall, Mickey Mouse headphones on, waved it in with his paddles. The low, squat, warpaint-mottled aircraft, taxiing in on the inner two of its four propellers, seemed to have been lent by its highwing configuration a kind of menacing beauty. It braked to a stop just where the red carpet indicated, its two working props somehow reversing spin before they froze.

Chocks on, signalled the ramp marshall, tips of paddles touching together. The rear ventral door was lowered. The band struck up a resounding tune. The man from Vietnam emerged, blinking as his eyes met the harsh glare of the summer sun. It was Eemee.

The command pilot chatted briefly with the mayor.

“Shoulda seen this fella come outta that ole B-52 back there,” he said, poking his thumb in a westerly direction. “Danged if he don’t stir up quite a fuss. Two seconds flat, and they got ’im surrounded by M-16s. But he’s real cool, gotta hand him that. Didn’ say a whole lotta nuthin’. Jes’ bums a cig’rette off the CO and smokes it lit end in his mouth, y’know? The gen’ral couldn’t git nuthin’ outta him neither, ’cept that he doan’ come from Mack Tan at all. He from Mand Howie. That yore place, ain’t it?”

“What about you, where are you from?”

“Me? Oh, I’m from Oklahoma.”

“Well, I couldn’t place your accent.”

“Yeah, same problem they had with him.”

There was nothing for it but to put Eemee in one of the cars and take him home. The mayor managed to keep it out of the papers, although we rather expected he would have a hard time living it down. Certainly his political opponents must have thought so. They had to suppress their smirks whenever they admonished wags not to embroider on the tale. The oldtimers, however, didn’t seem to think so. A few weeks later, they re-elected him by a landslide.