happened? Qué pasó?” Senio asked Melo hours later when he regained consciousness. Senio was a bleeding mess.
“Pig Vomit hammered you from behind. No warning. Americans give warnings, first. Not these bastards.”
“Gooks say it’s Bushido to shoot a guy in the back.” Senio had been on the outside of the group of men, doing nothing, walking away from the roll call when Pig Vomit brought him to the ground. All the Japs screamed the word Bushido, meaning that the white men are expected to fall on their honorable swords—the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner. That’s Bushido, a code that glorified death.
Right now, it looked like Senio was going to pull through. “Thank the Doc for me, okay?”
“He’s a good guy.”
“If anything, I’ve got a major grudge against the other officers,” Senio started in. “First they surrendered us and they asked the Nips for taxis on the Death March for chrissakes.”
“They’ve got it made, playing gin rummy while we’re dying of starvation and dysentery thirty a day. An officer bite the dust? He’d have to be really stupid.” Melo agreed. “Tonto.”
“Yeah, for me, I got no respect for the Nips generally and the officers specifically. Samo-samo.”
Melo muttered, “Me, too,” and he was right. At Cabanatuan there were 3,000 officers who by the Geneva Convention thought they could not be made to work like the 6,000 slave grunts had to. They were assholes, first-class college-boy assholes, but they got what was coming to them because the Japs didn’t play by the Geneva Convention.
“So they’re supposed to make the rules for the Americans in camp.”
“Rank does not mean shit in fucking MacArthur’s war.”
“You hear that General Black asked General Masaharu Homma if he could have a room at the Manila Hotel?”
“So, what’d he say?” General Homma was mean, the top honcho over the 320,000 surrendered troops.
“He screamed somethin’ high and squeaky in Japanese. He’s still trying to figure how MacArthur escaped and left all his three hundred and twenty thousand men without a pot to piss in.”
“Tokyo Rose says no problem, the war is over. Japan won. Everybody’s out of rice. They won because Roosevelt’s out of rice. Everybody in Washington’s out of rice.”
“She’s full of chickenshit.”
“What happens to us if we lose the war? I mean, what will really happen?” Melo knew the answer. He didn’t have to ask.
“They save their lousy rice and just machine gun us, standing in graves we dig ourselves.”
“What happens if we win?”
“Same thing. They want us dead so we won’t rat on ‘em.”
“When do you think that’ll be?”
“Another month, maybe.”
“Shit.”
“You know it. Shit”
“Worse than shit.”
3
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Still devastated that Roosevelt would fire on ships carrying POWs, Nicasia awoke at dawn the next morning with a strong hunch that her prayers might have been answered; that God Victoriously Accomplished was hard at work. And she waited impatiently to hear it first hand from the Señora. This time she came with a small stack of empanadas made the traditional way, with lard, flour, suet and raisins. If necessary, she would lie, saying that the lard was just butter. Out of respect for the I AMers who weren’t supposed to eat meat, she tried not to use suet but nobody could get butter.
Voices, animated voices flowed out from Anissa’s front room. Nicasia paused, holding the bowl lightly in her hands as she squinted to see if Anissa had a visitor. She always brought food because Anissa was no cook.
Nicasia hesitated, trying not to breathe, as she listened and heard Anissa talking rapidly. “Á quien?” There was no one there. No one visible, and all she could pick out was Anissa herself clearly in a state of ecstasy or divine madness, one or the other. She was spinning and although it was confusing, Nicasia convinced herself that something astounding had indeed occurred and being good news, it had to be about Melo, so she quietly entered and paused out of respect.
She knew, because Anissa had told her, that saints would appear if you meditate, even the Virgin Mary might come, especially if you used the short cut—spinning. When she spun and grew dizzy, she could see the saints even more clearly. It focused the attention.
Nicasia still hesitated. Anissa was talking to herself and spinning with her arms flailing in a state of total jubilation. She spun with such concentration that she didn’t notice Nicasia’s presence, and she continued singing, exclaiming and spinning, just missing the stick furniture. She had explained it before to Nicasia as “Divine Possession” which was, as she said, a very good thing.
“ Señora? Puedo?” Nicasia didn’t want to disturb her, but it was clear that Anissa was blissful in her trance and was probably receiving messages from an Ascended Master somewhere out of sight. Wonderful news. What if it was something about her Melo, starving, twenty-three years old and still holding on to a thread of life?
“Por favor, dimè?” She pushed the empanadas forward, needing to be informed. It was too important not to.
“Of course, Nicasia, come in! The Purple Flame has come into my life. Our prayer is answered!” Anissa fell backward onto the daybed, clutching at her excited heart and kicking her legs. She was out of control. The news was rapturous enough to seize her with tremors.
Nicasia, filled with joy and desperate to thank St. Germain, did not know how the prayer had been answered. She tried not to seem selfish. “Señora?”
“I can’t believe it! I cannot believe how incredible Saint Germain in His Wisdom and Mercy is.” Anissa said. Then she stopped thrashing her legs and sat up to receive the dish of little pies.
“Thank you.” Her feet tapped a hurried dance. Her attention skirted over the small suet packages, for she still pulsed with electrifying Supernatural Energy.
“Señora, please?”
“Yes, Nicasia. It is astounding.”
“Melo mio?”
“No, Querida Nicasia, I am so sorry. My esposo, Russell Barclay, my rotten drunk husband. I wasn’t even his first wife.”
“He is coming home?” Nicasia had to ask, because Anissa rarely mentioned him. She had always presumed the worst—that mercifully he had not even survived the first day of the Death March. Early death was considered a blessing by Padre Sembrillo because the dead were now at peace, resting in Jesus’ bosom.
“No, not at all. Quite the wonderful and amazing opposite.”
“He died without pain then?”
“Right as rain.”
“I am so sorry,” Nicasia said, moving to embrace the grieving widow. “You didn’t tell me he was a POW.”
“Russell? Oh my god, he wasn’t a POW, he was a goddamned drunk, and he drank alcohol, ate meat and kept a whore. Even the dirty Nips would have turned their backs on him.”
“It is bad to speak of the dead in this way,” the probable widow of a war hero said, the stricken mother of a lost son. She still wore her son Franque’s dog tags that clinked together with her other medals of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Christopher