stove.
“It’s okay. Saint Germain flattened him. You remember when I prayed; we prayed together, you and I, just yesterday? I was about to sign his divorce papers, hoping never to see him again in my life when, I can’t believe this, he died just like that!” She snapped her fingers and pinched herself for luck. “I’m giving whatever I get out of him to Edna Ballard for our Saint Germain Foundation in Chicago.”
“You have a big house in Chicago, no?”
“Edna Ballard said to lock it up and walk away. It wasn’t that easy, but that’s what I did.”
Anissa understood that Nicasia could never have done such a thing. She was just the latest in a succession of Garcias since the late 1600s to have been born and still be living in their familial adobe. If she gave it up and walked away, she would have been a lonely exile, walking the riverbanks, weeping like La Llorona the legendary witch, screaming for her lost children. Like her men, she would be ragged skin, an empty form, a draft animal, servant to inhumane masters. Her house with the tomato-colored geraniums in the south window was too important to leave. The heritage of it alone was enough to bring Melo home.
How often had Anissa explained how it happened that Edna Ballard had been called by her Saints to lead the I AM followers from Chicago to live out the war among these fixed, rooted people? Edna Ballard and her husband Guy were the founders of The I AM Presence Movement. They were avatars calling down the Ascended Masters to oversee the unfolding of the coming Golden Age. Anissa, skeptical, leery and educated, had joined them in Chicago because to her mind, at least, they made some sense in a brutal world gone mad with destruction. The Purple Sword was the logical solution to the vicious return of the world war cycle.
She showed her devotion by giving up meat in that city of abattoirs, going on the wagon and refusing Russell sex because he was undeserving. Phyllis was not his first dalliance and in fact, there was a girl-child somewhere, the daughter of someone’s French nanny. Of the three mortifications, abstinence was the most appropriate.
“You did not love your husband, even in the beginning?”
“Of course, I did. I was mad for him in the beginning. I was too young to see that he was a lady’s man, a man who could not keep his pants buttoned, ever.”
“Was he in the army, pues?”
“God no, they wouldn’t even have him, considering what he’d done to his hand. So clumsy he shot off his thumb. An accident years back. I mean, he was Four-F long years before Pearl Harbor happened. And he was devastatingly attractive to women, that was the problem.”
Nicasia let her talk.
“You know how it is with men who drink. It traps them. His day has passed and my bet is that his mistress, a chippie named Phyllis, was about to dump him as well.”
“A chippie?”
“Una puta.”
“Saint Germain let her live?”
“She was not on the motorcycle with him. He died alone. Too bad he didn’t take a Japanese with him in the name of freedom and bloodshed. No, Saint Germain didn’t even rid the world of the whore, Phyllis. We might as well keep this just between us. I don’t want people to think I’m a mean person, even though I am right. Just say that he’s part of the war dead.”
On the following day, the newspaper carried a posed photo of Roosevelt seated at his desk wearing his same toothy smile. Nicasia was outside when she saw Anissa come out and bend down for the paper lying on the wooden planks of her portale. Although it was not in the local New Mexican, the news that Russell L. Barclay had gone to his great reward bounced door-to-door throughout the town. That Anissa’s husband had died was met with disbelief because no one believed that she had ever been married. She was so difficult. And she could not even cook.
Cabanatuan Prison Camp, Philippines
Because the POWs captured by the Japanese were reduced to sorry animals, Senio jaundiced to a yellow the color of a carrion crow’s beak, became part fox, part raccoon. To stave off starvation, he had mastered rat-like cunning. Out of quinine and food, MacArthur and his generals had surrendered, thinking to save the lives of their severely weakened and under armed 320,000 Allied troops. Wainwright compassionately handed over his men in Bataan because of his misconception that the Japanese were well supplied with a great deal more than rice. The bitter truth was that with the help of the guerrillas, the 12,000 Americans might have better survived being abandoned in the enemy-controlled jungles. So since April 1942 when his battalion had been surrendered to the Japanese, Arsenio Lujan, Pfc., 200th Army Artillery from New Mexico stole food for himself and Melo.
For their part, the Japanese were unprepared to take any prisoners; and anyone allowing himself to be captured was a despicable coward, deserving whatever treatment was meted out. To their astonishment, an overwhelming 70,000 men had surrendered and the Japanese forced them—12,000 Americans among them—to walk the sixty-eight miles to the train for a ride to the inadequate barracks at Camp O’Donnell because they did not have vehicles enough to do otherwise. The world knew those sixty-eight miles as the Bataan Death March.
Of the 12,000 Americans, 5,000 died on that four day march. One corpse for every twenty yards of road. The Japanese maimed, mutilated and murdered the thirst-crazed, starving POWs. Anyone who broke file was bayoneted, those who stumbled were eviscerated and ground under by the thousands of feet still coming. During the worst of it, Senio dragged Melo to keep him up. This was the kick-off for their brutal three-and-a-half year fight to stay alive.
Senio’s adrenalin-fired outrage over the emasculations, disemboweling, decapitations, amputations, starvation and disease he acutely witnessed on the Death March quickened his survival strengths. He and his best buddy, his true hermano, Melo Garcia, vowed to keep themselves alive first; then to bring as many of the 1,800 men from New Mexico home as possible. They looked out for each other, and not just against the Japanese, but against other prisoners. Men formed tribes, banding together because the odds that a loner could survive were a nasty 500 to 1. Survival depended upon an unquestioning solidarity. Within a battery, it was impossible to imagine a man stealing from another, or Senio ever stealing from a New Mexican.
Theft from a Japanese was not theft, it was called liberating. Samo-samo for the insufferable British snobs in camp and ditto from the filthy, selfish Javanese Dutch. Pillaging whatever the Texans had was good sport, while the Texans in turn victimized the Damn Yankees.
Senio and his blood brother Melicio Garcia protected their sick buddies. They stole or scrounged food often hiding it crotched in their G-string fundoshis. They washed clothes and guarded gear for their buddies in sickbay. They stole, and stolen money bought Black Market quinine and canned food enough to delay the steady number of deaths—one more corpse every two hours. Of the dwindling 9,000 Americans in Prison Camp, 2,500 were now buried in shallow graves. Without medicine, malaria and all the diseases from starvation and filth—diphtheria, pellagra, and dysentery— ran unchecked. The camp reeked of infection and shit from the slit trench.
Melo had been hit hard on the Death March and was going downhill fast only to be pulled through by Senio’s anger. Other times Senio thought he was the one going to cash in, forcing Melo to rally. But Senio was wily. Wilier than the rest.
Senio gambled for anything from a handful of rice to a future Red Cross box. Men even bet their next meal. Maybe the loser would never have to pay, maybe he’d be dead, maybe the Red Cross boxes would not come, maybe the war would be over. Senio worked the system and mastered it, so he pulled Melo through.
What loot he got, he hid in ceilings, under floorboards, buried under rocks in the yard. Only the Japanese side of the prison camp had electricity for lights at night, so shrouded by a moonless dark, Senio liberated food and pinched cached rice grain by grain into his mouth, reaching down under the floorboards where it had been stowed. The two Santa Fe buddies fed each other.
Until someone ratted and the guards saw the few small