There were tears in her eyes.
“It’s called ‘friendly fire,’ meaning that we murder our own.”
Nicasia wept as well. She was too weak to respond.
“It’s like abortion—worse even than slaughtering babies,” Anissa reasoned and the older woman nodded. “Maybe it’s just the same. Friendly fire is like how you feel about abortion. Just a fancy word for getting people out of the way.”
“Pray with me,” Anissa said. “Ask Saint Germain to grab those Army-Air Corps pilots out of the sky and protect both Melo and his compadre, Arsenio Lujan.” The two women knelt on the floor, heads down, weeping.
After a while and in a clear singsong voice, Anissa began the invocation:
In the name of God, the Beloved I AM Presence, and in the Name of the Beloved Ascended Jesus Christ, I AM the Strength, the Courage, the Power to move forward steadily through all experiences, whatever they may be, by the glorious Presence with I AM. I AM the Commanding Presence, the Exhaustless Energy, the Divine Wisdom, causing every desire to be fulfilled. Serene, I fold my wings and abide in the Perfect Action of the Divine Law and Justice of my Being, commanding all things within my radiance to appear in Perfect Divine Order.
At the end, there was pause for begging and pleading. Both women silently formed their supplications. Nicasia implored, weeping, beseeching for the life of her remaining son, and in exchange for his life, she renewed her vow to abstain from sex and meat. Anissa, accustomed to chastity, asked for a peace larger than simple peace from war. She prayed for the death of Evil Meat-eaters, Drunks, Idiots, Mussolini, Hirohito, Roosevelt, Hitler and Russell L. Barclay. (Why not?)
“You must trust, Querida,” Anissa said, putting her arms around the stooped shoulders of the older woman, “that all you asked for will be done by the Violet Power of Saint Germain and by God Victoriously Accomplished.”
“It will be done,” Nicasia said. “God Victoriously Accomplished.”
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
Late that night when the moon had set, Anissa received the phone call from the West Palm Beach Police precinct. Unable to stifle her excitement, she lay in a thrilled swoon of abundant reward on the hand-hewn daybed that served as her living room couch. Russell was gone! She felt that she’d been granted wings. Her wavering faith had been fortified and she thanked her God Victoriously Accomplished and the Seventh Ray fifty, if not one hundred times, over and over.
All she had done was to pray to the Resplendent Essence and as a personal favor, a sure sign, It had swiftly removed Russell from her arena. The thorn in her side had been excised just-like-that!
Now she could count on spiritual peace and the transfer of some war bonds and his half of the lumber camp. They were hers to dispose of as she wished. She would hand them over to Edna and Guy Ballard and The I-Am Presence for the furtherance of the Power of Truth.
She knew Russell had signed away his Florida love nest; the whore was welcome to it.
Her heart beat wildly. Russell’s death was part of an irrefutable mounting sign that the Surrender would come soon. Now America was getting ready to accept the Ascended Masters and their God-gifts of Light, Life and Love. And her ordained mission was to spread the glorious word on the Plaza to mankind and thus make it manifest. One by one, handing out brochures with the pictures of a ten-foot tall Saint. When the Glory came, it would come through the agency of Saint Germain, the same Saint who had orchestrated Russell’s sudden death—the unmistakable sign of His Benevolence.
But this sign that she had just received, which she interpreted as the message of certainty that the war was at an end made her momentarily wistful. She’d have to pack up to return to Chicago. Changes would flow, like having to leave Nicasia before her son returned. She’d miss welcoming him back.
At the end of the war, she would go to her home with the dock on Lake Michigan but it would not be a homecoming. There would be no triumph to it, no welcome.
The I AM Presence in Santa Fe too would begin to decamp. Waiting out the war in Santa Fe had suited all of them well. She’d miss the place. Would anyone here miss her? For centuries now bands of immigrants had come and gone, leaving only a small imprint on the isolated town. Between the wars, fervent German ladies arrived with the intention of imposing serious culture on the place but they too returned home like the retreating tide. Texans as well. They came and went, came and went, leaving empty handed. But the town endured. Unchanged. Poor. Recalcitrant and still speaking their antique Spanish, a town more Mexican than American.
Cabanatuan Prison Camp, Philippines, 1944
Tokyo Rose says the war is over,” Senio whispered to the POW standing on his left at the morning Tenko—part drill, part headcount as well as three hundred and sixty degrees of bullying and torment.
“Says who?”
“Scuttlebutt.” The Bamboo Telegraph was fast and heavy with rumors of the final battle, but a month later the war was still not over. One low voice said MacArthur was coming back with beef, planes and aircraft carriers. Others said he was already in the jungle with ammo, cigarettes and chocolate. Sometimes the men who went off on work details in Manila came back whispering what they had learned from the Filipinos—that the war was almost over in early 1943. They whispered that The Empire’s Zeros were being shot out of the sky faster than the Japs could build them. They heard that the Nips were being forced to relinquish the Pacific, that the Americans were new getting even.
But Tokyo Rose said it was all lies. She broadcast that the Americans had already surrendered.
More rumors passed, saying that, island by island, the Allies were strafing the Rising Sun and sinking one Japanese ship per day, every day. And that liberation was right around the corner.
But the war was not over. It would take a total of three and a half years to force Tojo’s Army to its knees and bring the POWs home. By the end, the number of surviving American and Allied prisoners was a pathetic thirty-four percent. The survival rate of POWs in German Camps was ninety-four percent.
Pfc. Senio Lujan banked on the one-in-three odds that he would make it back home with Melo Garcia, his vato, alive. Times were when he’d been beaten unconscious by some screaming guard’s rifle butt for not saluting fast enough, that he considered maybe we wasn’t going home after all. The Japanese were brutal, attacking even their own their own enlisted men when they weren’t off abusing the whites. Any reason was reason enough, Bushido, the Samurai’s code. They could do anything they wanted to their humiliated captives. By and large the guard/overseers were both sadistic and bored, so torturing POWs afforded them some small diversion in a camp where no one wanted to be. Like the POWs, any Jap seen fleeing would be shot.
The men called the overseers by their given English names. One, Pig Vomit, had his eye on Senio and clouted him with his rifle butt given any chance. He’d beaten Senio so badly one time that Senio lay mercifully unconscious on the bare dirt by his split-toed shoes while Pig Vomit continued his frenzied job, trying to break what was left of his jutting ribs.
“Pig Vomit, Pig Vomit, look over here!” Melo shrieked and other prisoners joined in the chant. The overseer stopped, confused, and looked about for the cause of the uproar. Melo with some help from the doctor was able to slink in and drag Senio away from under Pig Vomit’s squint-eye. The name stuck.
Prison Camp had been structured so that the only protection the men had from the Japanese was supposed to come from their own officers in some legal orderly manner. None of the other 3,000 (too many) officers in camp would have lifted a finger to help an enlisted man like Senio. Officers just sat on their cans playing gin or solitaire in the shade. They even refused to filch fresh vegetables for themselves by working in the vegetable garden.
But not Doc Matson. The Doc knew how to trick an overseer into letting a prisoner go. One time, he offered him a cigarette,