Dust Devil (47 page)

Chase looked away from the corpse. He could only hope Lelani escaped Corregidor before the Japanese took the island, for those Filipinos suspected of working for or helping the Americans would be the first to be executed.

From the little Bicol, the local Filipino dialect that Lelani had taught Chase, he learned that the military prisoners were destined for Cabanatuan, a large town near the center of Luzon, and the civilians were to be interned at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.

By now most of the prisoners were terribly hungry, for it had been six or seven days since they had eaten. When Rabinowitz complained about the starvation to a Japanese lieutenant,
claiming, "It’s against the International Law dealing with prisoners,” the officer signaled to a guard who slammed his rifle butt against Rabinowitz’s head.

After a day and a half of layover at the village of Mariveles, the Japanese began to get the prisoners lined up in columns of fours. Between Chase and Rabinowitz, they managed to get Omaha near the front of the column. To fall out of the columns would mean certain death.

The guards shouted at the men as though they were on a cattle drive headed for the slaughter pens. They beat the men with their rifle butts and jabbed them with their bayonets to get them in line in a hurry. They were giving orders in Japanese, and no one could understand them. Chase looked along the column at the men’s faces. They were zombies.

"Tell me, Colonel Rabinowitz,”
he asked mockingly, "do you really think we will be treated in a decent and humane way — according to the International Law dealing with prisoners of war?”

The sun beating down was searing, and men began to fall by the wayside. At times Chase did not think he could continue
to support the stumbling Omaha, but if Spec could, he knew he could. Except that his head had begun to ache; every time he moved, a hundred pounds of cement banged around inside it.

Occasionally a scream was heard as a soldier fell out of line and was either shot or bayoneted. One time Chase’s sensitive nostrils flared at a particularly foul odor, and he looked down to discover he was walking on human flesh that belonged to corpses abandoned where they had fallen and been trampled by columns of trucks, tanks and cavalry.

After a while it was difficult for Chase to stand up. His head was dizzy with fever, and Rabinowitz took his place opposite Spec to support Omaha. When they halted about five that afternoon near Lubau, the colonel looked at Chase and told him he had malaria. "For someone used to the high, dry, arid places, this will be the worst on you.”

"You don’t look so good yourself, Colonel,” Chase told him with a weak smile.

Across the road from where the columns had halted was a creek, little more than a trickle. Chase knew he would die if he did not bring his fever down, so without bothering to ask the guard he got up and filled his canteen. About that time some of the Filipino prisoners made a break for the nearby sugar cane fields, and the Japanese began firing into the fields. While they were kept busy gunning down the Filipinos, the creek was swamped with the prisoners, fighting for the water. The guards began shouting for them to get back into formation.

Chase gave some of his water to Omaha before pouring the rest into his hands and wetting his temples. Omaha was out of his head now with fever.

Rabinowitz said, "We can’t continue to carry him, or we’ll also end up along the wayside.”

Chase had known this, but Rabinowitz looked as if it cost him his soul to admit it. "Look, Colonel,”
he said, "if each one of us hangs onto the prisoner’s belt in front, we might be able to keep up ’till we get where we’re going.”

It worked for the rest of the afternoon until halt was called for the evening. But next morning it was harder to get up and prepare for another long march. Some soldiers started to faint as they stood facing the hot sun again. Omaha was one of them and
. . . and he did not get up.

Chase began to laugh, and Rabinowitz’s wiry brows arched over dust-caked eyes. "He’s gone bananas with the fever, Colonel,” Spec said.

"Oh, I’m not hysterical, Colonel. I was just remembering what an old shaman told me — that I’d go through the Long Walk again, the one my people did a century before. Long Walk—hell, it’s a death march. Wish I’d thought to ask him if I’d survive this.”

The column
moved out with the unconscious Omaha left behind. Rabinowitz’s face resembled an Indian mask of carved wood, and Spec looked as if he were about to cry. Chase was too sick and weak from malaria to care at that point. But Rabinowitz made him hold onto his belt. When the prisoners were forced to halt, Chase would drop down on his haunches to rest, and Rabinowitz would haul Chase up by his belt when it was time to move out. "Get up! You dumb son-of-a-bitch! You stinking Indian! You going to die in the white man’s army?”

Out of sheer anger Chase dug down inside himself for a last ounce of reserve and struggled to his feet. He wavered like a sapling in the wind.

In front of him a master sergeant staggered out of the column. The front guard turned around and fired. Then he ran over to the sergeant and jabbed his bayonet through his chest. Witnessing this, Chase made up his mind not to fall out of line.

But about noon of the next day he felt death near and just did not think he could go any further. He stumbled and let go of the belt before him. At the same moment he heard the dreaded flapping of the wings of an
owl — death’s messenger. In his delirium he held up his arms before his face to ward off the fearsome bird.

Suddenly the shadows of the wings lifted, and Chase thought he could see a barrio down the gravel road ahead. Deborah was standing near one of the palm-leafed huts holding out a package of cigarettes for him with teasing lips and laughing eyes.

I’ll walk 'till I get there. After a cigarette I’ll feel better.

CHAPTER 49

The Cabanatuan prison camp was built before the war near the foothills of Luzon’s Sierra Madre mountains. It had been a United States agricultural experiment station, covering about one hundred acres. Army barracks built for a Filipino army division dotted the camp.

The barracks’ roofs were made of cogon grass, and the walls were closed in with nipa. The floors had cracks between the bamboo slats to allow for air circulation. Several guard
towers were stationed at intervals on the outside of the camp, and a high barbwire fence enclosed the prison compound.

This was the barrio that Chase could have sworn he saw on the Death March, although it had taken seven hours more to reach Cabanatuan. It had been seven hours of following a strange light and with his head buzzing. But he had made it.

Many times he wondered if the Death March had been worth it. For the first time in his life he was afraid. His own helplessness frightened him. He did not mind dying in combat like a warrior. But it was a depressing sight to see how the troops were. They had sore throats, bad colds, malaria, and dysentery. Not a single soldier was well. Chase’s own weight of two hundred and five pounds fell to one hundred and thirty. With his six-foot-three frame, he looked like a cadaver used in medical classes.

Hair and beards were matted from sweat and dirt. Most skins were pale, but Chase’s swarthy skin was a hue of gray. Everyone had puffy eyes. Spec could not wear his shoes because of the swelling in his feet and legs, caused by a lack of vitamin B known as beriberi. Many soldiers were simply too sick to get to formation for roll call each morning.

One of these was Rabinowitz. He had dysentery, and his stools were pure blood. And he could not make himself eat the things in his bowl of watered rice. Once Chase counted twenty-four items in his own bowl — mostly pebbles and worms. Since Chase was only seriously ill during the seizures of the malarial fever, each morning he would go look for Rabinowitz, who was housed in the separate officers’ quarters, to be sure the colonel was not in the pile of men listed for burial.

The damp, foggy, or rainy days that kept the men wet from lack of shelter were the worst on Chase. Once when he lay too weak in his bay to move, Spec showed up with quinine, something that Chase had been unable to obtain. "How’d you get that?” he mumbled through the fog of his fever.

Spec smiled. "Through the black market.” He took off his glasses and wiped the dirt off the lenses with his shirttail. "It’s a trick you learn best on New York’s streets. The stuff cost seven cigarettes.”

"There’s a Navajo word,” Chase rasped. "
Ukehe
. It means thank you — and is almost never said. Except in return for very great favors.
Ukehe
."

"It comes hard, doesn’t it, Red Man?” Spec asked. "Admitting that a white man might just be that—a man like yourself?” And he smiled again, showing the funny overlapping teeth. "But, God, I hope not. If I look like you right now, then I’ll bypass the human race.”

Chase grimaced and looked down at his long frame, seeing mostly bones, though there was a fresh scar, a two-inch purple welt just below his navel — engraved by a Japanese bayonet when he had not gotten into formation quickly enough. He knew his cheeks were sunken hollows and his eyes were deep sockets. Even his perspiration smelled different. That happened when the body underwent great changes.

But what was worse than the suffering of the body was the deterioration of the mind. Several men suggested that permission be obtained to use the books left in the Agricultural Station’s library and hold classes. Rabinowitz volunteered to teach finance and Hebrew; an A&M student, fruit production; a private whose father had been a pastor, the Bible; and so on.

While Chase realized Navajo was practically impossible for someone to learn who was not actually living in a Navajo village and subject to the daily activities, he did have a working knowledge of Spanish. This and the little
Bicol
he knew he taught in exchange for banking and finance from Rabinowitz and law from a lieutenant who promised his students that when, not if, they were freed from the prison camp they would have no problem in taking their bar exams and getting a degree.

One evening when the lieutenant was going over the Code Napoleon and its merits versus the Justinian Code, the conversation somehow got off on International Law and the Japanese breach of this law, especially in the two camps of Cabanatuan and Santo Tom
as.

"What I wouldn’t give to be a ci
vie at Santo Tomas,” a pimply-faced English private sighed. "It’s been so long I can’t remember what a round-eyed woman looks like!”

"You can bet, cobbers,” an Australian officer said, "that whatever looks a woman had are gone after a month at the Santo Tom
as resort!”

The last thing Chase was interested in was a round-eye. He had been burned once by one of the most beautiful of the round-eyes, and for all he cared their kind could rot in Santo Tomas. But the nagging knowledge that Deborah might be in Santo Tom
as, if she was not already dead, was like a vise — ever tightening on his brain. Sometimes he thought he would go crazy with the thought. Only when he was in the depths of malaria’s delirium was he free of anxiety. But the Australian’s comment roused Chase from his lethargy.

He was going to escape
— and take Deborah with him, if she was at Santo Tomas. How, he did not know.

With the advent of Christmas Deborah was more than ever on his mind. While the other soldiers sat and talked about their families back home, wondering how they were celebrating the holidays, it hit Chase hard that he had no family
—unless he counted Deborah (and every member of the
Tahtchini
clan). It was the loneliest he could remember ever being.

It was about this same time, when he had learned as much as Rabinowitz could teach him about finance
— and the passing of the New Year of 1943, which he did not even bother to celebrate with the others —t hat Chase began to realize he was being watched.

He felt this most acutely when he was on water detail. He hated burial detail, though it did not require as much work, so he had opted for the hauling of the water. He went to the large artesian wells for about three weeks before he began to notice, toward the middle of February, that one particular Filipino came more often than the others at this same time to fill the large jugs. Chase scrutinized the monkeylike man. The little eyes never wavered under Chase’s penetrating regard. One day the small brown hand went up to the straw hat, removed it, and fanned the short, narrow face. More than once the fingers ran about the inside of the hat’s band.

It could be his imagination that the man wanted to speak with him. It could be a trick. But since Chase had made up his mind to escape, he felt he had nothing to lose. The next time the monkey man went through the same routine — two days later — Chase moved nearer, setting down the water jugs he supported on a wooden yoke.

At the same time the man dropped his hat. Chase took the initiative and bent to pick it up. No gunfire erupted from the towers, but his back felt terribly broad at that moment and exposed. He began to hand the hat back to the little man when the man’s eyes communicated with his. Chase looked inside the hat. In its crown was a folded, dirty piece of paper. Carefully Chase’s large hand concealed the paper within his palm as he passed the hat back.