Rebound (17 page)

“We’re coming out this way only once,” Dartley warned, “so look and see whatever you need to see. Where will this road take
us, Rafael? It just sort of dies out on the map.”

“It just goes far enough into the forest and mountains to haul timber out or work a mine,” Rafael said. “I don’t remember
this road, but all the roads north out of Balbalasang turn into horse trails after a while, and farther on, the horse trails
turn into foot trails. We are going to
have to turn around and come back on this road. If you pass the Velez place and they see you going out and not coming back
real soon, they get suspicious. When you come back into the town, I will take you out on a road I know and find a safe place
for us to make camp.”

The Velez hacienda, about five miles outside the town, was a big house in a cluster of trees at the end of a long tree-lined
driveway. The fields were planted in neat rows with vegetables of some kind, and a small collection of tin-roofed shacks in
a hollow belonged to the tenant farmers.

“They work the land in exchange for one-third of the produce,” Rafael explained. “The landowner keeps two-thirds. When the
NPA guerrillas gain control of an area, they change that arrangement so that the tenant farmer gets two-thirds. In the last
few years all the big landowners here have had to go along with the guerrillas’ demands, except Happy Man. Anytime one of
his tenants make demands, he soon disappears. ‘He went to work in Manila,’ the strong-arm men say, but his family never sees
or hears of him again. That’s the way things work up here.”

There were no signs of anyone watching them as they passed the Velez place. About a half a mile farther on, the road became
a pair of tire tracks climbing a hillside. Dartley turned the car around and went back, again passing Happy Man’s house and
not seeing any guards. But Rafael was nervous and uneasy.

“When I worked up in this place,” he said, “I never once came out this road, and neither
did anyone else who did not have business here. Velez’s men will be asking in town this evening who it was that drove out
this way. We have to make it look like we are just dumb tourists who didn’t know what they were doing and who have now moved
on. Bear to the right up here and it will take you up toward the forests, and we’ll avoid the town.”

Dartley was pleased with the change in Rafael’s attitude. Both Benjael and Harry had noticed how Rafael had lost his laid-back,
self-possessed air once they neared Happy Man’s hideaway. This was a man who had seen and heard stories about Happy Man’s
goons and who knew they had now entered the lion’s den. Dartley never allowed himself to be governed by fear, but he recognized
that it could serve to bring others to their senses very fast.

He followed Rafael’s directions up logging trails into the hills. From an overlook on the summit of one hill they looked out
over the large valley that held the Velez hacienda. Rafael grinned at Dartley’s surprise to find himself poised far above
his target like this and pointed out the face of another hill to the American.

“That is where we make camp. Last year we finished logging there and the trails will not be overgrown yet, so you can bring
the car far in and hide it well. These hills are not worth clear-cutting. We just came in and felled select big trees marked
for us and hauled them out. It will be another five years or more before the loggers come to the face of that hill again.
We will be safe there.”

Harry and Benjael walked after the car on
the trails through the forest, using leafy branches to beat any tire trails left in the ground. The trail branched frequently,
but each turnoff was marked with two paint splashes on a tree to identify it for timber trucks. Blue over white marked the
main exit trail to the road. They left the main trail on green over blue and left that on the white-over-red trail, which
terminated in a circle to allow long trucks to turn around. Dartley drove the car out of the circle in among the trunks of
seventy-foot pines. When it could no longer be seen from the trail or from the air because of the tree canopy, he cut boughs
and placed them loosely over the roof, hood, trunk, and against the sides. Someone who didn’t know that the car was there
could walk by it only twenty yards away and not notice it among the trees, yet it was ready to move in a hurry, since the
concealing boughs would drop off once it was moving.

They loaded four backpacks with provisions and took along two two-man tents, a camp stove, four M16 rifles, four Pindad pistols,
ammunition, combat knives, medical kits, and extra clothing. Locked in the car trunk they left spare food and bottled water,
two M16s and ammo, two inflatable rafts, a cylinder of pressured air, nylon mountaineering ropes, tackle and pitons, plus
other odds and ends Dartley hoped they would never have to use. They moved out along a winding path through the bush and set
up the tents in a clearing about a mile away from the car. Dartley laid down a few simple rules: no cooking fires, no shooting
of weapons, no quarrels, and one man always on
watch. He ordered Rafael to go back to check the car, Benjael to guard camp, and Harry to come with him on a circular tour
of their position. They would all meet an hour later at the camp, eat their evening meal of K rations, and turn in for the
night.

Dartley and Harry saw nothing out of the ordinary on their tour. They found a stream with clear water that would be good to
drink after being boiled and saw the sawed-off stumps of a number of large trees. Rafael hadn’t gotten back yet when they
returned to camp. They waited a while and then went to look for him, leaving Benjael behind again, not looking nearly as fierce
out here in the forest as he had in the Tondo slums. They found Rafael talking to almost twenty women around the car. Dartley
moved forward, furious that Rafael would spend his time flirting instead of coming to warn them that the place to which he
had brought them was not deserted and secure, like he had promised it would be. They were unusually tall for Filipino women
and were dressed in brightly colored, traditional, long skirts and wore beads and shells in their hair and big bronze earrings.

“Kalingas,” Rafael said in a neutral tone. “They send their women when they want to avoid a confrontation. They’re giving
us a chance to leave.”

It was then that Dartley noticed that the air had been let out of the car’s tires. “How can they expect us to leave with four
flats?”

“You don’t understand,” Rafael said. “They want us to leave the car behind. Our guns too.”

“Tell them they are out of luck.” Dartley cocked his M16 and snapped it to full automatic.

Rafael stumbled in a language Dartley had not heard before. In response the women heaped abuse on him, a fresh one taking
up where another left off, until most of them had their say.

Rafael finally turned to Dartley and explained. “I don’t understand everything they say, but since I knew some of this from
before, I know what is going on. They think we work for the government, that you are an engineer or surveyor. Their men don’t
want to kill us because that would mean that soldiers will come here. Some of them know me because they have seen me working
in the forests here. Unlike some of the lumber men, I have always been interested in these people and tried to talk with them
and see their point of view. They think you government men have hired me to guide you here and say that we may leave unharmed
now, so long as we go empty-handed.”

“Tell them we’re not government people,” Dartley said.

“If they knew that, they would attack immediately.”

Harry was beginning to sweat as he came to realize that the American was not going to back down and leave quietly. He thought
about shooting him with his M16 or pistol, but he was not an expert with firearms, and the American was watching everyone
very carefully, his right hand resting over the trigger guard, a cold smile on his face and a hard look in his eyes.

“What else did the women say?” Dartley asked.

Rafael answered, “The government wants to build four hydroelectric dams up here, which will flood many Kalinga valleys, which
contain their homes, rice terraces, and ancestral burial grounds. I think’s it’s disturbing the dead that bothers them most—they
worship their ancestors. The Kalingas managed to put their feuds aside and even joined with other tribes to fight the government
on this. When the government moved in bulldozers, the women lay down in front of them, stole the ignition keys, vandalized
things when government workers turned their backs, and so on—while the warriors stood and watched. The government wisely suspended
work before anyone got killed. Now the Kalingas are giving us their government treatment. That’s all that’s saving us right
now.”

Dartley looked back at the women, who were watching his reactions with open curiosity. It was plain that they knew they had
Rafael on the run; equally plain that they were worried by the way Dartley was holding his gun and smiling all the time. They,
too, didn’t want to die.

“Ask them what they think about Happy Man,” Dartley ordered Rafael.

This brought a stream of comments from three of the women, which Rafael summed up for Dartley. “He is the one they blame for
the dams, because he wants to open up and develop the area he
thinks
he controls. Those are their words. They know he has come back here and believe that he has sent you up into these hills.”

Dartley decided it was time to stop arguing with these women. He said to Rafael, “Tell them I am here to kill Happy Man.”

Rafael did. The women smiled and chattered excitedly among themselves. Several of them said the words
Happy Man
in English and chopped at their necks.

“The Kalingas were headhunters until one or two generations ago,” Rafael explained in a low voice. “Some still may be. They
want to know if you will give them Happy Man’s head.”

“Happy Man!” Dartley shouted, and chopped at his neck. Then he walked forward, holding an imaginary head between his hands,
and presented it to the prettiest woman. She smiled shyly and averted her beautiful dark eyes while the rest of the women
laughed and made comments.

“Tell them to leave the car alone and that I will talk with their men tomorrow morning,” Dartley said to Rafael. The women
dispersed immediately on being told this by Rafael, and as they were leaving, Dartley thought to ask, “Do they know where
to find us?”

Rafael translated one woman’s answer: “Anyplace on these lands we go, they will find us.”

The four men took two-hour watches through the night. Dartley’s watch was from four to six, and he was extremely cautious
and vigilant, knowing that a dawn or predawn raid was a popular form of greeting strangers among forest peoples worldwide.
But he heard nothing and saw nothing as the gray light of early morning lit up the mist floating through the trees. The fog
was mostly in the broad valley below and did not obscure his vision at the campsite. Gradually the tree trunks, two tents,
and backpacks became visible in the half-light. Across the clearing,
less than ten yards away and directly in front of him, Dartley saw eight men sitting. They wore only loincloths and fur caps,
each with a short machete in a sheath on his left hip. They held their five-foot steel-tipped bamboo spears vertical and looked
expressionlessly at Dartley. He had no idea whether they had arrived during an earlier watch and had been sitting there all
night in total silence, or whether they had managed to slip in during his own watch and form this picturesque group as if
posing for a camera. Whatever way they did it, Dartley was impressed.

He did not make any gestures toward them in case his actions would be misinterpreted. So he sat and solemnly looked back at
them.

“We got company,” he shouted to the men inside the tents. “Wake up. Come out with your gun, but act friendly. Rafael, for
chrissake, get your ass out here and talk to these people.”

The three men woke up real fast when they saw the spear-carrying group sitting across the clearing. Rafael spoke with them.
“They want us to come with them,” Rafael said.

“We have to eat first,” Dartley said. “Maybe they’d like to try some K rations.” He pulled out a gray-green plastic package
of dehydrated spaghetti and meatballs and shook his head. “They might decide to kill us if we offer them this.”

“They say we must eat sacred food with them.”

“It’s probably hallucinogenic mushrooms before they sacrifice us,” Harry said.

Benjael, the other Manila resident, nodded
to show that he believed Harry was right. The eight Kalinga warriors crowded around Benjael to admire his tattoos. Rafael
winked at Dartley, amused at how the two big-city slickers from Manila had completely lost their cool out in the sticks.

M16s slung on their right shoulders, the four followed the eight Kalingas along a maze of trails deeper into the forest and
farther up the hillside. Here there were no signs of logging, and none of the trails were nearly wide enough to allow a truck
to pass. All the same, this network of trails was well beaten down through heavy use, and frequent horse droppings showed
that not everyone went on foot. They heard what sounded like gongs in the trees ahead, then heard voices and smelled wood
smoke. A very large, long hut was built in a clearing ahead of them. Children played in the clearing in front of the hut,
and small pigs and chickens ran all over the place. The long hut had nine doors along one side, and meat was grilling over
open fires in front of one door.

Dartley and the others followed the eight Kalingas into this door. First thing Dartley set eyes on was a dead man strapped
in a chair. He was in his late twenties, a Kalinga, with a small hole in his chest. The whole hut was built on a bamboo framework
and constructed out of a weave of bamboo and palm leaves. As Dartley’s eyes grew accustomed to the semidark interior he made
out many people. The hut’s ceiling was about twenty feet high, and ten-foot wicker screens served as dividers along its floor
space. He guessed that it was a multifamily dwelling
and that some of these dividers had been moved aside to accommodate the large number of mourners.