Читать книгу Now Silence - Tori Warner Shepard - Страница 13

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., 200^th 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 pieces stuck to his chin. Then everyone in their group was beaten and left out in the hot sun without food or water for twenty-four hours. After that, Senio and Melo groomed each other like chimpanzees and when one slept, the other guarded.

Rule for Survival: Trust only your buddies, suspect everyone else. The enemy is everywhere.

The hot blood in Melo and his Santa Fe buddies stood them in good stead. They were quick-footed and dark-eyed, mostly handsome with a dose of Arab fire. Of necessity, thieves and undercover operators, most were beaten less by the Nips because they were less white. Their people had been prisoners from the Spanish Inquisition, prisoners isolated for in New Mexico and the Philippines, hardened to exertion and weather. They knew survival, absolute loyalty and dark fierceness. An-eye-for-an-eye, they were unafraid of cruelty. And they were quick to administer justice.

When Senio said, “that dog has to go,” he was right. One of the British officers had actually carried his pedigreed dog with him on the Death March.

“It’s no good having a dog here,” Melo said. The Limey solidly refused to share the dog’s meat with starving enlisted men. Certainly with not Melo or Senio.

“So who does he pay for the meat?”

“Somebody who can stomach English people,” Senio admitted. No one liked them—the pompous blokes turned over Hong Kong and Singapore right at the start. Hardly put up a fight.

When it came to slitting the dog’s throat, Melo made Senio agree to wait past dark to avoid the beagle’s eyes.

“Skin it like a rabbit,” Tivo suggested, thinking the quan was another stringy monkey. Primitivo Lucero laid claims to being a cook at La Fonda Hotel back in Santa Fe before the war. He knew a bag of tricks with food and he could create a feast just talking about cooking.

Senio made two long slits with his knife, preparing it as he was instructed, hoping that, like a rabbit, the carcass would slip easily out of its coat. Just two long incisions.

But no, the dog’s skin had to be hard-cut into strips and jerked off—a messy affair leaving a lot of bloody hair stuck to the dirty carcass.

They called it quan and quan was anything good, everything rice was not. Any crowd, sensing quan, gathered like hungry gnats. The word came from something similar in Tagalog, a regional dialect of the Philippines, and it translated into something like whatchamacallit. This dead dog qualified as quan, and a pan was filled with red palm oil for frying.

No emotion crossed Senio’s face while he simmered the dog that had been given meat meant for starving American enlisted personnel. He served the pet in small portions, each piece with teeth-fouling hair. Some men went away truly disgusted, but there were plenty who wanted a piece, including the men from New Mexico’s 200th Army Artillery who ate with their eyes closed trying to pull dry dog hair from their mouths. They said it tasted like possum.

“Bloody cannibals!” the British screeched at them in their exaggerated accents. Senio sneered. He didn’t know any Englishmen he liked, but Melo said he had met one who was okay.

“We’ll be back tomorrow night and bloody skin you alive!” they shouted vowing revenge, catching their shallow breaths between the last words.

Melo nudged Senio and they pulled a Scotsman over. Senio and the Americans liked the Scots and the Scots liked the Americans, so they asked the Scotsman to deliver a simple clear message, a tipoff to the Brits not to mess with either of them. “Tell him this: we’re the ones who drank the dead guy’s blood.”

“We ate his fingers,” Melo said. Everyone had heard the story that had circulated just after the end of the Death March when the men were most crazed with thirst and starvation, but no one knew if it was true. The rumor said someone in camp had cannibalized a freshly dead man in one of the steaming hot train cars at the very end of the Death March. No one knew who would stoop so low as to drink blood.

“We did what we had to do. Melo and me were dying of thirst. Plus, starving.” They told the story over and over until they believed it themselves.

“Pass it on,” they told the bloke from Glasgow. “Tell the assholes we did it. It was us.”

The Brits did not return.

The survival rate for New Mexicans in prison camp exceeded that of all other tribes because of their abiding sense of what worked and what did not. When Senio gambled, he won. When he stole, they all ate. It had always been like that in Santa Fe. Love, pride and a strong heritage of hands-on justice. And the justice was based on tribes. Cowboys against the Indians, Spanish against everybody, macho Spanish with long memories and old vendettas.