For Mark Stoler
Bus to Angeles is an Excerpt from the novel The Sign of Jonah
by Charlie Canning
When Wilson had first pointed out to the shopkeeper that the book he was interested in buying had a National Library stamp in it, the man had answered, “This is the Philippines.” The response was troubling and yet somehow reassuring. Wilson wasn’t in Vermont and didn’t have to act like he was. He gave the man two hundred pesos for a hardcover book on Governor General Taft and left.
After one or two awkward years as an episodic reformer trying to save his brown brothers, Wilson had begun to see the merits of cultural relativism. Who was he to impose the strict Calvinism of his forebears on people at the other end of the world? They had their own system and it seemed – however imperfectly – to be working for them.
He spent a few anguished nights wondering if his newfound tolerance for licentiousness and greed wasn’t just capitulation in another form, but the upside of moral relativism was just too good to turn down. Wilson could drink again as he’d done in college. Prior to coming to the Philippines, he’d abstained from alcohol for six years but he needn’t do that here. What harm could there be in drinking a few beers?
The other thing he could do in the Philippines that he couldn’t do at home was sleep around. In Vermont, it was a wife for life. There was no sense in getting divorced. Not only was it recklessly expensive, but no matter how many times you divorced and remarried, you kept running up against the same prohibition: Sex with a woman not your wife was fornication and fornicators went to hell.
Even in the sub-cultures that allowed polygamy such as the Arabs with their harems and the Mormons with their wives, you were expected to keep it in the tent or in a cabin in Provo, Northern Wyoming, or Southeastern Idaho. Wilson didn’t want to go to hell but he didn’t want to live in the United States either.
The great thing about the Philippines was that you could have a mistress or a girlfriend or two and still call yourself a Christian. Despite what the Pope had to say, moral absolutism seemed a thing of the past.
Wilson had been doing quite well with this new brand of freethinking until the Philippine Rabbit broke down on the way to Angeles. Unlike Olongapo, which had pretty much closed after the U.S. Navy had left town, the bars and the juke joints and the massage parlors outside of Clark Air Base were still open. If Wilson had finished his business in Manila and had a couple of days before the next ferry to the island, he’d take a bus to Angeles City.
The buses left from the Philippine Rabbit Terminal in Avenida. “Rabbit” seemed a strange name for a bus line, but like most names in the Philippines (“Three Minute Burger” came easily to mind) it was actually a very clever play on the American standard. “Greyhound” was the name of the bus in America, but it was the rabbit and not the hound that got there first.
There were two classes of service: ordinary and air-conditioned. Since the pollution blackened his nostrils and soiled his clothes, Wilson generally rode air-conditioned buses, but on that day he decided to take an ordinary bus because it was leaving right away and there was a long queue for the next air-con bus. He chose a seat a few rows ahead of a squealing pig with its front and hind legs tied together. The animal was inconsolable and alternately panted and whined. At the front of the bus were a couple of fighting cocks in cardboard boxes. Usually quiet in the darkness, the roosters were baying loudly. An old man cooed to them quietly while his grandson looked out the window.
Just before they were about to leave, two girls in short skirts and heavy make-up clutching plastic bags of soft drinks and chicharon peeled off the queue for the air-con bus and got on board. They stopped short in the aisle when they saw Wilson, giggled and laughed. “Kawawa sha,” one of them said.
“Wala kong pera!” her friend answered. Wilson thought to reply that he did have money, but speaking Tagalog would have been a green light and it was too early for that. In a few hours’ time, it would be dark and the bar talk that felt so incongruous in the light of day would seem witty and bright. The chances of him meeting these two again would be slim, but it didn’t matter. He would meet others just like them.
The bus wound its way under the LRT for a few miles before reaching the Chinese Cemetery. Like Smokey Mountain, the Chinese Cemetery was on the abject poverty list. Taxi drivers brought tourists there to see the spectacle of hundreds of people living among the crosses and the mausoleums. Every few months, the police would evict the squatters and demolish their ramshackle houses, but it did no good: within an hour, they’d be rebuilding again.
Wilson looked out the window. A mother was bathing her child on top of a marble slab. Each time she poured a ladle of water over his head, the boy would shut his eyes, do a little dance and laugh. Like everyone else, Wilson had been prepared to feel bad. But there was too much joy in the scene to do anything but smile.
Once the driver got onto the freeway, he attempted to make up for the hour they’d spent crawling through the western confines of the city. They were flying, doing perhaps 80 miles an hour and passing everything in sight. The driver’s recklessness bothered Wilson no more than it did anyone else. Wilson was going to die, but he wasn’t going to die on that day. The warm air rushing through the windows felt good and in less than an hour’s time, he would be in a place with cold beer and a swimming pool.
About five kilometers short of their destination, the bus began to chortle and rasp. It was a Hino, a workhorse from Japan that had done hundreds of thousands of miles on the streets of Hiroshima before beginning its second life in the Philippines, but it was never meant to run forever. Shortly after the engine sputtered and died, the power steering and the hydraulic brakes went and the driver had to wrestle the bus to the curb.
Wilson looked out the window in surprise. They were exactly adjacent to the large concrete sculpture of the dove rising from the pair of outstretched hands. Though he had passed this sculpture many times on his way to Angeles, he’d been traveling too fast to get a good look at it. Since Pampanga had been on the route of the Bataan Death March, he’d always thought that it had had something to do with that.
Now that they had stopped, it was blistering hot in the bus and many of the passengers were getting out for air. Wilson got up too. One of the girls was slumped forward on the seat in front of her clutching her stomach. Rivulets of perspiration ran down the back of her shirt. Her friend was beating the air with a movie magazine but it didn’t appear to be doing much good. As Wilson drew even with them, the friend looked up at him as if he’d been the one that had sold them the soft drinks, the chicharon and the bus.
While the driver talked to someone on a two-way radio, Wilson stepped onto the pavement and walked over to the narrow shade of a lifeless tree. There was a fence along the side of the road separating the highway from a barren rice field. In the distance, the sculpture rose from a hummock of dried reeds. From where he was standing, Wilson could only make out part of the inscription: “For the . . . souls of Angeles . . . .”
The company had alerted its northbound drivers to pick up the stranded passengers and every fifteen minutes or so, another overloaded bus would arrive to take on a few more people. By this time, the pig had been removed from the bus and was lying in a pool of its own vomit. The two girls flagged a passing taxicab and Wilson thought to do the same. He wasn’t a mechanic or a veterinarian and there was nothing he could do here. But instead of moving, he just stood by the side of the road watching the waves rise from the asphalt and the cars and the trucks float by.
The heat was coming up through the soles of his shoes. No matter where he stood, the sun seemed to find him anyway. There was absolutely no shade. He was beginning to feel light-headed and thought he should sit down, but there was no place to sit. After some moments of hesitation, he climbed over the fence and began walking toward the sculpture. The driver called out to him: another bus had arrived and it was his turn to go to Angeles. But he waved the driver off and continued walking.
The outstretched palms of the cupped hands towered above him now and the inscription, barely readable before, was as plain as day: “For the unborn souls of Angeles City whose lives were ended before they’d begun.” It had had nothing to do with Bataan.
Note:
Bus to Angeles is an excerpt from the unpublished novel The Sign of Jonah by Charlie Canning. A previous excerpt The Cebuanos was published in Eastlit in May 2013. Another chapter Ramirez was published in Eastlit in July 2013, and yet another in the September issue of Eastlit was The Transmutation of Baser Metals into Paper and Plastic.
