Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from a family with deep roots in Appalachia, but I was born in Mexico, which is a different kind of southern altogether. So is Boracay Island, where this story is set, down in the hot bottom of the world. I lived for only a year in the southern Philippines, but I’m probably still more Maguindanao than Hillbilly. As for legitimacy, the proof is in the pudding.
A Common Courtesy
The man had been dragged into some scrub brush and rolled against a sand bank at a low point on the beach beneath a stand of high, crooked coconut palms a few hundred yards south of Club Basura, close to the Beachcomber Bar. At first, the boys thought the man was sleeping. He looked peaceful, as if he were dreaming of something pleasant. As they got close, they saw the faint dark rust stains on his shirt and, where his chest was exposed, the ragged little holes.
“Patay na,” said Bobong, the eldest. “He is dead.”
“O-o,” said Boyett. “It is bad luck to stay here,” he said. “Better that we never saw it.”
The man was pale and had blonde hair and was quite tall and fat: he wore only a floral-print button-down shirt and a pair of ragged khaki shorts with a lot of pockets in them. One by one, the boys leaned over him; one by one, each watched his tiny inverted reflection rise in the dark small mirror of the dead man’s eyes. They saw the deep brown stain made by the blood that had soaked into the chalk-white sand where his chest and stomach were exposed. A light breeze caught the cowlick on the dead man’s skull.
“Americano kini,” he said.
“Hindi,” said Bobong, shaking his head. Bobong was Boyett’s older brother. He was very dark skinned, and his eyes were the color of the waves on the sand at high tide. “Australian seguro. . .ambot lang,” he said. “He looks more Australian.”
The breeze moved over them and through the canopy of coconut palms high overhead. In the distance, a coconut fell to earth; they could feel it land through the soles of their feet. Another fell, and then another, and then the breeze died and the beach became quiet again. Toward Apo point, they could see the first fishing boats returning from the deep water past the reefs; in the foreground, vendors opened their tindahans and carendarias along the north side of the island. Some of them lit fires to cook rice for breakfast.
“Americano ‘ni,” said Bobong. “Austrailians are not so fat.” Bobong reached one leg forward, hesitantly, and touched the body with his big toe. He pushed, and the body budged a little; when it moved it made a wet, sucking sound, like the sound of an old man eating Durian. The corpse was already beginning to stink. The breeze changed, and Bobong covered his nose. Crabs would gather soon. So would other creatures: dogs, carrion birds, black flies. All of them would visit for a marienda before the sun fell back into the sea. “Bisag unsa, patay na siya,” he said. “Whatever he is, he is dead.”
“Let’s search his pockets,” Lito, one of the younger boys said.
Boyett began to walk away from the man, in the direction of Apo point. “Go ahead,” he said, and he kept walking without looking back. The others followed him, walking in line oldest to youngest. The air was cool and clean and smelled like flowers and sea salt. Now and then, they could smell the sweet scent of rice cooking at the carendariasalong the beach, and the smell of copra smoldering under skewers of pork and chicken; mostly, they smelled the big salty winds that rubbed the palm fronds high above them down the narrow ribbon of talc-white sand in the shade.
The brothers had a small skiff that they stashed among the rocks on the far side of a little cave that lay among the rocky cliffs at the western edge of the Island, beneath the mountains that rose above Apo Point, and from it they fished for big Tuna and for Lapu-Lapu that flashed like shiny new coins in the deep blue water off the edge of the reefs that ran a half-mile or so out from the edge of the beach. They used home-made spear guns, diving deep for minutes at a time without any tanks. Then there was always that nervous time between spearing a big fish and getting it to the surface before the sharks came. It was Mako water and sometimes Tiger Shark water, and at high tide the Barracuda swam right up the reef to the beach near Happy Home, where beautiful, well-oiled, linen-draped turistas reclined on rattan divans sipping champagne at sunset.
By high noon, the boys had taken one small, fat Tuna and two good-sized Lapu Lapu, and they hoisted their makeshift anchor and rowed for shore in the rising tide above the gathering sharks. On their way in, they crossed the path of the big motorized outrigger canoes that brought the turistas out from Panay every day in the morning and at noon, and the turistas took pictures and waved at the boys, who stopped rowing to brace against the coming wake, and to wave back.
On shore, Boyett and Bobong dragged the skiff up the hot sandy cove to the little rocky hollow where they hid it in the evening. The younger boys trailed behind them, laughing and tumbling on the sand in the crystalline blue shallows.
“I bet we get forty pesos each for the Lapu Lapu,” said Bobong.
“We’ll be lucky to get fifteen for both,” Boyett said, and then, after a thoughtful pause, “but there are more where this came from.” He grinned and winked, and they all laughed together and began the walk back up the beach toward Beachcomber and Basura and the other smaller tourist restaurants, beach-side cafes like Happy Home and Bistro Bistro, where they already had a buyer for their catch. “And we’ll get a good price for the junior, either way,” he said.
“Thirty?” Marsing said.
“At least,” said Lito.
“More like forty,” Bobong said.
“More like fifty,” Boyett said.
When they came back to the place on the beach where they had discovered the dead man, they found that he was gone. All that remained of him now was the dark stain of his blood on the sand, the faint lingering odor of death, and the angry hum of a great cloud of black flies. The boys stopped in the shade near the blood and looked at one another in disbelief. The flies lifted into a humming swarm above the sand and settled again. Boyett looked out at the beach.Turistas had begun to gather in chairs on the sand near The Beachcomber. Children moved among them, peddling small bottles of coconut oil and hand-made coral necklaces and shells gathered from the reefs close to shore.
“Asa man siya,” said Bobong, shaking his head. “Where did he go?” He shrugged and looked at the others.
“Maybe he was discovered,” offered Marsing. “Maybe somebody else discovered him and called the police.” Marsing was the youngest among them, but also the biggest and sometimes the smartest.
“Maybe he was eaten by the flies already,” said Bobong. “Or the flies carried him away.” That seemed the most reasonable explanation. Boyett nodded. He looked at Bobong and nodded again, and Bobong nodded. The flies lifted into a buzzing cloud above the sand and settled again, and one by one the boys walked back up the beach past The Beachcomber and Club Basura toward the village.
Before they went home, they stopped at Bistro Bistro, where the turistas ate with silverware by candle light, and they sold the fish they had caught to their uncle Dodong, the cook, whom they found cooking rice and preparing vegetables in the garden kitchen behind the restaurant. He bought their Tuna for fifty pesos, and he bought the Lapu-Lapu for twenty each.
The boys told Dodong about the dead man, and he nodded and said that the man was a turista who had insulted one of the Choi Boys at Club Basura. The turista had spilled the Choi Boy’s beer, and then had refused to replace it.
“It is a common courtesy to replace it,” said Dodong,“but he didn’t even offer; he didn’t apologize, either. He just waved his hand and laughed and walked away.” Dodong shook his head and spat into the coals. “The Choi Boys caught him walking home down the beach later on, and they beat him with cock-fighting barbs tied to their fists, like this,” Dodong said, demonstrating with a paring knife. “He bled out on the beach. They are still searching for the ones who did it, but . . they are probably in Cebu by now,” he said. He shrugged, smiling. “OK lang. After all . . it is a common courtesy. Everyone knows that. Better not to drink if you can’t hold your rum.”
With that, he deftly cut along the belly of the Tuna and then, with a flick of his wrist, gutted it and threw its entrails into the fire, where they hissed and smoked and bubbled into fat and melted away down the coals. Then Dodong grinned at the boys, and he reached for one of the Lapu Lapu and repeated the process. The veins and organs popped and hissed into the coals and vanished in a tiny whorl of black smoke.
The boys thanked their uncle Dodong, and they left the beach and walked inland, toward the village. Bobong said, “How is it fair that we give him the Lapu-Lapu for twenty pesos when he will cook it in a little oil and calamansi and sell it for three times that in an hour from now?”
Boyett shrugged. “That is the price at Bistro Bistro,” he said. “Dodong can charge them more, because he cooks them, and he has a place for them to eat the fish with a view of the water. You don’t even have a comfortable box to sit on.”
The boys laughed, except for Bobong. It made no sense to him, but he nodded anyway. It was getting hot, and it felt good to finally be inland again, beneath the trees on the loam in the deep shade of the forest. When they came to the village, the boys divided the money equally among the four of them, and Bobong and Boyett accepted a small tax from the others for the use of their skiff. Then the boys all parted ways, and each went home for marienda and a nice long siesta before dinner.
It was just hot enough not to be able to sleep. Boyett and Bobong watched the silvery waves that were made on the ceiling by the sunlight reflected from the ripples on the water in their mother’s laundry pail outside, and they listened to her voice, deep and sweet and knowing, singing softly, rising and falling on its own inner tidal clock. They could barely hear the words she sang; mostly, they heard the warbling melody of her voice, its gentle music drifting through the open window with the scent of fresh Papaya blossoms as they each fell into a shallow, troubled sleep and dreamed of leviathan sharks and dead turistas.
(end)
