$14.95
Fiction/Short Stories
n this moving debut collection, Geronimo Tagatac brings us the stories of the Guerrero family and the people who have touched their lives. Here are the farm laborers, dancers, kitchen workers, and soldiers who make up a world that is wrought with pain, nostalgia, and stunning grace. From the widowed Filipino father raising a son in a migrant work camp to the young veteran haunted by the ghost of war, The Weight of the Sun shows us not only what it is to be human, but how the human spirit can grow when faced with overwhelming adversity. Tagatac brings these characters home in our hearts with a poise and dignity that marks a new and powerful voice in short fiction.
“Sometimes a writer comes along with characters so beautifully portrayed and prose so clear and direct that my nerves pulse with energy. Shaking my head, I mutter, ‘wish I had written that story.’ Years ago, when I first heard him read ‘Augustine,’ I was electrified, and I’ve been waiting for this complete collection since that moment. These are wonderful, important stories giving heart and voice to people all-too-often overlooked in mainstream literature.” —Craig Lesley, author of The Sky Fisherman and Burning Fence
“Geronimo Tagatac’s powerful renditions of the Vietnam War’s impact on those who fought and the nation they fought for provides a unique and necessary reminder of that painful experience and a window into the tragedy that is again unfolding, this time in Iraq.” —David F. Schmitz, nonfiction author and Robert Allen Skotheim Chair —of History, Whitman College
Po
rt l a
nd Stat e Uni v er si
Ooligan Press P.O. Box 751 Portland, Oregon 97207-0751 www.publishing.pdx.edu
ISBN 1-932010-11-4
51495 9
Sun
and other stories
Geronimo G. Tagatac
ty
781932 010114
Ooligan
Cover art: George Bebawi Cover design: Bernadette Baker
of the
ligan Press Oo
Weight
The
Geronimo G. Tagatac
“Geronimo Tagatac is a quiet man with a powerful voice. His stories draw you into a world of curious ethnic mixes and cross-cultural situations that surprise, then seem natural and true, and leave you hovering at the edge of thirty-year-old stories that still live, often quiet and hidden, in America today. Maybe they are growing louder.” —Rich Wandschneider, Executive Director, Fishtrap, Inc.
The Weight of the Sun
I
The Weight of the Sun Copyright © 2006 by Geronimo G. Tagatac. All rights reserved. Introduction copyright ©2006 by Geronimo G. Tagatac. First edition published 2006 by: Ooligan Press The Publishing Program at Portland State University P.O. Box 751 Portand, OR 97207-0751 www.publishing.pdx.edu ISBN 10-digit 1-932010-11-4 ISBN 13-digit 978-1-932010-11-4 Cover and interior for this edition designed by Bernadette Baker and Jodi McPhee-Giddings Cover art by George Bebawi Edited by students of Ooligan Press under the direction of Kathryn Juergens and Karen Kirtley
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Introduction
O
ne warm California night when I was twelve years old, I walked with my father into the middle of the plowed field behind the small house where I lived with my parents and younger sister. My father looked up at the star-filled sky and the black hills to the east. He told me about the time the ship carrying him and others from Manila anchored in Hong Kong, and how the lights of the houses on the side of the mountains were so many that he couldn’t tell where they stopped and the stars began. Standing beside my father on the soft carpet of earth, I vowed to myself that someday I would see Hong Kong’s crowded hills and night sky, and a million other places besides. In those days, my father worked in the fields of an Italian immigrant who owned the land and let us live in a wood-framed house that stood in one corner of his farm. Nearby was a bunkhouse for the unmarried Filipino men who worked the land with my father. I listened to the stories they told about their lives in the Philippines. They also spoke of the years they spent in the fields, in restaurant kitchens, in the “little Manilas” of Sacramento and Stockton, and in the taxi-dance halls (places on the edges of some cities to which you had to take a taxi, where for a few cents you could hire a woman for a dance). When I was fifteen, I began working in the summers in the same fields, and in the nearby prune and apricot orchards. Always, mixed in with the creak of ladders and the ring of hoes on earth, were the stories told by these men. They were far from their homeland, some in their fifties and sixties, and most were single and childless.
Still dreaming of adventures in faraway places, I finished high school and went off to college to study math and physics. I left school and drifted, working restaurant jobs and making small change as a coffee house folksinger. I was homeless and broke when a friend of mine delivered an official-looking letter the Defense Department had sent to my last address. It was a draft notice. I entered the service of the United States and spent three years in the army, which included a year’s tour of duty in Vietnam as the demolition specialist on a special forces A-team. On a warm August afternoon in 1966, I returned to civilian life. I stepped out of a cab and stood on the corner of Ninth and San Carlos streets in downtown San Jose. The corner was not far from where I’d climbed through the back window of a vacant apartment to find shelter for the night three years before. I stood there with my duffle bag at my feet, twenty-five years old, tanned and hardened from a year in the bush, and I was suddenly aware that my life had been handed back to me.
What followed were restless and wandering years. I was frantic to
live, to learn, and to make up for the time I had lost. I spent a winter ski-bumming in Aspen, Colorado. I hitchhiked through Europe for three months with a friend, then returned to school in San Jose to study history. In the summers I hitched back to Colorado, where I rock climbed and did odd jobs to support myself. Everything pulled at me. At San Jose State, I took classes in Southeast Asian history and classical political philosophy, studied Japanese, the Chinese Communist revolution, and Roman history. Later, at Western Washington State College, I taught Asian American studies; then I left after a year and went to graduate school at the University of California at Davis. I worked a stint at the Port of Oakland as a planner for loading container ships, spent a year in Taipei studying Mandarin, and spent another year in Hong Kong researching Chinese foreign policy. I traveled through the People’s Republic of China. Returning to graduate school in the U.S., I took up modern and jazz dance. I left grad school without the degree I’d sought in political science and became a legislative consultant, working on legislative proposals related to economic development and foreign trade. Introduction•ix
I married a beautiful woman I’d met as a dancer. We lived in San Francisco and sometimes danced together in a small modern dance company. We had a daughter. For ten years, I put on a tie every weekday morning, went to work, and drove home. I worked a series of state government jobs as an information technology planner, then as an analyst. I wrote reports and memos and tended my career and family. We bought a house, moved to Oregon, and bought another. But in the back of my mind were all the things I’d seen and done and all the people I’d known through the wandering years. They camped around me wherever I went — the aging men in the bunkhouses and the fields, the dead man on the highway in Mississippi, the kid with the gun my platoon had killed on the rubber plantation during the war. The roads, the forests, the snow blowing off the shoulders of the white giants in the Rockies were waking dreams I carried with me wherever I went. The faces and voices, the memories of rivers and heat-distorted highways I could no longer name, made me think I was a little crazy. Ten years ago, I enrolled in a writers’ workshop and began to write in earnest. The stories were already there, trying to push themselves through my skin. I didn’t have a choice: it was either write or go truly crazy. And when I began, everything fell into place. I realized there had been a reason for those journeys and those visions. They were the seeds of stories that grew out of my memories.
Most of the stories in The Weight of the Sun are about the members
of the fictional Guerrero family. They cover a period of roughly seventy-two years, beginning in 1929. A few of the characters, such as Jacinto and his son Mateo, appear more than once. Others appear indirectly through the memories of younger family members, as in “Foreigner” and “The Anatolia Café.” The Guerreros are farm laborers, dancers, kitchen workers, bureaucrats, body builders, ski bums, soldiers, college students, and backpackers. Some are broke and homeless; others are just plain lost. — Geronimo G. Tagatac Salem, Oregon May 2004 •Introduction
The Center of the World
T
ony waits for his father at the edge of the yard, beside the dirt road. He has done this every day after school for the last three years. He stands in the slanting light, beneath the dark blue sky, and feels a growing dampness in the air. There is a breath of movement, a small distortion on the horizon, and he knows it to be the blade ends of hoes, then the heads and shoulders of the men coming over the gentle rise at the far end of the dirt road. He knows his father a quarter-mile away by the angle at which he carries his hoe — steeper than the angles of those carried by his uncles, Stanley, Mariano, and Tamayo. The light shades from yellow to deep orange, and the sun falls toward the aquamarine layer that lies on the western horizon. The men are like the first wisps of darkness rising out of the earth. To Tony it seems as though the contours of the fields, and plants that lie in them have given up the men in deference to the night. He can almost feel the mixed cadence of their walks, the textures of their faces, and the soft give and take of their voices. The irrigation ditch by the side of the road is a deep scar across the face of Tony’s world. He watches the men coming toward him and feels as though the center of the world is approaching, because to Tony, these men possess an intimacy with the dust, leaves, air, and light. When Tony sits in his classroom at William McKinley Public School watching Mr. Dickerson, his heavy-set, clean-shaven teacher, he sees a man almost without form, definition, or color. In contrast to the sharp angles of his father’s dark face, Mr. Dickerson’s face is
pink and smooth. Sometimes Tony watches Mr. Dickerson’s white hand, writing dry, scratchy words on the blackboard, and thinks of his father standing naked under the shower pipe in the bath house. The water makes the muscles of his father’s brown shoulders, arms, and chest gleam like the blade of a new knife. Coming to the edge of the field where Tony waits, the men stop and talk for a while. Tony stands beside his father and listens as they speak softly, in the Ilocano dialect of their Philippine homeland. Their laughter is light as dust, the laughter of men held in the familiar, gentle embrace of fatigue. When his father takes his hand in his own warm, callused hand, Tony feels as though he is connected to a hot, bitter current that runs through his father’s arm from somewhere deep in his body. He remembers the windy March afternoon when his father showed him the plants he had thought were weeds, telling him which were good to cook and to eat. His father told him how he and his uncles had often lived with loneliness, hunger, and exhaustion in the bad times, when there were no jobs. His father said that such things break the hearts of other men. Sicken and kill them. But not his father’s people. Never. His father has told him that when he is a man, there will be times when he too will be alone. He has said that if Tony carries an overcoat to sleep under, a piece of string to tie things with, matches to light a fire, and a knife to cut things, he will live. He reaches into his pants pocket and feels the gentle S-shape of the bone-handled pocketknife that his Uncle Tamayo gave him on his twelfth birthday. Tony looks down at the white scar across the fingertips of his father’s left hand. He remembers the morning he saw his father swing the blue steel blade of the cauliflower knife too close to that hand, nearly severing the ends of three fingers. His father had cursed harshly with an anger that Tony found both frightening and beautiful. Then he thrust the long, curved blade of the knife into the damp earth between the rows of cauliflower as though he were stabbing the thing that had wounded him. Blood rushed out of the cuts, over his fingers, down his hand, and dripped into the ploughed furrow at his feet. His father pulled his blue bandanna from the back pocket of his pants and wrapped it around his fingers. Then, when he retrieved the knife, the blade came away clean from the thirsty soil. Without a word, he had gone on working through the rest of the morning. In those moments, Tony stood in terror and envy of Geronimo G. Tagatac •19
his father’s power over blood and pain. And then a voice in him said, someday he will give me that power. When the men have gone, Tony follows his father into the bath house — a nail-scarred, two-by-four structure with corrugated tin walls and roof. The bathtub stands in the corner of the concrete floor, and a scrubbing board hangs from a nail above it. He watches his father hang his hat on a nail and wash his hands and face in the water from the tap above one end of the chipped bathtub. They cross the yard to the house, and when his father opens the door, Tony smells the aroma of cooking rice and red beans with salt pork. His father sits in a green wooden chair, unlaces his work boots, and sighs as he pulls them away from his stocking feet. Tony smells the dust from his father’s clothes mixed with the old leather and sweat smell of his boots and thinks about being big enough to wear such boots. His father brings the chair to the table where Tony’s young stepmother has placed three stainless steel tablespoons alongside the mismatched plates of food. The woman is only seven years older than Tony. She is a stocky, light-skinned woman who ties her hair in a bun. Tony’s real mother is distant, like the stories that Mr. Dickerson tells about Lincoln and Roosevelt. He remembers her as a slim, olive-skinned woman with brown eyes and light brown hair. Tony imagines her living beyond the bright smudge of sun that is masked by the thin sheet of high winter clouds. His father had taken him to see his mother a month after she went away. They rode east on a bus for three days, and during the nights, his father covered him with his brown wool overcoat as Tony slept in his seat. When they arrived in the city, Tony’s father took him into a very tall building with a smooth lobby floor of blue and red tile. They rode in an elevator with a dark wood interior then walked down a long carpeted hallway. His mother’s roommate let them into the apartment then went into another room. Tony stood on the thick white carpet and looked at the morning light coming through the filmy curtains. There was a big, bright, flower-patterned couch and lamps with blue glass bases. He had never seen anything as lovely as that room. His mother came out of her room. For a tiny moment, seeing Tony, her light-brown eyes softened, but then they hardened and turned on his father. She turned to face him, and they began to 20 • The Weight of the Sun
argue without looking at Tony. His parents’ voices went back and forth, loud and fast. She, then he, then she again. Tony wanted to find an empty space, a path between their words that would allow her to come to him. He wanted them to stop for a moment and for her to walk across that interval of silence, to take him up into her arms. Tony stood on the beautiful carpet, breathless and paralyzed, feeling the smell of her hair and her skin, and the sound of her voice being torn out of every cell in his body. The words please, please, filled his head, but his lips would not make the sound of these simple words because he knew that neither he nor they were big enough or strong enough to pull her back to him. Finally, his father turned to leave. Tony looked at his mother and saw her turn away from them. He watched the back of her silky pink dress and her thick hair as she went into her bedroom and closed the door. Tony’s father took him out through the door with gleaming brass handles. He held Tony’s hand as they walked down the long hall lined with doors just like his mother’s. They walked past the potted plants and chrome ashtray stands, their mismatched footfalls muffled by the dark red carpet. As they stood together in the descending elevator, Tony realized that he would never see his mother again. He began to cry. His father picked him up and held him in his strong arms as Tony wept against the front of his overcoat. His stepmother’s rages erupt without warning. When she is angry or impatient, she strikes Tony across the back with a wooden spoon or a piece of kindling. Sometimes she slaps him suddenly across the side of his startled face, sending him running out of the house, holding his hand to a streaming eye or stinging cheek. He feels no warmth from her and he gives none in return. Tony tries not to go within arm’s reach of her, and he hates the strange thing that holds his father and his stepmother together. She sits down at the table beside his father, and Tony watches her strong white arms and hands as she begins to eat. His eyes flash quickly across her dark eyes and wide face. “It would be nice to have meat in the house,” she says. Tony’s father puts his spoon down and stares at the food on his plate. “Are you saying I don’t take care of my family?” “I didn’t say that. I just said —” Geronimo G. Tagatac • 21
Tony’s father rises suddenly and walks out of the house, banging the door shut behind him. Tony starts to follow, to join his father. “Finish your food!” his stepmother says. When he has eaten his food and rinsed his plate, Tony goes out into the yard. He sees his father standing beside the Pontiac, silhouetted against the horizon’s thin red edge. In the way his father stands, hands on his hips, Tony knows a silent rage. Tony has seen men become aware of that same raw stillness in his father, watched them stop in mid-sentence and back away a step or two. Without warning, his father turns to him. “Want to go to the store with me?” His father is silent during the twenty-minute drive to the corner of White and Marshall roads, where the Soto’s grocery store stands beside Ponzi’s Garage with its red gas pumps. Mr. Soto, who is about to close up, lets them in. “How can I help you, Jacinto?” Mr. Soto says to Tony’s father. Tony’s father takes out his wallet, opens it, and removes all the money he has. “I want to buy some meat.” When they return to the house a half-hour later, Tony’s father carries a large paper shopping bag. Tony’s stepmother looks up from the table where she is reading a magazine. Tony watches her as she watches his father put the brown bag down next to the sink and begin stacking the white packages of meat onto the counter. “You wanted meat. Here it is,” he says, quickly stacking eight packages on the dark wood counter. “What will we …” she starts to ask. Tony’s father walks over to the far wall, removes one of his work shirts hanging from a nail, and walks out the door. Tony follows his father out to the bath shed, leaving his stepmother standing beside the counter, looking down at the white packages. As he goes out the door, he hears her say, “Touchy Pinoy.” Tony smiles as he enters the bath shed. His father is scrubbing his work shirt against the tin ridges of the washboard. The dim, yellow overhead light accentuates the muscles of his arms as he scrubs. He soaps another part of the wet shirt and resumes scrubbing, the muscles of his jaws working in the yellow light. Suddenly his father hurls the shirt across the bath shed with all his strength. The wet shirt slamming into the wall makes a sound as loud as a deer rifle, 22 • The Weight of the Sun
and Tony jumps. When Tony looks at his father, he sees his hands clutching the edge of the tub as though he is about to lift it and throw it at the wall as well. But his father’s face is bent toward the bottom of the tub, looking at something. Something is making him laugh. Tony starts to laugh with him, because he thinks his father is laughing at the wonderful joke he has played on Tony’s stepmother with the meat. And then Tony realizes that his father is weeping. The next morning, Tony waits for the school bus beside the twolane, blacktop road that lies half a mile down the dirt road from his family’s shack. The morning wind ruffles the weeds bordering the broccoli field. Tony looks up at the vacant, windblown sky and remembers the sound of his father’s sobs. He feels a dark emptiness inside him, as though the earth has shifted in the night and left him alone in a far-off place. He whispers the list of things that his father has told him he must carry. A knife for cutting, string for tying, matches for fire, an overcoat for the cold. He repeats the names of these things, again and again, to wind that washes over the silent fields.
Geronimo G. Tagatac • 23
Archangel
T
he chopper carrying the wounded soldier came down out of the dark sky, the rising clatter of its blades and the flash of its lights like an anxious star with a last-minute message. When they pulled his stretcher out, his eyes had the bewildered look of a man who had been mistakenly put into someone else’s broken body. Lillian Ocampo would not have heard the soldier’s voice had it not been for two circumstances. The first was that he was the only casualty that night. If they’d been busier, he might have been triaged into the “expectant” category and set aside until the frantic surgeons and nurses had gotten to others who could be saved. In that case, he would have died earlier. The second was that with his Asian looks and in his bloodied camouflage uniform, he might have been mistaken for an enemy soldier. But the chopper medic, who said that he had once gotten very drunk in the Morning Star Bar with the wounded man, made sure that the hospital staff knew he was “one of our guys.” Hearing this, Lillian assumed that he was from one of the special units, maybe the Mike Force, a rare creature from the war’s shadows. The surgeon removed the sharp pieces of metal that lay warming in the depths of the soldier’s compact body and cut away ruined tissue and organs, the destroyed, useless parts of him that had died first. He sutured back together what still lived, put an I.V. into the largest vein in his left ankle, and rolled him into the recovery area. There, he was left under Lillian’s care. “Last one, short-timer,” the surgical nurse said to Lillian.
Lillian would be leaving the next afternoon, after two tours incountry. In twenty-four hours she’d be flying east, high over the Pacific. For her, it was the last night of the war. Through the spare hours of darkness the soldier was so still Lillian couldn’t be sure he was alive. The pressure of his blood, his breath and warmth were bleeding out of him into the cracks between the walls, the floors, and the ceiling. “I need to tell you something,” he whispered an hour later, startling her. It was as though a piece of statuary had bent toward her out of graveyard stillness and spoken softly. Then coughs shook his chest and he was silent, exhausted from the drugs and the effort. “Don’t talk. You need to rest,” she replied, looking into his delicately shadowed face. She wondered if he suspected how little time he had left.
On the gurney, Isaiah fell back through the years of his life to the
summer of his eighth year. He remembered traveling east from Sacramento, the rise and fall of the road, the way the pines speared through the earth’s flesh toward the empty sky, and how the white granite boulders looked like big, crooked teeth. Then there were days of bright light that hurt his eyes, and heat that lingered through the slow, insect-filled nights. He pictured his father’s face with its high forehead and the straight, light brown hair that sometimes fell over his right eye. His father’s features were so much lighter and sharper than his mother’s dark, soft-planed Filipina face had been. Her absence hurt the insides of his chest and stomach, a pain as sharp as the time he had cut his hand with one of his father’s knives. When they crossed the thick, brown Sabine River between Texas and Louisiana, his father told Isaiah that he would be staying with some people while his father worked. He said Isaiah must behave himself—not shame him. In New Orleans, his father took him to an apartment where a woman and a man lived. They were Americans. He barely understood what the woman was saying except that her name was Gladys. He had never heard a Louisiana accent. His father gave Gladys an envelope with some money inside, embraced Isaiah, and told him that he would be back soon. Isaiah cried desperately not to be left behind, but his father went down the creaking stairs to his car and drove away. Geronimo G. Tagatac • 25
Isaiah wanted to like Gladys. She had light hair and brown eyes the color of honey. This woman was shorter and heavier than his mother. He wanted her to smile, to say something silly that would make them both laugh as his mother had before the divorce. Her husband was a small, thin man with thick black hair combed straight back from his face, and he said very little. Gladys took Isaiah into a large bedroom. There was an empty crib near the wall farthest from the windows. She pointed to it and told him that was where he would sleep. Out of politeness he did not tell her he was too old to sleep in a baby’s bed. When he walked over to the crib and touched the small, almost new comforter, she struck his hand away. “Don’t you ever put your black hand on that! That was my baby’s. I don’t want to see you touch it, do you hear me?” Looking down at Isaiah, she pointed to the space underneath the crib, where the polished floor disappeared into the shadows. “You’ll sleep down there.” His hand stung where she’d struck him, and his eyes filled with tears. “You start bawling and I’ll give you something to cry about,” she said. On his second afternoon beneath the crib, Isaiah could not resist the allure of the light shining through a perfume bottle on the dresser. He crossed the polished floor, pausing to look at the patterns on the rug at the foot of the large bed. Then he went up to the dresser, marveling at how much its neatly arranged, silver-handled brush and comb, and the perfectly aligned row of white jars with wide, gold lids resembled his mother’s. He did not hear the conversation in the next room stop nor the bedroom door open. When he looked up, Gladys was standing above and behind him, her light hair hanging loose at her shoulders. He started to explain about his mother’s things, about the way the glass perfume bottle bent the light. He saw her right arm rise in a long arc, heard a thin, whispering sound. A leather belt struck his shoulders and slashed sideways against his bare legs. He couldn’t force the words past the stinging pain. He knew he had to get back into the shadowy space beneath the crib. Her hair flew out around her head and she screamed at him from above, “Don’t you ever touch my things! Stupid black monkey!” From where he lay sobbing, Isaiah heard her go back into the kitchen. He heard her outraged voice, then all of them laughing. 26 • The Weight of the Sun
After that, he was never allowed out from under the crib except to go to the bathroom, to school, or to eat his meals. He never understood why she thought he was black when anyone could see that he was actually light brown. In the early evenings, he would lie on the cool wood surface and feel the way the last light filtering through the white curtains seemed to make one side of his face glow. He would look up at the wooden slats that held the small mattress and imagine that he was standing with his back against one wall, facing another. He pictured Gladys’ pale baby floating, still and breathless, on the other side of the soft wall before him. All that he had to do was climb up the shadowy ladder formed by the slats into the darkness above. If he could get to the top of the wall, he could ask the baby why she had left her mother. He could bring her back with him so Gladys would be happy and be kind to him. Maybe she would even tell his father to come and get him because she had her own child back.
Lillian checked the wounded soldier’s I.V. before going out to have a
cigarette. Looking at him, she wondered if he was what her brother, Antonio, might have grown into had it not been for the head-on collision seven years before, the lives of Antonio and his three friends smashed and scattered into the pre-dawn darkness of an otherwise deserted, two-lane highway. Lillian saw again the stillness of her father’s face and heard the sound of her mother’s screams, as though a furious wind had possessed her. She remembered sitting, stunned and dry-eyed, in the creaking pew during the funeral mass at Saint Michael’s, beneath the luminous gaze of the saints and angels. Lillian stood just outside the ward entrance, the red glow of her cigarette a tiny beacon in the dark. She kept thinking about how good it would be to take the edge off the night with a tall, iced glass of rum and Coke — something to blur the face of the soldier on the gurney, to make it a part of the great bruise of the other faces and bodies on her memory. She could not help wondering what must be going through the soldier’s mind. Perhaps he was remembering some pretty stateside girl, the childhood smell of his mother’s perfume, or a day beside a lake with his father.
Geronimo G. Tagatac • 27
Isaiah floated back across the years to the last Saturday at the end
of his first month with Gladys. His father had taken him to spend the night with him on the fishing boat where he lived. Below deck, he showed him the tiny galley where he cooked rice and chicken for both of them. He took him to the dark engine compartment that smelled of gas and oil. Then he led him into the wheelhouse, stood him on a stool, and let him play with the wheel. Beyond the glass window of the wheelhouse, deep green islands broke the distant line between the brown water and the cloudless sky. Isaiah wanted his father to start the boat’s engine, to steer them through the shadowed channels between the islands, far toward the distant crack of the horizon. And when they got to end of the sky and the world, they would pry apart the soft edges of the horizon and escape into whatever lay beyond. “I want to live with you,” he said, turning to his father. “What am I supposed to do with you when we go out to fish? It’s real dangerous, kid.” Then his father pulled him close and said in an almost sad voice, “I want you in school. You’re going to have a better life than me if I can help it.” Isaiah remembered how, the next morning, his astonished father had found him sleeping on the floor against a bulkhead, his small body curled around the upright of the small galley table. Isaiah grew to regard the time beneath the crib as a part of the new, foreign world he had entered. He imagined other children, all over the city, lying alone beneath their beds. Sometimes, when the light was right, he could make himself as clear as the glass perfume bottle on the dresser. He would float into the intersection of light and glass and fly upward through the thin film of space. Flying west through the cool air above the mountains, he would dive down to the rust-colored house where they used to live and would hang in the air above the yard where the wind snapped the white sheets on the clothesline and made the pale green leaves hiss in the tall trees. No one was ever there. The only sound was of the wind blowing into the open back door of the house, an invisible current pushing the red-checked curtains out of the front windows, like tongues thrusting out of silently screaming mouths. He would float a few feet above the middle of the windy yard and call his father and mother in a voice as thin as the wind. But the only sound would be 28 • The Weight of the Sun
that of the wind in the trees. Then he would wake up, beneath the crib, weeping silently for fear of waking Gladys. In his second month at Saint Joseph’s school, the teacher sent Isaiah and seven other students to the blackboard to solve addition problems. When they returned to their seats one boy remained at the blackboard, unable to provide an answer to his problem. The teacher walked, tight-faced, up to the boy and told him to hold out his right hand and make a small fist, knuckles up. She struck his knuckles five times with a wooden ruler. Isaiah’s insides winced with each crack. That afternoon, nuns formed them into two lines and escorted them into the great nave, flanked by rows of dark columns. Isaiah stood on the endless stone floor and looked up into the soaring lines of the arched ceiling far above him. He looked up at a stained glass window and saw Gladys. The light streamed through her face. She was swinging her belt high above her head, except this one was bright and silvery. A wind that he could not feel blew her light brown hair back, away from her face. She was wearing a short maroon dress that showed her strong, pale legs, the left one trailing behind her as though she were running. Her right foot was planted on the muscled back of a dark man who was lying face down, struggling to rise. And then he knew why the nuns were showing him this place: they were revealing his present and his future. He was the one with the dark, anguished face, the straining muscles in his arms. Gladys the one with the large, iridescent bird’s wings, her face radiant. After that, Isaiah avoided eye contact with the teacher. In class, he was silent, face tilted down as if, through the force of concentration, he could push himself into the ink marks and scratches that obscured the worn wood surface of his desk. He was frightened of the way the knotted, black rope at the waist of her habit swung in unison with her smooth, silent stride. He learned to mouth the words of the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary.” He was terrified of being found ignorant, of being beaten across the knuckles by the tall woman in black. In the schoolyard, he hid among the shouting, running swirls of his classmates. The words “stupid black monkey” echoed in his head, and he came to yearn for the close, quiet safety beneath the crib.
Geronimo G. Tagatac • 29
When Lillian went to check on the young soldier, his eyes were
closed and his breathing shallow. She put the end of her stethoscope against his chest, listening for his pulse. It was there, but soft and erratic. She wondered if it had been this way for Antonio in his last moments. She recalled how, before her enlistment when she was still drinking, she would often lie on her bed, her face beneath the aroma of her own hair, skin, and breath, trying in her mind to enter the thin space of her brother’s last moments.
Isaiah remembered the Saturday morning, nearly a year after his
arrival, when Gladys told him to dress himself and go into the living room. His small, packed suitcase stood waiting on the carpet beside the oak coffee table. He stood off the red Persian rug, in the small, bare space between the blue couch and the plump, cloth-covered easy chair. The gleam of the polished hardwood floor beneath his shoes comforted him. He felt as though he were standing on a cool sheet of reflected light. He could hear someone washing dishes in the kitchen. To Isaiah, the clatter was the sound of something fierce and dangerous that could turn on him without warning. He stood very still in the well-ordered space of the room, put time aside, and let himself fade into the light streaming through the cream-colored curtains. It might have been an hour before he heard footsteps on the stairs. And then his father was standing beside him. Gladys and her husband stood ranged before them, silently waiting for his father to give them the final white envelope of money. When he and his father turned to go, Isaiah did not say goodbye nor look back at them. He often spent his time alone in the fields and orchards of California where his father lived and worked. But even among the rows of trees, or the under the open skies of the Santa Clara Valley, he knew that something waited, just beyond the edge of his vision, a cruel and hissing shadow from his childhood, a creature that could do more than simply cut his flesh. It could be the edge of sarcasm in a teacher’s voice over a poorly answered question or a girl’s laughter over the way he wore his clothes. In high school, Isaiah was the only boy who did not go to his senior prom. The space and the solitude worked its way into him, making him a quiet, watchful boy. 30 • The Weight of the Sun
He spent a year at the local state college. By then he had grown in height and his shoulders had broadened. Women began to look at him. Isaiah held them off with his formality and good manners, his unwillingness to be drawn into personal conversations. One afternoon, as he sat at a small cafeteria table reading Big Two Hearted River, he looked up to see a young woman sitting across from him. She had amber-colored eyes and thick blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. Without taking her eyes off his, she asked, “You read Hemingway?” She could have had no idea of the terror that rose up in him and bound him to his seat. He never went back to the cafeteria. At the end of the semester, Isaiah enlisted in the army. He was glad to escape to the sparseness of the barracks. He disappeared into a world of foot and wall lockers, of rows of bunk beds standing on the uncompromising, waxed floors of squad bays, their hard surfaces echoing the brief, clear shouts of NCOs. It was a womanless world of steel helmets, rucksacks, and polished combat boots. In the winter, after basic and advanced infantry training, they sent Isaiah east, to the harsh atmosphere of the airborne school at Fort Benning. It was a vast place echoing with the sound of a thousand boots running in unison, one-hundred-and-twenty beats per minute, in the frosty, early morning air of Georgia. He was taught to push himself into the dark, one-hundred knot slipstream that waited beyond the open door of a plane, to fall away from the diminishing sound of engines toward the black earth’s rising curve. Isaiah would look up at the green palm of his open parachute canopy, holding him between the starlit sky and the smell of the earth, and feel a strange kind of safety. He volunteered for the Special Forces in 1964 and left for Vietnam in June of 1965. He was patient with the thick, hot grasp of the night. He did not mind the endless waiting in the shadows. He gladly folded himself into their soft edges and drifted along their contours. Isaiah thought he had found what he was looking for. He thought that right up to the moment he heard the faint sound, high above and behind him, in the forest. That sound seemed so familiar that he resisted the impulse to dive for cover. It was like the whisper of a forgotten friend. In the instant before the sharp crack of the explosion, he realized he had spent his life walking toward the exact spot where he had paused. It was as if Gladys had carried him Geronimo G. Tagatac • 31
there, and there she had pinned him. As he floated up, out of the anesthesia’s embrace, he saw Lillian’s brown face, her knowing eyes pulling gently at him, the way someone might awaken a lover. In that instant, he realized that she had not come in anger or retribution, and he began to weep quietly.
Lillian looked into wounded man’s dark eyes, knowing that he
would be the last man she would see die in the war. In that moment, he became all the men and boys who had come under her hands. In him she saw their suffering and lost dreams, their eternally frozen strength and terror. He was all their grieving families. She would have done anything to hover above him, to force breath back through his parted mouth and calm the stumbling rhythm of his heart. Then, quite simply, the soldier was gone. Lillian was left standing beside him, her arms braced on the edge of the gurney, weeping as a river of broken lives flowed through her, a river that had its source in her brother’s death. And so she went home.
Lillian often found herself going into the large, old sanctuary at Saint Michael’s when she felt the urge for a drink. She would sit in the front pew and stare at the Italian Renaissance-style painting of Saint Michael, known as The Protector. It gave her peace to look into that calm, beautiful face, to see his light hair swept back by the rush of his flight. She loved the certainty in his eyes and the strength of his sword arm, raised high above his head. Lillian imagined the cringing figure beneath his right foot to be the vanquished demon of her own past.
32 • The Weight of the Sun