but he smiled, and suddenly Phyllis was mesmerized by a vision of herself being courted wearing glamorous clothes in a place without mud. She, his leading lady with the arresting red hair. He, always the gentleman in excellent tweeds.
She felt Russell’s hangover, she felt his attraction to her, and it made her feel momentarily like a queen.
“You may be an asthmatic if you choose. I think you’re a great gal,” he said, smiling at her, squinting. What a bloodshot charmer! And last night with a drink in his left hand, she had been taken by him; he was debonair, intelligent, fit, strong and pitifully, lamentably misunderstood. He’d had a terrible go with wives and now he hoped he’d learned his lesson. He was badly in need of a pure-hearted girl, like herself.
He told her how sweet and nice she was, not selfish and spoiled like the others.
It was clear then that he was to be her fast ride out of Dawson Creek.
When he said, “I’d be happy to teach you how to shoot; that is, if you don’t already know how,” she accepted.
The gun fit her perfectly. A Churchill 29” side-by-side ladies shotgun he’d had lying about.
And he was handsome and rich. And because he found her fascinating, she was.
The lumber camp was only the beginning. He had properties down in the States.
And now, he was being held at the Palm Beach County morgue, being chilled on a slab, waiting for someone to poke him and say, Yes, that’s the one. That’s him, all right.
His death was another chapter. Her grief was incremental once she grasped that she was wealthy in her own right, she preened, certain that the bank account bestowed both wisdom and a lifelong contentment. When she spoke, crowds would quiet, attending to her thoughts. The world would bow to her. She felt powerful and beautiful, the owner of a fine house with rolling lawns and lantana bushes, two cars and a library. A library and the elegant shotgun. Hers was a new delirious future spreading before her like a highway to the horizon.
The pity was that Russell got sacrificed in the process.
Mum and Dad—they’re the sorry ones now. She knew that her aunt would pass on the news in a letter to be sent immediately by air to Aberdeen. The news of her acquisitions would set her above their scorn now, in spite of how her small-minded mother continued to rebuke her, insisting she’d tainted all of them—the family—forever.
And yet, when she thought of him after the morgue ordeal, the theater went dark. She no longer felt his presence. It must have been that he no longer thought of her, buoying and transforming her as always into an alluring being. She was just his lonely redhead now, money in her pocket for the first time. Still she knew that she was more than that, more than the fictional creation of a dead man. How was it that he had left the earthly plane so hastily and not stayed to communicate with her, to encourage her?
To call back his memory, as a legacy, she assumed his hatred and vigorous revulsion for his former wives. Pledging herself as a living memorial to his presence, she fanned the coals of his disgust. Feeling the same tightness in her chest, and his frustrations, she set out to vanquish every woman he’d ever slept with. She owed him that.
But Anissa was the primary target and like a true warrior, she studied the enemy. In his library she accumulated every photo album he had, stacking them on the dining room table.
Obsessed with his past, she filed through old photos and barely paused to examine the ones of his first wife and three children. She yearned to know everything possible about Anissa. She cared less about how his first wife dressed, about how she crossed her legs in what silk upholstered chairs and held her iced tea. Her focus was Anissa, the second wife.
Everything surrounding this last one both mesmerized and repulsed her. There she was, a blonde skier in gabardine pants in St. Anton, Austria, with her wary smile. Then again, photographed often in bars wearing hats with barrier cocktail veils that might burst into flames from cigarettes, or at the very least prevent her from sipping martinis. Anissa in her cocktail veils, little black dresses, beauty parlor hair and manicures before she threw it all over and joined the I AMers, swearing eternal sobriety and abstinence. Anissa, whose flesh-eating lawyers had pecked away at poor dear Russell, tormenting the both of them.
Phyllis could not take her transfixed eyes off her pictures. Later she pulled back from the table heavy under the stacks of albums and rose to fetch Anissa’s engraved shotgun with the walnut stock, and vowed never to relinquish the Churchill. It was far too fine. Let the lawyers make demands.
Phyllis coveted the grand shotgun she held in her hand, delighting in the perfect balance of it. Possessing the enemy’s weapon gave her its intrinsic power. Primitive tribes knew that shooting the enemy was weak, but that eating the enemy gave cannibals great force and vigor. Nevertheless, she acquiesced to simply possessing the gun rather than being served Anissa’s brains simmered in the cup of her skull. All she in fact needed to overpower the woman was the gun and it was solidly in her hands. The lawyers might well make their demands, nothing would come of them.
Anissa, the legal bereaved widow, did in fact call again regarding the matter of her shotgun, but she was a day too late.
2
Allied Prisoners of War
Camp, Cabanatuan,
Philippine Islands, 1943
Pvt. Melo Garcia and Pfc. Arsenio Lujan slumped back on the patch of shaded dirt next to the Cogan grass, confused and debating what to type. In their cracked unwashed hands they held four blank postcards doled out by the Red Cross with the instructions that they were to type their messages in fifty short simple-to-understand words—personal matters only— no mention of the Japs, prison conditions, or the war. Type only. Both prisoners were twenty-one years old, both from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“I should tell ‘em about my dysentery?” Melo muttered. “How the Gook guard smashed my hand for not doing what he said in Japanese?” He glanced across the baked dirt grounds of the prison camp to check out the line forming outside the American central control office. From the hopefulness of the men in line, he guessed there was more than one typewriter inside. “I don’t understand goddamned Japanese.”
“Only tell ‘em you’re alive,” Senio said. As for being alive, there were still close to 1,300 POWs from New Mexico among the 9,000-plus Allied, non-Filipino captives in the muggy latrine-stinking jungle prison camp. The Japs let all the Filipino natives go free and only used the white men for hard labor.
“Don’t waste words. If they get the card, you’re alive. But you got to type it in English. No Spanish. Only typing.”
“Me and Mamacita talk Spanish.”
“Can’t say you’re starving, they’ll scratch it out. Nothing about the food.” For lugao, watery rice soup, they boiled one pound of carabao meat to feed 50 large men, 200 pounds for 10,000. Then after they boiled the carabao to mush, they threw in moldy rice and the men dubbed it Tojo water.
“How many words is it to say how we followed the smell and found Ricardo Mares dead under the infirmary floor? Dysentery and cerebral malaria, like all us suckers here in Cabanatuan…”
“Yeah, she always liked Ricardo. She’ll be real upset, but that’s prison conditions. So you can’t
