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.
4
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1944
“Señora Ballard hates the president and he hates her,” Anissa informed Nicasia that morning.
“Claro que si,” she replied. Many people hated him. Republicans, isolationists, and the followers of Edna Ballard. They were given to shouting how vile the president was to anyone who would listen. The rest of the country loved him enough to re-elect him four times.
“I’m going down to the Plaza today. Ven conmigo?” Anissa asked, and received a willing nod.
Edna dubbed Santa Fe, the small town with its dirt streets, “the Golden Temple of the Sun” when she exhorted all her devotees to leave Chicago and move there with her. If Santa Fe was not golden, at least the sun in its pure blue sky played its part and the influx of devotees paid higher rents than anyone else for small charming mud houses. It was, as well, out of the reach of Japanese bombers on the Pacific and the Germans on the Atlantic, and it was so poor that no one would have marked it for plundering or pillaging.
Four hundred years earlier, the Conquistadors reported it to be one of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, the cities of pure gold, but taking a closer look, all they saw was mud and mountains. No wheels, no steel, no written language. A subsistence economy, natives happy to trade for shells and feathers.
Edna, claiming her husband was an Ascended Master, overlooked the dust and the burros bearing stacks of faggots on their backs and assured her followers that the little town was solidly under Saint Germain’s Protection. And it appeared to be so.
Further, it was the perfect place to honor Saint Germain, beseeching him to cleanse the world of evil with His Purple Flame. The 7,000-foot altitude alone seemed to elevate Edna and Guy’s proximity close enough to hand-deliver the prayers asking to purge America of the Infidel and to allow the coming Golden Age to unfold. Santa Fe became the wartime sanctuary for their ten-foot-tall Saint with His purple robes and His upraised Blazing Sword. He was proclaimed more effective than reluctant Jesus and his shy mother with His Might and Purple Power. So billows of prayers rose to his feet.
This Marvelous Saint was worthy of prayers; He looked the part.
And too, His consort, The Goddess of Liberty on her island in the center
