OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 21

  I close my eyes and I breathe out for the last time. Around me, Pig is screaming as Fletcher’s last arrow strikes its prey. They will work for us, now.

  Finding Those Who Are Lost

  By Celestine Trinidad

  The once-prosperous city of Tacloban lay in ruins; its streets littered with dirt and debris, many of its people buried beneath the rubble. Maria Sinukuan got to work as soon as she arrived. She whispered orders to her animal subjects: the mice, ants, and spiders crawled underneath the collapsed houses to see if anyone else could be saved; the birds flew off into the sky to look for survivors in the villages cut off from the rest of the town; and the horses and carabaos started carrying the wounded to the port, where Lady Cacao’s ship waited to ferry more people out of the island.

  Maria then turned her attention to giving out food and water to the survivors in the evacuation centers. She gave a sack of food each to the social workers and other volunteers, and they distributed this to the victims. Rare tears sprang into her eyes as she watched how the people wolfed down every morsel of the food like it was the first meal they had had in days—or like it was the last meal they would ever have.

  A white butterfly flitted towards her, lingering near her ear. She tilted her head closer to it, and a few moments later, her expression hardened.

  “And where is he now?” she whispered, in a language no one but the butterfly understood.

  She nodded after another pause. “I see. Thank you for telling me.” The butterfly landed on her cheek, staying there for a heartbeat, then flew away.

  She turned to the leader of the volunteers from her own hometown of Arayat, a woman named Nena, and handed to her the sack she was holding. “Please take care of this for me for a little while, Aling Nena,” she said. “I have an urgent matter to attend to. I will be back as soon as I can.” She was about to leave when she suddenly stopped and called over her shoulder, “The food inside that sack will never run out, as long you do not let anyone look inside it. Please don’t forget. Because if you do, the food inside it will be turned into rocks.”

  Aling Nena, who was already about to peek inside the sack, gave a little gasp and hastily looked away from it.

  Maria walked into the city, scanning the crowd. She finally tracked him down working outside what used to be an old school, where volunteers from all over the archipelago had managed to clear enough of the wreckage. They were now putting up tents to provide a temporary shelter for the victims. Juan—her most persistent, most annoying suitor—was in his human form, which in Maria’s opinion did little to improve on his real form. He was raising a tent all by himself, without even breaking into a sweat, even as four men beside him were struggling to put up one. She was not impressed, not in the least bit. The feat was only to be expected, given what he was: a tikbalang, a half-human, half-horse creature with the strength of four—humans and horses.

  He spotted Maria through the crowd, and he ran over to meet her. “Darling, you’re finally here! I’m—”

  Maria only glared at him, and a gust of wind came out of nowhere and knocked him off his feet.

  Juan only got up and brushed the dirt from his camisa and trousers. He beamed at her. “I’m so glad to see you! The people here have been awaiting your arrival. It was all they could ever talk about—”

  “Where are they?” Maria cut in.

  “They? Who? The ones awaiting your arrival? Well, they’re here, obviously—”

  “You know who I mean, tikbalang,” Maria said frostily. “The volunteers from Manila, the ones who were with you when you boarded Lady Cacao’s ship yesterday morning. I received a report that only the ones from Arayat got here today, the ones who came with me.”

  Juan shrugged. “Maybe they got lost.”

  “Exactly,” Maria said. “Lost. But you were supposed to be with them, and you’re here. Of course, I was a fool to allow a tikbalang to join them, when getting people lost is exactly what you do—”

  “Sometimes it’s better when people get lost,” Juan said.

  “Well I wish you would get lost, sometimes,” Maria snapped.

  Juan went on, as he pretended not to have heard her retort, or rather, that she ever said it at all. “How are you, Maria?” he murmured.

  “What do you mean?” Maria said peevishly. “Besides being immensely annoyed at this very moment? Stop changing the topic!”

  “You can feel them, I know,” he said. “You can feel their anguish and pain, both the thousands dead and the millions more still living in despair. I cannot imagine how you can stay here for this long.”

  “It must be done,” Maria said. “These people need my help now, most of all.” She sighed, a deep sigh that reflected the heaviness of her heart. “But—oh, stop distracting me! Answer my question! Where are the volunteers from Manila?”

  Juan looked back at the men building tents. “There is talk of a mayor of a nearby city, who is staying here, in Tacloban,” he said. “Two days ago, he stopped the volunteers right at the port and told them that all donations for his city should go through him first. He said that this is because control had not yet been established in the other villages, and looting was already rampant, so he did not want to start a riot among the people when they see the volunteers bringing food to them. So they agreed and turned over everything to his care.”

  There was a chorus of chirps and twitters from the sky, and Maria looked up. Six birds—five pigeons and a maya bird—flew down towards the earth and surrounded her. She raised a hand for silence, as they all kept tweeting all at the same time, and she finally had to shout above the din, “One at a time, please!”

  The birds fell silent, but Juan carried on as if nothing had interrupted them.

  “So he took all the food and water that had been donated,” Juan said, “and since the relief goods were now his to control, he chose who to give the relief goods to. He gave the goods to the villages that supported him in the previous election. And because of that, some of the other villages have still not received any aid at this time—mostly the villages who did not support him in the last election.”

  She glared at him, then looked at the birds. They huddled beside each other, ducking their heads, making the space they occupied smaller.

  “You may speak now,” she said.

  The pigeons started to chirp again, but spoke one by one, this time.

  Maria looked pointedly at Juan. “It seems that the volunteers from Manila somehow found their way to Talisayan,” she said. “The people from this barangay said food and water had not reached them for days now, even though their mayor has been receiving a steady flow of donations and relief goods from all over the archipelago. The volunteers do not know how they got to this village, when on landing at the port they meant to go to Tacloban, but they wound up there anyway. That is certainly curious, don’t you think, tikbalang?”

  “Yes,” Juan said. “Most curious.”

  Maria’s eyes narrowed and she turned to the birds again. “A riot didn’t break out among the survivors when the volunteers started giving out food?” she asked.

  “No, my lady,” one of the pigeons said. “Lady Makiling was there to ensure that order was maintained throughout the handing out of the relief goods.”

  “Makiling,” Maria breathed. She looked back Juan again. “So whose idea was this? Hers or yours?”

  Juan grinned. “You’d be surprised at how alike my sister and I are, in many ways.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Maria said. “But others might be. They don’t know what Makiling is capable of, for she works so hard to seem so gentle.” She sighed. “But I concede, yes, that this may have been in the people’s best interests. I will deal with their mayor myself.” A cold wind blew into the clearing, making the villagers, and even Juan, shiver.

  The maya bird spoke up again, and Maria turned to her, surprised. “You have other news?”

  The maya twittered excitedly at length, and finally, after a full minute of letting the maya speak, she no
dded and turned to Juan. “The Aguelo family? Did you and Makiling have something to do with that as well?”

  This time Juan blinked. “Who?”

  Maria started to walk away, even as Juan kept asking questions. “Who are they? What happened to them? Is this another case you’re going to take on?”

  She did not answer, and only went on her way. She could tell him to stop interfering in her cases, but she knew he was only going to tag along anyway. And this time, his help might actually be quite welcome.

  #

  The refugees staying inside what used to be a barangay hall were huddled around the stove, where some of the volunteers were cooking a meal for them from the various food items donated to them. Some of the victims still wore looks of numb despair on their faces, as they kept looking among the new arrivals for their missing loved ones.

  “We warned them, Lady Sinukuan,” one of the women said to Maria, looking up from the infant she was nursing. “We told them to not build their house on the side of the hill, because the hill belongs to the enkanto, and they did not get any permission to start building there. But they only laughed at us and said they didn’t believe in such things, and we were all just so stupid for being scared of them. We could only watch as their workers cut down the trees and started building their house.”

  “They didn’t listen, even when the enkanto started to threaten them themselves,” a man spoke from beside them. “Mrs. Aguelo woke up with rashes all over her body the morning after their workers started cutting the trees, but she said it was probably just the shrimps she had eaten the night before. Their daughter Rosa got sick a week later, vomiting everything she ate and drank. But they took her to the doctor, who said it was only dysentery, possibly from the water her daughter drank, so they gave it no heed, either. Then Mr. Aguelo himself nearly got into an accident two days later, when one of his workers was cutting a tree, and it fell right on the spot where he had been standing just a split second before.”

  “And that’s not all,” a man said from beside her. “There have been many incidents too, of some of their workers getting lost in the forest, sometimes for days. And now they’re missing too.”

  “This was before the storm hit your village?” Maria asked.

  “A day before, I went to see them in their house,” the man said. “Rosa is a student in my class, you see—I’m a teacher in the local school— and I was worried because the child had not come to school for three days. I was worried that she had fallen ill again. But then, when I came to their house, it was empty.”

  “And no one’s seen them since, “the woman said.”The enkanto took them to teach them a lesson.”

  Silence followed in the wake of the woman’s words, broken only by Juan, his tone still light and cheerful (inappropriately so, in Maria’s opinion). “Did you see Mr. Aguelo’s salakot anywhere in the house when you went to see them?” he said.

  The man frowned. “I don’t think so. But who would notice something like that—”

  “He’s a farmer, right? Then he wouldn’t go to the fields without a salakot. And what about Rosa’s school bag?” Juan went on. “She must have one, right? Was it there? And what about their clothes? Were any clothes hung out to dry outside the house?”

  “What does all this have to do with anything?” The man scratched his head, perplexed. He looked at Maria, who solemnly met his gaze.

  “Answer his questions, Lucas,” she said. “Think back and answer as best as you can, because this is important.”

  Juan grinned. “Why thank you, it’s like you can read my mind, my love!” Maria’s only response to that was to roll her eyes heavenward.

  “W-well, I don’t know,” the man said, still in bewilderment. “But I don’t think I saw Rosa’s bag or her father’s salakot there. And yes—come to think of it, I didn’t see any of their clothes outside their house, when at that time of the day they would usually hang them out to dry in the sun. I could be wrong, though.”

  Maria pursed her lips, deep in thought once more. “Thank you for telling me all this,” she said after a few more moments of silence. “How is the rest of your village, by the way? Were many lives lost?”

  The villagers looked at each other, then down at the floor. “Compared to the other villages, fewer by far,” the woman said. There were tears in her eyes. “But too many, still, for we knew all of those people who died.”

  Maria took the woman’s hand. “Every life lost in this storm is a tragedy,” she said. “We will help you in every way we can. We will never leave you.”

  The woman broke into sobs at this, while tears also started to fall on the man’s cheeks.

  Maria left them, with a heavier heart than when she arrived. She could not detect a similar change in Juan’s mood, as he still galloped as easily as before by her side, but he at least had the grace to keep silent. He stole glances at her every now and then, as if he was only waiting for her to say something.

  Maria sighed, and said, finally, “Would you like to take a walk with me tonight, tikbalang?”

  Juan’s eyes brightened and he grinned from ear to ear, like it was exactly what he was waiting for her to say. “But are you sure you want to take a tikbalang with you?” he asked. “Are you not afraid of getting lost?”

  Maria allowed a small smile to appear on her lips. “That is precisely the point.”

  #

  Maria returned to the central evacuation center in Tacloban, and the first thing she did was to go to the mayor of one of the other cities in Leyte. This man was overseeing the repacking and distribution of the relief goods received from the city of Manila—overseeing being the more polite way of saying that he stood around watching the volunteers, occasionally barking out orders while they did all the work, and taking credit for everything they did. In fact, Maria came upon the mayor as he was looking at the leaflets announcing that the relief efforts were “through the efforts of Mayor S— of T—”, leaflets which the mayor hastily (and unsuccessfully) tried to hide from her sight when she arrived.

  “A word with you, my good man,” Maria said. “Come with me.” Everyone, including the mayor, shivered, but he followed her out of the center.

  Maria returned to the center alone, and the mayor was nowhere to be seen after that. She did not say anything, and only returned to the task of treating survivors, as well as feeding everyone, so she could spare no time for explanations—not that anyone dared to ask for one. There were whispers among the people about what had happened to the mayor of the city of T—, for everyone knew what happened to all the people who once angered Maria Sinukuan.

  Maria did not revisit the case until later that evening. She walked along the path back to the village of Sagkahan. In the fading daylight she saw a figure silhouetted at the end of the road, a figure that for one moment seemed to be a huge black horse standing up on its rear legs, and the next that of a tall man with lazily cropped shoulder-length black hair.

  “Are you sure you want to do this now, Maria?” Juan said to her when she reached him. “We could rest a bit. Tomorrow will be a day as long as this one.”

  “I’m fine,” Maria said. “Unless you’re tired, tikbalang? You can simply cast your enchantment when we get there, and I can deal with the case myself.”

  “And miss out on all the fun?” Juan said. “Of course not.”

  “Fun,” Maria muttered. “Nothing about this is fun in any way.”

  “Ah,” was the only thing Juan said, still with a small smile that he could not keep entirely from his face.

  The sun had now set at this time, and dark clouds covered the sky, blocking out the moon; but a group of fireflies flew ahead of them, lighting their path. Juan cleared debris and rubble from the path, and soon, they arrived at the side of the hill, where the Aguelos’ house once stood.

  To Maria’s dismay, the house was now completely wrecked, for the storm had caused a landslide, which covered the house completely. She closed her eyes and tried to feel for the Aguelo family benea
th the rubble, if ever they were there. For a moment she staggered, as the echoes of a thousand cries of anguish and pain came at her, all at once. Her fireflies flew around her head in concern, while Juan held out a hand to support her, but she pulled away with a shake of her head. She steeled herself against the collective sorrow of all those who had perished in the storm, and focused on the task of finding the lost family instead.

  “They’re not here,” Maria said. She opened her eyes. “I cannot tell if they really are alive and well, because there are too many echoes in this place. But I am sure that we will not find them here.” She turned to Juan. “What about you? How many paths are there?”

  “Three,” Juan said.

  “Then let’s take the shortest one.” Maria said. “Which one is it?”

  “The one taken by the mother,” Juan said. “She was the one who left the house last.”

  “Lead the way then, tikbalang.”

  Juan smiled and straightened up. His shadow lengthened, shifted, and soon, he changed as well. The black horse stood once again before Maria, who soon bowed and lowered his head to the ground.

  “It’s going to be a long walk, my Lady,” he said, his voice seeming to come from the depths of the earth. “So ride me.”

  “I’d much rather walk,” Maria said. “But thank—wait, what?”

  The tikbalang tilted his head to one side, considering his words carefully. “Ride on me? Ride on top of me?” Maria was already walking ahead, muttering something about men and tikbalang and their disgusting innuendo, as the fireflies struggled to catch up with her. “Ah, my love, wait for me!”

  When they first began on the path, Maria found what seemed to be the remains of a camp. There was a pile of burnt branches with a pot sitting on top of it, and beside it, a pile of crumpled banana leaves. There was also a sack placed beneath a tree, and inside she saw rice, vegetables, and meat wrapped in banana leaves. There were three sets all in all, as well as three bottles containing fresh water. She took two of the food sets, tossing one to Juan, and they continued on the path.