Joe was training the newly constituted Philippine Army, and when he got back to Manila the Guard had already rolled out to Clark Field. The history of the Guard was a huge and intricate joke. Coming from landlocked New Mexico, they were trained in coast artillery. On arrival, they were given British cannons that had been bought as surplus from World War I. Within a week of the invasion they were fighting as infantry in the jungle. General MacArthur said the Philippines would never fall and President Roosevelt dispatched convoys of ammo and supplies to Manila, but out at sea the convoys turned around and headed for Europe, and MacArthur slipped away one night in a torpedo boat.

Before Joe ever found him, Rudy had vanished. The whole New Mexico National Guard vanished on Bataan. When Joe escaped and got Stateside and toured defense plants, the colonel in charge of publicity called him a walking advertisement for the Army, which seemed illogical to Joe, since he was one of a handful of men who got out of the Philippines compared with all the thousands who didn’t.

Dolores seemed to agree with Joe. She wrote him not to come back to Santiago because as far as she was concerned her only real son, Rudy, was dead. So instead of going home, Joe took the colonel’s wife to bed and got shipped to Leavenworth.

One trick the Japs had was to tie themselves high up in the fronds of a coconut palm. A sniper would eat a handful of rice, then swallow water from a canteen to make the rice swell and the stomach feel full. They could stay up in a tree for three days. But this one had been up for a week or more, tied so tight he couldn’t fall, swaying in the breeze and watching the world go by: planes, patrols, clouds. Joe wouldn’t have seen him if he hadn’t stepped on a rifle and looked up at the face staring down from the palm. The head was black as a coconut: holes for eyes, hole for a mouth, shirt and stomach burst open. A flying advertisement for Bataan.

When the Japs called at night, “Hey Joe!” “Over here, Joe!” Joe often wondered whether Rudy Peña had ever thought there was some confusion, that they’d come for the wrong man.

Without even trying to be quiet, Joe closed the magazine bunker door, snapped the padlock shut and followed his flashlight across the apron toward the Hill. He figured he owed the Army nothing.

8

Oppy had taken over the house of the headmaster of the old Ranch School. It was a stone-and-timber cottage behind a stand of spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The sun had just set over the Jemez, leaving the sky bright and the mesa dark. Joe had strapped on his Sam Browne belt and .45. His guard post was the garden.