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By Root 549 0

moment. He used to cast long glances homeward, ready to sprint back if she stumbled in the rock garden or tumbled off the roof while mending thatching. He was beside himself when she let the Holy Man—self-appointed nurturer and interpreter of Efrem’s curse—take him away to practice soldierkilling. They motored about in the Holy Man’s low-lying boat for nearly a year, searching for and never finding a horizon beyond which Efrem couldn’t see. He knocked whole flocks of pelagic birds out of the sky with lengths of dried coral. The Holy Man gave him an ancient Russian rifle and taught him to shoot pigs drinking at the distant sulfur spring. Together they peopled a deserted island with fake soldiers, placing coconut heads atop driftwood bodies, scattering the wooden mannequins in beach caves and beneath the root-canopy of a giant strangler fig. They motored some fifty kilometers away and Efrem decimated the imaginary battalion in a quarter of an hour.

Years later, after he’d graduated from wooden soldiers to real ones, Efrem still glanced homeward to check in on his mother. He lived among rebels, fellow apprentices of the Holy Man who made fertilizer bombs and dug tiger pits. From their hidden camp he watched, helpless, as his mother woke in moonlight and struggled to find a position she could breath in. He watched his uncle and cousins load her into their boat, the Hadji Himatayon, giving her sips of fresh water as they raced northeast to Zamboanga City. His uncle traded the unreliable outboard for a room near the hospital and sold the boat itself to pay the Manileño doctor’s fee. Efrem was still watching when his family returned home by slow ferry a month later—his mother’s symptoms diminished but not gone. No one aboard noticed the bomb hidden below a rice sack. It was a small charge, just strong enough to knock the knees off of an old man and punch a hole in the hull. His family survived the blast. They all escaped the sinking ferry. They swam for hours. Currents separated them, out of earshot, out of eyeshot. His cousins each drowned alone. His uncle drowned alone. His mother drowned in the arms of a stranger, held under by those arms till she screamed in a lungful of ocean. The stranger, a young rubber tapper, took her floating barrel for himself. He survived, washing ashore that afternoon and wandering about praising Jesus. He got a few hours’ celebration in before falling stone dead on a dark street, nailed to the ground by fifteen shots out of the sky.

Efrem would have liked to return to his village north of Tubigan. He would have liked to bury his uncle’s rubber-sling spear and his mother’s trowel together in a shallow grave. He would have liked to set the hut she once lived in on fire. But he didn’t want to raise suspicion. He wept when the Holy Man clutched him tight and told him that his family had been executed by soldiers in a gunboat—the story was true, after all. That’s how his first parents had died. But his new family had been killed by rebels—killed by the Holy Man.

Two weeks later he took up with some passing badjao fishermen. He rode with them to Davao City, lied about his age to army recruiters and became a Boxer Boy.

EFREM SLEEPS SOON AFTER CONFIRMING that Howard Bridgewater is still alive. The next morning he wakes to the sound of unshod horse hoofs on tile floors. A taller, blacker, four-legged Elvis gallops up and down the hall. Lorenzo sits atop him, riding bareback, whooping as they wreck the dearly bought flat, the pair of them looking ridiculous and free. Reynato and Racha are in the kitchen, planning Howard’s rescue over pancakes and coffee, gazing at his syrup-stained photograph. The kidnappers had posted poorly coded sale announcements on the Internet in the days before their failure at the Blue Mosque, and Reynato has contacted them under the guise of an interested southern buyer—someone who’d be happy to dress Howard in orange, lock him in a bamboo pig crate and make a home movie out of hacking through his neck with a bolo knife. Still bruised and gun-shy, the kidnappers insisted on meeting