Rosario: The living Barricade

Marhay na aga po saindo, Bicolandia! Good morning! What a beautiful Sunday!" The woman's voice burst from the old stereo with the same bright enthusiasm it'd had every morning for the past seven years. Maybe longer. "Looks like we'll be getting plenty of sunshine today, though expect a light drizzle later this afternoon. Nothing that should stop anyone from enjoying the day." A burst of static crackled over her last sentence. "...hopefully." Another voice laughed. "Don't scare them." "I'm not! I'm just saying—" "You're always just saying." They laughed together. It sounded practised. Like they'd already laughed at the same joke too many mornings in a row. "Now, a reminder from the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Office..." Paper shuffled somewhere near the microphone. "...Residents are advised to remain within their respective barangays unless travel is necessary. Please avoid abandoned structures, heavily shaded areas, and contact with unknown individuals." A pause. "...Especially those lingering beneath trees or inside buildings." Neither announcer spoke for a second. The silence stretched just a heartbeat too long. Then— "Anyway!" The woman's cheerfulness snapped back into place so quickly it almost hurt. "Santa Rosario is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this month! Congratulations to everyone there!" 1 The construction drowned out the sound of the radio. A young man hauled a bucket of water across the yard and poured it into the mixture of cement powder and gravel. Two workers with shovels in their hands worked it through together. Metal scraped against dried cement, echoed and mixed in with the sound of hammering around it. Again and again, they worked the concrete mixture through until it went from dry grey powder to something that moved like it was alive. Totz had always loved the sound of construction. Not the sound itself, exactly — it was more about what those sounds represented. A construction site, and everything that came with it, represented a livelihood, a way to earn and feed his family. To a man like Totz, who'd grown up watching his own father do the same thing, it felt like fulfilling a sacred obligation. He'd built things his whole life. Houses, sari-sari stalls, and the covered walkway at the school when the old one rotted through. But he'd never built anything like this before, and some nights that still sat strange in his chest, thick and unfamiliar, like swallowing something too big. They hadn't built it just to keep things out. Any fool with enough plywood and nails could raise a wall. What he and Migz had built was smarter than that, and it had taken three nights arguing across the kitchen table to get there — Migz with his notebook full of diagrams that looked like alien script to Totz, and Totz with thirty years of knowing, in his hands and his gut, what wood did when you pushed it, what a wall actually was underneath the idea of a wall. "You never build a room with only one way out, anak." He'd told him that, tapping his fingers once or twice on the table, on the blueprint they'd been drafting. Never. Not in a house, not in a barangay, not anywhere people gotta live. So they'd built failure into it. On purpose. Quiet, deliberate failure, hidden in plain sight — three sections of the perimeter that looked exactly like every other section, same lumber, same nail pattern, same weathering, but braced a few inches short of where they should've been, fastened with half the nails a section like that ought to carry. You'd never feel the difference leaning your shoulder into it. But a grown man, desperate, throwing his whole weight behind a kick — that section would give. Enough to get a family through. Not enough that anything outside would ever guess it was there. Jigz had liked the design the second Totz walked him through it, out here in the dirt with a stick drawing lines nobody else could've read. That's good, pard. That's real good, he'd said. And now it wasn't just their fence anymore. It was every fence, every exit, every gate that ringed Rosario, all of it carrying that same secret give inside it, and Totz still felt something swell in his chest every time he looked down the line of it and thought, we made that. My boy and I made that. He thought about the boy now, hammer in hand, sun already working hard on the back of his neck. Migz had been a sickly child, smaller than his peers at eight. Small enough to still ride his Lolo's shoulders, out past the edge of the rice field, too little and too sick to walk the whole way himself, and Gregoryo would set him down at the edge of the paddy and let him watch, hands folded in his lap, solemn as a little judge, while the rest of them worked the mud. That had been — what? Fifteen years ago. Sixteen. It didn't feel like sixteen years. It felt like yesterday, and now here he was, and the boy who used to sit at the edge of that field was designing the thing that might keep this whole barangay breathing. "You're doing that face again," Dan said, not looking up from his own hammering, sweat cutting a clean line down the dust on his neck. Totz frowned. "What face?" Dan didn't even bother looking at him. "The Migz face." "...I don't have a Migz face." "You do." "I don't." "You've got the same look every time you're about to brag about that boy." Totz snorted. "I wasn't even talking." "You don't have to." Dan pointed the head of the hammer at him, waving it around in a circular motion. "I've worked with you for twenty years, pare. I know the signs." Totz shook his head, grinning despite himself. "You're imagining things." "Oh, am I?" Dan chuckled. "Totz, I've heard stories about your son's second-grade report card. I know what he weighed when he was born. At this point, I probably know more about Migz than Migz." Totz laughed, big and unbothered, the kind of laugh a man gives when he means every word of the boast waiting behind it. "That's because my son has things worth knowing. Second-year pa lang siya; he's better than most engineers I've worked with, and I'm not exaggerating. Narumduman mo su engineer who designed the gymnasium in Tabaco High?" He shook his head, grinning widely. "Yung tig-sabi mo, the one that looks like a hard-boiled egg?" "Yeah! Him." Dan snorted. "What was his name again?" "No idea. I forgot it already." "You know, not even a year, and the roof is falling apart, according to my daughter — Sophia, who goes to Tabaco High and swears up and down that it leaks too." "Wait until Migz finishes college, then my son could show him what a real engineer looks like. First Barameda to be an engineer. First one in the whole family tree, all the way back." "You said that last week." "It was true last week, too." Dan laughed despite himself, shaking his head, and Totz laughed with him, and for one clean second, it was just two men laughing in the sun, the way men laughed before the world had a reason to make them stop. He didn't hear the tsinelas on the gravel behind him, or the voice calling his name — twice, maybe three times. Not because he was ignoring anyone. He'd just gone somewhere else in his head, the way he always did with a hammer in his hand, and by the time the voice cracked through the noise, it had risen almost to a shout to get his attention at all. "Totz! hoy!" a voice yelled loud enough that it startled him so hard the hammer nearly flew. "Ay!"