The Rainbird

TWO

I’d arrived in Manila in March, quite unsuspecting of the heat, which at high noon felt something akin to sticking my head inside an oven and trying to breathe. Just standing still on the curb with a cigarette caused many of my shirts to sweat through. Inside was better. I kept the condo unit’s air conditioner working full blast, until I needed to watch television with a blanket thrown over my torso.

Naturally I was curious about PTN’s lineup, and during my first month in the Philippines, watched with concentrated effort, trying to rectify—for myself if for no one else—Oliver’s accusation of my stupidity with the nation’s viewing culture. On my days off I watched several odd programs. One was about a wheelchair-bound detective who solved crimes through the employment of numerology; in the episode I watched, he ran over a sea of rice scattered on the floor, then counted how many grains stuck to the wheels to get the date and the time of a girl’s murder. Another program featured a young schoolgirl who’d fallen hopelessly in love with the school’s dashingly handsome gardener; the gardener, a forty-something man, appeared normal to all who saw him, but when he removed his shirt for the girl, she was appalled to discover a third eye embedded in his chest. The eye blinked at her with some curiosity at first, then became bored and drowsed off. Her trysts with the gardener ended on the spot, with no explanation whether it was the eye itself that instigated the termination, or its ill-mannered dismissal of the girl.

PTN’s news department was also a mess, though about this I could do nothing but be entertained. And entertained I was on the last Saturday of that March as I watched the network’s top anchorman, Allen Bautista, stagger his way through the evening news.

“SUSUNOD!” this middle-aged, cardboard-haired man boomed, smiling over a stack of papers. “Sunsunod! Susunod! Susunod!”

“Allen,” I clearly heard someone off camera say. “Sige na.”

But the anchorman wasn’t yet satisfied. “Susunod,” he said one more time, more gently. “Near SM North Mall a drunken Jeepney driver crashes into a display window full of mannequins. And ‘wooden’ you know it”—he paused here to chuckle at his own witticism—“none of the mannequins were hurt.”

“Diyos ko,” the off camera person sighed.

“So stay tuned!” Bautista urged his viewers.

Smiling, I found the entreaty impossible to refuse.

∞

I went to work Monday morning happy enough to ask Lysette out on a date. She must have sensed my self-confidence, because straight away she accepted. In my office I found four more pilots to look over, plus over a dozen emails about shows already in production that needed lower cost set design, along with a few rewrites for episodes that were having difficulties with continuity. Here the first true challenge of the job slapped me hard in the face. My Tagalog was bad, which made for a rather awkward phone conversation with the network’s budget department. After that the screenplays stopped showing up on my desk, forcing me to pursue them physically.

This last couldn’t be done over the phone. One day I walked down the hall and asked a copy boy to tell me where the sound stages were. But he misunderstood my broken command of the language. I was directed down a flight of concrete stairs that led to a dark, dingy smoking lounge. Tables with uneven legs were set up haphazardly on a warped floor of filthy tiles. Seated about them was a handful of network men and women, brooding behind lazy trails of cigarette smoke. One of the men I recognized, though we’d yet to meet. I couldn’t resist introducing myself.

“Mr. Bautista,” I said to the old, dignified looking gentleman with the round face. “I’m Alfredo Trentinara, the station’s new producer. I really enjoyed your broadcast the other night.”

Allen Bautista’s features were lined, I later learned, not necessarily from old age. Years of laughter had played a role. He looked up at me, beamed, and said:

“Well Jesus Christ! Sit the f**k down! Do you smoke?”

“I most certainly do,” I told him, taking a seat. I whipped out a pack of Marlboro Reds and lit up. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. Your delivery is very unique.”

He laughed, sounding a little bit like Santa Claus putting presents under the Christmas tree. “Unique as in s**t, or as in pretty good?”

“Unique as in excellent.”

Bautista had a fat cigar in his mouth, and puffed a magnificent plume of smoke over the table. “Finally!” he expelled. “A man at this goddamned station I feel like I could have a drink with!”

“How long have you been doing the news?” I felt compelled to ask.

The other man told me he’d been fired from three other networks before landing at PTN about twenty years ago. He held a Bachelor’s degree in communications, but admitted that he was a lousy typist, and tended to frighten his subjects with unorthodox questions. I liked listening to him talk. His anchorman’s voice was naturally deep and rich, and when he smiled—which was often—his face took on the appearance of a happy grandfather.

“One night in 1988 or ‘89,” he said, after pausing to take a sip of coffee, “a man on Quezon Avenue was murdered. Happened around midnight near one of the strip dives. By chance I was awake at the time, sitting half drunk at a nearby bar. So when I noticed the commotion I staggered down the street to conduct an interview. In those days I was still keen on getting the hot story, don’t you know?”

By this time I had ordered my own coffee, and the waitress—with a cigarette dangling from her mouth—dropped my cup unceremoniously onto the table.

“This isn’t Starbucks,” she told me. “I’m not gonna call your name. Next time wait at the counter.”

I apologized to the girl, which earned me a puff of smoke in the face. Then she left. When I next looked at Allen he was grinning ear to ear. “That’s Sammy,” he said. “Marvelous kid. I’d ask her to marry me if my equipment still worked.”

I’d been about to test the coffee. Now I laughed, nearly losing hold of the cup. “What about the murder?” I pressed, collecting a bit of self control. “What happened?”

Bautista took a moment to relight his cigar before answering. “Remember I told you about those awkward questions? Well, when I arrived at the scene of the crime there was the victim, shot through the head, his blood and brains all over the curb. And do you know the first thing I asked one of the witnesses?”

“Tell me.”

“If brains were like pocket change, do you think this man could have spared a little extra money to hail a cab? The witness was a woman, and she slapped me right across the face.”

“You cad,” I told him. But I was already smiling. Seconds after that, we were laughing so loud Sammy had to come over and tell us both to shut up.

“Don’t,” the anchorman told me, after we’d had a chance to get sober, “just go rejecting every idea that falls onto your desk. You’ve got to make a move on something.”

I’d given him a quick sketch of my previous week at PTN. Bautista was sympathetic of my plight, though rather dumbfounded as to why I was even here in the first place.

“What’s wrong with Cleveland?” he wanted to know. “Do the Browns really suck that bad?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I allowed. Then I sighed. In truth, I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain why I’d come to Manila, either. Yes, those other networks had rejected me—but then the man sitting opposite had been rejected, too. Yet here he remained. “I’m just looking for bit of adventure,” I came out with at last. It was the best I could do. “Something more interesting than working in a grocery store with my dad.”

“Did he s**t himself when you said you were leaving?”

“Probably. I didn’t take the time to sniff the air.”

That made Allen laugh again. “Well, remember what I said about being too fastidious. You’ve got to green light something. Your executive producer was picky. That’s one reason he got passed over for you.”

I glanced up from my third cigarette. “Oliver?”

“The one and only. He never seems to think anything’s good enough.”

This was strange to hear, especially after the way he’d fought for Boom Boody Boom.

“Really?” Bautista said, when I got done telling him about it. “He really liked it and you said no?”

“That’s pretty much how things went, yes.”

Bautista smiled at me. This time, however, it was not one of humor, but (did I really dare interpret it this way?) charitable incredulity. “Oh my goodness, Fredo. Oh, my goodness.”

His reaction was that week’s second yellow flag, the first being Oliver Madilim himself. Except there’d been another warning as well, one I’d yet to perceive. That night I took her out on a date.

∞

We ate dinner at a little Italian restaurant in Araneta. It was right next door to where Mohammad Ali had fought Joe Frazier in 1975, and Setti, though only twenty and not remotely what I would call muscular, took a moment to tell me this as we waited for our spinach lasagna. A candle glowed between us. Through it, the girl’s black eyes almost seemed to penetrate me, defining her as the dominant one, the one who held control. I didn’t like it, and to show her that I, too, knew how to take charge, said in a rather commanding voice: “Tell me about work.”

She was still dressed for the office, as we had come here directly from PTN. For Setti that meant a white blouse with black knee-length skirt. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“How long have you been with PTN?”

“Does it matter?”

The food arrived. We fell to, our chatter suffering for the gluttony of our palates. Setti ate daintily, however, dabbing her mouth with a napkin from time to time. She asked me about Cleveland. About Ohio. Like Allen Bautista, she wanted to know what had brought me here. I answered her with precisely the same words as before.

“Adventure,” she said, grinning over the candle. “I’ll take you on an adventure.”

And that very night she did. We went to Star City, an amusement park in Pasay. I was rather surprised to see such a place in the middle of the city, but when I told Setti as much, she seemed to wonder how it could be the United States lacked such things. We were standing in line at the gate, and her eyes got big.

“So what do you do downtown?” she demanded to know.

I spoke of the typical time-wasting activities. “Dance. Drink.”

Her answer put me off balance, which was quite a trick, considering we were surrounded by hoards of screaming children carrying toys and lollipops. “I’m not a traditional girl, Fredo. Don’t mistake me for one.”

“TICKETS!” a man yelled from a booth.

I paid for two, and we went inside.

Star City was a huge, fenced-in park crammed with people, cheap food stands, and rickety-looking rides that set my nerves on edge just seeing them. We were shoulder to shoulder on the midway with maybe a thousand people. I kept bumping into strangers, though none of them seemed to care. Small girl that she was, Setti weaved through them with the dexterity of a cat, until we were standing next to a roller coaster that looked ready to topple at any moment. Even as I watched, a car screamed past, tilting a number of huge support beams towards the unsuspecting crowd. Silently, I prayed for Setti not to ask for a ride on that.

She didn’t, but chose the Witch’s Wheel instead, which looked ten times as frightening and unsafe.

“Way up there!” she screamed, pointing at one of two cylindrical cars attached to a tremendous steel beam at least a thousand feet high. “That’s where we’re going!”

“You can’t be serious!” I yelled back, gaping at this spinning beast. There were screams coming from the cars—screams loud enough to be heard even down here amongst a cacophonous throng.

Setti’s smile turned mischievous. “Scared?”

I looked once more at the beast. I was indeed scared...but how could I show weakness before this pretty little pixie who’d deigned to eat dinner with me tonight?

“Nope!” I lied. “Let’s do it!”

Minutes later we were stepping into one the huge, rusty cars. As we did so an older man practically fell out, clutching his chest, gasping for air. I was not buoyant about things to come.

“Up up and away!” Setti cheered, clicking a seat belt over her waist.

“Setti, I’m becoming less and less happy here!”

The older man was now vomiting on the walk.

“Did you know,” Setti said, laughing hysterically, “that one of these cars broke loose five years ago? Right from the very top! Killed everyone on board!”

I nodded. “Thank you for sharing that! I feel ever so much better!”

“Relax! Stuff like that doesn’t happen twice in a lifetime!”

She may have had a point, but even to this day I clearly remember thinking, as the car lurched forward, that we were going to die that night. I was twenty-three years old. The year was 2006. I was sitting next to this beautiful girl who didn’t quite seem in full possession of all her marbles. And we were going to die. The memory surfaces at night mostly, with the Rain Bird lying asleep in my arms. I stroke her hair. I feel the softness of her bare skin. I listen to her lungs—her small, pretty lungs—taking in breath, letting it back out. And the memory becomes a question: Who is the Rain Bird really?

One thing I do know: I could never have gotten her on the Witch’s Wheel. Not for love or money.