Once Upon a Blue Dot

By Cesar Fernando Lumba

Vic Lucero and Gus Liloan grew up in an exclusive boys’ school in Manila, the Philippines and remained friends until Gus Liloan went to America and the two lost touch. When they meet again in 1973, Vic Lucero is a henchman of the general tasked by the brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos as the enforcer of Marcos’ whims and caprices. &sh

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643672304

Cesar Fernando Lumba

A short-story writer while in college in the Philippines, CESAR FERNANDO LUMBA immigrated to the U.S. in 1967 and pursued a career in corporate America. His accomplishments, while enviable to most Americans, including an inclusion in the Marquis Who's Who in Business in both 1988 and 1989, never met his high standards for himself. His MBA in Finance at Seattle University opened many doors for him, doors that led to drudgery and restlessness in Corporate America. ¬ rough it all, he longed for the chance to self-actualize and after his retirement in 2004, he realized that he had a chance to reach one of the dreams of his youth. He started writing again, but this time he concentrated on writing novels instead of short stories. He has written and published three novels, two of which were written under the pen name Jules Lombard. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with his family.

Book preview

ONCE

UPON A

BLUE DOT

CESAR FERNANDO LUMBA

Once Upon a Blue Dot

Copyright © 2019 by Cesar Fernando Lumba . All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

This historical fiction was inspired by true events and real persons’ stories. Names, descriptions, entities and incidents included in the story are either heavily fictionalized or are pure fiction. Major historical figures’ names have not been changed to provide historical context.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

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Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64367-231-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-232-8 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-230-4 (Digital)

Fiction

29.01.19

In a nightmare, truth and fiction intertwine.

C. F. Lumba

Contents

One: Dreamers

1

2

3

4

5

6

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8

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10

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12

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Two: The Posse and the Plotters

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Three: Homeward Bound

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Four: Home At Last

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82

One

Dreamers

1

She knew, when she looked outside the one window, a 2ft. x 2ft. opening in the musty concrete wall, caked with slime and sweat and body excretions of prisoners long gone, barred with 1-inch iron bars, the Big Bastard would come. Nighttime meant that the man, the beast, the monster would pop his head in, with a bouquet of roses and all sorts of flowers and native grasses in hand; and he would be carrying a pail of warm water and soap and watch the indignity of her having to wash and soap her privates. He likes to watch me wash myself though at that point I’m already crying, begging for mercy, that my whole body, including those parts of me are sore, she would tell herself, as though she were talking to someone else in the room. And when the Big Bastard did finally come, what she had imagined would be the end result of his visit, the expected suffering, the bleeding from soreness, was actually less gruesome than the actual experience, the savagery and the cruelty of sex forced upon her by a man who had an insatiable sexual appetite… Each night she screamed, her muffled screams reverberating in the corridors, as the man everyone called the Big Kahone, someone’s bastard son, ravished her with one hand cupping her mouth to prevent her full-throated wailing. She might as well be a silicone sex doll, devoid of feeling, always ready to please a satyr.

I hate this man, if I could I would torture him. I have to survive all this. If I die he wins. I must live to fight another day, she told herself, as though she were talking to another person in the room with her.

Josephine Guerrero was a socialite and graduate of an exclusive girls’ college in Manila. She had never entered a beauty contest, but none of the world famous Filipina beauties who had won top places in the Miss Universe and Miss World contests could hold a candle to the beauteous Josephine. A campus leader and an idealist, Josephine had been involved in a left-leaning organization that had lobbied for land reform in the Philippines.

She was arrested and confined in what was then known as the White House. During the martial law years, it was where Filipino leftist women were held for interrogation and torture.

But Josephine was not there for interrogation or the usual torture. She was there because the Big Kahone had taken a fancy to her. Every night for about a month during her confinement—a total of 93 days—Big Kahone visited her in her cell, raped and ravished her…

The Big Kahone had an unappeasable appetite for sex with Josephine, so it was somewhat surprising to the soldiers that he would tire of the woman. But he did get tired of her. Perhaps because she no longer looked like a beauty queen but instead had started to look like a common street waif. So he announced to the soldiers that it was their turn to ravage her. And they did. She screamed each night the wailing, haunting scream of a long-suffering restless soul…

Her emaciated body, weak and exhausted, slumped all through the following day after each night of the sheer torture. There must have been close to thirty of the tormentor-rapists. She had been counting until she could no longer focus and lost count.

Life stubbornly clung to her form—it was no longer her clinging to life for she had finally given up all hope—and one night, one moonless night, that form, half-dead, barely breathing, was dumped on a sidewalk at the Luneta Park. Josephine—what was left of her—slept until she was awakened by a street sweeper the following morning, who had tossed a cleaning towel on her naked torso. The street sweeper flagged down a taxi and begged the driver to take the emaciated remnants of a woman, a woman who obviously had been beautiful at one time, when she was the toast of Manila society, to a hospital, to any hospital. To the street sweeper the woman must have been a celebration of Filipino beauty, for there were traces of that category in the severely beaten body and contused arms, legs, shoulders and neck.

Victor Lucero kept hearing about the woman in the White House and in his mind he heard her screams. Later some related to him that soldiers had taken over from the Kahone. It was worse, the rumor went, when it was the soldiers’ turn.

But what was he to do? His boss had constantly reminded him that what they were doing was a necessary evil. We are the guardians of the state. We must be more brutal than the enemy. But the boss had never heard the story of the woman and the Big Kahone, the Big Bastard, or whatever demonic name he happened to go by at the moment.

So he related to his boss what was happening in the White House. Boss merely looked at him and said, the guy has the faith and confidence of the Apo. Can’t touch him.

2

It was ugly. Students, leftists and suspected commies were being rounded up and stunned like cattle in broad daylight. Wielding long rattan billy clubs, police in Manila were pulling young men and women from jeepneys and tryicyles and taxicabs and those who put up any kind of resistance ended up in the open sewers, beaten silly, before being loaded on trucks that took them to military camps.

On such occasions the cars and jeepneys would slow down and traffic would nearly stop.

Keep going, don’t create a traffic jam, policemen conducting traffic would enjoin the startled motorists. These are commies, resisting arrest.

Victor’s boss, General Rufo Bautista, was feeling the heat. No mess. Hell, no mess. We’re supposed to be creating a new society. We can’t look like we are the enemies of the people. The general put Vic on street detail. The police are making us look bad, Vic. I want things done cleanly. We can be brutal without being messy.

This was not supposed to go down like this. Months before martial law we had planned everything. We had dry runs. We knew exactly whom we would go after and how. Everyone knew what his role was.

Victor met with the Manila metropolitan command of the Philippine National Police and warned them that his boss, General Bautista, was very much displeased about images of policemen pulling young men—and even some women—from cars and jeepneys, from cabs and tricycles, and arresting them.

We’re lucky that the TV stations are not reporting these arrests. But tell your men not to conduct their arrests in broad daylight, he instructed the station captains. Night arrests only.

My God, what have we done to our sweet little country? The communist bogeyman was tiny. It was not a real threat then, but now they have become real. We created this threat. And I’m one of those responsible. My God, what have I done?

Under Marcos’s General Order No. 2, the Secretary of National Defense was tasked with the arrest of all those individuals on a list supplied by Marcos himself. That list was generally known as the Marcos Shit List (MSL).

Those who were on that list could look forward to months, if not years of incarceration and torture. The really unlucky ones were salvaged, the euphemism for assassination and murder.

Under the pretext of hunting down communists and subversives, Marcos’s people went all over the islands and captured the dictator’s enemies and those that the dictator deemed as subversives and impediments to his plan of ruling the country indefinitely. Some were merely voicing their concerns about new policies being implemented when they were immediately branded as subversives. The army arrested them and those who resisted arrest were shot—often in the head, their brains splattered on their children’s faces.

Where was the United States in all this? Where was Nixon? Marcos had managed to extort Nixon’s obeisance. Marcos was an ally of the U.S. in Vietnam. He had allowed the U.S. military to use Clark Air Base as a staging ground for attacks in Vietnam. He had allowed the U.S. military to store nuclear warheads at Clark Air Base. And Marcos, after all, was making war on communists, exactly what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam.

Nixon had no good options. He had to turn a blind eye to what his pal Marcos was doing to his own people.

Vic could only think this, and he could not, under pain of death, think this aloud.

Vic was relieved that he could finally stick his head in the sand. He had a new assignment.

The Marcelo family was a bitter Marcos rival, and the declaration of martial law sealed that family’s fate. The family owned newspapers and TV stations, and those were closed simultaneously with the imposition of martial law.

But the family would still control the country’s biggest power company, one that supplied power to the metropolitan Manila area, including the outlying exurban towns. Find a way to nationalize the power company. The Marcelos must not be allowed to control a utility company that could be used against us.

Vic’s instruction was clear: the government must grab the power company.

1971. A year before martial law. Victor hired two recent graduates of one of the country’s premier business schools and assigned them the task of auditing Marcelo Power. Their objective was to show that the company had been grossly overcharging its customers. Turn public opinion against Marcelo Power.

Shortly after Proclamation 1081, the martial law declaration, Marcelo Power was nationalized.

Since Marcos was the government, he owned the company now. Marcos rewarded Vic Lucero with a seat in the Board of Directors. Being a director kept him busy and away from the streets, temporarily, and away from the brutal and thankless assignments.

Dozens of other companies were seized by Marcos under novel pretexts, little or no compensation given to previous owners. In some cases, the seized companies belonged to Marcos’s cronies and relatives. They were seized, according to the period’s cynics, because the companies owed huge amounts of money and the government takeover was designed to transfer the companies’ debts to the government. In other cases, Marcos suddenly and mysteriously became the majority owner of public companies. There were many theories on how this happened; each theory novel and incredible, none of them ever proved.

The New Society was indeed being formed, and in that society, one man would emerge as the lone voice, the multi-billionaire lone voice, while 50 million would suddenly lose their voices.

What happened to Josephine Guerrero? Captain Victor Lucero wanted to know. He was told that the woman had been dumped in Luneta Park. Was she alive? Where did she go? She seemed to have disappeared.

Most newspapers had stopped publishing, and the TV stations that retained their licenses weren’t reporting anything that might displease the strongman. No one had looked into the case of the woman who had been turned into the Big Kahone’s sex slave.

His involvement in the power company as a director was a brief respite. He was back in the streets and burning out from the nightly raids. He had arrested sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, freshmen in college, and had turned them over to the interrogators. Why the kids were a clear and present danger to the Republic he could only guess. He had complained to his boss that it was not the commies they were arresting; they were instead arresting regular folks who couldn’t possibly overthrow the government.

Vic instructed his men to determine how many of the boys and girls he had rounded up had ended up salvaged.

He got the list he wanted.

Johnny Barbers, a freshman student, was picked up for questioning. He ended up with a skull cracked in two places; and then the following day was found dead in his cell. A pre-existing medical condition was blamed for his death.

Wayne Catala, Ron Centeno, Moy Abadilla—all dead, killed by their interrogators allegedly for trying to escape.

Amor Cabildo and Ellen Tabuga, students at an exclusive girls’ college, electrocuted. Amor died the following day, Ellen the following week. Both had their nipples clamped and electricity passed through their bodies.

Efren Reyes, a senior in high school, tried to grab his interrogator’s gun, was shot by the latter.

Santiago Sembrano, shot in the head while trying to escape.

Eliseo Carlos, a seminarian, found dead in his cell, allegedly a suicide.

Juan Tambunting, in a coma after a long interrogation, not expected to live.

The list was long. Vic could read no further. He tore up the report and burned the pieces in a metal trash can.

The discovery of three female bodies in Pasig River shocked the whole nation. One of Manila’s beauty queens, who had won an international beauty contest, was one of the three. The coroner took a long time to identify the beauty queen’s remains, which consisted of the torso, the legs and the arms, the head having been decapitated, to make identification impossible. But coroners had ways to identify bodies and it was determined that the remains, which had been cut starting from the vagina, up through the abdomen, up through the chest cavity, finally stopping in the upper chest cavity, had belonged to that beauty queen.

The country was up in arms and some of the soldiers who had intimate knowledge of what had transpired apparently had fallen off their horses and identified the army lieutenant who had captured, imprisoned and converted the beauty queen to his sex slave; and when he was done with her, killed her and quartered the remains to render them unidentifiable.

"Bakit mo inaresto yung babae?" (Why did you arrest the woman?) Vic did not really want to hear the lieutenant’s excuse for arresting the woman, but he felt he had to start where it all started.

She was a communist agitator, her boyfriend was in hiding, she was fair game, said the lieutenant defiantly.

But why did you not take her to the White House, where most women we arrest usually are held?

I made the decision to hold her where she could not infect other detainees.

I have interviewed other soldiers who assisted you and they all swear that you held her in a secret cell so you could rape her repeatedly and without being noticed officially.

That’s not true. Every army officer who detains an attractive woman is accused of rape and sexual molestation. In my case, it had been rumored, but it never happened.

The flustered Vic almost lost his cool. Lahat ng tao nagsisinungaling, pero ikaw ay nagsasabi ng totoo! (You say everyone else is lying while you are telling the truth!) He screamed at the lieutenant. Where is your proof that the woman was going to infect the other detainees? And wasn’t the solution to put her in solitary?

Look, I want my lawyer. I’m done talking, the lieutenant said.

Vic wanted to bust the guy’s nose, for starters, but he did not know to what extent the man had the backing of friends in the Philippine Military Academy, and he did not want to sound like he had a vendetta on one of those guys who considered themselves the elite in the country’s military.

The wheels of justice turned, but they turned too slowly, and the lieutenant was incarcerated, but he was given liberties that other accuseds in the country would never dare dream of having. Vic had to move on to other cases because he was tempted to engineer the lieutenant’s salvaging.

He wanted to quit. He already had a job as a member of the Board of Directors of the power company. He was in his early thirties and making a huge bundle. No need to arrest teenagers for a living.

General Bautista saw the need to give his protégé a break. A trip abroad would do wonders. Someone had to take a trip to Seattle and then to New York, might as well be his protégé.

Vic welcomed the assignment in Seattle, but he did not care much for the trip to New York. His longtime friend, Gus Liloan, lived in Seattle. He hadn’t seen him for nearly seven years. He would go out drinking with his buddy. They might even hit the bars, where topless Hispanic women were known to be extremely liberated—and accommodating.

He had started to fantasize about chucking everything, including his directorship at the power company, and moving his family to the U.S., where he could enjoy the simple pleasures of a free society and the comforts of the American dream.

After the Seattle trip he would visit his sister and family in Long Beach, California before going to New York. He would make a vacation out of it and at the same time toss around in his head the best way to plan and execute his escape.

3

Gus Liloan never got bored on the highways. His mind on overdrive, he had the company of his self-talk, and he liked himself and laughed at remembered jokes. He was on a high. Years later he would discover what being high really meant, but in those heady days, his brain was producing endorphins by the bucketful. He couldn’t believe his fortune. Coming to America by way of Seattle in November, 1967, he had never expected to find what to him would turn out to be an ideal job, a reporting job at Dun & Bradstreet that played to his strengths: his ability to sell himself and his ability to wordsmith.

Sometimes, rare times, he berated himself for the traumatic faux pas, and there had been many because he was a clumsy liberal idealist and, as his officemates had observed, he was not one who would turn a cold shoulder.

There was the am car radio that could get stations from as far away as Salt Lake City. Frank Sinatra’s I have been a rover kept him company on his long drives, and he saw himself as that rover, minus, wistfully, the girl in Portland and the one in Denver.

When in the mood, he fancied himself as a budding intellectual and he dabbled in the first principles: the where, whence and wherefore of human existence. He had watched the moon landing and had heard Armstrong utter the words: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He had been enthralled by the sight of earth from space, a large chunk of real estate on TV screens; yet in reality, as he had learned from his Introduction to Astronomy class in college, earth was a mere speck of dust in the limitless universe. Our species, one of millions, perhaps billions in the cosmic theater, was the only species that believed that the heavens were created partly for its benefit. Yet if somehow we could look at the universe from outside, we’d be lucky to find, through the most powerful telescopes imaginable, that pale blue dot that Carl Sagan would later write the earth might look like. And we, being microscopic in size and breadth and reach, think that we could explain the universe.

The Snoqualmie Pass Lodge was a good spot to rest his legs and to buy coffee on his way home, where no one drank coffee. It was also a good spot to watch the stars. He had always been fascinated by the stars. He had written in high school a piece on why we earthlings were probably not the only intelligent life in the universe; that the one in a billion chance of sustaining life in faraway planets convinced him that there would be others because the universe had billions of stars. Yet, we might never confirm the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life because we might never be able to travel as far as we would have to travel.

The ups-and-downs of his life, so far, had pretty much assured that along with the quiet bliss of doing something he loved to do, there would from time to time be irritants like the cop who wanted him to pay his no u-turn ticket by giving the cop cash. Irritants like hicks who did not like seeing a foreigner from the Far East, and who made double entendre remarks as he walked by. It’s a great country, ain’t it, one guy in overalls had said to him. And there were cops everywhere who hid behind abandoned service stations intent on nabbing an unsuspecting motorist for speeding in the many speed traps. On one unlucky stretch, he got three speeding tickets in one month.

Despite all the crap that went on at the Dun & Bradstreet office in Seattle, where fellow reporters were leaping off the merry-go-round because of the brutal schedule—reporters were considered exempt and were not paid overtime—and the rejection and, at times, swearing they got from people who were upset with D & B, Gus Liloan had reason to be happy with his job.

There was a reporter, Howard, in the D & B office—the famous office on 5th and Pike—who was in his 60s and who was the acknowledged genius, the one who had written the analyticals on the huge businesses such as Boeing, Weyerhauser, Seattle-First National Bank. Gus would have loved to grow into the top analytical reporter for D & B, replacing the retiring Howard, but it was not for him because he had other plans. He had a dream. He was going back to the Philippines in 1972 to claim what he had felt for a long time was his destiny. He was destined, he had felt in his guts, in his loins, to become one of the leaders of his birth country, perhaps even becoming its president someday. As great as America was, and if he had two lives he would have preferred to have been born American in both, the fact was he was born in the Philippines and he had sworn at a young age that it was that country that would forever be his love.

My dreams, when life first opened to me,

My dreams, when the hopes of youth beat high,

Were to see thy lov’ d face, o gem of the Orient Sea! From gloom and grief, from care and sorry free!

No blush on thy brow, no tear in thine eye.

Remembering words like those in the immortal poem by his country’s national hero, Jose P. Rizal, moistened his eyes, alone in his motel rooms in strange little towns in central Washington State after a couple of beers at a local bar, thinking of home, the home that he had last seen in 1967. In his mental calendar, he was supposed to be back in his country from his work experience and studies in America.

He could tolerate the long hours, the long absences from his family, because he knew that the hard work would someday end when he would return to Manila and actualize the picture of his adult self that had been hung inside his brain since he was a little kid.

His childhood daydreaming spanned days, sometimes weeks; he would lie on the sofa in the afternoon, home from school, with nothing better to do because it was rainy season and the pelting rains and howling winds were a constant, everyday occurrence, and he would pick up on his epic dreamed masterpiece where he had left off the previous day, a dream that had started with him becoming a star basketball player, then a famous lawyer, then a businessman and finally the Philippines’ president. And the people would love him, and they would beg him to agree to becoming semi-royalty. And there would be plenty of women, with pouty-lipped Bridget Bardot faces, along the merry way.

1972 had come and gone and still he was in America and not back in the Philippines, forced to revise his plans because the dictator Marcos had declared martial law on September 25 that year, and he could not imagine himself being happy, or more importantly secure in a police state. Besides, he had been doing very well on the road, that is, until he met his match.

On a late Wednesday afternoon in late Fall, 1973, he was on his way back to Seattle when snow started to flurry. He was just approaching the inviting cedar-sided, enormous glass-windowed Totem Lake motel on the left side of the highway, with its soaring twin posts carved with the decorated faces of Indian warriors, and he was tempted to stop and spend the night there.

He feared that the snow would intensify and block Blewett Pass and he would get stuck in the Pass.

But, it was just flurries, he thought to himself, and besides if he spent the night in Totem Lake motel he would have to spend the weekend there should the snow not let up by the following morning. He would have no way to write his reports because all the forms he needed he had kept at his home in Seattle.

He sped past Totem Lake motel, and hurried to get to the top of the Pass. The snow had started to come down real hard and as he kept going he could see that up ahead the snow had gotten deeper. Soon there was near-zero visibility. There was a car that was careening fast on the other side of the road, seemingly headed straight for him and his car, but the car swerved and got past him.

He would not see another car on the Pass.

It was dark as he approached the summit. He felt the road rise sharply. He imagined the tires rolling over the packed snow, not getting any traction, just going over the snow, like tires rolling over asphalt. The tires were not radials—radial tires were an expensive option in those days—and he knew that if he stopped or if the car got stuck, he would have to spend the night on Blewett Pass and very likely freeze to death. His heart was beating like an ear-shattering drum inside his chest as he prayed, God, please help me. Help me get through this; I’ ll do anything you ask me to do, just save me. He had forgotten that he was an agnostic because he needed help from someone who by reputation would eagerly come to his aid if he prayed hard enough.

He put his car in second gear, it was stick shift, and he could see in his mind very clearly how the tires were plowing through fresh snow. He actually felt the tires plowing through the snow. He imagined what would happen if the car stopped and could proceed no further, stuck in the snow. Millions of snow flakes, it seemed, were coming down hard, slapping and lapping at the car’s windshield. He could barely see, even though the car’s headlamps were on high beam. The road ahead and the sides of the road had disappeared from view, and he could barely make out the haunting winter wonderland scene, the scenery engulfed in black.

Was this how his life was going to end, as happened to those people he had read about who had been scaling the Himalayas when they got stuck in the howling snow and froze to death? He thought it was the end of him, a premature end since he was only 32 at the time, but he kept praying anyway in case a miracle was forthcoming. Lord help me, he prayed out loud, loud so God could hear him. Lord help me, help me, help me.

His head was throbbing, just slightly behind the beat of his heart striking the insides of his chest cavity, like a tom-tom. He could feel his face flushed, he was feverish. Is this what people go through when they know they will freeze to death? Anytime now, the car will get stuck, the snow has deepened. Anytime now, the car will slow down, and then it will go no further. I am not even steering the car, it is the car and the snow together determining where the car will go.

He could see the wipers, heavy with stuck ice, going full speed and barely keeping the windshield free of the attacking giant, wet snow flakes. He could not hear the sound of the wipers, all he could hear was his heart beating against his ribs, against his esophagus, against his lungs, against the edges of his chest cavity. Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom. His heart went on and on and on. He was not worried about a heart attack, he was worried instead of the car getting stuck, its tires spinning and the car going no further, and he would have to sit in his car, engine running and waiting for help from a passing motorist, another foolish driver braving the snow on Blewett Pass. Or, absent that foolish driver, more likely he would freeze.

He kept saying the same prayer over and over,. Lord help me, help me, help me.

At first he did not feel it, it was just a hint, but as the car accelerated and gained momentum he asked himself, is the car going downhill now? He listened and felt the road, through the tires; he and the car’s tires had become one, and he could feel the tires having an easier time turning. Was the car being pulled downward by the gravity of the zigzagging road? He was not certain, but it sure felt like it. He shifted the car’s gears from second to third and he felt the car lunge forward just a wee bit, and seconds later it was hurtling down.

I’m past the summit, I’m on the way down! he screamed. And he laughed and allowed himself to feel the sweat that had soaked his chest. Thank you Lord, thank you Lord, thank you Lord. It was all he could say, all he could think of, as the car gained momentum and he felt like he was halfway home.

He screamed and laughed and giggled, and thanked God that he would yet see his children, toddlers still and absolutely dependent on him, and his stay-at-home wife who wouldn’t know what to do if he had gotten stuck in the Pass and had stiffened like a frozen carcass in some walk-in freezer.

When he got to Cle Elum, the town just past Blewett Pass, he went straight to a tire store and bought two studded snow tires from a salesman who had eyed him suspiciously because he was sounding like a raving maniac telling anyone who would listen that he had just cheated death.

He arrived home late that Wednesday night, related to his wife Evelyn his misadventure on Blewett Pass and she told him, You should think about not being a traveling reporter anymore.

He had indeed been thinking of changing jobs, though he loved his D & B work, because opportunities were springing up everywhere. Affirmative action had taken root in Seattle and the management ranks had opened up in the big companies for people like him, a minority candidate who could someday be top management material. He would place his dream of going back home to the Philippines on hold and see where the new opportunities would lead.

That night, after that near-death experience at Blewett Pass, he was ready and eager to see what it would be like to work in an office, at a desk job in corporate America.

Oh, and by the way, his wife said, Guess who called last night asking for you? One guess.

The old gears aren’t turning right now, so why don’t you just tell me?

Vic Lucero… Just blew into town. Will call again tomorrow.

4

They had written each other regularly, Vic Lucero and Gus Liloan, until they both got busy with life and the letters dribbled to a drip and then stopped.

They met when they had just emerged from the toddler stage in a middle-class neighborhood in Pasay City, a whisper away from Manila Bay.

Vic and Gus were the same age, but Vic looked