Kaya returned from a day sweeping graves to find her boyfriend’s brother Manny waiting by her door in Navotas Cemetery. He was not alone. She looked up past the stacked cement graves at the two men and thought how it had been a pretty good day up to that point. Three families had paid her 300 pesos for her work clearing trash from the tombs of their loved ones ahead of All Saints Day. Her five year old son Gabi would eat tonight. He played just a few feet away with some of the neighborhood kids. She listened to them sing the chorus of a Bruno Mars song about being lucky and tried to ignore neighbors gossip. But as she walked past the stall of the woman who sold pagpag, Kaya heard her suck her teeth and say, the troublemaker’s back.
Kaya hadn’t seen Manny in over a year, not since Jimjim got busted with shabu and had gone to jail. She felt eyes follow her up the ladder leaning against the cement tombs. Her father had built their one-room shack with plywood and corrugated steel sheets some 14 years before. The police officer with Manny was in plain clothes and he examined the bottom of his buffed black shoes as if he had just stepped in a pile of shit. Inside, he stood in front of the single lightbulb, lit from electricity stolen from the city’s utility poles. He cast a sharp silhouette, bald dome shining.
“My friend here can get Jimjim’s delayed hearings pushed through,” Manny said. “Jimjim can come home to you and Gabi. Maybe by Christmas.”
Kaya thought of the cash in her pocket. “Walang pera po,” she said. She knew nothing was ever free.
“Not asking for money, just a favor,” Manny said. “To find someone.” Manny showed her a photo of a street and zoomed in on a thin boy standing alongside a row of tricycles. She examined the grainy image, unable to make out the boy’s features, only unkempt hair that was dyed orange. “Get close and kill him,” Manny said, but his voice snagged on a cottony dryness that had suddenly sprouted in his throat and the last two words were whispers. Before Kaya could ask Manny to repeat himself, Ocampo made it plain. “Kill him!”
Kaya’s eyes darted between the two of them. She waited for the punchline and when it didn’t come, a single bark of laughter escaped her mouth.
The man, who had been blankly surveying the room, looked at her now. He turned to a plastic bin that held her old junior high school uniform from before she had Gabi at 14, and a bottle of Rugby glue to get her through the most desperate days of hunger. And that’s when Kaya noticed the telltale bulge of a gun tucked into the back of his jeans. He fingered the items that Kaya lifted yesterday from young distracted mothers in the Avenida Bus Station—bright orange coral lipstick, a suede blue hair tie, a #2 pencil worn down to the stubs. Dangling in his fingers was the milk white rosary Kaya’s mother had hung up when they first fled their foreclosed farm in Carmen when Kaya was only five.
“These are nice.” His voice lilted in mock interest. “Where’d you get them?”
Kaya pressed her lips tight, bent on silence. The cop walked with the rosary to the edge of the tomb.
“I heard about the shooting today, out there.” He pointed with his chin in the direction of the cemetery entrance. On the way back home, Gabi and her childhood friend Rosa had seen the blood soaked into the dirt. Others in the neighborhood talked about seeing two helmeted men on a motorcycle fire the shots across the street from the cemetery. “You have to be careful nowadays,” Ocampo said. “Shootings, kidnappings.” He turned his back to her, leaned against the doorway and looked down at the pathway below where Gabi played among the trash heaps with his friends. “They’ll target anyone. Even kids.”
Bile rose up in Kaya’s throat. She threw a desperate look at Manny, but he turned away, wiping his dry lips with the back of his hand. He fixed his attention on Rosa who was keeping watch over Gabi and the other kids.
“Three days,” the man said to Manny. “That’s all you’ll get.”
He climbed down the ladder and kneeled in front of Gabi. As the man walked away, Gabi waved back at Kaya, a 100 peso bill in his small hand.
Manny stayed that night and the next. He bought Gabi and Kaya dinner their first night together—Jollibee fried chicken and spaghetti for Gabi. “It’ll be hard,” he said, staring at the darkness in the corner of the room where the light couldn’t reach. “But you get used to it.” He had been working for the man for two months and got paid well. Even with the new president’s war on drugs, he knew they could get Jimjim out. After all, Ocampo had gotten him out of a robbery charge in exchange for a few errands here and there.
Manny spoke at length about the first failed attempt to find the boy with the orange hair. Hopped up on adrenaline, he had revved the tricycle to pull up to the curb where the boy was loitering and hit a parked car. Manny was in the midst of a heated argument with the car owner and when he looked over, the boy was gone. He had disappeared for a whole week, but now that he was back, they could not afford to miss their chance.
That night they slept, Gabi separating them like a protective wall. Kaya waited until Manny was snoring to sneak out, crawling on her hands and knees. She had done this often to see Jimjim when her mother was still alive.
At Rosa’s door, she reached in through the tarp covering and tugged on Rosa’s foot, careful not to wake her mother. They stepped over crumbled cement and the bones of the disinterred dead whose families couldn’t pay to extend the five-year leases on graves. Picked their way down the pathway toward the water, where they could hear the waves crash against mounds of trash. Rosa rattled off a series of ideas—running away, going back to Carmen where a great aunt still lived.
“Couldn’t you go to the police?” Rosa asked.
Kaya stopped walking in disbelief. She often found Rosa naïve. Having an education not only spawned wildly impossible dreams, but blinded one to reality. “He is police.”
When they returned, Manny waited at the top of the ladder, his face obscured in shadow. Kaya brushed past him on the narrow ledge and crawled back next to the sleeping Gabi. She counted and recounted the beads of the white rosary hanging above her, and listened for Manny as he cursed before he laid back down.
The next day, Manny drove them in his tricycle to Manila City Jail to visit Jimjim. The guards had long ago shorn off the wavy hair that swept along his temple. The shabu, along with the tuberculosis he caught when he first arrived, had sharpened his cheekbones. But Jimjim still had this wily handsomeness. He told them that his hearing had been postponed another three months as soon as they sat down at the plastic table in the prison yard. “We’re gonna get you out, ading,” Manny said. “Maybe before Christmas.”
“Hear that, Gabi?” Jimjim squeezed him as he sat on his lap. Shared stories of petty fights and territorial gangs, stories he never shared when alone with Kaya. Prisoners outnumbered the guards 200 to 1. Rather than risk mutiny, the guards shared their power.
“Bahala Na likes me,” Jimjim said, leaning back in his chair. Joining a gang provided security, a private kubol in which to sleep, while everyone else slept sitting up on the stairs, on the ground in narrow hallways, on the CR countertops with noses buried into armpits to cover up the stench of the shit and piss from the latrines, or lined up on the TV room floor back to back to back.
“Shouldn’t you stay out of trouble?” Kaya said.
Manny shook his head. “No, ading. Do anything to stay alive.”
The brothers’ heads bowed closer together and their conversation grew hushed. The gauntlet of childhood with a drunk for a father had pressed into the two brothers an impenetrable secrecy. They had always been like this, going back to when she and Jimjim first met at the mall when they were 13. Manny, though four years older, crashed their dates, or joined them to pickpocket commuters at bus terminals.
Kaya watched five clouds cross the square of cerulean sky above her, framed by the sharp edges of sheet metal roofs. Their chatter melted into the ambient noise—the distant laughter of a visiting wife, a hacking cough, a metal gate slamming closed, the clamor of five thousand more men than the jail could handle.
As they said goodbye at the gate, Kaya studied the similarities in Gabi and Jimjim’s face—the high wide forehead, the swirl of hair topping Gabi’s crown.
“Guess I’ll be home soon,” Jimjim said, looking out for a guard before reaching for her waist. Manny had outlined his plan, but left out crucial details. Kaya wondered if he would still reach for her like this when he found out what she had done.
As they got into Manny’s tricycle, Kaya watched students at the college campus across the street gathering in circles. She thought she glimpsed the thin boy with the wild, orange hair entering a university building, but he was gone by the time she turned her head to look back.
Bong had planned to hide at the church for just a few days, after he was spooked by a wild-eyed man who crashed his tricycle into a parked car mere inches from where Bong sat on a curb waiting for his buyers. He tried to forget the drunken jeers and laughter trailing them the night before, as his nanay took hold of his collar and pulled him off the bench, onto the street, and down the narrow hallway to their apartment. He patted his pocket, felt the comforting pad of plastic there. What his mother saw as laziness or aimless socializing with the neighborhood junkies, he thought of as business. But he couldn’t go back to the bar now, not after last night.
He sat up and leaned over, his elbows digging soft red craters into his thighs. Through the buzzing whirr of the fan in the corner, he could hear the tinny growl of a tricycle passing, a caged dog howling. Last year before graduation, he would have greeted days like this with excitement. Nearly all his friends moved on to new jobs, college, marriage, children, or some other promising destination—except for Benji. They were once inseparable, spending afternoons after school going back and forth between the computer café and the barangay basketball court. But now Benji’s childish interests—tests, college applications, basketball, girlfriends—bored him.
In the dim bathroom, Bong ran his fingers through his hair. Inch-long black roots had grown in since he bleached it himself. He had aimed for a cool blonde, but landed somewhere between orange and a tangy yellow.
Another message from Ramon pinged on his phone. The two of them used to smoke shabu and roam the streets free like stray dogs, armored in laughter and bravado, faces and lights blurring past them like paint running in water. But at some point Ramon’s generosity emptied, and the shabu came with a heftier price tag. Ramon pocketed most of his earnings, but Bong still saved enough. With these last two bags, his would repay his debt. Bong closed Ramon’s unanswered texts, and typed out a number he deleted but never forgot.
When Manny left the cemetery to buy cigarettes, Kaya threw what little clothes they owned into her old school backpack and pocketed the 400 pesos. She made Rosa promise not to say anything. They took a meandering route away from the cemetery. “What about Tito Manny?” Gabi said as he tried to pull his hand from hers.
Two hours of begging outside the bus terminal yielded just 150 pesos—barely enough for one ticket. But the buses scheduled for Carmen already departed an hour before. The next bus headed out would not leave until nine. The ticket agent’s small TV played Action News and reported that another shooting victim had been found.
She did not see the blue and green tricycle while they waited. Manny spotted them first.
“Tito Manny!” Gabi waved. “Are you coming with us?”
The cords of muscle in Manny’s jaw pulsed as he ground his teeth. He motioned for them to get in. They rode in silence for 15 minutes, and he parked outside a covered basketball court somewhere in Tondo.
Manny told Kaya to put on the white sweatshirt below her seat. The gun in the pocket of the sweatshirt butted against her head as rivulets of sweat ran down her ribs. She rubbed her hands on her shorts and shook her head. “I can’t.” The back of his hand caught her mouth and her head slammed against the back of the tricycle. She covered Gabi’s eyes and his head with her arm as the ringing in her skull subsided. He had gone slack and quiet.
Manny spoke in an even voice, his jaw tight. “Putangina. Accidents happen.”
They sat in silence as the light dimmed and the sari-sari stores calmed. Tucked into the inside of the tricycle roof, always in Manny’s line of sight, were three photographs—one of him and his brother as children; another of them from two years before—Manny flipping a middle finger and Jimjim’s smile flashing a missing bottom tooth; and a photo of Gabi as an infant in Kaya’s arms, half her smile in frame. On the back window of the tricycle, were the words: Family Above All. Two hours passed, the pulsing pain in her lips keeping time.
“Think about little man Gabi.” Manny’s voice calmed to a soothing baritone. As they watched Bong leave the cafe, he showed her how to use the gun.
The large halogen lights in the covered basketball court snapped on. Bong and Benji had an old routine as kids—eight years of gaming followed by sticky sweet barbecue and garlic rice. But this past year they kept their distance. Now they didn’t know what to say to one another.
“What did you do to your hair?” Benji finally asked.
“I had to get the chicks.”
Benji’s laughter was reassuring. Bong patted his pockets, reached in and contemplated telling him everything he’d been doing in the last year, how much money he’d saved, about getting back on track.
Bong spotted a forgotten, sun-faded basketball underneath the bleachers, and pried it free. He delighted in the rhythm of his feet and the feel of the worn ball in his hand. He went for a layup, sent the ball sailing into the basket with a graceful curved arm.
He passed the ball to Benji. “Former team captain versus current team captain.”
“What have you been doing all this time anyway?” Benji asked. He stepped around Bong but was blocked, tried to the left again and nearly ran into him. In the past, he rarely ever got past him. “If I get this point you have to answer.”
Bong nodded, smiling.
Benji feigned forward, and Bong stepped back to give him space, but he skipped onto his back foot instead, jumped and shot from the three-point line. That was new.
“You have to answer,” Benji said, untucking his blue school uniform shirt and fanning air onto his torso.
Bong trapped the ball under his foot, thinking. Benji’s voice echoed, so the last word bounced against the orange metal fence. “Answer, answer, answer.” He looked around once more, at the two gates at either end of the court, at the hand-painted sign on a traffic barrier that read “Help the drug user. Jail the drug pusher.” He tossed a baggie to his childhood friend.
Benji caught it with two hands. The court lights shined off the shards like glass fragments. He asked what it was even though he already knew.
Bong took it back from him and laughed. “Look at you! You’re scandalized.”
Benji shrugged, recovering quickly. He snatched the ball back, even as a steel-like tension sprouted within his limbs. He drove down the court faster than Bong had ever seen him and dunked. He rubbed the echoing sting in his fingers.
“So the rumors are true.” The basketball bounced away from them both.
Bong’s smile melted. “What?” His voice was barely audible.
This was everything he wanted to avoid. He did not need an examination of the last year, a judgment handed down. Verdict: guilty—a lazy, good for nothing, waste of space. A criminal. A drug pusher. No surprises here. Just like everyone else, Benji failed to see what good Bong could do. All year he repaired the roof every time it rained. He bought groceries, cooked and cleaned, so his mom, who spent her entire life picking up after other people’s families, could rest—all things unnoticed and unacknowledged. No one knew that Bong had been accepted to Far Eastern University the year before, but the scholarship didn’t cover the full tuition. It was easier to skew closer to everyone’s expectations of him and say he never got accepted at all. Even now no one knew he had a plan. He visited the campus yesterday—the offer still stood. All he had to do was sell these last two bags and his debt to Ramon would be done and he would have the savings he and his mom needed.
They stood in silence a half court’s length from each other, Bong with his fists in his pockets, and Benji conciliatory with the palms of his hands up.
“I…” Benji started.
Bong turned to leave. “It’s getting late.”
He reached the gates just as a familiar green and blue tricycle screeched to a halt and blocked his exit. Inside was a small boy and a girl wearing a baggy white sweatshirt. Even in the shadows, he could tell she was pretty in a homely way. He could not see her eyes, just her soft cheeks and red full lips. Her long hair spilled out at the neck, curling at the end in one big hook.
She reminded him of a ghost story he and Benji heard in junior high. A tricycle driver picks up a woman in white waiting under a balete tree late at night. He drives her to a cemetery, but when he holds his hand out for her fare, he turns to find the woman gone, and two cotton balls in his hand, the kind morticians used to stuff corpse’s ears. The story rattled Benji, but Bong joked that he’d drive a hot ghost wherever she wanted to go.
A strange recognition washed over Kaya, as one does when meeting a person only previously seen in photographs. Questions of whether he deserved to die were beside the point. Her nanay and tatay did not deserve to die. No one ever deserved it, but people died all the time, from diseases that ate them up from the inside or by another person’s hand or their own or God’s or nature’s. And what did Kaya deserve? Did she not deserve a whole family? Or a house with walls that did not collapse in every typhoon, a single day free of corpses. A meal whenever she was hungry–heaping plates of pancit and peanuty kare-kare and bittermelon with eggs.
The green metal roof above the basketball court trapped a dark and heavy wind that smelled of coming rain. She freed the gun from her pocket and Bong met her eyes. He turned and sprinted. She would not be able to run after him, so heavy were her feet.
Kaya lifted the gun. Closed her eyes as Gabi opened his. Squeezed.
Gabi did not speak to Kaya for two days. When he did, it was to ask for money. He no longer joined her when she cleaned graves, instead joining the roaming groups of children who played by the water.
Ocampo gave Manny 8,000 pesos, and Manny gave Kaya 2,000 of that. He told her they would not be able to release Jimjim after all, but that Ocampo would continue to try his best, as long as they tried theirs. Jimjim would return home five years later, when prisoners were released to stem the onslaught of a new virus—back to Kaya and a now distant 10-year-old Gabi in a new one-bedroom home.
She never saw Ocampo in person again—Manny spoke for him from then on.
After a nine-day wake, a baby chick on the coffin pecking at rice to knock at the door of the murderer’s conscience, Bong was buried in Navotas Cemetery. Coverage of his death played repeatedly on every television Kaya came across. She saw the bald man—Ocampo was not his name after all. He concluded that Bong was a drug pusher, but admitted when pressed by reporters that they had found nothing in his pockets or his room. “All that matters is that he was a good friend,” a boy named Benji told reporters.
As a procession of Bong’s family, friends, protestors, police, and reporters descended on the cemetery, Kaya took the white rosary hanging on the nail and buried it under her junior high school uniform. She had enough money to buy food whenever she got hungry, but she still fished the nearly empty bottle of Rugby glue from the plastic bin. She sat cross legged with her back to the door, put her lips to a bag coated inside with a teaspoon of glue and inhaled.
Contributor Notes
Guia Marie Del Prado is a Filipinx American writer living and working in New York City. She is a 2020 Kweli Journal Fellow and currently a development associate at The Nation. A former journalist, her work has appeared in WNYC, City Limits, and Business Insider.
