Mickey

I’ve written a number of stories that have been lost. Many were brief but based on truth, compounds of things I’ve lived or seen. I remember bits of one that was set in the Philippines; it was about Mickey, a professional diver. Mickey had come to the Philippines courtesy of the U.S. Navy who had also trained him to be a diver. He was in and out of Subic over several re-enlistments where he spent long, beer-fed evenings, leaning on the greasy counter of an Olongopo girlie bar, a world away from his North Carolina white-trash roots: a fatherless family made up of numerous, quarrelling siblings and an indifferent mother.

It was inevitable that Mickey would fall for one of the girls that drank and loved the sailors in that string of bars facing the main entrance to the base; whether the cause was lust, love or loneliness or a combination of all three didn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things, one of girls was going to provide what Mickey needed.

Rose was the name of the one that Mickey ultimately learned to love. She came from the south side of Manila Bay, Batangas province. Like most poor Filipino families, Rose’s was large. She was the sixth child. Her father was a contract worker at Shell’s Tabangao Refinery. The work was good but only occasional. When he didn’t work he would drink and gamble with his friends. When he didn’t gamble, he would come home and make more babies with Rose’s amiable, fat mother.

Rose grew up in a concrete-block house on a dirt road that ended amongst some palms and a bit of sand and rock along the sea. The air was clean and there was just enough food. She learned to read a bit and to add and subtract. Her uncle ran a small store selling soda and cigarettes. At 16 Rose worked for him but when he began to touch her and pester her for sex, she left by bus for Olongopo where her cousin made good money working in a contract laundry for the U.S. Navy.

Only Rose’s cousin didn’t work for a contract laundry. She was a bar girl at the Power House.

Before long Rose’s scruples gave way before her greed and the 16 year-old was pounding beers with the sailors, fending off their groping hands and, occasionally, sleeping with one.

Rose wasn’t the prettiest girl at the Power House, she bordered on plain and she was skinny but Rose had a quality that drew Mickey to her, she was what the Indian matrimonials advertise as ‘homely’ and it was her domesticity that ultimately captivated Mickey. Rose filled a hole in Mickey’s life, an unarticulated need for family.

The two of them moved in together off base where they rented a two room flat above a shop during Mickey’s last tour. When his enlistment was up, they married and moved to another small but much quieter place overlooking clear seas at the end of a track near a Batangas beach. Mickey opened a dive shop with his savings and gave Scuba lessons to a few backpacking tourists and some wealthy locals. He was popular and laid back. Far from the most ambitious man in the world, Mickey seemed content to earn enough to pay the rent on the cement shack that served as shop and home to Rose and him. Children soon came, one after the other. The children lit up the faces of both parents, Mickey would spend long afternoon playing in the surf with them and evenings they would curl up around him and Rose as they watched their snowy, black and white TV, a wedding gift from Rose’s groping uncle. No longer objectionable, the uncle now behaved most respectfully towards his niece, partly, I’m sure, out of fear of Mickey’s brawny arms.

It was a good life for Mickey. I met him one day when, on a trip to the Shell offices at Tabangao, I stopped for lunch at a beach-side restaurant where Mickey was sharing a soda with several locals. We had little in common besides being American and each having once lived for a time in North Carolina. Still, it was enough for a conversation.

Over the years I lived in the Philippines I would see Mickey from time to time when I travelled into the provinces. Although he lived no more than a hundred miles from the capital, in all the time I knew him, I never heard of him coming to Manila. He changed very little, his face became more leathery and creased from the sun and the salt water. He had a smile that was individualised by cracked and worn teeth, some broken in fights at Olongopo and elsewhere during his Navy career, and he developed a beer gut that, strangely, seemed to suit him and secretly please Rose who was one of those cooks who fry everything. I can still close my eyes and smell her kitchen and the fresh fish that she prepared the few times that I ate with her and Mickey. Each time I would bring some toys for the kids – I think there were about 7 at the last count – some fabric for Rose to make up into clothes for the kids and a few beers for Mickey. We wouldn’t talk much, we’d sit outside on a couple of ratty old folding chairs and stare at the water, sucking a couple of beers. When the food was ready, we’d eat in the darkness of their unlit living room. Afterwards we’d drink coffee brewed from strong, Filipino beans.

As the heat of the afternoon crept even into the shade where we would sit, I’d make my excuses and drive back to Manila, the air-conditioning on full, insulating me from the land through which I drove and in which Mickey had chosen to live and, one day, die. You see, although the tale is one of languid happiness, ultimately it was a tragedy because one day Mickey disappeared into a South China Sea squall that had blown up quickly during the course of an afternoon. Some outrigger fishermen were caught by the storm a few miles offshore; they were visible between sheeting bands of heavy, almost horizontal rain. Their distress was obvious and their peril real. Mickey and two neighbours, all three combining fearlessness and foolishness in equal measure, went out in a small motorboat to bring them in. When the storm had blown itself out, the scattered outriggers were all found swept ashore on scattered beaches down the Batangas coast but the boat in which Mickey and two others had gone out to save the fishermen had disappeared.

It’s been 15 years since last I lived in those green islands. There was no way to keep direct contact with Mickey’s family and I lost touch even with those who might have known what happened to them. In a way that’s okay because I’ve kept Mickey alive in my world; I have put him back on that dusty patch under the palms, sitting in an old webbed lawn chair, sipping a beer and playing with his kids, laughing through his broken teeth.