Gorilla Bite

(*Sensitive theme: description of war*)

He had been told not to join. On no uncertain terms. His mother, and then his father, had sat him down (his mother fiercely, his father solemn) and told him that it was the errand of so many fools. That their hideout in the hills would echo with the sounds of gunfire and screams and young boys’ blood would wash into the rivers with the rain. 

But I can fight, he protested.

You can die, his mother railed, her anger magnifying her height until it seemed she was towering over him.

This is not a war—not anymore. It will be a slaughter, his father intoned, a weighty counterpoint to the mother’s cries. 

I won’t stay here, he said through gritted teeth. Not while all the other boys are going to the hills. We will look out for each other. I’m not a coward.

The father’s eyes narrowed, you will carry each other when you are shot down like dogs, bandage yourselves with rags in the dirt. You do not know what death is and yet you would run to welcome it.

The mother wept, they are gone—the Americans. They will not be back. Their weapons are gone. Their soldiers. They have left us here alone to die but I will not bury my oldest son.

There is nothing left, he shouted. No one is safe. If I am not conscripted now then it is only a matter of time before my head is found by the river. I am already guilty by association.

No. The father’s voice was curt. You are a good boy. You go to school, you study hard. Pre-law in Kabankalan no less. They will see this. You are useful.

The father’s glasses perched on the end of his nose. They trembled, once.

What school? What pre-law? That life is over, don’t you understand? He stood, his things were already packed, he could not take much with him.

His mother’s cries were raw but low, even now she would not draw undue attention. His father carried the quiet fury of stone, but did not block his way.

And he was gone. 

He did not remember the journey, at least most of it. He recalled only the cool shades of green of the dao tree and moringa, the way he could both feel and not feel the ground below his feet, speeding with uncanny intelligence over twisted root systems ready to snare someone less familiar with their midnight grasp. 

He arrived at the camp with the dawn, friends blearily greeting him while the older guerrillas said nothing, seeing perhaps his un-callused hands, his pants recently pressed, his eagerness. But they were in no position to turn anyone away.

That first day was the quietest he would remember of the War, after that—his memories blurred and ran like the edges of bright fish in deep water. 

They were constantly moving, tracking and raiding supply lines at night while resting fitfully in heavy tree cover during the hottest part of the day. He was young, his bones and limbs supple and strong and yet soon his back and legs ached from the wear of so many miles, screamed in displeasure when he crouched for hours to spy on the entrenched forces.

At meals, he would watch his friends, quieter, hollower, as they made half-jokes more out of habit than humor, reminiscing about worlds that seemed impossible now: movies, school. Girls. He laughed with them, though the sound rang sharp and unfocused as though it came from somewhere else. 

He could not be still. He twitched, hand on his weapon, at the first unfamiliar voice, the sound of a footfall behind him. His dreams gathered as ghosts—sometimes he would see his mother between the trees, her weeping echoed in the bee-eater’s call. The light from a signal mirror would become, for an instant, the reflection of his father’s glasses, impossibly near.

He ran his invisible patrols as day and night blended together. Moment after moment stretched sloppily, like quilted patches from a beginner’s hand. 

There, the moment his friend fell to injury, another to infection. There, when he was tasked with digging their graves. There, when the terror and bile and adrenaline surged through him, beating a drumbeat against his veins and a knife’s edge under his skin. There, when falling back from enemy fire the bullet caught him through the chest. 

Delirious, with nothing for the pain, he faded in and out as the camp medic extracted the bullet, cleaned and stitched the wound, bandaging it quickly. He saw moments improbable, himself as a small boy, an old man, a child’s voice exclaiming at the webbed and crooked scar across his chest.

What happened, Grandpa? You got hurt.

When I was a guerrilla—

A gorilla? You got bit by a gorilla? And in that moment he gathered the small child to him, eyes wide with lashes the color of his own and then he was himself again at his childhood home, reaching for his own reflection in his father’s lenses. A gorilla, yes, a gorilla bit me, and the child that was him and yet not him asked if it hurt and he smiled no, not anymore—it was a long time ago. Or it had yet to happen. And then he was stitched back into time, there in between the green, living forest and the part that would come next.

Before they reclaimed the town and the surrounding areas. Before the return of American reinforcement. Before he asked his parents’ forgiveness and for his future wife’s hand. Before he crossed the largest ocean never to return, at least not in the same way, and not as the same man. 

There, between the aching cacophony of forest sound and broken men, he closed his eyes. Waiting or remembering, he knew himself at every stage. He would not be buried in the loam that day. Or the next. 

There was a path already before him. And he knew well what it meant to run.