Sukimoko

Seventh Installment

Publication date: December 8th, 2025
Copyright 2025

By Dean Adams Curtis

 

CHAPTER 33

Rocky Corrigidor

It had been near sunset when the three of them had jumped off of the bridge over the Lamao River on Bataan Penninsula. After they all survived their plunges and had fought their way back to the surface, Rocky had dragged Juanita to cover under branches that hung out over the riverbank. Scrounger had sought cover under the same branches. Japanese patrols had deployed from around the machine gun carrier to scour both banks downriver of the bridge. The sky had darkended. Careful not to make waves, Scrounger, Juanita, and Rocky, had laid sinking themselves in mud and under decaying foliage. A Japanese patrol had stopped several feet from them, cursing, farting, laughing. The patrol had not spotted them. Then a spotlight had arrived on the bridge and illuminated the river. Another patrol had come, stabbing at the water along the riverbank every few feet.

Whoosh. Juanita recalled the sound that a bayonet blade had made as it penetrated the water between Rocky's head and hers.

That night, at the mouth of the Lamao River, they swam slow breast strokes toward a skiff anchored in Manila Bay. At the stern of the flat bottomed boat a small outboard motor rested, its propeller pulled up out of the bay.

First, Scrounger and Rocky pushed Juanita up onto the stern of the skiff. She grabbed onto a wooden plank seat within it and pulled herself the rest of the way forward onto the craft, which she then lay flat in. Next, Scrounger moved stealthfully along the bayside of the skiff to the bow and held it steady as Rocky climbed aboard the stern. Rocky crawled over Juanita to the bow and counterbalanced the skiff so Scrounger could slide aboard, also at the stern. Rocky carefully hauled up the skiff's anchor. The skiff had a pair of paddles. With them, Rocky and Scrounger paddled the skiff silently southward.

Moonrise approached. Due to the lightened night sky, Juanita saw the men look at the outboard, then at one another. She saw the nod pass between them when they silently agreed. Rocky put his hand around the starter cord's handle.

When he pulled the starter cord, the motor started. Rocky lowered the propeller into Manila Bay and the skiff sped the three of them across the water under starry night sky. A dozen minutes or so later the Moon rose across Manila Bay. From the perspective of Japanese troops on patrol on the Bataan Penninsula coast, they were backlit silhouettes.

Juanita watched Scrounger turn to Rocky.

"We must be nearing Cabcaben," he said.

She heard a burst of machinegun bullets fired. She saw Scrounger get hit. He lost his head. His body fell out of the skiff. Rocky did not collect Scrounger's corpse. Instead, he had thrown himself onto Juanita and was steering the skiff with his feet around the steering handle attached to the motor that was spinning the propeller. No more machinegun blasts were fired. But the skiff had been hit below the waterline. As they had nothing to bail out the skiff with, but for Juanita's cupped hands she indeed used, before long the craft was half filled with water. They saw Corrigidor Island south of them, illuminated by the moon and explosions of cannon shells fired from Japanese artillery along the southern edge of Bataan.

"Too far to make it swimming," Rocky whispered what was on both of their minds.

"What's that ahead?" Juanita whispered back. Rocky focused his eyes on an object in the middle of the channel between Bataan and Corrigidor. The skiff sank from beneath them.

They swam breast strokes toward an adrift and abandoned ship, a small passenger ferry, an achievable goal. When they finally crawled onto its deck they each immediately passed out from exhaustion.

She recalled he had told her he was in the U.S. Signal Corps. The night before, Kim Chee had driven her from her home in the light green 1940 Rambler wagon he had stolen, into the mountains east of Manila, the South Central Sierra Madre. He had taken Penelope Bloom to where he and his small team had set up their base camp. She looked out across a misty-bottomed mountain valley. She was relieved to be under protection of the half dozen men of the U.S. team led by Chee. He had strictly refused her information that, he said, would jeopardize others if she was caught and tortured.

That day, Chee had gone up a mountain with another man to set up a watching and signaling outpost. While he was gone, none of the other men talked with her. They were both verbally and radio silent, each engaged in his own tasks of cleaning, cooking, or writing. She wandered to a nearby stream and washed up, marveling at the mountains she had not realized were so near Manila. Persephone wondered about her husband, Anthony. Where was he? Other thoughts intruded, terrifying recalled sounds and shocking sights she heard and saw within her home the prior evening. She had pushed those images away by recalling her Ohio courtship with Tony. She told herself that he was a man who could take care of himself. Then she recalled what Chee had told her about Tony exporting opium. She wondered how long it had been going on.

"Magandang araw," said a woman's voice behind her. Persephone jumped, startled, then jumped upright.

"Magandang araw," Persephone regained her composure and quickly replied to the Filipina, using the words for 'good day' that Maria of Sukimoko had taught her.

"Very good," said the woman in perfect English. "You know Tagalog."

"And you know English," Persephone noted.

"Is that so surprising?" asked the woman with a friendly smile.

"No," Persephone smiled bashfully. "Sorry, of course not. It is the second language here, after all. You just speak so, so..."

"Much like a native born English speaker?" the woman completed Persephone's question.

"Yes," Persephone answered her.

"Thank you. I spent my late teens and college years in the United States," said the woman. "University of Washington."

"D.C.?" Persephone questioned.

"No, I don't believe there is a University of Washington D.C.," the Filipina answered her. "I went to the University of Washington in the State of Washington. And you?"

"Ohio," Persephone told the woman. "State of Ohio. As in Ohio State, as opposed to our rivals, the University of Ohio. Well, very nice to meet you." Persephone noted the woman had no wedding ring on her finger. "Miss?"

"Aling Rosa," the Filipina replied.

"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Rosa," Persephone said. "What was your major?"

"Yours first."

"English literature." Persephone then looked at Miss Rosa, anticipating hearing of her educational background.

"I was in school in the 1920s you understand," Aling Rosa began. "As an Asian woman in a white male American university, I followed the only course of study in science made available to me. I earned my masters degree in food and nutrition sciences."

"Masters. Impressive, Miss Rosa," said Persephone. "I would tell you my name but then one of these men would probably have to shoot you, or me, or who knows. I do not. My life is upside down. Sorry."

"I know who you are, Mrs. Persephone Bloom," Aling Rosa stated. She saw the American beauty's lower jaw drop in shock, then quickly close. "You are guests in my valley. Family land. You know about that sort of legacy from visiting your grandfather's land in southwestern Ohio."

"I will say again," said Persephone, "You are impressive, Miss Rosa."

Aling Rosa pointed toward the other Americans. "A pleasure to meet you, Persephone. I brought you and the boys pork adobo and rice. You ought to eat. I must go."

Aling Rosa disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived. Kim Chee returned when she and U.S. Signal Corps guys had already started eating. Then all slept, except the man who stood the first watch. The next morning she first put on a local dress that Chee gave her. Then, he had disguised her, put her hair up, wrapped a black bandana around her head, and put a wide brim hat on her head. He then put on his Japanesese army shirt and cap disguise. She got a surprise when he opened up the Nash Rambler's trunk and lifted a blanket. An unconscious man in a black suit was bound and gagged within it. "Japanese Naval Intelligence Captain, Yoshi Imai," said Chee. He injected him with something. "Best he continues to sleep." They both got into the wagon again. Chee accelerated away with her from his teammates. The Rambler kicked up a dust cloud.

She asked Chee where they were going. "East," he replied. "If we are stopped, don't speak. If asked, I will say in Japanese that you are my concubine."

Maria stood with a forearm casually rested on top of her cash register in her sari-sari shop that she called Sukimoko, on a palenque in Valenzuela, a city northwest of Manila near Manila Bay. She was with her cousin, Irene, who had left her rice seller's shop across the street from Sukimoko, as she often did when she had no customers, to talk with her cousin. Irene had been wondering about the whereabouts and health of her eldest daughter, Juanita, who she had not seen for several months. Maria's mind was on Persephone Bloom who had vanished two nights before. Neighbors told her the Japanese had become extremely interested in the Bloom home. They had remained, as if encamped, throughout the prior day and night.

Maria's two boys, Francisco the elder, and his energetic brother, Emiliano, entered the shop. Her youngest stepped uncharacteristically slow. She sensed he had, or thought he had, done something wrong. But what? He was holding the burlap bag she had given him. It was now filled with persimmons, as she had asked.

Behind the boys entered a handsome, white-suited, Asian man. Maria could not place his nationality. He smiled a charming smile. "Sukimoko." She smiled and nodded back to him. He browsed the items she had for sale.

"Sukimoko. Nihongo, desu ka?"

He realized that she did not understand his question. He had asked if Sukimoko was Japanese. He was not yet fluent in the Tagalog language of Luzon, Philippines. He ventured the question again, in English. "It sounds like a Japanese word, but if so it is one I do not know."

"It is a name I made up by putting together two Tagalog words, those for good and deal."

"Inventive of you."

Maria noted that both of her boy's eyes remained locked on the man she had now realized was an urban worldly Japanese man. She saw they had terrified looks on their faces. Maria looked to Irene.

"Tell me," he led with a command. "When was the last time you saw your customer, Mrs. Persephone Bloom?"

A chill simultaneously ran through each cousin's spinal columns.

Where else was she to go? Christina Ortegas, the Filipina beauty, who had once thought herself wealthy, had found she that she was now broke. She had found her home empty and open, with her jewelry gone and staff nowhere around. She had checked her bank accounts and had discovered them empty as well.

Christina made her way from the kitchen of the Manila Hotel carrying a tray of plates loaded with food into the dining room. There she rounded a table of German engineers and past a table of Japanese officers. She laid the tray upon a stand her assistant waiter had set next to the table of a Japanese general with a toady-looking face in seemingly perpetual frown.

The general seemed to take no notice of her as she served plates to him and his staff of other high ranked officers at his table. On her way back to the kitchen, one of the German engineers reached out and grabbed one of the cheeks of her bottom, giving her such a start, she let an exclamation escape her throat. She turned to see the table of German's laughing. After she had hurried back into the kitchen, a coworker had urged her to the round window in the kitchen door. She took over the viewing through the portal of glass to see two Japanese officers demanding that the German who had grabbed her stand. Then they escorted him from the restaurant. Though she did not know how the man's expulsion had come about, she was relieved to see it happen.

Toward the end of her shift at the Hotel Manila, Christina entered an elevator with a tray of food, responding to a room service request from the Manila Hotel penthouse. The elevator had two Japanesese soldiers aboard, operating and guarding the elevator. As she arose in it her thoughts were of Tony, Anthony Bloom. She recalled hearing him tell people his pitch line, "I'm bringing elevators to Asia," on varied occasions. "I'm riding on the first and only elevator he had installed in Asia," she thought. Neither of the Japanese soldiers looked at her. Each stared straight ahead into the elevator cab's walnut paneling.

Tony Bloom had been her project. Win him over. He would divorce. She would marry him. Someday thereafter, they would move to America. She realistically reassessed that project's prospect for success, now near nill.

A hidden bell dinged as the cab of the elevator arrived at the penthouse level. A light came on behind the button labeled P. Neither soldier moved. She stepped from the elevator into a quiet hallway. One of the high ranking Japanese officers who she had seen downstairs at the general's table, opened the penthouse door. She settled her tray on a sideboard table in the dining room of the suiet. The officer gave her a command she did not understand, but pointed in such a way as to inform her she was to stay and serve. Then, he left the room. She peeked around a door frame to see him rousting other officers from seats and desks in the living room of the suite then usher them out the door. What was going on?

A conception of what was happening appeared in her brain. A moment later she heard something behind her. She turned to see the frowning general seating himself at the head of the dining table.

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