Two boys walked slowly down the middle of a fish pond beside a one-lane jungle highway, pausing now and then to chop their bolos at the mudfish who’d grown lethargic in the heat of mid-day. The sun burned like a big white diamond in the sky directly above them, making iridescent whorls in the chemical slicks left by the kerosene they applied to the surface in the mornings to kill the mosquito larvae. Every hour or so, the roadside ferns and Tangan-tangan leaves shifted in the breeze caused by a passing Jeepney, or by a passenger bus bound for Midsayap or Davao. The only movement beside the occasional traffic was the gradual forward movement of the boys and the sudden lifting and falling of their bolos, which flashed in the sun when they chopped at the fish in the murky water. Except for the splashing of the water, the silence was interrupted only by their conversation, and by the intermittent bursts of laughter from the children of the labanderas filling containers at the water pump beside the community store in the distant hillside barangay of Habitat Sada’an.

            “Maybe we have enough, now,” Jomar said. Jomar was the elder of the two; he was just enough older than Boyett to be his companion and often his example and sometimes his leader. They looked like identical twins of different sizes, though Jomar’s eyes wore a naturally worried expression while Boyett’s were mostly curious. They had the same wild, thick, curly black hair that fell just above their shoulders, just like their father’s.

            “How many do you have?” Boyett said.

            Jomar peered down into his woven fish basket. “Four.” He reached in with his hand. “No . . wait! Five! There was one hiding in the bottom.”

            “I have three,” Boyett said. “Tatay said to get at least twelve big ones.”

            Jomar nodded. “If we catch four more big ones we can stop,” he said, and he smiled. “Then there will be enough left over for breakfast.”

             “Can we catch fighting spiders later on, then,” Boyett said, “if we finish homework early?”

            “Only if we can catch four more big ones,” Jomar said. “Let’s take a break now, though. It’s too hot now.”

            “Good thinking,” Boyett said. “My head is cooking.”

            “Sige,” Jomar said. “So are the fish. Let’s sit in the shade for a little while. Ta ra!”

            The boys climbed out of the pond, and they left their bolos on the bank of the pond and walked over to sit on the grass in the thin strip of shade made by the chicken hutch at the far end of the yard. A jeepney passed down the highway toward Lungon; a cloud of dust plumed up behind it drifting a delicate ocher film over the trees and bushes and all along the surface of the pond. Another jeepney passed in the opposite direction; as the dust from it settled, a little mutt descended the hillside toward the gate at the corner of the highway and the barrio road. It stopped and sat and looked one way and then the other way down the highway.

            “Isn’t that Manang Ame’s dog?” Boyett said.

            “O-o,” Jomar said. “Si ‘Shadow’ siya.” Then, after a long pause, he said “Kuya Pedro must be coming back.”

            “How do you know?” Boyett said. “Did he send a letter to Manang Moralde, or DokSalem?”

            “Ambot lang,” Jomar said. He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s the dog who knows.”

            “How does the dog know? He’s just a dog!?”

            “Ambot lang,” Jomar said. He shrugged again, smiling. “It’s strange. He just knows. Tatay told me they are connected somehow. It’s because Kuya Pedro doesn’t treat him like anyone else.”

            “How?”

            “Well . . . Kuya Pedro never hits him or throws rocks at him, and he feeds him sardines, even from his own plate sometimes. He even lets him sleep in the bed at the staff house.”

            “In the bed?”

            “O-o.”

            “With him?”

            “O-o, lagi . . only when Kuya is here.”

            “Gaaaago kaaaayo!” Boyett said. “That’s craaaaazy!”

            “Maybe. Maybe not. The dog knows when he’s coming, though. He can feel him.”

            “Do you think Kuya Pedro can talk to dogs?”

            “Seguro,” Jomar said. “Dogs are special in America. Tatay said that in America, dogs are heroes. They treat them like pamilya; they keep them inside the house, and they even have special doctors for them.”

            “That makes no sense. Heroes?”

            Jomar shook his head. “I don’t know. I have never been to America.”

            “Neither has Tatay.”

            “No. But Tatay is a grown man,” Jomar said. “And he has been to Jolo and even Borneo. You have never even been to Cotabato.”

            “I bet that if I lived in America, I could learn how to talk to dogs,” Boyett said.

            “I think so, probably,” Jomar said. “I think they can all talk to dogs in America. Most people, anyway.”

            “Do they eat dogs, too?”

            “No, I don’t think so. Since they’re heroes. Come on . . let’s finish fishing now.”

            “Sige lang . . ta ra!”

            The two brothers descended the bank to the pond again, and they eased themselves into the water gently, to avoid disturbing the fish. Once they were in the pond, they retrieved their bolos from the bank of the pond and resumed their hunt, feeling along with their legs and with their free hands as they walked slowly forward, one after the other through the murky water. Their reflections traced their gradual steps, following mutely, languidly across the rippled surface of the pond beside them. Jomar turned and whispered over his shoulder to Boyett, “Remember . . try to stun them if you can. Use the blunt edge, but be careful.”

            Boyett nodded, turning the bolo in his grip so that the sharp side pointed upward and the flat, dull side pointed down. “Like this, no?”

            “O-o,” Jomar said. He nodded, and he continued forward, walking one careful step at a time, one hand feeling along through the water, the other hand raised high above his head, holding the bolo aloft such that it flashed in the sunlight, at the ready, a thin steel blade tethered fast by neural conditioning to his steady, searching eyes and his groping legs and to his one free hand. Boyett watched Jomar lead the way, and then he followed along after him, stepping where he stepped, mimicking his brother’s posture precisely; thus they pressed on, so gradually they almost seemed to stand perfectly still, like figures captured in an ancient frieze. Constellations of iridescent water bugs wove nested figure eights along the surface of the water in the shade near the bank. Now and then, one of the boys cut his bolo down hard through the dark surface of the water, and now and then a fish rose to the surface on its side, stunned or dead, for the boys to gather and tuck away into their little woven creel baskets.

            “That leaves two more, right?” Boyett said.

            “Two big ones,” Jomar said. “Or three. That last one I got . . he was not so big.”

            “Shouldn’t you put it back, then?”

            “It’s dead already.”

            “Ok lang . . .”

            They fished in silence until they reached the far end of the pond, Jomar first, then Boyett, each of them scanning the surface of the water for signs of fish, drifting his hand along just below the surface. When Boyett reached the place where Jomar waited for him, they paused for a minute to let the fish relax before they made their return walk across the pond. The bigger the fish were, the more wily they were, and the more difficult to catch; if they didn’t hit one on the first strike, then the fish would hide deep down, out of harm’s way until the water became calm again, or until someone scattered feed.

            “See?” Jomar said, motioning toward the little dog by the intersection in the distance. “He knows. Kuya Pedro will arrive soon . .  And then he will disembark from the bus, and he will squat down to pet the dog and talk to it. Then, he will go across the street to Gemone store and drink rum with Iting and Mol-mol and the other choi boys from Crossing until he feels sleepy.”

            “How do you know all of that?” Boyett said. “Does the dog know that, too?”

            Jomar shrugged. “I don’t know.”

            “But how do you know?”

            “Because Tatay told me. Plus, I pay attention. It’s what he does every time.”

            “Ahhhh . . .”

            Before long, they heard the sound of another passenger bus approaching from the direction of Lungon. They heard the gears whine as the bus made the final descending turn into the straightaway that ran the length of the little valley that lay between Sada’an and Midsayap, and then they heard the long hydraulic hissing exhalation of the brakes as the bus came to a slow halt beneath the stand of old palm trees beside the barrio gate. It was a big air-conditioned Weena passenger bus, one of the fleets that ran a circuit back and forth from Cagayan de Oro to Dadiangas, all the way across Mindanao. It lurched to a halt in the settling dust, and the front door folded open and out popped Kuya Pedro; he wore sunglasses and a sleeveless sweatshirt over a pair of homemade cotton-sack draw-string shorts; he wore chinellas, and a bandanna tied across his head bohemian style, and he gazed all around, grinning up into the sunlight with a single hand-sewn rucksack slung over one shoulder.

            “That rag he wears makes him look silly,” Boyett said. “Without it, he looks just like the professional wrestler, ‘Mister Perfect.’”

            “He wears it to look Choi-choi,” Jomar said, “so people don’t think he’s an American soldier.”

            Boyett furrowed his brow. “He looks like a choi-choi American soldier or a silly Mister Perfect,” he said.

            As Kuya Pedro disembarked, the little dog made a series of gleeful pirouettes up into the air to greet him, barking joyfully as his long-awaited friend knelt to rub his back and kiss his head. Kuya Pedro knelt there for a minute, whispering to the little mutt, hugging him, and then he stood up and looked both ways down the highway to check for traffic; as the passenger bus pulled away toward Midsayap, he walked across the road and down a faint path that vanished beneath a canopy of chocolate and mango trees, leaving the dog to sit waiting patiently in the shade of the trees across the highway.

            “You see?” Jomar said. “He is at Gemone store now, lighting a cigarette, drinking rum with Iting; Tatay says he always goes there first, no matter what.”

            “But how does Tatay know?”

            “Because he has to know; it’s his job.”

            “Why is it Tatay’s job?”

            “Because Tatay is paid to be his guard when he goes into the city.”

            “Why does he need to be guarded?” Boyett said. “Who does he need to be guarded from?”

            “Bandits, lagui . . but also MILF, and MNLF . .  and Way-S . . Everyone who doesn’t know him.”

            “But if he does the same thing every time when he arrives, why don’t they just set a trap?”

            Jomar shook his head. “No. Not here in Sada’an. Sada’an is safe. Sada’an is home.”

            After the boys brought their catch home to their mother, they walked across the road to bathe at the water pump in the radiant warmth of twilight with the other boys and girls from the barangay. They washed with soap underneath their clothes, and they splashed one another and cheered and bathed and took turns drinking the good fresh cold well water directly from the pump while the sunset through the distant canopies of coconut palms; and then, by ones and chattering twos and threes they bid one another goodnight, and they dispersed to walk homeward bearing water buckets and long wooden poles strung with sloshing jerry cans through the twilit jungle landscape; they diverged down fern-latticed footpaths all along the hillside hamlet of Habitat Sada’an, and through accidental tunnels where bananas and papayas converged overhead, and as each of them came into view from home, the distant voices of their loved ones rose to greet them over the cacophony of dinner time chatter among the younger children and the livestock that gathered now in the warmth of evening kitchens.

            Much later, lying full and happy and tired on their mat on the family bed beside their mother and grandmother and siblings beneath the mosquito net, Jomar and Boyett could hear the talking of the men at the Gemone store across the highway, their voices rumbling deep and distant as thunder felt through the earth, rising and falling and breaking into occasional bursts of laughter as the wind gusted high up in the mango trees. They could smell the acrid smoke from makeshift kerosene lanterns, and the sweet, musky smell of cannabis burning; and they could smell, too, the smoke from the little fire where the men made bamboo skewers for cooking pieces of chicken and lechon to eat while they drank tuba after the rum was finished.

            Jomar listened carefully into the rhythmic warbling thunder of the men’s voices in the distance for the sound of his father’s voice and of the voice of Kuya Pedro; he had listened to them many times before, on a dozen evenings just like this when Kuya Pedro came home, and he knew they would be there for hours yet, sitting long into the dark of night drinking with the other men, Kuya Pedro telling stories of things that he had seen in Dadiangas and on the roads in the south, and Tatay listening, grinning, drinking one shot for every three of Kuya Pedro’s, always watching, rarely speaking, rising from his seat on the log bench beside the others now and then to pace the little stretch of road just beyond the tree line, across the highway from the spot where Shadow would still be sitting quietly, waiting in the starlight.

– David VanDevelder