Episode 12: What Peping Knows

Previously on the Chicken Chronicles... A package arrived at Chester's door, addressed to G. Añonuevo — the same handwriting as the treasure map that had started everything. Inside: a cassette tape with no label and a letter in Ilocano. When Henrietta called Peping, the tricycle driver from Divisoria, and read him the name on the package, he went very quiet. He said he wouldn't explain over the phone. He gave them an address and told them to bring the tape.

What Peping Knows

The tape was in Chester's left hand for all of the C5, switched to his right somewhere past Valenzuela, and by the time the Meycauayan exit signs appeared he had gone through five different ways of holding a cassette tape and Henrietta had stopped commenting.

"Put it in the bag," she said.

"I know."

He didn't.

The NLEX stretched ahead of them, flat and silver, the skyline of Manila already a smear in the rearview mirror. The envelope of Ilocano letters was in his lap. The brass key was in his pocket. He'd brought it without deciding to.

He tried to remember what Peping had sounded like on the phone. The slowness of him. The weight of three seconds before he'd spoken again.

Where did you get that name.

Not a question. An accounting.

---

The address was a house behind a church, the kind of house that had been added to over decades until it was three or four houses' worth of decision sitting on one lot. Corrugated roof on the newest part. Old concrete on the section that had been there since before the road was widened. A frangipani in the yard, white flowers going sideways in the hot air.

Peping was waiting at the gate. He was larger than Chester remembered from Divisoria — or maybe Divisoria had been so loud that everything in it seemed smaller. He opened the gate without a word and they followed him inside.

There was a woman in the sala, maybe sixty, sitting in a monoblock chair with a glass of water she wasn't drinking. She looked at Chester. He had the feeling she was looking for something specific and had not found it yet.

"My ate," Peping said. "Estrella."

Chester said hello. Henrietta said hello. Estrella nodded.

"Show her," Peping said.

Chester opened the bag. He brought out the envelope first, and Estrella took it before he could hand it over — reached out and took it with the quickness of someone who had been waiting for this for a long time. She read the first page standing up. Her face did not change. She read the second page. Her face did exactly one thing at the line near the bottom.

She put the letter down on the table and looked at Peping.

"Naibagak,"

Chester looked at Henrietta. Henrietta looked at Peping.

"She knew this was coming," Peping said. "Not when. But that it was coming."

---

Peping came back from the kitchen with two glasses of water nobody asked for. Chester sat across from Estrella, who had picked up the letter again and was going through it slowly, one line at a time, her lips moving without sound. The cassette tape sat on the table between them, unremarked.

"G. Añonuevo," Chester said. "You know him."

"Knew," Peping said from the doorway. "Gregory. Our cousin." He said it the same way he'd said everything — slow, deliberate, presenting the word and waiting for it to land. "He moved to Manila in the nineties. We lost touch. People do."

"The old woman in Baguio," Henrietta said. "She said her son left and never came back."

Peping was quiet. He looked at his ate.

"Gregory had no mother in Baguio," Estrella said. Her Tagalog was careful, accented. "He had a woman he wrote letters to. For years. He never said who."

Chester looked at the brass key. He was not aware he'd taken it out of his pocket. "She said her son made a map. Sent it ahead of himself, in case something happened."

Estrella looked at the key.

"That key," she said, "is to the cabinet in the back room. He left it here the last time he visited." She paused. "2004."

The room was quiet except for the frangipani scraping the window glass.

"There is a tape player in the cabinet," Peping said. "If you want to know what Gregory recorded."

---

The cabinet was green. Old lacquered wood, the lock a round brass throat — exactly the size of the key in Chester's hand. He stood there for longer than was probably reasonable while Henrietta and Peping and Estrella waited.

He put the key in. It turned.

Inside: a tape player, still in its original box, the foam yellowed but intact. And beneath it, a photograph — not the rooster photograph he'd been carrying, but a new one. Two young men in front of that same frangipani tree, arms around each other, grinning at whoever was holding the camera. On the back, in the same forward-leaning ink: Peping at nineteen. Me at twenty-three. Before everything.

Chester turned the photo over. He looked at Estrella.

"This is Gregory?" he asked.

She looked at the photograph for a long time. "Yes."

"He looks like—" Chester stopped.

"Like what?" Henrietta said.

He didn't finish the sentence. He put the tape in the player. He pressed play.

The sound came through in hiss and tape-warble, tinny from the small speaker, but clear enough: a voice, low and measured, speaking in Ilocano — and then a phrase, just two words, that even Chester could understand. That anyone who'd grown up with a Filipino grandparent would know.

He looked at Henrietta.

"I understand those two words," he said.

"What are they?"

"Anak ko," he said. "My child."

Next week on the Chicken Chronicles: The tape keeps running. Chester doesn't stop it. Nobody speaks for four minutes and forty-two seconds. Then Estrella says: "You should go to Vigan."