Marina's Fella

                           Marina's Fella

Chapter 1

Marina Sundang, her name betrayed her light mestiza skin. She didn't look like what she thought what a Pinay woman ought to be.  No dark carmel skin, nor straight black hair, more of a light brown tint to her short bob hairstyle, and definitely no thick accent for this third generation Filipina/Mexicana American.  But that didn't matter to Regino Elustrado, he loved her, even if she didn't know it yet.

Regino would notice,  as she walked up the stairs at 8 a.m. every day to the office upstairs from the warehouse floor, usually carrying a stack of paperwork.

"Git back to werk! Stop stawking the seketaree! Wes need dis truk oflodded ASAP!"  yelled his partner Anthony Dubois.

"Shut up man, you think she heard you Tony?", Regino asked sternly.

"Uv corse she'd hurd me, maan. Why don't yuse jus ask hers out bye now? En my lan, theyse people are marrie bye da time wese twen-ee".

"Wait, where do you come from again Tony? How come I met a guy from Liberia and his accent wasn't as garbled as yours?...heh heh.

"Monkee boi, I'se tole yoo  nawt ta make da baad talk bawt my lan, okae monkee boi, I'll run yoo  dawn wit dis fawkleeft! Okae monkee boi!",  Anthony jokingly replies.

"I told you Tony about calling me monkey boy! I'll report you to HR if you say that again." Regino looks up through the glass office door to Marina at her  desk, wondering what she's thinking.

Six hours and three containers empty later, a dirt smeared  Regino wipes the sweat off his dark brown forehead with a piece of brown paper towel.

The work day ends for Regino and as he walks out the front door of the warehouse, he looks up once more towards the office where Marina is checking a document on the computer screen.

Chapter Two: Peat Dirt in the Hot Central Valley

Regino turned on the shower and the cool water refreshed his sore shoulders and back.  After the shower, he began to dry off and look at his tattoos that his two twin brothers , Melecio and Isidoro forced him get.  The last tattoo, his last name  ELUSTRADO, was something his brothers encouraged him to get before  they both  left  to  Afghanistan  for the Army  years earlier.

     He hated the ink on his back, "Elustrado" in big black Old English lettering, not so much the other tattoos, because the  Latin  prayer  on his right calf made sense to him, but the name Elustrado on his back made no sense to him.  For him, the last name Elustrado represented a mistake made years ago by a U.S. naval officer that couldn't understand his late grandfather Juanito Ilustrado told him to spell his name out.  Because his grandfather Juanito was illiterate, he didn't know that the U.S. naval officer misspelled his own name, and for the last 70 years, the Ilustrado name became Elustrado.  The alibata and indigenous animal patterns on his chest and arm sleaves represented ancient symbols of Ilustrado  family  lineage and Cebuano culture pride.  Battles, both in ancient times before the Spanish arrival in Cebu, down through his grandfather's time spent in the U.S. Navy fighting the Japanese in World War Two, even up to the times when his father Elpidio was in the Army during the Vietnam era. Though his dad  never went to Vietnam, being stationed in Germany and Kansas before young Regino was born or his twin brothers were born.

     Regino thought about his two brothers that tied him down and forced the tattoos on him when he was 14 years old, saying that the oracion (prayer) on his leg was an anting-anting (spiritual amulet) , and that it would protect him from danger. Though Regino knew of God, his relationship with God was not what he knew it was supposed to be, that Lord's prayer tattoo on his calf was the closest thing to Jesus he would know, until later on.