Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Eddie bowled a line in the low nineties, not unrespectable for duckpins, and drank 7Up and grenadine as he’d done when a boy. Six weeks ago, after a debauched New Year’s Eve, he’d sworn off liquor.

He went up the stairs and through the lobby to the intercom and buzzed Ernesto in the drivers’ shack and stood out front waiting. The grounds and the drive of the Polo Club hadn’t changed in decades, and beyond the grounds, in the subdivision of Forbes Park, all was still well, but beyond Forbes Park chaos waited. The quarantine of beautiful lawns and stately homes was massed about with the choking city. He had plans to relocate. He was rich, he could go where he wanted. He only lacked an idea where.

Imogene wasn’t home. The children must be out of school by now but off visiting, or looking for trouble.

In his office upstairs he sat at the desk, his chair turned toward the window, and cradled a cup of coffee in his hands. He didn’t like coffee. He just drank it.

“A letter has come.”

“What?”

Carlos, the houseboy. The formerly beautiful Imogene preferred he

say “servant.” Carlos placed the envelope on his desk. “It comes from Mr. Kingston. His driver brought it in the car.”

Kingston, an American, lived nearby. The letter, he saw, came from Pudu Prison and was addressed to Eddie care of Manila’s Canadian Consul. Kingston had clipped to it a note reading, “This was given to me by John Liese of the Canadian Embassy. I believe it’s for you —Hank.” The connection, Eddie guessed, was that Kingston did a lot of business with Imperial Oil of Canada, and Sands was masquerading as a Canadian.

12/18/82

Dear Eduardo Aguinaldo:

Mr. Aguinaldo, my name is William Benęt. I’m currently in prison in Kuala Lumpur, awaiting sentencing on gun-running charges. My solicitors tell me I should expect to hang.

Mr. Aguinaldo, I’m dying and I’m glad. I imagine you at the big window of a high-rise above the smog, looking down on Manila floating like a dream in the fumes and smoke, a jowly guy no doubt, big paunch, a guy I don’t know and who possibly doesn’t remember me.

But I’m writing to you because you’re the only one who can deliver a message for me to the Eddie Aguinaldo of eighteen years ago, the young Major who fought the Huks and dated rich young mestizas and who played Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”—do you remember?—and was the best thing in it. I’ve got nothing to say to anybody else. Nothing to report to the denizens of this era, the heirs to our lies. So I’m writing to Eddie Aguinaldo. The kindhearted Eddie Aguinaldo who took the time and the risk to send me a warning against the danger I’d already dived into in Cao Quyen in Vietnam, the soul-dissolving acid guys like me immersed ourselves in while we politely covered our mouths with handkerchiefs and complained about the DDT and the herbicides while our souls boiled away in something a lot more poisonous than poison.

I hope it surprises you to learn I lived in Cebu City from ‘73 to ‘81. Since then I’ve been nowhere very long-term until just a few months ago, when I was arrested in the Belum Valley, on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The wrong side, believe me, to get arrested on.

I’m currently in Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur. If your travels happen to take you out this way in the next few months, stop in and say hello. It would be nice to see a familiar face. You can gather I’ve come to end my life under a cloud. This has been embarrassing. Or it should be. But I don’t feel particularly embarrassed.

Sincerely, Skip William French Benęt

He looked again at the first letter:

.. They call me “Skip.” You, in fact, called me “Skip.” Do you by

any chance remember me? Let’s just say I’m not the person I was

back then, and leave it at that. But do you remember me?

—That one had come addressed to Eduardo Aguinaldo, Forbes Park, Makati, Rizal, Philippine Islands. No house number, no street address, but it had found him. And his name wasn’t Eduardo. His name was Edward. As a kind of mockery between chums, Skip had called him Eduardo. Skip had mocked himself as well. Maybe under the Latin influence, in these islands named for a Spaniard king, he’d cultivated a silly mustache, and Eddie had called him Zorro. Certainly he remembered the young American with the crew cut and the mustache.

He stood by the window of his office and looked out on the pool, the bathhouse, the acacia dropping whirling blossoms on the lawn, and wondered if his happiest times hadn’t come in his teens, when he was down here in Manila on holiday from the Baguio Military Institute, running wild in a city without limits; and in his mid-twenties, those patrols in the jungle with Skip Sands, the man from the CIA.

His window fronted none-too-sturdy-looking high-rises veiled, as Skip said he imagined, in fumes. Once the places with better views had looked out on fields of high coarse elephant grass, dirt roads, open spaces with a few tall buildings. The Rizal Theater had been visible from two miles off. All his life he’d lived in Forbes Park. At the edge of a burning field once he’d found a dead dog with newborn pups at her teats, and he’d taken the minuscule beasts home and tried to nurse them from an eyedropper. That’s who he’d been once.

Recently he’d been struck with an idea for a wicked lampoon of My Fair Lady—a one-act, The Wedding Night of Liza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, with off-color lyrics set to the familiar melodies of “The Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”

The trouble was that in this cultural environment such a show would be, like Liza Doolittle (as he imagined her for the purposes of this entertainment), unmountable. And for the same reasons: conformity, prudery, feminine cowardice. He felt himself unsuited for the climate of his times. He could only stand outside and laugh at his own class, the educated emulators of British and American manners—his wife, her father the good senator, all those people—a light scum of gentility floating on a swamp.

And everybody else, all his fellow Filipinos: a lot of superstitious maniacs, miracle-seekers, statue-worshippers, stigmata-bleeders, berserk flagellants running on Good Friday through province after province with dripping, self-inflicted wounds while others came out to beat them with sticks or soothe their gashes with water hurled from old soup cans, and a man in Cotabato Province who had himself crucified annually before his weeping neighbors in a church.

Skip Sands to the gallows. Me too.

Why the jolly hell not?

He thinks, Fm a jolly good fellow and an unhappy man.

Approaching the steps to Kuala Lumpur’s Old High Court on the day of sentencing, Jimmy Storm looked up toward the second story and saw a number of women in bright dresses—secretaries, maybe—picnicking on a balcony, taking lunch with their rice bowls in the laps of their bright dresses. As they fed themselves they held the bowls up close to their faces, conversing, laughing, sounding almost as if they sang to one another.

On the top step he paused. He didn’t know where to go. He consulted the day’s printed agenda in its glass case while dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his shoe, and then pushed through the great wooden doors of the Old High Court—Moorish in its architecture, tropic Colonial in its spacious interiors, resonant and shadowy, dwarfing and cooling the concerns of those who came here.

He took a seat in the rearmost pew of Courtroom Seven, where at

1:00 p.m. a Chinese gun dealer named Lau would be sentenced. Then, at 2:00 p.m., the prisoner calling himself William French Benęt.

One yellow fire extinguisher. Twelve overhead fluorescent lights. A sign in Malaysian or whatever they spoke— DI–LARANG MEROKOK—which he took to mean “No Smoking.” Eleven wall-mounted electric fans, should the central cooling fail. Storm doubted it ever would. Everything worked perfectly in Kuala Lumpur. People seemed competent and agreeable.