Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“So what’s the point? The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam.”

In late September Sands took the train from the town at the bottom of the mountain into Manila. It was hot. He sat by an open window. Vendors came aboard at stops with sliced mango and pineapple, with cigarettes and gum for sale as singles, from open packs. A small boy tried to sell him a one-inch-square snapshot of what it took him a long time to understand was a woman’s naked groin, very close up.

As instructed, he would neither appear at the embassy nor contact anybody in Manila concerning his assignment. He might have looked up the major, but he’d been specifically cautioned to steer clear of Eduardo Aguinaldo. But the officer’s club at the Seafront compound hadn’t been forbidden him, and they served the best pork chops he’d ever tasted. At the station in Manila he barged rapidly through the horde of beggars and hustlers, right hand clutching his wallet in his pants pocket, and rode to the compound on Dewey Boulevard in a taxi that smelled strongly of gasoline.

At the air-conditioned Seafront club he could look out the southern window at the sun descending into Manila Bay or across the room out the northern window at the swimming pool. Two solid-looking men, probably marine guards from the embassy, practiced trick dives from the board, somersaults, back flips. A black-haired American woman in a tawny, leopard-spotted two-piece shocked him. It was practically a French bikini. She spoke to her teenage son, who sat on a deck chair’s extension staring at his feet. She wasn’t young, but she was fabulous. All the other women at the pool wore full one-piece suits. Skip was afraid of women. The pork chops came, succulent, moist. He didn’t know enough about cooking even to guess at the trick for coming up with pork chops like this.

Leaving, he bought a flat pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes from the display at the cashier’s counter, though he didn’t smoke. He liked to give them away.

He waited for a cab just outside the club, stood in the late light looking over the wide grounds, the jacarandas and acacias, the spike-topped wall, and, at the compound’s entrance, the American flag. At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

The flag rolled in the salty breeze, and beyond it the sun soon sank. He’d never seen in nature anything as explosively crimson as these sunsets on Manila Bay. The dying light charged the water and low clouds with a terrifying vitality. A shabby taxi stopped in front of him, two carefully nondescript young men of the Foreign Service got out of its backseat, and the anonymous young man from the Intelligence Service took their place.

Carignan woke after a sweaty dream that felt like a nightmare, left him shaking, but what of the dream should frighten? Dream, or visit: a figure, a monk with a pale region where his face should have been, telling him, “Your body is the twig that ignites the passion between your love of Jesus and the grace of God.” He’d drifted so far from English that certain of the phrases felt erased even as he turned them over in his mind and tried them with his lips—passion, ignite. Years since he’d so much as whispered words like that. And it surprised him that he should dream about grace or Jesus Christ because it had been many years too since he’d let such things trouble him.

The loneliness of my own life—Judas’s solitary journey home.

He rose from his bed in the corner of the mildewed church, walked to the pale brown river with an ingot of pale brown soap. Two little boys stared at him as they fished with hand lines from the broad back of a carabao, the local domesticated water buffalo. A second such beast nearby wallowed deep in a mud hole beside the bank, only its nostrils visible, and some of its horn. Wearing his zoris and underclothes, shoving the soap beneath his garments, Carignan bathed briskly, lest the leeches take hold.

By the time he’d returned and changed into clean undershorts, put on khakis and a T-shirt, affixed his collar, Pilar had some tea going.

The priest sat on a stump beside a wobbly table under a palm tree and smoked the day’s first cigarette and sipped from a china cup. He told Pilar, “I’ll go to see the Damulog mayor today. Mayor Luis.”

“All the way to Damulog?” “No. We’ll both go to Basig, and we’ll meet.” “Today?” “He says today.” “Who told you?” “The Basig datu.” “All right. I’ll take everything to my sister’s and do the washing there.” “No services until Sunday morning.” He only had to tell Pilar, and

everyone would know. “All right.” “We’ll meet with three other datus. It’s because of the missionary—do

you remember the one who disappeared?” “Damulog missionary.” “They think he’s been found.” “Hurt?” “Dead. If he’s the one.” Pilar crossed herself. She was middle-aged, a widow, with many rela

tives, both Muslim and Catholic, and took good care of him. He said, “Please bring my tennis shoes.” A gray day, but he wore his straw hat as he hiked the ten kilometers

down the red earthen road to Basig. The wind came up, the stalks shook and shuddered, also the palms, also the houses. An infestation of tiny black beetles numerous as raindrops roamed the gusts and sailed past. Children playing on the paths whooped when they saw him and ran away. In Basig he made for the market square, speculating as always that life would improve if he lived it here in a town. But the town was Muslim, and they wouldn’t have a church in it.

Before he reached the market the Basig datu and the two datus from Tanday, a village in the hills—men nearly sixty, all three of them, in ragged jeans or khakis, in conical hats like his own, one bearing a long spear—joined him on either side, and now in the safety of town the children cried softly from the shade of thatched awnings, “Pa-dair, Padair”—Father, Father … The four men marched together into the café to kill time before the arrival of Mayor Luis. Carignan had rice with a dish of goat’s meat, and instant coffee. The others had rice and squid.

Carignan bought a pack of Union cigarettes and got one going, and if these Muslims didn’t like it, too bad. But they asked him for some, and they all four sat smoking.

Mayor Luis had sent word last week that the people in possession of the corpse and its effects had been told, already, what identifying features to look for. The datus had said they’d return as far as Basig with the verdict—was this the missing American missionary? —on Tuesday. Carignan believed today was already Thursday. It didn’t matter.

The jeepney from Carmen arrived covered with passengers and shed them like a gigantic husk. The mayor from Damulog would be on it.

People walked by the cafe’s door and past the windows and looked in, but nobody entered. A toothless drunken old man sat alone at another table and mumbled a song to himself. Quite different music came from out back, where a few kids squatted around a U.S. Army crank radio. The clearest station came from Cotabato. Months-old American pop tunes. They went for the hot beat or the sad ballads.