Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

He woke at dawn having scarcely slept and stepped out to relieve his bladder against the side of the schoolhouse. After the night of rain it was cool, without a breath of wind. At this hour the land seemed to lie open, ready to give up its secret.

What offering would I lay at the foot of the cross of the thief?

He passed gas, and some children peeking at him from around the corner pursed their lips and imitated the sound and laughed. What consolation at the foot of his death? Without preliminaries or farewells the three datus came out and re

sumed the journey. They carried nothing, so he carried nothing. Although they went barefoot, he wore his Keds.

They navigated a slick path downward to a long ridge and stumped along it toward another mountain. One edge of the world turned red and the sun came rolling over on them, burning away the vapors below and seeming to fashion from the mist itself a grander and more complicated vista full of hills and ravines and winking creeks and vegetation tinted not just the innumerable values of green, but also silver, black, purple. They stopped at a barangay of several huts on the adjoining hill and had native coffee and each a bowl of rice. Saliling spoke with the headman in the Bisayan dialect, and Carignan heard them discussing some gunfire they’d heard across the valley just this morning. “He has warned us of some fighting ahead,” Robertson said, and Carignan said, “I heard him say it.” They began hiking again.

They came down the other side of the mountain onto a wide, level trail beaten smooth by carabao hooves. Gradually the way narrowed until Carignan had to draw his arms to his chest in order to keep from being savaged by thorns on either side. Saliling led the march, the tip of his spear scraping the leaves overhead and knocking last night’s rain into Carignan’s face. The two others crouched behind the priest. Suddenly Saliling left the trail and lunged into a sea of elephant grass through which, somewhere in the region of their feet, traveled a six-inch-wide path. Now they had the sun bearing down from overhead and yet, beneath their progress, a thick red mud that seemed alive, clinging to Carignan’s shoes, building up on the soles, clambering up over the sides, engulfing him up to the ankles. In their bare feet the others ambled over it easily, while Carignan struggled along among them with his tennis shoes encased in red cakes as heavy as concrete. He took off his Keds lest they be stolen by the stuff, and joined them by the laces and dangled them from his fist.

As they left the mesa and descended toward a creek deep in a ravine, Carignan despairing of yet another descent, yet another climb, there came a faint crackling from somewhere behind the next peak, and they fell under the shadow of a mass of smoke in the sky ahead of them, a black column rising straight upward in the windless day. There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke—from Joel, wasn’t it? Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated “pillars of smoke,” but the original Hebrew said “palm trees of smoke.”

As they crossed the creek at the pit of the ravine Carignan tried to clean his shoes. The mud didn’t dissolve in water, he had to scrape and rub at it with his fingers. The water looked clear. He wondered if it was potable. Somewhere along its length every creek in the region had a clan or village irrigating from it, sewage going in, animals bathing. He had a desperate thirst, his whole being pounded with it, but the men didn’t drink, so he didn’t drink. He pulled his wet shoes onto his bare feet. Now they made directly toward the black monolith of fumes.

They crested the rise and picked along down a path both muddy and rocky toward a barangay of several huts, all burning, nearly gone, down to their boards, and the boards still black and smoking. Saliling cupped his hand beside his mouth and hooted. An answer came. Around the side of an abutment they found an old man dressed in a burlap G-string. Carignan sat on a patch of coarse grass and waved the smoke away from his eyes while Saliling and his nephew spoke to the villager. “He say the Tad-tad came to destroy,” Robertson told the priest. “But everybody escaped. He is too old to escape. They shot him in the hand, and he is hiding.” The Tad-tad were a Christian sect. Their name meant “chopchop.”

Of the inhabitants here nobody was left now but this old man with a bullet hole in his hand, which he’d wrapped in a poultice of leaves and flies’ eggs. “Even if they have a bad wound, they never cut off their limbs in this clan,” Robertson explained. “It isn’t necessary, their wounds never infect, because they allow the eggs to hatch and eat of the rot of their flesh.”

“Ah. Aha,” Carignan said.

“It is a good way. But sometimes it makes him sick, and he dies.”

The old man seemed immensely so, with a shrunken monkey’s face and leathery flesh that drooped from his bones at the joints. Toward the back of his mouth he had two or three teeth which he used, at this moment, to gnaw at a mango with intense concentration. He answered Saliling’s questions gruffly, but when he was done with the fruit he tossed away the pit and showed Carignan his anting-anting, a bracelet of hollow seeds around his waist. Its magic, he explained, guaranteed him a peaceful death. Therefore his bullet wound meant nothing.

The old man spoke a Cebuano-Bisayan dialect Carignan could make out pretty well, though young Robertson translated: “He just needs to drink some blood from the monkey, and he’ll be new again.”

“Take me to the river with you,” the old man said. “I want to drink some mud.” “Now he wants to go with us,” Robertson said.

“Yes. I understand.”

“This clan says the mud gives life. He wants the river.”

“I know what he says,” the priest insisted.

The old man pointed eastward over a hill and spoke of a story-land, a legendary place.

“He says that over that mountain is the place called Agamaniyog.”

“The children tell these stories,” Carignan said.

Still pointing east, the old man said, “Agamaniyog. It is the land of coconuts.” Carignan said, “Agamaniyog is for children.” “Then don’t go there,” the old man said. They began again, wading down the middle of the creek through the

tight valley and then up the facing mountainside, clutching at shocks of weed to pull themselves upward, Carignan afflicted every step of the way by the goads of the Accuser: I am evil in the sovereignty of my will, and incompletely repentant. But a little, a little repentant. But very incompletely. I have failed in the spirit of my sonship. He stifled the devil’s voice, which was his own, and trained his hearing on the outer sounds, the shivering of wet leaves in the wind, guffaws of parrots, the dishonest glibness of small monkeys in the bush. The plants closed over them. The path was only a figment now in Saliling’s mind. Carignan blundered after, kept upright by the fear that if he went down he’d be lost in the vegetation. His clothes were sopped, even his pockets were full of his sweat. The path widened again, and they came onto a ridge overlooking the world. The going was easier now. In less than two hours they stood above the Arakan Valley, some five kilometers wide, and the olive-drab Pulangi River running through it. Gigantic acacia trees shaped like mushrooms, ten stories high and their crowns a hundred feet across, hid the riverside from view. Saliling hadn’t once spoken to him, but he turned now and said in Cebuano, “Look back—you see where we came. It’s twenty kilometers to there.” Carignan looked west: the gray-green jungle washed in a rosy light, crumbling into the cauldron of the sunset.