Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

They were another hour hiking down into what was left of the barangay of Tatug. Last year’s flooding had pasted down the grasses and toppled the houses from their low stilts, but the people still lived here. Carignan, so drained he couldn’t raise his hands to get his hat off, sat down on a mound he was vaguely aware must be that of a grave. Other graves surrounded him, not quite yet grown over by the relentless clawing grass and ground vines. Something had massacred a dozen of these people, more, twenty, twenty-five—a plague, a flood, marauders. He found strength to take his hat off. He heard children laughing, he heard a woman weeping. “Come, get out of here, you must not sit here,” Robertson said. Saliling had him by the arm. Robertson said, “See, we have a box.” He held in his hands a box made of grub-eaten, salvaged boards. “These are the bones of your countryman.”

In pursuit of his first official operation as an intelligence officer, Sands arrived at the Manila domestic airport at 4:15 a.m. on a Saturday to take a DC-3 to Cagayen de Oro, the northernmost city on the island of Mindanao, and added himself to the throng at the sellers’ windows, scores of people half asleep, their hankies draped over their necks, fanning themselves slowly with wilted journals, milling gently but resolutely forward into the blunt faces of the clerks. Then they disappeared before actually getting on the plane. Skip’s name came fortieth on the wall’s chalk-written waiting list, but the first thirty-nine travelers didn’t show, and he was the first to board the DC-3, which carried a total of five passengers over the iridescent jungles and the black sea and landed without mishap on a bumpy strip of red ground. These DC-3s, he understood, could fly with a wing shot off—he’d heard tales from the colonel.

Sands found a cab to the De Oro market, omitted breakfast, and boarded a passenger bus heading south across the island. He carried an inexpensive camera, an Imperial Mark XII in pastel green missing its flash attachment, but he spent most of his time looking at the ripe, spongy landscape. They made good speed, slowing nearly to a halt to let passengers on and off, but never quite stopping. In every hamlet vendors ran alongside selling sliced mango and pineapple wrapped in paper, and Coca-Cola in wobbling plastic baggies knotted shut and pierced with a drinking straw, and this was his fare until the journey broke for the night in Malaybalay, a city in the central mountains.

Throughout this passage waves of homesickness broke over him, not for the States, not for Kansas, or for Washington, but for the house in the mountains on Luzon, with its air-conditioned bedrooms and its Campbell’s soup and Skippy peanut butter from the embassy’s Seafront commissary. These tiny bouts of panic he welcomed as signs of a deepening immersion in his environment. A notion the colonel had advanced intrigued him: one God, but different administrations. His fears dragged him also to the far end of this assignment—who would read his report on Father Thomas Carignan, how would his report impress them?

Malaybalay, though poor and constructed mostly of plywood and galvanize, was populous and full of noise and movement. Next to the Catholic church square he found a hotel and a room with a Muslim-style private bath—a stall enclosing both a toilet hole and a cold-water faucet with three feet of rubber hose attached. This exotic system plunged him into a spiritual nausea. He’d expected on assignments of this kind to experience isolation and terror; but not merely at the sight of the plumbing. He lay on the bed gasping while the strength boiled out of his blood. The narrow room’s windows were too high to see out of. The air of this world seemed to carry no oxygen, only the bleating of children and the racket of the streets. He made his way downstairs with his camera and sat on a stone bench in the square, getting a shoeshine. The shine boy, he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, worked up a sweat, great drops beaded his upper lip, and he banged his brush on the box decisively to signal his customer should switch his feet. Sands snapped his picture. The boy had poise and pretended not to notice. This would do it, this would steady him, this child’s face. He paid plenty, went into the church —no walls, just a great dome over banks of pews — and waited for the Saturday evening liturgy. A few others joined him. Dusk came. Bats flitted around the square outside. The Latin soothed him. During the homily the youthful priest spoke Bisayan, but Skip recognized many English terms—”demonic possession” —”exorcisms” — “fallen angels” —”spiritual investigation” —”psychological investigation.” When the congregation rose to take Communion, he left them to it and stepped back into the devastatingly foreign city.

By stopping passersby until he found an English-speaker, he learned of a Western-style restaurant and soon sat down at La Pasteria, an Italian place getting perhaps part of its menu out of cans, but offering also fresh tossed salad and antipasta with radishes and fresh celery, even olives.

White tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles, and a phonograph on which the staff spun seventy-eight rpm Dixieland recordings.

The wooden shutters lay open to an evening mountain breeze as cool as could be had at this latitude. Beside one of the windows, alone, sat a woman Sands was convinced must be British or American, young but somehow not youthful, businesslike, something like a spinster librarian or a pastor’s maiden sister. But throughout the meal, whenever he glanced at her, she stared back with a disorienting candor.

As the waiter cleared her place, she rose and walked directly to Skip’s table. She carried her coffee cup and set it down next to his. She held out her hand. “We’ve been staring at each other all night. We might as well be introduced. I’m Kathy Jones.”

She shook his hand, and held it. Not in mere friendship. Her eyes locked on his, her gaze almost tearful, hot with need. Sands was speechless. He’d never known what to do about women. Her false smile, melting with desperation, shocked his heart with pity. She was ill, or drunk, maybe both.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, and turned away with a small laugh or sob. Leaving her coffee on his table, she went out quickly.

Sands shook inside, and he couldn’t eat. Nevertheless he ordered dessert. When it came—cannoli—the waiter lingered beside him in a grisly state of selfconsciousness and finally succeeded in saying, “The lady did not pay today. Will you be the one to pay?” and Skip paid.

The next afternoon, stepping from the bus onto the unpaved main street of the village of Damulog, he was greeted by a small plump man who apparently made a habit of inspecting new arrivals and who introduced himself as Emeterio D. Luis, Damulog’s mayor. Luis took him over to the only hotel, owned by a man named Freddy Castro, along the way pointing out the important places in Damulog, the market, the restaurant, the cockfights building, the dry-goods store.

Damulog lay at the end of the concrete road, end of the bus route, end of the power lines. Though electricity reached there, the town had no sewers and, as far as Sands could learn, no indoor plumbing, certainly not at Mr. Castro’s hotel, which was constructed of sturdy wood but where, that afternoon, the rain worked not only through the roof but through two intervening stories to drip from the ceiling of his groundfloor room. Keeping his bed and belongings dry needed some thoughtful arrangement. At dusk both the mayor and Mr. Castro, a young man with good English, took him to one of the town’s five springs, where Sands, in his checkered undershorts and yellow zoris, before an audience of women and openmouthed children, bathed in clear water flowing from a pipe in a hillside.