Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Have your bath, have your bath, you are safe,” the mayor promised him. “We have no crocodiles here. We have no malaria. We have no marauders. I believe we are seeing some organized activity from the Muslim groups in the south, but in Cotabato only. We are not in Cotabato. This is Damulog. Welcome to Damulog.”

When Skip’s back was turned, the children called out to him. The island of Mindanao had seen no U.S. military; therefore nobody called him Joe. The children called him “Pa-dair, Pa-dair …” Father … Mistook him for a priest.

Those were strange dreams last night, Lord …

She sat on a bench in the market piecing together last night’s terrors, waiting for the 6:00 a.m. departure, waiting for coffee while nearby two half-awake women opened their stall for commerce. I stood at the seat of Judgment, but what before that, what, I had my purse, I stepped into a shop to buy a pencil, but the shop was a stage in a big black stadium at the end of the world, and now I was dead and had to account for my sins. And I couldn’t. And the darkness was my eternal death.

Whose voice had whispered in the dream? But the lady was prepared now to sell her some coffee, pouring hot water from a thermos into the plastic cup over a spoonful of powdered Nescafe. The lady turned on her transistor radio—DXOK from Cotabato City, pop tunes followed by a

6:00 a.m. break for five Hail Marys.

The bus waited, but the driver hadn’t come. Whether they left on schedule hardly interested her. She wore no watch, hadn’t owned one for years.

And who’s this? Not thirty feet away, seating himself at another stall and getting himself a sugar roll, was the man before whom she’d acted like an idiot at the restaurant, at La Pasteria. Idiot, idiot! But last night at the sight of him she’d felt such an ache, such thirst. In his Philippine-made apparel, brown slacks, brown sandals, white box-cut sport shirt, in the dusk of candlelight, with his shaggy head and mustache, he’d looked so much like Timothy the young arrival, Timothy the bringer of good news and bright fellowship. And she’d thrown herself at this American as blindly as she would have done at Timothy if Timothy had come back to her out of the blank question into which he’d dematerialized.

No dawn yet. Strange weather on this mountain, the sunlight fell on you like an anvil, but it was cool in the shade, after nightfall almost chilly. She hunched in her parka sweater, her face invisible in the shade of its hood, and observed the American from thirty feet away. For that first instant last night, Timothy, I thought he was you and my blood leapt to my head and fingers and I could hardly see, and here, drinking Coca-Cola at six in the morning with his arm hooked through the strap of his cotton satchel, Timothy, he still looks just like you. Now another man arrived, probably the bus driver, and sat down next to the American and ordered coffee. Way up in the tin eaves, frail fluorescent lights attended by a glory of winged bugs… Sleepy stall women wrapped in light blankets beside wooden cases opened up to display boiled eggs, cigarettes, candy, sugar rolls. Timothy, are you alive? The woman at the stall beside me is weaving tiny boxes for party favors out of coconut leaves. Another woman goes by bent over a short broom, just a sheaf of straw, sweeping … May I always remember the truth I feel right now … Timothy, we live, we die.

The driver opened his bus and the American boarded behind him. Impossible to get on that bus, to be seen. She’d take a later one. She turned her back and asked for an egg and a roll and more Nescafe, and then gathered her things and walked. She carried her things in a brown paper bag with string handles.

She sat on a bench in Rizal Plaza and watched half a dozen women and children spreading the rice harvest on the basketball court, walking through it with rakes to turn the grains. She had nowhere else to go. Better to gamble on the less dependable afternoon schedule than to stay another night. The city had no Seventh-Day church, and so she’d lodged at a rooming house, where the fact of a woman traveling alone had created a tense solicitousness that felt to her like hatred. Everybody trying to be polite. That’s why she’d gone to La Pasteria, though she could hardly afford it—thus for going there in the first place she’d had an excuse, but none for opening herself to the stranger.

Had he really looked so much like Timothy? From her paper luggage she fished a pack of photos, the sole reason for this trip. Last week amid the miscellany of Timothy’s belongings she’d found a roll of film, and had traveled all this way to reach a man with a darkroom. Most of the frames had come out, twenty or so photos, three showing Timothy, two only peripherally—Timothy with a group of engineers from Manila, looking at the site for a future water plant, Mayor Luis dashing into the foreground like a large, happy rodent; Timothy close but blurred, apparently instructing the novice photographer—and one of Timothy with his arm around the shoulders of Kathy herself, posing with a Filipino wedding party in front of a pink stucco church. The rest were shots he’d meant to send to the newlyweds: Cotabato City; Kathy recognized the pink church. She’d stayed at his side on what he called “a junket,” nearly a hundred kilometers over washed-out roadways with dozens of other passengers in a jeepney designed for eight people. At the church in Cotabato they’d received him as a god, petitioned him with their cares, burdened him with small offerings, beseeched him to attend the wedding of strangers, allowed him to record the occasion with his German-made camera.

Besides these photos her paper sack held yesterday’s change of clothes and a small pillow she put between herself and the wooden bench on the bus she rode down off the mountain that afternoon. The road fell gradually, looking straight into the distance, the view ahead lovely and vast, eleven hundred blends of green under slowly massing black and gray thunderheads. The air howled through the open windows, smelling at first of pine, next of the fermenting lowlands. The bus drove through a downpour and arrived in Damulog still dripping at 4:00 p.m.

No Mayor Luis at the bus stop today. He must be off wagering. She heard the men roaring at the cockfights in the building across the square. She’d watched once, from a distance, lingering outside in the street. The birds wore razors strapped to their spurs and cut each other to pieces within seconds.

She and Timothy lived not far from the square in a three-bedroom house with screened windows and a tight roof, sharing it with their servant Corazon and also, usually, two or three of Cory’s nieces, not always the same ones. She found the house empty. On Sabbaths and Sundays the girls went home to barangay Kinipet.

After the piney scent and relative cool of the mountain city, she could smell her home again, the damp wood and sour linen. The house was dark. She pulled the overhead chain in the kitchen—the power worked. Roaches ran for the corners. Cory had left her some rice in a covered bowl. The ants were at it. What a desperate, horrible place this was without Timothy.

She tossed the food, bowl and all, in the dirt by the margin of the property and left, three minutes after returning to her home.

She ate supper at the Sunshine Eatery and got trapped there by the day’s second rainstorm. The town’s electricity failed, and she waited out the weather in the candle-lit place talking with a man named Romy, here from Manila with a survey team, and with Boy Sedosa, who wore the uniform of a constabulary patrolman. Romy drank from a pint of Old Castle Liquor and Sedosa from a pint of Tanduay rum. Thelma, the patroness of the People’s Sunshine Eatery, sat on a high stool behind the counter across the room listening to a transistor radio.