Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Each night Sands roamed the town and walked several times past the house of Mrs. Jones, but never saw a light until the fourth night of his wandering.

She answered his knock, but she didn’t ask him in. She looked terrible.

“You’re home.”

“Go away,” she said.

T m leaving town tomorrow.”

“Good. Don’t come back.”

“I could arrange to come back in a while,” he said, “maybe in a couple weeks.”

“I can’t stop you.”

“Can I come in and talk to you?”

“Beat it.”

He turned on his heel and headed off.

“All right, all right, all right,” she called. “Come here.”

Late Monday morning a jeepney turned up in the square and waited there with the hood raised and a couple of men bent over the engine, another man’s legs sticking out from under, and the driver sitting up front pumping the brake, exclaiming.

Sands was the first aboard. He’d hopped these things for short rides in Manila but never traversed any mountains, as he would today. These elongated jeeps looked capable of seating about a dozen people, front and back, but actually carried as many as could be loaded aboard without breaking the axles, and they traveled over any surface, always painted many garish colors and adorned with pennants and chromed trophies and whizzbang doodads of the kind appealing to teenage speedsters, and, emblazoned over the front windshield of every one, always, its title and its claim: Commando; World Champion; et cetera. This one called itself Still Alive.

While the repairs went on, Sands waited on the bench in the vehicle’s passenger section, staring down at floorboards speckled with rice grains, jammed in with many travelers and several folks just looking for a shady place. After two hours, the problem fixed and the vehicle laden with at least twenty voyagers and their kits and sacks, it seemed to Sands the moment had come. But bodies were still being added. He counted at least thirty-two, including eleven pairs of legs draping down from the roof, and two babies, one sleeping, one bawling. He heard baby chicks, too. The travelers had crushed themselves together closely enough to stare at the tiny red flecks of heat damage on the surfaces of one another’s eyeballs, to extend their tongues, if they felt like it, and taste the sweat on each other’s cheeks … His last count, before the thing began moving, budging forward by some supernatural force, drifting hugely out of town, like a greasy, sweaty, iceberg—of what use brakes against such inexorableness?—stood at forty-one passengers, twenty-five in back with him, three up front, one dozen on top. And the driver. And others climbing on at the last second, and still more chasing after and grappling themselves aboard the roof, until they’d built enough speed to leave the last few stragglers laughing and waving farewell. Sands faced an old man like a monkey, a woman like a lizard, and a little girl with the feet of a hundred-year-old crone. Not far out of town they lurched into a low-ceilinged forest of banana plants that muted and filtered the roaring noon, passed tiny, dazed villages of oak-frame huts, drove, at one point, directly through a campfire of burning bamboo in the middle of the shattered road. Then the jeep climbed mountain switchbacks, swaying and moaning. Then a flat tire. Almost everyone jumped off, and Sands had a chance to gather them all together for a photo. Forty-seven people bunched themselves around the conveyance, shrieking with fascination while he tripped the shutter.

At three that afternoon he disembarked in Carmen: an asphalt main street, several two-story stucco buildings, the grandest civilization he’d experienced since Malaybalay a week ago. He found a room for the night, lay down for a nap, and didn’t wake till well past two in the morning. The town slumbered, all but the dogs, and the sinners… At this solitary hour Sands repented his lust for Kathy Jones. In his mind he fell at the foot of the Cross and begged Jesus to pour down his cleansing blood. Mrs. Jones was solid, made for middle age but not yet there. She had a round face, plump cheeks, a corona of thick curly hair almost like lamb’s wool, very soft and kind brown eyes, and hands very soft but also strong. While she talked her tongue touched her small, very even front teeth. She was intriguing, pleasant, attractive, but not nerve-wrackingly so. His soul crawled back and forth between Jesus and Mrs. Jones until he heard the roosters screaming.

Skip had his maps. He’d pored over them daily, hungrily, joyfully, loosed from his body, free as a hawk. The colonel had told him where to find the priest, Carignan; there was nothing on his Mindanao map indicating a place called Nasaday on any river called the Rio Grande. On his map of the province of North Cotabato, however, the urban churches of the diocese were pinpointed, and first thing in the morning he walked to Formation House, the resortish headquarters on the edge of Carmen. He was told that Father Haddag rested. He came out within twenty minutes, a wiry old Filipino with Communion wine on his breath. Together they looked at the map. The priest made a small mark with a pencil. “I think the church is there, or there,” he said. “It’s my reasonable guess.” In a fantastic display of generosity, he loaned Skip a 50cc Honda motorcycle, and Skip accomplished a twenty-mile trip in a bit more than two hours, perhaps a thirty-mile trip, if he factored in the continual diagonal maneuvering thanks to the potholes. And the church waited there on its pencil mark, a lopsided concrete block with olive canvas stretched over its roof, or serving in place of a roof. Skip had passed through several hamlets on the way from Carmen, but this structure stood in awkward solitude a half mile from the nearest, on a stretch of river apparently eating the ground from beneath it.

Father Carignan, of French-Canadian descent, white-headed, leathery, with a tentative bearing and cloudy eyes, had lived here so long—for thirty-three years, in fact, through the Japanese occupation, Muslim uprisings, famous typhoons, and sudden calamitous changes in the river’s course, speaking Cebuano and ministering to these sun-baked native Catholics—that he hardly had a grip on the English language anymore. Asking about Skip’s origins, he inquired who his descendants were, meaning his ancestors.

Carignan made him properly welcome, had tea brought out to a table in the shade, sat across from him with his zoris slipped off and his feet together under the chair and his knees flung apart. He wore faded denim trousers and a T-shirt browned by river water. He breathed through his mouth, smoked Union cigarettes, pronounced them “Onion.” When not smoking he clutched his thighs and rocked slightly in his seat, his gaze sliding down and sideways like a mental patient’s. He made some effort to engage himself; when Sands spoke he faced his guest with an expression —unintentional, Sands was sure—of veiled shock, of friendly disbelief, as if Sands had come here minus his pants. He didn’t appear remotely capable of running guns.

“Do they ever call you Sandy?”

“Do they ever! But my friends call me Skip.”

“Skip,” the priest repeated, saying “Skeep” as would a Filipino.

“I understand you helped with finding the lost missionary. Getting the remains, I mean.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s so, isn’t it?” “Down by the Pulangi River?” “Yes. On the way back, coming up the hill, I fainted.” “But isn’t this the Pulangi right here? That’s what it says on my map.” “It’s a division, how do we call it, I can’t remember—a branch, you

know. This part is the Rio Grande.” “A fork.” “To get to the Pulangi branch we had to hike many miles. Many

miles. At night I dream I’m still hiking! Is your tea all right for you?” “Very good, thanks.” “The water’s all right. We have enough for drinking, but not for