Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“I’ve made my last confession. Who’s the person in the Bible most like me—who am I most like? Judas. Judas the betrayer—that’s me. What else is there to confess? Nobody paid me to betray Jesus, but what does it matter, eh? I could never pay them back. They would never take back their dirty money.”

In over thirty years he hadn’t spoken at such length in his native language. He let it run on, the English coming out of his head as out of a loudspeaker. “My grandmother used to use that expression, ‘bowels and mercies.’ I never asked her about what it meant.

“I remember how I rejected my grandmother. I loved her very much, I was her favorite, but then, when I came to my early teens, twelve, thirteen, she came to live with us, and I was very unkind to her. She was just some old woman, and I was very unkind.

“I don’t like to remember that. The memory is very bitter. My grandmother loved me, and I treated her with disrespect. I felt no love for anyone.

“Here, of course, where the people are so poor, so sick, you can’t love them. It would pull you under. You would go under. Everyone here knows how to love, but love them back—it’s quicksand. I’m not the Christ. No man is the Christ.

“Other times we’re the thief on the cross, the one who got crucified next to Jesus, the thief who turned to Jesus and said, ‘Remember me when you get to your Kingdom/ And Jesus had mercy and said, This day you shall be with me in Paradise/ I really think we have to be one or the other. We’re either the betrayer, or we’re the thief.

“I look around me and I think: How did I get here to Nasaday? How did I get here? This is just a corner in the maze. Island in the swamp. Judas jumped down a hole and God knows, God knows if he’s ever coming up, huh? It’s entirely up to God. Who are we? We’re Judas sometimes. But Judas … Judas went out and hanged himself.

“These thirty years, and more, that I’ve spent living with barbarians, living with their powerful gods and goddesses, taking inside me the traditions, you know, which aren’t fairy tales, they’re real, they’re real once you take them inside you, and taking inside my mind all the pictures of their tales and living in the adventures of the ancestors, and the years I’ve spent meeting face-to-face with their dangerous demons and saints, saints who have the names of the Catholic saints, but only to disguise themselves … How many times I almost got completely lost forever, how many times I almost wandered into the part of the maze where you can never come back … but always comes the touch of the Holy Spirit at the last moment, before the gods and goddesses destroyed me, always at the last moment I received the reminder of who I am, and why I came here. Only a glimpse, you know, only a reminder of who I really am. And then back down into the tunnel.”

The Mass said, the celebrants departed, Carignan stripped to his undershorts and zoris and went down to the river to bathe.

The sound of a motorized palm-boat, quite rare on this river, made him stop and watch. The craft passed through his view, slowing, the motor throttling down to an idle, the two men aboard peering toward the shore, coming close. Carignan waved. They passed from sight, hidden by the low sago palms growing along the bank.

He waded in up to his waist and bathed.

What a silly sermon. Because of the English, his old vexation had come awake, struggling upright and flailing in its dirty bandages—his soul and his soul’s diseases.

How did I get here?—Judas pops up in the maze.

He stepped from the river with his head down but not watching his feet, preoccupied, troubled by the unkindnesses he’d done in his adolescence, none of them at all serious, but they terrified him now because they’d been perpetrated with a kind of amorality which, had it continued, would have made him very dangerous to the world.

He turned and saw among the sago fronds a most curious sight: a Western man in Western garb holding a long tube to his lips. Something like a bamboo reed. As Carignan examined this sight and prepared to make some sort of greeting, the man’s cheeks collapsed and something stung the padre in the flesh over his Adam’s apple and seemed to lodge there. He reached up to brush it away. His tongue and lips began to tingle, his eyes burned, and within seconds the sensation was that of having no head at all, and then of losing touch with his hands and feet, and abruptly he didn’t know where any part of him was, every part of him seemed to go away. He did not feel himself collapsing toward the water, and by the time he landed in it he was dead.

Having relieved himself beside a bush near the river, Sands came along the path below the church and met two very little boys riding alongside an irrigation ditch on the back of a carabao. They smiled with shyness and doubt. “Padair. Padair …”

Maybe they thought he was Carignan —maybe they thought there existed in all the universe only a single priest who took many forms.

He tossed the kids some gum. One missed the toss and scrambled down off the wide platform of the animal’s back to pluck it from the grass at the ditch’s edge. “Padair. Padair.”

“I’m not your father,” Sands said.

In the sunset light he watched a palm-boat race downriver through a magical rainbow-colored mist churned up by a quite powerful propeller, two figures on board. There was nothing about the boatmen, so far out in the river and veiled by spray, that under any other circumstances would have made him say, “It’s Eddie Aguinaldo and the German,” nothing strong enough to rate them a mention, say, in his report. But those two had been lurking, and now they loomed. He was about to turn and race back to the church for his binoculars, but here was the priest, he suddenly noticed, swimming just offshore, and facedown. Who swims like that? The drowned. Sands waded out in pursuit. He plunged into a hole, and the water closed over his head. He surfaced, saw Carignan floating, turning, heading downstream. Sands began to swim after him, changed his mind, swam to shore and ran along the path beside the water until he’d gotten downstream of Carignan, kicked off his sandals, waded out into the deeper water, and launched out again, trying to intercept the drifting priest. He’d misjudged. Loose-limbed, cadaverlike — perhaps dead—the priest slipped rapidly away at a tangent, downstream and out toward the middle of the quarter-mile-wide water.

Again Sands gave up swimming, turned back, clambered ashore, and headed, now barefoot, down the path. He veered off toward a house, saw a banca-boat overturned on the grass beside it, hollered, no one home, tried to get it right-side up, failed, tried to drag it toward the path. A man stopped him, a muscular young man, barefoot, bare-chested, baffled, wearing red short-pants. He quickly caught the moment’s urgency and grabbed a paddle leaning against the house. Each man took a side and they jerked the boat along to the shore, boarded precariously, and struck out after the corpse, the Filipino paddling and the American pointing, their small craft steadily gaining on the murdered man as he traveled toward Kingdom Come.

The next day Sands returned the Honda motorbike to the diocese and reported the death by drowning of Father Thomas Carignan. Father Haddag was saddened by the loss, and surprised to hear about it so soon. “Sometimes news takes weeks to come from the river people,” he said.

This errand took all afternoon. Afterward Sands booked a room in Carmen and had chicken-on-a-stick and a bowl of rice with three men from the Department of Agriculture whom he simply ran into on the highway through town, all of them wandering up and down it looking for a restaurant. They settled for one of the roadside stands where a man barbecued gaunt legs and thighs over coconut-shell charcoals, dousing them with a mix of soy sauce, spices, and Coca-Cola. Starving dogs watched them eat. David Alverol, the chief among the three Agriculture workers, wanted to knock around town with this American, but Sands was dead tired. The other two kept their poise, while David Alverol seemed so excited to have met the American that the American really feared for David’s sanity. He kept repeating himself, performing the introductions several times, his face shining with sweat and also from an inner illumination. He suggested every two minutes that the American come to his home “for a dialogue.” “You’re very jolly,” he told the American. “My type of guy. Can’t you come with us for one more thirty minutes?” David got more and more insistent, to the embarrassment of his two companions, beseeching the American drunkenly with tears in his eyes as the American got out of their government jeep in front of his small hotel—”Please, sir, please, one half an hour only, sir, sir, I beg you, yes, please …” Sands made an appointment to see them tomorrow, warning them his schedule might prevent him from keeping it. They parted that way, Sands and the two others understanding he’d never be seen again, and David Alverol expecting to meet him first thing in the morning.