Tree of Smoke (15 page)

On Saturday night striped wasps and small dragonflies coated the fluorescent tube in the Eatery. Mating energetically, they dropped down onto the plates. One gang after another alighted on this community, crawled all over the illumination, and then was seen no more. Mayor Luis hunted up Sands in the café. His Sabbath over, he looked for company.

“I am going to save you from the same thing every night,” Luis told him, and took him for dinner to his wood and brick home with its strange linoleum floor. They ate spicy pork adobo and they drank painit, a native coffee. And Old Castle Liquor—not Scotch, not Bourbon, just Liquor. With Romy keeping to the hotel, hiding his bruises from the public, Skip had only the mayor for laughs. What of Kathy Jones? “She left to Manila on Tuesday morning,” the mayor said. “She is going to accompany her husband’s remains to the airport.”

The news struck him a blow. “She’s left for good?”

“She will meet her father-in-law, and he will take the remains to the United States.”

“She’s not going back with him?”

“In fact she is only going to put her husband’s bones on the plane, then she’s coming back to Damulog. She will not proceed all the way to the United States because of her dedication.”

Next day he went with Mayor Luis and a load of four-inch iron pipe in a multicolored right-hand-drive Isuzu cargo truck to the site of the future waterworks, where a large concrete filtering station stood in a big field. It was plain to see the pipe-laying project was barely off the starting line. Mayor Luis also envisioned a stadium here someday. He paced off the perimeters of guesthouses and ball fields and a swimming pool in the midst of this empty plain of elephant grass, gesturing with his small hands.

The rain held off through the third straight night. Driven from their sweltering homes, people lay out on the basketball court, the only concrete surface in Damulog, looking up at the closed, flat, black heavens, hardly conversing, waiting for dawn.

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.

“I’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 bathing. The tank made a leak.” He was talking about the badly cracked concrete cistern a few yards away.

“Are there quite a few Catholics in your parish?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Catholics. I’ve baptized hundreds, confirmed hundreds. I don’t know where they go afterward. I never see most of them.”

“They don’t come to Mass?”

“They come here in times of trouble. To them I’m not really a priest of God. They like to use witches to help them. I’m more like that.”

“Ah.”

“They’ll come tomorrow. A few. Because it’s Saint Dionysia’s feast day. They believe she has power.”

“Aha.”

“And you.”

“Me?”

“Are you a Catholic?”

“My mother wasn’t a Catholic. My dad was.”

“Well—the father isn’t usually very religious.”

“My dad died in the war. I made lots of visits to his Irish relatives in Boston. They were pretty rabidly Catholic.”

“But you’re confirmed?”

“Right, I had my confirmation in Boston.”

“Did you say Boston? I grew up in Bridgewater. Near there.”

“Yes.” They were now having most of this conversation for the second time.

The priest told him, “After I left home, my mother and father moved to Boston. I talked to my mother on the telephone in 1948. I called from the new important hotel in Davao. New at that time. Still important, maybe, eh? She said she was praying for me always. Hearing her voice made her sound more far away than ever. When I got back to the parish here, it was like starting all over again on the first day. I felt far from home again.”

Four tiny children, naked but for undershirts, stood at the corner of the building, staring. When Sands smiled, they screamed and ran away.

Carignan said, “I met the other man. He visited us, too.”

“I’m not sure who you mean.”

“The colonel, Colonel Sands.”

“Oh, of course, the colonel,” Skip agreed.

“But he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I think the uniforms must be too hot. So I don’t know what branch of the military.”

“He’s retired.”

“He is also Sands.”

“Yes. He’s my uncle.”

“Your uncle. I see. Are you also a colonel?”

“No, I’m not with the military.”

“I see. Are you with the Peace Corps?”

“No. I’m with Del Monte. I think I mentioned that.”

“Some of the people are very excited about the Peace Corps. Everybody wants a visitor if possible.”

“I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about it.”

“And the two others yesterday. The Filipino soldier, and the other one.”

“Yesterday?”

Carignan knit his eyebrows together and said, “Wasn’t it yesterday?”

“Let me get the sequence of events in order,” Sands said. “When did the colonel come?”

“Oh, some weeks ago. Around the feast of Saint Anthony.”

“And the other two were here
yesterday
?”

“I didn’t see them. Pilar told me. I went downriver to deliver the last rites—a very old woman there. Pilar said a Filipino and a white. Not a Joe. A foreigner. They had a palm-boat.”

“I see, a palm-boat,” Sands said, feeling the shores erode beneath his feet.

“Boston, is it,” Carignan said.

“Yeah, Boston,” Skip said.

“Del Monte, did you say?”

“Yes, I did. But these two visitors—how strange, huh?”

“I believe they’re still on the river. I’ll ask Pilar. She has all the news from the river people.”

“Pilar is the housekeeper? The lady who served us the tea?”

“Is it okay? We don’t have milk,” the priest reminded him, as he had when they’d sat down.

“Jesus,” Skip said.

The priest seemed to sense Skip’s disarray. He was solicitous. “We all have a spiritual trial to go through. When I was a little boy I was very hateful toward the Jews because I said they were the crucifiers. I was very contemptuous of Judas too, because of his betrayal.”

“I see,” Sands said, and saw nothing.

Carignan seemed to struggle. The words stuck in his throat. He touched his mouth with his fingers. “Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

“May I snap your picture?”

The priest suddenly looked studious and foreboding, his hands clasped together before his chest. Skip focused and tripped the shutter, and Carignan relaxed. He said, “You are something of a pilgrim, eh? Yes. Me too. I went on a very long hike to the Pulangi River.”