Tree of Smoke (79 page)

“Where the fuck is he going?” They watched the boat head into deeper water and turn back downriver.

“He wants to see his people. He will be back. When we come at suppertime, he will be here.”

Storm tied a bandanna around his brow. They hefted their packs and took to the worn trail, Johnny leading, skirting frequent large cakes of elephant droppings sprouting tiny mushrooms. Somebody lived here: the wild rubber trees had been scored in spirals, and sap dripped into wooden bowls tied to the trunks at knee-level.

On the flap of Johnny’s large backpack was emblazoned an American flag. Storm watched it moving through the jungle, floating over the trail. In his own small pack he carried only cigarettes and matches and his notebook and socks and bandannas, all wrapped in a plastic bag, and a flashlight. And batteries. There was no use carrying a gun. You were always outnumbered.

The rain stopped. It didn’t matter—sweat or rain, he’d be wet. “Your name is Ju-shuan.”

“Ju-shuan?”

“So I was told.”

“Ju-shuan? That is a nonsense noise. Ju-shuan is not a Chinese name.”

They were climbing, and they were breathing hard, but Johnny stopped for a quick smoke.

The trail made its way along the side of a cliff. They remained standing, looking down on the rough green canopy and the brown Jelai River cutting through it.

Johnny asked him, “What is your name?”

“Hollis.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m forty-plus.”

“Forty-plus,” Johnny said, “forty-plus.” A bit later he said, “Forty-plus.”

“That means I’m more than forty.”

“Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.”

“Forty-three.”

“Forty-three years old.”

“Yeah.”

Johnny mashed his cigarette into the earth with the heel of his black sandal. “I know you.”

“Sure you do. And you knew Benét.”

Johnny’s eyes searched around for a lie. He tried candor: “I knew him, sure.”

“He’s dead. They hanged him.”

“Of course, I know, it’s a famous case. That’s what I mean. I heard about him from the newspapers, that’s all.”

He began climbing again, Storm close behind.

“Why don’t you talk? I have a lot of information about the region. Why don’t you ask me?”

“When I’m ready, I’ll ask.”

After half a kilometer they stopped again to rest. The trail was narrow here and they could only lean against the cliffside. “There is the top. Then we’ll go down, and at the bottom we’ll find the caves.”

Storm lit a cigarette.

“I said seven and you came at seven,” Johnny said. “You’re very on-the-dot.” His face was not the inscrutable kind. He looked perplexed and desperate.

“That’s me.”

“I didn’t sleep correctly,” Johnny told his patron. “I felt my soul departing from me in the night. Did you know that I pray? But in the past few days, nothing has gone correctly. When I pray, I see no shadow on the wall—but I am not superstitious.”

“You’re babbling.”

Johnny pointed to an outcropping on a bluff across the gorge: “I see my father’s face in that rock.”

Storm made no answer, and they resumed hiking, Johnny still in the lead, his head turned three-quarters now at all times toward Storm behind him. “Look, I’m telling you two things,” he said as they walked. “I don’t know Benét and also my name is not Ju-shuan.”

When they gained the ridge Johnny shed his pack and sat down beside it. “It’s too heavy. I have a small tent inside. After the caves we can camp. I have the food. Do you want some fruit?”

Storm devoured a mango and scraped at the seed with his teeth. The clouds had parted. The sunshine crashed heavily down on them and turned the canopy below a lively pulsing green and glinted sharply on the river far below. It was his first time in real jungle. He’d never seen the bush during the war except from helicopters high overhead. Spongy and multifariously green, like this, only sometimes with tracers rising out of it, or under flares at night.

“We must get a stick. If it’s too wet, we can slip going down.”

Each found a staff, and they headed down to the caves. At the bottom Johnny showed him a square-meter hole in the base of the cliff. “The natives took the boys here to be changed into men. To go inside you have to be born for a second time. You’ll see. That’s why they chose it. You’ll see. But first, are you hungry?”

They sat on a log and ate rice out of plastic baggies with their fingers while an angry monkey tossed dirt and bark down onto them from the cliff above. “It’s always good to eat,” Johnny said. “Now we’ll go inside. We must leave our belongings.”

Storm crouched before the hole. Pebbles dribbled down in front of his face—the monkey still at it up the cliff. He shone his light: the aperture narrowed within. “Bullshit.”

“It’s quite safe. No one is here to steal from us.”

“It’s a little fucking tube, man.”

“We can do it easily. I will go. It turns to the left. When you don’t see my light, you come, okay?” He went down on all fours grunting and crawled forward scraping his flashlight along the floor. Storm squatted at the entrance looking after him. In seconds Johnny’s light was gone around a tight bend. Storm followed on hands and knees. The beam from the torch in his hand leapt at the walls and flashed up at his face. After the bend he saw Johnny’s light pointing back at him. Within a few yards he had to stretch out and wriggle through the passage with his arms to his sides, flashlight directed backward, head laid flat. In Chinese Johnny talked to himself. Storm had to blow out his breath to go on, but he couldn’t see how to back out, and anyway the fat bastard had made it through and he had to stay with him—he’d do anything to keep with him and reminded himself that he didn’t care whether he lived or died. He slid face first through darkness, incredibly swiftly. Light bloomed around him. Johnny stood in a chamber whose walls lay too far off to see. With Johnny’s help Storm rose carefully from the slick floor but could hardly keep his feet under him. Johnny whispered, “Quiet, please.”

He shone his light upward. Bats covered the high ceilings like a shaggy carpet of drooping leaves. Tens of thousands of them.

Johnny snapped his fingers once, and each bat shivered slightly where it clung—the collective noise like that of a locomotive charging past. The blast died quickly, but the darkness seemed to resonate now with a certain life.

“Look where they scratched the rocks. The natives.”

Storm examined a few barely discernible markings in the circle of the flashlight’s glare, nothing he could make sense of.

Johnny moved his light among the vague symbols and asked, “What does it say?”

“What? I don’t know.”

“I thought you knew. Maybe you know about these people from your university.”

Storm laughed. It came out of him like a shot, and the bats roared again.

He clutched his light in his armpit and wiped slick goo from his palms along the backs of his pants legs. “What is this shit?”

“Yes. It’s the guano. From the bats.”

“Goddamn. How far do these caves go?”

“This is the only cave. We can go out the other side.”

“Fuck me. You mean there’s an easier way?”

“Only to go out. We have to drop out a small hole, but it’s easier than going back. Very easy to drop. But you can’t climb inside that way. It’s too slippery.”

“Well, fuck, man, let’s go.”

“This way.” Johnny moved ahead of him very slowly toward an emptiness that soon produced out of itself a wall, and next a hole in the wall somewhat larger than the one they’d come in by.

“Me first,” Storm said.

They only had to duck their heads to stay moving now, but the footing was almost impossible. Storm saw no bats in the passage, though their shit was everywhere.

Johnny’s light wavered and tumbled to the floor. Storm took two careful steps backward and retrieved it and found Johnny on his back and dropped the instrument beside him.

“I can’t see you,” Johnny said.

Storm unsnapped the knife from his belt and shone his own light on it. “Can you see this, fucker?” He crouched and raised the hem of Johnny’s T-shirt with the knifepoint.

“What are you doing?”

He trained the beam on Johnny’s face and Johnny squinted and looked away. “I want to know what you’re doing.”

“I’m going to carve some fat off your belly.”

“What are you doing! You act crazy!” In the chamber down the tunnel the bats roared.

“I’m going to skin you bit by bit. I’m going to throw the pieces in a pile there, and you can watch the monkeys eat the pieces. Meanwhile, the ants are eating you.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Assume I’m not.”

“Money! Money! I can get you!”

“You said you know Benét.”

“Yes, it’s bad to be executed. But you have to see it was a badness of fate that put him there. It was a terrible position.”

“Welcome to the position.”

“But I have nothing to do with that!”

“Let’s get back to your current position.”

Johnny talked a little in Chinese, and then sounded as if he were answering himself. “Okay. I know. I know what you want.”

“Then give it to me.”

“This—please listen—this was not because of me, sir. Please understand.”

“You’re gonna talk to me.”

“Let me shine my light.”

“Keep that thing off me.”

“Just to the side.” Johnny shone his light on the wall. He raised his head and searched very carefully for some sign of a future in Storm’s face. “Can I please say one thing to you? We are all one family.”

“Johnny. Where’s the colonel?”

“Oh, for the love of God, the colonel. Yes. Tell me what you want. He’s not far. Only in Thailand, across the border. You can go straight there by the trails. Let’s go back to the town, and I’ll get you sorted out. Whoever takes the rubber trail to those villages in the Belum Valley, he can find the colonel easily. Anyone knows that.”

Storm backed off two paces and sheathed his knife. “Get up.”

“I can get up. I can do it easily!” He rose with a lightheartedness Storm recognized from having survived, himself, when he thought the Coast Guard would murder him. Johnny led the way another forty meters to a brilliant hole in the floor.

Storm dropped his flashlight through the opening and followed it, feet first, and dropped two meters down into the daytime. Johnny’s feet dangled above him and he gripped the leg of the fat man’s shorts as he lowered himself until his arms were stretched full length above his head, his hands gripping rock, and let himself fall. He smiled stupidly and shook his head.

Storm said, “Let’s go.”

He stayed close to Johnny while they made their way around the mountain and back to the place where they’d taken lunch. “Here we are!” Johnny said. “You see?” he said as if in demonstration of an important truth.

“I need a map.”

“Of course! Of course! I have maps at my hotel.”

“What’s in your pack?”

“Of course! I forgot I have a map in my pack!” He squatted and tore open the flap and hauled out his baggies of grub, a blue poncho, a three-meter swatch of colorful fabric which unrolled around him and which he explained was his blanket, and handed Storm a ragged map folded all wrong. “Unfortunately the writing is Malay. But you just want to take the rubber trail and speak to the headmen along the way. Someone will guide you.”

Storm spread the map out on the ground. “Show me.”

“We will go back to town. Tomorrow you can hire a car to this place. Then it’s no more road. The motorcycle can take you.”

“Is this the Thai border?”

“Yes, but here is the village you will go to.”

“I don’t see a village.”

“It’s there. I can’t make a mark. There’s no pen.”

Storm did his best to get the map into compact dimensions and jammed it into his own pack. “Let’s go.”

They shouldered their packs and walked. Climbing the hill they didn’t speak. It wasn’t as far uphill this way as it had seemed coming out. Storm dogged him while they passed along the ridge, and preceded him going down the other side. Even on the downhill side Johnny breathed heavily and had nothing to say.

When they’d reached the trail along the river, he seemed more certain of his position. “You gave me a concern! But we’re getting along now.”

“Not if you fucked me.”

“Of course I don’t do that. We’re friends.”

“Bullshit.”

“I believe it! We are friends!”

In a place where the muddy river ran level with its banks they stopped to wash the guano away.

“I won’t run off,” Johnny said, wading out. “So you can trust me. Anyway it’s too far to the other side. And there—I see a crocodile.”

Immediately he launched out. Storm watched him flounder the hundred feet across the water. He hit a deep spot and flailed at the current, taking buoyant leaps sideways downstream, finding his footing at last and grappling with the vegetation and hauling himself out to rest on all fours, drenched and shrunken, raising his head, gasping for breath, lowering it again. He didn’t look back at Storm.

Storm watched for only a few seconds, then turned and hurried down the trail to meet the boatman before Johnny did.

All the while he hiked downriver he asked himself: Why did I mention the colonel before he did? I gave him his cue. He might have sent me chasing anything.

He sat on the straw tatami at Johnny’s hotel taking off a sock stained brown with his own blood. He’d daubed the leech bites with river mud, but he’d missed one.

Johnny’s old woman came around the corner of the hall stirring up the dust with a three-foot broom. “Ah! You back!”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

“Where is my husband?”

“Still with his friends in the jungle.”

“Then Johnny he staying another longer maybe?”

“Yeah. Like that.”

“You want tea?”

“No. I want a car to the border.”

“You have money?”

“I’m the richest person you’ll ever meet.”

“I get you a car tomorrow morning. You got some friend in Thailand?”

“I sure do.”

“Your friend is waiting.”

“It’s a definite possibility.” He stared at her, searched her face. But he didn’t feel it yet. So much closer, and he didn’t feel it. “I think I’ll change hotels,” he said.