Tree of Smoke (80 page)

For a dozen miles by the blurred odometer he rode shotgun in a Morris Minor. At a bridge over a river he didn’t know the name of, his driver asked for the fare and put him out, refusing further risk. The bridge’s weather-eaten boards looked rotten. Storm offered more money but the man said, “Can you buy me one new car?”

“Coward. Fuck your mother,” Storm said.

He hitched a ride atop a pile of kindling on a modified pedicab driven by an old man and pulled by an animal that might have been a donkey and might have been a stunted horse. Storm wore cutoff jeans, and the kindling chafed his underthighs. He carried nothing better in his pack, no change of clothes, only his flashlight, knife, and a plastic poncho; and his notebook and Johnny’s map. They stopped at a village two or so miles along, where Storm tried to barter with the old woodman for further assistance, but without any luck. Sapling rubber trees had invaded the roadway ahead, and his woodcart couldn’t pass. Locals came to the doorways of the hooches to stare. A man approached Storm, hesitated just out of reach, and stomped boldly forward one more step to touch the stranger’s arm. People screamed. The man turned away laughing.

Storm didn’t know how far he’d have to walk to reach the border. Less than twenty kilometers, if he read the map correctly.

The old woodman came from behind one of the hooches with a flat-faced, staring young man walking a motorbike. The boy kicked its pedal and straddled it and started off so quickly Storm doubted he expected a passenger, but he leapt on behind him anyway, shouting, “Where you go? Where you go?” It sounded as if the boy said, “The Road.” As they made for the habitation’s edge an old woman, face bursting, shouting and moaning, threw herself into the dirt in front of the bike—the brakes yelped, Storm pitched forward, his lips touched the driver’s hair. The boy stuck his legs out and tried to get around her but she spun like a swimmer, kicking in the dirt, to block his way. Storm lurched from side to side as they rolled over her with each tire in turn and she said, “Hm! Hm!” People in doorways cried out at them—people laughing—a child came out and spit at them. Storm felt the wind string the saliva out along his bare thigh as they accelerated. He clutched at leaves on a tea plant and scoured the spit away as they rounded the bend out of town. The road was red gouged mud. Sometimes a great puddle slowed them as the boy skirted it, sticking out his feet for balance.

Ahead grew mostly rubber trees. A carpet of leaves covered the track there. Light washed down among the trees. The bike thumped twice over a thick snake with brilliant bands. The road narrowed to a trail and they bucked continually over roots, the small engine buzzing like a horn, sounding that insignificant, that drowned amid all this organic life. Three hours, four hours, but they didn’t stop for lunch, or even water. Storm kept low behind the boy’s shoulders as the trail narrowed and slender branches whipped across the boy’s face. The boy wiped continually at his face and his arm came away each time bloodier. He pressed on shouting, weeping. They scraped forward almost entirely in the lowest gear. Storm smelled his rubber shoe sole burning on the tailpipe and repositioned his heels on the struts, but in such a way that they kept slipping off.

By one in the afternoon it was quite dusk in the tall woods and the road was almost impossibly glutted, no more than a path, and then they came into daylight, open spaces, gray elephant grass, emerald rice paddies. Here the path crossed a dry streambed with sheer six-foot walls. The motorbike couldn’t pass.

They dismounted and the boy ran the machine some yards off the path into the high grass and let it fall there on its side, and fell with it himself. He jumped up quickly and came away wiping at his face. Blood spiraled down his forearm where he’d gashed it badly in the tumble. He noticed his injury and smiled at Storm and then suddenly sobbed angrily. Storm took hold of his arm. “Unwrinkle your soul, man. You ain’t dead. Fuck,” he said, “it’s deep.” He untied the bandanna from his brow to bind the wound and had hardly finished knotting its ends when the kid turned to lead the way again. They clambered down one side of the creek and up the other. Storm tried him—“Kid. Kid. I want to give you money, money”—but the boy didn’t answer or pause, and they continued along the dikes of paddies and into a village where everything stirred in the afternoon wind.

On the porch of a wooden home stood a man in brown slacks and a blue shirt, like anyone on the corner of any city. “Welcome to you! Come in for some teatime and I will show you my specimens.”

“We need water.”

“Come into my museum. Please. Come.”

He ushered them into something on the order of a café without chairs, only several tables with big jars standing on them. He lifted a large one, in it a brown insect as long as his forearm, maybe, if it hadn’t been curled like a bracelet and floating in what looked like old piss. “I have quite a collection of insects. This centipede killed a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“What about some water.”

“Do you want me to boil it first? Because you are American.” His eyebrows pulled apart and crashed together as he talked. Bug eyes and fat lips. Big forehead. Except for the fat lips, he resembled one of his specimens.

“Just fill my jug. Please, I mean. I got the shit to fix it with.”

The strange man took Storm’s canteen through the doorway into his kitchen, in which a cot and stove were visible, and immersed it in a galvanized washtub and held it under. Storm followed him, twisted the dripping canteen from his grasp, and dosed it with two tabs. He screwed shut the lid and shook it. “Fuck, I’m thirsty.”

“I believe it, yes,” said the man.

They stood among the specimens, and Storm drank off half in a series of violent swallows and handed the canteen to the kid, who drank briefly, exhaled and inhaled deeply as it came away from his mouth, and grimaced in surprise.

“That’s iodine.”

“Yes,” the man said, and spoke in Malay with the kid.

“He will not tell me his name. That is his privilege. I am Dr. Mahathir. And may I ask your name also?”

“Jimmy.”

“Jimmy. Yes. You say a bad word a lot, Jimmy. You say ‘shit.’ Isn’t this a bad word?”

“I’m a fucking foulmouth. Where do you get these jars, man?”

“I am a scientist. An entomologist.”

“So you shit big jars out your ass?”

“Oh!—these jars. I have twenty-six of them. People sell them to me. They realize an entomologist requires jars for the specimens. Here is a scorpion.”

“Yeah. How many thirteen-year-olds did he kill?”

“The bite isn’t fatal. Only numbing you for a time. Swelling at the site of the puncture. It’s the largest scorpion to be found in this region. Therefore, yes, I preserve it.”

“Formaldehyde, right?”

“Yes. Formaldehyde.”

“Is that shit antiseptic?”

“Of course.”

“Have you got a jug of clean stuff? This guy ripped his arm open.”

“Yes, I saw that plainly.” He spoke to the kid, who held out his arm while gently the scientist unwound the bandanna from the wound. “Nothing to it. We’ll clean the damage, and put some sutures. I can do it.”

“Medical sutures? You have the stuff?”

“No. Needle and thread.”

“What about Xylocaine?”

“No.”

“You better explain that to him, Doc.”

They spoke, and the kid continued to seem very upset.

“He says he must hide the wound. His body must have no blemish.”

“No blemish? Look at his face. He scratched the shit out of it banging through the bush like he had a grenade up his ass.”

“I don’t know. It’s his belief.”

“He’ll get you stitched up,” Storm explained to the kid as the doctor found his materials in the kitchen. “It’s gonna be unpleasant.”

The doctor came back dragging a bench with one hand and carrying a Pepsi bottle in the other. Between his lips he gripped a needle, thread hanging down from it. “Sit here, please.” He and the boy sat on the dirt floor and he rested the boy’s arm across the bench and lowered his suturing materials down into the bottle’s mouth. “I’m going to sterilize,” he said, and fished out the needle by its thread and immediately pinched closed the wound and ran the needle through the flesh. The kid inhaled through his teeth with a hiss, nothing more. “He is a stoic,” the scientist said.

“Can you talk to this guy? Translate for me, man.”

“Of course.”

“First off, who was that old woman he ran over with his motorbike?”

The two spoke, and the scientist said, “It was his grandmother.”

“You’re shitting me. Who
is
this guy?”

“He is not permitted to tell us his actual name. I know who he is. I have heard of him. He’s traveling to a village up ahead.”

In silence, except for the boy’s hissing with each suture, the scientist finished his work. The wound was bloodless now, closed with five tight blue knots. Storm said, “That’s some number one stuff. You’re Elvis.”

“Yes. It’s good. Thank you.”

The boy stood up and said a few words.

“He says that from here we must walk.”

“No shit? We’ve been walking for an hour already.”

“Tomorrow is an important ceremony. This man has made a very serious bargain to participate.”

“Where does this happen? He said ‘The Road.’”

“Yes. I will write it for you. You can spell it this way.” With his finger he gouged at the hardened film of dust on his tabletop, among the floating monstrosities:
The Roo.
“I will go also.”

“Can we get a car?”

“We can only walk. It’s a few hours, but very easy. You see, we are on a plain. Then we go down to the valley.”

“All right, fuck it, let’s walk.”

“You are going to accompany us?”

“No, man.
You
are the fucking new guy. I’m already on this ride.”

The scientist rubbed his hands together and frowned. “All right! You can accompany us for a while, Jimmy, okay?”

The boy had already walked out the door. Storm followed, and Dr. Mahathir caught up to them on the path as it gave over again to paddies outside the village. “Do you have water in your canteen?”

“I’m half full.”

“It’s enough.”

The boy did not look back at them. He pulled his shirt on over his head without pausing or even slowing down. The three clambered along at such a pace none of them had breath to speak until they’d regained the path after half a kilometer of successive dikes and ditches. Mahathir called after him in Malay with a plea in his voice.

“I have told him we must stop to rest at the next place. I think he will allow it.”

“Señor, what is this kid up to? Ask him to tell me what he’s doing.”

“He cannot answer you. From this place until we reach that place, he must keep his silence.”

“What for?”

“He has a function to perform. There will be a ceremony.”

“What kind of ceremony would that be, Mr. Bugs?”

“It’s very unusual. It is not often to happen. I will observe it.”

At the next village they stopped outside a small wooden house and sat on two benches in the shade and drank iced tea without ice. The entomologist said, “It is a hot day.”

“Damn right.”

“Here is a good place. It’s far enough for you. Can you rest?”

“No way I stay here. I’m going farther than you.”

“Farther will be Thailand.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Mahathir hunched his shoulders and sipped tea from his plastic glass, looking as if it tasted bad. He knit his brow, cleared his throat, poured out the last drops on the ground, and wiped down the glass with the hem of his undershirt, making sure to keep his dress shirt clean.

They all three rose and began walking. When they reached the last house at the edge of the village Mahathir halted, wrapped his arms around himself, and said, “Excuse me, Jimmy. I think you should not go on from here. No, you must not come now. I’m very sorry to bring you here.”

The boy was getting away. “Let’s go, Doc. I gotta talk to some people.”

“This is not the proper day for you to do it. Do it another day, okay?”

They’d left behind them the shade trees of the village, and they passed now among scrubby bushes streaked with rain-washed dust. “This is bad, it’s even terrible. Yes, it’s terrible,” Mahathir said.

They began the descent into the Belum Valley.

“There he is,” Storm said, “there he is.”

“Who is there?”

Before them stretched the jungle canopy beneath which in a substratum invisible to the eyes of Disneyland right now MIAs were getting the fuck tortured out of them.

“Who is there?”

“Let’s go. This kid ain’t waiting.”

The path descended gradually, cutting along the side of the hill, or the mountain, Storm didn’t know which it was, because even on the steep decline the trees grew tall enough to hide both the sky and the valley’s bed. After another kilometer they came onto a grassy flat. The path took them toward a clearing and some dwellings, hooches of woven straw and batten, roofed with galvanize. He heard the river somewhere and some birds or perhaps people.

“The boy will stop here. I am stopping here also.”

“Where are they?”

“We will go closer to the river.”

A hundred meters on, beside the river, they found a couple of dozen villagers and a burn pile nearly five meters in height and twice as wide at its base. Its preparation was apparently complete. Three women wrapped in dirty sarongs circled the edifice with armloads of dry tree limbs, inserting kindling where they could. Beyond these women, men in G-strings stood in the river up to their knees, bathing, splashing water one-handed up into their armpits and dousing their heads and swaying from side to side, bent over, to shake away the drops from their long hair.

“They’ve made the pyre.”

“They’re gonna torch him.”

“This boy? No.”

“Then who?”—Storm wondered if it was himself.

“With this fire they are going to destroy his soul.”

Four men also in G-strings stood to the side acknowledging no one, as if they waited to be photographed, as did the pyre itself, looming like a god assembled out of limbs and bones while the boy looked up at it out of his flat face.