Tree of Smoke (9 page)

“He’s a good lad. He’s got the right kind of curiosity,” Pitchfork said.

“Have any of our bunch in Manila contacted you?”

“No. Unless you call Pitchfork basically living here a form of contact.”

“Pitchfork isn’t with our bunch.”

“Then what is he?”

“I’m a poisoner,” Pitchfork said.

“Anders is actually and honorably employed by the Del Monte Corporation. They contribute plenty to malaria eradication.”

“I’m all about DDT and swamp recovery. But I don’t know what sort of organism might make the little mud dabs.”

Colonel Francis Sands tipped back his head and poured half a snifter down his spout, blinked against the dark, coughed, and said, “Your own dad—my own brother—lost his life in that sleazy Jap run on Pearl Harbor. And who were our allies in that war?”

“The Soviets.”

“And who’s the enemy tonight?”

Skip knew the script: “The Soviets. And who’s our ally? The sleazy Japs.”

“And who,” said Pitchfork, “was I fighting in the Malay jungle in ’51 and ’52? The same Chinese guerrillas who helped us with the Burma business in ’40 and ’41.”

The colonel said, “We’ve got to keep hold of our ideals while steering them though the maze. I should say through the obstacle course. An obstacle course of hard-as-hell realities.”

Skip said, “Hear, hear!” He disliked it when his uncle dramatized the obvious.

“Survival is the foundation of triumph,” Pitchfork said.

“Who’s on first?” the colonel asked.

“But in the end,” Pitchfork said, “it’s either liberty or death.”

The colonel raised his empty glass to Pitchfork. “At Forty Kilo, Anders manned a little crystal radio set for seven months. To this day he won’t tell me where he kept it hid. There were at least a dozen little Jap sonsabitches in that camp did nothing but think how to locate that contraption day and night.” Forty Kilo had been the Burmese railroad outpost where their work gang had been interned by the Japanese in 1941. “We used coconut shells for rice bowls,” he said. “Everybody had his own coconut shell.” He reached out and clutched his nephew’s wrist.

“Uh-oh,” said Skip, “am I losing you?”

The colonel stared. “Uh.”

He leapt to bring his uncle back: “Colonel, the file catalog goes back to Saigon at some point, am I right?”

The colonel peered at him in the dark, moving slightly, making many tiny adjustments in his posture, as if balancing his head on his neck. Apparently as a kind of focal exercise he examined his cigar stub, trying it at various distances, and seemed to rally, and sat up straighter.

Sands said, “I’ve been working on my French. Get me assigned to Vietnam.”

“How’s your Vietnamese?”

“I’d need to brush up.”

“You don’t know a single word.”

“I’ll learn. Send me to the language school in California.”

“Nobody wants Saigon.”

“I do. Set me up in an office over there. I’ll look after your card files. Appoint me your curator.”

“Talk to my ass; my head aches.”

“I’ll make every little datum accessible and retrievable—you’ll just comb through with these two fingers and zip-zip, sir, whatever you want pops up at you.”

“Are you so in love with the files? Have you fallen under the spell of rubber cement?”

“We’re going to beat them. I want to be there for that.”

“Nobody wants to go to Saigon. You want Taiwan.”

“Colonel, with the very deepest respect, sir, what you implied before is completely mistaken. We’re going to beat them.”

“I didn’t mean we don’t beat them, Skip. I meant we don’t beat them automatically.”

“I realize that. I expect them to be worthy of us.”

“Aaaah—despite all my best efforts, you’re one of these new boys. You’re a different breed.”

“Send me to Vietnam.”

“Taiwan. Where the living’s good and you meet all the people on their way up. Or Manila. Manila is number two, I’d say.”

“My French is improving. I’m reading well, always did. Send me to the language school and I’ll land in Saigon talking like a native.”

“Come on. Saigon’s a revolving door, everybody’s in and out.”

“I need rubber bands. Big long thick ones. I want to batch your cards by regions until you get me some more drawers. And more card tables. Give me a room and two clerks in Saigon. I’ll write you an encyclopedia.”

The colonel chuckled, low, wheezing—sarcastic, histrionic—but Skip knew it for a happy sign. “All right, Will. I’ll send you to the school, we’ll work that out. But first I need you to go on assignment for me. Mindanao. I’ve got an individual down there I want more on. Would you mind poking around Mindanao a little bit?”

Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, “I’m your man, sir.”

“Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn everything.”

“That’s pretty broad.”

“There’s a man named Carignan down there, a priest, he’s been there for decades and decades. Father Thomas Carignan. You’ll find him in the files. Familiarize yourself with the stuff on this guy named Carignan. American citizen off in the boonies there, a padre. He’s receiving arms or such.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I don’t know what it means. That’s the phraseology. Receiving guns. I’ve got nothing elaborated.”

“And then what?”

“Off you go. See the man. Looks like we’re gonna finalize the file.”

“Finalize?”

“We’re laying the ground for it. Those are the orders.”

“‘Finalize’ seems…” He couldn’t quite finish.

“Seems?”

“This sounds to be about more than files.”

“It’ll be months before any decisions. Meanwhile, we want things in place. If it’s a go, that’s not us. You are there only to report to me. You’ll transmit the report through the VOA station there on Mindanao.”

“And then I’m your cataloger in Vietnam?”

“Vietnam. Better ship your M1 home to Mama. We don’t issue that ammo anymore.”

“Shit. I think I’ll have another brandy.”

The colonel held out his glass while Skip poured. “A toast—but not to Vietnam. To Alaska. Yowza!”

Anders and Skip raised their drinks.

“This is a happy coincidence. Because I wanted to give you a little task, and I think if your conduct in the field is as exemplary as I’d predict for you, then I’ll have every reason to get you reassigned.”

“Are you playing me? Have you been playing me all night?”

“All night?”

“No. Not all night. Since—”

“Since when, Skip?” He drew on his cigar so his fat face bloomed orange in the darkness.

“You’re a vaudevillian.”

“Playing you?”

“Since I was twelve.”

The colonel said, “I went to Alaska once, you know. I toured the Alaska-Canada road they built there during the war. Fantastic. Not the road, the landscape. The mighty road was just this insignificant little scratch across that landscape. You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible…God before he woke up and saw himself…God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge, and I do mean right now, sir.” He looked red-eyed around himself, as if he only halfway recognized his environment. Sands willed himself not to be too disconcerted. “I met a lady who’d lived there for quite some years—later, that is, just last Christmas is when I had the pleasure. An elderly woman now, she spent her youth and most of middle age near the Yukon River. I got to talking about Alaska, and she had only one comment. She said: ‘It is God-forsaken.’

“You poor, overly polite sonsabitches. I read your silence as respect. I appreciate it too. Would you like me to get to the point?

“The lady’s remark set me thinking. We’d both had the same experience of the place: Here was something more than just an alien environment. We’d both sensed the administration of an alien God.

“Only a few days before that, couple of days before at the most, really, I’d been reading in my New Testament. My little girl gave it to me. I’ve got it right now in my kit.” The colonel half rose, sat back down. “But I’ll spare you. The point is—aha! yes! the bastard has a point and isn’t too damn drunk to bring it home—this is the point, Will.” Nobody else ever called him Will. “St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, ‘There is one God, and many administrations.’ I understand that to mean you can wander out of one universe and into another just by pointing your feet and forward march. I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddamn it.

“So what’s the point? The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam.”

In late September Sands took the train from the town at the bottom of the mountain into Manila. It was hot. He sat by an open window. Vendors came aboard at stops with sliced mango and pineapple, with cigarettes and gum for sale as singles, from open packs. A small boy tried to sell him a one-inch-square snapshot of what it took him a long time to understand was a woman’s naked groin, very close up.

As instructed, he would neither appear at the embassy nor contact anybody in Manila concerning his assignment. He might have looked up the major, but he’d been specifically cautioned to steer clear of Eduardo Aguinaldo. But the officer’s club at the Seafront compound hadn’t been forbidden him, and they served the best pork chops he’d ever tasted. At the station in Manila he barged rapidly through the horde of beggars and hustlers, right hand clutching his wallet in his pants pocket, and rode to the compound on Dewey Boulevard in a taxi that smelled strongly of gasoline.

At the air-conditioned Seafront club he could look out the southern window at the sun descending into Manila Bay or across the room out the northern window at the swimming pool. Two solid-looking men, probably marine guards from the embassy, practiced trick dives from the board, somersaults, back flips. A black-haired American woman in a tawny, leopard-spotted two-piece shocked him. It was practically a French bikini. She spoke to her teenage son, who sat on a deck chair’s extension staring at his feet. She wasn’t young, but she was fabulous. All the other women at the pool wore full one-piece suits. Skip was afraid of women. The pork chops came, succulent, moist. He didn’t know enough about cooking even to guess at the trick for coming up with pork chops like this.

Leaving, he bought a flat pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes from the display at the cashier’s counter, though he didn’t smoke. He liked to give them away.

He waited for a cab just outside the club, stood in the late light looking over the wide grounds, the jacarandas and acacias, the spike-topped wall, and, at the compound’s entrance, the American flag. At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

The flag rolled in the salty breeze, and beyond it the sun soon sank. He’d never seen in nature anything as explosively crimson as these sunsets on Manila Bay. The dying light charged the water and low clouds with a terrifying vitality. A shabby taxi stopped in front of him, two carefully nondescript young men of the Foreign Service got out of its backseat, and the anonymous young man from the Intelligence Service took their place.

C
arignan woke after a sweaty dream that felt like a nightmare, left him shaking, but what of the dream should frighten? Dream, or visit: a figure, a monk with a pale region where his face should have been, telling him, “Your body is the twig that ignites the passion between your love of Jesus and the grace of God.” He’d drifted so far from English that certain of the phrases felt erased even as he turned them over in his mind and tried them with his lips—passion, ignite. Years since he’d so much as whispered words like that. And it surprised him that he should dream about grace or Jesus Christ because it had been many years too since he’d let such things trouble him.

The loneliness of my own life—Judas’s solitary journey home.

He rose from his bed in the corner of the mildewed church, walked to the pale brown river with an ingot of pale brown soap. Two little boys stared at him as they fished with hand lines from the broad back of a carabao, the local domesticated water buffalo. A second such beast nearby wallowed deep in a mud hole beside the bank, only its nostrils visible, and some of its horn. Wearing his zoris and underclothes, shoving the soap beneath his garments, Carignan bathed briskly, lest the leeches take hold.

By the time he’d returned and changed into clean undershorts, put on khakis and a T-shirt, affixed his collar, Pilar had some tea going.

The priest sat on a stump beside a wobbly table under a palm tree and smoked the day’s first cigarette and sipped from a china cup. He told Pilar, “I’ll go to see the Damulog mayor today. Mayor Luis.”

“All the way to Damulog?”

“No. We’ll both go to Basig, and we’ll meet.”

“Today?”

“He says today.”

“Who told you?”

“The Basig datu.”

“All right. I’ll take everything to my sister’s and do the washing there.”