Tree of Smoke (11 page)

As they crossed the creek at the pit of the ravine Carignan tried to clean his shoes. The mud didn’t dissolve in water, he had to scrape and rub at it with his fingers. The water looked clear. He wondered if it was potable. Somewhere along its length every creek in the region had a clan or village irrigating from it, sewage going in, animals bathing. He had a desperate thirst, his whole being pounded with it, but the men didn’t drink, so he didn’t drink. He pulled his wet shoes onto his bare feet. Now they made directly toward the black monolith of fumes.

They crested the rise and picked along down a path both muddy and rocky toward a barangay of several huts, all burning, nearly gone, down to their boards, and the boards still black and smoking. Saliling cupped his hand beside his mouth and hooted. An answer came. Around the side of an abutment they found an old man dressed in a burlap G-string. Carignan sat on a patch of coarse grass and waved the smoke away from his eyes while Saliling and his nephew spoke to the villager. “He say the Tad-tad came to destroy,” Robertson told the priest. “But everybody escaped. He is too old to escape. They shot him in the hand, and he is hiding.” The Tad-tad were a Christian sect. Their name meant “chop-chop.”

Of the inhabitants here nobody was left now but this old man with a bullet hole in his hand, which he’d wrapped in a poultice of leaves and flies’ eggs. “Even if they have a bad wound, they never cut off their limbs in this clan,” Robertson explained. “It isn’t necessary, their wounds never infect, because they allow the eggs to hatch and eat of the rot of their flesh.”

“Ah. Aha,” Carignan said.

“It is a good way. But sometimes it makes him sick, and he dies.”

The old man seemed immensely so, with a shrunken monkey’s face and leathery flesh that drooped from his bones at the joints. Toward the back of his mouth he had two or three teeth which he used, at this moment, to gnaw at a mango with intense concentration. He answered Saliling’s questions gruffly, but when he was done with the fruit he tossed away the pit and showed Carignan his anting-anting, a bracelet of hollow seeds around his waist. Its magic, he explained, guaranteed him a peaceful death. Therefore his bullet wound meant nothing.

The old man spoke a Cebuano-Bisayan dialect Carignan could make out pretty well, though young Robertson translated: “He just needs to drink some blood from the monkey, and he’ll be new again.”

“Take me to the river with you,” the old man said. “I want to drink some mud.”

“Now he wants to go with us,” Robertson said.

“Yes. I understand.”

“This clan says the mud gives life. He wants the river.”

“I know what he says,” the priest insisted.

The old man pointed eastward over a hill and spoke of a story-land, a legendary place.

“He says that over that mountain is the place called Agamaniyog.”

“The children tell these stories,” Carignan said.

Still pointing east, the old man said, “Agamaniyog. It is the land of coconuts.”

Carignan said, “Agamaniyog is for children.”

“Then don’t go there,” the old man said.

They began again, wading down the middle of the creek through the tight valley and then up the facing mountainside, clutching at shocks of weed to pull themselves upward, Carignan afflicted every step of the way by the goads of the Accuser: I am evil in the sovereignty of my will, and incompletely repentant. But a little, a little repentant. But very incompletely. I have failed in the spirit of my sonship. He stifled the devil’s voice, which was his own, and trained his hearing on the outer sounds, the shivering of wet leaves in the wind, guffaws of parrots, the dishonest glibness of small monkeys in the bush. The plants closed over them. The path was only a figment now in Saliling’s mind. Carignan blundered after, kept upright by the fear that if he went down he’d be lost in the vegetation. His clothes were sopped, even his pockets were full of his sweat. The path widened again, and they came onto a ridge overlooking the world. The going was easier now. In less than two hours they stood above the Arakan Valley, some five kilometers wide, and the olive-drab Pulangi River running through it. Gigantic acacia trees shaped like mushrooms, ten stories high and their crowns a hundred feet across, hid the riverside from view. Saliling hadn’t once spoken to him, but he turned now and said in Cebuano, “Look back—you see where we came. It’s twenty kilometers to there.” Carignan looked west: the gray-green jungle washed in a rosy light, crumbling into the cauldron of the sunset.

They were another hour hiking down into what was left of the barangay of Tatug. Last year’s flooding had pasted down the grasses and toppled the houses from their low stilts, but the people still lived here. Carignan, so drained he couldn’t raise his hands to get his hat off, sat down on a mound he was vaguely aware must be that of a grave. Other graves surrounded him, not quite yet grown over by the relentless clawing grass and ground vines. Something had massacred a dozen of these people, more, twenty, twenty-five—a plague, a flood, marauders. He found strength to take his hat off. He heard children laughing, he heard a woman weeping. “Come, get out of here, you must not sit here,” Robertson said. Saliling had him by the arm. Robertson said, “See, we have a box.” He held in his hands a box made of grub-eaten, salvaged boards. “These are the bones of your countryman.”

I
n pursuit of his first official operation as an intelligence officer, Sands arrived at the Manila domestic airport at 4:15 a.m. on a Saturday to take a DC-3 to Cagayen de Oro, the northernmost city on the island of Mindanao, and added himself to the throng at the sellers’ windows, scores of people half asleep, their hankies draped over their necks, fanning themselves slowly with wilted journals, milling gently but resolutely forward into the blunt faces of the clerks. Then they disappeared before actually getting on the plane. Skip’s name came fortieth on the wall’s chalk-written waiting list, but the first thirty-nine travelers didn’t show, and he was the first to board the DC-3, which carried a total of five passengers over the iridescent jungles and the black sea and landed without mishap on a bumpy strip of red ground. These DC-3s, he understood, could fly with a wing shot off—he’d heard tales from the colonel.

Sands found a cab to the De Oro market, omitted breakfast, and boarded a passenger bus heading south across the island. He carried an inexpensive camera, an Imperial Mark XII in pastel green missing its flash attachment, but he spent most of his time looking at the ripe, spongy landscape. They made good speed, slowing nearly to a halt to let passengers on and off, but never quite stopping. In every hamlet vendors ran alongside selling sliced mango and pineapple wrapped in paper, and Coca-Cola in wobbling plastic baggies knotted shut and pierced with a drinking straw, and this was his fare until the journey broke for the night in Malaybalay, a city in the central mountains.

Throughout this passage waves of homesickness broke over him, not for the States, not for Kansas, or for Washington, but for the house in the mountains on Luzon, with its air-conditioned bedrooms and its Campbell’s soup and Skippy peanut butter from the embassy’s Sea-front commissary. These tiny bouts of panic he welcomed as signs of a deepening immersion in his environment. A notion the colonel had advanced intrigued him: one God, but different administrations. His fears dragged him also to the far end of this assignment—who would read his report on Father Thomas Carignan, how would his report impress them?

Malaybalay, though poor and constructed mostly of plywood and galvanize, was populous and full of noise and movement. Next to the Catholic church square he found a hotel and a room with a Muslim-style private bath—a stall enclosing both a toilet hole and a cold-water faucet with three feet of rubber hose attached. This exotic system plunged him into a spiritual nausea. He’d expected on assignments of this kind to experience isolation and terror; but not merely at the sight of the plumbing. He lay on the bed gasping while the strength boiled out of his blood. The narrow room’s windows were too high to see out of. The air of this world seemed to carry no oxygen, only the bleating of children and the racket of the streets. He made his way downstairs with his camera and sat on a stone bench in the square, getting a shoeshine. The shine boy, he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, worked up a sweat, great drops beaded his upper lip, and he banged his brush on the box decisively to signal his customer should switch his feet. Sands snapped his picture. The boy had poise and pretended not to notice. This would do it, this would steady him, this child’s face. He paid plenty, went into the church—no walls, just a great dome over banks of pews—and waited for the Saturday evening liturgy. A few others joined him. Dusk came. Bats flitted around the square outside. The Latin soothed him. During the homily the youthful priest spoke Bisayan, but Skip recognized many English terms—“demonic possession”—“exorcisms”—“fallen angels”—“spiritual investigation”—“psychological investigation.” When the congregation rose to take Communion, he left them to it and stepped back into the devastatingly foreign city.

By stopping passersby until he found an English-speaker, he learned of a Western-style restaurant and soon sat down at La Pasteria, an Italian place getting perhaps part of its menu out of cans, but offering also fresh tossed salad and antipasta with radishes and fresh celery, even olives. White tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles, and a phonograph on which the staff spun seventy-eight rpm Dixieland recordings.

The wooden shutters lay open to an evening mountain breeze as cool as could be had at this latitude. Beside one of the windows, alone, sat a woman Sands was convinced must be British or American, young but somehow not youthful, businesslike, something like a spinster librarian or a pastor’s maiden sister. But throughout the meal, whenever he glanced at her, she stared back with a disorienting candor.

As the waiter cleared her place, she rose and walked directly to Skip’s table. She carried her coffee cup and set it down next to his. She held out her hand. “We’ve been staring at each other all night. We might as well be introduced. I’m Kathy Jones.”

She shook his hand, and held it. Not in mere friendship. Her eyes locked on his, her gaze almost tearful, hot with need. Sands was speechless. He’d never known what to do about women. Her false smile, melting with desperation, shocked his heart with pity. She was ill, or drunk, maybe both.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, and turned away with a small laugh or sob. Leaving her coffee on his table, she went out quickly.

Sands shook inside, and he couldn’t eat. Nevertheless he ordered dessert. When it came—cannoli—the waiter lingered beside him in a grisly state of self-consciousness and finally succeeded in saying, “The lady did not pay today. Will you be the one to pay?” and Skip paid.

The next afternoon, stepping from the bus onto the unpaved main street of the village of Damulog, he was greeted by a small plump man who apparently made a habit of inspecting new arrivals and who introduced himself as Emeterio D. Luis, Damulog’s mayor. Luis took him over to the only hotel, owned by a man named Freddy Castro, along the way pointing out the important places in Damulog, the market, the restaurant, the cockfights building, the dry-goods store.

Damulog lay at the end of the concrete road, end of the bus route, end of the power lines. Though electricity reached there, the town had no sewers and, as far as Sands could learn, no indoor plumbing, certainly not at Mr. Castro’s hotel, which was constructed of sturdy wood but where, that afternoon, the rain worked not only through the roof but through two intervening stories to drip from the ceiling of his ground floor room. Keeping his bed and belongings dry needed some thoughtful arrangement. At dusk both the mayor and Mr. Castro, a young man with good English, took him to one of the town’s five springs, where Sands, in his checkered undershorts and yellow zoris, before an audience of women and openmouthed children, bathed in clear water flowing from a pipe in a hillside.

“Have your bath, have your bath, you are safe,” the mayor promised him. “We have no crocodiles here. We have no malaria. We have no marauders. I believe we are seeing some organized activity from the Muslim groups in the south, but in Cotabato only. We are not in Cotabato. This is Damulog. Welcome to Damulog.”

When Skip’s back was turned, the children called out to him. The island of Mindanao had seen no U.S. military; therefore nobody called him Joe. The children called him “Pa-dair, Pa-dair…” Father…Mistook him for a priest.

T
hose were strange dreams last night, Lord…

She sat on a bench in the market piecing together last night’s terrors, waiting for the 6:00 a.m. departure, waiting for coffee while nearby two half-awake women opened their stall for commerce. I stood at the seat of Judgment, but what before that, what, I had my purse, I stepped into a shop to buy a pencil, but the shop was a stage in a big black stadium at the end of the world, and now I was dead and had to account for my sins. And I couldn’t. And the darkness was my eternal death.

Whose voice had whispered in the dream? But the lady was prepared now to sell her some coffee, pouring hot water from a thermos into the plastic cup over a spoonful of powdered Nescafé. The lady turned on her transistor radio—DXOK from Cotabato City, pop tunes followed by a 6:00 a.m. break for five Hail Marys.

The bus waited, but the driver hadn’t come. Whether they left on schedule hardly interested her. She wore no watch, hadn’t owned one for years.

And who’s this? Not thirty feet away, seating himself at another stall and getting himself a sugar roll, was the man before whom she’d acted like an idiot at the restaurant, at La Pasteria. Idiot, idiot! But last night at the sight of him she’d felt such an ache, such thirst. In his Philippine-made apparel, brown slacks, brown sandals, white box-cut sport shirt, in the dusk of candlelight, with his shaggy head and mustache, he’d looked so much like Timothy the young arrival, Timothy the bringer of good news and bright fellowship. And she’d thrown herself at this American as blindly as she would have done at Timothy if Timothy had come back to her out of the blank question into which he’d dematerialized.