Tree of Smoke (13 page)

The next morning came sunny and almost cool, the sky full of beautiful traveling clouds, everything so different from last night’s cauldron of ooze. Cory came in with bread and three tiny eggs from the market and made breakfast, after which Kathy met with eight nurse’s aids whom she’d trained and who now ran stations in the outlying barangays, at the moment only four stations, and six last quarter, and next quarter who knew, one or six or ten, the funding came and went.

The meeting was joined by a woman from the Upliftment Development Foundation, Mrs. Edith Villanueva, who took notes unnecessarily. Kathy’s eight aids, all women, all young, all married, all of them mothers many times over, and none of them very often free of their barangays, made a party of the occasion. They had rice and sugar fried in coconut oil and wrapped in banana leaf, rice wrapped in coconut leaf, and regular rice. “It’s all rice,” Mrs. Villanueva said somewhat apologetically.

The ladies were all very fond of her husband, had all the news about his disappearance, spoke of him respectfully, in such a manner as to imply he was neither dead nor alive. They called him Timmy.

And then, lunch concluded, it was time for Mayor Emeterio D. Luis, who held a central and elevated position by virtue of having learned everything about everyone in Damulog, who would have been the mayor even if no such municipal office had presented itself for his occupancy. Kathy brought him the leftover dainties arranged on a mahogany tray and draped with a silk scarf. Although Damulog housed a post office and city hall in a three-room cinderblock structure by the market, the mayor stayed out of it, preferring the small parlor of his home, which got shade and a breeze. He put Kathy in a wicker chair beside his desk, called out loudly for ice water, and asked her about polio immunization. She’d known him for two years. Still he took a few minutes to address her as if she’d just landed as an emissary. “Can we bring the polio vaccine to the outlying stations? We have problems in the countryside. Not everyone can march along the roads with so many children all the way to Damulog. These are the poor of the poorest. And sometimes also there can be robbers on the road. We don’t want to be victimized by these lawless elements. These are the poor of the poorest.” Kathy had heard him use the phrase several times lately. He invariably turned the words around. Yes: Emeterio D. Luis, the
D
, according to an engraved granite paperweight on his desk, standing for “Deus.”

Elections were far off, but already, he told her, his opponent for the office of mayor had slandered him, called him a coward, a man with “white eggs.” In his eyes, beneath the pains of office, glowed a general happiness. His sister, who taught at Southern Mindanao University, was singing tribal folk songs through a small PA amplifier on the patio, and he listened with satisfaction, his hands folded beside a vase of foam-rubber blossoms on top of his desk.

He talked to her about the American, Skip Sands, just as he must have spoken to Skip Sands about her. And of course he was aware she’d encountered the American in the Sunshine Eatery.

“I asked Skeep Sands if he knew the American colonel, and yes, they have a very interesting connection…Are you going to ask me what connection?”

“I wouldn’t want to gossip.”

“Gossip is un-Christian!” he said. “Unless you are talking to the mayor.”

Kathy uncovered the desserts and he studied the tray like a chess-board, his hand hovering. “So many visitors!”

Kathy said, “I think you conjure them up.”

“I conjure them up! Yes! I have conjured the American colonel, and the Philippine Army major, and I have conjured that other man, I think he was Swiss, what do you think he was?”

“I didn’t meet him. Or the Filipino. Just the colonel.”

“And I have conjured the survey team of engineers. Mrs. Luis,” he asked his portly wife as she entered from the kitchen, sliding across the linoleum floor in her straw-soled zoris, “what do you think? Do you think I am a conjurer?”

“I think you have a very loud voice!”

“Kathy believes I can conjure things,” he called as she continued toward the rear of the house. “Kathy,” he said, “I want the survey team to do some work for me. I think you can help me to persuade them.”

“I don’t hold much sway with them, Emeterio.”

“I have conjured them up! They must work for me!”

“Well, you’ll have to do your own talking there.”

“Kathy. The American called Skeep, do you know what he told me? The colonel is his relative. The colonel is his uncle, to be exact.”

Kathy said, “Well!” He’d made a strong general impression, but she couldn’t remember—conjure—the colonel’s face in order to make any comparison.

“When I asked Skeep about the Filipino officer and the other man, he pretended he doesn’t know them.”

“Why would he know them?”

“These people all know each other, Kathy. They are on a clandestine government mission.”

“Well, everyone’s under cover.” She herself appeared here under the auspices of the International Children’s Relief Effort, an organization without religious affiliation, whereas in fact she’d come as the wife of her husband: a worker in the vineyards of Jesus Christ.

The mayor threw his sandal at a dog that wandered in, a perfect shot, dead on the rear, and it screeched like a bird and leapt out the door.

“It’s completely outside of our ideas to gamble,” he suddenly reflected. “Gambling is against the Seven Day ideas. I’m trying to put it behind me.”

“I bet you succeed.”

“Thank you. Oh—‘I bet’! Yes! Ha ha! ‘I bet’!” He quickly sobered. “But you see, I go to the cockfights. It’s my obligation. I want to connect to the passions of the people.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

Fifteen minutes had passed, and now a young woman—servant, neighbor, or relative—set down two glasses of ice water on the desk. Mayor Luis dabbed at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand. He sighed. “Your husband Timmy.” The Filipinos all referred to her husband, for the first time in his life, as Timmy. “We will wait for word about the remains. It’s taking a little longer. I hold out hope, Kathy, because it’s possible that suddenly we might hear from some criminal elements of people who have taken him alive. We are victimized by so many lawless elements and kidnappers, but this time it can be said that they give us hope.” He sipped his water while a completely candid silence enclosed him: No. No hope.

At two in the afternoon, after classes let out and while the town dozed, she opened the doors of her Damulog health station, which operated in one of the cinderblock schoolhouse’s four classrooms. Upliftment Development’s Edith Villanueva was on hand to observe as young mothers brought in their infants to be immunized. A couple of dozen lined up, girls as young as twelve and thirteen—and looking only nine or ten—gripped the limbs of their babes ruthlessly for the shots, and received each a can of evaporated milk, which yielded, for them, the real meaning of the visit.

Meanwhile, the American Skip Sands sat out front on the concrete porch, looking at a book; in checkered short-pants and a white T-shirt, and rubber zoris on his feet. Apparently undisturbed by the screams.

As they left, Kathy introduced Edith to the American. He started to get up, but Edith sat beside him, smoothing her skirt. “What’s the book?” Edith asked. “A secret code?”

“Nope.”

“What. Greek?”

“Marcus Aurelius.”

“You can read it?”

“
To Himself
. Generally translated
Meditations
.”

“A linguist. You are a linguist?”

“It’s just for practice. I have an English translation at the hotel.”

“Castro’s? God, I wouldn’t stay there,” Edith said. “I’m taking the four o’clock bus out of here.”

“Mr. Castro’s roof has holes in it, but the next hotel is far, far away.”

“All alone?” Edith was a married woman, and middle-aged, or she’d never have been flirting with him.

He smiled, and Kathy suddenly wanted to kick him in the side—wake him up—in the softness below the ribs. To disturb the good humor in his bright American face.

“Can I see?” Kathy said. His book was very cheap and plain, printed by the Catholic University Press. She handed it back. “Are you a Catholic?”

“Midwestern Irish Catholic. That’s a mixed-up mixture, we like to say.”

“Kansas, you said, right?”

“Clements, Kansas. How about you?”

“Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or the country outside there. On the same latitude as Kansas.”

“Longitude.”

“Okay. We’re right due north of you.”

“But different countries,” Edith said.

“Different worlds,” Kathy said. Here they were, two weary wives, both crowding him. “Come along, then,” she said, and pulled him up by his hand.

They began walking toward Kathy’s street. “So you are from the midwestern United States?” Edith said.

“Yes, right, Kansas.”

Kathy said, “So is my husband. Springfield, Illinois.”

“Ah.”

“He’s missing at the moment.”

“I know, I heard. The mayor told me.”

Edith said, “The mayor told you—who else!”

“Emeterio tells everyone everything,” Kathy said. “That’s how he finds things out. The more he talks, the more people tell him. Were you waiting to see me?”

“Well, in fact, I was,” he admitted, “but I’ve waited too long. I’ve gotta run.”

“Run!” Edith said. “That’s not at all a very Filipino thing to do.”

After he’d left them, Edith said, “He didn’t realize I was still with you. He wanted to see you alone.”

Around four that afternoon, as they waited for Edith’s bus out of town, the two women spied the American strolling among the market stalls in his Bermuda shorts, on his sunburned legs, with a hairy brown coconut in his hand. “I’m looking for someone to whack this open for me,” he said.

The market square took up a full city block ringed with thatched kiosks, its interior beaten bare. They walked its borders seeking someone to deal with the visitor’s coconut. The bus arrived, chaos descended, the passengers hoisted their sacks and herded their children and swung their flapping, upside-down chickens by the talons. “The driver has a bolo, I’m sure,” Edith said. But Skip found a bolo-wielding vendor who topped the coconut expertly, raised it as if to drink, and offered it back to the American. Skip held it out—“Anybody thirsty?” Both women laughed. He tried the milk. Edith said, “For goodness’ sake, dump that out, man. It’s going to turn your stomach.” Skip emptied it onto the ground and let the vendor crack the fruit into quarters.

Edith had some words with the driver and then came back to them. “I made him wash the headlights. They don’t wash the headlights. It gets dark and they drive as if they had a blindfold because of so much mud.” She began her goodbyes to Kathy, and her thanks, and took a long time winding up her visit. She offered her hand to Skip Sands, and he held her fingertips awkwardly. “Thank you so much,” Edith said. “I think you’ll be an inspiration to Damulog.” There was something arch and improper in her tone.

Edith carried a gigantic multicolored straw bag with a hemp clasp. She went off swinging it, walking flat-footed in her sandals, her butt rolling like a carabao’s in her silk skirt. Good. Gone. All afternoon Kathy had felt in her neck and shoulders a tenseness, a readiness to shrug off the weight of this woman’s company. Each day’s end stole the light from her heart, then came the night’s sorrowing madness, waking, weeping, thinking, reading about Hell.

On the other hand the American, spreading out his white hankie for her on a mildewed bench, seemed pointless, stupid, soothing. He said, “Voulez-vous parlez Français?”

“I’m sorry?—Oh, no, we don’t do that in Manitoba. We’re not those kind of Canadians. Are you really some kind of linguist?”

“Just as a hobby. I’m pretty sure a real linguist could do a whole life’s work down here. As far as I can find out, nobody’s tried to study the Mindanao dialects in any kind of organized way.”

He picked up a slab of his coconut. The ants had found it. He blew them off and pried a chunk from it with the blade of a dark blue Boy Scouts of America pocketknife.

“Your work is tough,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I misjudged the nature of the whole proposition.”

“Did you?”

“The depth of it, yes, and the seriousness.”

She wanted to cry out to him to take stock of himself.

“Well, I just meant you have to deal with a lot of people.”

“Once you get among the heathen, it all changes. It changes a lot. It gets a lot clearer, a lot more vivid, it gets vividly clear. Oh, well,” she said, “it’s the kind of thing that gets confused when you talk about it.”

“I guess it would be.”

“Then let’s not talk about it. Do you mind if I write down a few thoughts sometime and pass them along to you? On paper?”

He said, “Sure.”

“And what about you? How is your work going?”

“It’s more of a holiday.”

“What’s Del Monte’s interest here? I wouldn’t think these Maguindanao plains would grow many pineapples. Too much flooding.”

“I’m on vacation. I’m just touring.”

“So you arrive without any explanation at all. Just a lost ambassador.”

“Well, yes, I’d see it as maybe an ambassadorial kind of opportunity, if fine folks like you weren’t already doing a much better job of representing us.”

“Representing us who, Mr. Sands?”

“The United States, Mrs. Jones.”

“I’m Canadian. I represent the Gospel.”

“Well, so does the United States.”

“Have you read a book called
The Ugly American
?”

He said, “Why would I want to read a book like that?”

She stared at him.

“Aah, okay, I’ve read
The Ugly American
,” he said. “I think it’s nonsense. Self-flagellation is getting to be the vogue. I don’t buy it.”

“And
The Quiet American
?”

“I’ve read
The Quiet American
, too.”—And that one, she noticed, he didn’t label nonsense.