Tree of Smoke (17 page)

The Mass said, the celebrants departed, Carignan stripped to his under-shorts and zoris and went down to the river to bathe.

The sound of a motorized palm-boat, quite rare on this river, made him stop and watch. The craft passed through his view, slowing, the motor throttling down to an idle, the two men aboard peering toward the shore, coming close. Carignan waved. They passed from sight, hidden by the low sago palms growing along the bank.

He waded in up to his waist and bathed.

What a silly sermon. Because of the English, his old vexation had come awake, struggling upright and flailing in its dirty bandages—his soul and his soul’s diseases.

How did I get here?—Judas pops up in the maze.

He stepped from the river with his head down but not watching his feet, preoccupied, troubled by the unkindnesses he’d done in his adolescence, none of them at all serious, but they terrified him now because they’d been perpetrated with a kind of amorality which, had it continued, would have made him very dangerous to the world.

He turned and saw among the sago fronds a most curious sight: a Western man in Western garb holding a long tube to his lips. Something like a bamboo reed. As Carignan examined this sight and prepared to make some sort of greeting, the man’s cheeks collapsed and something stung the padre in the flesh over his Adam’s apple and seemed to lodge there. He reached up to brush it away. His tongue and lips began to tingle, his eyes burned, and within seconds the sensation was that of having no head at all, and then of losing touch with his hands and feet, and abruptly he didn’t know where any part of him was, every part of him seemed to go away. He did not feel himself collapsing toward the water, and by the time he landed in it he was dead.

H
aving relieved himself beside a bush near the river, Sands came along the path below the church and met two very little boys riding alongside an irrigation ditch on the back of a carabao. They smiled with shyness and doubt. “Padair. Padair…”

Maybe they thought he was Carignan—maybe they thought there existed in all the universe only a single priest who took many forms.

He tossed the kids some gum. One missed the toss and scrambled down off the wide platform of the animal’s back to pluck it from the grass at the ditch’s edge. “Padair. Padair.”

“I’m not your father,” Sands said.

In the sunset light he watched a palm-boat race downriver through a magical rainbow-colored mist churned up by a quite powerful propeller, two figures on board. There was nothing about the boatmen, so far out in the river and veiled by spray, that under any other circumstances would have made him say, “It’s Eddie Aguinaldo and the German,” nothing strong enough to rate them a mention, say, in his report. But those two had been lurking, and now they loomed. He was about to turn and race back to the church for his binoculars, but here was the priest, he suddenly noticed, swimming just offshore, and facedown. Who swims like that? The drowned. Sands waded out in pursuit. He plunged into a hole, and the water closed over his head. He surfaced, saw Carignan floating, turning, heading downstream. Sands began to swim after him, changed his mind, swam to shore and ran along the path beside the water until he’d gotten downstream of Carignan, kicked off his sandals, waded out into the deeper water, and launched out again, trying to intercept the drifting priest. He’d misjudged. Loose-limbed, cadaverlike—perhaps dead—the priest slipped rapidly away at a tangent, downstream and out toward the middle of the quarter-mile-wide water.

Again Sands gave up swimming, turned back, clambered ashore, and headed, now barefoot, down the path. He veered off toward a house, saw a banca-boat overturned on the grass beside it, hollered, no one home, tried to get it right-side up, failed, tried to drag it toward the path. A man stopped him, a muscular young man, barefoot, bare-chested, baffled, wearing red short-pants. He quickly caught the moment’s urgency and grabbed a paddle leaning against the house. Each man took a side and they jerked the boat along to the shore, boarded precariously, and struck out after the corpse, the Filipino paddling and the American pointing, their small craft steadily gaining on the murdered man as he traveled toward Kingdom Come.

The next day Sands returned the Honda motorbike to the diocese and reported the death by drowning of Father Thomas Carignan. Father Haddag was saddened by the loss, and surprised to hear about it so soon. “Sometimes news takes weeks to come from the river people,” he said.

This errand took all afternoon. Afterward Sands booked a room in Carmen and had chicken-on-a-stick and a bowl of rice with three men from the Department of Agriculture whom he simply ran into on the highway through town, all of them wandering up and down it looking for a restaurant. They settled for one of the roadside stands where a man barbecued gaunt legs and thighs over coconut-shell charcoals, dousing them with a mix of soy sauce, spices, and Coca-Cola. Starving dogs watched them eat. David Alverol, the chief among the three Agriculture workers, wanted to knock around town with this American, but Sands was dead tired. The other two kept their poise, while David Alverol seemed so excited to have met the American that the American really feared for David’s sanity. He kept repeating himself, performing the introductions several times, his face shining with sweat and also from an inner illumination. He suggested every two minutes that the American come to his home “for a dialogue.” “You’re very jolly,” he told the American. “My type of guy. Can’t you come with us for one more thirty minutes?” David got more and more insistent, to the embarrassment of his two companions, beseeching the American drunkenly with tears in his eyes as the American got out of their government jeep in front of his small hotel—“Please, sir, please, one half an hour only, sir, sir, I beg you, yes, please…” Sands made an appointment to see them tomorrow, warning them his schedule might prevent him from keeping it. They parted that way, Sands and the two others understanding he’d never be seen again, and David Alverol expecting to meet him first thing in the morning.

Sands hadn’t told Father Haddag of the eight-inch sumpit dart jutting from the neck of Carignan’s corpse.

In his room in Carmen he lay awake thinking about the German killer. What before had seemed in the German effeminate now seemed poetic—his eyeglasses, his thick lips, the pale skin. He trafficked intimately with death, he knew things. Sands had thought him pompous and irritable. Now he seemed the carrier of a transcendental burden.

Just as he got back to Damulog, little red ants hit town. They walked all over his table at the Sunshine Eatery, all over his bed at Castro’s hotel.

He might have continued to Davao City on the island’s southern end and caught a plane for Manila. He went back to Damulog instead. He might have spent a night there at the longest, waiting for a bus. Instead he stayed three weeks while he composed a report containing nothing of substance, based entirely on hearsay from the Mayor Emeterio D. Luis, and drawing no inference as to the nature of the priest’s contacts or the responsibility for his death.

Sands was, in effect, AWOL. He buried his dereliction in his pointless labors and practiced a soldierly detachment from his bitterness. And spent his nights with Mrs. Jones.

B
ill Houston’s Honolulu shore leave commenced with the forenoon watch, too early for a man with money to spend: on top of everything, the navy wished to deny him any nightlife. He took a shuttle bus from the naval station and across the open fields of the air force base and then through town to Waikiki Beach, wandered dejected among the big hotels, sat on the sand in his Levi’s and wild Hawaiian shirt and his very clean shoes—white bucks with red rubber soles—ate grilled pork on a wooden skewer at a kiosk, took a city bus to Richards Street, booked a bed at the Armed Services YMCA, and started drinking in the waterfront bars at one in the afternoon.

He tried an air-conditioned place favored by young officers, where he sat at a table by himself smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking Lucky Lager. It made him feel lucky. When he’d collected enough change he called home on the mainland, chatted with his brother James.

That just made him more depressed. His brother James was stupid. His brother James was going to end up in the military like himself.

He strolled the waterfront with the beer thudding inside his head, a lonely feeling pulling at his heart. By 3:00 p.m. the pavement of Honolulu had baked so hot it sucked at his rubber shoe soles as he walked.

He hid inside the Big Surf Club trading beers with two men slightly older than himself, one of them a man named Kinney who’d recently joined the crew on Houston’s ship—the USNS
Bonners Ferry
, a T2 tanker manned mostly by civilians, of whom Kinney was one. But he hadn’t just waltzed on board for a tropical cruise. He’d spent time in the navy, lived on ship after ship, and had no real home ashore. Kinney had attached himself to a barefoot beach bum who seemed hopped up on something. The bum bought the table two pitchers in a row and eventually revealed he’d served with the Third Marines in Vietnam before landing back home on an early discharge. “Yeah, baby,” the bum said. “I got the medical.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’m mentally disabled.”

“You seem all right.”

“You seem all right if you buy us a beer,” Kinney said.

“No problem. I’m on disability. Two forty-two a month. I can drink a serious amount of Hamm’s, man, if I sleep on the beach like a Moke and eat what the Mokes eat.”

“What do the Mokes eat? Who are the Mokes?”

“Around here you got the Mokes and the Howlies. We are the Howlies. The Mokes are the native fuckers. What do they eat? They eat cheap. Then there’s a whole lot of Japs and Chinks, you probably noticed. They’re in the Gook category. You know why Gook food stinks so bad? Because they fry it up with rat turds and roaches and whatever else gets in with the rice. They don’t care. You ask them what the fuck stinks around here and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I’ve seen some things,” the bum went on. “Over there the Gooks wear these funny straw hats, you probably seen those—they’re pointy? Girls riding on a bicycle, you grab their hat when you go by and you just about yank their head off, because they’re tied with a string. Yank her right off the bike, man, and she goes down fucked-up in the mud. This one time I saw one where she was all bent like this, man. Her neck was snapped. She was dead.”

Bill Houston was completely confused. “What? Where?”

“Where? In South Vietnam, man, in Bien Hoa. Right in the middle of town, practically.”

“That’s fucked up, man.”

“Yeah? And it’s fucked up when one of them honeys tosses a grenade in your lap because you let her get up beside you on the road, man. They know the rules. They know they should keep their distance. The ones who don’t keep their distance, they probably have a grenade.”

Houston and Kinney kept quiet. They had nothing comparable to talk about. The guy drank his beer. A moment almost like sleep came over them. Still nobody had spoken, but the bum said as if answering something, “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.”

“Let’s see some beer,” Kinney said. “Ain’t it your round?”

The bum didn’t seem to remember who’d bought what. He kept the pitchers coming.

J
ames Houston came home from the last day of his third year in high school. Got off the bus raising his middle finger at the driver and whooping.

His mother had caught a ride out to work and left the truck in the driveway, as he’d asked. His little brother Burris stood in the drive with a finger in one of his ears, peering down the barrel of a cap pistol while he pulled the trigger repeatedly.

“Watch your eyes, Burris. I’ve heard of a kid got a spark in his eye and he had to go to the hospital.”

“What are caps made of?”

“Gunpowder.”

“WHAT? GUNpowder?”

The telephone rang inside.

“I’m not allowed to answer,” Burris said.

“Did they turn the phone back on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s ringing, ain’t it?”

“Shut up.”

“Now it done quit, you fool.”

“I wouldn’t answer anyhow. It sounds like bugs talking in there. Not people.”

“You’re a funny feller,” James said, and went inside, where it was hot and smelled a little like garbage. His mother refused to turn on the evaporative cooler unless the temperature got into the hundreds.

He carried a number of papers from school, homework, report card, year-end bulletins. He shoved them in the trash can under the sink.

The phone rang again: his brother, Bill Junior.

“Is it hot in Phoenix?”

“It’s almost a hundred, yeah.”

“It’s hot here too. It’s
sweaty
.”

“Where you calling from?”

“Honolulu, Hawaii. Hour ago I was standing on Waikiki Beach.”

“Honolulu?”

“Yep.”

“Do you see any hula girls?”

“I see a bunch of whores is all. But I bet they’ll do the hula.”

“I bet they will too!”

“What do you know about it?”

“Me? I don’t know,” James said. “I was just saying.”

“Goddamn, I wish I was back in good old Arizona.”

“Well, I’m not the one who reenlisted.”

“You can put me on a nice clean desert anytime you want to. It’s honest heat there, ain’t it? It’s dry and burning. This here’s mushy, is what it is. Hey, kid, imagine this, did you ever lift the lid on a kettle full of boiling sewage? That’s what it’s like stepping out on the street in this place.”

“So,” James said, “what-all else is going on?”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“I’ll be seventeen here pretty quick.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“What am I gonna do? I don’t know.”

“Are you done with school?”

“I don’t know.”