Tree of Smoke (12 page)

No dawn yet. Strange weather on this mountain, the sunlight fell on you like an anvil, but it was cool in the shade, after nightfall almost chilly. She hunched in her parka sweater, her face invisible in the shade of its hood, and observed the American from thirty feet away. For that first instant last night, Timothy, I thought he was you and my blood leapt to my head and fingers and I could hardly see, and here, drinking Coca-Cola at six in the morning with his arm hooked through the strap of his cotton satchel, Timothy, he still looks just like you. Now another man arrived, probably the bus driver, and sat down next to the American and ordered coffee. Way up in the tin eaves, frail fluorescent lights attended by a glory of winged bugs…Sleepy stall women wrapped in light blankets beside wooden cases opened up to display boiled eggs, cigarettes, candy, sugar rolls. Timothy, are you alive? The woman at the stall beside me is weaving tiny boxes for party favors out of coconut leaves. Another woman goes by bent over a short broom, just a sheaf of straw, sweeping…May I always remember the truth I feel right now…Timothy, we live, we die.

The driver opened his bus and the American boarded behind him. Impossible to get on that bus, to be seen. She’d take a later one. She turned her back and asked for an egg and a roll and more Nescafé, and then gathered her things and walked. She carried her things in a brown paper bag with string handles.

She sat on a bench in Rizal Plaza and watched half a dozen women and children spreading the rice harvest on the basketball court, walking through it with rakes to turn the grains. She had nowhere else to go. Better to gamble on the less dependable afternoon schedule than to stay another night. The city had no Seventh-Day church, and so she’d lodged at a rooming house, where the fact of a woman traveling alone had created a tense solicitousness that felt to her like hatred. Everybody trying to be polite. That’s why she’d gone to La Pasteria, though she could hardly afford it—thus for going there in the first place she’d had an excuse, but none for opening herself to the stranger.

Had he really looked so much like Timothy? From her paper luggage she fished a pack of photos, the sole reason for this trip. Last week amid the miscellany of Timothy’s belongings she’d found a roll of film, and had traveled all this way to reach a man with a darkroom. Most of the frames had come out, twenty or so photos, three showing Timothy, two only peripherally—Timothy with a group of engineers from Manila, looking at the site for a future water plant, Mayor Luis dashing into the foreground like a large, happy rodent; Timothy close but blurred, apparently instructing the novice photographer—and one of Timothy with his arm around the shoulders of Kathy herself, posing with a Filipino wedding party in front of a pink stucco church. The rest were shots he’d meant to send to the newlyweds: Cotabato City; Kathy recognized the pink church. She’d stayed at his side on what he called “a junket,” nearly a hundred kilometers over washed-out roadways with dozens of other passengers in a jeepney designed for eight people. At the church in Cotabato they’d received him as a god, petitioned him with their cares, burdened him with small offerings, beseeched him to attend the wedding of strangers, allowed him to record the occasion with his German-made camera.

Besides these photos her paper sack held yesterday’s change of clothes and a small pillow she put between herself and the wooden bench on the bus she rode down off the mountain that afternoon. The road fell gradually, looking straight into the distance, the view ahead lovely and vast, eleven hundred blends of green under slowly massing black and gray thunderheads. The air howled through the open windows, smelling at first of pine, next of the fermenting lowlands. The bus drove through a downpour and arrived in Damulog still dripping at 4:00 p.m.

No Mayor Luis at the bus stop today. He must be off wagering. She heard the men roaring at the cockfights in the building across the square. She’d watched once, from a distance, lingering outside in the street. The birds wore razors strapped to their spurs and cut each other to pieces within seconds.

She and Timothy lived not far from the square in a three-bedroom house with screened windows and a tight roof, sharing it with their servant Corazon and also, usually, two or three of Cory’s nieces, not always the same ones. She found the house empty. On Sabbaths and Sundays the girls went home to barangay Kinipet.

After the piney scent and relative cool of the mountain city, she could smell her home again, the damp wood and sour linen. The house was dark. She pulled the overhead chain in the kitchen—the power worked. Roaches ran for the corners. Cory had left her some rice in a covered bowl. The ants were at it. What a desperate, horrible place this was without Timothy.

She tossed the food, bowl and all, in the dirt by the margin of the property and left, three minutes after returning to her home.

She ate supper at the Sunshine Eatery and got trapped there by the day’s second rainstorm. The town’s electricity failed, and she waited out the weather in the candle-lit place talking with a man named Romy, here from Manila with a survey team, and with Boy Sedosa, who wore the uniform of a constabulary patrolman. Romy drank from a pint of Old Castle Liquor and Sedosa from a pint of Tanduay rum. Thelma, the patroness of the People’s Sunshine Eatery, sat on a high stool behind the counter across the room listening to a transistor radio.

The American who looked like Timothy came in dripping wet, carrying what looked like a camera looped to his wrist, and hesitated just inside the door. The talk stopped. He sat at the next table and asked for coffee. If he recognized her, he was too polite to say so.

Ah, she might have known. Damulog was the end of the bus line and the only stop offering lodging.

He placed his camera on the table. They all watched him drink his coffee while the rain continued steadily.

A gang of young drunks took over the café, horsing around and knocking over tables and chairs. By candlelight they made frightening, violent silhouettes. Thelma clapped her hands and laughed as if they were her own boys. They left, and she went about righting the furniture. Patrolman Sedosa stirred himself to direct the beam of his flashlight out after them into the rain. Then a crazy lady came inside to beg. She and Thelma embraced like kin, which they may well have been.

Patrolman Sedosa, though keeping his chin and shoulders straight, sank toward the candle flame. He stared at the American at the next table until the American was forced to take notice. “I would like to request your name.”

“My name is William Sands.”

“I see. William Sands.” Sedosa’s face belonged in the movies—dead drunk eyes among fat, greasy features. His nose was sharp, Arabic. He didn’t blink. “Not touching in any way on your personality,” Sedosa said, “but can you show me some papers permitting you to travel in our province?”

“I don’t have any ID with me at all,” the American said, “I’ve only got one pocket.” He wore a white T-shirt and what appeared to be bathing trunks.

“I see.” Sedosa stared at him as if forgetting him.

“I’m a friend of Mayor Luis,” Sands said. “He officially approved my visit.”

“Are you working for the United States Army, perhaps?”

“I’m with the Del Monte Corporation.”

“I see. That’s good. I am just checking.”

“I understand.”

“Just ask for Boy Sedosa when you need my assistance,” the patrolman said.

“Okay. And please call me Skip.”

“Skeep!” Sedosa said.

And Romy from the survey team said, “Ah! Skeep!”

And Thelma, on her stool behind her jars of food, clapped her hands and cried, “Hello, Skeep!”

“Here’s to Skip,” Kathy said.

Did he realize? He’d offered his nickname. Trouble would never touch him again in this town.

He raised his glass to them all.

“I see you’re carrying a camera around in the rain,” she said.

“I’m not making much sense tonight,” he admitted.

“Do you take it with you every minute?”

“Nope. I try not to get attached. If you’re not careful, it can turn into your eye, the only dream you see through.”

“Did you say ‘dream’?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you say it turns into the only dream you see through?”

“Did I? I meant ‘eye.’ Your camera turns into your eye.”

“A strange slip there, sir. Did you dream about being a photographer when you were young?”

“No, I didn’t, ma’am. Did you dream about being Sigmund Freud?”

“Have you got a grudge against Sigmund Freud?”

“Freud is half of what’s wrong with this century.”

“Really? What’s the other half?”

“Karl Marx.”

It made her laugh, though she disagreed. “Probably the first time either one was ever mentioned in this town,” she said.

Romy, the surveyor, grappled across the intervening space for the American’s hand and shook it. “Will you please give us the honor of your company?” He pulled until the American moved his chair and joined them. “Can you please enjoy a coffee with us? Or something even more enjoyable?”

“Sure. Who wants a cigarette? They’re a little damp.”

“That’s quite all right,” Patrolman Sedosa said, and accepted one and held it near the candle’s flame to get it dry. “Ah! Benson & Hedges! It’s a good one!”

Seeing the American again now, even closer this time, she felt nothing stir in her. She wished something would. The town ran with mud and reeked of every kind of dung and infestation. Now that she’d seen this place without Timothy, she didn’t want it with him or without him.

The men discussed bantamweight Filipino boxers she’d never heard of. Tiny moths scattered themselves on the tabletop, around the candle stuck upright in a gallon jug formerly containing Tamis Anghang Banana Catsup, whatever that was. The men discussed politicians who didn’t interest her. They discussed basketball, something of a national passion. When she got tired of it she walked home through a light drizzle, in the pitch-dark blackout, stepping in puddles and lucky to keep her feet on the road, even luckier to find the house.

She set down her shoes inside the door, made her way to the bedroom. She groped for the flashlight on the nightstand and undressed by its dim illumination. On the nightstand also lay Timothy’s book, she’d found it among his things, the dreadful essays of John Calvin and his doctrine of predestination, promising a Hell full of souls made expressly to be damned, she didn’t know what to do with it, kept it near her, couldn’t help returning to its spiritual pornography like a dog to its vomit. She found a match, lit a coil of insecticidal incense in a dish, crawled under the mosquito net, drew the sheet to her chin…Certain persons positively and absolutely chosen to salvation, others as absolutely appointed to destruction…Lying there in the stink of her life with her hair still wet from rain. She didn’t touch the book.

She woke in a glaring light: the ceiling lamp. Apparently the power lines had been dealt with. Still black outside, and the rain had ceased. She took her sandals into the kitchen, tossed them at the sink to drive away the cockroaches, turned on the light, poured a glass of cold water from the refrigerator—gas-powered—and sat at the table looking at the photographs. Going for the film had been something to occupy her while she waited for somebody to bring her the ring, the band, which may or may not have been gold, from the finger of a corpse washed up along the Pulangi River. The river people hadn’t sent the ring. Rather than disturb the bones or this sole ornament, they’d gone looking for Westerners who might claim some kinship with these relics. After weeks of deliberation among themselves they’d bartered for an insignificant consideration, just fifty pesos.

She was looking through his eyes at this wedding party.

They’d been warned they’d be photographed, had prepared themselves. Some of the little girls were dolled up with lipstick and powder, their black hair made brilliant with pomade.

His eyes had seen, his mind had processed exactly this moment on the broken steps of the pink church. In the right-hand background a sign—“TREADSETTERS / a new horizon in the world of retreading”—and effigies of Saint Michael floating above a crowd of celebrants, with the blades of his swords swaddled in tinfoil. It was Michaelmas. Muslims, Catholics, everyone danced the praises of the warrior-saint. As Timothy fiddled with the flash attachment the groom’s family began to exclaim and laugh, and when the flash popped they denuded themselves of all human restraint, screeching and trying to hide behind one another in a bashful panic.

She took from their box in the refrigerator one of Timothy’s Filipino cigars, sat down with it, held it, lit a match from the dish on the table, took several brief draws before dousing it in the sink, and sat down again at the table surrounded by the reek of him, though her head swam. She tracked any glint of memory into the void. Cigars, photographs, things he’d touched, remarks that floated back, she collected them all compulsively, as some kind of evidence.

She got back into bed without turning off the light overhead. Immediately she opened the book of the works of Calvin, the book Timothy had found and read and wouldn’t stop reading. It shocked her that there should exist a phraseology for these defilements, ideas she’d assumed to have been visited on herself alone, doubts uniquely sinful, never expressed—and Timothy must have felt the same, because he’d never spoken to her about them or about the book. In the margins he’d penciled checkmarks next to certain passages. She shut her eyes and read them with her fingers…

“Although, therefore, those things which are evil, in so far as they are evil, are not good, yet it is good that there should be evil things.”

“And if God foreknew that they would be evil, evil they will be, in whatever goodness they may now appear to shine.”

“Are we children? Will we hide from the truth that God by His eternal goodwill appointed those whom He pleased unto salvation, rejecting all the rest?”

This fluttering heart, the thrill of the abyss, the inescapable truth of my foreordained damnation.

She fell asleep with the light on, holding these terrifying affirmations against her breast.