Tree of Smoke (5 page)

The men offered him a cot and even gave him a small pillow. They arranged themselves in a bivouac tableau: Outside a man stood sentry; inside five men played cards while one kibitzed and another snored nearby. Trung tried to nap, but he couldn’t sleep. He imagined they spent many days like this. The wind died off outside. He could hear the swollen river rubbing along the banks. The day grew dark. The sentries abandoned their outposts upriver and came in for the evening meal. Altogether there didn’t seem to be more than fifteen of these quiet, emaciated men strung along this part of the Van Co Dong, protecting themselves from all who might come, they didn’t care who, and they didn’t seem to realize no one was coming.

They kept the cook-fire smoldering all night to drive away the mosquitoes. Trung slept with his bandanna over his nose and mouth. The others didn’t seem to mind the fumes.

The rain came long after dark. The men started stowing their gear in leak-free spots, and they all rearranged themselves, repeating, “Move it! Move it!” They lay back in their new positions while the rain strung itself down all around them through the roof. Nobody talked because of the watery noise. By the light of candles Trung saw their faces staring out at nothing. But their spirits rose. There was singing and laughter. They were good boys. They were only doing whatever came along to be done. As the rain got harder, they stuck more flattened cigarette packs here and there in the ceiling.

At midnight four dogs snuck in. Trung was the only one awake. He aimed his flashlight around as they prowled silently. When its beam hit them, they bolted out the open doorway. The light cut through the cook-smoke and played over the men and boys sleeping in groups of two or three. They lay side by side, their arms draped around one another, or touching in a casual, familial way.

At dawn he crept outside, sat cross-legged on the damp ground, and cleared his mind by focusing on the progress of the breath in and out of his nostrils, as during his boyhood he’d done every morning and evening at the New Star. And he’d been doing it again now, daily, for nearly a year, and had no notion why. The practice was making a lousy Communist of him. In fact he was no longer persuaded that blood and revolution made useful tools for altering the concepts in a person’s mind. Who said it?—probably Confucius—“I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of a man by violence.” Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.

The four dogs last night—they’d been the Four Noble Truths, dogging his lies into the darkness.

—Losing track. He returned his awareness to the movement of his breath.

Again he wondered why he’d asked Hao for money.

Hao’s face when he saw me: like the puppy I played with too roughly. The little thing came to fear me. I loved it. Ah, no—

—Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside—it was a dream.

He returned his attention to the breath.

Morning—a mist hiding the river and a cloud caught on the peaks beyond. He heard the boys stirring within, waking to the earth’s richest triumph, another day outside the grave. Groggy-eyed, everyone shuffled forth, blankets wrapped around them, to pee. “Young men, while you live,” he told them, “find out how to wake up from this nightmare.” They looked at him with sleepy faces.

A
s had become the weekly routine, on Monday night William “Skip” Sands of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency tested his energies by accompanying a patrol of the combined Philippine Army and Philippine Constabulary in a fruitless search for invisible people among dark mountain places. This time his friend Major Aguinaldo couldn’t come along, and nobody else had any idea what to do with the American. They drove the rutted roads all night wordlessly, noisily, in a convoy of three jeeps, looking for any sign of Huk guerrillas, as was the routine, and seeing none, as was the routine, and just before dawn Sands came back to the staff house to find the lights dead and the air conditioners silent. For the third time this week the local power had failed. He opened his bedroom to the jungle and sweltered in his bedclothes.

Four hours later the window unit came to life, and he woke quickly and completely in sheets damp from sweat. He’d overslept, had probably missed breakfast and would have to omit his morning calisthenics. He showered quickly, dressed himself in khaki pants and a native box-cut shirt, a gauzy dress item called a barong tagalog, a gift from his Filipino friend Major Aguinaldo.

Downstairs he found a place set for him at the otherwise bare mahogany dining table. The ice had melted in his water glass. Beside it lay the morning’s newspapers, which were actually yesterday’s, delivered in a courier pouch from Manila. The houseboy Sebastian came out of the kitchen and said, “Good morning, Skeep. The barber is coming.”

“When?”

“He’s coming now.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in the kitchen. You want breakfast first? You want egg?”

“Just coffee, please.”

“You want bacon and egg?”

“Can you stand it if I just have coffee?”

“What kind of egg? Over easy.”

“Bring it on, bring it on.”

He sat at the table before a wide window that looked onto the insane spectacle of a two-hole golf course surrounded by overripe jungle. This tiny resort—a residence, servants’ quarters, a shed, and a workshop—had been built to serve vacationing staff of the Del Monte Corporation. Sands hadn’t yet met anybody from Del Monte and by now no longer expected to. Only two other men appeared to be staying here, one an English specialist on mosquitoes and the other a German whom Sands suspected of being a more sinister kind of specialist, perhaps a sniper.

Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Tiny eggs. The bacon was always tasty. Rice, no potatoes. A soft bread roll, no toast. Filipinos moved around the place in white uniforms, with mops and cloths, keeping the grime and mildew at bay. A young man wearing only black boxer shorts skated past the archway to the main room on the downturned halves of a coconut husk, polishing the wooden floor.

Sands read the front page of the Manila
Times
. A gangster named Boy Golden had been slain in the living room of his apartment. Sands studied the photo of Boy Golden’s corpse, in a bathrobe, limbs flung crazily and the tongue lolling from between the jaws.

The barber appeared, an old man toting a wooden box, and Skip said, “Let’s go out back.” They stepped through French doors onto the patio.

The day was clear and looked harmless. Still he feared the sky. Rain six weeks straight, from the moment of his arrival in Manila in mid-June, and then one day it just shuts off. This was his first trip beyond the borders of America. He’d never resided outside of Kansas until he’d taken himself and a red-orange suitcase on the bus to Bloomington, Indiana, for the university; but several times as a child and once again in his teens he’d visited Boston to stay with his father’s side of the family, boarding almost a whole summer the last time among a gauntlet of relations, an Irish horde of big cops and veteran soldiers like mastiff guard dogs, and their worried poodle wives. They’d overwhelmed him with their unselfconscious vulgarity and loud gregariousness, embraced him, loved him, uncovered themselves as the family he’d never found among his mother’s midwestern group, who treated one another like acquaintances. He had scant memory of his father, a casualty of Pearl Harbor. His Boston Irish uncles had shown Skip who to become, had marked out the shape he’d fill someday as a grown man. He didn’t think he was filling it. It only set off how small he was.

Now from these Filipinos he felt the same warmth and welcome, from these charming miniature Irishmen. He’d just begun his eighth week in the Philippines. He liked the people, he hated the climate. It was the start of his fifth year serving the United States as a member of its Central Intelligence Agency. He considered both the Agency and his country to be glorious.

“I just want you to cut the sides,” he told the old man. Under the influence of the late President Kennedy he’d begun to let his crew cut grow out, and also just recently—under the influence, maybe, of the region’s Spanish vestiges—he’d started a mustache.

As the old man clipped at his head Sands consulted a second oracle, the Manila
Enquirer
: the biggest front-page article announced itself as the first of a series devoted to reports by Filipino pilgrims of startling miracles, including asthma cures, a wooden cross that turned to gold, a stone cross that moved, a plaster icon who wept, another icon who bled.

The barber held an eight-by-five-inch mirror before his face. It was good he didn’t have to show this head around the capital. The mustache existed only as a hope and the hair had reached a middle state, too long to go unnoticed, too short to be controlled. How many years had he kept his crew cut?—eight, nine—since the morning of his interview with the Agency recruiters who’d come to the campus in Bloomington. Both men had worn business suits and crew cuts, as he’d observed the previous afternoon, spying on their arrival at the faculty guest residence—the arrival of the crew-cut recruiters from Central Intelligence. He’d liked the word Central.

He felt, here, a day’s drive from Manila on terrible roads, central to nothing. Reading superstitious newspapers. Staring at the vines on the stucco walls, the streaks of mildew on the walls, the lizards on the walls, the pimples of mud on the walls.

From his perch here on the patio Sands detected tension in the air, some sort of suppressed quarrel among the workers—he didn’t like to think of them as “servants”—of the house. It pricked his curiosity. But having been raised in the American heartland he was dedicated to steering clear of personal controversy, to ignoring scowls, honoring evasiveness, fending off voices raised in other rooms.

Sebastian came out onto the patio looking quite nervous and said, “Somebody here to see you.”

“Who is it?”

“They will say. Let me not say.”

But twenty minutes went by, and nobody came out to see him.

Sands finished his haircut, went into the cool parlor room with its polished wooden floor. Empty. And nobody in the dining area other than Sebastian, setting the table for lunch. “Was somebody here to see me?”

“Somebody? No…I think nobody.”

“Didn’t you say I had a visitor?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Great, thanks, keep me guessing.”

He took himself to a rattan chair on the patio. Here he could either read the news or watch the English entomologist, a man named Anders Pitchfork, chip a golf ball with a three-iron back and forth between the two full-sized greens of the very undersized golf course. Its two or so acres of lawn were minutely tended and biologically uniform, circled by high chain-link with which the surrounding plant life grappled darkly and inexorably. Pitchfork, a graying Londoner in Bermuda shorts and a yellow Ban-lon shirt, an expert on anopheles mosquitoes, spent his mornings here on the course until the sun cleared the building’s roof and drove him away to do his job, which was to eradicate malaria.

Sands could see, down the colonnade, the German visitor taking breakfast in his pajamas on the private patio outside his room. The German had come to this region to kill someone—Sands believed this having spoken to him only twice. The section chief had accompanied him from Manila and, though the chief’s visit had been ostensibly about squaring Sands away, he’d spent all his time with the German and had instructed Sands to “stay available and leave him alone.”

As for Pitchfork, the malaria man with the unforgettable name—just gathering information. Possibly running agents, of sorts, in the villages.

Sands liked to guess everybody’s occupation. People came and went on murky errands. In Britain this place might have been called a “safe house.” In the U.S., however, in Virginia, Sands had been trained to consider no house safe. To find no island anywhere in the sea. The colonel, his closest trainer, had made sure each of his recruits memorized “The Lee Shore” from Melville’s
Moby-Dick
:

Pitchfork placed his ball on a tee, selected a big-headed wood from the golf bag lying by the green, and drove one over the fence and deep into the vegetation.

Meanwhile, according to the
Enquirer
, pirates had seized an oil tanker in the Sulu Sea, killing two crewmen. In Cebu City, a mayoral candidate and one of his supporters had been shot full of holes by the candidate’s own brother. The killer supported his brother’s opponent—their father. And the governor of Camiguin Province had been shot down by, the paper said, “an amok,” who also killed two others “after becoming berserk.”

And now the German practiced against a rubber tree with a blowgun: of other than primitive manufacture, Sands guessed, as it broke down neatly into three sections. Assembled, it ran better than five feet in length, and the darts looked seven or eight inches long—white, tapered; like overlong golf tees, as a matter of fact. The German sent them deftly into his target’s hide, pausing often to mop at his face with a hankie.

Skip had an appointment down in the village with his friend, Philippine Army Major Eddie Aguinaldo.

Skip and the German assassin, who may not have been an assassin, or even a German, rode together halfway down the mountain to the market. They took the air-conditioned staff car, gazing out the closed windows of the backseat at the thatched homes of warped, rough-cut lumber, at tethered goats, wandering chickens, staggering dogs. As they passed the grannies who squatted on the dusty stoops, spitting red betel nut, squads of tiny children detached themselves from the old crones and ran alongside the car.