Tree of Smoke (8 page)

“I’m joking about the rank. But not about the birthday. Pitchfork: Can you remember where you were on your birthday twenty-four years ago?”

Pitchfork said, “Exactly twenty-four years ago I was swinging under a parachute on a very dark night, dropping into China. I didn’t even know the name of the province. And who was flying that plane I’d just jumped out of? Who was it gave me a half dozen candy bars and kicked me out into the sky? And headed back to a comfy bunk!”

“And who never made it because the bastards shot me down? And who was it you gave a hard-boiled egg in a POW camp twenty days later?”

Pitchfork pointed at the colonel. “Not because I’m generous. Because it was the poor feller’s birthday.”

Eddie’s mouth was open. “You survived the Jap camp?”

The colonel shoved his chair back and wiped at his face with his napkin. He perspired, he blinked. “Having been a dishonored guest of the Japanese…how to put it…I know what it means to be a prisoner. Let me rephrase that—let me rephrase that—give me a minute and let me rephrase that…” He stared dully from under, at Skip in particular, while Skip developed the uncomfortable notion that the colonel had forgotten himself and would now deliriously change the subject.

“The Japanese,” Sands prompted him, lacking the strength not to.

The colonel sat shoved away from his dinner, his knees splayed, his right hand gripping his drink and set on his thigh, his back absolutely straight, and the sweat charging down his crimson face. This is a great man, Sands announced to himself. Distinctly but silently he said it: A person of tortured greatness. At such a moment he couldn’t help dramatizing because it was all too wonderful.

“They were short on cigars,” the colonel said. His rigid forbearing demeanor inspired awe, but not necessarily confidence. He was drunk, after all. And so sweaty they might have been viewing him through broken glass. But a warrior.

Sands found himself speaking inwardly again: Wherever this journey takes us, I will follow.

Pitchfork said, “In that war, I knew precisely who to hate.
We
were the guerrillas.
We
were the Huks. And that’s who we need to be to beat the bastards in Vietnam. Lansdale proves it, if you ask me. We need to be the guerrillas.”

“I’ll tell you who I think we need to be,” the colonel said. “I’ll tell you what Ed Lansdale’s learned to become: aswang. That’s what Ed Lansdale is. Aswang. Yes. I’m going to take two breaths, get sober, and tell you.” He did draw a breath, but cut it short to tell Pitchfork, “No, no—don’t go hollering hear, hear.”

Eddie shouted. “Hear, hear!”

“All right, this is my aswang story: In the hills there above Angeles, up there above Clark Air Base, Lansdale had the Filipino commandos he worked with kidnap two Huk guerrillas right off one of their patrols, took the two boys at the tail end of the group. Strangled them, strung them up by the legs, drained the blood out of each one”—the colonel put two fingers to his own neck—“through two punctures in the jugular. Left the corpses on the path for the comrades to find the next day. Which they did…And the day after that, the Huks cleared out of there entirely.”

“Hear, hear!” said Pitchfork.

“Now. Just let’s consider for a minute,” the colonel suggested. “Didn’t these Huks live in the shadow of death anyhow? Lansdale and his strike force were killing them off in small engagements at the rate of half a dozen per month, let’s say. If the threat of their daily pursuers couldn’t impress them, what was it about the death of these two boys that ran them out of Angeles?”

“Well, it’s superstitious fear. Fear of the unknown,” Eddie said.

“Unknown what? I say we look at it in terms we can utilize,” the colonel said. “I say they found themselves engaged at the level of myth. War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow’s gods too. And his devils, his aswang. He’s more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.”

“I think that’s your cue to say, ‘Hear, hear!’” Eddie said to Pitchfork. But Pitchfork only finished his wine.

“Colonel, did you just come from Saigon?” Eddie asked.

“Nope. Mindanao. I was down in Davao City. And Zamboanga. And over by this place Damulog, little jungle town—you’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“A couple of times, yes. To Mindanao.”

“Damulog?”

“No. It doesn’t sound familiar.”

“I’m surprised to hear that,” the colonel said.

Eddie said, “Why would you be surprised?”

“When it comes to certain aspects of Mindanao, I was told you were the man to talk to.”

Eddie said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

The colonel swiped at Skip’s face with his napkin—“What’s this?”

Eddie said, “Ah! The first to mention the mustache! Yes, he’s turning himself into Wyatt Earp.” Eddie himself sported one, the young Filipino’s kind, widely spaced black hairs sketching where a mustache might go were one possible.

“A man with a mustache has to have some special talent,” the colonel said, “a special skill, something to exonerate his vanity. Archery, card tricks, what—”

“Palindromes,” said Anders Pitchfork.

Sebastian appeared, with an announcement: “Ice cream for dessert. We must eat it all, or it’s melting without any power.”

“We?” The colonel said.

“Perhaps if you don’t finish, we will have to finish in the kitchen.”

“No dessert for me. I’m feeding my vices,” the colonel said.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Eddie said. “For a minute I forgot what is a palindrome. Palindromes! Yes!”

The lights came on, the air conditioners labored to life here and there in the building. “Eat that ice cream anyway,” the colonel told Sebastian.

Following dinner they adjourned to the patio for brandy and cigars and listened to the electronic bug-destroyer and talked about the thing they’d avoided talking about all through dinner, the thing everybody talked about eventually, every day.

“My God, I tell you,” Eddie said, “in Manila we got the news around three in the morning. By dawn everybody knew. Not even by radio, but from heart to heart. Filipinos poured into the streets of Manila and wept.”

The colonel said, “Our
President
. The President of the United
States
. It’s bad stuff. It’s just bad stuff.”

“They wept as for a great saint.”

“He was a beautiful man,” the colonel said. “That’s why we killed him.”

“We?”

“The dividing line between light and dark goes through the center of every heart. Every soul. There isn’t one of us who isn’t guilty of his death.”

“This is sounding—” Skip didn’t want to say it. Religious. But he said it. “This is sounding religious.”

The colonel said, “I’m religious about my cigars. Otherwise…religion? No. It’s more than religion. It’s the goddamn truth. Whatever’s good, whatever’s beautiful, we pounce, and whap! See those poor critters?” He pointed at the wires of the bug-killing device, where insects crashed and flared briefly. “The Buddhists would never waste electricity like that. Do you know what ‘karma’ is?”

“Now you’re getting religious again.”

“By God, I am. I’m saying it’s all inside us, the whole war. It
is
religion, isn’t it?”

“What war are you talking about? The Cold War?”

“This isn’t a Cold War, Skip. It’s World War Three.” The colonel paused to shape his cigar’s ember on the bottom of his shoe. Eddie and Pitchfork said nothing, only stared at the darkness—drunk, or exhausted by the colonel’s intensity, Skip couldn’t guess which—while the colonel, predictably, had surfaced clear-eyed from the cloud he’d seemed lost in earlier. But Skip was family; he had to show himself equal to this. To what? To scaling that social Mount Everest: an evening of dinner and drinks with Colonel Francis X. Sands. In preparation for the ascent, he took himself to the sideboard.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m just pouring myself a brandy. If it’s World War Three, I’d better have some of the good stuff.”

“We’re in a worldwide war, have been for close to twenty years. I don’t think Korea sufficiently demonstrated that for us, or anyway our vision wasn’t equal to the evidence. But since the Hungarian uprising, we’ve been willing to grapple with the realities of it. It’s a covert World War Three. It’s Armageddon by proxy. It’s a contest between good and evil, and its true ground is the heart of every human. I’m going to transgress outside the line a little bit now. I’m going to tell you, Skip: sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the goddamn Alamo. This is a fallen world. Every time we turn around there’s somebody else going Red.”

“But it’s not just a contest between good and evil,” Skip said. “It’s between nuts and not nuts. All we have to do is hang on until Communism collapses under the weight of its own economic silliness. The weight of its own insanity.”

“The Commies may be out of their minds,” the colonel said, “but they aren’t irrational. They believe in central command and in the unthinkable sacrifice. I’m afraid,” the colonel said, and swallowed from his snifter; the hesitation made it seem the end of his statement: that he was afraid…He cleared his throat and said, “I’m afraid it makes the Communists uncontainable.”

This kind of talk embarrassed Sands. It had no credit with him. He’d found joy and seen the truth here in a jungle where the sacrifices had bled away the false faith and the center of command had rotted, where Communism had died. They’d wiped out the Huks here on Luzon, and eventually they’d wipe out every one of them, all the Communists on earth. “Remember the missiles in Cuba? Kennedy stood up to them. The United States of America stood up to the Soviets and backed them down.”

“At the Bay of Pigs he turned tail and left a lot of good men dying in the dirt—No, no, no, don’t get me wrong, Skip. I’m a Kennedy man, and I’m a patriot. I believe in liberty and justice for all. I’m not sophisticated enough to be ashamed of that. But that doesn’t mean I look at my country through some kind of rosy fog. I’m in Intelligence. I’m after the truth.”

Pitchfork spoke from the dark: “I knew a lot of good Chinese in Burma. We laid down our lives for each other. Some of those same folks are now good Communists. I look forward to seeing them shot.”

“Anders, are you sober?”

“Slightly.”

“God,” Skip said, “I wish he hadn’t died! How did it happen? Where do we go from here? And when do we get through one day where we don’t say these things over and over?”

“I don’t know if you know it, Skip, but there’s an element on the Hill thinks we did this. Us. Our bunch. In particular, the good friends of Cuba have come under scrutiny, the folks who ran the Bay of Pigs. Then we have the investigation, the commission, Earl Warren and Russell and the others—Dulles was on it, working to keep any suspicion away. Worked very hard at it. Made us look guilty as hell.”

Eddie lurched upright. His face was a shadow, but he seemed unwell. “I can’t think of one single palindrome,” he announced. “I’ll take my leave.”

“You’re feeling all right?”

“I need to drive the roads with some air in my lungs.”

“Give him air,” the colonel said.

“I’ll walk you to the car”—but Skip felt the colonel’s hand on his arm.

“Not at all,” Eddie said, and soon they heard his Mercedes start up on the other side of the house.

Silence. Night. Not silence—the dark screeching insect conflagration of the jungle.

“Well,” the colonel said, “I didn’t think I’d get anything out of old Eddie. I don’t know what they’re up to. And why does he say he worked extensively with Ed Lansdale? He wasn’t out of short-pants around Lansdale’s time. In ’52 he must’ve been a tiny babe.”

“Oh, well,” Sands said, thinking that when passion stirred Major Eddie’s heart, he tended to speak in a kind of poetry—you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying.

“How have you been keeping yourself busy?”

“Riding around at night with Aguinaldo. And familiarizing myself with the card catalog, as instructed. In the horrible manner instructed. Clipping and gluing.”

“All right. Very good, sir. Any questions?”

“Yeah: Why do the files make no reference to this region whatsoever?”

“Because they weren’t compiled here. Obviously they’re from Saigon. And its environs. And a bunch from Mindanao, which I inherited. Yes, I am the section officer for Mindanao, which has no section. Anything you need?”

“I’m stacking the duplicates back in the boxes after I get them down to size. I’ll need more of those drawers.”

The colonel grabbed the seat of his chair between his legs and drew himself close to Skip. “Just use the cardboard boxes, okay? We’re going to ship them out soon.” Again he seemed taken by drink, his gaze was vague, and probably, if it could be seen, his nose was red, a reaction to liquor featured by all the men on his side of the family; but he was brisk and certain in his speech. “Other questions?”

“Who is this German? If that’s what he is.”

“The German? He’s Eddie’s man.”

“Eddie’s man? We had lunch with him today and Eddie didn’t seem to know him at all.”

“Well, if he’s not Eddie’s man I don’t know whose man he could possibly be. But he ain’t mine.”

“Eddie said you’d met with him.”

“Eddie Aguinaldo,” the colonel said, “is the Filipino equivalent of a goddamn liar. Any other questions?”

“Yeah: Anders, what are these little dabs of mud on the walls?”

“Beg pardon?”

“These little pocks of mud? Do they have something do with insects? Aren’t you an entomologist?”

Pitchfork, waking from his nap, took a meditative taste of his brandy. “I’m more about mosquitoes in particular.”

“The deadlier pests,” the colonel said.

“I’m rather more about draining swamps,” Pitchfork said.

“Anders has been giving me a very good report on you. Positively bragging on you,” the colonel said.