Tree of smoke by Denis Johnson Page A

again.
    They came down the other side of the mountain onto a wide, level trail beaten smooth by carabao hooves. Gradually the way narrowed until Carignan had to draw his arms to his chest in order to keep from being savaged by thorns on either side. Saliling led the march, the tip of his spear scraping the leaves overhead and knocking last night’s rain into Carignan’s face. The two others crouched behind the priest. Suddenly Saliling left the trail and lunged into a sea of elephant grass through which, somewhere in the region of their feet, traveled a six-inch-wide path. Now they had the sun bearing down from overhead and yet, beneath their progress, a thick red mud that seemed alive, clinging to Carignan’s shoes, building up on the soles, clambering up over the sides, engulfing him up to the ankles. In their bare feet the others ambled over it easily, while Carignan struggled along among them with his tennis shoes encased in red cakes as heavy as concrete. He took off his Keds lest they be stolen by the stuff, and joined them by the laces and dangled them from his fist.
    As they left the mesa and descended toward a creek deep in a ravine, Carignan despairing of yet another descent, yet another climb, there came a faint crackling from somewhere behind the next peak, and they fell under the shadow of a mass of smoke in the sky ahead of them, a black column rising straight upward in the windless day. There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke—from Joel, wasn’t it? Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated “pillars of smoke,” but the original Hebrew said “palm trees of smoke.”
    As they crossed the creek at the pit of the ravine Carignan tried to clean his shoes. The mud didn’t dissolve in water, he had to scrape and rub at it with his fingers. The water looked clear. He wondered if it was potable. Somewhere along its length every creek in the region had a clan or village irrigating from it, sewage going in, animals bathing. He had a desperate thirst, his whole being pounded with it, but the men didn’t drink, so he didn’t drink. He pulled his wet shoes onto his bare feet. Now they made directly toward the black monolith of fumes.
    They crested the rise and picked along down a path both muddy and rocky toward a barangay of several huts, all burning, nearly gone, down to their boards, and the boards still black and smoking. Saliling cupped his hand beside his mouth and hooted. An answer came. Around the side of an abutment they found an old man dressed in a burlap G-string. Carignan sat on a patch of coarse grass and waved the smoke away from his eyes while Saliling and his nephew spoke to the villager. “He say the Tad-tad came to destroy,” Robertson told the priest. “But everybody escaped. He is too old to escape. They shot him in the hand, and he is hiding.” The Tad-tad were a Christian sect. Their name meant “chop-chop.”
    Of the inhabitants here nobody was left now but this old man with a bullet hole in his hand, which he’d wrapped in a poultice of leaves and flies’ eggs. “Even if they have a bad wound, they never cut off their limbs in this clan,” Robertson explained. “It isn’t necessary, their wounds never infect, because they allow the eggs to hatch and eat of the rot of their flesh.”
    “Ah. Aha,” Carignan said.
    “It is a good way. But sometimes it makes him sick, and he dies.”
    The old man seemed immensely so, with a shrunken monkey’s face and leathery flesh that drooped from his bones at the joints. Toward the back of his mouth he had two or three teeth which he used, at this moment, to gnaw at a mango with intense concentration. He answered Saliling’s questions gruffly, but when he was done with the fruit he tossed away the pit and showed Carignan his anting-anting, a bracelet of hollow seeds around his waist. Its magic, he explained, guaranteed him a peaceful