Tree of Smoke

1963

Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subie Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder.

Now it was late in the morning, and Seaman Apprentice William Houston, Jr., began feeling sober again as he stalked the jungle of Grande Island carrying a borrowed.22-caliber rifle. There were supposed to be some wild boars roaming this island military resort, which was all he had seen so far of the Philippines. He didn’t know how he felt about this country. He just wanted to do some hunting in the jungle. There were supposed to be some wild boars around here.

He stepped carefully, thinking about snakes and trying to be quiet because he wanted to hear any boars before they charged him. He was aware that he was terrifically on edge. From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as the cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if he stopped dead and listened a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears. If he stayed motionless only another couple of seconds, the bugs found him and whined around his head.

He propped the rifle against a stunted banana plant and removed his headband and wrung it out and wiped his face and stood there awhile, waving away the mosquitoes with the cloth and itching his crotch absentmindedly. Nearby, a seagull seemed to be carrying on an argument with itself, a series of protesting squeaks interrupted by contradictory lower-pitched cries that sounded like, Huh! Huh! Huh! And something moving from one tree to another caught Seaman Houston’s eye.

He kept his vision on the spot where he’d seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. It moved again. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree’s trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Seaman Houston took the monkey’s meager back under the rifle’s sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.

The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.

Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey’s fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it. It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon. The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

s”J esu

Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two.Christ!” he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition. He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like someone following the progress of some kind of conversation, some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle—the morning—the moment—was having with itself. Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. “Hey,” Houston said, but the monkey didn’t seem to hear.

As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.

When he got back to the club down near the water, Houston saw that a school of violet-tinted jellyfish had washed up on the gray beach, hundreds of them, each about the size of a person’s hand, translucent and shriveling under the sun. The island’s small harbor lay empty. No boats ever came here other than the ferry from the naval base across Subie Bay.

Only a few yards off, a couple of bamboo cabins fronted the strip of sand beneath palatial trees dribbling small purple blooms onto their roofs. From inside one of the cabins came the cries of a couple making love, a whore, Seaman Houston assumed, and some sailor. Houston squatted in the shade and listened until he heard them giggling no more, breathing no more, and a lizard in the cabin’s eaves began to call—a brief annunciatory warble and then a series of harsh, staccato chuckles— gek-ko; gek-ko; gek-ko …

After a while the man came out, a crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth, and stood there splayfooted, holding the towel together at his hip with one hand, staring at some close but invisible thing, and swaying. An officer, probably. He took his cigarette between his thumb and finger and drew on it and let out a fog around his face. “Another mission accomplished.”

The neighboring cabin’s front door opened and a Filipina, naked, hand over her groin, said, “He don’t like to do it.”

The officer shouted, “Hey, Lucky.”

A small Asian man came to the door, fully dressed in military fatigues. “You didn’t give her a jolly old time?”

The man said, “It could be bad luck.” “Karma,” the officer said. “It could be,” the little fellow said. To Houston the officer said, “You looking for a beer?” Houston had meant to be off. Now he realized that he’d forgotten to

leave and that the man was talking to him. With his free hand the man tossed his smoke and snaked aside the drape of the towel. To Houston he said—as he loosed almost straight downward a stream that foamed on the earth, destroying his cigarette butt—”You see something worth looking at, you let me know.”

Feeling a fool, Houston went into the club. Inside, two young Filipinas in bright flowered dresses were playing pinball and talking so fast, while the large fans whirled above them, that Seaman Houston felt his equilibrium give. Sam, one of the marines, stood behind the bar. “Shut up, shut up,” he said. He lifted his hand, in which he happened to be holding a spatula.

“What’d I say?” Houston asked. “Excuse.” Sam tilted his head toward the radio, concentrating on its

sound like a blind man. “They caught the guy.” “They said that before breakfast. We knew that.” “There’s more about him.” “Okay,” Houston said. He drank some ice water and listened to the radio, but he suffered

such a headache right now he couldn’t make out any of the words. After a while the officer came in wearing a gigantic Hawaiian-print shirt, accompanied by the young Asian. “Colonel, they caught him,” Sam told the officer. “His name is Oswald.” The colonel said, “What kind of name is that?”—apparently as out

raged by the killer’s name as by his atrocity. “Fucking sonofabitch,” Sam said. “The sonofabitch,” said the colonel. “I hope they shoot his balls off. I

hope they shoot him up the ass.” Wiping at his tears without embarrassment he said, “Is Oswald his first name or his last name?” Houston told himself that first he’d seen this officer pissing on the ground, and how he was watching him cry.

To the young Asian, Sam said, “Sir, we’re hospitable as hell. But gen

erally Philippine military aren’t served here.” “Lucky’s from Vietnam,” the colonel said. “Vietnam. You lost?” “No, not lost,” the man said. “This guy,” the colonel said, “is already a jet pilot. He’s a South Viet

Nam Air Force captain.”

Sam asked the young captain, “Well, is it a war over there, or what? War?—budda-budda-budda.” He made his two hands into a submachine gun, jerking them in unison. “Yes? No?”

The captain turned from the American, formed the phrases in his mind, practiced them, turned back, and said, “I don’t know it’s war. A lot people are dead.”

“That’ll do,” the colonel agreed. “That counts.” “What you doing here?” “I’m here for helicopters training,” the captain said. “You don’t look hardly old enough for a tricycle,” Sam said. “How old

are you?” “Twenty-two years.” “I’m getting this little Slope his beer. You like San Miguel? You mind

that I called you a Slope? It’s a bad habit.” “Call him Lucky,” the colonel said. “The man’s buying, Lucky. What’s your poison?” The boy frowned and deliberated inside himself mysteriously and

said, “I like Lucky Lager.” “And what kind of cigarettes you smoke?” the colonel asked. “I like the Lucky Strike,” he said, and everybody laughed. Suddenly Sam looked at young Seaman Houston as if just recogniz

ing him and said, “Where’s my rifle?” For a heartbeat Houston had no idea what he might be talking about.

Then he said, “Shit.” “Where is it?” Sam didn’t seem terribly interested —just curious. “Shit,” Seaman Houston said. “I’ll get it.” He had to go back into the jungle. It was just as hot, and just as

damp. All the same animals were making the same noises, and the situation was just as terrible, he was far from the places of his memory, and the navy still had him for two more years, and the President, the President of his country, was still dead—but the monkey was gone. Sam’s rifle lay in the brush just as he’d left it, and the monkey was nowhere. Something had carried it off.

He had expected to be made to see it again; so he was relieved to be walking back to the club without having to look at what he’d done. Yet he understood, without much alarm or unease, that he wouldn’t be spared this sight forever.

Seaman Houston was promoted once, and then demoted. He glimpsed some of Southeast Asia’s great capitals, walked through muggy nights in which streetside lanterns shook in the stale breezes, but he never landed long enough to lose his sea legs, only long enough to get confused, to see the faces flickering and hear the suffering laughter. When his tour was up he enlisted for another, enchanted above all by the power to create his destiny just by signing his name.

Houston had two younger brothers. The nearest to him in age, James, enlisted in the infantry and was sent to Vietnam, and one night just before the finish of his second tour in the navy, Houston took a train from the naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, to the city of Yokohama, where he and James had arranged to meet at the Peanut Bar. It was 1967, more than three years after the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In the train car Houston felt gigantic, looking over the heads of pitch-black hair. The little Japanese passengers stared at him without mirth, without pity, without shame, until he felt as if his throat were being twisted. He got off, and kept himself on a straight path through the late drizzle by following wet streetcar tracks to the Peanut Bar. He looked forward to saying something in English.

The Peanut Bar was large and crowded with sailors and with scrubbed-looking boy merchant marines, and the voices were thick in his head, the smoke thick in his lungs.

He found James near the stage and went over to him, holding his hand out for a shake. “I’m leaving Yokosuka, man! I’m back on a ship!” was the first thing he said.

The band drowned out his greeting—a quartet of Japanese Beatles imitators in blinding white outfits, with fringe. James, in civvies, sat at a

little table staring at them, unaware of anything but this spectacle, and Bill fired a peanut at his open mouth. James indicated the performers. “That’s gotta be ridiculous.” He had

to shout to make himself even faintly audible. “What can I say? This ain’t Phoenix.” “Almost as ridiculous as you in a sailor suit.” “They let me out two years ago, and I re-upped. I don’t know—I just

did it.” “Were you loaded?” “I was pretty loaded, yeah.” Bill Houston was amazed to find his brother no longer a little boy.

James wore a flattop haircut that made his jaw look wide and strong, and he sat up straight, no fidgeting around. Even in civilian dress he looked like a soldier.

They ordered beer by the pitcher and agreed that except for a few strange things, like the Peanut Bar, they both liked Japan—though James had spent, so far, six hours in the country between flights, and in the morning would board another plane for Vietnam—or at any rate, they both approved of the Japanese. “I’m here to tell you,” Bill said when the band went on break and their voices could be heard, “these Japs have got it all plumb, level, and square. Meanwhile, in the tropics, man, nothing but shit. Everybody’s brain is boiled fat mush.”

“That’s what they tell me. I guess I’ll find out.” “What about the fighting?” “What about it?” “What do they say?” “Mostly they say you’re just shooting at trees, and the trees are shoot

ing back.” “But really. Is it pretty bad?” “I guess I’ll find out.” “Are you scared?” “During training, I seen a guy shoot another guy by accident.” “Yeah?” “In the ass, if you can believe it. It was just an accident.” Bill Houston said, “I saw a guy murder a guy in Honolulu.” “What, in a fight?”

“Well, this sonofabitch owed this other sonofabitch money.” “What was it, in a bar?” “No. Not in a bar. The guy went around back of his apartment build

ing and called him to the window. We were walking past the place and he says, ‘Hang on, I gotta talk to this guy about a debt/ They talked one minute and then the guy I was with—he shot the other one. Put his gun right against the window screen, man, and pop, one time, like that. Forty-five automatic. The guy kind of fell back inside his apartment.”

“What’d you do?”

“Just about filled my britches with poop. He turns around and sticks his gun under his shirt and, ‘Hey, let’s get some brew.’ Like the incident is erased.”

“What was your comment about all this?” “It kind of felt like I didn’t want to mention it.” “I know—like, shit, what do you say?” “You can bet I was wondering what he thought about me as a witness.

That’s why I missed the sailing. He was on our rig. If I’d shipped out with him, I’d’ve gone eight weeks without closing both eyes.”

The brothers drank from their mugs simultaneously and then sought, each in his own mind, for something to talk about. “When that guy got shot in the ass,” James said, “he went into shock immediately.”

“Shit. How old are you?” “Me?” “Yeah.” “Almost eighteen,” James said. “The army let you enlist when you’re only seventeen?” “Nope. I done lied.” “Are you scared?” “Yeah. Not every minute.” “Not every minute?” “I haven’t seen any fighting. I want to see it, the real deal, the real

shit. I just want to.”

“Crazy little fucker.” The band resumed with a number by the Kinks called “You Really Got Me”:

You really got me— You really got me— You really got me—

Before very much longer the two brothers got into an argument with each other over nothing, and Bill Houston spilled a pitcher of beer right into the lap of somebody at the next table—a Japanese girl, who hunched her shoulders and looked sad and humiliated. She sat with a girlfriend and also two American men, two youngsters who didn’t know how to react.

The beer dribbled off the table’s edge while James fumbled to right the empty pitcher, saying, “It gets like this sometimes. It just does.” The young girl made no move at all to adjust herself. She stared at her lap. “What’s wrong with us,” James asked his brother, “are we fucked up

or something? Every time we get together, something bad happens.” “I know.” “Something fucked-up.” “Fucked-up, shitty, I know. Because we’re family.” “We’re blood.” “None of that shit don’t matter to me no more.” “It must matter some,” James insisted, “or else why’d you haul your

self all this way to meet me in Yokohama?” “Yeah, ” Bill said, “in the Peanut Bar.” “The Peanut Bar!” “And why’d I miss my ship?” James said, “You missed your ship?” “I should’ve been on her at four this afternoon.” “You missed it?” “She might still be there. But I expect they’re out of the harbor by

now.” Bill Houston felt his eyes flood with tears, choked with sudden emotion at his life and this place with everybody driving on the left.

James said, “I never liked you.”

“I know. Me too.”

“Me too.”

“I always thought you were a little-dick sonofabitch,” Bill said.

“I always hated you,” his brother said.

“God, I’m sorry,” Bill Houston said to the Japanese girl. He dragged some money from his wallet and tossed it onto the wet table, a hundred yen or a thousand yen, he couldn’t see which.

“It’s my last year in the navy,” he explained to the girl. He would have thrown down more, but his wallet was empty. “I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I’m all different.”

Th e afternoon of that November day in 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Captain Nguyen Minh, the young Viet Nam Air Force pilot, dove with a mask and snorkel just off the shore of Grande Island. This was a newfound passion. The experience came close to what the birds of the air must enjoy, drifting above a landscape, propelled by the action of their own limbs, actually flying, as opposed to piloting a machine. The webbed fins strapped to his feet gave him a lot of thrust as he scooted above a vast school of parrot fish feeding on a reef, the multitude of their small beaks pattering against the coral like a shower of rain. American Navy men enjoyed scuba and skin-diving and had torn up all the coral and made the fish very timid so that the entire school disappeared in a blink when he swam near.

Minh wasn’t much of a swimmer, and without others around he could let himself feel as afraid as he actually was.

He’d passed all the previous night with the prostitute the colonel had paid for. The girl had slept on the floor and he in the bed. He hadn’t wanted her. He wasn’t sure about these Filipino people.

Then today, toward the end of the morning, they’d gone into the club to learn that the President of the United States, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been murdered. The two Filipinas were still with them, and each girl took one of the colonel’s substantial arms and held on as if keeping him moored to the earth while he brought his surprise and grief under control. They sat at a table all morning and listened to the news reports. “For God’s sake,” the colonel said. “For God’s sake.” By afternoon the colonel had cheered up and the beer was going down and down. Minh tried not to drink very much, but he wanted to be polite, and he got very dizzy. The girls disappeared, they came back, the fan went around in the ceiling. A very young naval recruit joined them and somebody asked Minh if a war was actually being waged somewhere in Vietnam.

That night the colonel wanted to switch girls, and Minh determined that he would follow through as he had last night, just to make the colonel happy and to show him that he was sincerely grateful. This second girl was the one he preferred, in any case. She was prettier to his eyes and spoke better English. But the girl asked to have the air conditioner on. He wanted it off. He couldn’t hear things with the air conditioner going. He liked the windows open. He liked the sound of insects batting against the screens. They didn’t have such screens in his family’s house on the Mekong Delta, or even in his uncle’s home in Saigon.

“What do you want?” the girl said. She was very contemptuous of

him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Take off your clothes.” They took off their clothes and lay side by side on the double bed in

the dark, and did nothing else. He could hear an American sailor a few doors down talking to one of his friends loudly, perhaps telling a story. Minh couldn’t understand a word of it, though he considered his own English pretty fair.

“The colonel has a big one.” The girl was fondling his penis. “Is he

your friend?” Minh said, “I don’t know.” “You don’t know is he your friend? Why are you with him?” “I don’t know.” “When did you know him the first time?” “Just one or two weeks.” “Who is he?” she said. Minh said, “I don’t know.” To stop her touching his groin, he clasped

her to him. “You just want body-body?” she said. “What does it mean?” he said. “Just body-body,” she said. She got up and shut the window. She felt the air conditioner with the palm of her hand, but didn’t touch its dials.

“Gimme a cigarette,” she said. “No. I don’t have any cigarette,” he said. She threw her dress on over her head, slipped her feet into her san

dals. She wore no underclothes. “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “What does it mean?” he said. “What does it mean?” she said. “What does it mean? Gimme a cou

pla quarters. Gimme a coupla quarters.” “Is it money?” he said. “How much is it?” “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “I wanna see if he gonna sell

me some cigarette. I wanna coupla pack cigarette—a pack for me, and

one pack for my cousin. Two pack.” “The colonel can do it,” he said. “One Weenston. One Lucky Strike.” “Excuse me. It’s chilly tonight,” he said. He got up and put his

clothes on.

He stepped out front. From behind him he heard the small sounds of the young woman inside dealing with her purse, setting it on a table. She clapped and rubbed her hands and a puff of perfume drifted past him from the open window and he inhaled it. His ears rang, and tears clouded his sight. He cleared a thickness from his throat, hung his head, spat down between his feet. He missed his homeland.

When he’d first joined the air force and then been transferred to Da Nang and into officers’ training, only seventeen, he’d cried every night in his bed for several weeks. He’d been flying fighter jets for nearly three years now, since he was nineteen years old. Two months ago he’d turned twenty-two, and he could expect to continue flying missions until the one that killed him.

Later he sat on the porch in a canvas chair, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, smoking—he actually did possess a pack of Luckies—when the colonel returned from the club with his arms around both the girls. Minh’s escort had a pack in her hand and waved it happily.

“So you explored the briny deeps today.” Minh wasn’t sure what he meant. He said, “Yes.” “Ever been down there in any of those tunnels?” the colonel asked. “What is it?—tunnels.”

“Tunnels,” the colonel said. “Tunnels all under Vietnam. You been down inside those things?”

“Not yet. I don’t think so.”

“Nor have I, son,” the colonel said. “I wonder what’s down there.”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody does,” the colonel said.

“The cadres use the tunnels,” Minh said. “The Vietminh.”

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, “This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.”

Minh had noticed you could talk to the colonel for a long time without recognizing he was drunk.

He’d met the colonel only a few mornings back, out front of the helicopter maintenance yard at the Subie base, and they’d sought each other out continually ever since. The colonel had not been introduced to him—the colonel had introduced himself—and didn’t appear to be linked to him in any official way. They were housed together with dozens of other transient officers in a barracks in a compound originally constructed and then quickly abandoned, according to the colonel, by the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Minh knew the colonel was one to stick with. Minh had a custom of picking out situations, people, as good luck, bad luck. He drank Lucky Lager, he smoked Lucky Strikes. The colonel called him “Lucky.”

“John F. Kennedy was a beautiful man,” the colonel said. “That’s what killed him.”

1964

N guyen Hao arrived safely at the New Star Temple on his Japanese Honda 30 motorbike, in dress pants and a box-cut shirt, wearing sunglasses, the pomade melting in his hair. It was his sad errand to serve as his family’s only representative at the funeral service for his wife’s nephew. Hao’s wife was down with chills. The boy’s parents were deceased, and the boy’s only brother was flying missions for the air force.

Hao looked back to where he’d dropped off a friend from his youth named Trung Than, whom everybody had always called the Monk and who’d gone north when the country had been partitioned. Hao hadn’t seen the Monk for a decade, not until this afternoon, and now he was gone: he’d hopped backward off the bike, removed his sandals, and padded off barefoot down the path.

Hao made sure to take the motorbike slowly over anything looking like a puddle, and when he reached the rice paddies he walked the machine most carefully along the dikes. He had to keep his clothes clean; he’d be overnighting here, probably in the schoolroom adjacent to the temple. The village wasn’t far from Saigon, and in better times he might have motored back in the dusk, but the critical areas had expanded such that nowadays after three in the afternoon the back roads over to Route Twenty-two would be hazardous.

He set his straw bedroll on the earthen floor just inside the schoolroom’s doorway, so as to be able to find his bed later in the night.

No life showed itself among the string of huts other than foraging chickens and stationary old women visible in the doorways. He pulled aside the wooden lid of the concrete well and lowered the bucket and drew himself a drink and a wash from out of the dark. The well was deep, drilled by a machine. The water came clear and cool into his hand and onto his face.

No sound from the temple. The master probably napped. Hao rolled his motorbike into the interior—rough lumber, with a roof of ceramic shingles and a dirt floor, about fifteen by fifteen meters, not much bigger in area than the downstairs of Hao’s own house in Saigon. Rather than disturb the master, he turned and went out even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness, but already the must of the floor and the aroma of joss sticks had wakened his boyhood, when he’d served here at the temple for a couple of years. He felt something tugging at him from that era, a thread connected to a sadness which was generally inert and which quickly forgot itself. So much of this had been laid over by the rest of his life.

Also he felt a confused sadness over his nephew’s preposterous death. Inconceivable. On first hearing of it Hao had assumed the boy had perished in an accidental fire. But in fact he’d burned himself alive—as had two or three elder monks in recent times. But those others had killed themselves spectacularly in the Saigon streets in order to cry out against chaos. And they were old men. Thu was only twenty, and he’d set himself afire out in the bush beyond the village in a solitary ceremony. Incomprehensible, crazy.

When Master woke he came out not in his robe, but dressed for the fields. Hao stood up and bowed his head, and the master bowed very deeply, a small man with a large rib cage and stick-limbs, his head covered with stubble —it occurred to Hao that Thu had probably been the one who’d shaved him. Poor dead Thu. “I was going to take up a hoe this afternoon,” the master said. “I’m glad you’ve stopped me.”

They sat on the porch and made a start at polite conversation, moving into the doorway while a loud rain came over. The master apparently chose to let the chatter of this downpour serve the purposes of small talk, because when it was over he spoke immediately of the death of Thu, saying it mystified him. “But it brings you back to see us. Every fist grips

calling.” “That’s not quite the way to phrase it.” “Those were the words you used.” “No. I said you must allow your doubt to become your calling, you

must permit it. I don’t suggest that you make it so, only that you let it be so. Let your doubt be your calling. Then your doubt will be invisible. You’ll inhabit it like an atmosphere.”

The master offered a bit of champooy, which Hao declined. He put the spicy dried fruit in his own mouth and sucked on it vigorously, frowning. “A certain American is coming to the service.”

“I know him,” Hao said. “Colonel Sands.” The master said nothing, and Hao felt forced to go on: “The colonel

knows my nephew Minh. They met in the Philippines.” “He told me so.” “Have you met him personally?” “He’s come several times,” the master said. “He cultivated an ac

quaintance with Thu. I think he’s a kind man. Or at least a careful man.” “He’s interested in the practice. He wants to study the breath.” “His breath smells of the meat of cattle and cigars and liquor. And

what about you? Have you continued with the breath?” Hao didn’t answer. “Have you continued your practice?” “No.” The master spat out the pit of his champooy. A skeletal puppy darted

from under the porch and gobbled it quickly, trembling, and then dematerialized. “In their dreams,” the old man said, “dogs travel back and forth between this world and the other world. In their dreams they visit the before-life, and they visit the afterlife.”

Hao said, “The Americans are going to become somewhat active here, somewhat destructive.” “How do you know?” The question was very indiscreet, yet even in

the face of Hao’s silence he persisted: “Did this American tell you?” “Thu’s brother told me.” “Minh?” “Our air force will participate.” “Will young Minh bomb his own country?” “Minh doesn’t fly a bomber.” “But will the air force destroy us?” “Minh told me to get you out of here. I can’t tell you more than that,

because it’s all I know.” Because to traffic in information any more specific than that terrified him. Would have terrified anyone. Should have terrified the master.

Hao raised another matter: “I just saw the Monk. He showed up at my house and asked me for money. Then I took him here on the back of the motorbike.”

The master only studied him with his eyes. Yes, he’d known the master must have heard from Trung. “How long

since you’ve seen him?” “Not long,” the master admitted. “How long has he been back?” “Who can say? And you? How long since you’ve seen him?” “Many years. He has a northern accent now.” Hao stopped himself

from saying more, stared at his feet. “It disturbed you to see him.” “He came to my house. He wanted money for the cause.” “For the Vietminh? They don’t take taxes in the city.” “If he asked, they must have told him to ask. It’s extortion. Then he

insisted I take him here on the motorbike.” The master said, “He knows he’s safe. He knows you won’t name him to his enemies.” “Maybe I should. If the Vietminh have their way, that means the destruction of my family business.” “And of our temple, probably. But these outsiders are destroying the

entire country.” “I can’t give money to Communists.” “Maybe I can get word to Trung that you have no money. That

you’ve spent it for something.” “For what?” “Something that puts you beyond reproach.” “Tell him, please.” “I’ll just say you’ve done all you can.” “I’m indebted.” Hao could feel tomorrow morning’s mist beginning to shape itself al

most immediately as the sun fell behind the nearest hill to the west, called Good Luck Mountain. The fortunes of the mountain had altered, however. The construction arm of the American military was making an encampment up there, most people guessed a permanent landing zone for helicopters. News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn’t like to see it poisoned.

On account of this American colonel’s possible arrival they delayed the memorial until past four in the afternoon, but the colonel didn’t come, and the risk of ambush would keep him off the roads now, and they went ahead without him. They held the service in the temple. Eight of the villagers attended, seven old men and someone’s grandchild all sitting in candlelight around the temple’s centerpiece without a corpse to look at, only a small crowd of bric-a-brac, mostly wooden Buddhas painted gold. A scintillating battery-run decoration of the type found in GI taverns topped the whole display: a disc on which changing bands of light revolved clockwise. The master was more than audible. He spoke as if he were teaching. As if nobody ever learned anything. “We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.”

The Americans arrived by last light in an open jeep. Either they had no fear of the roads, or they’d bivouacked with the American military construction group above, on Good Luck Mountain. The brawny colonel, in civilian dress as always, had the wheel, driving with a rifle jutting up between his knees, smoking a cigar, accompanied by a U.S. infantryman and also by a Vietnamese woman in a white blouse and gray skirt whom he introduced as Mrs. Van, an employee of the United States Information Service.

They’d brought a projector and a collapsible screen and intended to show a one-hour film to the people of the village.

Colonel Sands bowed to the master, and then they shook hands vigorously, in the American way. “Mr. Hao, we’re going to set up the projector in the main room, if that’s all right. Will you please tell him that?”

Hao translated and told the colonel that the master saw no obstacle. The young soldier arranged the machine, the cords, and four folding canvas chairs—”for the elders,” the colonel said—as well as a small generator which he set going a few meters beyond the temple’s wooden walls and which filled the valley with its racket and scented the whole region with its exhaust. Hao explained that he and the master had to visit a sick villager but might come to see part of the film later on. The colonel said he understood, but Hao wasn’t sure he did. And as dusk arrived, and then the darkness, and as it grew evident that nobody at all would come, Colonel Sands asked to have the show played just for himself. The movie machine, powered by the noisy generator, filled the temple with flickering illumination and a hollow booming voice and strident music. The film, Years of Lightning, Day of Thunder, recounted the brief, tragic, heroic span of President John F. Kennedy’s life. The American soldier and Mrs. Van also watched. Mrs. Van had come along to translate the narrative for the audience, but of course there was no need. The colonel had said it would go on for fifty-five minutes, and five minutes short of that, under cover of the darkness, Hao and the master crept in to join the Americans, the master sitting on his pillow at the head of the room, behind the portable screen, where he couldn’t see anything, actually, and Hao in a chair beside the young soldier. Mrs. Van, sitting behind the colonel, glanced at Hao but seemed to decide he could translate for himself. In fact he couldn’t. To fathom English speech he usually needed faces and gestures. And anyway the colonel was already talking more loudly than the recording, seated with his arms crossed over his fists, addressing himself in bitter tones to the shining spectacle as the music swelled and the view closed in on the eternal flame marking John F. Kennedy’s grave, a squat torch which the Americans intended to keep alight forever. “The eternal flame,” the colonel said. “Eternal? If you can kill the man, you can sure as hell kill his flame. The thing is this: We’re all dead in the long run. In the end we’re dirt. Let’s face it, our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. In the end some mongrel barbarian wakes up in the morning and stands with one foot on a rock and the other on the kicked-over vessel of Kennedy’s eternal flame. And that vessel is cold and dead, and that sonofabitch doesn’t even know he’s standing on it. He’s just taking a piss in the morning. When I get up in the morning and step behind the tent to break wind and void my bladder, whose grave am I pissing on?—Mr. Hao, is my English too fast? Am I getting across?”

Hao made out the colonel’s intent, and, Yes, he wanted to agree, it’s all simply water coursing into larger and then still larger seas, and only what we do in this moment can save us … His vocabulary allowed him to say, “It’s true. I think so. Yes.”

Both men were distracted now by a small rat or frog hopping boldly into the room through the front door. The colonel astonished Hao by reacting to this intrusion violently, flinging himself bodily at the small man and knocking him backward, chair and all, so that the back of Hao’s head struck the packed dirt floor and a pain burst over his sight like an explosion of freezing needles. His vision cleared as the object, for that is what it was, and not some rodent, stopped only a meter from his face, and he understood that it was probably a grenade; it was his death. Something clapped down over the grenade. The soldier had covered it with his helmet and now lowered himself, not rapidly, but with some reluctance, and covered the helmet with his body, staring at first at the dirt of the floor and then looking toward Hao’s face, only inches away, so that his eyes were readable as he curled himself around his terror. Long seconds passed in a voluminous silence.

The silence held. More long seconds. The soldier’s face did not change, and he didn’t breathe, but his soul came back into his eyes and he stared at Hao with some comprehension.

Hao became aware that the colonel lay across his chest, had thrown himself there just as the soldier had thrown himself over the helmet. He became aware of pain in his calves, his head, of the big American colonel’s weight. Hao sucked hard at the atmosphere, he was suffocating. The soldier himself exhaled the air he’d been harboring, and Hao felt the soldier’s breath bathe his face. At last the colonel placed his palms on the floor either side of Hao’s shoulders and heaved himself to his knees, and Hao was able to fill his lungs.

The colonel stood up like a very old man and bent to grip the soldier’s arm. “Nothing happening, son.” The soldier was deaf. “Get up. Get up, son. Come on, now, son. Get up.” The youngster, finding life in his body, overcame some of his shock and rolled himself over. Quickly the colonel tossed the helmet aside, scooped up the hand grenade, pitched it underhanded toward the doorway, but it struck the wall and made it only as far as the threshold, and he said, “Damn it all.” He approached it, bent and took a firm hold of it, and strode out the door and to the well. He moved the lid aside and tossed the device into the depths. Then he walked back to the building and turned off his generator.

The others followed him out, perhaps inadvisedly. Mrs. Van tended to the soldier, talking rapid English, brushing at his shirt and trousers energetically, almost hysterically, as if batting at flames. When she was done she started on Hao, swiping at the back of his shirt. “These are bad people,” she said in English. “This is what happens with these horrible people.”

The master came out of the temple. From his place behind the screen he’d witnessed almost nothing. When Hao told him about the grenade, he took two long steps backward away from the lip of the well.

The colonel said, “Look, I’m sorry. The well was the quickest place to come to mind.” Hao translated the colonel’s apology and then the master’s reply: “I

believe it’s safe.” “If that grenade goes off, it’s gonna muddy up your water.” The master said, “Later it will become calm again.” “That thing must be deep. And is it concrete?” Hao said, “Concrete construction.” “It’s top-notch.” “Top-notch?” “It’s very well made.” “Yes. It was placed by the Swiss Red Cross.” “When was this?” “I don’t know when.” The colonel said, “They heard that noisy goddamn generator, didn’t

they?” By way of an answer, Hao pursed his lips. Hao stood by politely while the visitors reloaded their gear and ra

dioed the encampment on Good Luck Mountain. “We’ll scoot on up the hill,” the colonel said. “Good. There it’s more secure,” Hao agreed. In minutes a patrol of three jeeps arrived, and many soldiers, and the

convoy roared away into the night.

Hao crept into the schoolroom and felt along the wall for a nail. He undressed and hung up his shirt and trousers, swept his straw mat with his hands, unrolled two yards of linen to cover him against the mosquitoes. The master heard him from the other side of the wall, in the temple, and called goodnight. Hao replied softly and lay back in his shorts and undershirt in the pitch-dark.

This colonel —Hao had never encountered him in a uniform. It seemed fitting. Somehow he thought of all Americans as civilians, although in his entire life he’d seen only government Americans and military Americans, and a few missionaries. Just the same, he thought of Americans as cowboys. The young soldier’s courage astounded him. Maybe it was good they’d come to Vietnam.

But even through the wall he could feel the master’s anger at himself for dealing with the colonel. The American was attractive, fascinating, but the Americans were, in the end, just another horde of puppet-masters. The curtain falls on the French, the curtain rises, now the American puppet-drama. But the time of slaves and puppets was over. A thousand years under China, then the French domination—all of it finished. Now comes freedom.

Hao spoke softly to Master. He wished him lucky dreams. He himself couldn’t sleep. His bowels smoldered with fear. What if another grenade rolled toward him out of the night? Listening for his murderers, he became aware of the oppressive life of the jungle, of the collective roar of insects, as big as any city’s at noon. A curse lay over everything. His wife was sick, his nephew was dead, the wars would never stop. He found his sandals with his feet and went out to the well and drank from the can in the dark and recollected himself. Nothing could hurt him. He’d lived, he’d known love, he’d been shown much kindness. Lucky life!

After rolling the device into the temple, Trung turned and ran behind the row of huts as quietly as he could and entered the trail. Only a few meters along, he slowed down, listening. Voices, movement. But no blast.

A minute; two minutes. If the noise had come he might not have heard it for the booming of his blood.

He stood in the narrow thoroughfare with his arms wrapped around his middle, grief wringing itself out of him. He hadn’t expected the fools to be sitting there next to the American. He hadn’t wept in years.

If I’d actually killed them, I might weep less.

This outpouring was good. The old women said, Scatter your tears, they’re good for the crops. He’d cried for lots of reasons in his youth. Not much since then.

He moved on down the path. In Saigon they’d given him only the one grenade. Well.

He’d been told to wait for the American civilian who brought the film projector. A specific target. He hadn’t asked why then they hadn’t sent a good shot, with a rifle. He guessed the American’s death was meant to seem incidental.

He had to take to the creek briefly to get around a hamlet where lived some noisy dogs. Heading downstream he reached the house of the region’s head cadre. The occupants slept. In the tiny garden behind it he squatted with his rump against a tree trunk, draped his head with a rag, and put his face down onto his knees. He rested for two hours.

He didn’t know why he’d asked his old friend Hao for funds. He hadn’t been instructed to initiate any contact. He didn’t think he should examine his motives.

Immediately after the roosters’ second crow, he woke the cadre and reported his failure. He was issued a Chinese Type 56 rifle and two banana clips, each holding thirty rounds, and told to go back to the encampment of ragtag boys by the Van Co Dong River, a “lost command” of Hoa-hao guerrillas. They’d declared themselves ready to submit to relocation and indoctrination.

“Has there been any trouble?” he asked the cadre.

“No one has harmed them. You won’t encounter any tensions.”

“All right. Keep the gun. But let me have a flashlight.”

The river ran high. Trung had to make his way to a ford well above the encampment, cross over, and hike back downstream, some five or six kilometers overall.

He hooted as he came to an outpost, a lean-to of banana leaves and bamboo, but no one answered.

The path led to a black scarred region close by the river, formerly a market square. The people here had been driven out by a plague, and later a practitioner had ordered the buildings burned in a superstitious ceremony. A small barn nearby still stood upright and now served as a barracks.

The youngsters had grouped out back of the structure to bury one of their comrades. A two-week bout of malaria, they explained, had ended in his extinction. They’d stripped him of his clothes. They sprinkled grains of rice into his open mouth, lowered the naked youth into a grave about four feet deep without any kind of casket, and covered him with damp, yellowish clots of earth.

Trung stood by watching, waving the flies away from his face. The boys gathered around the mound in silence for about a minute. Finally one spoke up. “It’s bad,” he said. “There goes one more.”

They were all young, many still in their teens. Their group had never been part of the Vietminh. They were ignorant mountain people from Ba Den who didn’t know how to bury their dead.

When they’d finished he stood with them out back of their barracks to address them, but he could only repeat what others had already said.

“We can get you medicine against malaria. It’s possible we can relocate you north, to a collective farm we call a kolkhoz, where you’ll live in peace and order. But if you want to go on fighting, we can put you to better use.

“We are centralized. We have an iron structure. We are closed into a single fist that disappears up a sleeve when it has to. Our will is unshakable. Our will is our weapon. The greatest colonialist armies can’t stand against it. We drove out the French, and we’ll drive out the Americans, and we’ll slaughter and bury their puppets. Do they claim victories? Let them. The invaders are fighting the ocean. No matter how many waves they beat down, the ocean of our resolve is always there.

“Do you want to be free? Personal liberation is national liberation. The men who led you in the beginning understood this, they learned it with the Hoa-hao, and they took you this far. Now you must come with us and go through to the end—which is the beginning we have all hoped for, the first day of our national freedom.”

It had been long enough since he’d stopped attending classes that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying.

Trung had been sent here because of the time he’d spent serving at the New Star Temple in the nearby village. It was assumed he probably knew these people. A slight mix-up. As little children, orphan boys, they’d been recruited—kidnapped—far upriver by Hoa-hao guerrillas, originally from the Mekong Delta, who’d been driven into the hills by the Vietminh. The boys’ leaders had abandoned the young recruits, or been killed. Meanwhile the village of their ancestors had vanished, dispersed by the fighting. Over a period of years the boys had worked their way farther and farther down the Van Co Dong, finding no welcome anywhere and finally stopping along this stretch well-known in the region for its particularly virulent strain of malaria, called “piss-blood.” Nobody bothered them while one by one they died.

Trung explained that his own people came from Ben Tre, but he’d spent years and years in the North. Right now, until reunification, the heart of Vietnam lay in the North. “After reunification, all of Vietnam will be our home. Millions of square kilometers of Vietnam with no partition, no relocation, no disruption of the national fabric. We will lie down at night in peace and wake up to another day of peace. And those of us who die on the way, like your friend, will find peace in the grave.”

Look at you, he thought, from your births to your deaths only exile, wandering, war.

“What will it be like on the kolkhoz farm?”

“Do you want work? There you’ll have work and freedom.”

“But we’ve been on our own a long time. We’re already free.”

“On the farm it’s a different kind of freedom.”

Yes, yes, yes, nothing but crap, what a monstrosity, he cursed himself for participating. Die here, die there, he wanted to say. Just stay away from the kolkhoz. “It’s time to take you to a group forming to head north. There’s a camp near Bau Don. It’s a long hike. We can make it in a day if we start very early tomorrow.”

“We’ve already talked about it,” one of the men told him. “There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll go north. But tonight the moon is empty. We can’t travel tomorrow. Right after the empty moon, it’s bad luck to start a journey. We just lost another one, thanks to bad luck.”

“The malaria doesn’t come from bad luck or spiteful gods. It’s caused by living creatures too small to see, as venomous as a snake, but smaller than a speck of dust. We call these creatures microbes.

“Young brothers, let this sink into your ears. We all die. Do you want to die at the hands of a microbe? The ultimate victory will be composed of many defeats. Do you want to be defeated by a microbe? The sooner we go, the better.”

They only looked at him as if they couldn’t understand him. Probably many of them couldn’t, coming from so far upriver, a region of different dialects. “We’ll think about it,” the man said.

While they talked among themselves, Trung stood aside and looked away. The same man came and touched his arm. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“If that’s your decision,” Trung said, “then good.”

The whole group had stayed up all the previous night with their sick comrade. Everyone was tired. There was nothing to do, so they dispatched a few sentries and the rest hung around the barracks. Trung sat down against the wall. He noticed flattened cigarette packs covering leaks all over the thatched ceiling. Several gaunt cats skulked around eating bits of garbage from the floor.

One of the guerrillas, a one-eyed youngster, brought in an armload of green coconuts. He pointed to his chest. “My Mosa,” he told Trung in some sort of mountain tongue. “My name” another corrected him. “My name Mosa,” he said, turning his head sideways to center Trung in his one functioning eye. He smiled: his teeth, in the way of these mountain tribes, had been filed down flat. With a machete half as large as his own leg he scalped the tops of the coconuts. They drank the milk and scraped at the floppy translucent meat with shards from the shell.

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.

1965

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 Gulden’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-Ion 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:

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

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.

“What is that? They’re saying something.”

” ‘Chez,’ ” Sands told the German.

“What is that? Did you say ‘chez’? It means? What does it mean?”

“Their parents used to ask the GIs for matches. ‘Matches! Matches!’ Now they just shout, ‘Chez, chez, chez.’ They don’t know what it means.

There aren’t any GIs around anymore, and if they want a match they say ‘posporo.’ “

But the old women grappled after the children angrily, in a way he hadn’t seen before. “What is the matter with these people?” he asked the German.

“They need a better diet. The protein is too little.” “Do you sense it? Something’s up.” “It’s too little fish high up in the mountain. The protein is too little.” “Ernest,” Skip said, leaning forward and talking to the driver, “is

something going on in the village today?” “Maybe something, I don’t know,” Ernest said. “I can ask around for you.” He came from Manila, and his English was excellent.

Major Eduardo Aguinaldo, in crisp fatigues, waited in the rear seat of a black Mercedes outside the Monte Mayon, a restaurant run by an Italian and his Filipino family. Pavese, the Italian, served whatever people would buy, which wasn’t much. For visitors Pavese made a quite delicious spaghetti Bolognese with a lot of goat’s liver in it. The major welcomed the German and insisted he call him “Eddie” and insisted he join them for lunch.

To Skip’s surprise, the German accepted. Their guest ate robustly, voluptuously. He wasn’t fat, but food seemed his passion. Skip hadn’t seen him so happy. He was a bearish, bearded character with thick brown rims for his glasses and skin that burned rather than tanned, and big soft lips that got wet when he talked.

“Let’s get some of Pavese’s espresso, because it’s full of life,”

Aguinaldo said. “Skip was up all night. He’s tired.” “Never! I’m never tired.” “Were my men good to you?” “Most respectful. Thanks.” “But you didn’t locate any Huks.” “Not unless they were hiding by the road and we never saw them.” “What about the PC boys?” “The PC?” These were the Philippine Constabulary. “The PC were

fine. They kept pretty much to themselves.”

“They don’t care for the army’s assistance. I won’t say I can blame them. It’s not a war. These Huks are only renegades. They’ve been reduced to the status of bandits.”

“Correct.” But these excursions amounted to Sands’s only strategy for gaining points and landing a reassignment to Manila or, even better, to Saigon. Above all, these jungle patrols relieved him of the uneasy feeling that he’d undergone rigorous training, swung by ropes along the faces of cliffs, parachuted into thunderclouds, sweated while following recipes for highly explosive materials, clambered over barbed wire, traversed rushing streams in the dark of night, been interrogated for hours while tied to a chair, all in order to become a clerk, nothing more than a clerk. To compile. To sort. To accomplish what any spinster librarian could accomplish. “And what did you do last night?” he asked Eddie.

“Myself? I turned in early and read James Bond.” “You’re kidding.” “Perhaps we’ll go on patrol this evening. Will you come?” Aguinaldo

asked the German. “It can be quite exhilarating.” The German was confused. “What is the purpose?” he asked Sands. “Our friend won’t be coming,” Sands told Eddie. “I’m going farther down,” the German explained. “Farther down?” “To the train.” “Oh. The station. Going to Manila,” Aguinaldo said. “A pity. Our lit

tle patrols can be bracing experiences.”—As if they came often under fire. Nothing of the kind had ever happened, as far as Skip knew. Eddie was boyish, but he liked to seem menacing.

Three weeks ago, in Manila, Sands had seen Eddie playing Henry Higgins in a production of My Fair Lady, and he couldn’t erase from his mind the picture of his friend the major overly rouged and powdered and strutting the boards in a smoking jacket; pausing; turning to a beautiful Filipino actress and saying, “Liza, where the devil are my slippers?” The audience of Filipino businessmen and their families had been swept to its feet, roaring. Sands too had been impressed.

“What is that thing you’re practicing with?” Sands asked the German. “You mean the sumpit. Yes.” “A blowgun?” “Yes. From the Moro tribe.” “Sumpit is a Tagalog word?” “I think it’s very generally used,” Eddie said. “It’s a word used everywhere in these islands,” the German agreed.

“And what’s it made of?” “The construction, you mean?” “Yes.” “Magnesium.” “Magnesium. For goodness’ sake.” “Quite sturdy. Quite weightless.” “Who forged it for you?” He’d asked just to make conversation, but was shocked to see a look

pass between Eddie and the assassin. “Some private people in Manila,” the German said, and Sands let the topic die. Following the meal they all three took espresso coffee in tiny cups.

Before coming to this remote village, Sands had never tasted it. “What’s going on today, Eddie?” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Is it some sort of—I don’t know—some sort of sad anniversary? Like

the day of some great leader’s death? Why does everybody seem so mo

rose?” “You mean tense.” “Yeah. Tensely morose.” “I believe they’ve been spooked, Skip. There’s a vampire about. A

kind of vampire called aswang.” The German said, “Vampire? You mean Dracula?” “The aswang can turn into any person, assume any shape. You see in

stantly the trouble—it means anybody can be a vampire. When a rumor like this starts, it floods a village like cold poison. One night last week— last Wednesday, around eight o’clock—I saw a throng outside the market, beating an old woman and crying, ‘Aswang! Aswang!’ “

“Beating her? An old woman?” Skip said. “Beating her with what?”

“With anything that came to hand. I couldn’t quite see. It was dark. It seemed to me she escaped around the corner. But later a storekeeper told me she changed into a parrot and flew away. The parrot bit a little baby, and the baby died in two hours. The priest cannot do anything. Even a priest is helpless.”

“These people are like demented children,” the German said.

After they’d eaten and their companion had continued in the staff car down the mountain toward the railway line for Manila, Skip said, “Do you know that guy?”

“No,” Eddie said. “Do you really think he’s German?”

“I think he’s foreign. And strange.”

“He met with the colonel, and now he’s leaving.”

“The colonel—when?”

“It’s significant that he hasn’t introduced himself.”

“Have you asked him his name?”

“No. What does he call himself?”

“I haven’t asked.”

“He never talked of paying. I’ll pay.” Eddie conferred with a plump Filipina whom Skip believed to be Mrs. Pavese, and came back saying, “Let me get fruit for tomorrow’s breakfast.” Sands said, “I understand the mango and banana are good this time of year. All the tropical fruit.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Yes, it is.” They entered the market with its low patchwork tarpaulin roof and its atmosphere of rank butchery and vegetable putrefaction. Unbelievably deformed and crippled beggars scrambled after them, dragging themselves along the hard earthen floor. Little children approached too, but the beggars, on wheeled carts, or on leg stumps socked with coconut shells, or scar-faced and blind and toothless, lashed out at the children with canes or the butt ends of severed limbs and hissed and cursed. Aguinaldo drew his sidearm and pointed it at the roiling little pack and they reared backward in one body and gave up. He dickered briskly with an old lady selling papayas, and they got back into the street.

Eddie took Sands in his Mercedes back to the Del Monte House. Nothing had, as yet, transpired between them. Sands held back from asking if their meeting had a point. Eddie went inside with him, but not before he’d opened the car’s trunk and taken out a heavy oblong package of brown paper tied with string. “I have something for you. A going-away gift.” At his urging they sat again in the backseat—upholstered in leather and covered with a white bedsheet going gray.

Eddie held the package on his knees and unwrapped an M1 carbine of the paratrooper’s type, with a folding metal stock. Its barrel’s wooden foregrip had been refinished and etched with an intricate design. He handed over the weapon to Skip.

Sands turned it in his hands. Eddie moved a penlight over the engraving. “This is remarkable, Eddie. It’s fantastic work. I’m so grateful.”

“The sling is leather.” “Yes. I can see that.” “It’s quite good.” “I’m honored and grateful.” Sands meant it sincerely. “A couple of boys at the National Bureau of Investigation had a go at

it. They’re wonderful gunsmiths.” “Remarkable. But you call it a going-away gift. Who’s going away?” “Then you’ve received no order as of yet?” “No. Nothing. What is it?” “Nothing.” The major smiled his affected Henry Higgins smile. “But

perhaps you’ll get an assignment.” “Don’t put me in the bush, Eddie, don’t put me in the rain! Don’t put me in a dripping tent!” “Have I said anything? I’m as ignorant as you are. Have you spoken

about it with the colonel?” “I haven’t seen him for weeks. He’s in Washington.” “He’s here.” “You mean in Manila?” “Here, in San Marcos. In fact, I’m sure he’s in the house.” “In the house? For God’s sake. No. It’s a gag.” “I understand he’s your family.” “It’s a gag, right?” “Not unless he’s the one making such a gag. I spoke to him by tele

phone this morning. He said he was calling from this house.” “Huh. Huh.” Sands felt stupid to be making only syllables, but he was

past words. “You know him quite well?” “As well as —huh. I don’t know. He trained me.” “That means you don’t know him. It means he knows you.” “Right, right.” “Is it true the colonel is actually your relative? He’s your uncle or

something?” “Is that the rumor?” “Perhaps I’m prying.” “Yes, he’s my uncle. My father’s brother.” “Fascinating.” “Sorry, Eddie. I don’t like to admit it.”

“But he’s a great man.”

“It’s not that. I don’t like to trade on his name.”

“You should be proud of your family, Skip. Always be proud of your family.”

Sands went inside to make sure it was a mistake, but it was completely true. The colonel, his uncle, sat in the parlor having cocktails with Anders Pitchfork.

“I see you’re dressed for the evening,” the colonel said, referring to Skip’s barong, standing and offering his hand, which was strong and slightly wet and chilled from holding his drink. The colonel himself wore one of his Hawaiian-patterned shirts. He was both barrel-chested and potbellied, also bowlegged, also sunburned. He didn’t stand much taller than the Filipino major but seemed mountainous. He wore a silver flattop haircut on a head like an anvil. He was at the moment drunk and held upright by the power of his own history: football for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, missions for the Flying Tigers in Burma, antiguerrilla operations here in this jungle with Edward Lansdale, and, more lately, in South Vietnam. In Burma in ‘41 he’d spent months as a POW, and escaped. And he’d fought the Malay Tigers, and the Pathet Lao; he’d faced enemies on many Asian fronts. Skip loved him, but he was unhappy to see him.

“Eddie,” the colonel said, taking the major’s hand in both his own, moving the left hand up and gripping him above his elbow, massaging the biceps, “let’s get drunk.”

“Too early!”

“Too early? Darn—and too late for me to change course!”

“Too early! Just tea, please,” Eddie told the houseboy, and Skip asked for the same. The colonel looked with curiosity at the package under Skip’s arm. “Fish for dinner?” “Show him!” Eddie said, and Skip laid the Ml on the brass coffee table, nested in its open wrapping.

The colonel sat down and held the rifle across his knees just as Skip had done in the car moments ago, reading its intricate engravings with his fingers. “Fantastic work.” He smiled. But he looked at no one when he smiled. He reached beside him to the floor and handed Skip a brown paper grocery bag. “Trade you.”

“No, thanks,” Skip said. “What’s in the sack?” Eddie asked. “Courier pack from the ambassador,” the colonel said. “Ah! Mysterious!” As ever, the colonel drank from two glasses at once. He waved his

empty chaser at the houseboy. “Sebastian, are you all out of Bushmills?” “Bushmills Irish whiskey coming up!” the young man said. Pitchfork said, “The servants seem to know you.” “I’m not a frequent visitor.” “I think they’re in awe of you.” “Maybe I’m a big tipper.” The colonel rose and went to the bucket on

the sideboard to scoop ice into his glass with his fingers and stood looking out at the grounds with the air of somebody about to share a thought. They waited, but instead he sipped his drink.

Pitchfork said, “Colonel, are you a golfer?” Eddie laughed. “If you tempt our colonel out there, he’ll decimate the landscape.”

“I stay out of the tropical sun,” the colonel said. He stared lovingly at the rear end of a maidservant as she set out the tea service on the low brass table. When the others all held something in their hands, he raised his glass: “To the last Huk. May he soon fill his grave.”

“The last Huk!” the others cried. The colonel drank deeply, gasped, and said, “May the enemy be wor

thy of us.” Pitchfork said, “Hear, hear!” Skip carried the paper sack and the beautiful gun to his quarters and

laid both on his bed, relieved to take a minute alone. The maid had opened the room to the day. Skip cranked shut the louvered windows and turned on his air conditioner.

He poured out the contents of the sack onto the bed: one dozen eight-ounce jars of rubber cement. Such was the stuff of his existence.

The colonel’s entire card catalog system, over nineteen thousand entries ordered from the oldest to the latest, rested on four collapsible tables shoved against the wall either side of Skip’s bathroom door, over nineteen thousand three-by-five cards in a dozen narrow wooden drawers fashioned, the colonel had told him, in the physical plant facilities at the government’s Seafront compound in Manila. On the floor beneath the tables waited seven thirty-pound boxes of blank cards and two boxes full of thousands of eight-by-eleven photocopies, the same nineteen-thousand-card system in duplicate, four cards to a page. Skip’s main job, his basic task at this phase of his life, his purpose here in this big bedroom beside the tiny golf course, was to create a second catalog arranged by categories the colonel had devised, and then cross-reference the two. Sands had no secretary, no help—this was the colonel’s private intelligence library, his cache, his hidey-hole. He claimed to have accomplished all the photocopying by himself, claimed Skip was the only other person to have touched these mysteries.

The large guillotine-like paper cutter and the long, long ranks of the jars of glue. And the dozen card drawers, sturdy three-foot-long troughs like those in libraries, each with four digits stenciled across its face —

2242

—the colonel’s lucky number: February 2, 1942, the date of his escape from the hands of the Japanese.

He heard the colonel telling a story. His roar carried through the house while the others laughed. Sands felt in his uncle’s presence a shameful and girlish despair. How would he evolve into anyone as clear, as emphatic, as Colonel Francis Sands? Quite early on he’d recognized himself as weak and impressionable and had determined to find good heroes. John

F. Kennedy had been one. Lincoln, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius … The colonel’s smile as he’d examined the gun—had the colonel known beforehand Skip was to receive this weapon? Sometimes the colonel had a way of smiling—irritating to Skip—a knowing play of his lips.

Long before he’d followed his uncle into intelligence —in fact, before the existence of the CIA—as a child, Skip had made of Francis Sands a personal legend. Francis lifted weights, he boxed, played football. A flier, a warrior, a spy.

In Bloomington that day nine years ago, the recruiter had asked, “Why do you want to join the Agency?”

“Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague.”

The recruiter didn’t blink. As if he’d expected the response. “And

who’s your uncle?”

“Francis Sands.”

Now the man blinked. “Not the colonel?”

‘Tes. In the war he was a colonel.”

The second man said, “Once a colonel, always a colonel.”

He’d been a freshman then, eighteen years old. This move to Indiana University had been his first relocation since 1942, when, following his father’s death on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, his newly widowed mother had brought him from San Diego, California, back to the plains of her beginnings, to Clements, Kansas, to spend the rest of his childhood with her in the quiet house, in the sadness that didn’t know what it was. She’d brought him home to Clements in early February, in precisely the month that her brother-in-law Francis Xavier, the captured Flying Tiger, made his escape over the side of a Japanese prisoner-of-war ship and into the China Sea.

On graduation Skip had accepted employment with the CIA, but even before training was returned to school to get a master’s in comparative literature at George Washington University, where he helped Nationalist Chinese exiles with their translations of essays, stories, and verse from the Communist mainland. The handful of journals publishing such pieces were funded almost entirely by the CIA. He got a monthly stipend from the World Literature Foundation, a CIA front.

At the mention of his uncle that day in 1955, both recruiters had smiled, and Skip smiled too, but only because they smiled. The second man said, “If you’re interested in a career with us, I think we can accommodate you.”

They’d certainly done so. And here before him stretched that career: nineteen thousand notes from interviews, almost none of them comprehensible to him —

Duval, Jacques (?), owner 4 fishing boats (helios, souvenir,

devinette, renard). [Da Nang Gulf], wife [Tran Lu (Luu??)] inf st

boats poss criminal/intel use. Make no profit fishing. CXR

—the last three letters designating the interrogator who’d made the entry. Skip had taken to adding notes of his own, quotations from his heroes — “Ask not what your country can do for you …” — on cards marked JFK, LINC, SOC, the thickest batch from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, messages the old Roman emperor, besieged and lonely at the edges of his empire, had written to himself in the second century after Christ:

Nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just,

self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad

unless it has the contrary effect. MAM

As Skip approached the dining room, Pitchfork seemed to be hollering, “Hear, hear!”

They’d already been served a course of fish and rice. Skip took his place before an empty plate at the colonel’s left elbow, and the houseboy brought him his portion. They ate by the dim light from candelabras. When the power failed it hardly changed the atmosphere. The hum of air conditioners ceased in the wings, the fan in the parlor ceiling stopped its muttering and revolving.

Meanwhile, the colonel held forth, his fork mostly in the air, one hand gripping his tumbler as if pinning it to the table. He spoke in a Boston Irish accent overlaid by years on air force bases in Texas and Georgia. “Lansdale’s one true goal is to know the people, to learn from them. His efforts amount to art.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Pitchfork. “Completely irrelevant, but hear, hear!” “Edward Lansdale is an exemplary human being,” the colonel said. “I say it without blushing.” “And what has Lansdale got to do with the aswang or any of our other legends?” Eddie said.

“Let me say it again, and maybe you’ll hear me this time,” the colonel said. “Edward Lansdale’s overriding fascination is with the people themselves, with their songs, their stories, their legends. Whatever comes out of that fascination in the way of intelligence—do you get it? — it’s all by-product. God, that fish was skinny. Sebastian, where’s my little fish? Where did it go? Hey—are you giving him my fish?” The houseboy Sebastian at that very moment was offering Skip a second go at the platter of bangos. Skip knew this to be the colonel’s favorite. Had even the cook been warned of this visit? “Okay, I’ve landed a whale,” the colonel said, taking another helping. “I’ll postpone telling you my story about the aswang.”

Sebastian, unbidden, forked yet a third fish onto the colonel’s plate and headed for the kitchen, laughing to himself. Back there the staff talked loudly, happily. Around the colonel and his kidding, Filipinos grew giddy. His obvious affection for them had a way of driving them nuts. Eddie too. He’d unbuttoned his tunic and switched from ice water to Chardonnay. Skip could see the evening ending with phonograph records littering the polished floor and everybody doing the Limbo Rock, falling on their asses. Suddenly Eddie said, “I knew Ed Lansdale! I worked with him extensively!”

Had he? Eddie? Skip didn’t see how this could be true.

“Anders,” Skip asked Pitchfork, “what is the scientific name of this fish?”

“The bangos? It’s called milkfish. It spawns upriver, but lives in the sea. Chanos salmoneus.” Eddie said, “Pitchfork speaks several languages.” The bangos were tasty, troutlike, not at all fishy. AID had helped put

in a hatchery at the bottom of the mountain. The colonel ate steadily and carefully, stripping the morsels of flesh from the tiny bones with his fork and washing them down with several whiskeys during the meal. His habits hadn’t changed: after five each evening he drank voluminously and without apology. The family’s not-quite-articulated assumption was that the Irish drank, but drinking before five was undisciplined and decadent, and patrician. “Tell us about the aswang. Give us a tall tale,” he said to Eddie.

“Well, all right,” Eddie agreed, once again assuming, Skip believed, some of the character of his Henry Higgins, “let’s see; once upon a time, which is how these things begin, there lived a brother and sister with their mother, who was in fact a widow following the death of the father in a tragic accident of some kind, I’m sorry I don’t remember what kind, but I’m sure it was heroic. I’m sorry you didn’t give me a warning to consult with my grandmother! But in any case I’ll try to remember the tale. Two young children, a brother and sister, and now I apologize once more, because it was a pair of orphans, both their parents had been killed, and it was not after all their mother, but their mother’s old aunt who was caring for them in a hut some distance from one of our villages in Luzon. Perhaps our own village of San Marcos, I’m certainly not ruling that out. The boy was strong and brave, the young girl was beautiful and kind. The great-aunt was—well, you can predict, I’m sure—she liked to torment the two fine children with too many tasks, too much harsh language, and blows with a broom to get them to hurry up. The brother and sister obeyed her without complaining, because in fact they were quite dutiful.

“The village had been happy a long time, but lately a curse had fallen, and a bloodthirsty aswang fed on the lambs, also upon the young goats, and worst of all it fed on the little children, and especially on the young girls like the sister. Sometimes the aswang was seen as an old woman, sometimes in the form of a gigantic boar with savage tusks, sometimes even as a lovely young child to lure the little ones into the shadows and suck their innocent blood. The people of the region were terrified, they failed to smile anymore, they stayed in the houses at night near their candles, they never went to the forest, to the jungle, to gather the avocados or any beneficial plants, or to hunt for meat. They gathered in the chapel of the village each afternoon to pray for the death of the aswang, but nothing helped, and, even, they were sometimes suddenly taken in a bloody murder while walking home from these prayers.

“Well, in the manner of these things, a saint appeared to the brother and sister, Saint Gabriel in the rags of a wanderer one day coming along in the jungle. He met the children at the well when they came to get some water, and he gave the boy a bow and a sack of arrows—what do you call that sack?”

“A quiver,” Pitchfork said.

“A quiver of arrows. That’s rather a beautiful phrase. He gave the lad a quiver of arrows and a very strong bow and charged him to stay all night in the granary at the bottom of the path, because there he would slay the aswang. Many cats gathered in the granary at night, one of whom was in fact the aswang, who assumed this form in order to camouflage. ‘But, sir, how will I know the aswang, because you haven’t given me arrows to shoot every cat?’ And Saint Gabriel said, ‘The aswang will not play with its rat when it catches one, it only tears the rat in pieces instantly and revels in its blood. When you see a cat do that, you must shoot him right away, because that one is the aswang. Of course, if you fail, I don’t have to inform you you’re going to feel yourself being torn apart by the fangs of the aswang, and it will drink your blood as you die.’

” ‘I am not afraid,’ the boy said, ‘because I know you are Saint Gabriel in a disguise. I am not afraid, and with the help of the saints, I won’t fail.’

“When the boy returned to his home with these arrows and such, the aunt of his dead and departed mother was refusing to let him go out. She said he must sleep in his bed every night. She attacked him with her broom and confiscated his weapons and hid them in the thatch of the hut. But for the first time, the boy disobeyed his guardian and stole them back that night, and crept away to the granary with one candle, and waited in the shadows of the place, and I will assure you they were very eerie shadows! And silhouettes of rats scurrying among the shadows. And silhouettes of cats creeping everywhere, about three dozen. Which one would be the aswang? Let me just tell you that a pair of fangs glowed red in the night, the hiss of an aswang was heard, then the cry, and as a horrible visage leapt at his throat, the boy loosed an arrow and heard a thump when the creature fell back, and then a strangled moaning came, and then he heard the claws scraping as the wounded fiend dragged itself to protection somewhere. Surveying the scene, the young hero found the severed leg of a giant cat with deadly claws, the left foreleg, and his arrow was lodged through and through it.

“The young hero returned home, and his ugly old guardian scolded him. His sister was also awake. Great-Aunt served them tea and some rice. ‘Where did you go, brother?’ ‘I fought the aswang, sister, and I think I wounded it.’ And sister said, ‘Beloved Aunt, you too were absent in the night. Where were you?’

” ‘I?’ said the beloved aunt. ‘No, I was here with you all night.’ But she served the tea quickly, and made her excuses to go lie down.

“Later that day the two children found the old woman hanging by her neck from the tree outside. Beneath her the blood pooled, dripping from the place where she was missing her left arm. Earlier, as she poured the tea, she had kept from them beneath her robe the sight of her severed arm, dripping her life’s blood, the poisonous blood of the aswang.

“It’s an old story,” Eddie said. “I’ve heard it many times. But the people believe it will happen, and now they believe it happened here, yesterday, this week. My God,” he said, pouring himself more Chardonnay, shaking the bottle upside down over his glass while his small audience applauded, “have I sat here talking and drinking an entire bottle?”

The colonel was already turning the screw in another cork. “You’ve got Irish in you, fella.” He raised a toast: “Today is the birthday of Commodore Anders Pitchfork. Salud!”

“Commodore?” Eddie said. “You’re joking!”

“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 pos

sibly 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. “He’s a good lad. He’s got the right kind of curiosity,” Pitchfork said. “Have any of our bunch in Manila contacted you?” “No. Unless you call Pitchfork basically living here a form of contact.” “Pitchfork isn’t with our bunch.” “Then what is he?” “I’m a poisoner,” Pitchfork said. “Anders is actually and honorably employed by the Del Monte Cor

poration. They contribute plenty to malaria eradication.” “I’m all about DDT and swamp recovery. But I don’t know what sort of organism might make the little mud dabs.” Colonel Francis Sands tipped back his head and poured half a snifter down his spout, blinked against the dark, coughed, and said, ‘Tour own

dad —my own brother—lost his life in that sleazy Jap run on Pearl Harbor. And who were our allies in that war?”

“The Soviets.”

“And who’s the enemy tonight?”

Skip knew the script: “The Soviets. And who’s our ally? The sleazy Japs.”

“And who/’ said Pitchfork, “was I fighting in the Malay jungle in ‘51 and ‘52? The same Chinese guerrillas who helped us with the Burma business in ‘40 and ‘41.”

The colonel said, “We’ve got to keep hold of our ideals while steering them though the maze. I should say through the obstacle course. An obstacle course of hard-as-hell realities.”

Skip said, “Hear, hear!” He disliked it when his uncle dramatized the obvious.

“Survival is the foundation of triumph,” Pitchfork said.

“Who’s on first?” the colonel asked.

“But in the end,” Pitchfork said, “it’s either liberty or death.”

The colonel raised his empty glass to Pitchfork. “At Forty Kilo, Anders manned a little crystal radio set for seven months. To this day he won’t tell me where he kept it hid. There were at least a dozen little Jap sonsabitches in that camp did nothing but think how to locate that contraption day and night.” Forty Kilo had been the Burmese railroad outpost where their work gang had been interned by the Japanese in 1941. “We used coconut shells for rice bowls,” he said. “Everybody had his own coconut shell.” He reached out and clutched his nephew’s wrist.

“Uh-oh,” said Skip, “am I losing you?”

The colonel stared. “Uh.”

He leapt to bring his uncle back: “Colonel, the file catalog goes back to Saigon at some point, am I right?”

The colonel peered at him in the dark, moving slightly, making many tiny adjustments in his posture, as if balancing his head on his neck. Apparently as a kind of focal exercise he examined his cigar stub, trying it at various distances, and seemed to rally, and sat up straighter.

Sands said, “I’ve been working on my French. Get me assigned to Vietnam.”

“How’s your Vietnamese?”

“I’d need to brush up.”

“You don’t know a single word.” “I’ll learn. Send me to the language school in California.” “Nobody wants Saigon.” “I do. Set me up in an office over there. I’ll look after your card files.

Appoint me your curator.” “Talk to my ass; my head aches.” “I’ll make every little datum accessible and retrievable—you’ll just

comb through with these two fingers and zip-zip, sir, whatever you want pops up at you.” “Are you so in love with the files? Have you fallen under the spell of

rubber cement?” “We’re going to beat them. I want to be there for that.” “Nobody wants to go to Saigon. You want Taiwan.” “Colonel, with the very deepest respect, sir, what you implied before

is completely mistaken. We’re going to beat them.” “I didn’t mean we don’t beat them, Skip. I meant we don’t beat them

automatically.” “I realize that. I expect them to be worthy of us.” “Aaaah—despite all my best efforts, you’re one of these new boys.

You’re a different breed.” “Send me to Vietnam.” “Taiwan. Where the living’s good and you meet all the people on

their way up. Or Manila. Manila is number two, I’d say.” “My French is improving. I’m reading well, always did. Send me to

the language school and I’ll land in Saigon talking like a native.” “Come on. Saigon’s a revolving door, everybody’s in and out.” “I need rubber bands. Big long thick ones. I want to batch your cards

by regions until you get me some more drawers. And more card tables. Give me a room and two clerks in Saigon. I’ll write you an encyclopedia.”

The colonel chuckled, low, wheezing—sarcastic, histrionic—but Skip knew it for a happy sign. “All right, Will. I’ll send you to the school, we’ll work that out. But first I need you to go on assignment for me. Mindanao. I’ve got an individual down there I want more on. Would you mind poking around Mindanao a little bit?”

Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, “I’m your man, sir.”

“Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn

everything.” “That’s pretty broad.” “There’s a man named Carignan down there, a priest, he’s been there

for decades and decades. Father Thomas Carignan. You’ll find him in the files. Familiarize yourself with the stuff on this guy named Carignan. American citizen off in the boonies there, a padre. He’s receiving arms or such.”

“What does that mean?” “Well, I don’t know what it means. That’s the phraseology. Receiving

guns. I’ve got nothing elaborated.” “And then what?” “Off you go. See the man. Looks like we’re gonna finalize the file.” “Finalize?” “We’re laying the ground for it. Those are the orders.” ” ‘Finalize’ seems …” He couldn’t quite finish. “Seems?” “This sounds to be about more than files.” “It’ll be months before any decisions. Meanwhile, we want things in

place. If it’s a go, that’s not us. You are there only to report to me. You’ll

transmit the report through the VOA station there on Mindanao.” “And then I’m your cataloger in Vietnam?” “Vietnam. Better ship your Ml home to Mama. We don’t issue that

ammo anymore.” “Shit. I think I’ll have another brandy.” The colonel held out his glass while Skip poured. “A toast—but not

to Vietnam. To Alaska. Yowza!” Anders and Skip raised their drinks. “This is a happy coincidence. Because I wanted to give you a little

task, and I think if your conduct in the field is as exemplary as I’d predict

for you, then I’ll have every reason to get you reassigned.” “Are you playing me? Have you been playing me all night?” “All night?” “No. Not all night. Since-” “Since when, Skip?” He drew on his cigar so his fat face bloomed or

ange in the darkness. “You’re a vaudevillian.” “Playing you?”

“Since I was twelve.”

The colonel said, “I went to Alaska once, you know. I toured the Alaska-Canada road they built there during the war. Fantastic. Not the road, the landscape. The mighty road was just this insignificant little scratch across that landscape. You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible … God before he woke up and saw himself… God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge, and I do mean right now, sir.” He looked red-eyed around himself, as if he only halfway recognized his environment. Sands willed himself not to be too disconcerted. “I met a lady who’d lived there for quite some years —later, that is, just last Christmas is when I had the pleasure. An elderly woman now, she spent her youth and most of middle age near the Yukon River. I got to talking about Alaska, and she had only one comment. She said: It is God-forsaken.’

“You poor, overly polite sonsabitches. I read your silence as respect. I appreciate it too. Would you like me to get to the point?

“The lady’s remark set me thinking. We’d both had the same experience of the place: Here was something more than just an alien environment. We’d both sensed the administration of an alien God.

“Only a few days before that, couple of days before at the most, really, I’d been reading in my New Testament. My little girl gave it to me. I’ve got it right now in my kit.” The colonel half rose, sat back down. “But I’ll spare you. The point is—aha! yes! the bastard has a point and isn’t too damn drunk to bring it home—this is the point, Will.” Nobody else ever called him Will. “St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, ‘There is one God, and many administrations.’ I understand that to mean you can wander out of one universe and into another just by pointing your feet and forward march. I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddamn it.

“So what’s the point? The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam.”

In late September Sands took the train from the town at the bottom of the mountain into Manila. It was hot. He sat by an open window. Vendors came aboard at stops with sliced mango and pineapple, with cigarettes and gum for sale as singles, from open packs. A small boy tried to sell him a one-inch-square snapshot of what it took him a long time to understand was a woman’s naked groin, very close up.

As instructed, he would neither appear at the embassy nor contact anybody in Manila concerning his assignment. He might have looked up the major, but he’d been specifically cautioned to steer clear of Eduardo Aguinaldo. But the officer’s club at the Seafront compound hadn’t been forbidden him, and they served the best pork chops he’d ever tasted. At the station in Manila he barged rapidly through the horde of beggars and hustlers, right hand clutching his wallet in his pants pocket, and rode to the compound on Dewey Boulevard in a taxi that smelled strongly of gasoline.

At the air-conditioned Seafront club he could look out the southern window at the sun descending into Manila Bay or across the room out the northern window at the swimming pool. Two solid-looking men, probably marine guards from the embassy, practiced trick dives from the board, somersaults, back flips. A black-haired American woman in a tawny, leopard-spotted two-piece shocked him. It was practically a French bikini. She spoke to her teenage son, who sat on a deck chair’s extension staring at his feet. She wasn’t young, but she was fabulous. All the other women at the pool wore full one-piece suits. Skip was afraid of women. The pork chops came, succulent, moist. He didn’t know enough about cooking even to guess at the trick for coming up with pork chops like this.

Leaving, he bought a flat pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes from the display at the cashier’s counter, though he didn’t smoke. He liked to give them away.

He waited for a cab just outside the club, stood in the late light looking over the wide grounds, the jacarandas and acacias, the spike-topped wall, and, at the compound’s entrance, the American flag. At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

The flag rolled in the salty breeze, and beyond it the sun soon sank. He’d never seen in nature anything as explosively crimson as these sunsets on Manila Bay. The dying light charged the water and low clouds with a terrifying vitality. A shabby taxi stopped in front of him, two carefully nondescript young men of the Foreign Service got out of its backseat, and the anonymous young man from the Intelligence Service took their place.

Carignan woke after a sweaty dream that felt like a nightmare, left him shaking, but what of the dream should frighten? Dream, or visit: a figure, a monk with a pale region where his face should have been, telling him, “Your body is the twig that ignites the passion between your love of Jesus and the grace of God.” He’d drifted so far from English that certain of the phrases felt erased even as he turned them over in his mind and tried them with his lips—passion, ignite. Years since he’d so much as whispered words like that. And it surprised him that he should dream about grace or Jesus Christ because it had been many years too since he’d let such things trouble him.

The loneliness of my own life—Judas’s solitary journey home.

He rose from his bed in the corner of the mildewed church, walked to the pale brown river with an ingot of pale brown soap. Two little boys stared at him as they fished with hand lines from the broad back of a carabao, the local domesticated water buffalo. A second such beast nearby wallowed deep in a mud hole beside the bank, only its nostrils visible, and some of its horn. Wearing his zoris and underclothes, shoving the soap beneath his garments, Carignan bathed briskly, lest the leeches take hold.

By the time he’d returned and changed into clean undershorts, put on khakis and a T-shirt, affixed his collar, Pilar had some tea going.

The priest sat on a stump beside a wobbly table under a palm tree and smoked the day’s first cigarette and sipped from a china cup. He told Pilar, “I’ll go to see the Damulog mayor today. Mayor Luis.”

“All the way to Damulog?” “No. We’ll both go to Basig, and we’ll meet.” “Today?” “He says today.” “Who told you?” “The Basig datu.” “All right. I’ll take everything to my sister’s and do the washing there.” “No services until Sunday morning.” He only had to tell Pilar, and

everyone would know. “All right.” “We’ll meet with three other datus. It’s because of the missionary—do

you remember the one who disappeared?” “Damulog missionary.” “They think he’s been found.” “Hurt?” “Dead. If he’s the one.” Pilar crossed herself. She was middle-aged, a widow, with many rela

tives, both Muslim and Catholic, and took good care of him. He said, “Please bring my tennis shoes.” A gray day, but he wore his straw hat as he hiked the ten kilometers

down the red earthen road to Basig. The wind came up, the stalks shook and shuddered, also the palms, also the houses. An infestation of tiny black beetles numerous as raindrops roamed the gusts and sailed past. Children playing on the paths whooped when they saw him and ran away. In Basig he made for the market square, speculating as always that life would improve if he lived it here in a town. But the town was Muslim, and they wouldn’t have a church in it.

Before he reached the market the Basig datu and the two datus from Tanday, a village in the hills—men nearly sixty, all three of them, in ragged jeans or khakis, in conical hats like his own, one bearing a long spear—joined him on either side, and now in the safety of town the children cried softly from the shade of thatched awnings, “Pa-dair, Padair”—Father, Father … The four men marched together into the café to kill time before the arrival of Mayor Luis. Carignan had rice with a dish of goat’s meat, and instant coffee. The others had rice and squid.

Carignan bought a pack of Union cigarettes and got one going, and if these Muslims didn’t like it, too bad. But they asked him for some, and they all four sat smoking.

Mayor Luis had sent word last week that the people in possession of the corpse and its effects had been told, already, what identifying features to look for. The datus had said they’d return as far as Basig with the verdict—was this the missing American missionary? —on Tuesday. Carignan believed today was already Thursday. It didn’t matter.

The jeepney from Carmen arrived covered with passengers and shed them like a gigantic husk. The mayor from Damulog would be on it.

People walked by the cafe’s door and past the windows and looked in, but nobody entered. A toothless drunken old man sat alone at another table and mumbled a song to himself. Quite different music came from out back, where a few kids squatted around a U.S. Army crank radio. The clearest station came from Cotabato. Months-old American pop tunes. They went for the hot beat or the sad ballads.

Petite and potbellied Mayor Luis of Damulog came into the café smiling, clapping his hands, behaving like his own entourage. He joined them and surveyed the scene, such as it was.

“Did you ask them?” he said in English. “No.” Speaking Cebuano, Luis said to Saliling, the oldest, the man with the

spear: “The people who found the dead man at the Pulangi River.” ‘Tes.” “We told them to look for the shoes. We sent a drawing. And the label

of the shirt. We sent a drawing.” Saliling said, “They have only bones. And the ring from the finger.” “On his left hand? A gold ring?” “They didn’t say.” “This hand. The left hand.” “No. They didn’t say.” “Did they look at the teeth? He has metal placed in his teeth. Did

you tell them?” He jabbed his finger at his own mouth and asked Carignan, “Do you have? Can you show them?”

Carignan opened wide and jutted a view of his molars at the three da

tus, who seemed to enjoy this display. “Did they find metal in the teeth?” the mayor asked. Saliling said, “We will look for these kind of teeth. But there is a prob

lem in our barangay we want to talk about.” “I am not the datu of your barangay. You are the datu. This is your

position, not my position.” “Our schoolhouse needs repairs. The roof keeps out the sun, but not

the rain.” “He wants money,” the mayor said to Carignan in English. “I can speak Cebuano,” Carignan said. “I know. I just like to talk when these Muslims can’t understand. I am

a Christian, sir. Seven Day. I am Seven Day. But we are all one family

against these Muslims.” “This lost missionary is Seventh-Day too, isn’t he?” “Yes. It’s very sad for the town of Damulog.” “Give the man fifty pesos.” “Do you think I have fifty pesos? I’m not rich!” “Tell him you’ll pay it later.” Luis said to Saliling, “How much to repair the school?” “Two hundred.” “I can give twenty. Not now. Next week.” “The boards are expensive. At least one hundred fifty for the boards.” “I have boards in Damulog. If you need boards, I can give you boards.” “Some boards and some funds.” “Twenty-five in funds.” Saliling spoke with the others. Luis looked to Carignan, but the priest

shook his head. He didn’t recognize the dialect. “Ten boards of at least ten feet,” Saliling said in Cebuano. “The thick

ones.” “Yes.” “How much will you give in funds?” “Forty is the limit. I’m not pretending.” “Fifty.” “All right. Fifty pesos in funds, and ten thick boards. Next week.” The datus went into conference. The missus of the café arrived, a

hunched, worried woman bringing two bread rolls for the priest, also a metal spoon, though he’d already eaten his meal with his fingers like the others. On the belief that white men liked bread, not rice, she always headed for the market for rolls when he appeared in town.

Saliling said, “It’s fine if you wait for one week. Right now we have to

travel back to Tanday, and then over the hills to the Pulangi River.” “They haven’t gone yet to the river!” Luis said in English. “I understand.” “These Muslim people are slow. They enjoy wasting our time.” The missionary had been missing since before the rainy season. This

news of a corpse had come over a month ago.

The datu Saliling said, “We’ll meet here in two weeks. Or we’ll come to Damulog. We will bring an answer, and you will bring the lumber and the funds.”

“Not two weeks—one week, please! Mrs. Jones is waiting. Poor Mrs. Jones!”

The men spoke in the other dialect among themselves. “No,” the datu said, “it can’t be done in a week. It’s far and the people of the Pulangi River aren’t trustworthy. They aren’t Muslims. They aren’t Christians. They have other gods.”

Carignan felt bad for Mrs. Jones, the missionary’s wife. He had a thought: “Maybe we can go along, and arrange to bring back the body to Damulog.”

Luis said, “I’m willing to travel with you as far as Tanday, if we both go. As for crossing the Pulangi River—no. I don’t want to die. I want to live long.”

“All right.” “Will you go with them, Father?” “Yes.” “By yourself?” “If I’m with them, I’m not by myself.” They agreed: the datus would find Luis in Damulog in two weeks.

Luis ordered a San Miguel. “I like the Catholic restaurants,” he told his companions. “In our Seven Day we get no beer. It’s not healthy.” The missus urged on them some tidbits, meat from a large jar. Townspeople clustered either side of the cafe’s doorway, staring with open mouths.

“I can get avocado,” the missus told Carignan. “Come for lunch and I’ll make you the avocado milkshake.”

He had a bite of carabao meat tenderized in spices, incredibly gamy. He nodded his appreciation, and now they were bringing out a whole plate of it for him. It wasn’t bad. But the aftertaste was too much like a carabao’s smell. Voices from the throng at the door—”Pa-dair, Pa-dair, Pa-dair.”

Judas went out and hanged himself.

“I will say a prayer for everyone,” the priest called to them.

Saliling got to his feet and charged at the intruders. He stomped his bare foot, shook his spear. The group backed away a few paces.

The missus began striking the old drunk at the next table with her limp hand, yelling unintelligibly. He seemed oblivious. “Hah, your followers want to confess,” Luis said. Judas threw himself from a high place and his belly broke on the

stones. He wondered if these people, merely surviving, knew anything of guilt. The gnarled mahogany creatures hobbling here to confess themselves. He left with the others, the datus shoving the villagers aside. “I am going to pray. Everyone must pray. Pray to the saints in Heaven.”

He would go with the two datus to their barangay, called Tanday. There was no jeep to Tanday and, after a point, no road. They would walk. Carignan understood only that the people holding the missionary’s remains lived by the Pulangi River. How long a journey to find them, he couldn’t guess. The datus said twenty-five kilometers, but it was silly of him to ask, because how could they know? Out of courtesy they offered an estimate: two days’ hiking. The datus insisted they leave right away in order to make Tanday by nightfall.

They walked together until noon, as far as Maginda. There the datus accomplished the kindness of borrowing for him a horse, no bigger than a pony, with a wooden saddle on its back. Preceded by the three old men, the meager animal lurched beneath Carignan’s weight for a few kilometers, to the bottom of the hill below the barangay of Tanday, and then he had to get off and climb the path behind it as the dark came down over the endless folds of the low mountains.

The pathway up the hill was wide and in that respect easy, hacked clear by the villagers, but it was steep, and he was winded. He’d grown too old for adventures —how old? Sixty, almost. He couldn’t remember exactly. Halfway along they heard a low whistle, and a fourth escort joined them. “Good evening, Pa-dair,” he said in English. “I will accompany you.” The young man identified himself as Robertson, a nephew of Saliling. Robertson s face was invisible in the evening glow.

Thoughts of Judas, images, the monk, the dream, had come back to him throughout the day. The monk in the dream with the silver cloud for a face. Maybe he could find someone to interpret it for him.

They made the crest and went to the schoolhouse for the night. The men brought him a supper of sticky white rice and a green plant they called hwai-an, and soon, because the night was black, there was nothing to do but turn in. He lay on his side on the wooden floor like the others, without a mat or cover. He couldn’t sleep. The air smelled different from that of his bedroom by the stinking river near Basig, the schoolroom was stuffy, the huge leaves of banana plants crowded the windows, and even the lizards clucking in the eaves sounded foreign. Near midnight it started raining steadily, harder and harder, until the storm made as if to shatter the metal roof, drowning them first with sound, threatening to drown them very soon with water. The drops drove themselves through the seams of the corrugated sheets, and Carignan pulled two desks together and crawled underneath for protection. Villagers with even leakier roofs crept into the pitch-dark schoolroom until they must have made nearly two dozen. When the downpour quit, he could hear it roaring down off the hillside for hours.

He woke at dawn having scarcely slept and stepped out to relieve his bladder against the side of the schoolhouse. After the night of rain it was cool, without a breath of wind. At this hour the land seemed to lie open, ready to give up its secret.

What offering would I lay at the foot of the cross of the thief?

He passed gas, and some children peeking at him from around the corner pursed their lips and imitated the sound and laughed. What consolation at the foot of his death? Without preliminaries or farewells the three datus came out and re

sumed the journey. They carried nothing, so he carried nothing. Although they went barefoot, he wore his Keds.

They navigated a slick path downward to a long ridge and stumped along it toward another mountain. One edge of the world turned red and the sun came rolling over on them, burning away the vapors below and seeming to fashion from the mist itself a grander and more complicated vista full of hills and ravines and winking creeks and vegetation tinted not just the innumerable values of green, but also silver, black, purple. They stopped at a barangay of several huts on the adjoining hill and had native coffee and each a bowl of rice. Saliling spoke with the headman in the Bisayan dialect, and Carignan heard them discussing some gunfire they’d heard across the valley just this morning. “He has warned us of some fighting ahead,” Robertson said, and Carignan said, “I heard him say it.” They began hiking 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 “chopchop.”

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 death. Therefore his bullet wound meant nothing.

The old man spoke a Cebuano-Bisayan dialect Carignan could make out pretty well, though young Robertson translated: “He just needs to drink some blood from the monkey, and he’ll be new again.”

“Take me to the river with you,” the old man said. “I want to drink some mud.” “Now he wants to go with us,” Robertson said.

“Yes. I understand.”

“This clan says the mud gives life. He wants the river.”

“I know what he says,” the priest insisted.

The old man pointed eastward over a hill and spoke of a story-land, a legendary place.

“He says that over that mountain is the place called Agamaniyog.”

“The children tell these stories,” Carignan said.

Still pointing east, the old man said, “Agamaniyog. It is the land of coconuts.” Carignan said, “Agamaniyog is for children.” “Then don’t go there,” the old man said. They began again, wading down the middle of the creek through the

tight valley and then up the facing mountainside, clutching at shocks of weed to pull themselves upward, Carignan afflicted every step of the way by the goads of the Accuser: I am evil in the sovereignty of my will, and incompletely repentant. But a little, a little repentant. But very incompletely. I have failed in the spirit of my sonship. He stifled the devil’s voice, which was his own, and trained his hearing on the outer sounds, the shivering of wet leaves in the wind, guffaws of parrots, the dishonest glibness of small monkeys in the bush. The plants closed over them. The path was only a figment now in Saliling’s mind. Carignan blundered after, kept upright by the fear that if he went down he’d be lost in the vegetation. His clothes were sopped, even his pockets were full of his sweat. The path widened again, and they came onto a ridge overlooking the world. The going was easier now. In less than two hours they stood above the Arakan Valley, some five kilometers wide, and the olive-drab Pulangi River running through it. Gigantic acacia trees shaped like mushrooms, ten stories high and their crowns a hundred feet across, hid the riverside from view. Saliling hadn’t once spoken to him, but he turned now and said in Cebuano, “Look back—you see where we came. It’s twenty kilometers to there.” Carignan looked west: the gray-green jungle washed in a rosy light, crumbling into the cauldron of the sunset.

They were another hour hiking down into what was left of the barangay of Tatug. Last year’s flooding had pasted down the grasses and toppled the houses from their low stilts, but the people still lived here. Carignan, so drained he couldn’t raise his hands to get his hat off, sat down on a mound he was vaguely aware must be that of a grave. Other graves surrounded him, not quite yet grown over by the relentless clawing grass and ground vines. Something had massacred a dozen of these people, more, twenty, twenty-five—a plague, a flood, marauders. He found strength to take his hat off. He heard children laughing, he heard a woman weeping. “Come, get out of here, you must not sit here,” Robertson said. Saliling had him by the arm. Robertson said, “See, we have a box.” He held in his hands a box made of grub-eaten, salvaged boards. “These are the bones of your countryman.”

In pursuit of his first official operation as an intelligence officer, Sands arrived at the Manila domestic airport at 4:15 a.m. on a Saturday to take a DC-3 to Cagayen de Oro, the northernmost city on the island of Mindanao, and added himself to the throng at the sellers’ windows, scores of people half asleep, their hankies draped over their necks, fanning themselves slowly with wilted journals, milling gently but resolutely forward into the blunt faces of the clerks. Then they disappeared before actually getting on the plane. Skip’s name came fortieth on the wall’s chalk-written waiting list, but the first thirty-nine travelers didn’t show, and he was the first to board the DC-3, which carried a total of five passengers over the iridescent jungles and the black sea and landed without mishap on a bumpy strip of red ground. These DC-3s, he understood, could fly with a wing shot off—he’d heard tales from the colonel.

Sands found a cab to the De Oro market, omitted breakfast, and boarded a passenger bus heading south across the island. He carried an inexpensive camera, an Imperial Mark XII in pastel green missing its flash attachment, but he spent most of his time looking at the ripe, spongy landscape. They made good speed, slowing nearly to a halt to let passengers on and off, but never quite stopping. In every hamlet vendors ran alongside selling sliced mango and pineapple wrapped in paper, and Coca-Cola in wobbling plastic baggies knotted shut and pierced with a drinking straw, and this was his fare until the journey broke for the night in Malaybalay, a city in the central mountains.

Throughout this passage waves of homesickness broke over him, not for the States, not for Kansas, or for Washington, but for the house in the mountains on Luzon, with its air-conditioned bedrooms and its Campbell’s soup and Skippy peanut butter from the embassy’s Seafront commissary. These tiny bouts of panic he welcomed as signs of a deepening immersion in his environment. A notion the colonel had advanced intrigued him: one God, but different administrations. His fears dragged him also to the far end of this assignment—who would read his report on Father Thomas Carignan, how would his report impress them?

Malaybalay, though poor and constructed mostly of plywood and galvanize, was populous and full of noise and movement. Next to the Catholic church square he found a hotel and a room with a Muslim-style private bath—a stall enclosing both a toilet hole and a cold-water faucet with three feet of rubber hose attached. This exotic system plunged him into a spiritual nausea. He’d expected on assignments of this kind to experience isolation and terror; but not merely at the sight of the plumbing. He lay on the bed gasping while the strength boiled out of his blood. The narrow room’s windows were too high to see out of. The air of this world seemed to carry no oxygen, only the bleating of children and the racket of the streets. He made his way downstairs with his camera and sat on a stone bench in the square, getting a shoeshine. The shine boy, he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, worked up a sweat, great drops beaded his upper lip, and he banged his brush on the box decisively to signal his customer should switch his feet. Sands snapped his picture. The boy had poise and pretended not to notice. This would do it, this would steady him, this child’s face. He paid plenty, went into the church —no walls, just a great dome over banks of pews — and waited for the Saturday evening liturgy. A few others joined him. Dusk came. Bats flitted around the square outside. The Latin soothed him. During the homily the youthful priest spoke Bisayan, but Skip recognized many English terms—”demonic possession” —”exorcisms” — “fallen angels” —”spiritual investigation” —”psychological investigation.” When the congregation rose to take Communion, he left them to it and stepped back into the devastatingly foreign city.

By stopping passersby until he found an English-speaker, he learned of a Western-style restaurant and soon sat down at La Pasteria, an Italian place getting perhaps part of its menu out of cans, but offering also fresh tossed salad and antipasta with radishes and fresh celery, even olives.

White tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles, and a phonograph on which the staff spun seventy-eight rpm Dixieland recordings.

The wooden shutters lay open to an evening mountain breeze as cool as could be had at this latitude. Beside one of the windows, alone, sat a woman Sands was convinced must be British or American, young but somehow not youthful, businesslike, something like a spinster librarian or a pastor’s maiden sister. But throughout the meal, whenever he glanced at her, she stared back with a disorienting candor.

As the waiter cleared her place, she rose and walked directly to Skip’s table. She carried her coffee cup and set it down next to his. She held out her hand. “We’ve been staring at each other all night. We might as well be introduced. I’m Kathy Jones.”

She shook his hand, and held it. Not in mere friendship. Her eyes locked on his, her gaze almost tearful, hot with need. Sands was speechless. He’d never known what to do about women. Her false smile, melting with desperation, shocked his heart with pity. She was ill, or drunk, maybe both.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, and turned away with a small laugh or sob. Leaving her coffee on his table, she went out quickly.

Sands shook inside, and he couldn’t eat. Nevertheless he ordered dessert. When it came—cannoli—the waiter lingered beside him in a grisly state of selfconsciousness and finally succeeded in saying, “The lady did not pay today. Will you be the one to pay?” and Skip paid.

The next afternoon, stepping from the bus onto the unpaved main street of the village of Damulog, he was greeted by a small plump man who apparently made a habit of inspecting new arrivals and who introduced himself as Emeterio D. Luis, Damulog’s mayor. Luis took him over to the only hotel, owned by a man named Freddy Castro, along the way pointing out the important places in Damulog, the market, the restaurant, the cockfights building, the dry-goods store.

Damulog lay at the end of the concrete road, end of the bus route, end of the power lines. Though electricity reached there, the town had no sewers and, as far as Sands could learn, no indoor plumbing, certainly not at Mr. Castro’s hotel, which was constructed of sturdy wood but where, that afternoon, the rain worked not only through the roof but through two intervening stories to drip from the ceiling of his groundfloor room. Keeping his bed and belongings dry needed some thoughtful arrangement. At dusk both the mayor and Mr. Castro, a young man with good English, took him to one of the town’s five springs, where Sands, in his checkered undershorts and yellow zoris, before an audience of women and openmouthed children, bathed in clear water flowing from a pipe in a hillside.

“Have your bath, have your bath, you are safe,” the mayor promised him. “We have no crocodiles here. We have no malaria. We have no marauders. I believe we are seeing some organized activity from the Muslim groups in the south, but in Cotabato only. We are not in Cotabato. This is Damulog. Welcome to Damulog.”

When Skip’s back was turned, the children called out to him. The island of Mindanao had seen no U.S. military; therefore nobody called him Joe. The children called him “Pa-dair, Pa-dair …” Father … Mistook him for a priest.

Those were strange dreams last night, Lord …

She sat on a bench in the market piecing together last night’s terrors, waiting for the 6:00 a.m. departure, waiting for coffee while nearby two half-awake women opened their stall for commerce. I stood at the seat of Judgment, but what before that, what, I had my purse, I stepped into a shop to buy a pencil, but the shop was a stage in a big black stadium at the end of the world, and now I was dead and had to account for my sins. And I couldn’t. And the darkness was my eternal death.

Whose voice had whispered in the dream? But the lady was prepared now to sell her some coffee, pouring hot water from a thermos into the plastic cup over a spoonful of powdered Nescafe. The lady turned on her transistor radio—DXOK from Cotabato City, pop tunes followed by a

6:00 a.m. break for five Hail Marys.

The bus waited, but the driver hadn’t come. Whether they left on schedule hardly interested her. She wore no watch, hadn’t owned one for years.

And who’s this? Not thirty feet away, seating himself at another stall and getting himself a sugar roll, was the man before whom she’d acted like an idiot at the restaurant, at La Pasteria. Idiot, idiot! But last night at the sight of him she’d felt such an ache, such thirst. In his Philippine-made apparel, brown slacks, brown sandals, white box-cut sport shirt, in the dusk of candlelight, with his shaggy head and mustache, he’d looked so much like Timothy the young arrival, Timothy the bringer of good news and bright fellowship. And she’d thrown herself at this American as blindly as she would have done at Timothy if Timothy had come back to her out of the blank question into which he’d dematerialized.

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 Nescafe, 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 see. That’s good. I am just checking.” “I understand.” “Just ask for Boy Sedosa when you need my assistance,” the patrol

man 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, justfifty 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.p>

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.

The next morning came sunny and almost cool, the sky full of beautiful traveling clouds, everything so different from last night’s cauldron of ooze. Cory came in with bread and three tiny eggs from the market and made breakfast, after which Kathy met with eight nurse’s aids whom she’d trained and who now ran stations in the outlying barangays, at the moment only four stations, and six last quarter, and next quarter who knew, one or six or ten, the funding came and went.

The meeting was joined by a woman from the Upliftment Development Foundation, Mrs. Edith Villanueva, who took notes unnecessarily. Kathy’s eight aids, all women, all young, all married, all of them mothers many times over, and none of them very often free of their barangays, made a party of the occasion. They had rice and sugar fried in coconut oil and wrapped in banana leaf, rice wrapped in coconut leaf, and regular rice. “It’s all rice,” Mrs. Villanueva said somewhat apologetically.

The ladies were all very fond of her husband, had all the news about his disappearance, spoke of him respectfully, in such a manner as to imply he was neither dead nor alive. They called him Timmy.

And then, lunch concluded, it was time for Mayor Emeterio D. Luis, who held a central and elevated position by virtue of having learned everything about everyone in Damulog, who would have been the mayor even if no such municipal office had presented itself for his occupancy. Kathy brought him the leftover dainties arranged on a mahogany tray and draped with a silk scarf. Although Damulog housed a post office and city hall in a three-room cinderblock structure by the market, the mayor stayed out of it, preferring the small parlor of his home, which got shade and a breeze. He put Kathy in a wicker chair beside his desk, called out loudly for ice water, and asked her about polio immunization. She’d known him for two years. Still he took a few minutes to address her as if she’d just landed as an emissary. “Can we bring the polio vaccine to the outlying stations? We have problems in the countryside. Not everyone can march along the roads with so many children all the way to Damulog. These are the poor of the poorest. And sometimes also there can be robbers on the road. We don’t want to be victimized by these lawless elements. These are the poor of the poorest.” Kathy had heard him use the phrase several times lately. He invariably turned the words around. Yes: Emeterio D. Luis, the D, according to an engraved granite paperweight on his desk, standing for “Deus.”

Elections were far off, but already, he told her, his opponent for the office of mayor had slandered him, called him a coward, a man with “white eggs.” In his eyes, beneath the pains of office, glowed a general happiness. His sister, who taught at Southern Mindanao University, was singing tribal folk songs through a small PA amplifier on the patio, and he listened with satisfaction, his hands folded beside a vase of foam-rubber blossoms on top of his desk.

He talked to her about the American, Skip Sands, just as he must have spoken to Skip Sands about her. And of course he was aware she’d encountered the American in the Sunshine Eatery.

“I asked Skeep Sands if he knew the American colonel, and yes, they have a very interesting connection … Are you going to ask me what connection?”

“I wouldn’t want to gossip.”

“Gossip is un-Christian!” he said. “Unless you are talking to the mayor.”

Kathy uncovered the desserts and he studied the tray like a chess

board, his hand hovering. “So many visitors!” Kathy said, “I think you conjure them up.” “I conjure them up! Yes! I have conjured the American colonel, and

the Philippine Army major, and I have conjured that other man, I think

he was Swiss, what do you think he was?” “I didn’t meet him. Or the Filipino. Just the colonel.” “And I have conjured the survey team of engineers. Mrs. Luis,” he

asked his portly wife as she entered from the kitchen, sliding across the linoleum floor in her straw-soled zoris, “what do you think? Do you think I am a conjurer?”

“I think you have a very loud voice!”

“Kathy believes I can conjure things,” he called as she continued toward the rear of the house. “Kathy,” he said, “I want the survey team to do some work for me. I think you can help me to persuade them.”

“I don’t hold much sway with them, Emeterio.” “I have conjured them up! They must work for me!” “Well, you’ll have to do your own talking there.” “Kathy. The American called Skeep, do you know what he told me?

The colonel is his relative. The colonel is his uncle, to be exact.”

Kathy said, “Well!” He’d made a strong general impression, but she couldn’t remember—conjure—the colonel’s face in order to make any comparison.

“When I asked Skeep about the Filipino officer and the other man,

he pretended he doesn’t know them.” “Why would he know them?” “These people all know each other, Kathy. They are on a clandestine

government mission.”

“Well, everyone’s under cover.” She herself appeared here under the auspices of the International Children’s Relief Effort, an organization without religious affiliation, whereas in fact she’d come as the wife of her husband: a worker in the vineyards of Jesus Christ.

The mayor threw his sandal at a dog that wandered in, a perfect shot, dead on the rear, and it screeched like a bird and leapt out the door.

“It’s completely outside of our ideas to gamble,” he suddenly reflected. “Gambling is against the Seven Day ideas. I’m trying to put it behind me.”

“I bet you succeed.”

“Thank you. Oh-‘ I bet’! Yes! Ha ha! ‘I bet’!” He quickly sobered. “But you see, I go to the cockfights. It’s my obligation. I want to connect to the passions of the people.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

Fifteen minutes had passed, and now a young woman—servant, neighbor, or relative—set down two glasses of ice water on the desk. Mayor Luis dabbed at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand. He sighed. “Your husband Timmy.” The Filipinos all referred to her husband, for the first time in his life, as Timmy. “We will wait for word about the remains. It’s taking a little longer. I hold out hope, Kathy, because it’s possible that suddenly we might hear from some criminal elements of people who have taken him alive. We are victimized by so many lawless elements and kidnappers, but this time it can be said that they give us hope.” He sipped his water while a completely candid silence enclosed him: No. No hope.

At two in the afternoon, after classes let out and while the town dozed, she opened the doors of her Damulog health station, which operated in one of the cinderblock schoolhouse’s four classrooms. Upliftment Development’s Edith Villanueva was on hand to observe as young mothers brought in their infants to be immunized. A couple of dozen lined up, girls as young as twelve and thirteen—and looking only nine or ten—gripped the limbs of their babes ruthlessly for the shots, and received each a can of evaporated milk, which yielded, for them, the real meaning of the visit.

Meanwhile, the American Skip Sands sat out front on the concrete porch, looking at a book; in checkered short-pants and a white T-shirt, and rubber zoris on his feet. Apparently undisturbed by the screams.

As they left, Kathy introduced Edith to the American. He started to get up, but Edith sat beside him, smoothing her skirt. “What’s the book?” Edith asked. “A secret code?”

“Nope.”

“What. Greek?”

“Marcus Aurelius.”

“You can read it?”

“To Himself. Generally translated Meditations.”

“A linguist. You are a linguist?”

“It’s just for practice. I have an English translation at the hotel.” “Castro’s? God, I wouldn’t stay there,” Edith said. “I’m taking the

four o’clock bus out of here.” “Mr. Castro’s roof has holes in it, but the next hotel is far, far away.” “All alone?” Edith was a married woman, and middle-aged, or she’d

never have been flirting with him.

He smiled, and Kathy suddenly wanted to kick him in the side — wake him up—in the softness below the ribs. To disturb the good humor in his bright American face.

“Can I see?” Kathy said. His book was very cheap and plain, printed by the Catholic University Press. She handed it back. “Are you a Catholic?”

“Midwestern Irish Catholic. That’s a mixed-up mixture, we like to

say.” “Kansas, you said, right?” “Clements, Kansas. How about you?” “Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or the country outside there. On the same lat

itude as Kansas.” “Longitude.” “Okay. We’re right due north of you.” “But different countries,” Edith said. “Different worlds,” Kathy said. Here they were, two weary wives, both

crowding him. “Come along, then,” she said, and pulled him up by his hand. They began walking toward Kathy’s street. “So you are from the midwestern United States?” Edith said. ‘Tes, right, Kansas.” Kathy said, “So is my husband. Springfield, Illinois.” “Ah.” “He’s missing at the moment.” “I know, I heard. The mayor told me.” Edith said, “The mayor told you—who else!” “Emeterio tells everyone everything,” Kathy said. “That’s how he

finds things out. The more he talks, the more people tell him. Were you waiting to see me?” “Well, in fact, I was,” he admitted, “but I’ve waited too long. I’ve gotta run.

“Run!” Edith said. “That’s not at all a very Filipino thing to do.” After he’d left them, Edith said, “He didn’t realize I was still with you. He wanted to see you alone.”

Around four that afternoon, as they waited for Edith’s bus out of town, the two women spied the American strolling among the market stalls in his Bermuda shorts, on his sunburned legs, with a hairy brown coconut in his hand. “I’m looking for someone to whack this open for me,” he said.

The market square took up a full city block ringed with thatched kiosks, its interior beaten bare. They walked its borders seeking someone to deal with the visitor’s coconut. The bus arrived, chaos descended, the passengers hoisted their sacks and herded their children and swung their flapping, upside-down chickens by the talons. “The driver has a bolo, I’m sure,” Edith said. But Skip found a bolo-wielding vendor who topped the coconut expertly, raised it as if to drink, and offered it back to the American. Skip held it out—”Anybody thirsty?” Both women laughed. He tried the milk. Edith said, “For goodness’ sake, dump that out, man. It’s going to turn your stomach.” Skip emptied it onto the ground and let the vendor crack the fruit into quarters.

Edith had some words with the driver and then came back to them. “I made him wash the headlights. They don’t wash the headlights. It gets dark and they drive as if they had a blindfold because of so much mud.” She began her goodbyes to Kathy, and her thanks, and took a long time winding up her visit. She offered her hand to Skip Sands, and he held her fingertips awkwardly. “Thank you so much,” Edith said. “I think you’ll be an inspiration to Damulog.” There was something arch and improper in her tone.

Edith carried a gigantic multicolored straw bag with a hemp clasp. She went off swinging it, walking flat-footed in her sandals, her butt rolling like a carabao’s in her silk skirt. Good. Gone. All afternoon Kathy had felt in her neck and shoulders a tenseness, a readiness to shrug off the weight of this woman’s company. Each day’s end stole the light from her heart, then came the night’s sorrowing madness, waking, weeping, thinking, reading about Hell.

On the other hand the American, spreading out his white hankie for

her on a mildewed bench, seemed pointless, stupid, soothing. He said, “Voulez-vous parlez Français?” T m sorry?—Oh, no, we don’t do that in Manitoba. We’re not those kind of Canadians. Are you really some kind of linguist?”

“Just as a hobby. I’m pretty sure a real linguist could do a whole life’s work down here. As far as I can find out, nobody’s tried to study the Mindanao dialects in any kind of organized way.”

He picked up a slab of his coconut. The ants had found it. He blew them off and pried a chunk from it with the blade of a dark blue Boy Scouts of America pocketknife.

“Your work is tough,” he said. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I misjudged the nature of the whole proposi

tion.” “Did you?” “The depth of it, yes, and the seriousness.” She wanted to cry out to him to take stock of himself. “Well, I just meant you have to deal with a lot of people.” “Once you get among the heathen, it all changes. It changes a lot. It

gets a lot clearer, a lot more vivid, it gets vividly clear. Oh, well,” she said,

“it’s the kind of thing that gets confused when you talk about it.” “I guess it would be.” “Then let’s not talk about it. Do you mind if I write down a few

thoughts sometime and pass them along to you? On paper?” He said, “Sure.” “And what about you? How is your work going?” “It’s more of a holiday.” “What’s Del Monte’s interest here? I wouldn’t think these Maguin

danao plains would grow many pineapples. Too much flooding.” “I’m on vacation. I’m just touring.” “So you arrive without any explanation at all. Just a lost ambassador.” “Well, yes, I’d see it as maybe an ambassadorial kind of opportunity, if

fine folks like you weren’t already doing a much better job of represent

ing us.” “Representing us who, Mr. Sands?” “The United States, Mrs. Jones.” “I’m Canadian. I represent the Gospel.”

“Well, so does the United States.” “Have you read a book called The Ugly American?” He said, “Why would I want to read a book like that?” She stared at him. “Aah, okay, I’ve read The Ugly American” he said. “I think it’s non

sense. Self-flagellation is getting to be the vogue. I don’t buy it.” “And The Quiet American?” “I’ve read The Quiet American, too.”—And that one, she noticed, he

didn’t label nonsense. She said, “We Westerners have many blessings. A freer will. We’re

free from certain …” She stalled in her thoughts. “We have rights. Liberty. Democracy.” “That’s not what I mean. I don’t know how to say it. There are ques

tions about free will.” She trembled to ask him now if he’d perhaps read

John Calvin … No. Even the question was an abyss. “Are you feeling okay?” “Mr. Sands,” she said, “do you know Christ?” “I’m Catholic.” “Yes. But do you know Christ?” “Well,” he said, “not in the way I think you mean.” “Neither do I.” To this he said nothing. “I thought I knew Christ,” she said, “but I was entirely mistaken.” She noticed he sat very still when he had nothing to say. “We’re not all crazy here, you know,” she said.—Another one he had

no reply for. “I’m sorry,” she said. He cleared his throat carefully. “You could go home, couldn’t you?” “Oh, no. I couldn’t do that.” She could sense him fearing to ask why.

“Just because then I’d never get anything straightened out.”

This American created a silence hard to resist. She had to fill it: “You know, it’s not unusual, it’s not weird, it’s not unheard of, to go on in the middle of tragedy. Look at where we are! The sun keeps rising and setting. Each day kicks more room in your heart—what would be the word… the love is relentless, relentlessly pushing, it keeps pushing and kicking like a child inside you. All right, then! That’s enough out of me!” What a fool I am! she almost shouted.

The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light. The American didn’t comment on it. He said, “And what happens when all this is, is, is —concluded?”

“There, congratulations, you found a word.” “Sorry.” “You mean if Timothy’s dead?” “If, well—yes. Sorry.” “We don’t know what happened to him. He got on the bus for Malay

balay, and we’re still waiting for him to come back. He seemed ill, he promised he’d see a doctor at the sanitarium there before he kept any other appointments. As far as we know, nobody at the sanitarium saw him. We’re not sure he arrived in Malaybalay at all. We’ve been to every town between here and there —nothing, nothing, no news.”

“And I guess it’s been a little while.” “Seventeen weeks,” she said. “Everything’s been done.” “Everything?” “We’ve contacted everybody, all the authorities, the embassy, and our

families, of course. We’ve all made a thousand calls, everyone’s gone crazy a thousand times. His father came over in July and posted a reward.”

“A reward. Is he pretty well off?” “No, not at all.” “Oh.” “There’s been a development, though. Some remains have been

found.” True to his midwestern origins, the American reacted to this remark

by saying, “Ah,” and, “Uh-huh.” “So right now we’re waiting for word about the corpse’s effects.” “Mayor Luis told me.” “And if it’s Timothy? I’ll stay for a while, and then find a new post,

which is what we planned on anyway. Or, if Timothy comes back to surprise us all—which he might do, you don’t know Timothy—and if he does, we’ll probably just go on with the plan. He’s due for a change. Wanted a change, a new challenge. Meaning the same old problems in a brand-new location. And I’m a nurse, they’ll take me wherever they can get me. Thailand, or Laos, or Vietnam.”

“North Vietnam, or South?”

She said: “We do have people in the North.” “The Seventh-Day Adventists?” “The ICRE-International Children’s Relief Effort.” “Right, the ICRE.” And suddenly he launched out passionately, “Lis

ten, these folks around here will never have much better than what they’ve got. But their children might. Free enterprise means innovation, education, prosperity, all the corny stuff. And free enterprise is bound to spread, that’s its nature. Their great-grandkids will have it better than we do in the States.”

“Well,” she said, taken aback, “those are nice thoughts, those are hopeful words. But ‘these folks’ can’t eat words. They need some rice in their bellies, and I mean tonight.”

“Under Communism their kids might eat better tonight. But their

grandkids will starve to death in a world that’s all one big prison.” “And how did we get on this topic, anyway?” “Did you know the ICRE is considered a Communist front?” “No. Is that true?” In fact she hadn’t heard, and didn’t much care. “The U.S. Embassy in Saigon considers them Third Force.” “Well, Mr. Sands, I’m not a fifth column, or a third force. I don’t

even know what a third force is.” “It’s neither Communist nor anti-Communist. But more helpful to the Communists.” “And do you folks at Del Monte spend a lot of time at the U.S. Em

bassy in Saigon?” “We get bulletins from all over.” “The ICRE is a tiny outfit. We get along on grants from a dozen char

itable foundations. We have an office in Minneapolis and about forty nurses in the field in I don’t know how many countries. Fifteen or sixteen countries, I believe. Mr. Sands, you seem upset.”

He said, “Do I? You must have been pretty upset yourself the other

night.” “When?” “In Malaybalay.” “Malaybalay?” “Oh, come on —in the Italian place? When the mayor mentioned

Kathy Jones the Seventh-Day Adventist, the name was the same. But I sure didn’t think it was you.”

“Why is that?” “That night you didn’t seem like any Seventh-Day Adventist.” The American seemed to be waiting in his colorful Bermuda shorts

for some word from her, though plainly there wasn’t any use. “The

mayor and his family have been very good to me.” “Well, I mean —come on.” “We don’t always tell the whole story about ourselves, do we? For in

stance, the mayor thinks you’re not who you say you are at all. He says

you’re on a secret mission.” “I’m not from Del Monte, you mean? I’m a spy for Dole Pineapple?” “Your uncle said he was from AID.” “Did you get much chance to talk to him?” “He’s a colorful old rogue.” “I guess you did. Who was he with?” “Nobody.” “Oh. But the mayor mentioned a couple of others. A German,

maybe.” “They came around much more recently.” “The other two? When were they here? Do you remember?” “I left Friday. So they were here Thursday.” “You’re saying last Thursday. Four days ago.” “One two three four, yes, four days. Is that bad?” “No, no, no. I just wish I hadn’t missed them. Who was the German

with?” “Let me see. A Filipino. From the military.” “Aha, Major Aguinaldo.” “I didn’t actually see him.” “He’s a friend of ours. But I’m not sure about the German guy. Was

he German? I’m not sure I know him. The mayor said he had a beard.” “A Swiss, the mayor said.” “With a beard?” “I didn’t see him.” “But you saw the colonel.” “We don’t see many beards around here. That must prickle. So does

that mustache, I bet you.” He faced her in silence, as if in defiant expectation of her examination of him—no hat, sweat dripping from his drenched scalp, also from

his drooping mustache … Now he allowed himself to look around, to take in the vermilion glow surrounding them just as it faded. “Wow,” he said.

“My grandmother called this the gloaming.” “Sometimes it just knocks you out.” “In five minutes the skeeters will be swarming and we’ll be eaten

alive.” “The gloaming. Sounds Gaelic.” “There it goes. It was almost like liquid.” “Makes you feel more certain of Heaven.” “I’m not sure Heaven is really all that much to be desired,” she said. She’d assumed this would shock him, but he said, “I think I kind of

know what you mean.” She said, “Do you travel with the Word?” “The word? —Oh.” “Do you have a Bible with you—I mean at the hotel?” “No.” “Well, we can certainly arrange to place one in your hands.” “Well-all righty.” “The Catholics don’t quite cling to the Word the way the rest of us

do, do they?” “I don’t know. I don’t know how the rest of you do.” “Mr. Sands, how did I get on your bad side?” “I’m very sorry,” he said. “That’s not the situation at all. I’m just not