Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Read Free Book Online

day’s drive from Manila on terrible roads, central to nothing. Reading superstitious newspapers. Staring at the vines on the stucco walls, the streaks of mildew on the walls, the lizards on the walls, the pimples of mud on the walls.
    From his perch here on the patio Sands detected tension in the air, some sort of suppressed quarrel among the workers—he didn’t like to think of them as “servants”—of the house. It pricked his curiosity. But having been raised in the American heartland he was dedicated to steering clear of personal controversy, to ignoring scowls, honoring evasiveness, fending off voices raised in other rooms.
    Sebastian came out onto the patio looking quite nervous and said, “Somebody here to see you.”
    “Who is it?”
    “They will say. Let me not say.”
    But twenty minutes went by, and nobody came out to see him.
    Sands finished his haircut, went into the cool parlor room with its polished wooden floor. Empty. And nobody in the dining area other than Sebastian, setting the table for lunch. “Was somebody here to see me?”
    “Somebody? No…I think nobody.”
    “Didn’t you say I had a visitor?”
    “Nobody, sir.”
    “Great, thanks, keep me guessing.”
    He took himself to a rattan chair on the patio. Here he could either read the news or watch the English entomologist, a man named Anders Pitchfork, chip a golf ball with a three-iron back and forth between the two full-sized greens of the very undersized golf course. Its two or so acres of lawn were minutely tended and biologically uniform, circled by high chain-link with which the surrounding plant life grappled darkly and inexorably. Pitchfork, a graying Londoner in Bermuda shorts and a yellow Ban-lon shirt, an expert on anopheles mosquitoes, spent his mornings here on the course until the sun cleared the building’s roof and drove him away to do his job, which was to eradicate malaria.
    Sands could see, down the colonnade, the German visitor taking breakfast in his pajamas on the private patio outside his room. The German had come to this region to kill someone—Sands believed this having spoken to him only twice. The section chief had accompanied him from Manila and, though the chief’s visit had been ostensibly about squaring Sands away, he’d spent all his time with the German and had instructed Sands to “stay available and leave him alone.”
    As for Pitchfork, the malaria man with the unforgettable name—just gathering information. Possibly running agents, of sorts, in the villages.
    Sands liked to guess everybody’s occupation. People came and went on murky errands. In Britain this place might have been called a “safe house.” In the U.S., however, in Virginia, Sands had been trained to consider no house safe. To find no island anywhere in the sea. The colonel, his closest trainer, had made sure each of his recruits memorized “The Lee Shore” from Melville’s Moby-Dick :

    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