Read Online Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online

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