"Smoke was always in the air. It came from the hills and mountains, from the burning of felled jungle trees and underbrush and it came from the smoldering carcasses of campesino homes and from the charred bodies of the campesinos huddled in the corners. It came from the camp fire Chicho fed with the wood of the avocado tree he cut down in the afternoon and from the cigars of the two men gathered around the yellow light of the campfire.
The brown man with the cowboy hat drank from the bottle of beer in one hand and smoked from the cigar in his other. He sat in his wooden chair hunched over the flames without burning his skin and the smoke hesitated under the brim of his hat before rising into the overhanging branches and vines of the tropical canopy. In his eyes the flames danced and his face showed no emotion.
The tall pale man with the short red hair sat across from the cowboy in a wooden chair leaning away from the smoke of the campfire. The metal insignias upon his shoulder flickered with gold light and his face showed little emotion. The cigar never left his thin lips and the ash grew long without falling away to the dirt at his feet. The tobacco smoke rose into the recesses of his blue eyes and he squinted constantly with the sting of it but he did not remove the cigar from his clamped teeth."
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