Tree of Smoke (22 page)

That made James laugh, which in turn made Stevie cry.

“Stevie, Stevie, Stevie,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He was glad it was Christmas Eve. She’d spend tomorrow with her family, and he wouldn’t have to see her.

But it was only the beer working on her, and in two minutes she’d accepted his apology. “The sunset’s always beautiful when there’s clouds,” she said.

In the dusk it would cool off quickly now. He felt a breeze starting, the day’s last warm breath as it ended. Stevie kissed him many times.

In South Carolina they’d treated him like a beast, and he’d survived. He’d grown bigger, stronger, older, better. But having returned to the world he’d grown up in, he had no idea how to sit in a room with his mother, or what to say to this sixteen-year-old girl, no idea how to get through a few days in his life until he shipped to Louisiana for Advanced Infantry Training, until he got back where people would tell him what to do.

Stevie said, “I guess we’ll open presents and all that stuff pretty early,” and placed her loving fingertips on the back of his neck. “What time do you want to come over?”

As he considered this simple question, it seemed to widen until it split his very thoughts open.

He wrenched at his door’s handle and got out into the air and walked past the exploded wreck and stood bent over with his hands on his knees, barely keeping upright, his gaze lifted toward the winter horizon. He wanted somebody to come out of the faint pink and blue distances and save him. Far away he saw the ripples of a mirage—either a horrible burning death in Vietnam, like that of the man pried from this charred Chevrolet, or a parade of years filled with Stevie’s questions and her fingers touching his neck.

S
ands stayed overnight in a private room with a bath at Clark Field’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, most of which was devoted to dorm-style living in a collegiate atmosphere, with doors opening and closing and half-dressed young men shouting up and down the halls and the sounds of showers and Nancy Sinatra tunes warring with Stan Getz bossa nova instrumentals, and the stink of Right Guard spray deodorant. He arrived around eight at night. He and the driver got his footlockers into his room. He spoke to no one, turned in early, got up late the next day—New Year’s Eve—and boarded the base shuttle bus and asked the Filipino driver to let him off wherever he could find some breakfast.

Thus Sands found himself at 9:00 a.m. on December 31, 1966, at the snack bar in a bowling alley filled, even at that hour, with airmen pursuing improved averages in a clattering atmosphere. He ate bacon and eggs off a plastic plate at a table alongside rows and rows of bowling balls and watched. Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands determined he’d give it a try as soon as his breakfast settled. Meanwhile, he drank black coffee and read his letter from Kathy Jones. She wrote in a neat hand, apparently with a fountain pen, in blue ink, on flimsy, grayish, probably Vietnamese-made onionskin. Her first few letters to him had been direct, chatty, lonely, affectionate. She’d wondered if they might meet in Saigon, and Sands had looked forward to that. Now these recent letters, these confused ruminations—

-they might have been torn from a journal, addressed to no one. He could hardly stand them. He’d stopped looking forward to seeing her again.

In the beginning her communiqués hadn’t been long, generally two sides of a page, and had ended, “Well, my hand’s getting tired! I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy” or “Well, I see I’m down to the bottom, I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy.” In the beginning he’d replied, always very briefly. Not, he hoped, curtly. But he hadn’t known what to say. The nature of their connection, clear enough in the heat of it, had become mysterious.

Here was clumsy thinking, and Sands had long ago lost patience with it. Would she like to see a bust of Lenin by the door of every public school? See the Statue of Liberty toppled in an obscene ceremony? Of course she would. And that wrongheadedness appealed to him. Always the sucker for sardonic, myopic, intellectual women. Women quick-witted and congenitally sad. In her face a combination of aggression and apology. Kind brown eyes.

He slipped the letter under his coffee mug. No concentrating on it now. Travel excited him. This world ending, the next emerging, the bowlers surrounding him with motion and noise, flinging out black planets, smashing the constellations of wooden pins. Back in his room, other things to set moving: the monster of the colonel’s files, and a duffel bag packed with two pairs of walking shoes and four changes of machine-washable clothing—no suit, no dress apparel—also a small crate woven of cane, a basket, really, but quite sturdy, packed with dictionaries in several languages. Skip had been trained to remember that he came as a civilian and must dress like one, avoid khaki or olive garb, wear brown shoes rather than black, brown belts as well. He’d left behind his custom-tooled carbine and traveled with a secret agent’s kind of weapon, a .25-caliber Beretta automatic concealable in a pants pocket. His mind raced over all of it, a result of too much coffee. He gave up the idea of bowling, left the lanes, and went striding through the tropic noon until his brow thudded and his wet shirt clung to him.

The base library looked open. The air conditioner roared on its roof. He approached the door and saw people within beneath fluorescent lights, but the door wouldn’t budge, and he had a moment of panic in which he felt himself locked out and gazing helplessly on the land of books. A man coming out opened it with some effort—just stuck in its frame, swollen with damp—and Sands gained entrance. Jangling from the coffee he flitted from stack to stack and looked into a number of books, never taking a seat. In a copy of Twain’s
Pudd’nhead Wilson
he read all the chapter epigraphs, looking for one he thought he remembered—something to do with the treasure of a life spent in obscurity—but it wasn’t there. In the children’s section he found some volumes of Filipino folk tales. Nothing from Vietnam.

He was delighted to chance, next, on a book about Knute Rockne. He sat down and turned its leaves until he found on page 87 a photo of Rockne on the fields of Notre Dame in 1930 with the last team he’d coached; and among them, in the middle of the third row, with more abundant hair and his wrinkles erased and the familiar, eager sincerity on his face: Uncle Francis. A second-string freshman, but nevertheless one of Rockne’s blunt, confident young men—chests out, chins up, peering ahead no further than two or three minutes into the life to come. Francis’s older brother Michael, Skip’s father, had graduated from Notre Dame the year before and moved to his bride’s hometown of Clements, Kansas. Francis would join the army air force and leave it in 1939 to fly with the pseudo-civilian Flying Tigers in Burma. Michael would grow restless selling farm equipment and join the navy in 1941 and go down six months later with the
Arizona
in the first few seconds of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Death had too often visited prematurely among his father’s people—wars and accidents. The colonel had a daughter, Anne; a son, Francis Junior, had drowned one Fourth of July while sailing in Boston Harbor. A brother and a son, both claimed by harbors. There had been brothers and sisters and plenty of cousins, and many children from those sources, and everybody had somebody missing. It was a loud, sad family.

Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children. They stared back at him. An old ache sang its song. Only child of a widowed mother. Somehow he’d entered their world without becoming a man.

He shut the book and instead opened the fragile pages of the letter from Kathy Jones:

He spent the afternoon in the cool of the library and rode the shuttle bus back to the BOQ.

He’d hardly been back in his room a minute when somebody knocked at the door, a man about his own age, wearing civvies, holding in each hand a bottle of San Miguel beer.

“These are the last in the bucket, my man.”

The quality of the man’s smile was disconcerting.

“The Skipper needs a beer.”

Skip said—“Hey!”

“Quantico!”

He accepted a bottle and they shook hands, Skip flushing with a warmth of recognition, although the name escaped him. They’d done a twenty-one-day ciphers program together at Quantico just after his training at the Farm—never buddies, but certainly, now, well met. They sat around chatting about nothing, and after a few minutes Skip felt the moment for getting his friend’s name had slipped past. “Where’s your home station now?” he asked the man. “Still Langley?”

“They’ve got me stashed in the District. At the State Department, the big building, Pennsylvania Avenue. But I make the rounds—Saigon, Manila, DC. What about you?”

“I’m being transferred. Saigon.”

“You get a good deal in Saigon—share a house, servants, that order of existence. Run of the place whenever you can get away. Hell—every weekend. Most weekends.”

“I hear it’s a beautiful country.”

“Surprisingly beautiful. You step out of a hooch to take a leak, shake off the last drop, and look up—God, you can’t believe it, where’d it come from?”

“Just like here, in other words.”

“Considerably more dangerous. You do earn your hazard pay.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”