Tree of Smoke (31 page)

The replacements tried to ask Flatt what might be the purpose, the mission, of their outfit, and Flatt tried to tell them it was mainly a kind of wide-perimeter security for the landing zone. And somebody else said, “We work for the CIA.”

“I thought this was a Recon unit.”

“This is not a Recon unit. We don’t know what we are.”

“If I work for the CIA, then where’s my green beret? Them’s the ass-holes work for the CIA. The Green Berets.”

And just that quick—probably not yet sober from the night before—the new guys were drunk in the Purple Bar.

“One thing about you, Houston, you’re sort of a cowboy, but one thing about you: You got class. You got style.”

“Thanks, pardner.”

“No, I mean it. I mean it. I’m drunk, but—you know what I mean.”

“I do. I do. I do. You mean you’re a queer and you want to blow me.”

“Shut up. Who farted?”

“What do you mean? The whole country stinks.”

“He who smelt it, dealt it.”

“He who detected it, ejected it.”

“He who sensed it, dispensed it.”

The guys living up the hill around the helicopter bull’s-eye were always covered with dust; they kept their heads nearly shaved rather than deal with filthy hair. Flatt introduced the replacements to a couple of men from the LZ by saying, “Ask them their name.”

“You mean, both of them?”

“Yeah, asshole, both of them, both of them.”

The cowboy said, “Hey, now, listen: I am not your asshole.”

There was a pause. Then they all burst out laughing, the cowboy too.

He said, “Okay. Who are you?”

“Bloodgutter.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nope. Bloodgutter.”

“He is. That’s his real name.”

“Bloodgutter? What a cool fucking name, man. That is the coolest name in the world.”

“It’s not as cool as this guy’s name.”

“What’s his name?”

“Firegod.”

“
Fire
god?”

“Yep. Joseph Wilson Firegod.”

“Wow.”

“And his name is Bloodgutter,” Firegod said.

“Wow.”

“So we are asshole buddies,” Bloodgutter said, “we hang around together. It just stands to reason.”

Private Getty came in and sat by himself.

“Gettys-bird, where’s your big old forty-five?”

“Sarge took it,” Private Getty said.

“Where’d you get a forty-five, Private Getty?”

“Traded for it.”

“Traded, fuck. You stole it.”

Private Getty went into one of his trances where he acted deaf and talked to himself. “I don’t know why I’m remembering so hard about home.”

“Pay no attention to Gettys-bird. He crazy. He dinky dau.”

Everybody, including Getty, stopped talking when the three Kootchy Kooties came in. The three pulled chairs around the table and sat down, and one belched loudly.

It was best not to talk until they talked, but Flatt seemed driven to ask, “Hey, is the sarge back down the hill?”

“Sarge still up there,” the black savage said. “You still safe.”

Flatt couldn’t shut up. “You’re a Indian,” he told the Indian tunnel rat, “and this motherfucker Houston right here is a cowboy.”

“You’re a cowboy?”

“Not back home I ain’t. Just here.”

Off by himself Private Getty was still trancing—“I’m on the wrong ride. I’m on the wrong ride. The—wrong—ride”—expressing this thought over and over and nothing else.

The other two just drank their beers, but the black Kootchy glowered at Private Getty. “Busting me down with his jive. Busting cracks inside me.”

Flatt said, “Aw, he don’t mean nuthin.”

“I know he don’t mean nuthin. I won’t hurt him. Do I look like I’ll hurt somebody?”

“No.”

“No? I
feel
like I’ll hurt somebody.”

A second jeep stopped out front. One of the new guys said, “Shit—Lieutenant Perry.”

“Sarge ain’t with him, so fuck him.”

They insulted the lieutenant wholesale as he breezed through with a false, wise smile saying, “I suggest you discontinue fucking with me,” and tossing out plastic dosers of talc that turned to sludge all over you in four minutes if you used it, but all of them used it.

He got himself a bottle of Coke and sat by himself, the same way Private Getty did. From time to time he fed rum out of a chromed flask into the mouth of his Coke. At one point he turned to them all, trying to look like a man of the world, and pointed at the cowboy and said, “You. Do you know what reality is?”

“What?”

“Wrong answer.”

He was like that, that’s all, mostly when he drank, which was most of the time; otherwise he was just mostly young and mostly stupid, like most of the rest of them.

Later he said, looking at no one at all, “I will fuck the Reaper. But I won’t kiss my sister.” Nobody answered him.

Cowboy said, “He’s goofy, ain’t he?”

“What is he?”

“He’s goofy.”

“What is he?”

“I said he’s goofy, he’s all screwed up.”

“That’s it! You got it! That’s the Screwy Loot!”

When Screwy Loot stood up to leave he looked over at the replacements, in particular Fisher, the tall one with a front tooth chipped from playing basketball, and said, “The movie’s not over till everybody’s dead.” He walked out with an uncoordinated, bouncing step.

And then they sat around letting the new ones in on things little by little:

“Do we work for the CIA?”

“You’re working for Psy Ops.”

“Does Psy Ops work for the CIA?”

One of the new ones, Evans, was very plastered, saying over and over again only, “Let’s face it. Let’s face it. Let’s face it.”

“Do you understand what’s happening? The rest of the Third are getting chewed up alive. The rest of the whole Twenty-fifth Infantry.”

“In fact, when they get chewed up alive, they’re dead.”

“Shut up. But that’s right. They’re dead, like I would hate to be.”

The Purple Bar was made of bamboo poles and thatch. A layer of some kind of straw covered the floor. Underneath that, dirt. It didn’t have walls, only bead curtains painted with various faded tropical scenes—palm trees and mountain ranges. A deep ditch on three sides protected the Purple Bar from flooding when the rain poured down on the town. It was really just a large hooch furnished with collapsible tables and chairs, all U.S. government–issue. A loud MASH generator outside ran the juice for the Purple Bar. Three table fans along the west side turned their faces left and right as if following the conversations.

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s face it.”

“Here’s to the Lucky Fucks.”

“Who’s the Lucky Fucks?”

“We’re all the Lucky Fucks because we pull about five patrols a month in a totally friendly zone.”

“About once a week, yeah, and the rest of the time we just stay out of everybody’s way.”

“That is our sacred duty. Gimme a toke.”

“A what?”

“A token? A cigarillo? Of the smoking variety? So I can smoke it?”

“Okay. You call them a token?”

“The trouble is, when you don’t pull duty, you spend your pay—that’s actually a horrible drawback.”

“Because—I mean—let’s
face
it.”

A table by the freezer served as the bar. On it were a portable record player, a stack of albums, and a bar toy called a lava lamp, an amber jug in which you could observe the unfathomable almost cyclical but unrepeating lit-up movements of liquid wax in warm oil. The girl with red toenails controlled all the records. No requests allowed. If you asked her name, she said, “What name you like? I make my name for you.”

Blackflies and mosquitoes clouded the air. The papasan chased after them with a swatter and a can of Raid.

The tunnel rats got drunk and bought a few rounds in a friendly manner that made them no less scary. Only one was black, but they all talked like spades. They had eerie stuff to say. Philosophers. All God’s chillun got tunnels. Everybody got a tunnel to be motorvating. They drank and drank, drank until their eyes went completely flat and blind-looking, but they didn’t appear drunk otherwise, except that one of them when he had to piss just unzipped and did so right there at the table, in fact right on his own boots…You didn’t often see blacks and whites hanging around together…People kept to the categories…

M
inh understood Skip’s disappointment, but life came as a storm, and the colonel, Skip’s uncle, was the landscape’s dominant figure. It made sense to take shelter in him. If the colonel wished his nephew out of the way, well and good. Thanks to the colonel, Minh himself no longer flew jets and had reason to hope he might survive this war. Nowadays he flew only helicopters, and only for the colonel. He went about often in civilian dress and spent many days free in Saigon. He had a girlfriend there, Miss Cam, a Catholic, and he went to Mass with Miss Cam on Sunday mornings and spent Sunday afternoons at her home in the company of her large family.

Flying took concentration, it wore on the mind. He enjoyed this ride as a passenger in the black Chevrolet. Nothing to do but look out at the murdered landscape off Route Twenty-two and wonder about Miss Cam.

Uncle Hao had warned Minh that Mr. Skip spoke Vietnamese. While driving the American to his new quarters in the region of Forgotten Mountain, therefore, he and his uncle didn’t speak much. Minh sat up front, Skip in the back with one of his footlockers. Uncle drove the car, both hands at the wheel, head forward, concentrating deeply, his mouth open like a child’s. The rain clattered on the Chevy’s black roof, a storm out of nowhere, a bit early this year. Uncle Hao tried speaking English, but Mr. Skip didn’t answer much. “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk.”

“Ah, my friend Hao,” Skip said, “the rain is making me sad.”

Minh tried some English himself: “It’s good to learn to be happy in the rain. Then you’ll be happy a lot, because there’s a lot of rain.” In English it didn’t sound very clever.

Uncle braked, and Minh braced himself against the dash—a water buffalo crossing in front of them. A cargo van coming the other way ran into the animal and seemed to carom from its thick hide, stopping sideways in the middle of the broken pavement.

The buffalo put its head down as if trying to remember something, stood still a few seconds, and walked off into the tall grass wagging its horns from side to side, its rump rocking like two fists alternating in a paper sack. Hao maneuvered the Chevy around the stalled van as the beast faded away among the sheets of rain.

Once they’d left Route Twenty-two all the roadways were bad, almost impassable, but as long as Uncle kept the wheels turning they’d avoid getting mired. “When we come to the big dip,” Hao said, “I will go down fast, because we have to get up the other side.”

“The big dip—what is that?”

“A hill down and then a hill up. There’s mud at the bottom.”

“I understand.” They were speaking Vietnamese.

Uncle Hao headed the black Chevrolet into the long drop and they splashed through the mudhole at the bottom and climbed up the other side, steeply, until the top was nearly theirs and only sky was visible in front of them. The tires broke traction and howled like tormented ghosts while the Chevy slowly slid backward. They rested at the bottom in a foot of gumbo. Hao switched off the engine, and Mr. Skip said, “All right. Here we are.”

Minh removed his sandals, rolled his cuffs above his knees, draped himself in his clear plastic poncho, and waded to the house of the nearest farmer, who followed him back to the car, yanking his water buffalo along by the nose ring, and hitched a rope to the front axle and hauled them out of the bog.

Skip peered through the rear window at where they’d been and said in English, “Out of one hole and into another.”

It wasn’t so bad where Skip was going. He would have a gas stove, some form of indoor plumbing, probably a couple of servants. A hot bath when he wanted one. The villa, Minh understood, belonged to the family of a Frenchman, a physician, a specialist in hearing disorders, now deceased. As far as could be ascertained, this Frenchman had been fascinated with one of the area’s tunnels, had gone exploring, had tripped a wire.

The drumming of the rain lightened to a tapping on the roof. Minh opened his eyes. He’d been asleep. Uncle had stopped the car again. The road seemed to end here, to dive into a creek overrunning its banks, and Minh wondered if now they’d wait for some hooded skeletal boatman to ferry the American across this river to his state of exile. But Hao inched them forward. It wasn’t a creek at all, just a wide rivulet escaping from some creek they couldn’t see.

The rain ceased as they wheeled slowly into the village of Forgotten Mountain. The afternoon sun glittered on the wet world, and already the people moved around outdoors as if no storm had ever visited, carrying their bundles along the road, clearing palm fronds from the front of their homes. By the dirt lanes, in the shaded, drier places, children skipped rope using pale plastic chains.

They stopped in the driveway of the villa, and Minh hardly had a minute to take it in before getting involved in a small adventure—a lot of yelling from behind the house, then an old man who appeared to be a houseboy or papasan ran into view waving a rake over his head and yelling about a snake. Minh leapt to follow, Uncle and Skip close behind, and they came on a monstrous constrictor zigzagging across the backyard, a brindle python longer than any of them, longer than all of them together. “Let me, let me,” Minh said. The old man swiped his rake at it one more time uselessly and gave up the weapon to Minh. What now? He didn’t want to mar the valuable skin. The snake headed for the bank behind the house. He ran after and brought the rake down hard, hoping to trap the reptile’s head, but sank the splines rather farther down its spine, and like that, with frightening energy, the snake wrenched the handle free of his hands and swiveled off wildly, still skewered, dragging the rake into the brush. Minh and the houseman gave chase, beat the wet bushes with their hands, both men sopping now, and the houseman yelled, “Here is the monster!” He came up behind a dripping poinsettia holding the tail. “It’s almost dead!” But it was still writhing and got away from his grip. Minh managed to catch hold of the rake, step on the snake’s spine, extract the weapon from their prey, and bring it down several times on its skull—surprisingly fragile, easily pierced.