Tree of Smoke (34 page)

“Shit. I don’t know.”

“Not unless she bites you!”

Coming back into camp they tried to keep it quiet, but as they found Bunker Four, Evans whispered loudly, “I can’t believe it! If I’m gonna die, at least I’m not gonna die a virgin.”

Fisher sat hunched on his cot. He sounded seasick. “I feel so evil. I never should’ve done it. My first time, and I paid for it.”

Evans fell back on his cot, fondling himself. “Man, I just want to kiss my own dick cuz I’m so in love with it for being able to FUCK!”

Somebody in another bunker shouted, “Well, fuck YOURSELF and SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

Fisher went to his knees in the dark. “Please, God, please, Holy Mary and Jesus and the Saints, don’t let me get VD.”

“I don’t know how to describe this,” Evans said, “but after I finished, I was lying on top of her and she kind of put her legs together and kind of…rubbed her legs together. And it felt…real good.”

James said, “I’ve been scared so it don’t let up, like I have a sore stomach all the time, right here.” He touched himself below his breastbone. “But for once in this God-fucked shit-hole I feel like I don’t have to be scared no more. Because I’m so goddamn drunk, and I’m finally eighteen.”

“Oh, man,” Fisher said. “She took my shit. She took my powers. They’re working for Charlie. Those whores are working for Charlie.”

I
n June, during the rains, a man named Colin Rappaport rendezvoused with Kathy Jones on the highway not far from her nursing station in Sa Dec on the Mekong Delta. He had the use of a Land Rover. Making a tour of things for World Children’s Services, for whom he worked these days. He helped her get her knapsack and her rattling black bicycle in the back of his vehicle, and they headed for the orphanage eight kilometers down the American-made road.

She’d met him several times in Manila long ago. Colin had been skinny then, now he was portly, having lived in the U.S. the last year or more. While he drove he set aside his straw hat and mopped his crown with a sopping hankie. He’d always been bald. You couldn’t get much balder than Colin Rappaport.

“How are you liking your visit?”

“Jesus, Kathy, I thought poverty was bad enough.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I mean, I’ve never wondered about what a war could do.”

“After a while it just gets funny. I’m not kidding. You get so sick in the head you just start laughing.”

When they arrived at the Emperor Bao Dai Orphanage, ragged attendants were cutting up a handful of rotten vegetables into a cauldron of steaming rainwater. “Here’s Van,” she told Rappaport as a young man hurried over wiping his hands on his T-shirt. “Miss Kathy, so good to have a visit, come, I take you,” Van said, shaking hands with Rappaport, guiding them up the dark staircase of this former factory to the building’s third level, where in six chicken-wire pens on the vast open floor lived two hundred children, segregated by age. The place was thick with flies and the smell of piss and offal. Van made the eight-year-olds rise and stand in rows in their frayed and filthy cotton shorts and shirts to sing a song of welcome, throughout which Rappaport stood still with a glazed smile, and then Kathy led him back down the stairs and out to the malaria bay, a tin-roofed shed where a dozen patients lay in darkness and silence. Kathy moved among them propping open eyelids and mouths. “Nobody’s dead,” she told Colin.

When they came out two attendants were hoisting the cauldron between them and heading for the main building, one with a ladle in his free hand.

“Oh, Lord,” Colin said. “It’s their food.”

She took him under a tree and they sat in the dirt.

He said, “I thought it was garbage. Dishwater.”

“We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.”

“I think I get you.”

Van came over with two glasses of tea.

“Go ahead, they boil it,” Kathy said.

Colin set the glass between his feet. He took a cigar from his left breast pocket and a lighter from the right. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“The whole planet. The days are evil.—I’m sorry, am I talking kind of crazy?”

Obviously he thought yes. “I had no idea how overwhelmed you are.”

He said no more while he finished his tea. He smoked most of his cigar, carefully shaved away its ember by rubbing it against a tree root, and replaced the rest in his breast pocket.

Soon it rained hard, and they sat in the Land Rover while the downpour splashed on the asphalt drive and turned its surface to a bed of glassy spikes. “I’ll see if we can’t get you supplies here,” he said. “I’d like to divert a whole planeload for you. I think I can do it. I’ll see.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“Can I have the rest of your cigar that’s in your pocket?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“You smoke cigars?”

“Once in a while.”

“I guess we’d better let you do what you want,” he said. “Jesus Christ, we’ve got to get you some help.”

She said, “I’ve got Lan and Lee.”

“Who?”

“You’ll meet Lan. She and Lee mind the shop when I’m gone.”

“Oh. Right. Are they trained?”

“They’re a great help. Not formally trained. Very competent.”

“Kathy, this is why I left ICRE. They just drop you down in the jungle with a map and a compass.”

“We get help from all over, though. The GIs give us stuff. We do what we can.”

“The GIs help you?”

“I got a half liter of Xylocaine last week. I spent yesterday and this morning pulling teeth. They love the Xylocaine. Otherwise they go to the local yanker, who gets it with a big pliers and the flat of his foot on their chest. And if he’s not around they dig it out by themselves with a nail. Carpenter’s nail. It takes all day to do that. They’re very stoic.”

“Not like the Filipinos, huh?”

“The Filipinos have a lot of pride, but they’re not stoic.”

“They’re never ashamed of their agonies.”

“Believe it or not, I like it better here. In this country there’s nothing left but the truth.”

“Well then,” Colin said, and by his tone she realized she must be talking crazy again.

Back at the nursing station that evening she dispatched her assistants to their homes and boiled some rice on the Primus stove.

For the last two days a sick child had been occupying her hammock. She mashed up rice in a bowl with the heel of her hand and fed the patient mush from her finger, cradling the head in her other hand, the head like an empty eggshell. Nothing went down. She tried rice water and Coca-Cola in a baby bottle, but the child, a boy, was five or six and had no sucking reflex. Tomorrow morning or the next the child would likely be dead. And if he lived?—one of the cages at Bao Dai.

She sat in a large rattan chair and smoked the butt of Colin Rappaport’s stogie. The village was dark. Children moaned and dogs barked and the small voices of women called out. A few bicycle headlamps moved here and there far up the road. She puffed the cigar until she felt woozy and green-faced and threw it down, then took her chair back inside, near the mosquito coil, next to the stertorously breathing child in the hammock, and fell asleep. In her dreams people spoke very clearly in Vietnamese and she understood all they said.

Next morning the child held its head up on its own and sipped water and Coke from a cup. Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it. She fished the cigar butt from the dirt where she’d tossed it, brushed it clean with her fingers, and smoked it in celebration.

M.
Bouquet, the brother of the deceased Dr. Bouquet, putting the doctor’s estate in order, came to the villa with a van and a driver to claim the late doctor’s effects.

Sands had arranged to be off visiting the villages with Père Patrice, but when he returned at the end of the day the brother was still there, an almost elderly Frenchman, husky, lantern-jawed, dressed as if for a day of angling, in olive short-pants and a matching vest with many pockets, fanning his face with a canvas hat with a chinstrap. Sands and he took tea together. His English was better than passable. He spoke at first not of his brother, but of women. “As I get older, the older females have more attractions. Flesh which used to be ugly, now it can seem charming. The thin purple veins, you know, so frail. It’s a beautiful mystery. The new kind of grace—the grace of a calm woman, it’s even more erotic. Now I come to adore the women of the Renaissance painting. Very full, very soft from the inside. Have you a native concubine?”

Sands had no answer.

“No? I don’t know this country. But I thought it’s customary here to have a concubine. I prefer a widow. A grown woman, as I have been telling you. She has experienced love, and she realizes how to behave in bed.”

“I’ve been curious about your brother,” was all Skip could say.

“Claude was my twin. Fraternal—we didn’t look alike. I got the information that he is dead, and I didn’t cry about it. I suddenly thought, Oh, no no no, I didn’t know him, even not a little. We grew up together, but we never talked about anything, we just lived there. As far as I was concerned, he was like a visitor. But not coming to visit me—coming to visit my parents, my sister, something like that. Now, this morning, seeing everything, this house where he lived, I know more about him than I knew from many years of youth spent side by side. Looking here, I wondered if I would find a certain print of a certain painting we had in our bedroom in those days. Yes, I know, it makes no sense that he would have it after all this time.
The Clown in Repose,
or some similar name. A clown with his eyes closed—Dead? Unconscious? Why closed? He had it on the wall above his bed for many years. It frightened me as a child. And the fact that the clown didn’t frighten Claude—that was frightening even more. And he stayed here so many years in this place, and he wasn’t frightened. I am frightened.” M. Bouquet sighed. “We’ve loaded the boxes, as you see. Thank you for packing so much for us. I’ll leave the furniture, and those kinds of things. Someone from the family will live here again sometime—when the Communists are finished. When you have defeated them. For now I’ll go on renting the house to your Ecumenical Council and”—He looked at Skip anew. “You’re not with the CIA or something like this, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Okay.” He laughed. “I’m not concerned!”

“No need to be.”

Skip had kept aside a few fragile items—let the brother take responsibility for packing them. M. Bouquet elected to leave the doctor’s delicate representation of the human ear, the porcelain bones. “They came so far to here. It’s pointless to take them back, it’s sad to take them. We must rescue the books and papers for the family library. Our sister makes it her passion. The papers, the papers. For her it’s our only legacy, but I say to her, Why must we have any legacy at all? Things are destroyed over and over, the good things and bad things. So many wars and storms on the earth. Destruction on top of destruction. What happened to Claude? Poof, exploded, nothing left. The same thing for all of us—ashes, dust, poof, that’s our legacy. No. I don’t take this one. It’s too breakable.” With his thick fingers the brother detached and examined each part—the outer ear with its Pavillon and Lobe, then the Conduit and Tympan and then the Labyrinthe Osseux with its Vestibule and Fenêtres, its Canaux semi-circulaire and the Nerf auditif, the Limaçon, the long tube of the Trompe d’eustache heading into the skull. Even the minute inner bones had been fashioned and labeled—the Marteau, Enclume, and Étrier—and the spongy-looking Cellules mastoïdiennes. “Ah! So small, so perfect, an antique—it comes from his school days, perhaps, I think. Claude took his certification in 1920 or 1921.” He said suddenly, “Do you know the tunnel where Claude was blown up? Have you seen it?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

“Avez-vous Français? Un peu?”

They switched to French, and the conversation quickly became trivial. Apparently this large, solid man enjoyed his frankest exchanges in a language in which he wasn’t facile enough to camouflage himself.

Sands encouraged M. Bouquet to stay until morning, but he seemed fearful of spending the night here, though the roads would be dangerous. Everything was in the van. He left as the dark fell.

Weeks earlier, M. Bouquet had sent a letter to the phony Ecumenical Council’s mail drop, naming this day of his arrival. In the meantime, Sands had grown attached to certain of the dead man’s texts—a few obscure quarterly magazines and dusty books—and he’d placed these in his footlockers, hidden them from the doctor’s relatives and heirs. The brother left without them.

And weeks later, Sands still worked to translate paragraphs the Doctor had underlined—bits of philosophy by French intellectuals Sands had never heard of, abstract passages that unaccountably inflamed him, one, for instance, from an article called “D’un Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras” by somebody named Antonin Artaud: