Tree of Smoke (43 page)

“What’s this, now—no cigars?”

“Some days they taste a little scummy. You still don’t smoke.”

“No.”

“Don’t start.” He smoked. “It’s a war, Skip.”

“I understand.”

Skip got up and wandered around the place. He looked into the vague interior of the Bar Jolly Blue. Standing in the doorway he could feel it was ten degrees hotter inside. It was empty except for three girls and the mamasan behind the plywood bar, who called, “Yes, sir, you want beer?”

“I’m hungry.”

“You want soup?”

“Soup and a baguette, thanks.”

“I bring you. You sit down.”

“Let me introduce you myself,” one of the girls said, but he turned away without answering.

He went around to the concrete trough looking out on a dark plain of elephant grass behind the sex rooms. He pissed, washed his face from the spigot at the cistern, retucked his sweaty shirt, told himself: It’s a war, Skip. Vanquish fear.

He made his way back to his comrades.

At their table the colonel was telling Storm, “Eggs were hard to come by. We pooled things like that, eggs and any meat we’d trapped, and the docs, the medical people, such as we had, the docs decided who ate what from the food store. We caught dogs, monkeys, rats, birds. We had a few chickens cooped up.” He said to Skip, “I’m telling him what Anders Pitchfork did for me in the prison camp. I was sick, and Anders fed me a hard-boiled egg. Anders was allowed an egg every day because he was on a hard detail and needed the protein. And he gave one to me because I was laid out sick. And I didn’t say pish posh, no thanks—I gobbled that egg down quick before he changed his mind. If Anders Pitchfork walked in here and asked me to cut off my hand for him right now, I wouldn’t hesitate. My severed hand would lie here on this table. That’s what war gives you. A family deeper than blood. Then you go back to peacetime, and what do you get?—backstabbing enemies in the office down the hall. Guys like Johnny Brewster. Brewster is a thoroughgoing asshole, and he’s permanently pissed off at me. Do you know him, Skip?”

“Not personally. What did you do to piss him off?”

“The question is, what did Brewster do to me? Got me stuck behind a desk almost six months last year and answering a lot of questions. They tried to make it look like some sort of health inquiry. But I knew what it was about.”

“And what was it? Not the business in the Philippines?”

“Hell, no. About Cao Phuc. About my helicopter, about my platoon. And I put him on his ass, and do you know what? The questions stopped. The interlude was over, and I was back here again.”

“Put him on his ass, did you say?”

“Last June,” said the colonel, “I knocked him out.”

“What?”

“You heard right. I invited him to play handball. We suited up in the locker room, we stepped onto a court, and I walked over and I socked him on the chin. Ask any boxer: you don’t want to take a blow to the point of the chin. The first thing they teach you is—tuck your chin. I laid him out, sir, and I don’t regret it, because he’s a slimy, oily, politicking—have you got a thesaurus? I’d have to hunt through a thesaurus to give you Brewster’s full description.”

“I never heard anything about this.”

“I don’t know that he ever told anyone. How could he? No way of putting a good face on it, running to the brass and whining that he got his ass kicked.”

“Have you ever arm-wrestled this old thug?” Storm asked.

“No,” Skip said.

“I didn’t hurt the SOB. Johnny Brewster’s a strong and agile man. He parachuted into northern France for the OSS. But he spent too much time with the Resistance, and they turned him pink. Made him a leftist sympathizer. And he’s an elitest. Wants to get rid of us old thugs. The war shook quite a few of us toads in amongst the goldfish, and they’d like to get us sorted out.”

He signaled to Hao, who sat in the Chevy three yards away with the radio on and the door open. “Hao, Hao. Come on.” Skip saw by the way his uncle cocked his head and waved his fingers that he was drunk now. “Do you need anything? When was the last time you ate? Sit down, buddy, sit down.”

“I can get something in the bar.”

“Sit down, we’ll get you something, sit down.”

Hao sat down and the colonel waved at the mamasan and said, “Actually, I don’t play handball. Those noisy acoustics, and the ball whacking and the rubber shoes squeaking—never play it. It’s harder on your ears than the target range. It’s as deafening as artillery.” The mamasan approached and he said, “Get him something to eat. What can we get you, Hao? What are you hungry for?”

“I will talk to her.” Hao rose and walked off toward the barroom with the mamasan.

“John Brewster,” the colonel said, “wears socks with clocks on them and thinks Washington, DC, is slightly bigger than the universe. What are they going to do to me? Fire me? Jail me? Kill me? Will, young Will, you know something of my history. What can they do to me now? I was a prisoner of the Japanese. What is there left in human experience that they can hope or expect to scare me with?”

The mamasan came over with four bowls of soup and a plate of baguettes on a tray. The colonel tore a baguette in half and said, “I tell you this sincerely: there’d better not be a man at this table who in any way fears death.”

“Hear, hear,” Skip said.

“It’s all death anyway,” Storm said.

“Oh, I forgot,” the colonel said with a mouthful of baguette, “Mr. Jimmy thinks he’s a samurai.”

“I’m just moving through the motions, Papasan. Death is the basic condition.”

“What do you know about it really?”

“No. No. The universe had to come from somewhere, right? Wrong. It had to come from nowhere. The Big Nothing.”

“Mr. Jimmy follows the Buddha.”

“I follow a completely different mode of Buddhism.”

“Mr. Sergeant Jimmy studies the Tibetan.”

“I study the knowledge of the moves after death. The realm of the Bardo. What to do at each part of the journey after you die. It’s full of wrong turns leading back here, man. Back to Planet E. I’m not coming back. It’s a shit-hole.”

“It’s a shit-hole with fireworks,” the colonel said.

“Come back if you want. But don’t expect your current rank.”

That his uncle would tolerate, even celebrate this fool.

“You tried some meditation over in Cao Phuc—at the temple, didn’t you, Colonel?”

The colonel squinted at Storm as if trying to summon an answer and after a considerable pause said, “I don’t play handball. Although it’s an ancient game. Sport. Pastime.” He sat back comfortably. “Venerable Irish pastime. Came from Ireland. Came over from Ireland.” His head nodded forward, and he was deeply asleep.

In this way began the Year of the Monkey.

K
athy traveled to Saigon to seek help from anyone she could, starting with Colin Rappaport at World Children’s Services. Vietcong and even stray NVA regulars marauded in the Sa Dec area, the Americans and ARVN had grown ruthless and undiscriminating in the pursuit, supplies weren’t getting to the Bao Dai Orphanage, soon it would all be impossible.

The American helicopters strafed anything moving on the rivers. To reach the road to Saigon she pedaled her bike along the paths by the canals, hard going, not muddy, but unresisting, slowing the tires—how pliant this land, how rich and soft, how deceptive—and out onto the dikes, in the open. A wind came rolling over the paddies and sunlight moved in the green shoots like a thrill under the flesh.

She waited in a dirt-floor café. Tin-roofed, straw-paneled. Sat at a table drinking hot tea from a tin can, awaiting transport across a river about a hundred feet wide. At her feet a little kid played with a bright green grasshopper half the length of his arm. She left the bicycle with the café family, who told her no helicopters had shown in the area since early morning. A sampan woman wearing pale violet formal-gown gloves and a pink face-cloth ferried her across. On the other side lay houses and gardens…A girl in a beautiful dress in a tiny plot of graves, prostrate on one of the tombs in the dappled shade…Kathy caught a lift with a farmer in a three-wheeled truck bearing old rice sacks full of duck feathers toward Saigon. A few miles southeast of the city their ways parted and he let her out.

She wore a calf-length skirt, sandals, no stockings. Sitting in a thatched teahouse beside Highway Seven she felt the sweat running from the crooks of her knees down her calves. She opened her knapsack and took out her Bible to read, but it was already too dark. She held it in her lap, flicking at the bookmark with her finger. Somewhere in the Psalms it said: Against You, You only have I sinned. For a few minutes as the explosions came particularly close the night of Tet she’d felt all pride crushed, all knowledge stopped, all desire, had existed only as naked, abject subjugation. Her sin had seemed small, her salvation or damnation seemed small.

Night came. A man set out red chairs in front of the teahouse.

She took a cyclo into the city. She stayed at a hostel of sorts across from the green-shuttered Jamia Mosque on Dong Du Street. She lay on a cot for half an hour but couldn’t sleep.

She went walking. It was nearly eleven. As she waded through the traffic, a cyclist bearing on his shoulder a three-meter-long sheaf of lumber seemed about to make a turn and possibly knock her head off with the ends of his boards. She stepped backward and was almost run down by a U.S. jeep—they called them “Mutts”—the tires screeched, and one wheel went up over the curb. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” said the wild-faced young infantryman driving.—So; nearly dead. She didn’t care.

She walked down a red-lit alley. In a window—a soldier slapping his woman while a child up on its knees on the mattress howled out of a face like a fist…

Through the doorway of a tavern—a couple of sad-drunk infantrymen dancing in the jukebox glow, each alone, chins down, fingers popping, shoulders working, heads bobbing, trudging like carriage horses toward some solitary destiny. She stopped to watch them. In the songs on jukeboxes or on radios tuned to AFVN she often heard God calling out to her—“Love me with all your heart”—“This guy’s in love with you”—“All you need is love”—but tonight the voice sang only to the soldiers, and its message didn’t reach the street.

She passed a recruit with his head hanging, one hand guiding his stream against the wall. He raised acid-bright eyes to her and said, “I been pissing for a thousand years.” His friend beside him was bent over puking. “Don’t mind me, ma’am,” he said, “I’m high on life.”

The Vietnamese were restful to her eyes. She had no background with them. The American soldiers seemed far too much like Canadians—pulling her heart out in an undertow of joy and sorrow, guilt, anger, and affection. She watched the broad backs of these two as they tottered away from her.

They threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans.

The next morning in the offices of the World Children’s Services Colin Rappaport said to her, “Kathy. Please. Let me find you a bed in one of the hospitals.”

“This isn’t the conversation I came here to have.”

“Do you realize the shape you’re in? You’re exhausted.”

“But if I don’t feel tired, it doesn’t count.”

“But you realize.”

“I realize,” she said, “but I don’t feel tired.”

A
t the start of February, James Houston, in his dirty jungle fatigues, caught a ride with a water truck from Good Luck Mountain down to Highway Thirteen and then with a jeep into Saigon. He could have stopped—had meant to stop—at the big base to look in on Sergeant Harmon at the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital. But the boys in the truck were heading all the way, and he simply stayed aboard.

The sarge, very soon, as soon as they got him to the point he could be moved without killing him, would be taken to Japan. If James wanted to visit him, he’d better do it now. This according to Black Man. According to Black Man the sarge was seriously hurt, hurt permanently. Something big and possibly from their own side had hit him from close range, hit him square in the belly, above his pelvis, and Black Man had promised James he wouldn’t like what he’d see.

From a vendor on Thi Sach Street James bought a stick of chewing gum and a fake Marlboro cigarette. His second tour had entered its third day. He was sober, AWOL, and virtually broke.

James’s two friends Fisher and Evans had shipped out the day before. Tall, chip-toothed Fisher had shaken James’s hand and said, “Remember our first night here?”

“The Floor Show.”

“Remember the Floor Show?”

“I sure do.”

“Remember that first time getting laid at the Purple Bar?”

“I sure do.”

“When the world ends, and Jesus comes down in a cloud of glory and all that shit, it’ll be the second most incredible thing that ever happened to me. Because I will remember that night at the Purple Bar.”

They embraced one another, and James put all his concentration into damming back the tears. They all swore to meet again. James assumed they never would.

In the Cozy Bar on Thi Sach James bummed another cigarette from an airman who revealed he was a Cherokee Indian and the descendant of chiefs and who refused James a second cigarette and seemed on the brink of ditching him until James, finally taking the stool beside him, rearranged the gun under his shirt, at which point the airman said, “What’s that there?”

“It’s for tunnels.”

“For tunnels?”

“Thirty-eight automatic. Got me a suppressor back at camp.”

“Do you mean like a silencer?”

“Yep. Christ almighty—what smells like gasoline in here?”

“I pump jet fuel all day long.”

“Is it you?”

“I don’t smell it no more myself.”

“Whoo. You’re making me dizzy. Buy me a beer, would you, please?”

“No can do. You know, there’s a jeweler right on Thi Sach. I sold him a forty-five this morning.”