Tree of Smoke (44 page)

“He buys weapons?”

“I sold him a forty-five.”

“You think he’d like a thirty-eight?”

“I bet he would.”

“I bet I know where he can get one.”

That afternoon, drunk, AWOL, flush with Vietnamese piasters on the smelly street—odor after odor and the hiss of frying gunk—James stopped at a shop and bought himself some imitation Levi’s denims and a red T-shirt and a shiny yellow tour jacket illustrated with a naked woman that said “Saigon 1968.” It was far too hot for such a jacket, but he wore it anyway because it put him in an excellent mood. He bought two packs of real U.S. Marlboros and got a haircut from a street barber—he’d never had his hair cut anywhere but at the big base, but he was drunk enough to try something different—and afterward purchased a pair of flimsy blue-black loafers. He changed in the street while people very carefully didn’t look at him, and carried his fatigues in a brown paper shopping bag with string handles.

He thought he’d better get sober before he went to see the sarge, and before he got sober he’d better get drunker. Around eleven that night he bartered with a cyclo driver to get him to a cheap hotel in the Cho Lon District, but somewhere en route they revolutionized the plan and instead traveled in the unsafe hours of darkness nearly sixty miles to the shores of the China Sea and to a whorehouse James had heard of called Frenchie’s, a place with its own legend. At two in the morning they reached it, a scattering of shacks near a fishing village. He woke up a papasan napping on the bartop in the café who understood a little English and could guess the rest, and who, when James asked, “Are you Frenchie?” said, “Frenchie coming,” but Frenchie didn’t come. No exterior lights. He heard no generator. Saw no girls anywhere. No other GIs. Nor anyone else at all. The melancholy old papasan led him by flash-light to a bungalow no better than a hooch in a row of several just like it. Somebody else’s pubic hairs dotted his bedding. He stripped off the sheet. The thin mattress was stained, but the stains looked less recent than the pubic hair. For this room, including a battery-powered bedside fan, he was paying about a dollar a night. He didn’t bother letting the net down. He didn’t see any mosquitoes.

In the glow of a kerosene lantern he found his clasp knife and almost cut away the legs of his fatigues; but thought better of it and shortened his fake Levi’s instead. By the time he turned in, his drunk had become a hangover.

He rose around noon and went to the sand-speckled café, where a woman served him an omelet, hot tea, and a small baguette. Then he told her to bring him the same thing all over again, only with a beer, no tea.

He wasn’t the only customer. A one-legged GI in cutoff jeans and rip-sleeved fatigue shirt, a towhead with sunburned flesh and aviator sunglasses, sat a couple tables away drinking beer and eating nothing, most of the time holding a nine-millimeter pistol with his thumb on the ejector button, dropping the butt of the clip into the palm of his hand and slapping it back in, ejecting it, slapping it back in.

“We all die,” he said. “I’ll die high.”

James didn’t like this at all and got up and left.

He headed for the low seawall and the rumbling shore. The beach was narrow and the sand was brown. He sat on the rock wall and smoked a cigarette and watched a drowned rooster rolling in the surf. This wasn’t the Frenchie’s everybody talked about. Everybody said Frenchie sold only 33 beer—that much seemed correct—and also Spanish Fly. Also girls—but they were peasants—but they were girls. And everybody said there were Old West–style gunfights out front almost every night. And said the cyclo drivers never went near there after dark, or their little machines would be commandeered for races up and down the beach and usually out into the sea.

The noise of a single gunshot stopped his thoughts, and he ran to the café to look at the disaster, but nothing had happened. The towheaded boy sat alone there.

“HEY EVERYBODY,” the boy cried, though nobody was around. “This guy thinks he’s figured out some shit!”

James stood in the entry and went no farther. He would have liked a beer, but the lady had run off.

“You want to play ‘Spin the Browning’?”

James said, “No.”

“You better get your shit-proof Playtex pants on, señor.”

James took the chair across from him and sat with his hands at his sides.

The boy stopped playing with the gun and scratched the puckered end of his stump with his fingers, then resumed ejecting the clip into his palm and slapping it back in. “Don’t sit at my table if you don’t want to play my game.”

He’d obliterated the name on his name tape, apparently with the burning end of a cigarette. Instead of dog tags, from a string around his neck hung a rusty-pointed can opener.

He set the gun before him on the table next to a pack of Parliaments and a Zippo lighter.

“You like these things? Parliaments?”

“Not much,” James said.

“More for me.”

He tapped out a cigarette, put it between his lips, and fired it up, using only his right hand for these proceedings, resting the left on top of the gun.

James told him, “I can’t watch this.”

“Fine. This ain’t the circus.”

“How do I get a ride out of your insane asylum?”

“Just start humping down the road.”

“I can’t walk to Saigon.”

The boy scratched his scalp with the gun’s muzzle. “No, man, no. First motherfucker who sees you, he’ll be right up your ass with his scooter. Or his cousin will.” He kept the gun pointed at his scalp.

“Put that sucker down, would you?”

“We all die, man.”

“Ain’t you even got a name?”

“Cadwallader.”

“What about just putting it down for a minute? Then I could have a beer with you.”

“I told you my real name. Big mistake.”

“Why is it a mistake?”

“People know your name,” he said, “and it hurts.”

“I realize you got tore up,” James said. “It’s the shits.”

The towheaded boy closed his eyes and sat without a twitch, breathing through his nostrils. “Oh, man,” he said after a long time, “all you zombies.”

The buzz of a two-stroke engine approached and stopped outside. Cadwallader lowered the pistol to the tabletop. “The French have arrived.”

In came a skinny man dressed in Scotch-plaid Bermuda shorts, zoris, and a long-sleeved shirt. A white man, blue-eyed and bald-headed. Pulled up a chair as if to sit, but hesitated, noticing the weapon.

“It’s for you,” he said, and set down a cardboard packet next to Cadwallader’s hand.

Cadwallader dropped his cigarette and let it burn on the floor. He stripped a side away from the packet and spilled a dozen or so large tablets onto the tabletop. He plunked four down the spout of his 33 beer, and the mixture began to foam. He toasted James. “Time for a change.”

James said, “Frenchie.”

“C’est moi.”

“You speak English?”

He shrugged disinterestedly.

“This motherfucker’s fixing to do himself harm.”

This time a complete body shrug—hands, shoulders, lifting himself on his toes—with a little grimace of the face.

“Why don’t we get us a couple of girls?” James suggested.

Cadwallader watched the tabs fizz and dissolve in his beer. “You can’t just paint everything with your mind to make it look like it makes sense.”

“Don’t pussy make sense no more?”

Frenchie swung his seat around, straddled it backward, and sat with his stringy legs sticking out and his forearms resting on the back of the chair.

Cadwallader floated his hand above his leg as if conjuring up the missing portion. “This is the only thing in the world I’ve ever seen that isn’t bullshit.”

“I hate to be the one telling you,” James ventured to say, “but that shit ain’t nothin’. There’s guys with a whole lot worse been done to them.”

“Here’s the explanation, Frenchie. We all die, right? Fuck you.” Cadwallader swirled his potion and drank it off in several pulls. He sat back and began cleaning under his fingernails with the pointed end of his church key. “Go ahead and go for that gun.”

The old man didn’t move. “Do you say I need a gun? Don’t you know I’m French? Our war is lost.”

“There’s only one happy ending, man. If I don’t blow this world away, then I’m a coward and a bullshitter.”

“Catch you later.” James got up slowly and with, he hoped, a harmless air.

“I didn’t hurt nobody. So don’t tell me about karma.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t even know what karma is.”

“You’re better off.”

“I’m going somewheres. I’m going for a swim. So if you end up doing something, there won’t be nobody here to care.”

“Frenchie’s here.”

“Frenchie don’t care,” James said, and went back down the path to sit on the seawall.

In only a couple of minutes the towheaded boy came after him. Having jammed the index finger of each hand into the mouth of a 33, he was able to carry two dangling bottles while humping on crutches. He stopped. Hung on his struts like a scarecrow, flicking drops from the mouth of one of his beers, with his thumb, directly into James’s face. “As the recipient of a Purple Heart I can fuck with you all I want, and it’s tough shit.”

“The fuck it is.”

“You can’t attack a pitiful cripple.”

“The fuck I can’t.”

“Hold these 33s for me.” He dropped the left crutch, and lowered himself down the other to sit on the sand before letting it fall.

James gave him back one beer and kept one.

“Peace and love, my fellow Americans.”

“All right, then. Peace and love.”

“I got all sideways.”

“It ain’t nothin’.”

“Sorry ’bout that, I guess.”

“Is your leg hurting you?”

“I can call you a dumb fuck for asking a dumb-fuck question, and you can’t do shit, because I’m crippled. You want some pills?”

“Not just now I don’t.”

“There’s thirty milligrams of codeine inside every one of these things.”

“I tried pot a few times…Hell, I been drunker’n that.”

“My invisible foot hurts.”

“What area is this?”

“We’re in Phan Thiet. Or Mui Ne.”

“I never seen boats like that before.”

“Those are dinghies. The real boats are out fishing.”

“They look like bowls for soup.”

“What are you? Absent without leave, missing in action, or deserter?”

“AWOL, some.”

“I’m a deserter.”

“I’m just AWOL. Anyways I think.”

“Thirty days and it’s desertion.”

“I ain’t up to thirty yet.”

“My leg deserted. So I followed the example. Cut out from China Beach.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“That smiley gung-ho physical therapy? Fuck no. I like to drink and cry and take pills.”

“I don’t need telling.”

“Yeah. Sorry ’bout that, GI. I got seized up in a mood.”

“So this is Phan Thiet, you think?”

“Yeah. Or Mui Ne.”

“And this is really the worl’ famous whorehouse? I heard this place jumped.”

“It’s been like this for the last two weeks. It don’t jump since the big push. The enemy triumphed over Frenchie.”

“Where’d everybody go?”

“Mostly people went back to their units, or somewhere else, I don’t know. You’re coming the other way.”

“I guess I am.”

“You bug out at the height of the action, boy, that’s desertion.”

“Why are you trying to convince me that I deserted?”

“I’m philosophizing, brother, not convincing. Hey, if they were shooting at me, I’d leave too—Wait! I already did!”

“I didn’t desert for that.”

“Then why?”

“I had to see a feller.”

“Who is it?”

“A guy supposed to be at Hospital Number Twelve over there.”

“So you cut out to go see him?—or you cut out so you don’t have to?”

“Yeah, funny. What’s your name again?”

“Cadwallader.”

“Don’t rag on me, Cadwallader. I got twice as many legs to kick with.”

“What am I gonna call you?”

“James.”

“Not Jim?”

“Never Jim.”

They finished the beers and flung the bottles into the surf.

James went among the coconut palms down the beach, Cadwallader following with great, three-legged strides while James turned upright one of the odd round boats—giant baskets six or seven feet across, of woven thatch and batten, coated with something like lacquer—and dragged it in heroic, lurching fits toward the surf. Little naked children came around to view the struggle. If there were any grown-up people in the hooches beyond the palms, they didn’t show themselves.

He stopped for breath, still many yards from the water. “Where’s your mighty weapon at?”

Cadwallader pulled up his shirtfront. The gun butt protruded above his waistband.

“If you’re riding with me, it’s liable to get wet. ’Cause I’m liable to sink us.”

“Lift up that boat over there.”

James raised the edge of another of the overturned boats, and Cadwallader wrapped the gun and his cigarettes and lighter in his shirt and tossed it under. James did the same with his Marlboros and in one last explosion of effort got the craft out into the waves.

Up to his chest in the mild surf, Cadwallader laid his crutches in the boat and clambered aboard. The craft had one paddle. “Rock and roll!” cried Cadwallader while James nearly capsized them. “If we get in the wrong current we’ll never see land again. Do you care?”

James tried paddling on alternate sides. He didn’t know where to stand, or whether to stand at all in this rocking hemisphere. “This ain’t working. How do they make these things go?”

“Gimme that paddle. I’m a sailor in my blood.”

The children stood on the shore and watched the boat drift away. Goats bleated in the coconut grove. Soon James heard nothing but the surf behind them. Beyond the shore the grove, beyond the grove the hooches of thatch and straw…They go up like matchheads, he thought.

“We’re lost at sea!” Cadwallader cried. “My head is
swimming
from the
symbolism
of it.”

“You remind me of my little brother.”

“Why—what about him?”

“I can’t put my finger right on it. You just do.”