Tree of Smoke (49 page)

He was fast, precise, devoted. It took him two days to catch up to the time zone, and on the morning of the third he sprang awake, looked around with clear eyes, and demanded to have brought before him any material and personnel that might enlarge his understanding of the local VC tunnels. This came down to a few of the guys and a couple of wrinkled drawings the Cowboy Corporal had made for the old, the previous, the former, the Screwy Loot.

Screwy Loot, it was said, had gone to Tan Son Nhut, hitched a ride on a MAC flight to Honolulu, and melted away into the gigantic heaven of stateside.

Cherry Loot spent a morning in his Quonset hut with the Cowboy Corporal’s drawings spread out on the collapsible table serving as his desk. He demanded creative input from his sergeant. “Isn’t there some radar or sonar we can use to deal effectively with this shit? I mean, we only want to know where these tunnels are located. We don’t have to crawl around inside to figure that out, do we? Are we bugs or snakes or some shit like that? Or are we upright rational humans on two legs with brains so we can attack this problem?”

“I don’t think we really have to do this, sir.”

“What?”

“I don’t think we actually have to map these holes.”

“I’m under express orders to accomplish this. It’s our whole purpose for being here. Otherwise you know what we do? We get down along Route One and breathe some stuff’s gonna kill us. That’s the alternative assignment. Clouds of God-knows-what that’s gonna fuse up your lungs and no doubt sterilize your balls.”

“Express orders, sir, I mean, sir, do you mean written?”

“I mean they are clearly expressed inside my mind as I interpret them. Do you want me to hassle somebody to clarify in writing? Because ROTC didn’t teach me fuck-your-mother about how to survive one day in this shit but they did teach me not to go yanking the coat of my superiors or catch their attention in any way.”

“I encourage you to make that policy, sir,” Burke said. “But there’s squads they call them tunnel rats will go down in there for you. I can check if they can get assigned over here.”

“We’re under Psy Ops–CIA till September first, then there’s a chance we all go home. I’m saying a chance.”

“Sir. Consensus is that Colonel F.X. has ripped his stitches.”

“Leave it alone. You don’t know the history of this thing.”

Cherry Loot paced the camp hatless under the smoldering clouds of noon. He seemed profoundly afraid, but not of the war or of his responsibilities in it. Of something bigger. Cosmically worried.

Echo found very irritating the difference in the way litter was handled by Screwy Loot and by Cherry Loot. Screwy had just let the trash scatter itself around until the sergeant, at first Harmon and then Ames and finally Sergeant Burke, hustled them to police the area, but Cherry wants it done by the clock, everything tick-tock, wants it all relentlessly squared away. In a number of ways the Cherry Loot was screwier than the Screwy Loot. Screwy Loot hadn’t been entirely irrational about garbage. Just extremely twitchy about all else.

B
lack Man was snapping his fingers, wrinkling his face, squinting his eyes, then popping them wide—all ripped up over whatever he was trying to get across even as James was still approaching the Cherry Loot’s Quonset hut—saying to James:

“And you go up against Mr. Charlie, right into him, right
through
each other, and you swap yourselves and it ain’t you coming up here with us, man, with your buddies. It’s him. And it ain’t him coming up over there and getting with the other Charlies, squatting down and shovel that sticky rice up into their face, man, it ain’t him. It’s you. Oh, they just mickey mousing us every which goddamn way.”

“Black Man.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“It’s me.”

“Oh. Oh. Shit, yes. Yes, it is. You going in to see the new boy?”

“Looks like it.”

Black Man chewed his lips nonstop today. “He’s cherry but he act like he don’t know it.”

James said, “How’s it going?”

“Okay. Okay. One or two demons have quit eating me.”

James hadn’t seen Black Man in a long time. Since Tet.

“I thought you were gone.”

“It wasn’t nothing. All that blood turned out to be from one little vein or something. Shit. Didn’t you hear I was dead almost?”

“You got hit?”

“No. I got cut over there at the Tu Do Bar. Nigger followed me in the john.”

“You got in a
knife
fight?”

“Muhfucker broke a bottle and jabbed my shoulder right here while I was pissing.”

“You get a Purple Heart for that shit?”

“Almost ate it for my muhfucking country, now I’m back here smelling you. And you stink.”

“I didn’t know nothing about it.”

Black Man’s eyeballs were shaking in his head.

James said, “I saw the sarge. Remember Sergeant Harmon? Staff Sergeant Harmon?”

“Yeah. Harmon. Sarge. Yeah. You saw him? Just now?”

“No. Right after.”

“Right after the bad thing?”

“Yeah,” James said.

They stood in the parallelogram of shade on the Quonset hut’s eastern side. James sat down and leaned back against the wall, but Black Man couldn’t sit.

“Hey, man. Tell me your name.”

“You dreamin’!”

“Please tell me at least your first name.”

“Charles. Charles Blackman.”

“Blackman?”

“That’s what I mean. That shit right there. Name like that.”

“Gah-damn. Name like that.”

“You going in to see the New Loot?”

“I guess.”

“He got some moves, baby.”

“Yeah, he’s a little ball of fire.”

“Yeah. Ball of fire.”

“Charles Blackman.”

“See?”

“I guess there’s white guys named Whiteman.”

“Yeah, yeah. But I don’t hear the laughter, you dig?”

James said, “I’m laughing at you, but you’re making me kind of sad.”

The door banged. The little sergeant from Psy Ops strode from the Quonset hut and sat down facing James like an Indian at a powwow and said, “Another perfect day. Whether we know it or not.”

“I don’t think so.”

The sergeant read James’s name tape and said, “So—Houston, J. What’s the
J
for—jerk-off? I’m just kidding. Sorry. I’m an idiot this morning again oh shit. And I bet you never been to Houston.”

“Nope. I’m from Phoenix.”

“It’s hot there. What’s the
J
for?”

“James.”

“They call you Jimmy?”

“Sometimes, but I tell them don’t.”

“They call me Jimmy. But don’t call me James. I like Jimmy. Don’t ever call me James. Let’s keep it loose. It’s hot in Phoenix. It breaks a hundred there. One-oh-two, one-oh-three, one-oh-four.”

“You that guy from Psy Ops?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

“What.”

James just shook his head.

Jimmy lay back and pulled his cap down over his face. “It’s hot here too. Vee-yet Nam. It means ‘permanent sweat’ in their fucked-up language.”

Once again the door banged. A guy came out and walked off toward the latrines without greeting them. Storm hopped upright. “Phoenix Houston’s turn.”

He followed James in and stood beside Sergeant Burke and said not a word while the Cherry Loot took his turn.

“Corporal Cowboy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t get around to you?”

“Matter of fact, sir—”

“I saved the worst for the last.”

James looked around for a chair, but Cherry Loot had the only one in the room.

“We got sixty-six days left on this thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Before we have to break this thing down and we all go back to the regular Twenty-fifth Infantry.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We had ninety days and we’ve wasted twenty-four out of ninety. Speaking of which,” the lieutenant said, “you were AWOL twenty-one days last February. I know your history. Where were you—demonstrating at the Democratic Convention?”

“The who?”

“The Democratic National Convention?”

Sergeant Burke said, “Sir, the Democratic Convention was last week.”

“Where’d you run to, Corporal?”

“I was on a special assignment.”

“No. You were drunk and running, and the colonel fixed it with my predecessor. Say yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant looked at the sergeant from Psy Ops as if expecting comment. None came. The lieutenant said, “We want focus, which means we want mission, which means we want goals. Otherwise we get pulled and sent thirty kliks over that way, to the most horrible place on earth. Have you seen that wasteland along Route One?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our mission is mapping the local tunnels. You’re the one jumped down in there.”

“Me?” James said.

“You went in there.”

“Just to sort of, you know,” James said, “sir.”

“Well, what’s your report?”

“I don’t know. Like what?”

“What did you see?”

“Just tunnels.”

“What about it? Tell me something.”

“The walls are very smooth.”

“What else?”

“It’s small in there. You can’t stand up.”

“You have to crawl?”

“Not exactly crawl. Just stay bent over is all.”

“You must be insane,” the Cherry Loot said.

“No argument there, sir,” James said.

“I’d like to put you back in those tunnels. Get those suckers mapped in detail. Not these raggedy drawings. You kind of like it down there, don’t you?”

“It ain’t exactly that.”

“Well, no, shit no, nothing ain’t exactly nothing no more. But you kind of like it down there.”

“You can go ahead and volunteer me if it gets you all hard,” James said.

“Look, sojer, I want to create an environment about two-by-two kliks that I know every single thing inside it that lives and breathes.”

“You know, there ain’t but six tunnels around here. I been in them all and they don’t go nowhere. The real tunnels are north of here. Northwest.”

“Don’t tell me that. You take away my reason for living.”

“I want reimbursement for my kit.”

“Your kit, is it.”

“I paid two-eighty-five for the gun and the silencer and the headlight. Seems like I should’ve been issued one, but if I’d waited on the army I’d still be waiting this minute.”

“You mean two hundred and eighty-five dollars?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s that on your hip?”

“Hi-Power.”

“Where’s your .380 for tunnels, then?”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“Is it? Is there anything not kind of complicated in this fuck-a-monkey show?”

“Never happen.”

“Two-eight-five?”

“Thereabouts.”

“If I could put in for actual cash money, I’d get a whole bunch for myself. I can put in for a tunnel kit, maybe. That much seems reasonable.”

“Put in for one, then. I can sell it and break even.”

“Are you going to make me an accessory to black marketeering now?”

“Just thinking out loud is all.”

“I can’t have people thinking. I can’t have it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Meantime for sixty-six more days you hit the ground running every day and all day you bust hump for Echo Platoon. No leave no furlough no beer at the Purple Bar say yes sir.”

“Yes sir.”

“Dis-missed up and at ’em rocknroll.”

James turned to go.

“All right. Wait.”

“Yes, sir.”

“After I chew you up for sixty-six days, what’s your plan?”

“I’m over to Nha Trang for Lurps.”

“No shit. The recondo school? That’s on-the-job training, man.”

“I know it.”

“You know who they do their training maneuvers against?”

“Yeah.”

“The NVA Seventeenth Division. They just put you on patrol and see who eats who.”

The little Psy Ops sergeant laughed happily. “You fuck up in training you’ll be dead, and mushrooms,” he said, “will be growing outa your ass.”

“Shut up, Sergeant—please. Corporal, this your second tour?”

“It is.”

“They’re gonna make you do your third.”

“Fine with me.”

“Dismissed,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck. Dismissed.”

H
e woke in the late afternoon to the quarreling of birds. Gave himself a sponge bath of water and, for its cooling effect, rubbing alcohol at the bowl in the upstairs bathroom. Put on his army surplus bathing trunks and zoris and went downstairs. “Mr. Skip, it is tea?” Mr. Tho said in English. “S’il vous plait,” he said. He sat at the desk and went to work on the passages of text even before his tea had arrived or his head had cleared of dreams, for he’d often found this a favorable state in which to come by the meaning of a foreign phrasing, to catch its glimmer. He kept the lamps off and worked in a kind of twilight. During pauses he peered at the porcelain model of the human ear, running his finger along the delicate Labyrinthe membraneux—the Utricule and Saccule, the Canal endolymphatique and Nerf vestibulaire, the Ganglion de scarpa and Ganglion spinal de corti—and

“Incredible as it may seem,” Sands had rendered it, “the Tarahumara Indians live as if they were already dead…”

Each afternoon he followed a long nap with this game of translation, while outdoors the birds continued, some insistent, others probing, interrogatory, grandly ecstatic, troubled—more intelligible, at least in their intent, than the mysterious song of M. Artaud: