Tree of Smoke (84 page)
Authors: Denis Johnson
Tags: #Vietnam War, #Intelligence officers, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975, #Fiction, #War & Military, #Military, #Espionage, #History
“Once upon a time,” the letter began—
Dear Kathy Jones,
Dear Kathy.
Dearest Kathy,
The blood rushed into her extremities and her face as if she’d plunged them into hot water: the same feeling she’d had twenty minutes ago when the van had nearly mashed her.
Once upon a time there was a war.
She set down the letter. Looked out over the restaurant.
“Are you okay?”
She picked up the pages and folded them around the snapshot.
“Is it something bad?”
“Mom.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember Timothy?”
“What?”
“Do you remember Timothy? I mean very well?”
“Of course, yes,” Ginger said. “I think about him often. It changed me that I knew him. He made a difference. That’s what I was saying before. He really made a difference.”
“I don’t run into anybody who knew him. Not anymore.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about Timothy. I wrote you just afterward, but here we are in person, and—it’s been a while, I know, all these years, but…”
“Thank you.”
“He was a remarkable guy.”
“I have no memory of him.”
“Oh.”
“Memories used to come like beestings, ouch, out of nowhere, but now they don’t come. But sometimes I get such an urgent, this urgent—feeling.”
“I see…Or no, I don’t.”
“This fist just grabs me by the heart and yanks at me like a dog telling me, ‘Come on, come on’—”
“Well, I guess that’s, that’s—well—understandable, in a way. And—”
“I don’t know you well enough to talk like this, do I?”
“Kathy, no! I mean,
yes
—”
“Excuse me,” Kathy said.
“Sure. Sure. Sure.”
Making her way to the ladies’ room, she set her purse by one of the sinks and splashed water on her face—thanked God she didn’t use makeup. Looked in the mirror. A bit of graffiti on the tiles beside it in Magic Marker:
electric child
on
bad fun
The bathroom stank. In Vietnam the blood and offal had spilled everywhere, but it had all belonged to God, God’s impersonal filth. Here in the public bathroom she smelled the proceedings from other women, and it was foreign.
She locked herself in a stall and sat with the letter on her lap. To read it was the least she could do. With a sickness in her throat, she unfolded the pages.
April 1, 1983
Dear Kathy Jones,
Dear Kathy.
Dearest Kathy,
Once upon a time there was a war.
There was once a war in Asia that had among its tragedies the fact that it followed World War II, a modern war that had somehow managed to retain or revive some of the glories and romances of earlier wars. This Asian war however failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths.
Among the denizens to be twisted beyond recognition—even, or especially, beyond recognition by themselves, were a young Canadian widow and a young American man who alternately thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American.
That’s me. My name is William Benét. You knew me as Skip. We last met in Cao Quyen, South Vietnam. I still have the mustache.
After I left Vietnam I quit working for the giant-size criminals
I worked for in tI served when I knew you and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer. And the stakes are plain. You prosper until you’re caught. Then you lose everything.
So, what’s my line? This and that. Smuggling. Running guns and such. Once I stole an entire freighter
onceand sold it in China. A freighter. (Can’t tell you which city I sold it in, becausesomebodyOur dearly beloved illustrious Warden Shaffee probably reads my mail before it goes out.) Mostly running guns.
That’s what’s got me in the calaboose here in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a capital crime in Malaysia, designated such by the same government that buys arms from America. We’re all the same bunch but, like I say, from my end of the telescope the ethics are clearer. Or as x said to x, I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can’t remember who said it.
To make a long story short, since the days when you knew me as Benét I’ve lived under a dozen aliases, not one of them government-issued. I’ve led a life of fun and frolic, a real life of adventure, and I never expected it to last very long. When I go, which will be soon, I won’t be sorry, I won’t have regrets. Anyway, as my uncle used to say, an adventure isn’t actually any fun till it’s over. Or was it you who told me that? Anyway, this one’s over. Some of this that I’m saying is a bit of a false front, a bit of bravado, but it’s true for the most part. In fact, if this note ever reaches you, I’m sorry to inform you they’ve already
hung hangedhung me—hanged me? Somebody should decide once and for all, was he hung, or was he hanged?
I have a
wifecommon-law wife and three kids in Cebu City in the P.I. It’s just something that happened. I think she’d say the same thing. But I think I like the kids. They’re teenagers, sweet kids. Haven’t seen them for a while. Cebu City got a little too hot for me, in the law-enforcement sense of the word, and she wouldn’t move to Manila. Loves her extended family and all that, couldn’t leave them. Her name’s Cora Ng.
If you have any sense, your traveling days are long over, but if you happen to get down that way, stop in at the Ng Fine Store near the docks and ask for Cora and say hi.
The Warden tells me the Canadian Consul’s coming around today and I can pass along any letters for mailing. The Consul and I hate each other and I don’t actually let him visit me, but he has to stop around anyway, especially in “The Last Days” here, just to keep up appearances for the press. So I guess this letter goes out tomorrow, and this is hello and goodbye from (I hope I hope) an old friend.
They’ve had me here since August 12. Today is April 1, April Fool’s Day, an appropriate day to
put anend the long fiasco, but I’m scheduled actually for April 6. I waited this long to write so I wouldn’t have a lot of time to sit around wondering if I’d reached you, wondering if you’d answer.
Just had my supper. Now I’ll start a six-day fast and go to the gallows nourished only in my soul. So what was
mythe condemned’s last meal? Same as always, rice in some kind of fishy broth, and two breadrolls. Bon appetít!
Kathy, I believe I loved you. It never quite happened with anyone else. I take your memory with me. And I give you my thanks in return.
Love,
Skip
April 2
The Warden came by last night to convert me to Jesus and pick up my mail but I didn’t give him this letter. I guess I’ll wait a few days. I guess I hate
—Someone came into the bathroom. She recognized the voice of the old woman who’d sat at the next table.
“Did Eugene say what his son died of?”
“Eugene never had a son.”
“Heart attack?”
The stall two doors down banged open and closed.
Kathy looked at her watch. She was late. She put the pages in her purse and got up to go out past the old woman, who stood by the mirror with her head cocked and stared at the floor.
She went back and found Ginger and made her apologies and left.
She made for the Radisson Riverfront Hotel, the first door around the corner, and in the lobby looked around for the MacMillan Houses event. She gathered the function involved something for, or about, or by young women, for there were many present in the lobby—very young, twelve, thirteen, all of them pretty girls, explosive and giddy, heavily made-up as if for the stage, their imperfections made brazen by this accentuation of their beauty—knock-knees, low waists, blotchy thighs in short skirts, probably because they felt chilly.
Following the directions of a brass-plated sign by the elevators, she passed through the lobby and down a long hallway at whose ending, at a table, sat a woman with two shoe boxes. From the auditorium’s open double doors came the kindly, amplified drone of someone reading a speech from a page.
“Are you here for the MacMillan fashion show?”
“Good. I’m in the right place.”
“A to L, or M to Z?”
“I think I’m looking for Mrs. Rand. I’m supposed to speak.”
“Well—Mrs. Keogh is downstairs.”
“I don’t think I know Mrs. Keogh. I think I dealt with Mrs. Rand.”
“Mrs. Rand is at the podium.”
“Do you suppose I can go in and sit?”
The woman said, “Oh.” The idea seemed to strike her at the wrong angle. “There’ll be an intermission.”
“Or I can catch her at the intermission. I’ll just sit over here.” Except for the woman’s chair and table, the area was bare of furniture. “Or I’ll be in the lobby. I’ll try back in a few minutes.”
“If that’s all right. If you don’t mind. I’m sorry—”
“No,” she said, mortified, her face flaming, “I’m late. I’m very sorry.”
In the lobby she sat in a chair upholstered with brown leather and brass rivets and opened her purse.
April 2
The Warden came by last night to convert me to Jesus and pick up my mail, but I didn’t give him this letter. I guess I’ll wait a few days. I guess I hate to say goodbye. I didn’t convert to Jesus, either.
Once I thought I was Judas. But that’s not me at all. I’m the youth at Gethsemane, the one on the night they arrested Jesus, the sleazy guy who slipped out of his garment when the throng had hold of him, and “he fled from them naked.”
I think you’re interested in the concept of Hell. I remember you as something of an expert. Dante’s 9th circle of Hell is reserved for the treacherous—
To kindred
To country and cause
To guests
To lords & benefactors
I betrayed
My kindred out of allegiance to my lords
My lords out of allegiance to my country
My country out of allegiance to kindred
My crime was in thinking about these things. In convincing myself I could arbitrate among my own loyalties.
In the end out of shifting allegiances
I managed toI betrayed everything I believed.
I have to restrain myself from writing down every little thing. I feel I could take note of every little thought and describe every molecule of this cell and every moment of my life. And I have plenty of time. I have all day.
But a limited amount of paper, and maybe yourBut only so much paper, and only so much faith in your patience, so I’ll rein in my thoughts.
April 3
This morning they hanged, hung, or in other words strung up a guy, some leader of a Chinese gang. They do it right out in the courtyard here at the prison, Pudu Prison,
not far from downtown Kuala Lumpur, about a hundred yards from where I’m sitting, but I can’t see the rig from this cell. Cells across the gangway get the whole view. But condemned guys, no. They keep us on the other side of the building. If I chin myselfI canon the bars of my window I can see the roofs of houses across the street. The first time I get a look at the scaffold will be the last time.
There’s some whacking with a cane, that’s the preliminary punishment, but we don’t hear any hollering. Anyway I haven’t. The guy this morning was the fourth to be stretched since I got here last August. I suppose he had it coming, even the caning. These Chinese gangs are nasty, nasty and mean.
Maybe I’m covering up my fear. I don’t mean to sound flip. Or I do mean to, just out of nervousness, but I don’t want you to think I’m going to the noose with a flippant attitude. Three days from today, that’s it. I die. With an empty stomach. No last meal but an unbeliever’s prayer. If you still believe, Kathy, pray for me. Pray for me if you still believe.