Tree of Smoke (19 page)

“It didn’t hurt him, I suppose.”

“He called today.”

“He called? What did he say?”

“Nothing. He’s in Honolulu.”

“I’ve never seen a dime from him. Not that I’d ever ask it.”

“If I get in the army, I’ll send you some.”

“Once or twice he sent some money. Not regular. He hasn’t lately. And I can’t ask him because my pride strangles me.”

“I’ll send some every payday. I swear,” James said.

“You decide that on your own.”

“Does that mean you’d sign for me?”

She didn’t answer.

He picked up a fork and started eating sliced tomato. “You send me the envelope every month, I’ll send you some money back inside it.”

“Did you talk to the recruiters yet?”

“I will.”

“When?”

“I will.”

“Will when?”

“Monday.”

“If you have the papers Monday night, and you can show me some good reasons for the service, I might sign. But if you’re just dreaming, then Tuesday you better wake up and get over to the ranch with me. I’ve got the phone back on, but the rent is waiting on the Lord to move. Where’s Burris?”

“He’ll come when he’s hungry.”

“He’s always hungry,” she said, and began to say all over again the same things she’d just told him, because she was unable not to say them.

His mother was unable to be quiet. She read the Bible all the time. She was too old to be his mother, too worn out and stupid to be his mother.

B
ill Houston thoroughly enjoyed beer, but there came a point where it started to stick in his throat. This tavern must face west, because the burning sun poured through the open door. No air-conditioning, but he was used to that in the places he drank in. It was a dive, all right.

He returned from the toilet, and Kinney was still interrogating the beach bum: “What did you do? Tell me exactly what you did.”

“Nothing. Fuck it.”

Bill Houston sat down and said, “I got nothing against you boys. Got a little brother wants to go in the Marines.”

The ex-marine was drunk. “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.”

“He’s talking like he did something to some woman over there,” Kinney said.

“Where?” Houston said.

“Vietnam, goddamn it,” Kinney said. “Aren’t you listening?”

“I’ve seen some things,” the boy said. “What it was, they held this woman down and this one guy cut her pussy out. That stuff happens there all the time.”

“Jesus God. No shit?”

“I did some of it too.”

“You
did
it?”

“I was there.”

Houston said, “You really”—He couldn’t quite repeat it—“you really did that?”

Kinney said, “You cut up some bitch’s cunt?”

“I was right there when it happened. Right nearby, right in the same—almost in the same village.”

“It was your guys? Your outfit? Somebody in your platoon?”

“Not ours. It was some Korean guys, a Korean outfit. Those fuckers are senseless.”

“Now shut the fuck up,” Kinney said, “and tell us what the fuck you did.”

“There’s a lot of bad business that goes on,” the man said.

“You’re bullshit. The U.S. Marines would never put up with that. You’re so bullshit.”

The guy held up both hands like an arrestee. “Hey, wow, man—what’s all the excitement about?”

“Just tell me you cut up a living woman, and I’ll admit you’re not bullshit.”

The bartender shouted, “You! I told you before! You want beef? You want scrap?”—a big fat Hawaiian with no shirt on.

“This is a Moke right here,” their companion said as the bartender threw down his rag and came over.

“I told you to get out of here.”

“That was yesterday.”

“I told you to get out of here with that talk. That means I don’t want to see you yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

“Hey, I got a beer here.”

“Take it with you, I don’t care.”

Kinney stood up. “Let’s get the fuck out of this shit-hole Moke joint.” He put his hand up under his shirt at the level of his belt.

“You pull a gun in here you gonna do time, if I don’t kill you.”

“I get mad easy on a hot day.”

“Get out, you three.”

“You making me mad?”

The young bum laughed insanely and hopped backward toward the door, dangling his arms like a monkey’s.

Houston hurried for the exit too, saying, “Come on, come on, come on!” He was pretty sure he’d actually seen a gun butt in the waist of Kinney’s jeans.

“See—that’s a Moke, right there,” the bum said. “They act all rough and tough. You get an advantage on them, and right away they cry like little babies.”

They each bought a jug of Mad Dog 20/20 from a grocer who demanded they buy three loaves of Wonder Bread along with the wine, but it was still a bargain. They ate a little of the bread and tossed the rest to a couple of dogs. Soon they walked, drunk, surrounded by a pack of hungry strays, toward a glaring white strip of beach and the black sea and blue froth crashing on the sand.

A man stopped his car, a white, official-looking Ford Galaxie, and rolled down his window. He was an admiral in uniform. “Are you fellas enjoying the hell out of yourselves?”

“Yes, sir!” Kinney said, saluting by putting his middle finger to his eyebrow.

“I hope like hell you are,” the admiral said. “Because hard times are coming for assholes like you.” He rolled up his window and drove away.

The rest of the afternoon they spent drinking on the beach. Kinney sat against the trunk of a palm tree. The bum lay flat on his back with his Mad Dog balanced on his chest.

Houston took off his shoes and socks to feel the sand mounding under his arches. He felt his heart expanding. At this moment he understood the phrase “tropical paradise.”

He told his two comrades, “What I’m saying, I mean, about these Mokes. I think they’re related to the Indians that live down around my home. And not just them Indians, but also Indians that are from India, and every other kind of person you can think of who’s like that, who’s got something Oriental going on, and that’s why I think, really, there ain’t that many different kinds of people on this earth. And that’s why I’m against war…” He waved his Mad Dog around. “And that’s why I’m a pacifist.” It was wonderful to stand on the beach before this audience and gesture with a half gallon of wine and talk utter shit.

However, Kinney did disturbing things. With a dreamy look on his face he tipped his bottle above his shiny black dress shoes and watched the wine dribble onto the toes. He tossed several pinches of sand in the bum’s direction, speckling the bum’s chest, his face, his mouth. The bum brushed it away and pretended not to realize where it was coming from.

Kinney suggested taking the party to a friend’s house. “I want you to meet this guy,” he told the bum, “and then we’re gonna fix your bull-shit.”

“Fine with me, asshole,” the bum said.

Kinney held up his thumb and forefinger pressed together. “I’d like to get you in a space about that big,” he said.

They headed across the beach to find the house of Kinney’s friend. Houston was in agony, dealing with bare feet on the hot sand, and now on the black asphalt.

“Where are your shoes, you moron?”

Houston carried his white socks in the pockets of his Levi’s, but his shoes were gone.

He stopped to purchase a seventeen-cent pair of zoris at a store. They had a sale on Thunderbird, but Kinney said his friend owed him money and promised to take them on the town later on.

Houston had loved those ivory-white bucks. To keep them white he’d powdered them with talc. And now? Abandoned to the tide.

“Is this a military base?” he asked. They were in some kind of development of cheap little pink and blue dwellings.

“These are bungalows,” the bum said.

“Hey,” Houston said to their companion. “What is your name, man?”

“I’ll never tell,” the bum said.

“He’s totally full of bullshit,” Kinney said.

Maybe these bungalows seemed a bit slummy, but not compared to what Houston had seen in Southeast Asia. A mist of white sand covered the asphalt walkways, and as the three of them strode among the coconut palms he heard the surf thunder in the distance. He’d passed through Honolulu several times, and he liked it a lot. It simmered and stank as much as any other tropical place, but it was part of the United States, and things were in good repair.

Kinney checked the numbers above the doorways. “This is my buddy’s house. Let’s go around back.”

Houston said, “Why don’t we just ring the doorbell?”

“I don’t want to ring the doorbell. Do you want to ring the doorbell?”

“Well, no, man. He ain’t my friend.”

They followed Kinney around the building.

At one of the back windows, where a light shone, Kinney stood on tiptoe and peered inside, then he pressed himself against the trunk of a palm tree beside the wall and said to the beach bum, “Do me a favor, tap on the screen.”

“Why should I?”

“I intend to surprise this guy.”

“What for?”

“Just do it, will you? This guy owes me money, and I want to surprise him about it.”

The bum scratched his fingernails along the window screen. The light went off within. A man’s face hovered in the window frame, barely visible behind the screen. “What’s the story, mister?”

Kinney said, “Greg.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, hey, man—Kinney.”

“Yeah, that’s right, it’s me. You got the two-sixty?”

“I didn’t see you there, man.”

“You got my two-sixty?”

“You just back on the island? Where you been?”

“I want my two-sixty.”

“Shit, man. I have a phone. Why didn’t you call?”

“I wrote you we’d be pulling in the first week in June. What do you think this is? It’s the first week in June. And I want my money.”

“Shit, man. I don’t have all of it.”

“How much you got, Greg?”

“Shit, man. I can probably get some of it.”

Kinney said, “You are a lying piece of genuine shit.”

From his waistband he pulled a blue .45 automatic and aimed it at the man, and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared. Right at that time Houston heard an explosion. He tried to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.

“Come on, come
on
,” Kinney said.

There was a hole through the window screen.

“Houston!”

“What?”

“We’re done. We’re going.”

“We are?”

Houston couldn’t feel his own feet. He moved along as if on wheels. They passed houses, parked vehicles, buildings. Now traffic surrounded them. They’d come a long way in what seemed like three or four seconds. He was out of breath and sopped with sweat.

The crazy bum said, “That’s pretty nifty, man. I think you won
that
conversation.”

“I don’t forgive my debtors. I don’t forgive those who have trespassed against me.”

“I gotta go.”

“Yeah, I bet you gotta go, you stupid fuck.”

“Where are we?” Houston said.

The bum was moving at a tangent now, off the sidewalk, into the street.

“Hey. I don’t like your face,” Kinney said as the guy left. “You crazy treacherous coward.”

“What?” the guy said. “Listen, don’t fuck with me.”

“Don’t fuck with you?”

“I think that’s my bus,” the guy said, and sprinted across the street right through squealing traffic and got behind the cover of a bus.

Kinney shouted, “Hey! Marine! Fuck you! Yeah! Semper Fi!”

Houston doubled up and vomited all over a mailbox.

Kinney didn’t look right. A greasy film covered his eyes. He said, “Let’s get a drink. Have you ever had a depth charger? Shot of bourbon in a mug of beer?”

“Yeah.”

“I could use a bellyful of them bastards.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Houston said.

They found a place with air-conditioning, and Kinney got the two of them set up with beers and shots in a booth in the darkness at the back and began preparing depth chargers.

“This’ll put some torque in your pork. Ever had one of these?”

“Sure, you drop a shot in a beer.”

“Ever had one?”

“Well, I just know how you make one,” Houston said.

Without any sense of the intervening hours, Houston awakened sweaty and all bitten up by mosquitoes and sand fleas, a sagging mattress swallowing him alive, a headache pounding against his skull. He could hear the surf pounding also. His first fully conscious thought was that he’d seen one man shoot another man, just like that.

He seemed to be quartered in some kind of open-air bedroom. He made his way to the faucet in the corner, where he drank deeply of the sweet water and peed, first removing from the sink a wet bedsheet with a large black-rimmed hole burned in its middle. He found his watch, wallet, pants, and shirt, but he’d lost his shoes on the beach, he now remembered, and he was pretty sure he’d left his kit bag at the Y. His seventeen-cent zoris seemed to have walked away on their own.

His wallet held a five and two ones. He collected ninety cents in coins scattered on the bamboo floor. He stepped out to get his bearings.

His head swam. The water he’d gorged on was making him drunk all over again.

The sign said
KING KANE HOTEL
, and it said
SAILORS WELCOME
.

He kept an eye out for Kinney, but he didn’t see anyone at all, not a living soul. It was like a desert island. Palms, the bright beach, the dark ocean. He headed away from the beach, toward town.

He didn’t return to the
Bonners Ferry
. He had no intention of getting anywhere near her berth, or anywhere else he might run into Kinney, the last person he wanted to see. He missed the sailing and spent two weeks ashore without liberty, sleeping on the beach and eating once per day at a Baptist mission on the waterfront, until he was confident Kinney was closer to Hong Kong than to Honolulu; then he turned himself in to the Shore Patrol for a week’s recuperation in the brig.