Tree of Smoke (20 page)

His rate was rolled back to E-3 and he was a seaman again, which meant he automatically lost his Boilerman rating. This was the second demotion of his career. The first had resulted from “repeated minor infractions” during his tour at Subic Bay Naval Base—after he’d taken to the warrens of vice outside its gates.

Houston spent the following eighteen months assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base in Yokosuka, Japan, mostly with rowdy black men, low-aptitude morons, and worthless bust-outs like himself. More often than he liked, he remembered the admiral in Honolulu who’d lowered the window of his white Ford Galaxie and promised, “Hard times are coming.”

B
ecause he now had a girlfriend who let him go all the way, James forgot about the army for a while. Once or twice a week he put an air mattress and a sleeping bag in the back of his mother’s pickup and snuck Stevie Dale out of her unconscious household and made love to her in the predawn desert chill. Twice, sometimes three times in a night. He kept a tally. Between July 10 and October 20, at least fifty times. But not as many as sixty.

Stevie didn’t seem moved to participate. All she did was lie there. He wanted to ask her, “Don’t you like it?” He wanted to ask, “Couldn’t you move a little bit?” But in the atmosphere of disappointment and doubt that fell down around him after their lovemaking, he was unable to communicate with her at all, other than to pretend to listen while she talked. She talked about school, about subjects, teachers, cheerleaders—of whom she was one, just an alternate, but she expected to join the main squad next year—nonstop in his ear. Her gladness was a fist stuffing him deeper into the toilet.

He had more on his mind than his love life. He worried about his mother. She didn’t make much money at the ranch. She exhausted herself. She’d grown thinner, knobbier. She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law husband. James had never accompanied her on these pilgrimages, and Burris, now almost ten, refused to serve as escort—just ran away into the neighborhood of shacks and trailers and drifting dust when the poor old woman started getting herself ready on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

James didn’t know how he felt about Stevie, but he knew his mother broke his heart. Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her? She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. James suspected she was just faking herself out, flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window. Having just about reached a decision in his mind to quit school and see the army recruiters, he stalled for many weeks, standing at the top of the high dive. Or on the edge of the nest. “Mom,” he said, “every eagle has to fly.” “Go ahead on, then,” she said.

The army turned him down. They wouldn’t take minors. “The Marines will take you when you’re seventeen, but the army won’t,” he told his mother.

“Can’t you wait a half a year?”

“More like three-fourths of a year.”

“That’s a lot of growing and learning you could do in school, for your education. Then you could graduate and be ready for your service, ready all the way through.”

“I got to go.”

“Go in the Marines, then.”

“I don’t want the Marines.”

“Why not?”

“They’re too stuck up.”

“Then why are we talking about the Marines?”

“’Cause the army won’t take me till I’m eighteen.”

“Not even if I sign?”

“Not even if anybody signs. I need a birth certificate.”

“I have your birth certificate. It says ‘1949.’ Couldn’t you just as easy change it to ‘1948’? Just close up the tail on the nine to where it looks like a eight.”

On the last Friday in October, James went back to the army recruiter with a lying birth certificate and came home with instructions to report for muster on Monday.

The first two weeks of his basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina were the longest he’d experienced. Each day seemed a life entire in itself, lived in uncertainty, abasement, confusion, fatigue. These gave way to an overriding state of terror as the notions of killing and being killed began to fill his thoughts. He felt all right in the field, in the ranks, on the course with the others, yelling like monsters, bayoneting straw men. Off alone he could hardly see straight, thanks to this
fear
. Only exhaustion saved him. Being driven past his physical limits put a glass wall between him and all of this—he couldn’t quite hear, couldn’t quite remember what he’d just been looking at, what he’d just been shown. He waited only for sleep. He dreamed hysterically throughout, but slept for as long as they let him.

They assigned him to Vietnam. He knew it meant he was dead. He hadn’t applied, hadn’t even asked how you apply, they’d just handed him his fate. Four days out of basic, here he carried his lunch toward a table in the enlisted mess, the steamy odor of reconstituted mashed potatoes rising toward his face, and his legs felt like rubber as he stepped toward a future scattered with booby traps and land mines: they’d be on patrol and he’d be too far ahead of the others in a line of guys in the jungle, he’d be in
front
and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss. There was no sense sitting here, spooning up his lunch off a partitioned tray. He should be saving his life, getting out of this mess hall, disappearing maybe in some big town where they had dirty movies that never close.

Two of the guys came over and started talking about dying in battle.

“Are you trying to get me spooked worse than I am already?” James said, trying to sound humorous.

“The odds are you won’t get killed.”

“Shut up.”

“Really, there’s not that many battles or anything.”

“Did you see that guy over there?” James said, and they had: three tables away sat a very small black man in dress greens, a first sergeant. He didn’t look big enough to join the army, but on his chest he wore many ribbons, including the blue one with five white stars signifying the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Whenever they saw a soldier with decorations, James and the others made a point of passing close to get a look. That was it, wasn’t it?—to be drinking a cup of coffee with this person inside of you hardened and blackened by heroic deeds, and kids walking by with a weak feeling in their stomachs, trying not to stare. But in order to enjoy it, you had to get home alive.

When the others left, James returned to the line for another helping. People complained about the food, and therefore James complained too; but actually he liked it.

The black man with the blue ribbon on his chest beckoned him to his table.

James didn’t know what to do but go on over.

“Come on, sit down,” the sergeant said. “You got that look.”

“Yeah? What look?”

“Just sit down,” the sergeant said. “I ain’t that black.”

James joined him.

“I says you got that look.”

“Yeah?”

“The look says I wanted to drive a tank or work on helicopter engines, but instead they sending me to the jungle and get shot at.”

James said nothing, lest he weep about it.

“Your sarge told me, Conrad, Conroy.”

“Sergeant, yeah,” James said, extremely nervous. “Sergeant Connell.”

“Why didn’t you think of something to volunteer for, to get you out of it?”

Now James feared he’d laugh. “Because I’m stupid.”

“You’re going to the Twenty-fifth, right? Which brigade?”

“The Three.”

“I’m from the Twenty-fifth.”

“Yeah? No shit?”

“Not the Three, though. The Fourth.”

“But the Three—are they, are they—you know—fighting?”

“Some units are. Unfortunately, yes.”

James felt if he could only say, Sarge, I don’t want to fight, he would surely save himself.

“You worried about getting killed?”

“Sort of, you know, I mean—
yeah
.”

“Nothing to worry about. By the time The Thing eats you, you all emptied up, you ain’t thinking. Nothing but jazz happening.”

James couldn’t quite take comfort from this statement.

“Yep.” The small black man hunched forward, touching the finger-tips of each hand together rapidly. “Come here. Listen,” he said. James leaned toward him, half afraid the man might grab him by the ear or something. “In a combat zone, you don’t want to be a pin on a map. Sooner or later the enemy’s going to hammer on that pin with a superior force. You want to have some mobility options, don’t you? You want some decision-sharing, don’t you? That means you want to volunteer for a Recon outfit. That’s a voluntary thing. You volunteer for that. After that, you never, never volunteer for nothing, nothing, nothing, not even to jump in bed with a red-hot female, not even James Bond’s girlfriend. That’s rule number one, is don’t volunteer. And rule number two is that when in the foreign land, you don’t violate the women, you don’t hurt the livestock, and if possible not the property, except for burning the hooches, that goes with the job.”

“That’s a Medal of Honor you got there.”

“Yes, it is. So you listen to what I say.”

“All right. Okay.”

“I might be black as coal, but I’m your brother. You know why?”

“I don’t guess I do.”

“Because you’re going over to the Twenty-fifth as a replacement, ain’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t sir me, I ain’t your sir. You going to the Twenty-fifth, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. And you know what? I came from the Twenty-fifth. Not the Third Brigade, the Fourth. But anyway,
I
could be the one you’re replacing. So I giving you the dope.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“No, you don’t thank me, I thank you. You know why? It’s me you could be replacing.”

“You’re welcome,” James said.

“Now: what I just said, you take all this under your advisement.”

“Will do.”

James enjoyed the way they talked in the infantry, and he tried to talk that way too. Mobility options. Pin on a map. Superior force. Under advisement. These were the same phrases a recon sergeant had used while delivering a talk to their barracks just two weeks earlier. Now the phrases rang true, they made sense. One fact stood out clear: if you had to be a grunt, you might as well be recon.

A
fter more than a year in the States, in California—two months at the Defense Language Institute in Carmel, and nearly twelve months at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey—Skip Sands returned to Southeast Asia and, somewhere between Honolulu and Wake Island, flying miles above the Pacific on a 707, came into the shadow of the mystery that would devour him.

After the 707 to Tokyo he went by prop plane to Manila, by train to the bottom of the mountain north of there, by car once again to the staff house in San Marcos, ready for a confrontation with Eddie Aguinaldo, and also happy at the prospect of the major’s pointless sweaty jungle night patrols, only to find that the patrols had been discontinued and Eddie Aguinaldo was nowhere around. The Huks had been declared extinct. Anders Pitchfork was long gone. For company Sands had only the household crew and occasional vacationing staff from Manila, usually overworked couriers who slept a lot. He waited nearly a month for one of them to bring word from the colonel.

Word arrived in a courier pouch, on a photo postcard of the Washington Monument. A yellow seal pasted to a corner warned,
KEEP OFFICIAL BUSINESS UNDER WRAPS / COUNSEL CORRESPONDENTS TO USE ENVELOPES / THANK YOU / YOUR AMERICAN POST OFFICE.

But the files were already packed, or so he assumed. His first day back he’d found, in the closet he’d left them in, three olive army-issue foot-lockers, the lid of each stenciled with the name
BENÉT W.F
.—the accent applied by hand with a soft-point pen—and each one heavily padlocked.

Having had no word as to the keys to these treasures, he left that matter for another day and did the next indicated thing, which was to travel to the embassy in Manila in a staff car almost entirely filled with his uncle’s project. There he was instructed to keep the car and travel some forty miles beyond the capital to Clark Air Base, where he’d board military transport for South Vietnam.

Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve. His itinerary would have him taking off on New Year’s Day from Clark Field for the airport at Tan Son Nhut, outside Saigon.

At last! Feeling as if he’d already taken to the air, he sat in the staff car on Dewey Boulevard watching the sun quiver on Manila Bay, and by its glorious light, in order to calm himself, he glanced through his mail. An alumni newsletter from Bloomington.
Newsweek
and
U.S. News and World Report
, both many weeks old. In a large manila envelope he found his final batch of California mail, forwarded from there through his APO address. These letters had chased him for two months. From his Aunt Grace and Uncle Ray—the eldest of his father’s four siblings—came a greeting card envelope with something whacking around inside it, one of the new John F. Kennedy half dollars, it turned out, and a Hallmark card, to which the coin had evidently been taped before coming loose on its ten-thousand-mile journey. Skip had turned thirty on October twenty-eighth, and in commemoration of this milestone here came fifty cents, double the usual, no more quarters for such a big boy.