Tree of Smoke (24 page)

“Are you carrying his football film to him?”

“Skip. Skip. Nobody’s giving him any football film.” He stood up and held out his hand. As firmly as he could, Skip accepted it. “Look,” Voss said, and as he searched for words his eyes broadcast human sympathy. “See you in the war.” His jeep was running. He turned away.

Sands drank two more beers, and when darkness had fallen he wandered away from the fun and ate fish and rice in a café. Through the doorway he watched a minor spectacle in the street, a drunken young man with one burned and bandaged arm in a sling, who nevertheless was able to light a succession of firecrackers and toss them at the feet of leaping, squealing passersby. By 9:00 p.m. the town rattled all over with celebratory explosions. Independence Day in San Marcos had impressed him, but this was wilder and decidedly more dangerous, full of actual gunfire and large booming cadences, as if the entire night were under attack. He thought he’d probably find it more peaceful in South Vietnam. He strolled into the red-light district—Angeles consisted of little else—the slop, the lurid stink, the thirsty, flatly human, openmouthed stares of the women as he passed dank shacks beating with rocknroll music, as hot and rich with corruption as vampire mausoleums. The wanton mystery of the Southeast Asian night: he loved it as passionately as he loved America, but secretly, with dark lust; and he admitted to himself without evasion that he didn’t care if he never went home.

B
eginning two days after Christmas, James ceased calling his friends, stopped taking Stevie’s calls. He spent the days watching cartoons on television with his ten-year-old brother, Burris, sharing as best he could in the serenity of a mindless childhood.

On New Year’s Eve he went to a party. Stevie was there. She was angry, and she left him alone. She stayed out back in the dark with Donna and her other friends, the alternate cheerleaders and future runner-up prom queens, huddled under a cloud of resentment. Good. The one he’d really always wanted was Anne Vandergress, who’d come to Palo Verde High School the same year as James and who stood now in the doorway of the kitchen looking beautiful, talking to a couple of guys he’d never seen before.

He drank rum. He’d never before tasted it. “We call this a three-oh-two,” somebody said.

If he was going somewhere to be blown up by a mortar or something, then he wished he’d never started going around with Stevie Dale.

“Well, hell. That three-oh-two goes down easier’n beer does,” he agreed.

“Now put you some in a Coke.”

It was Anne Vandergress talking. She was a honey-blonde who always wore nice makeup, and he’d never approached her because to him she’d seemed too young and pure and elevated, then his last full year in school he’d heard she was dating a football player, a senior, Dan Cordroy, then another one, Cordroy’s buddy Will Webb, then half the goddamn team, all seniors, and he’d heard she was putting out for every last one. “You’re so fucking beautiful, you know that?” he said. “I never told you that,” he said, “did I ever tell you that?”—though it seemed to James she was a little less beautiful than he remembered, a little heavier, thicker in the face. More grown-up, but not in a good way; instead in a way that reminded him of middle age.

One particular swallow of rum stalled in his throat and nearly gagged him, but then it went down all right, and after that his throat felt numb, and he could have swallowed nails or glass or hot coals.

He rushed through an hour like a physical thing, a hallway. His lips turned to rubber and he drooled while saying, “I’ve never been this drunk in my life.”

People seemed to be circling him, laughing, but he wasn’t sure. The room tilted sideways and the very wall knocked him on his ass. Hands and arms grappling him upright like the tentacles of a monster…

He arrived in his body from some dark place, and he was standing outdoors holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.

Donna loomed like a wreck coming at you. Mad as
fire
. “Why would you say that? Why would anybody talk that way?” Stevie in the background with her head bowed, weeping, girls around her patting her hair and smoothing away the grief.

Rollo held him upright in the yard. Donna dive-bombing him, you couldn’t shake her. “Donna, Donna—” Rollo was laughing, snorting, barking—“He can’t hear you, Donna. Stop the lecture.”

“Stevie was almost pregnant. Don’t you realize she was just about pregnant? How can you act like this?”

“Almost pregnant?” Rollo said. “
Al
most?” James was on his knees with his arms around Rollo’s legs.

“She
thought
she was pregnant, okay, Rollo? Okay? He can’t just spit her out the last night he’s in town and just go to Viet-
nam
. Okay, Rollo?”

“Okay!”

“Tell him that!”

“Okay! I’ll tell him! James,” Rollo said, “James. You got to talk to Stevie. You sure hurt her feelings, James. Stand up, stand up.”

His legs rolled him over to Stevie standing by a stone barbecue pit with a fire in it. He said something, and Stevie kissed him—her soggy teenybopper breath. “And you’re smoking a cigarette,” she said, “and you don’t even smoke.”

“I smoke. I always did smoke. You just didn’t know about it, is what.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I smoke.”

Something else happened and Stevie disappeared and was replaced by, or turned into, her friend Donna. “You’ve hurt her for the last time, James.”

“I smoke,” he tried to say. He could neither shut his jaws nor raise his chin from his chest.

He was back inside the kitchen, where Anne Vandergress seemed no longer beautiful. She seemed old and worn-out. Her hair was frizzy. Her face was flat and red and sweaty and her smile looked dead. She laughed along with everybody else while he announced she was a whore. “It took me a while—but you’re a whore. You’re a whore, all right,” he said very loudly. “I just want you to figure that out like everybody else already did,” he said, “that you’re a complete, slutty whore.” Anne laughed grotesquely. She looked like she’d been pulling a train all night. His mind was stuck in a warp and he kept saying, “What a whore—what a whore—what a whore—”

They threw him on the ground and hosed him down. The dirt turned to slime around him and he crouched in it, flailing, trying to stand upright.

This was not vastly different from certain moments of his basic training. His feet splayed and he flopped on his face and ate mud, thinking: All right, men: here we go.

O
n the afternoon of January 1, 1967, Nguyen Hao drove to Tan Son Nhut Airport with Jimmy Storm, a man very close to the colonel. Jimmy Storm almost always wore civilian clothing, though the first time Hao had seen the lad he’d been squatting on his heels outside the CIA–Psy Ops villa taking a break, smoking a cigarette, in U.S. Army fatigues with the hash marks of a sergeant.

This afternoon Mr. Jimmy wore this same uniform, and the entire distance to the airport, Mr. Jimmy, or Sergeant Storm, sitting rigidly upright, with his cap on, in the backseat, where he’d never sat before, said nothing at all—possibly a little nervous, Hao thought, about greeting the new arrival.

But this silence might have come from anywhere. Mr. Jimmy Storm was a strange and complicated young man. By the time they saw William Sands coming down the gangway of the Air America DC-3, ducking his head a bit against the noise of jets and the onslaught of damp wind, Mr. Jimmy had recovered all his volubility and spoke with Sands cheerfully, and too rapidly for Hao to follow.

They put two footlockers in the trunk of the black Chevrolet, and the third had to go in the backseat with the newcomer, who asked his hosts to call him Skip.

“Right, right, right,” Mr. Jimmy agreed, and then he disagreed: “But let me call you Skipper. Skip’s too short. It just skates past.” Now Mr. Jimmy sat up front with Hao.

Hao said, “Mr. Skip, I’m glad to welcome you. Your uncle knows my nephew. Now I know your uncle’s nephew.”

“I have something for you.” The newcomer handed over a carton of cigarettes. From the box they looked almost like Marlboros, but they were the other kind. Winstons. Hao said, “Thank you so much, Mr. Skip.”

A bicycle approached on their right as they waited for traffic. Mr. Jimmy rolled down his window rapidly and said, “Diddy mao!” and gestured, and the rider veered off.

Mr. Skip said in Vietnamese, “May I speak Vietnamese, Mr. Hao?” and Hao answered in Vietnamese, “It’s better. My English is that of a child.”

“Today is our New Year,” Mr. Skip said. “Soon I’ll be celebrating another, your Tet.”

“Your pronunciation is quite good.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you come many times to Vietnam?”

“No. Never.”

“That’s surprising,” Hao said.

“I took an intensive course,” Mr. Skip said, using the English words for “intensive course.”

“So there it is, huh?—all seven hundred pounds,” said young Mr. Jimmy, reaching back to place his hand on the footlocker. “The keys to the kingdom of the Duke of Earl.”

Hao was suddenly convinced that despite never having met him, Jimmy Storm floundered in a deep hatred for Skip Sands. Skip, for his part, seemed suspicious of Storm and hesitated slightly before saying, “More like two hundred pounds.”

Sundown, and the bellies of the clouds flared red. They entered Saigon and passed along a street of homes where kids played jump rope in the twilight, and snatches of the jumpers’ magical chants reached their ears. Then over to the GI streets, the avenues of wretched commerce, past doorways like mouths, each delivering its music, its voices, its stench, and then across the river and into what was officially Gia Dinh Province and down Chi Lang Street to the CIA–Psy Ops villa where nobody lived for very long, only Jimmy Storm in his cluttered bedroom with its chugging air conditioner, just off the parlor with its rattan tables and kapok-cushioned sofa and nearly empty bookshelves and its bamboo bar—no stools—and a framed painting of horses in a stable on one of its pale yellow walls.

The black Chevrolet stayed at the villa. Hao helped the Americans with the unloading—Mr. Skip’s duffel and his cane basket and the three footlockers—and said goodbye and walked home along the broken pavement beside a sewage canal, seeing his way by a flashlight.

They lived above and behind the family’s defunct shop, he, his wife Kim, and occasional relatives. The shop had come from Hao’s family; the relatives were Kim’s. It had been dark for an hour when Hao entered by the alley, but he heard her sandals scraping in the concrete court out back as she puttered among the fruit plants she raised in large pots. Hao turned on the overhead fluorescent light in the parlor to summon her.

He wanted to talk. It seemed to him that having been asked to meet a member of the colonel’s family on his arrival, he’d now solidified an alliance and crossed a river in his life, which was also hers. She had a right to form some general appreciation of their circumstances.

He sat in his chair before his red plastic electric fan. Quite soon Kim came in, middle-aged, splay-footed, a stick frame with fat daubed onto it, wiry arms and bowed legs with a jutting paunch. Her face had become somewhat like those on the stone frogs in gardens, and somewhat like that of the Buddha’s—jowly, pop-eyed. She sat catching her breath and said, “I’m fine today.”

“It’s a miracle,” he said, because he knew she liked to use such terms.

“I took the asthma remedy from the old story.”

“Ouch,” he said, “that’s a crazy idea.”

“But it worked. I’m fine.”

“Let me get you a checkup with an American doctor. I’m sure Mr. Colonel can arrange it.”

“Leave me alone,” she said, as always, “I’m the only one going to fill my grave.”

She took good care of things and was a fine friend to him. He held her dear and wished her a long life. But her health wasn’t good.

They sat together while the red fan whirred and the tabletop hummed underneath it. Kim shut her eyes and breathed through her nose, this on the recommendation of yet another practitioner.

It had really been a very long illness, complicated probably by the loss of her nephew some years ago—four years? Often she came back to the topic of Thu’s suicide. Hao could see how she looked somewhere else, longingly, while something, maybe just the sound of her own voice, dragged her down into the discussion against her will: Do you think it could have been an accident, do you think he could have simply been experimenting, wondering, looking, smelling the fuel, I don’t know. And Hao would say, I don’t know either; but Thu had to go to some trouble to come into possession of the gasoline. I don’t like Buddha, she would say. There are many gods, she would say, with Buddha things are too simple, just look around, do things look simple? No, no.

Because in order to talk to her he must enter her world, he asked, “What do your dreams tell you lately?”

“That my breathing will stay clear and my cousin will be married soon.”

“Cousin? Which cousin?”

“Lang! Do I have to take you to the side room and show you Lang sleeping on her pallet?”

“I forgot which one was staying with us.”

“There are two! Lang and Nhu.”

“It’s time to talk about our situation.”

“Talk.”

“You realize Mr. Colonel has a project near Cu Chi, around Good Luck Mountain.”

“It’s dangerous to help him. Can you dodge the wind?”

“I’m already helping him. I’ve talked to several headmen, I’ve marked the location of tunnel openings on his maps.”

“If you take sides, what will happen to us?”

“I’ve taken a side. I believe we have to consider what happens when the country’s reunified. I think we’ll have to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Leave the country. Emigrate. Go to another country.”

“But we can’t!”

“What keeps us? There’s nobody left in the household.”

“There’s nobody left because you don’t have work for them. Why did you sell the other two shops when this one was already closed? Anyway, there’s Minh.”