Tree of Smoke (3 page)

“I don’t know.”

“When did you know him the first time?”

“Just one or two weeks.”

“Who is he?” she said.

Minh said, “I don’t know.” To stop her touching his groin, he clasped her to him.

“You just want body-body?” she said.

“What does it mean?” he said.

“Just body-body,” she said. She got up and shut the window. She felt the air conditioner with the palm of her hand, but didn’t touch its dials. “Gimme a cigarette,” she said.

“No. I don’t have any cigarette,” he said.

She threw her dress on over her head, slipped her feet into her sandals. She wore no underclothes. “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said.

“What does it mean?” he said.

“What does it mean?” she said. “What does it mean? Gimme a coupla quarters. Gimme a coupla quarters.”

“Is it money?” he said. “How much is it?”

“Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “I wanna see if he gonna sell me some cigarette. I wanna coupla pack cigarette—a pack for me, and one pack for my cousin. Two pack.”

“The colonel can do it,” he said.

“One Weenston. One Lucky Strike.”

“Excuse me. It’s chilly tonight,” he said. He got up and put his clothes on.

He stepped out front. From behind him he heard the small sounds of the young woman inside dealing with her purse, setting it on a table. She clapped and rubbed her hands and a puff of perfume drifted past him from the open window and he inhaled it. His ears rang, and tears clouded his sight. He cleared a thickness from his throat, hung his head, spat down between his feet. He missed his homeland.

When he’d first joined the air force and then been transferred to Da Nang and into officers’ training, only seventeen, he’d cried every night in his bed for several weeks. He’d been flying fighter jets for nearly three years now, since he was nineteen years old. Two months ago he’d turned twenty-two, and he could expect to continue flying missions until the one that killed him.

Later he sat on the porch in a canvas chair, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, smoking—he actually did possess a pack of Luckies—when the colonel returned from the club with his arms around both the girls. Minh’s escort had a pack in her hand and waved it happily.

“So you explored the briny deeps today.”

Minh wasn’t sure what he meant. He said, “Yes.”

“Ever been down there in any of those tunnels?” the colonel asked.

“What is it?—tunnels.”

“Tunnels,” the colonel said. “Tunnels all under Vietnam. You been down inside those things?”

“Not yet. I don’t think so.”

“Nor have I, son,” the colonel said. “I wonder what’s down there.”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody does,” the colonel said.

“The cadres use the tunnels,” Minh said. “The Vietminh.”

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, “This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.”

Minh had noticed you could talk to the colonel for a long time without recognizing he was drunk.

He’d met the colonel only a few mornings back, out front of the helicopter maintenance yard at the Subic base, and they’d sought each other out continually ever since. The colonel had not been introduced to him—the colonel had introduced himself—and didn’t appear to be linked to him in any official way. They were housed together with dozens of other transient officers in a barracks in a compound originally constructed and then quickly abandoned, according to the colonel, by the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Minh knew the colonel was one to stick with. Minh had a custom of picking out situations, people, as good luck, bad luck. He drank Lucky Lager, he smoked Lucky Strikes. The colonel called him “Lucky.”

“John F. Kennedy was a beautiful man,” the colonel said. “That’s what killed him.”

N
guyen Hao arrived safely at the New Star Temple on his Japanese Honda 30 motorbike, in dress pants and a box-cut shirt, wearing sunglasses, the pomade melting in his hair. It was his sad errand to serve as his family’s only representative at the funeral service for his wife’s nephew. Hao’s wife was down with chills. The boy’s parents were deceased, and the boy’s only brother was flying missions for the air force.

Hao looked back to where he’d dropped off a friend from his youth named Trung Than, whom everybody had always called the Monk and who’d gone north when the country had been partitioned. Hao hadn’t seen the Monk for a decade, not until this afternoon, and now he was gone: he’d hopped backward off the bike, removed his sandals, and padded off barefoot down the path.

Hao made sure to take the motorbike slowly over anything looking like a puddle, and when he reached the rice paddies he walked the machine most carefully along the dikes. He had to keep his clothes clean; he’d be overnighting here, probably in the schoolroom adjacent to the temple. The village wasn’t far from Saigon, and in better times he might have motored back in the dusk, but the critical areas had expanded such that nowadays after three in the afternoon the back roads over to Route Twenty-two would be hazardous.

He set his straw bedroll on the earthen floor just inside the schoolroom’s doorway, so as to be able to find his bed later in the night.

No life showed itself among the string of huts other than foraging chickens and stationary old women visible in the doorways. He pulled aside the wooden lid of the concrete well and lowered the bucket and drew himself a drink and a wash from out of the dark. The well was deep, drilled by a machine. The water came clear and cool into his hand and onto his face.

No sound from the temple. The master probably napped. Hao rolled his motorbike into the interior—rough lumber, with a roof of ceramic shingles and a dirt floor, about fifteen by fifteen meters, not much bigger in area than the downstairs of Hao’s own house in Saigon. Rather than disturb the master, he turned and went out even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness, but already the must of the floor and the aroma of joss sticks had wakened his boyhood, when he’d served here at the temple for a couple of years. He felt something tugging at him from that era, a thread connected to a sadness which was generally inert and which quickly forgot itself. So much of this had been laid over by the rest of his life.

Also he felt a confused sadness over his nephew’s preposterous death. Inconceivable. On first hearing of it Hao had assumed the boy had perished in an accidental fire. But in fact he’d burned himself alive—as had two or three elder monks in recent times. But those others had killed themselves spectacularly in the Saigon streets in order to cry out against chaos. And they were old men. Thu was only twenty, and he’d set himself afire out in the bush beyond the village in a solitary ceremony. Incomprehensible, crazy.

When Master woke he came out not in his robe, but dressed for the fields. Hao stood up and bowed his head, and the master bowed very deeply, a small man with a large rib cage and stick-limbs, his head covered with stubble—it occurred to Hao that Thu had probably been the one who’d shaved him. Poor dead Thu. “I was going to take up a hoe this afternoon,” the master said. “I’m glad you’ve stopped me.”

They sat on the porch and made a start at polite conversation, moving into the doorway while a loud rain came over. The master apparently chose to let the chatter of this downpour serve the purposes of small talk, because when it was over he spoke immediately of the death of Thu, saying it mystified him. “But it brings you back to see us. Every fist grips its gift.”

“The atmosphere of the temple is very strong,” Hao said.

“You always seemed uncertain here.”

“But I’m doing what you suggested. I’ve made my doubt into my calling.”

“That’s not quite the way to phrase it.”

“Those were the words you used.”

“No. I said you must allow your doubt to become your calling, you must permit it. I don’t suggest that you make it so, only that you let it be so. Let your doubt be your calling. Then your doubt will be invisible. You’ll inhabit it like an atmosphere.”

The master offered a bit of champooy, which Hao declined. He put the spicy dried fruit in his own mouth and sucked on it vigorously, frowning. “A certain American is coming to the service.”

“I know him,” Hao said. “Colonel Sands.”

The master said nothing, and Hao felt forced to go on: “The colonel knows my nephew Minh. They met in the Philippines.”

“He told me so.”

“Have you met him personally?”

“He’s come several times,” the master said. “He cultivated an acquaintance with Thu. I think he’s a kind man. Or at least a careful man.”

“He’s interested in the practice. He wants to study the breath.”

“His breath smells of the meat of cattle and cigars and liquor. And what about you? Have you continued with the breath?”

Hao didn’t answer.

“Have you continued your practice?”

“No.”

The master spat out the pit of his champooy. A skeletal puppy darted from under the porch and gobbled it quickly, trembling, and then dematerialized. “In their dreams,” the old man said, “dogs travel back and forth between this world and the other world. In their dreams they visit the before-life, and they visit the afterlife.”

Hao said, “The Americans are going to become somewhat active here, somewhat destructive.”

“How do you know?” The question was very indiscreet, yet even in the face of Hao’s silence he persisted: “Did this American tell you?”

“Thu’s brother told me.”

“Minh?”

“Our air force will participate.”

“Will young Minh bomb his own country?”

“Minh doesn’t fly a bomber.”

“But will the air force destroy us?”

“Minh told me to get you out of here. I can’t tell you more than that, because it’s all I know.” Because to traffic in information any more specific than that terrified him. Would have terrified anyone. Should have terrified the master.

Hao raised another matter: “I just saw the Monk. He showed up at my house and asked me for money. Then I took him here on the back of the motorbike.”

The master only studied him with his eyes.

Yes, he’d known the master must have heard from Trung. “How long since you’ve seen him?”

“Not long,” the master admitted.

“How long has he been back?”

“Who can say? And you? How long since you’ve seen him?”

“Many years. He has a northern accent now.” Hao stopped himself from saying more, stared at his feet.

“It disturbed you to see him.”

“He came to my house. He wanted money for the cause.”

“For the Vietminh? They don’t take taxes in the city.”

“If he asked, they must have told him to ask. It’s extortion. Then he insisted I take him here on the motorbike.”

The master said, “He knows he’s safe. He knows you won’t name him to his enemies.”

“Maybe I should. If the Vietminh have their way, that means the destruction of my family business.”

“And of our temple, probably. But these outsiders are destroying the entire country.”

“I can’t give money to Communists.”

“Maybe I can get word to Trung that you have no money. That you’ve spent it for something.”

“For what?”

“Something that puts you beyond reproach.”

“Tell him, please.”

“I’ll just say you’ve done all you can.”

“I’m indebted.”

Hao could feel tomorrow morning’s mist beginning to shape itself almost immediately as the sun fell behind the nearest hill to the west, called Good Luck Mountain. The fortunes of the mountain had altered, however. The construction arm of the American military was making an encampment up there, most people guessed a permanent landing zone for helicopters. News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn’t like to see it poisoned.

On account of this American colonel’s possible arrival they delayed the memorial until past four in the afternoon, but the colonel didn’t come, and the risk of ambush would keep him off the roads now, and they went ahead without him. They held the service in the temple. Eight of the villagers attended, seven old men and someone’s grandchild all sitting in candlelight around the temple’s centerpiece without a corpse to look at, only a small crowd of bric-a-brac, mostly wooden Buddhas painted gold. A scintillating battery-run decoration of the type found in GI taverns topped the whole display: a disc on which changing bands of light revolved clockwise. The master was more than audible. He spoke as if he were teaching. As if nobody ever learned anything. “We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.”

The Americans arrived by last light in an open jeep. Either they had no fear of the roads, or they’d bivouacked with the American military construction group above, on Good Luck Mountain. The brawny colonel, in civilian dress as always, had the wheel, driving with a rifle jutting up between his knees, smoking a cigar, accompanied by a U.S. infantryman and also by a Vietnamese woman in a white blouse and gray skirt whom he introduced as Mrs. Van, an employee of the United States Information Service.

They’d brought a projector and a collapsible screen and intended to show a one-hour film to the people of the village.

Colonel Sands bowed to the master, and then they shook hands vigorously, in the American way. “Mr. Hao, we’re going to set up the projector in the main room, if that’s all right. Will you please tell him that?”

Hao translated and told the colonel that the master saw no obstacle. The young soldier arranged the machine, the cords, and four folding canvas chairs—“for the elders,” the colonel said—as well as a small generator which he set going a few meters beyond the temple’s wooden walls and which filled the valley with its racket and scented the whole region with its exhaust. Hao explained that he and the master had to visit a sick villager but might come to see part of the film later on. The colonel said he understood, but Hao wasn’t sure he did. And as dusk arrived, and then the darkness, and as it grew evident that nobody at all would come, Colonel Sands asked to have the show played just for himself. The movie machine, powered by the noisy generator, filled the temple with flickering illumination and a hollow booming voice and strident music. The film,
Years of Lightning, Day of Thunder
, recounted the brief, tragic, heroic span of President John F. Kennedy’s life. The American soldier and Mrs. Van also watched. Mrs. Van had come along to translate the narrative for the audience, but of course there was no need. The colonel had said it would go on for fifty-five minutes, and five minutes short of that, under cover of the darkness, Hao and the master crept in to join the Americans, the master sitting on his pillow at the head of the room, behind the portable screen, where he couldn’t see anything, actually, and Hao in a chair beside the young soldier. Mrs. Van, sitting behind the colonel, glanced at Hao but seemed to decide he could translate for himself. In fact he couldn’t. To fathom English speech he usually needed faces and gestures. And anyway the colonel was already talking more loudly than the recording, seated with his arms crossed over his fists, addressing himself in bitter tones to the shining spectacle as the music swelled and the view closed in on the eternal flame marking John F. Kennedy’s grave, a squat torch which the Americans intended to keep alight forever. “The eternal flame,” the colonel said. “Eternal? If you can kill the man, you can sure as hell kill his flame. The thing is this: We’re all dead in the long run. In the end we’re dirt. Let’s face it, our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. In the end some mongrel barbarian wakes up in the morning and stands with one foot on a rock and the other on the kicked-over vessel of Kennedy’s eternal flame. And that vessel is cold and dead, and that sonofabitch doesn’t even know he’s standing on it. He’s just taking a piss in the morning. When I get up in the morning and step behind the tent to break wind and void my bladder, whose grave am I pissing on?—Mr. Hao, is my English too fast? Am I getting across?”