Tree of Smoke (32 page)

The old man’s face positively broke open, all smiles. “Come, come, we’ll take it to my family!”

The region’s Catholic priest had turned up to greet them. He spoke in English to Skip: “It’s not necessary to kill such animals. Many people keep them for a pet. But it’s big enough to take the skin. Too bad it’s not more colorful. Some of them are red and sometimes orange.” A young man in nice clothes, probably from the city, wearing the priest’s collar. “You must visit my residence,” he said, and Skip said he would.

Then Minh and the old man paraded their catch down the main street through the ville, Minh at the head and his friend at the tail and fully four meters of snake bridging the distance between them, their free arms outflung to counter its dead weight, and little children running after, yelling and singing.

Mr. Skip had stayed at the house with the priest, or Minh at this moment would have assured him, “Here is a wonderful omen for your arrival.”

W
illiam “Skip” Sands of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency arrived at the villa in Cao Quyen, which meant “Forgotten Mountain,” with his duffel and his uncle’s three footlockers at the very moment a hard rain gave way to fine, sunny weather in which he didn’t feel a participant.

Voss had claimed to have something for him, had claimed he’d keep Sands close. It had come to nothing, he’d kept Sands stashed, not at all close, in an air-conditioned Quonset hut in the MAC-V compound at Tan Son Nhut, as part of a short-lived project devoted to collation of a superabundance of trivia called the CORDS/Phoenix file system, which amounted to every note ever jotted by anybody who’d seen or heard anything anywhere in South Vietnam. The project group, roughly eighteen men and two women, all drafted from the personnel pool, spent most of their energies trying to characterize the dimensions of the material delivered onto the site—boxes of pages that would make an eight-and-one-half-inch-wide path four-point-three times around the earth’s equator, or completely blanket the state of Connecticut, or outweigh the pachyderms in seventeen Barnum & Bailey shows, and so on. Shock and despair. An appreciation for the victims of sea catastrophes as the cataracts thundered into the hold. One day instructions came to put all the boxes on handcarts and push them along a cinder path under the tropical sun to a storage facility in the same complex. End of project. History.

Next, the waiting in Cao Quyen—“Forgotten Mountain,” “Mountain of Forgetting,” or “Forget This Mountain”—which he thought of as “Damulog II,” once again beyond the last reasonable stretch of roadway and past the end of the power lines.

He and Hao and Minh were served a meal of rice and fish by the Phans, the elderly pair who looked after the place and whom he would address as Mr. Tho and Mrs. Diu, and then his companions abandoned him with promises that Hao would return every week or ten days with mail, and books, and commissary items for the pantry.

Skip’s new home had running water from a tank on its roof as well as indoor plumbing, a bathroom downstairs with toilet and sink, and upstairs another with toilet, bath, and bidet, and wallpaper depicting mermaids, burnished by a strange mold. When he opened the shutters in this bathroom, half a dozen moths flew out of the toilet bowl and attached themselves to his scalp.

Nothing electric. He had butane lamps with copper shades, and rooms of rattan furniture shedding its finish in flakes. If rain came, and it would come daily for months now, there were wooden louvers to wind shut. Small leaks came down through the upstairs into several lacquer bowls set around the parlor. But the house was well situated for the breezes and had a homey feel. Things were sensible here. They spooned the salt and pepper out of tiny cups, like sugar, rather than clumping it into shakers; and his bed upstairs took up a screened corner of the house just off the modest master suite, open to every movement of the sultry night atmosphere.

By the day’s last light he toured the villa, a two-story structure mainly of a damp, rough material like concrete or adobe. Small black wasps crawled in and out of bullet holes in the outer walls—during the time of the French, the region had seen battles. A concrete gutter ran around the foundation of the house and carried off the rain into a fat, slow creek in a gulley behind the grounds. He had a look down there: adventurous children sailed past on water wings patched together out of absolutely any buoyant thing—kindling, coconuts, palm fronds—calling out to him.

The villa’s owner, a French physician, had passed away leaving, as Sands understood it, no trace of his physical body other than a film on the walls of a tunnel, but his shoes stood by the front door in a row, three pairs, sandals, slippers, bright green rubber boots. His walking shoes had disappeared with the rest of him. The physician, a Dr. Bouquet, had arrived from Europe early in the 1930s with a wife who had returned, according to the papasan, Mr. Tho, very shortly to Marseilles, and of whom no evidence remained anywhere in the house, unless she’d chosen the wallpaper in the upstairs bath, the innumerable tarnished mermaids. But the absent doctor constituted a pervading presence; since the day of his death nothing had been done with anything, all of it waited. In his high-ceilinged study off the living room the surface of his massive mahogany desk hid under books and journals held down by a porcelain model of the human ear—inner and outer—with detachable parts, an inkwell, an ashtray, and so on, his rack of three meerschaum tobacco pipes turned at a slight angle, shreds of newsprint or coarse, beige toilet paper marking places in several books stacked beside it, one of these pages surely holding the last word he’d read before he’d set his glasses aside, gone out walking, and been vaporized. Except for the clutter of his studies the office was clean and neat, the furniture draped with pages of the Saigon
Post
and
Le Monde
and the shutters closed. Skip pried gently under the covers of the books, careful not to shift their places, as if the owner might come checking. The physician had been cruel to the pages—tea stains, inky fingerprints, lengthy passages outlined boldly. Each volume bore inside its front cover the inscription “Bouquet” in an identical hand above the date of its purchase. He failed to find a single one without it. In addition the doctor had collected seventeen years of
Anthropologe
, a book-sized periodical, sixty-eight numbered issues with paper covers of heavy stock, all beige. And several scholarly reviews, each bound by year in the same brown paper. A damp, burgundy-cloth-bound
Nicholas Nickleby
was the only book in English. Skip had read it in college and could remember nothing about it except that somewhere in its pages Dickens called human hope a thing “as universal as death.”

In a week Hao came out again, as promised, delivering many flattened cardboard boxes for Dr. Bouquet’s effects, along with Skip’s mail. He was glad for the boxes—he hadn’t asked for them, Hao had just guessed. There was a crazy, despairing letter from Kathy Jones. Apparently these days she acted as liaison between the ICRE and several orphanages, and her life now, the things she witnessed, had turned her Calvinist fatalism—or, Skip thought, her fatal Calvinism—completely black:

Between downpours a breeze off the creek cowed the bugs and kept the study cool. He spent the evenings in the doctor’s shot-silk robe, inquiring among the doctor’s library of some eight hundred French titles, and, at first, hardly ever ventured beyond the grounds.

He busied himself recovering to the third dimension the flattened cardboard boxes. Also Hao had brought a roll of gummed paper tape, turned by this weather into a solid wheel, all stuck together, completely useless. Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

He sent Mr. Tho to the village shop for string and told Mrs. Diu he was heading to the local priest’s for tea.

Père Patrice’s small house lay a hundred meters off the main street, down a pathway marked by tattered boards bridging the puddles.

Père Patrice traveled around the district a lot, and Sands hadn’t passed much time with him. Sands hadn’t revealed himself as a Catholic. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Maybe, he thought, I’m tired of my faith. Not because it’s been tested and broken, like Kathy’s. Only because it’s gone unexercised. And the small open-air church, a tin roof on wooden poles on a concrete slab, is this where the drama of salvation plays out? Sands found the priest, a tiny man in his tiny garden. Père Patrice had a round, simian face. More nostril than nose. Huge reptilian eyes. Beyond exotic, he looked like a man from outer space. He brought his guest hot tea in a water glass. They sat in the garden on damp wooden benches while the recent rain dripped from the tall poinsettias. Sands tried his Vietnamese.

“Your pronunciation is good,” the young man said, and then spoke incomprehensibly for half a minute—Skip had already practiced his Vietnamese with the villa’s two servants and found it hopeless.

“I’m very sorry. I don’t understand. Can you please speak more slowly?”

“I will speak more slowly. I’m sorry.”

There was a silence between them.

“Will you kindly repeat your statement?”

“Yes, of course. I said I hope your work will go well here.”

“I believe it’s going well, thanks.”

“You are with the Canadian Ecumenical Council.”

“Yes.”

“It is a project of Bible translation.”

“We have many projects. That is one project.”

“Are you one of the translators, Mr. Benét?”

“I’m trying to improve my Vietnamese. It’s possible I’ll help later on with translation.”

“Let’s speak English,” the priest said in English.

“Whatever you like.”

Père Patrice said, “Shall I hear your confession?”

“No.”

“Thank God! You’re not Catholic?”

“Seventh-Day Adventist.”

“I don’t know about Seventh-Day people.”

“It’s a Protestant faith.”

“Of course. God doesn’t care who is Protestant or Catholic. God himself is not Catholic.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“What is this universe to God? Is it a drama? Is it a dream? Perhaps a nightmare?” The priest smiled yet seemed angry.

“That’s a big question. I think it qualifies as a mystery.”

“I’m reading a most wonderful book.”

Skip waited for him to finish, but he didn’t say anything further about the book.

“I have met Mr. Colonel Sands, there at your villa. He’s your friend? Your colleague?”

“He’s my uncle. Also my friend.”

“The colonel fascinates me. I don’t understand him. But I don’t think we should talk about him, do you?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I believe that we should confine ourselves.”

Sands decided that the priest was a subtle man unable to complete his thoughts in English.

“Can you help me collect folk tales in the area?” he asked the priest.

“Folk tales? Fairy tales, perhaps?”

“Yes. It’s a hobby, a personal interest of mine. Not associated with my work.”

“Not associated with your Bible work?”

“Well, of course it helps me as a translator. It helps me to understand the language of myth.”

“But do you say that the Bible is a myth?”

“Not at all. I say it’s in the language of myth.”

“Of course. Surely. I can help. Do you like songs also, perhaps?”

“Songs? Of course.”

“I’ll sing you a Vietnamese song,” the priest said.

He gazed into Skip’s eyes. His features seemed to clarify. His look became earnest. For almost a minute he sang quite beautifully in a clear, strong voice, unabashed, completely unselfconscious. The tune was high and struck a note of yearning.

“Did you understand the song?”

Skip was speechless.

“No? For three years, he is a soldier at the outpost, far from his village. He’s very lonely and he works hard to cut bamboo all day. His body hurts. He eats only bamboo shoots and some fruit, and his friends are only the bamboo. And he sees a fish in the cistern, swimming by itself, also with no friends. I think we are like this—Mr. Benét and Père Patrice. Don’t you think so? I’m far from my home in my village, and you are far from Canada.”