Tree of Smoke (38 page)

Thus Seaman Houston received an early general discharge, and spent his last ten days in the navy not as a sailor but as a prisoner in the brig of the Yokosuka Naval Base.

On his release he was issued a voucher for a commercial jet flight to Phoenix. Traveling by air made him miserable. His ears popped like a hammer on his skull, he felt dizzy, the air tasted dead. The first and last plane ride of his life, this he swore. In the LA airport he balled up the Phoenix portion of his ticket and tossed it in an ashtray, changed into his uniform in the men’s room, and, impersonating a sailor, hitchhiked home with his duffel on his shoulder through the clarity of the Mojave Desert in January. He encountered the outskirts of Phoenix sooner than he’d expected. It was much more of a city now, tires wailing on Interstate Ten and loud jet airliners coming in overhead, their lights shimmering in the blue desert twilight. What time was it? He didn’t have a watch. In fact, what day? Houston stood at Seventeenth and Thomas under a broken street-lamp. He had thirty-seven dollars. He was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t tasted beer in almost a month. Lacking a plan, he phoned his mother.

A week later, sitting in his mother’s kitchen drinking instant coffee, Bill answered the phone: his younger brother James. “Who’s that?” James said.

“Who dat who say who dat?” Bill said.

“Well—I’ll be.”

“How’s that Saigon pussy?”

“I guess Mom ain’t sitting right there.”

“Done left for work, I think.”

“Ain’t it six a.m. there?”

“Here? No. Closer to eight.”

“It ain’t six a.m.?”

“It used to be. Now it’s eight.”

“What are you doing there at eight a.m.?”

“Sitting here in my Jockeys, drinking Nescafé.”

“You done with the navy?”

“Done with them, and them with me.”

“You living at Mom’s?”

“Just visiting. Where are you at?”

“Right this minute? Da Nang.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down deep somewhere in a bucket of shit.”

“I haven’t seen you since Yokohama one year ago.”

“Yeah, that’d be about right.”

“That’s funny to say.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“‘Haven’t seen you since Yokohama.’”

James said, “Well…” and there was a silence.

Bill asked, “You getting any pussy?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How is it?”

“’Bout like you’d think.”

Bill said, “Did you know your gal came by?”

“Who?”

“Stephanie. Your little gal that you dated. Yeah. She paid a visit.”

“So what?”

“Bothering the old woman about you.”

“About what?”

“Says you don’t answer her letters no more. Wants to know how you’re going along.”

“Are you living there now, or what?”

“I just thought you should know. So now you know.”

“So now I know. Don’t mean I care.”

“You’re a funny feller. Yeah, she’s all upset about you doing another tour.”

“Are you living there for sure?”

“I’m just visiting a few days till I get squared up with a job.”

“Good luck.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Where’s Mom? She at work?”

“Yeah. What time is it there?”

“I couldn’t care less,” James said. “I’m on leave. Three days.”

“It must be seventeen or eighteen hundred.”

“I couldn’t care less. Not for three days.”

“And it’s already tomorrow, ain’t it.”

“It ain’t never tomorrow, not in this fucking movie. Never ain’t nothing but today.”

“You seen any actual combat yet?”

“I been in them tunnels down there.”

“What’d you see?”

His brother didn’t answer.

“What about the fighting? Have you been in battles?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Really?”

“It’s sort of off over there somewhere, never right around where you’re at. I mean, I seen dead guys, hurt guys, guys all tore up, over at the LZ, the landing zone.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. So, yeah, there’s shit going on all over. But it never gets to right here.”

“You’re probably lucky.”

“That’s about it.”

“What else? Come on.”

“What else? I don’t know.”

“Come on, brother. Tell me about that pussy.”

His young brother’s voice came small and echoing over the wire, seven, eight thousand miles. Anybody’s voice. Talking about the one thing. “It’s all over hell, brother Bill. It’s falling out of the trees. I got one I keep in a hooch over at the ville. I never seen anything like her, I mean never. Her ass never once touches the bed while I’m on her. She couldn’t weigh more’n eighty-two pounds, and she keeps me lifted up halfway to the roof. She must eat atomic fuel for breakfast. Listen: I don’t think I could take her in a fight.”

“Goddamn. Goddamn, little James. I don’t know how I’m gonna get laid now I’m back at home. I don’t know how to talk to a natural white woman!”

“You better get back with the navy.”

“I don’t believe they’ll have me.”

“No? They won’t?”

“They got a little tired of me, seems like.”

“Well…” said James.

“Yeah…”

During the silences came a faint wash of static, in which you could almost hear other voices.

“How’s old Burris?”

“He’s all right. He’s a funny feller too, just like you.”

“Mom doing okay?”

“Just fine.”

“Runnin’ with Jesus.”

“Sure enough. Did you get my postcard that she sent?”

“Yeah, that postcard? Yeah.”

“I was in the brig when I sent that.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah…”

“Listen, don’t tell that Stevie gal I called.”

“Stephanie?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell her you talked to me.”

“She said you don’t answer back when she writes you.”

“Everybody else just thinks about their girl back home, that’s all they think about.”

“What do you think about?”

“Sideways pussy.”

“Whorehouse pussy. Paid-for pussy.”

“Nothin’s free on Planet E, brother Bill.”

Dead guys, guys all torn up. In this James could have been lying. He might have felt pressured, in an overseas long-distance phone call, to produce experiences worth telling. Bill Houston had heard there wasn’t much fighting over there. Not like Iwo Jima, anyhow, not like the Battle of the Bulge. Bill Houston saw no point in calling him on his bull. James wasn’t his little punk brother anymore. You didn’t want to kid him and keep him in his place.

“I got to go, brother Bill. Tell Mom I love her.”

“I’ll pass the word along. What about your Stevie gal?”

“I done told you,” James said, “just don’t mention me.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

“Keep your head down, James.”

“It’s down and staying down,” James said, and the phone clicked dead.

January came and nearly went before Bill Houston found work in the rural environs outside Tempe, near Phoenix. He took a room on South Central Street he could pay for by the day, week, or month, and bused back and forth. At 10:00 p.m. each Tuesday through Saturday he arrived in darkness at the gates of Tri-City Redimix, a sand-and-gravel outfit, for his duties as night cleanup man. By ten-thirty the last of the second shift had left and he tossed aside his mandatory hard hat and presided over fifteen acres of desert—mountains of crushed rocks sorted by size, so that each mountain was made bewilderingly of the same-sized thing, from fist-sized stones down to sand. From one hopper leaked a thread of fine dust that made a pile at the end of a tunnel some twenty feet long; for each shovelful he crept down its tight length toward a distant lightbulb burning in a hemisphere of wire mesh, holding his breath and approaching, a mist of dust exploding in slow motion when he jabbed the blade into the pile, backing out step by step carrying the one shovelful and tossing it to the chilly currents circling the earth. He washed the concrete troughs under the crushers’ conveyor belts with a violent fire hose and scraped each one clean with a flat-nose shovel. The nights were wild with stars, otherwise empty and cold. For warmth he kept fifty-five-gallon drums full of diesel-soaked sand burning around the place. He made a circuit among the maze of conveyor belts under gargantuan crushers and was never done. The next evening the same belts, the same motions, even some of the same pebbles and rocks, it stood to reason, and the same cold take-out burger for lunch at the dusty table in the manager’s trailer at 2:00 a.m.; washing his hands and face first in the narrow john, his thick neck brown as a bear’s, sucking water up his nostrils and expelling the dust in liverish clumps. Not long after his lunch the roosters alone on neighboring small farms began to scream like humans, and just before six the sun arrived and turned the surrounding aluminum rooftops to torches, and then at six-thirty, while Houston punched out, the drivers came, and they lined their trucks nose-to-ass and one after another drove beneath the largest hopper of all to wait, shaken by their machines, while wet concrete cascaded down the chute into each tanker before they went out to pour the foundations of a city. Houston walked a mile to the bus stop and there he waited, covered with dirt and made sentimental by the vision of high school punks and their happy, whorish girlfriends walking to class, heading for their own daily torment, sharing cigarettes back and forth. Houston remembered doing that, and later in the boy’s bathroom…nothing ever as sweet as those mouthfuls from rushed, overhot smokes…stolen from the whole world…In his heart—as with high school—he’d quit this job on the first day but saw nowhere else to go.

S
crewy Loot stopped his jeep, signaled to one of the new guys. New guy ran over to the jeep, came back humping two clanking double basic loads of magazines and threw them at James’s feet and ran back toward the jeep, saying, “He’s calling me.”

“What’s all this ammo for?”

“Fuck if I know! He’s calling me!” The new guy returned to Screwy Loot’s jeep, listened, came back humping two jerry cans.

“Burn ’em, burn ’em, burn ’em!”

“What?”

“Burn the hooches! He says we gotta burn ’em.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Something very fucked-up is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“He says there’s an attack!”

“
Where?
”

“I don’t know!”

James gripped a handle and as panic rode over the back of his skull down his spine and up his ass they both flicked the cans at the nearest hooch and dabbed it with fuel. From somewhere over the hill came deep, repetitive explosions.

The new private pulled a Zippo and the spark blew the vapors and the explosion sent them backward, but it wasn’t as loud as the booming from over the hill. He said, “It’s all a
thing
, man, it’s all a desperate, fucking
thing
.”

James circled one hooch and then a second, sloshing gas until the can was empty. He tossed the can into a burning dwelling and the flames found it and ignited the vapors inside and it whooshed loudly and whirled and took a hop. “Did you see that?” James shouted, but the roof’s thatch fried so loudly as it burned he couldn’t hear himself talk.

He shouted, “What are we doing this for again?”

“Fuck if I know!”

“What’s your name again?”

“Fuck if I know!”

James said, “That’s kind of fucked-up,” but couldn’t make himself heard. He heard gunfire nearby. A noisy chopper floated past overhead and laid a pair of rockets down on the other side of the draw, out of sight, where James was sure there’d never been any people or structures. Black smoke and orange light leapt out of the earth. Had he ever seen any people there? Maybe somebody was dug in. Tough titty, they were on fire now.

The private yelled, “Psycho-delick!”

The structures collapsed quickly. James looked inside a hut as it burned. It was empty. Not even a piece of trash or an old cigarette pack remained. The roof began falling in, and he drew back.

“This is the shits, man,” he explained to the private, “because we knew them. I mean, I’ve seen those people before. We pass by here a lot.”

“I’ve still got gas.”

“Let’s pull back to them hooches over there.”

Keeping low, they ran to a copse of huts in a small basin.

It was empty of life.

“Where’s our guys, goddamn it?”

The private said, “Fuck if I know.”

“Go tell Sarge.”

“I ain’t going over that hill—there’s people shooting over there!”

“That where it’s coming from?”

“Yeah. They’d just as soon shoot me as Charlie.”

“I thought it was coming from around to the east.”

“Damn. They’re shooting all over.”

Sergeant Harmon came ducking and running over the lip of the basin. He stood upright as he came down their side.

“I want you two dug in over here.”

“What happened? Seems like we were just about in a firefight.”

Sarge said, “Did you fire your weapon?”

“No.”

“Then you weren’t in no firefight.”

“Who was it?”

“Could have been our own fucking guys!”

Sarge said, “This whole mountain’s under attack.”

Huge booms from straight up the hill.

“What is that?”

“Mortars?”

From the east boomed something bigger.

“What is
that
?”

And from behind them, too close, came more. “Where
are
they?”

“Right around us. Them’s mortars,” Sarge said. “Listen up. I want you dug in here. You hear me?”

“Yes,” the new guy said.

“We’re in a mess here. If we do this right we can fall back, we can cut around west and skedaddle around them up the hill. I want both ends holding while we fall back from the center real quiet and they don’t know. If they flank us on the west, we’re fried. Or east. Either way. You’ve got cover on your west. And you are the cover for the east, you hear me? Charlie comes around that hill, don’t cut and run. You hear me?”

“Yes, yes.”

Sarge threw down a bindle of twenty-shot magazines. “Keep your switch on semi-auto. You hear me?”