Tree of Smoke (4 page)

Hao made out the colonel’s intent, and, Yes, he wanted to agree, it’s all simply water coursing into larger and then still larger seas, and only what we do in this moment can save us…His vocabulary allowed him to say, “It’s true. I think so. Yes.”

Both men were distracted now by a small rat or frog hopping boldly into the room through the front door. The colonel astonished Hao by reacting to this intrusion violently, flinging himself bodily at the small man and knocking him backward, chair and all, so that the back of Hao’s head struck the packed dirt floor and a pain burst over his sight like an explosion of freezing needles. His vision cleared as the object, for that is what it was, and not some rodent, stopped only a meter from his face, and he understood that it was probably a grenade; it was his death. Something clapped down over the grenade. The soldier had covered it with his helmet and now lowered himself, not rapidly, but with some reluctance, and covered the helmet with his body, staring at first at the dirt of the floor and then looking toward Hao’s face, only inches away, so that his eyes were readable as he curled himself around his terror. Long seconds passed in a voluminous silence.

The silence held. More long seconds. The soldier’s face did not change, and he didn’t breathe, but his soul came back into his eyes and he stared at Hao with some comprehension.

Hao became aware that the colonel lay across his chest, had thrown himself there just as the soldier had thrown himself over the helmet. He became aware of pain in his calves, his head, of the big American colonel’s weight. Hao sucked hard at the atmosphere, he was suffocating. The soldier himself exhaled the air he’d been harboring, and Hao felt the soldier’s breath bathe his face. At last the colonel placed his palms on the floor either side of Hao’s shoulders and heaved himself to his knees, and Hao was able to fill his lungs.

The colonel stood up like a very old man and bent to grip the soldier’s arm. “Nothing happening, son.” The soldier was deaf. “Get up. Get up, son. Come on, now, son. Get up.” The youngster, finding life in his body, overcame some of his shock and rolled himself over. Quickly the colonel tossed the helmet aside, scooped up the hand grenade, pitched it underhanded toward the doorway, but it struck the wall and made it only as far as the threshold, and he said, “Damn it all.” He approached it, bent and took a firm hold of it, and strode out the door and to the well. He moved the lid aside and tossed the device into the depths. Then he walked back to the building and turned off his generator.

The others followed him out, perhaps inadvisedly. Mrs. Van tended to the soldier, talking rapid English, brushing at his shirt and trousers energetically, almost hysterically, as if batting at flames. When she was done she started on Hao, swiping at the back of his shirt. “These are bad people,” she said in English. “This is what happens with these horrible people.”

The master came out of the temple. From his place behind the screen he’d witnessed almost nothing. When Hao told him about the grenade, he took two long steps backward away from the lip of the well.

The colonel said, “Look, I’m sorry. The well was the quickest place to come to mind.”

Hao translated the colonel’s apology and then the master’s reply: “I believe it’s safe.”

“If that grenade goes off, it’s gonna muddy up your water.”

The master said, “Later it will become calm again.”

“That thing must be deep. And is it concrete?”

Hao said, “Concrete construction.”

“It’s top-notch.”

“Top-notch?”

“It’s very well made.”

“Yes. It was placed by the Swiss Red Cross.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know when.”

The colonel said, “They heard that noisy goddamn generator, didn’t they?”

By way of an answer, Hao pursed his lips.

Hao stood by politely while the visitors reloaded their gear and radioed the encampment on Good Luck Mountain.

“We’ll scoot on up the hill,” the colonel said.

“Good. There it’s more secure,” Hao agreed.

In minutes a patrol of three jeeps arrived, and many soldiers, and the convoy roared away into the night.

Hao crept into the schoolroom and felt along the wall for a nail. He undressed and hung up his shirt and trousers, swept his straw mat with his hands, unrolled two yards of linen to cover him against the mosquitoes. The master heard him from the other side of the wall, in the temple, and called goodnight. Hao replied softly and lay back in his shorts and undershirt in the pitch-dark.

This colonel—Hao had never encountered him in a uniform. It seemed fitting. Somehow he thought of all Americans as civilians, although in his entire life he’d seen only government Americans and military Americans, and a few missionaries. Just the same, he thought of Americans as cowboys. The young soldier’s courage astounded him. Maybe it was good they’d come to Vietnam.

But even through the wall he could feel the master’s anger at himself for dealing with the colonel. The American was attractive, fascinating, but the Americans were, in the end, just another horde of puppet-masters. The curtain falls on the French, the curtain rises, now the American puppet-drama. But the time of slaves and puppets was over. A thousand years under China, then the French domination—all of it finished. Now comes freedom.

Hao spoke softly to Master. He wished him lucky dreams. He himself couldn’t sleep. His bowels smoldered with fear. What if another grenade rolled toward him out of the night? Listening for his murderers, he became aware of the oppressive life of the jungle, of the collective roar of insects, as big as any city’s at noon. A curse lay over everything. His wife was sick, his nephew was dead, the wars would never stop. He found his sandals with his feet and went out to the well and drank from the can in the dark and recollected himself. Nothing could hurt him. He’d lived, he’d known love, he’d been shown much kindness. Lucky life!

A
fter rolling the device into the temple, Trung turned and ran behind the row of huts as quietly as he could and entered the trail. Only a few meters along, he slowed down, listening. Voices, movement. But no blast.

A minute; two minutes. If the noise had come he might not have heard it for the booming of his blood.

He stood in the narrow thoroughfare with his arms wrapped around his middle, grief wringing itself out of him. He hadn’t expected the fools to be sitting there next to the American. He hadn’t wept in years.

If I’d actually killed them, I might weep less.

This outpouring was good. The old women said, Scatter your tears, they’re good for the crops. He’d cried for lots of reasons in his youth. Not much since then.

He moved on down the path. In Saigon they’d given him only the one grenade. Well.

He’d been told to wait for the American civilian who brought the film projector. A specific target. He hadn’t asked why then they hadn’t sent a good shot, with a rifle. He guessed the American’s death was meant to seem incidental.

He had to take to the creek briefly to get around a hamlet where lived some noisy dogs. Heading downstream he reached the house of the region’s head cadre. The occupants slept. In the tiny garden behind it he squatted with his rump against a tree trunk, draped his head with a rag, and put his face down onto his knees. He rested for two hours.

He didn’t know why he’d asked his old friend Hao for funds. He hadn’t been instructed to initiate any contact. He didn’t think he should examine his motives.

Immediately after the roosters’ second crow, he woke the cadre and reported his failure. He was issued a Chinese Type 56 rifle and two banana clips, each holding thirty rounds, and told to go back to the encampment of ragtag boys by the Van Co Dong River, a “lost command” of Hoa-hao guerrillas. They’d declared themselves ready to submit to relocation and indoctrination.

“Has there been any trouble?” he asked the cadre.

“No one has harmed them. You won’t encounter any tensions.”

“All right. Keep the gun. But let me have a flashlight.”

The river ran high. Trung had to make his way to a ford well above the encampment, cross over, and hike back downstream, some five or six kilometers overall.

He hooted as he came to an outpost, a lean-to of banana leaves and bamboo, but no one answered.

The path led to a black scarred region close by the river, formerly a market square. The people here had been driven out by a plague, and later a practitioner had ordered the buildings burned in a superstitious ceremony. A small barn nearby still stood upright and now served as a barracks.

The youngsters had grouped out back of the structure to bury one of their comrades. A two-week bout of malaria, they explained, had ended in his extinction. They’d stripped him of his clothes. They sprinkled grains of rice into his open mouth, lowered the naked youth into a grave about four feet deep without any kind of casket, and covered him with damp, yellowish clots of earth.

Trung stood by watching, waving the flies away from his face. The boys gathered around the mound in silence for about a minute. Finally one spoke up. “It’s bad,” he said. “There goes one more.”

They were all young, many still in their teens. Their group had never been part of the Vietminh. They were ignorant mountain people from Ba Den who didn’t know how to bury their dead.

When they’d finished he stood with them out back of their barracks to address them, but he could only repeat what others had already said.

“We can get you medicine against malaria. It’s possible we can relocate you north, to a collective farm we call a kolkhoz, where you’ll live in peace and order. But if you want to go on fighting, we can put you to better use.

“We are centralized. We have an iron structure. We are closed into a single fist that disappears up a sleeve when it has to. Our will is unshakable. Our will is our weapon. The greatest colonialist armies can’t stand against it. We drove out the French, and we’ll drive out the Americans, and we’ll slaughter and bury their puppets. Do they claim victories? Let them. The invaders are fighting the ocean. No matter how many waves they beat down, the ocean of our resolve is always there.

“Do you want to be free? Personal liberation is national liberation. The men who led you in the beginning understood this, they learned it with the Hoa-hao, and they took you this far. Now you must come with us and go through to the end—which is the beginning we have all hoped for, the first day of our national freedom.”

It had been long enough since he’d stopped attending classes that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying.

Trung had been sent here because of the time he’d spent serving at the New Star Temple in the nearby village. It was assumed he probably knew these people. A slight mix-up. As little children, orphan boys, they’d been recruited—kidnapped—far upriver by Hoa-hao guerrillas, originally from the Mekong Delta, who’d been driven into the hills by the Vietminh. The boys’ leaders had abandoned the young recruits, or been killed. Meanwhile the village of their ancestors had vanished, dispersed by the fighting. Over a period of years the boys had worked their way farther and farther down the Van Co Dong, finding no welcome anywhere and finally stopping along this stretch well-known in the region for its particularly virulent strain of malaria, called “piss-blood.” Nobody bothered them while one by one they died.

Trung explained that his own people came from Ben Tre, but he’d spent years and years in the North. Right now, until reunification, the heart of Vietnam lay in the North. “After reunification, all of Vietnam will be our home. Millions of square kilometers of Vietnam with no partition, no relocation, no disruption of the national fabric. We will lie down at night in peace and wake up to another day of peace. And those of us who die on the way, like your friend, will find peace in the grave.”

Look at you, he thought, from your births to your deaths only exile, wandering, war.

“What will it be like on the kolkhoz farm?”

“Do you want work? There you’ll have work and freedom.”

“But we’ve been on our own a long time. We’re already free.”

“On the farm it’s a different kind of freedom.”

Yes, yes, yes, nothing but crap, what a monstrosity, he cursed himself for participating. Die here, die there, he wanted to say. Just stay away from the kolkhoz. “It’s time to take you to a group forming to head north. There’s a camp near Bau Don. It’s a long hike. We can make it in a day if we start very early tomorrow.”

“We’ve already talked about it,” one of the men told him. “There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll go north. But tonight the moon is empty. We can’t travel tomorrow. Right after the empty moon, it’s bad luck to start a journey. We just lost another one, thanks to bad luck.”

“The malaria doesn’t come from bad luck or spiteful gods. It’s caused by living creatures too small to see, as venomous as a snake, but smaller than a speck of dust. We call these creatures microbes.

“Young brothers, let this sink into your ears. We all die. Do you want to die at the hands of a microbe? The ultimate victory will be composed of many defeats. Do you want to be defeated by a microbe? The sooner we go, the better.”

They only looked at him as if they couldn’t understand him. Probably many of them couldn’t, coming from so far upriver, a region of different dialects. “We’ll think about it,” the man said.

While they talked among themselves, Trung stood aside and looked away. The same man came and touched his arm. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“If that’s your decision,” Trung said, “then good.”

The whole group had stayed up all the previous night with their sick comrade. Everyone was tired. There was nothing to do, so they dispatched a few sentries and the rest hung around the barracks. Trung sat down against the wall. He noticed flattened cigarette packs covering leaks all over the thatched ceiling. Several gaunt cats skulked around eating bits of garbage from the floor.

One of the guerrillas, a one-eyed youngster, brought in an armload of green coconuts. He pointed to his chest. “My Mosa,” he told Trung in some sort of mountain tongue. “My
name
,” another corrected him. “My name Mosa,” he said, turning his head sideways to center Trung in his one functioning eye. He smiled: his teeth, in the way of these mountain tribes, had been filed down flat. With a machete half as large as his own leg he scalped the tops of the coconuts. They drank the milk and scraped at the floppy translucent meat with shards from the shell.