Tree of Smoke (45 page)

They floated around and the current took them away from Vietnam.

“Well, James, you gonna stay awhile?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I can talk to Frenchie about a discount.”

“I got money. I don’t need a discount.”

“That’s kind of a strange attitude.”

“I’m just saying I don’t need no favors.”

“Where are you at in your tour?”

“A little ways into number two.”

“You’re just a mess of strange attitudes. I don’t get why anybody would go around a second time on this hog.”

“Ain’t no reason for it,” James admitted. “Are you short?”

“Not that short.”

“How far along are you?”

“Eight months. Six months and eight days when they hurt me. Halfway and eight. It’s fucked up.”

“Just as fucked up to eat shit if you’re the new guy.”

“Yeah. It’s always fucked up to eat shit. That’s part of the plan.”

Cadwallader rose storklike on his single leg, tipped sideways, and rolled into the water. James was entirely alone in the ocean until Cadwallader broke the surface, blowing and spitting.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey what.”

“Get back in the boat.”

“What for?”

“At least stay there.”

“I am. You’re the one moving.”

“I can’t paddle this thing. Come on, I’m about to lose you.”

“Yeah?”

“Cadwallader. Cadwallader.”

“Adios, motherfucker!”

“It’s a mile to shore.”

Cadwallader floated on his back a hundred feet away.

“Cadwallader!”

James paddled hard but he didn’t know how it was done. He could glimpse the boy now only when the low swells dipped. Cadwallader floated on his back, staring upward and kicking. “You’re coming the right way!” James shouted, but Cadwallader didn’t hear or didn’t care. James believed one of them was making progress toward the other, and this inspired him. The paddle seemed to function better if he worked it back and forth like a fishtail out behind. The work exhausted him. Cadwallader came near and James grasped at his hand, but he fended him off. James clutched at his hair. Cadwallader yelped and took hold of the side. James didn’t have strength to haul him aboard. He had no breath left even to swear at him. His chest heaved and the coppery taste of fatigue filled his mouth.

Cadwallader kicked away, turned over, and began swimming over-hand toward shore. James paddled after. The current seemed to be with them now.

The teacup craft scraped bottom and the small surf pitched it around. James got out and dragged it to land.

Cadwallader lay flat on his back a hundred yards off. James trudged toward him, dragging a crutch by either hand and leaving two lines behind him in the sand. Meanwhile, the waves had reclaimed the boat. It bobbed in the foam and seemed to be heading out to sea.

“You’re fucked up, man. You’re all wrong inside.”

“Obviously.”

“I’ve had it, man.”

“Gimme my sticks.”

James flung each one as far from him as possible. “Get your own goddamn sticks.”

He shuffled to where they’d stashed their gear and retrieved it and examined Cadwallader’s gun, a Browning Hi-Power.

“Hey,” he called. “This is officer’s issue. Are you an officer?”

Cadwallader crawled bitterly across the sands like a cinematic Saharan castaway.

“Are you an officer?”

“I’m a civilian! I’m a fucking deserter!”

He dragged himself to James’s feet. James ejected the Browning’s magazine and yanked back the slide to clear the action of the last bullet and said, “Now you can play all you want.”

“Fuck you. I got plenty of ammo.”

“Enjoy it, then, and I’m taking the weapon.”

“Gimme back my boom-boom.”

“Never happen, or you’re gonna kill yourself.”

“You’re stealing my gun.”

“Looks like it.”

“Fuck your cracker ass. That’s my ticket to Paradise.”

They both lit cigarettes off Cadwallader’s Zippo, and James said:

“I gotta go.”

He turned and walked off.

“Halt. That’s an order. I’m a lieutenant, man.”

“Not in my war,” James said over his shoulder.

As he headed through the chink in the seawall he heard Lieutenant Cadwallader calling, “Kill me a Gook, man!”

James caught a ride in a Mutt with two men of the Twenty-fifth from downtown Saigon out to the big base. They dropped him right in front of the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital in its fog of rotor dust and he went inside without talking to anyone and was instantly lost amid all the wards with their sickly hush and medical stench. He’d had a lot of beer that morning and felt irritable and hollow. First they told him Ward C-3, then no, C-4, and the nurse for C-4 guessed Ward 5 or 6, and finally a nurse in 6 gave him a doughnut and said she cared for the expectants and some of the bad ones and brought him to a curtain around a space in a kind of alcove and said to him, “Jim? Do they call you Jim?” She didn’t move the curtain.

“I go more by James.”

She moved the partition aside a bit. “Sergeant Harmon?” the nurse said. “James is here. James from your unit.”

The sarge was in no kind of shape. James stood beside the bed and said, “Hey, Sarge,” and tried to work up something further, but failed. James wanted to say The guys are gonna drink without you around and say They were shooting the place up a while ago and say I was shooting the place up too. He was angry at somebody around here and possibly it was the sarge, who looked not very different from dead, certainly past provoking by news of undisciplined conduct. He looked like the Frankenstein monster laid out in pieces, wired up for the jolt that would wake him to a monster’s confused and tortured finish. The sarge even had gleaming metal bolts like the Frankenstein monster’s coming out the sides of his head—for what purpose? A sheet covered him up to where his navel would have been, if he’d had an abdomen instead of something that looked put together out of scraps from a slaughterhouse. A machine beside the bed made a regular hiss and thunk. Red numbers on a monitor’s screen told his pulse: 73, 67, 70.

“What’s that tube out of his mouth for?”

“James, the sarge isn’t breathing entirely on his own yet.”

The nurse moved a chair for him, and he sat beside the bed and took Sarge’s hand. A bubble traveled up the drip in the sarge’s wrist. “Sarge.”

The sarge’s very blue eyes, free-floating in their sockets, drifted toward James and stopped. Sarge made a ticking noise with his tongue against his palate.

“Do you see me?”

The sarge clicked his tongue again,
tsk tsk
, as if he were scolding a kid,
tsk tsk
. The lips white and cracked, flaking.

James leaned close and looked down into the sarge’s eyes. Eyelashes shellacked together by tears, radiating out in a burst, as in a child’s drawing. Beautiful blue eyes. If they were a woman’s you couldn’t stop looking at them.

“What’s that sound he’s making?” he asked, but the nurse had gone. “What are you trying to say, Sarge?” He wiped his own tears and sucked and spat in the brown waste can full of swabs and slimy tissue papers. “I just came by,” James said. “Just to say hi. See if you need anything. Shit like that.”

Every few seconds, that ticking sound. Was it Morse code? “Sarge, I forgot my Morse code,” he said.

Two nurses came in and moved James aside and drew the tube from between Sarge’s lips and stuck another tube deep down his throat. The tube made a scouring and sucking noise and the numbers on the monitor rose rapidly—121, 130, 145, 162, 184, 203. After a minute they replaced the tube and the sarge was able to breathe again and the numbers descended slowly.

“Goddamn,” James said.

“We’re keeping his lungs clean,” one of the nurses said.

“You didn’t even say hello,” James said.

“Hello, Sarge,” the nurse said, and they departed and James sat down again and took the sarge’s hand.

The sarge’s eyes floated there burning and pleading. Everything coming out of his eyes. James wept like a barking dog. The reality and the rightness pouring off him, the purity of weeping, just crying, and who gives a shit—this is bigger than any of your games. The tears ran backward from the sarge’s eyes over his temples and into his ears, but he made no sound other than by clicking his tongue.

“This is James, Doctor,” the nurse said. She’d come back with a happy-looking medical man. “James is from Sergeant Harmon’s unit.”

“How we doing today, Sergeant?”

“What happened?” James said.

“What do you mean?”

“What happened? What happened? How’d he get hurt?”

The doctor said, “What happened to you, Sarge?”

The sarge moved his flaking lips and clicked his tongue.

“He makes that noise,” James said. “Can you hear it?”

“What happened to you, Sarge? Do you remember? We talked about it yesterday?”

The sarge timed the movement of his lips with his machine’s exhalations, and he said, “I—I—” or moved his lips so it looked like that’s what he said.

“Remember what we talked about? We said you might’ve got hit with a flare? Hit in the back?”

“I thought he got hit in the middle, the belly, I thought—”

“The flare entered below the solar plexus and headed up the spine, as far as we can tell. Laid him open all up his backbone.”

“He got hit with a flare?”

“Correct.”

“You mean a flare. A signal flare.”

“Correct. Lotta damage. Muscle, lung, spine. Spinal cord all the way up to the second vertebra. Lotta damage, huh, Sarge?”

Moving his lips. Trying to produce sounds with the saliva in his throat, trying to shape a statement. As far as James could make it out, the message was, “I’m a mess.”

The lines for the phones ran ten deep, but there were three other phones just for the use of officers at the Officers’ Club, and he went there. After he’d dialed for the operator he kept his right hand on the butt of his new pistol and locked eyes with anyone who got near. He had all three phones to himself.

He gave the operator Stevie’s number, an unforgettable series of digits, he’d dialed it hundreds of times thousands of years ago, in high school.

Her mom answered—“Hello?”—sleepy and maybe frightened.

He hung up.

A captain brought him a Budweiser. These guys weren’t so bad. He took his hand off his gun and lit a smoke, and then called home.

“What time is it there?” his mother said.

“I don’t know. In the afternoon.”

“James, what did you decide? On the business of staying on? What did you decide about it?”

“I put a little extension on my visit here.”

“Why would you want to stay on? Don’t you realize you’ve done your service to your country? As much as anybody ever
has
.”

“Yeah…It felt like it wasn’t over yet.”

“Don’t you dare sign away for no more of it after this one.”

“I been shirking my duties. They might not even want me no more.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re probably shell-shocked.”

“Suppose they cut me loose—maybe I could come to Phoenix.”

“Well, yes, yes, hon. Where else would you think of to go to?”

“I don’t know. Some island maybe.”

“What do you mean, a island? We don’t live on a island.”

“How’s everybody? How’s Burris?”

“Burris takes drugs!”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t swear!”

“Jeez. Jeez. What kind of drugs?”

“Whatever kind he gets his hands on.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s not even twelve!”

“What a little punk. Well—well—what do you hear from Bill Junior? Anything?”

“Bill Junior was away almost a month.”

“Away where?”

“Away. Away. Away is all.”

James paused to take the last drag and put out his cigarette. “You mean jail?”

“One on drugs, and another off to jail!”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Some of this and some of that. He got in jail one week after New Year’s Day and didn’t get loose till February tenth. They had him for three weeks. He had to plead guilty and get two years’ suspended sentence or they’d-a kept him and kept him. These folks are tired of the misbehavior.”

“Is he in Arizona?”

“Yep. Suspended sentence. If he strays in his behavior they’ll put him in Florence with your Dad. Like father, like son.”

“Ain’t that sweet.”

“Don’t be smart about it. The Holy Spirit’s been battering away at the souls of the men in this family for generations. But do you think he’s ever made so much as a dent?”

“Yeah—you know what? Maybe the Holy Spirit ain’t so holy.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“You been to Oklahoma, ain’t you, and Arizona. And that’s all.”

“What do you mean by saying that?”

“I don’t know. Just you need to get around a little more, before you start talking about the Holy Spirit.”

“James, do you go to church?”

“No.”

“James, do you pray?”

“To who?”

His mother began to weep.

“Woman, let me tell you about the Holy Spirit. He’s crazy.”

“James,” she said.

He really felt nothing, neither sorrow nor satisfaction, but he said to her, “Mom, okay, sorry ’bout that. I’m sorry.”

“Will you pray? Will you pray with me now, son?”

“Go ahead.”

“Dear Lord, dear Redeemer, dear Father in Heaven,” she said, and he removed the receiver from his ear thinking if the Holy Spirit ever came to South Vietnam, he’d probably get his balls shot off.

Over at the bar he saw men drinking whiskey from glasses with ice. An officer in fatigues stared down at his fingers while they shredded his cocktail napkin.

At this moment he thought suddenly of Sergeant Harmon:

Oh, my Lord. He wanted water.

“Son,” his mother said, “are you still there?”

The dry, cracked lips—thirsty, parched. Signaling with his tongue.

“Thanks for the prayer, Ma,” he said, and hung up the phone.

He tipped his beer and drank it away and sucked out every last drop. It was the best he’d ever tasted. The worst and the best.

James dreamed he couldn’t find his car. The parking lot changed into a village of narrow curving streets. He didn’t want to ask for help, because he carried his M16, and these people might arrest him. Time was running out. That’s what he remembered when he woke on the mat in his saturated civvies, though the dream had held a million peripherals, avenues of twisted events and unspoken complications. He dreamed a great deal each night. It felt like work. Sleeping made him tired.