Tree of Smoke (73 page)

“What happened to that local, James?”

“Anybody got wasted they were hostiles, is all.”

“Were you on that patrol?”

“No.”

“Four nights ago?”

“No.”

“No? Address me as sir.”

“Who snitched us?”

Sergeant Lorin said, “None of your business.”

“Somebody’s a liar.”

“Somebody’s a liar about what?” the sarge said.

James waited for the captain to speak.

“Did you do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Goddammit, man, you will address me as sir.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Did you do this, or not?”

“I don’t remember which night was what, sir. I think I drank too much beer last week.”

The sarge said, “Had him a wicked jag on.”

“Do you like beer, James? Well, there isn’t any beer in Leavenworth.”

“Have you been there?”

“Don’t sass me.”

“I got friends there.”

“Don’t sass me.”

“Apologize to the captain.”

“I apologize, sir.”

“What did you do to that woman?”

“She was VC.”

“Bullshit.”

“She was a VC whore.”

“Bullshit.”

“She’s a whore, and this is a war. Sir.”

“Don’t tell me what this is. I know what it is. I think.”

“So do I.”

“Do you intend to do a fourth tour?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, sir. No more for you.”

“Sir, I’ve got patrol at seventeen hundred.”

“Patrol? Jesus Christ. Number one, we don’t send guys with their ribs taped up and their arm in a cast out on patrol.”

“It’s a sling. It ain’t a cast. It comes off.”

“Number two: We don’t send civilians out on patrol.”

“I ain’t a civilian.”

“Well,” the captain said, and such anger gripped him that he slurred his words, “do you mind if I tell you that if you’re not a civilian you haven’t heard the last of this? I’m gonna take stock of this, I will get back to you, you haven’t heard the last of this. I will get back to you. Maybe a lot of people will be getting back to you. Maybe the whole army will be getting back to you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? Are you being insubordinate?”

“I’m just saying something.”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you saying?”

“That you think you’re gonna get back to me, but I don’t think you’re gonna get back to me, because she was a whore, and this is a war. And that’s what happens, because this is a war, because this is not just a war.”

“Well, which is it? Is it a war, or is it not just a war?”

“I’m just telling you.”

“You little punk. I was in this war before you learned to jerk your meat. All right?”

“All right.”

“All right,” said the captain. For thirty seconds they just stood there doing nothing.

James said, “Sir, Captain, I gotta go, I gotta boogie.”

“No, James, you don’t. Jesus Christ.
Patrol?
”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Galassi stood up. He stepped smartly to the door of the Quonset hut, grasped the knob, and opened it wide. Outside, the dust, the noise of trucks, helicopters—a heavy, gray day—“Sergeant,” he said, “speak to this man.” He left and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving things relatively quiet again under the air conditioner’s hum.

The sarge sat down at the captain’s desk and offered James a seat. But not a cigarette.

Lorin said, “You could’ve wasted as many as four of those mother-fuckers.—Well, I know, the only one got hurt is you.” After a while Lorin said, “But this business with the woman.”

“Shit goes on all the time.”

Lorin just looked at him. Stared at him. Said, “James.”

“What.”

“No. You tell me what.”

James said, “I mean, where did this shit about a woman come from, what is this shit doing in my movie?”

“You like your movie?”

“It’s kind of like where I have these sensors. And the minute the shit starts my mind snaps on in Technicolor. Like I have these sensors.”

“So you just want to keep on keeping on?”

“Yeah.”

“Watching your Technicolor movie?”

“Yeah.”

“Till you eat shit and die?”

“Yeah.”

“Right there I kind of agree with you, James. I don’t really think it’s highly advisable to turn you loose on the United States. I’d say keep you right here till you get killed. But if it ain’t bass-ackwards, it ain’t the U.S. Army, is it?”

“We do it all in the dark, Sarge. Mistakes get made.”

“Yeah, they do. But this little mistake with the woman is traveling right straight up the captain’s ass. And then with the fragging thing, you’re sticking out all over.”

“Can you spare me a toke?”

“In a minute. I’m telling you something.”

“Okay.”

“So I think it’s the real deal, Cowboy. I think you’re gonna have to go home.”

“Home?”

“Home where you came from.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’re a mess.”

“I’m a mess.”

“If you don’t want a ticket out of hell, then you ain’t regular in your mind no more, are you, sojer?”

“If you’re talking, I gotta listen. You always did have your finger right smack on the thing, man.”

“Uncle Ho done died, buddy. You won the war. It’s over.”

“Yeah?”

“Pack up. Go home. Right now.”

“Now?”

“Absolutely. Get to Tan Son Nhut and get on a MAC flight and go. Just go. I’ll furlough you, and after you’re there we’ll work all the paper to make it permanent.”

The sergeant took out a cigarette. He offered James one and lit both out of a matchbook from the Midnight Massage. He said, “It’ll be honorable.”

“What will?”

“The discharge.”

“Oh…Yeah. Honorable?”

“Honorable Discharge.”

“If you say so.”

“I say Honorable. And I always will.”

I
n the middle of June, Bill Houston bailed his brother James out of jail. James had reached Phoenix a couple of weeks before but hadn’t gotten in touch with anyone until he’d been arrested for simple assault, and then he’d called their mother. As James came out past the bailiff ’s desk, he was smiling. Otherwise he looked sketchy, like something might get him from behind.

“First of all, I ain’t smiling because I’m proud. I’m smiling because I’m glad as hell to get out.”

“You’re lucky I had a few bucks.”

“Sorry for you spending it this way.”

“Usually I’m on my ass, but lately things have been breaking a little different for me.”

“Looks like you put on a little weight.”

“Well—I was in Florence.”

Out on the street James ducked his head and squinted against the light.

“I appreciate this, Bill Junior. No lie.”

“Family better count for something. Because nothing else does.”

“You got that right.”

“You ready for a burger?”

“Does the Pope wear a dress?” James expelled a wad of tobacco from his mouth and it bounced on the pavement like a small turd. “How much did you pay the bondsman guy?”

“A hundred. And if you don’t do right and show for court, I owe him a thousand.”

“I’ll do right.”

“I kind of hope so.”

“I’ll pay you back the hundred too.”

“Don’t sweat it. Just when you can.”

Bill Houston reached his right hand cross-draw to dig in the left pocket of his jeans for the keys.

“You got a car.”

“Yep. It’s a Rolls.”

“No shit?”

It was an old Lincoln with a hood like the deck of an aircraft carrier. “Yeah, it ain’t a Rolls. But it rolls when you push on the gas.”

He took James to a McDonald’s and got him three of the biggest they had and two chocolate shakes. James ate fast and then sat there with his arms crossed on his chest, mad-dogging everybody.

“Hey.”

James belched loudly.

They talked about their mother. James said, “How old is she, anyways?”

“She’s fifty-eight at least,” Bill said, “maybe fifty-nine. But she seems like she’s past a hundred.”

“I know. Yeah. She does. She has for a long time.”

Bill said, “So—I’m called Bill Junior. But did something ever occur to you? It occurred to me a long time ago.”

“What.”

“There ain’t no Bill Senior.”

An old man at the next little table asked them: “How old are you boys?”

They looked at each other. The old man said: “I’m sixty-six. You know—Route Sixty-six? Like that. Sixty-six.”

“Fuck yourself,” James said.

Bill Houston observed James dipping snuff. He took a wad from the tin, shoved it down inside his cheek, shut the lid, wiped his fingers on the underneath of his pants leg.

“The bondsman said this was the fourth time in two weeks the cops rousted you for fighting, so they finally had to charge you.”

“That what he said?”

It pissed Bill Houston off, it irked him unreasonably, that James would playact an old soldier, as if he’d explored some mysterious region and been tortured there.

“You want another burger?”

“I’m all right.”

“Really? You’re all right?”

“Yeah.”

“The evidence is pointing the other way.”

T
he day after James got out of jail he went to a small office where a fat, sad man helped him fill out some forms. He said the checks would start in about four weeks if everything didn’t go too wrong. The man told him about a place downtown that might give him further benefits, and James went to see about it, but they wanted him to stand in line there and fill out more idiotic forms

For several days he was permitted to stay in a hostel on the east side, on Van Buren Street, the street of outlaws and whores, thirty blocks from where his mother had lived before he’d left for Southeast Asia. Perhaps she still resided there.

In the mornings he set out walking, rarely stopping. To the west lay factories and warehouses. In other directions the city gave way to suburban tracts, empty desert, or irrigated farmland. It was early in the desert summer, hot, but dry. He wore a straw cowboy hat and kept the sun behind him all day, asking in restaurants for water. When it came down ahead of him he turned and went the other way. Only half of him was plugged in. The rest was dark. He could feel his sensors dying.

James didn’t get in touch with Stevie. She came to see him just before he left the hostel for good, and they went out for drinks, but he railed at her so unflaggingly in the Aces Tavern that the bartender shouted at James to leave, and Stevie stayed, saying that she’d seen what he wanted to show her and that she got the message and refused to go anywhere with a man who repaid her kindness with curses and abuse. As the bartender strong-armed him into the night James looked back and saw her crying, swaying in the light of the jukebox. Thirty minutes later Stevie found him standing in front of the state insane asylum at Twenty-fourth Street, looking in through the barred gate at the wide lawns, which in the illumination of the arc lamps looked uniformly silver and magical. She’d finished crying. She told him she couldn’t stop loving him. He swore to her he’d get a job.

He’d made it out of the war with just short of four hundred dollars cash. He rented an apartment in a plywood sort of building called Rob Roy Suites and bought a Harley in many pieces which he commenced to assemble in the living room and knew he’d never complete. He hated his neighbor across the court, a diesel-dyke with a bad mouth. You could tell she used to be sexy but had always hated men. James didn’t know what to do. What did these good souls want you to do? Most evenings he went to a bar just a few blocks down the street where you could almost always get into a fight, or he drank port wine from plastic cups in places full of ripped-up old alcoholic men. He waited for his checks to start. When they started, he bought a Colt .45 revolver, a real six-shooter. He was pretty sure he would eventually shoot the woman living across the way but he felt there was nothing any human power could do about it.

After a month at the Rob Roy Suites he moved to the Majestic Palms Apartments on Thirty-second Street half a block above Van Buren. Each morning he sat by the shadeless window naked, jiggling his knees, and watched a tremendously fat black guy in a circus-tent T-shirt cross the street from wherever he dwelt and open up the Circle K on the corner.

James walked the neighborhood and passed the slack whores on the bus stop benches and shouldered past the old crones taking their minuscule paces forward through the intersections and observed the Mexican women in their tall spiked heels and tight pink pants, who looked for sale but really weren’t.

He sits at a bus stop. He drags on a Kool. He spits between his feet. In his fingers he holds the neck of a half pint of Popov vodka, his head bowed low under the crashing irrelevance of these millions of monsters and their games.

An older guy sitting next to him with a newspaper open across his knees, reading in the glaring sunlight, squinting, began to curse these people undermining the military effort in Vietnam. “Those boys are doing right. They’re our boys. They’re doing right,” he said. James felt as if he could sure use a cigarette, and said so. “I don’t smoke,” the man said. “Don’t even drink coffee. I was raised as a Mormon. Yep. Raised as a Mormon. But I don’t believe in it now. You know why? Because it’s phony.” James repeated he’d like a cigarette, and the man got up and walked away. And a dog came along and stopped and looked at him and James said, “You got a face, buddy,” and he scratched its ears and he said, “Yeah, buddy, you got a face.”

One night in the Aces Tavern he ran into his older brother Bill and Bill’s old friend Pat Patterson. Patterson had just come out of the Arizona State Prison in Florence, where the two had been acquainted. He was a slender, erectly postured young man who looked like he’d landed here intact from the rockabilly fifties, his hair combed in a ducktail and his short sleeves turned up above his triceps, and his collar turned up too.

Bill explained to his brother a little bit about prison: “You got your guys, and they got their guys, depending on your skin color. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s who’s who—who’s the people next to you. And you owe them.”