Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Do you get the message? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t.

I could say more but I’d just be repeating myself in different words. Kathy

P.S.: I flipped a coin and I’m addressing this note to the name William Sands. Maybe you’ll get it and maybe you won’t.

He examined the envelope. The letter had come through the American

post office in San Francisco. Goodbye to the women in his life. And so much else. “Are you sure the colonel’s gone? Dead?” he asked Minh. ‘Tes. If he was living, I can still feel him.” Minh set down his chop

sticks and touched his breast gently to indicate where. “I know what you mean.” “Colonel is dead. My heart can feel it.” ‘Tes. Definitely. I feel it too.” Skip turned his eyes anywhere, to the tiles of the floor, the walls, the

cobwebbed vents in the eaves, seeking a clue as to the character of coming days.

Everything he looked at was suddenly and inexplicably smothered by a particular, irrelevant memory, a moment he’d experienced many years ago, driving with fellow undergraduates from Louisville to Bloomington after a weekend holiday, his hands on the wheel, three in the morning, headlights opening up fifty yards of amber silence in the darkness. The heater blowing, the boozy odor of young men in a closed car. His friends had slept and he’d driven the car while music came over the radio, and the star-spangled American night, absolutely infinite, surrounded the world.

O n the morning of March 17, a day before his Aunt Giang’s birthday, Viet Nam Air Force Captain Nguyen Minh sat with a bowl of noodles at one of the many tables under the awning at the big bus station in the Cho Lon neighborhood of Saigon. He was hungry. They were delicious. He shoveled them at his face with the chopsticks and sucked them down, wiping his chin with a white handkerchief after each mouthful.

The steaming pots of rice and shrimp, all these buses, all this diesel smoke, the horns were driving him crazy … Perhaps he felt the tiniest bit more sensitive because he didn’t like going home.

Two U.S. noncoms sorted out the Vietnamese infantrymen patrolling the Cho Lon bus station. They’d doubled the patrols since last May’s Communist offensive, coming just five months after the big Tet push. The two sergeants gathered with the patrol commander and went down on their haunches to converse. Minh’s people squatted on flat feet, their arms around their knees.

Now the colonel was dead over a month. Minh hadn’t seen him much during the past year, but the colonel had remained, for him, a great fact. Without the fact of the colonel looming between his sight and these Americans, they stood up clearly as empty, confused, sincere, stupid —infant monsters carrying loaded weapons. The idea that they fought on anyone’s side was foolish.

On the bus he chose a window seat and opened the glass a bit and buttoned his shirt at the neck. The vehicle left the city on Highway Seven, a good road, American-built, past donkey carts, cyclos, small three-wheeled vans, past paddies where buffalo dragged furrows in the mud with single-blade plows and where herons and egrets jutted from the shoots of nearby sections already planted, past women selling petrol in glass jars, past stone ovens in which kindling smoked, turning to charcoal for the kind of cooking his aunts and cousins even now probably labored at in preparation for Aunt Giang’s birthday feast. His Uncle Hao wanted him to settle the question of ownership and rental of the house there, a matter that had lain for years, but now his uncle was suddenly anxious that it be finished with. And he had to speak with the man Trung, send him to Saigon.

And why ride a bus?—His uncle still had use of the black American Chevrolet, they could have driven together in the car. Because his uncle was a coward whom Uncle Huy would chop up with his teeth. Hao had avoided his brother-in-law on the last trip. Dropped off the man Trung, settled him in a room above a café, and a month now Trung had languished there a stranger, if he hadn’t run off.

Minh disembarked at the roadside and bought a roll and a cup of tea in a store whose proprietress remembered him and asked about his family and said the water taxis were running again these days, but not many.

The ville lay two miles down the brown river. He walked. After the city, things smelled different here. The reeking water. The smoke from the burn piles of deadfall and trash had the odor of legend, the chicken droppings, even. Everything carried him off—where? To here. But not to this moment. Here he had fished from the back of a buffalo while beside him Brother Thu had held the string of a kite surging in the winds above … even then their lines plumbing opposite depths. One to high school and the air force, one to the monks.

He saw little traffic on the water. An old woman with an old woman’s mashed-in face poled past in a skiff keeping to the shallows, every push of the pole threatening to steal her last breath.

Minh walked under a gray sky, sorrow biting at his throat. He stepped into a banana grove and tore off three of the fruits and ate, tossing the peels in the water as he and Thu had done in a better world.

He imagined his brother burning—he often did—Thu’s body in the flame, dreadful pain outside, going up his nostrils and in. And then as a monkey holds two branches for an instant, lets go of the first and clings to the new one, he was no longer the body, but the fire.

Lap Vung was more than just a ville. An extensive pier, a market, several shops, everything the same, all of it.

He found Trung Than taking his lunch at the cafe’ s only table. The daughter of the proprietor sat across from her guest without food herself, staring at him, her face empty.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Is your room all right?”

“Come and see.”

They went out and up the stairs at the side. At the landing overlooking the back, Trung said, “The room is small. Let’s talk here.” “Good.” “I shouldn’t stay here any longer. There’s VC activity here. By now

the cadres must have been told about a single male making a vague agri

cultural study.”

“Hao wants to see you.”

“He’s here?”

“In Saigon. He’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

“Will I travel with you?” “No. Tomorrow morning go to the highway and take the earliest bus to Cho Lon. Hao will meet you at the depot.”

“As long as I leave here. That girl wants to marry me. Every day she serves me lunch and asks what I studied out in the countryside. It’s a crazy lie. Too vague. I stay up all night reading, and in the morning I dress, take breakfast, and go out to sleep in the fields till noon.”

“Are you afraid?” “I’m thinking of the mission.” Minh believed him. “Mr. Than, the colonel has died.” Trung said, “Would you like a cigarette?” “Thank you.” They smoked for a minute while Trung deliberated and at last said,

“He was your friend. It’s sad for you.” “It’s sad for me, and it means your operation won’t be completed.” “Something else. Another operation.” “Hao will take care of you.” “What is the plan you have in mind for me?” “My Uncle Hao has arranged a meeting. Hao has instructed me.” “Do these instructions come from the other American?” “Skip Sands? No.” Trung was silent. “What’s the trouble?” Trung tossed away his cigarette and composed his face and ignored

the question, but Minh knew the trouble. Trung had settled his mind, marched across the bridge, and found the colonel dead on the other side.

“Mr. Than, I believe my uncle has several American contacts. I know your friendship is strong. Hao will look out for you. Hao will take care of you.” He knew he shouldn’t be talking like this, but the man’s strength aroused pity.