Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

His uncle uncrossed his ankles and rose to his feet, his hands folded before him.

Minh said, “Thank you, Uncle.”

Uncle Huy clapped his hands together and proceeded to the table and picked up a china plate from the stack. The others followed him in silence, filling their plates or bowls from the massed fruit, the steaming rice and the soup, the shreds of dog and chicken.

Some of the children were too small to have understood the speech. They ate fast, left their bowls on the floor, ran in and out of the yard laughing, returned for more food. Older children began to play too. The adults talked of other things, first out of graciousness and embarrassment, then with true interest, finally with a certain enthusiasm. The young women sang songs. His uncle suggested to Minh that perhaps he could tell Hao the house and it occupants had been destroyed by an American bomb. Minh thanked him once more.

When he woke the next morning, his uncle had already gone to the paddies. Minh had coffee with his aunt and some cousins, one by one embraced them all, and set out along the path beside the canal toward the road to the city, where he’d have to explain to his Uncle Hao that getting money out of Uncle Huy looked like more trouble than it was worth.

Ski p on his knees at an open footlocker, lifting out the troughs of card files—a musk of paper and glue, slight nausea, anger, those many months with these odors in his mouth, all of it a waste—and found the Ts and flicked through the cards by their edges and plucked out three entries in his uncle’s block printing:

ToS

A pillar of smoke stood above the Ark like a cedar tree. It brought such a beautiful perfume to the world that the nations exclaimed, “Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like a tree of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the powders of the perfumer?” Song of Solomon 3:6

ToS

And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. Joel 2:30,31

ToS

“cloudy pillar”—Exodus 33:9, 10. literal—”tree of smoke.”

Six weeks now in the Villa Bouquet since the colonel’s death, a state of disarray and pointless aftermath, a newflavor to his imprisonment. Hao came once a week with magazines and cards of sympathy for the death of Beatrice Sands. No movement from RSC, or whoever Crodelle worked for, as to the question of Skip’s participation in a doubtful scheme. Surely with the principal schemer dead and gone, some sort of pardon approached. He waited for Hao to bring a summons. No word from anyone in power.

Sands thought it fitting, in the meantime, that he compile notes for some sort of biography for the Agency’s Studies in Intelligence organ, something more extensive, more deeply illuminating of Colonel Francis Xavier Sands than the single-paragraph death notice in Newsweek’s “Milestones” ten days ago. He sat at the desk in the upper room occupied lately by the colonel’s double agent Trung and opened a notebook to a blank, lined page. What did he know that Newsweek didn’t? Bits from here and there. His Aunt Grace, who’d married into the family, said they were Shaughnesseys out of the County Limerick, and why his great-grandfather Charles Shaughnessey had elected himself a Sands, and whether, actually, he’d even been a Charles, had never come to light. Charles had arrived in Boston on an American ship, because everyone did, Aunt Grace had explained, because planes, she informed young Skip, weren’t invented then; maybe the new immigrant had come ashore with the crew and presented himself as an American citizen, borrowing the name of the captain. He’d worked on the docks, married as soon as he could, fathered two children, a girl and a boy, and died in his thirties having seen no more of the country than Boston Harbor. Fergus, his son, Skip’s granddad, had worked harder than Charles, made more children—Raymond, Francis, and William, and then two girls, Molly and Louise—and lived longer, into his fifties. The three boys had all attended the St. Mary’s grade school, and here the family’s history, as Grace retailed it, had become mainly the history of Francis, the middle brother. Francis had been expelled for unnamable mischief and banished for a couple of years to a public school also unnamable, then returned for high school to St. Mary’s, where he played line positions on the football team, behaved honestly, studied hard, and gained admission to Notre Dame. By his plunge and redemption Francis had rendered himself a bold figure, the one to watch, the one to follow, the one who fell on his face and got up and headed for Notre Dame.

The colonel’s own reminiscences weren’t histories, but merely anecdotes. They didn’t constitute a biography. He’d entered Notre Dame, if Skip remembered correctly, in 1930 or ‘31. Again good grades, a freshman tackle for Notre Dame during Knute Rockne’s final year as its football coach. Of Rockne he hadn’t told much, and Skip had gathered the famous coach had paid no attention to the freshman squad. Francis had moved to the first squad halfway through his sophomore year. He’d graduated high in his class, having done nothing, up to this point, to distinguish himself from any number of strong, earnest young men, save in his education, which placed him beyond the obvious choices of his lowermiddle-class Boston origins —the docks, the police force—but which he seemed to shed with his graduation gown, striking out after adventures.

Whatever Francis had met with to make him a madman and a hero had found him sometime, Skip concluded, between 1935 and 1937, a period of biographical darkness. Apparently he headed west. Skip had heard mention of freight cars and hobo camps, mention of a rodeo, a Denver whorehouse, a prison term, a brief mysterious marriage —most of this from Skip’s mother Beatrice, none of it from the colonel himself. More than once, however, the colonel had alluded to experiences with aircraft—engine work for barnstormers and crop dusters, work around airfields and hangars, nothing he seemed to think worth elaborating on—and to some association with Chinese laborers in San Francisco during this same period, when Japan was making war on their homeland. Whether some person among the fliers or some event involving the Chinese had caught him by the head and pointed him toward the rest of his life Skip simply didn’t know; at the end of 1937, however, young Francis, now about twenty-six years old, had returned to Boston, found work at the docks, and enrolled at the City College for night courses designed to assist in passing the army air force’s aviation cadet exam. He entered the army, trained in Tennessee on Stearman biplanes and in Mississippi and later Florida on low-wing Vultee Valiants, and by 1939, with a rank of captain, was flying P-40 Warhawk fighters and training, when he might have slept, for larger aircraft, including bombers.

In 1938 he married Bridghed McCarthy, a childhood friend. By 1940 he had a daughter, Anne, and a son was on the way—Francis Junior, who drowned in the summer of 1953 while sailing in a race from Boston Harbor to Nantucket. Not once had Skip heard his uncle mention the tragedy.

Early in 1941 Captain Sands resigned from the military under an arrangement among the Chinese, the U.S. government, and the paramilitary Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company to fly, along with nearly a hundred other American pilots, as a mercenary for the Republic of China Air Force in Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, with a mission to protect the Burma Road supplying Chinese troops. Each American volunteer was promised eventual reentry into the military at his former rank and paid $600 a month in salary and $500 for each Japanese plane he shot down. Here the captain flew his P-40 on over a hundred missions, and earned his share of the bounty. However, in December 1941—days after the death of his own brother at Pearl Harbor—having offered to replace a comrade down with malaria as pilot of a modified DC-3 on a parachute run of British commandos, among them Anders Pitchfork, the captain had been surprised on the return trip by fire from a rare Japanese antiaircraft battery and had crashed in the paddies, but not, he claimed, until the second wing had been shot off. Despite help from the locals, he’d been captured by the Japanese and forced—along with Pitchfork, also captured, and sixty-one thousand other prisoners —into labor on the Siam-Burma railroad: sickness, beatings, torture, starvation. Once he’d been given an egg. Inexplicably placed on a ship out of Bangkok for transfer, perhaps to Luzon, possibly to Japan itself, the captain had escaped overboard off the coast of Mindanao by a terrible ruse. A fellow prisoner had gone mad during their confinement in a nearly airless hold belowdecks, and their captors had promised to shut the hatch and suffocate them all if his cries didn’t cease. Captain Sands, chosen among them by lot, had strangled the man to death. Escape was forbidden; those left behind would be punished; but the captain, having soiled his soul in aid of the others, demanded the right to make an attempt by having himself handed up through the hatch along with his victim’s corpse. If the Japanese threw him overboard for dead, as he hoped, his escape would go undetected. The ruse worked. Though weakened by a year’s mistreatment and hard labor he swam for miles, subsisted for weeks in the jungle, and lived for two years in a series of island villages in the Sulu Sea before managing to get space on a freighter that took him to Australia. Immediately he rejoined the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned to Burma for secret aerial missions, often with British commando units. He earned impressive citations, rose rapidly in rank, and came out of the war a colonel, the colonel, the iron figure that had broken the hammers.