Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

contact can arrange it. We’ll monitor in advance of the meeting. Then the ground is ours.” The major pursed his lips as if considering the angles. “It makes

cleanup perhaps difficult.” “The site must be cleaned?” “Not by you, Mr. Reinhardt! That’s all in place. Everything is in

place, Mr. Reinhardt.” “You’re saying it’s too late to change the plan.” “We shall go forward with confidence.” On the way back to his room he stopped at a stall in the square and,

without bargaining over the price, bought a large English dictionary of some two thousand pages. At the Continental’s desk he asked for his valuables from the safe, and the clerk brought his Vietnam Air Lines flight bag. Upstairs he took the equipment from the bag and turned the room’s radio up loud. It was 2:00 p.m.; the U.S. military station delivered the news of an imminent journey to the moon. He affixed the silencer to the pistol, placed the dictionary in his bathtub, and fired four shots into it from a distance of one meter.

The first unblemished page was numbered 1833. As he’d expected, at close range the weapon would produce an exit wound. More nonsense. I ask for a twenty-two, and you bring me a howitzer. I can’t call Berlin, while astronauts aim at the moon.

The phones worked, he’d gotten through, his father was dead.

Two years he’d waited to hear it, yet the news had absolutely stunned him. The old man had won his way forward breath by breath through so many ailments it hadn’t seemed possible he’d ever be stopped. Nothing in particular had beaten him. He’d died in his hospital room while napping after breakfast. On the phone his mother had sounded tired but otherwise unaffected.

He’d called Dora as well, and he’d broken down weeping as he told her of his father’s death. “I’ll call again soon. The phones are working.” It must have sounded as if the good news about the telephones had broken his heart.

Because a Chinese travel broker ran this four-room hotel, Trung assumed Chinese businessmen used the establishment.

Daytimes the street outside was noisy, and after 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. fairly quiet—distant traffic, distant jet fighters, helicopters much closer, over the city itself. He’d never before stayed in a rented city room. He had possession of a key to the street entrance and a key to his own door, both attached by a string to a scrap of wood with the numeral 1 scratched into it.

The door on the street opened onto a narrow stairwell leading up into a narrow hall with high ceilings and plaster walls and two rooms on each side and a bathroom at the end of it—a sink; a tub; a toilet that flushed when he pulled a chain. In the mornings he heard feet stomping along the hall and his neighbors running the water and hocking and spitting in the bathroom and at night he heard the man next door coughing and treading from his bed to the window to spit down into the alley.

The place was wired for electricity. At the top of the stairwell and also in the ceiling above the bathroom hung fluorescent tubes that burned all night, but his room had none. He had a butane lantern, a thin mattress on a bamboo frame, a circular, domed bed net, and a small square table on which rested the lantern, a box of wooden matches, and a large clamshell for an ashtray.

Each night he took his supper at a café one street over and bought food to last him through the following day. Hao had given him money and told him to stay indoors as much as possible until the Americans, probably within a week or so, accomplished their arrangements. But he had to make this outing every day. He wouldn’t deprive himself. He’d been in Saigon four days.

He didn’t have to be told to keep out of sight. If anybody recognized him it was over. The cadres understood him to be visiting family in Ben Tre for the Tet celebrations, for only a few days; he’d been out of touch now almost two months. No explaining such an absence, no lie would spare him a “workout”—hours of group discussion, until more than anybody else in the room you yourself believed you’d crossed the line, and you demanded to be punished. He’d make sure the Americans understood this problem. Maybe the Americans knew other turncoat VC who could devise a story—he couldn’t imagine what, a bout of illness, or a wound—and vouch for his whereabouts during his absence.

I won’t have rice again today. Noodles, if they still have the hoisin sauce. They had it yesterday, but I used the last.

These past few weeks, first in the room above the café on the Mekong, now in the room above the travel broker’s, had been a form of incarceration, but under conditions happily very different from what he’d learned to think of as prison. In the cell in Con Dau he’d slept on a stone floor with a dozen other men, sometimes on a concrete slab to which his ankles had been shackled. The guards patrolled on catwalks crisscrossing overhead— pissing down on them sometimes, or tossing offal from a bucket. The cell itself had been not quite long enough for two men end to end, about half that in width. The prisoners had all looked out for each other, nothing but death could separate them from the cause. Then the end of the French, liberation, the journey north by ship, and the kolkhoz, the communal farm—the citizens of the Collective Future, generally tense, sometimes erupting, always desperate, living in stupidity, anger, and submission. The citizens of the future had found little to say to him. He was older and had come in by all Three Gates—prison, blood, self-denial—each a stage deeper into the lie that trapped them all. And the last gate, the one that didn’t get a number: renouncing friends and relatives, the gate to true imprisonment. Once you mix in your blood, your strength, and your days, then you belong to the cause. But betrayal is the main thing.

The happiest days of his life had been those spent coming down out of the Truong Son Mountains, ambling homeward in good weather after the weeks of climbing through rain on the uphill northern side, after the plague that had nearly killed him, after the camps of deserters all shivering with fever, after the grave mounds of piled boulders bristling with sticks of incense or dug up and scattered and the corpses chewed to pieces by hungry tigers, and now the easy downhill journey toward Ben Tre, the breath of the south in his lungs, the sunshine falling in shafts through the jungle’s canopy, and the flowers with his mother’s name. But I entered a land where my mother was dead and all the others pretended not to be. My legs carried me over the mountain, but I never got home.

Betrayal had fueled the trip out. Betrayal would bring him back.

In his olive bathing trunks, bare-chested, Sands sat in the wicker chair on the small back porch taking the breeze from the creek and drinking something made with sugar and coconut milk and things he probably didn’t want to know about. All this trash smoke, the creek’s stench wrung his stomach, the bugs were driving him crazy. Screeching cicadas. Tiny winged creatures flailing at his face.

He heard a vehicle coming up the lane and recognized the sound as that of a military jeep.

Four days since his getaway, and no one had come until now. The gods ground slow. Or they realized he’d fled without a plan, without money, leapt from the window into the wild night, and what—loitered in the dark, waiting to be arrested.

When he heard the jeep’s brakes out front he got up and entered the house.

This time of day, with the heat, Skip hung mosquito netting over the front door and left it open. He watched through the open doorway as Jimmy Storm, in fatigues and a brown T-shirt, let himself through the low gate and walked up the steps.

Sands pulled the netting aside and let it drop closed behind his guest. Storm clutched a bundle of mail against his chest. He did not say hello. “Voss is no longer a contributor.” “Pardon?”