Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

downtown no more.” James headed for the door. “Take the wheel, baby! I got no hands!” It was dark, but it wasn’t that late. Joker watched over him while they

walked a long way to the Red Cross and stood in line a long time. When it was James’s turn on the telephone, Joker left him alone while he talked to his mother. He’d hardly said hello before regretting he’d called. She sobbed in torment.

“We haven’t heard from you in I don’t know how long. I don’t know

if you’re alive or dead!” “Me neither. Nobody does.” “Bill Junior’s gone to prison!” “What’d he do?” “J don’t know. A little of everything. He’s been there almost a year,

since last February twenty.” “What month is it now?” “You don’t know what month you’re in? It’s January.” She sounded

angry. “What are you laughing over?” “I ain’t laughing.” “Then who was it just now laughing in my ear?” “Bullshit. I didn’t laugh.” “Don’t use that toilet-talk on my telephone.” “Don’t it say ‘shit’ somewhere in the Bible?” “Get your tongue out of the toilet. I’m your mother telling you. Your

mother who doesn’t even know where you are!”

“Nha Trang.” “Well, thank the Lord,” she said, “that he delivered you out of Vietnam.” Now somebody laughed. Possibly himself, though nothing was funny.

Early in the morning of February 20, 1970, Bill Houston cruised in a state-owned van with two corrections officers and three other miscreants down Route Eighty-nine toward Phoenix, having served twelve months of a one-to-three-year sentence of incarceration in the Florence prison, not at all clear in his mind as to why, exactly, he’d been jailed, or why released. Apparently since the day of his homecoming from the navy a pile of charges had stacked up: a term of probation for stealing a car, a suspended sentence for assault, which meant getting into a fight when cops were around to arrest you for it, and a warrant out for failure to appear on a shoplifting charge; and then the theft of a single case of beer, twenty-four cans, had crashed it all down on his head. Drinking, strolling through an alley off Fourth Avenue, he’d seen the rear door of a tavern propped open by a delivery of Lucky Lager, and he’d taken a case off the top. This was supposed to be his lucky beer, but it had brought him horrible fortunes. He’d been two blocks away, waiting at a DON’T WALK sign like an honorable citizen—shifting the case from his left to his right shoulder, and plotting where to find refrigeration for these things—when the squad car caught up to him. A couple of hearings, a month in County, and off to live behind walls fifteen feet high.

Heading for prison one year ago, carried in perhaps this very van with these same officers toward the just reward his mother and teachers had promised him, he’d felt excited and grown-up. Was it true they tried to stab you and rape you in the joint? Then why hadn’t he seen such stuff in the Maricopa County Jail? Not that he worried. He’d never lost a fight in his life and looked forward to beating up as many people as tried to make a punk out of him. On the other hand, these were killers and such, and they had nothing to do but exercise and train in there, if that’s what they wanted. Best to keep his head down. Learn a valuable skill. Maybe he’d take up leather tooling, belts and moccasins, cigarette cases. After all, he was known on the street as Leather Bill. Did they let you make sheaths for knives? He had doubted the possibility.

Assigned to the medium-security barracks, he found the inmates no meaner than those he’d bunked with in the sheriff’s jail and the food a little better. They had a quarter-mile track for running, as well as an extensive set of weights. His second day there he played left field in a ball game and drove in two runs and hit a homer. Nine full innings—only eight men to a side, but they had all the equipment, including headgear for the batters and full protection for the catcher.

By the third month inside he felt at home. From this distance, the things he thought he’d miss looked small. His jobs had demanded his soul and in return had given him poverty, the women he’d dealt with had quickly turned to irritants. Liquor had brought him high times but propelled him often into the arms of the police. Among free citizens his stomach had ached constantly. He hadn’t felt like swallowing anything but booze. But from the day of his arrival he was hungry and focused like a hound on each coming meal. He put on fifteen pounds, all muscle — push-ups and sit-ups every morning, fifty of each. Four days a week he lifted weights. On Saturday afternoons he boxed, and a couple of former pros had taught him that brawling was an art. His wind was good, and he could take a punch. He was the best Bill Houston he’d been since he’d left the navy.

Westward now, home to Phoenix, back the way he’d come. The rising sun at his back, he sailed toward a life he couldn’t imagine. They’d given him the phone number of his parole officer, a check for twenty dollars, and the clothes he’d been arrested in thirteen months before. He surveyed the road ahead, the desert frozen in morning light, flat and green after the winter rains, the highway black and perfectly straight through the van’s front window, and felt an adventure moving beneath him, as when he’d watched the southern California coast growing insignificant from the railing of his first cruise at age seventeen.

In Phoenix he entered the first bar he found and got with the first woman who was halfway nice to him. She said she was an epileptic, and that seemed about right. Every couple of hours she took a pill, a downer, Seconal. She had several bottles of them all to herself and claimed they were prescribed. It took her only two beers to get tipsy. He had to talk to her for a long time.

They ambled along the streets. She wanted him to walk on the outside, the curb side, because, she insisted, if he put the lady on the outside that meant he was pimping her. She seemed to know all about that, but she didn’t ask for money. When they went up to her room in a hotel overlooking the Deuce, the neighborhood around Second Street, it turned out her Seconal was undependable. In the night the bed started shaking. He said, “What is it?” She said, “I had a seizure.” She seemed confused about who he was. He said, “Is there any beer left?” They’d bought only one six-pack; he found its cardboard carrier flattened under his naked ass. “I’d better go see my family. I just got out of prison,” he said.

The night had cooled off. He walked through the Deuce. He would have sat down for a nap, but by now the dawn was near, the pavement had grown chilly, and the bums who’d slept on the sidewalk with their heads resting on their arms were already stirring awake, commencing to walk through the silent streets without a destination. Bill Houston joined the parade of souls waiting for the sun.

He walked himself sober and stayed that way until after his first meeting with his parole officer in a building downtown on Jefferson Street, abstinence from alcohol being a condition of his early release. No one was checking, however, and he soon fell back into his old ways, pulling himself together on Tuesdays for the weekly confrontation with the man who could send him back to prison with a phone call. His PO, Sam Webb, a portly young citified rancher type, who called Houston “a downtown cowboy,” got him employment as a trainee. Two months into his freedom Houston showed up for the meeting with whiskey on his breath, but Webb only sneered at the offense. “I could get you jailed for the weekend,” he said, “but they’d just let you go again. They need the cells in Florence for the meaner boys.”

Houston finished his training and began drawing full wages. He drove a forklift at a lumberyard, the biggest such concern in the Southwest, it was claimed, not counting California. All day from massive trucks to massive sheds he moved tons and tons of puke-smelling fresh-cut boards, and he never built anything but rectilinear stacks, and little by little he dismantled them. Others put the wood to use. He just watched it go by. Hardly socializing though drinking plenty, staying out of trouble, living almost as a solitary, feeling reluctant, somehow, to become himself again, he worked at the lumberyard well into the spring until his longer and longer absences rendered him nearly useless, and they fired him.