Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

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.”

“I know about it.”

“I know you know about it. You sure do. You’ve had experience on both sides of a gun.”

“It never happened.”

“But what I’m saying—you must’ve had a lot of experiences.”

“It never happened. It never happened.”

Bill Junior turned his glass in his hands and frowned. “It kind of rubs me wrong how you act, James.” He cleared his throat, made sure the bartender wasn’t looking, and spat on the floor. “Like, ‘James is back in the world. And the world is a big old zit so James wants to piss in its face.’ How long are you going to stay an asshole?”

“Till something convinces me different.”

Bill drained his glass and got up and wandered out the door.

Patterson said to James, “Here’s a question for you: Is this the Aces Tavern as in, Man, I got four Aces? Or is this Aces Tavern as in, This tavern belongs to a cat named Ace?” He pointed to the barmaid, saying, “She’s a young, hot little machine.” James agreed she was little, but she was long past young. The flesh under her arms wobbled as she plunged beer mugs into the sink and shook the drops out and placed them on a towel. James pointed it out. “I ain’t watching her arms/’ Patterson said. “I’m watching her ass wiggle.”

“I better go see what Junior’s up to.”

“Fuck that boy. He’ll be just fine.”

James went out on the sidewalk, but Bill was gone. There was only a young man out front bothering the citizens who passed, trying to sell the shirt off his back. James retreated into the Aces and rejoined Patterson, who asked if James had a gun, and James said he had one.

“Wadn’t you a Lurp over there in the Vietnam?”

James said yes.

Patterson intended to rob a casino some folks ran in an isolated house out near Gila Bend and wondered if James would like to make some money. Patterson explained that robbing a casino out in the desert, in the night, would have some of the quality of warfare. James said, “All right.”

They’d been told the patient was a child, but he was a grown man in his thirties, Vietcong, probably. At this point the men who’d brought them to the patient described him as a farmer who’d unearthed an unexploded artillery round. From the nature of the injury—one arm mutilated, the rest of him apparently shielded —it seemed likely he’d meant to salvage the device in order to turn it against its American manufacturers. How the patient had sustained his injuries made no difference to Dr. Mainichikoh, and certainly Kathy didn’t care. With the doctor, in his Land Rover, she got around the villes more freely than she might have if she waited to go with any of the WCS teams, and by her assistance as his nurse she paid her fare. Among the villes Dr. Mainichikoh was known as “Dr. Mai,” which, with a certain upward inflection, could mean “Dr. American,” and today this had led to confusion —Kathy, clearly the Anglo, was presumed to be the physician, and the villagers took the little Japanese man accompanying her to be her nurse. Mai made no attempt to disabuse them except by seizing the situation and giving orders. She liked working with him. He was resourceful—a requirement, given the lack of resources—and good-humored to the point he seemed quite insensitive to grim facts. She understood he was rich, from a Tokyo import-export family. Whether they did business with Vietnam she didn’t know.

The two men who’d conducted them here had established a kind of facility shaded by a canvas tarp. They had the patient laid out on a bloodstained table of boards and lumber rounds and told Kathy they were ready to sterilize the implements immediately. As Dr. Mai began his examination they began to grasp his true role, and they asked him if now they should get the fire going. He told them yes, right away.

Amputation had been pretty well completed by the injury itself, but the forearm remained connected by a bit of bone, muscle, and flesh below the elbow. On a day so hot and without instruments to measure at what point on the limb arterial deficiency had begun, determining what to take and what to leave was guesswork, but Dr. Mai had a deep faith in his own ability to judge the extent of devitalized tissue. “He can keep the elbow,” he said. “It’s a small explosive. If it’s a land mine, well, you’d better take the whole limb, isn’t it? Because it’s going to die.” She might have argued that since this was the patient’s only chance for surgery, higher was better and maybe the whole arm should go, but Dr. Mai wasn’t addressing her. He talked to himself habitually, always in English. “This man is quite strong. A good one. Not even in shock.” The patient stared straight up at the canvas sheet protecting them from the sun and seemed determined not to lose consciousness. A dozen or so shrapnel lacerations on his face and chest had already been excised and sutured with tailoring thread. One, on the cheekbone, had just missed taking his left eye.