Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

They had only Xylocaine, but the doctor cheerfully effected an axillary block of the brachial plexus and went to work while Kathy dabbed away the sweat on his face with a bandanna sterilized in rubbing alcohol.

The patient’s two comrades squatted by a tree not far off, ready to fetch whatever might be needed, as if they had anything to fetch. The man’s family kept out of the way in one of the hooches, all but a toothless mamasan who enacted a ritual of private significance only a few meters away, out in the relentless sunshine, in the smoke of the charcoal fire and the steam from the pot where the instruments boiled: a dance of ominous hesitations, and sudden leaps, and arabesques. Dr. Mai permitted the display without comment, and Kathy welcomed it as boding well for the patient. The idea that among the ragged, the crazy, the whirlyeyed, the frothing-at-the-mouth, among the sideways, among the murablers, shufflers, laughers, a bit of loving scrutiny would turn up the blessed poor in spirit, the burned visionary, the holy vagrant—she’d always entertained it, this romance.

Dr. Mai lifted his machete from the cauldron and poured half a quart of alcohol all over it and said, “Banzai.” Kathy laughed and pulled back the skin in the direction of the elbow. “In the time of your Civil War,” Dr. Mai said, making the initial cut and beginning to work circumferentially through the first layer of flesh to the fascia beneath, “amputation was a very gruesome business to perform. Now we can be optimists.”

“My Civil War?” she said. “Do you mean the American Civil War?” “Yes.” “I’m from Canada,” she said. “I’m Canadian.” “I see. Between the Union and Confederate.” “The Canadians weren’t part of that war.” “I see—Canada.” “You know I’m from Canada.” “Yes. But I thought Canada is from the United States.” “We’re north of there.” “So often north, south. Not so often east and west civil war.” She released her grip on the skin, and when it retracted Dr. Mai,

pressing down with his palm on the blade’s back and rocking the handle up and down, cut through the fascia and the first layer of muscle, and as each layer retracted he cut through the next. Wherever he encountered a blood vessel Kathy clamped it with thread. With her hands she applied upward pressure on the proximal muscle stump. After the deep muscles had retracted the doctor took his saw from the cauldron and went at the bone while she irrigated the site with saline from a large syringe.

The doctor brushed the severed arm from the table onto the earth between his feet and picked up the bandanna and wiped his face, while one by one Kathy pulled the major nerve stumps forward and cut them as high along as could be reached. One of the arteries still bled, and she tied it off again.

She cleaned and repacked the implements while Dr. Mai took the crazy old woman’s hand and danced a little jig with her. He’d made a good concave stump—he was an excellent technician and had a genuine medical sixth sense—but Kathy wondered if they should have left so much of the arm. In fluent Vietnamese the doctor instructed the patient’s companions in caring for the stump and preventing retraction of the skin by the use of adhesive tape and an Ace bandage. He just wasn’t equipped to plaster-cast the arm’s remainder and fashion a ladder splint and stockinette and wire retractor and all the rest, but it didn’t matter. One look at the patient’s face told you he’d survive. Kathy had seven onequarter-grain syrettes of morphine in her kit and left them all with him because you could see this man would survive.

Dr. Mai stepped to the Land Rover and took his canteen from the front seat and enjoyed a long drink and brought it back to Kathy. She declined.

“I don’t see you drink enough water, Kathy.”

“I get plenty.”

“You’re well adjusted to the tropics. How long did it take you to adjust?” “I lived in the PI a couple years before I ever came here.” “You’ve been here five years, isn’t it?” “Five years. Almost.” “Yes. How long will you stay?” “Until it’s over.”

O n a sunny November morning just two weeks before he went away to prison, James married Stevie at the courthouse.

His family came to watch. In a churchgoing dress with puffy shoulders, his mother looked like the Okie she was. Brother Bill wore a white sports coat over a white T-shirt, and as the family all stood before the magistrate he sweated as if he were on trial, while young Burris smirked and giggled like a girl, and resembled one, too, with hair grown almost to his shoulders.

Stevie’s parents believed she was marrying a criminal. At first they made promises to attend, but in the end they stayed away.

As the newlyweds left the courthouse the groom could see the Deuce, the section of Second Avenue where the bums rolled in the gutters, and beyond the Deuce the neighborhood where he lived.

Afterward they barbecued small sirloin steaks in South Mountain Park. Bill Junior got red-eyed drunk, and Burris, who might have been fourteen but looked no older than eleven, smoked cigarettes openly. Their mother stayed off in a corner, ready to preach at all who’d listen, or rehearse the family’s tragedies.

The wedding didn’t change much. James kept living in his apartment and Stevie stayed on at her parents’ while James dealt with charges of aggravated assault and armed robbery. He’d pled innocent and made bail, but soon he’d appear again before the judge and change his story and receive his sentence. Not much doubt attached to his prospects. Nevertheless, his court-appointed attorney insisted on taking the process through all its steps in order to get the best deal from the prosecutor. James and the rockabilly Pat Patterson had done all right to begin with, but their luck had run out and the police had arrested them without incident outside a tavern about an hour after their fourth robbery. Patterson, a parolee, had gone directly back to Florence.

On this, his first felony offense, and thanks to his war record, James could expect to serve no more than three years, probably more like two. Stevie swore she’d wait. James might have run away to Mexico, but he was tired, very tired.

Four days from sentencing, four days from prison food, ten days married, and still never having tasted a meal cooked by his wife, James went looking for breakfast on South Central Avenue. He sat in a diner among a handful of demented customers, a man grimacing, another man swearing, and ordered an egg. The chubby probably Chinese proprietress stood by the register having breakfast, eating her oatmeal out of a coffee mug. She tore off half a slice of bread in her teeth and gnashed it down, carrying on with a full mouth in what she must have thought was English, but James couldn’t understand a word—she had that whining, nasal way of talking. Suddenly he very vividly smelled and tasted Nha Trang.

He was distracted by the man in the booth next to his table, who sat sideways with his legs out in the aisle. “I am all souped-up on speed. Yes,” he said very quietly, “I am a speedy little boy.”

“Fm not in the shape of mind to find that interesting,” James said.

“You know where I was seven hours and twenty minutes ago? I was home. You know where home is? San Diego. Know what I was doing? Standing in front of a mirror—full-length mirror, okay?—stark-naked, with a.357 in this hand, holding it to my head just like this. Fm gonna shoot myself. Do you believe me?”

James put his fork down.

“Yeah. Had a little problem with the gambling. Little? Fuck. It took every fucking thing I owned. Wife. Kids. House. Fm bankrupt. She got the house. And a million years of payments on it. Fuck. Ready to blow my brains all over my sister’s bedroom. Yes indeed. Fuck yes. But I didn’t want my sister coming home to a mess like that—or I didn’t have the balls to shoot myself, let’s admit it. So I’m thinking I need to come up with a way of ending this horror show that’s quick and painless and they won’t know I was the one who did this to myself. So I got dressed and I decided here’s how I’ll go out, I’ll get in that little foreign job, little VW bug, small car, sister’s car, ain’t my car. So I got in it and fired it up and headed east on Interstate Eight, my friend, out of San Diego, and I put on my high beams and I told myself the first semi truck flashes his lights at me I’m gonna swing into him head-on, take myself out kamikaze-style. And I had both hands on the wheel the whole way, man, didn’t take my hands off except to scratch my nuts or thumb the cap off a bottle of bennies and shake a couple more down my throat. And I tell you what. That whole ride, three hundred and fifty miles at least, nobody once flashed their lights at me, sir, not one person, there was not a single incident of anybody flashing their lights at me. And that’s a miracle. It’s a miracle I’m sitting here alive. I don’t know what it means. But I’m alive. That’s all I know. And I don’t know anything more on this earth except that. I am alive.”