Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

April 5 That leaves God.

I’m dangerously close to refusing forgiveness. Dying impenitent, because of anger at myself. Dying without a prayer. I’ve lived for fourteen years without a prayer. Fourteen years heading for the other side of the street whenever I thought my shadow was in danger of falling on a church’s wall.

I know if you pray for me Your prayers will touch God And God will touch my heart And I will repent

I think I was drawn to you because you were a widow, like my mom. Child of one widow, lover to another. You scared me. Your passion and your belief. Your grief and tragedy. My mom had that too, but veiled and polite. So I ran away from both you gals. And then I didn’t answer your letters. And here you go, one from me you’ll never be able to answer.

OK…

OK, Kathy Jones. Our funny little warden’s standing here waiting for this letter. Last chance for the mail train. Tomorrow morning I’m off.

Warden, if you’re reading this, au revoir.

You too. Au revoir, Kathy Jones.

If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t run. Much love Skip

Yes, she remembered the uncle. He was impressive at a glance. Prowess, a word she’d never used, came immediately to mind. Dangerous, but not to women and children. That type.

Skip she didn’t remember nearly as well. More boy than man. He joked, he evaded, he dissembled, he lied, he gave you nothing to remember. This current representation of himself—even as it tore at her, she wasn’t sure she believed it.

She looked again at the photograph, dozens of Filipinos surrounding a stalled jeepney, and felt very moved—more so than by the news photo of Skip, the smeary fading face and its crippled arrogance and self-pity, more so than if he’d sent from that Damulog era a photo of himself, or of her, or of both of them together.

She put it all back in her purse and sat with her eyes closed. She

hardly remembered saying goodbye to Ginger. Had she been unkind? “Are you Mrs. Benvenuto?” It was the woman handling the tickets, no taller standing up than

she’d been sitting down. “Yes.” “I’m sorry—I didn’t realize.” “That’s all right.”

“It’s intermission now. Mrs. Rand’s probably in the basement. The dressing rooms.”

“I’ll be right along.”

Kathy followed down the slate-tiled, echoing hallway, thinking of gangster films and the Last Mile, and the woman led her to a door not far from the big ones to the auditorium and down a flight of steps. The walls twittered, and young models raced everywhere in their glad bodies, deaf to their matron, who stalked them calling, “Girls?—Girls?— Girls?—Girls?” as Kathy entered a large, low-ceilinged chamber. Lovely models posed. Flashbulbs popped. The girls themselves popped in and out of cubicles made of dividers on casters.

“Mrs. Keogh,” her escort called, and the girls’ matron waved and came over. “This is Mrs. Benvenuto.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“We’re all late! I’m just glad you made it. I’ll tell Mrs. Rand. If you want to sit in the audience—is that all right?—if you just wait in a seat, she’ll call you up and introduce you after she talks about the Orphan Flight. We’ve got a couple of girls here from the same flight—from the same—your flight. Three girls.”

She referred to the evacuation flight out of Saigon, the plane crash that had broken Kathy’s legs. Forty of the survivors had gone out on a later flight. Only a few had been adopted in the U.S. and a couple, apparently, here in Minneapolis.

“Three of the orphans?” “Yes! A kind of reunion. Li—where’s Li? She’s not dressed! Girls!” cried Mrs. Keogh.

Kathy left her without saying goodbye, because a young Eurasian girl had just passed them to go out the “Exit” door across the large chamber, and Kathy felt compelled to get a look at her. She followed the girl out and up the concrete steps, at the top of which the girl leaned against the wall in an alley, alone. She moved aside slightly to let Kathy pass. Kathy went two steps beyond her, bringing into view the river at the alley’s one end, the street at the other. Kathy thought she recognized this Eurasion child, or Amerasian, who would have been four or five years old the morning of the crash, thought she recalled her standing up on her seat on the plane, remembered her uncharacteristically long legs and round eyes and the brown tint to her hair. Kathy had seated one of her own exactly next to her in the plane’s upper compartment, the lucky compartment. Many of her own had been in the upper deck and had survived. She’d put her children aboard, helped with the loading of others, had left the plane to head back to Saigon and at the last minute was offered a seat by an acquaintance from the embassy who’d decided not to go, not just yet—she couldn’t remember his name, they’d never met again—to this day, he probably thought her dead in his place—and she’d leapt at the chance, not to escape the downfall, but to help, to be of use, to ease the terrors of tiny pilgrims. She hadn’t even known the destination. Australia, probably. They hadn’t made it. And eventually this child’s journey had ended in St. Paul. In two-inch heels and a blue skirt and yellow T-shirt tight across her training bra, with lipstick and mascara, she looked like a little whore, arrogant and sullen, her auburn hair twisting in a wind that blew from the street through the alley and down the Mississippi. She opened her purse and found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Her cheeks pouched as she shielded the flame with her hand and lit a filter-tip cigarette. She exhaled and the breeze snatched the cloud from her mouth.

Kathy again slipped past the girl, down the stairs. She negotiated the basement’s bedlam and went to the auditorium above, a decent space for public events, with firm, cushioned seats and a steep rise, though the walls gave back the PA in a slight echo, and the mike made piercing sibilants and popping p’s. The event’s second half had begun. The house had been darkened, but lights brightened the stage, and she saw her way. Many seats remained empty. So as not to make a disturbance she took the first vacant place on the aisle. At the podium a large-jawed, stately woman with a tight gray hairdo, presumably Mrs. Rand, in a pink ensemble, spoke of orphans. Apparently Mrs. Rand dealt with a small delay, going past her text, extemporizing valiantly. She talked about the “orphan runs” that had flown so many children to new lives in the very last hours of the terrible, terrible war, of Flight 75, which Kathy had ridden and which fate had brought down like a dragon; and Kathy reflected, certainly not for the first time, that the war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment, death itself might erupt from the fabric of this very breath, unmasked as a friend; and she mourned the passing of a time when, sitting

in a C -5A Galaxy airplane as it bounced into paddies suddenly as solid as rock, hearing the aluminum fuselage tear itself into jags and swords, she’d pitied only the children around her and regretted only the failure to get them out of the war, when the breaking of her own legs had meant not shock or pain, but only bitterness that she couldn’t help the others. Mrs. Rand now introduced the three girls from Flight 75, including Li, the Amerasian, all wearing the ao dai, the flared shift over satin trousers, pacing one by one to stage left and again to stage right, compellingly selfconscious and poised, spirits quivering in flesh, and seating themselves on folding chairs so that their shoes were visible, black pumps with two-inch stiletto heels. Mrs. Rand described the crash, eight years ago almost to the day, she said—although she was off by a month—one of the worst aircraft disasters in history, she was sad to say, with more than half of the three hundred children and adults aboard, almost everyone in the bottom cargo compartment, the majority of them children under two years of age, taken away to Heaven. A mechanical failure. For some years afterward Kathy believed a missile had shot them down. Mrs. Rand knew more about the mishap than Kathy herself and described the final few seconds, the plane breaking into burning parts that boiled in the wet paddies, the clouds from ignited oil. On impact Kathy must have shut her eyes. She remembered only sounds, predominantly rending metal — a very vocal idiom of many vowels and grinding consonants, ragged gutturals, magnificent vowels, all the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, urgent, bewildered, gigantic. Then a general black silence lacerated by pleas and outcries and weeping, including her own. And one or two children laughing.