Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Shit. How old are you?” “Me?” “Yeah.” “Almost eighteen,” James said. “The army let you enlist when you’re only seventeen?” “Nope. I done lied.” “Are you scared?” “Yeah. Not every minute.” “Not every minute?” “I haven’t seen any fighting. I want to see it, the real deal, the real

shit. I just want to.”

“Crazy little fucker.” The band resumed with a number by the Kinks called “You Really Got Me”:

You really got me— You really got me— You really got me—

Before very much longer the two brothers got into an argument with each other over nothing, and Bill Houston spilled a pitcher of beer right into the lap of somebody at the next table—a Japanese girl, who hunched her shoulders and looked sad and humiliated. She sat with a girlfriend and also two American men, two youngsters who didn’t know how to react.

The beer dribbled off the table’s edge while James fumbled to right the empty pitcher, saying, “It gets like this sometimes. It just does.” The young girl made no move at all to adjust herself. She stared at her lap. “What’s wrong with us,” James asked his brother, “are we fucked up

or something? Every time we get together, something bad happens.” “I know.” “Something fucked-up.” “Fucked-up, shitty, I know. Because we’re family.” “We’re blood.” “None of that shit don’t matter to me no more.” “It must matter some,” James insisted, “or else why’d you haul your

self all this way to meet me in Yokohama?” “Yeah, ” Bill said, “in the Peanut Bar.” “The Peanut Bar!” “And why’d I miss my ship?” James said, “You missed your ship?” “I should’ve been on her at four this afternoon.” “You missed it?” “She might still be there. But I expect they’re out of the harbor by

now.” Bill Houston felt his eyes flood with tears, choked with sudden emotion at his life and this place with everybody driving on the left.

James said, “I never liked you.”

“I know. Me too.”

“Me too.”

“I always thought you were a little-dick sonofabitch,” Bill said.

“I always hated you,” his brother said.

“God, I’m sorry,” Bill Houston said to the Japanese girl. He dragged some money from his wallet and tossed it onto the wet table, a hundred yen or a thousand yen, he couldn’t see which.

“It’s my last year in the navy,” he explained to the girl. He would have thrown down more, but his wallet was empty. “I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I’m all different.”

Th e afternoon of that November day in 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Captain Nguyen Minh, the young Viet Nam Air Force pilot, dove with a mask and snorkel just off the shore of Grande Island. This was a newfound passion. The experience came close to what the birds of the air must enjoy, drifting above a landscape, propelled by the action of their own limbs, actually flying, as opposed to piloting a machine. The webbed fins strapped to his feet gave him a lot of thrust as he scooted above a vast school of parrot fish feeding on a reef, the multitude of their small beaks pattering against the coral like a shower of rain. American Navy men enjoyed scuba and skin-diving and had torn up all the coral and made the fish very timid so that the entire school disappeared in a blink when he swam near.

Minh wasn’t much of a swimmer, and without others around he could let himself feel as afraid as he actually was.

He’d passed all the previous night with the prostitute the colonel had paid for. The girl had slept on the floor and he in the bed. He hadn’t wanted her. He wasn’t sure about these Filipino people.

Then today, toward the end of the morning, they’d gone into the club to learn that the President of the United States, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been murdered. The two Filipinas were still with them, and each girl took one of the colonel’s substantial arms and held on as if keeping him moored to the earth while he brought his surprise and grief under control. They sat at a table all morning and listened to the news reports. “For God’s sake,” the colonel said. “For God’s sake.” By afternoon the colonel had cheered up and the beer was going down and down. Minh tried not to drink very much, but he wanted to be polite, and he got very dizzy. The girls disappeared, they came back, the fan went around in the ceiling. A very young naval recruit joined them and somebody asked Minh if a war was actually being waged somewhere in Vietnam.

That night the colonel wanted to switch girls, and Minh determined that he would follow through as he had last night, just to make the colonel happy and to show him that he was sincerely grateful. This second girl was the one he preferred, in any case. She was prettier to his eyes and spoke better English. But the girl asked to have the air conditioner on. He wanted it off. He couldn’t hear things with the air conditioner going. He liked the windows open. He liked the sound of insects batting against the screens. They didn’t have such screens in his family’s house on the Mekong Delta, or even in his uncle’s home in Saigon.

“What do you want?” the girl said. She was very contemptuous of

him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Take off your clothes.” They took off their clothes and lay side by side on the double bed in

the dark, and did nothing else. He could hear an American sailor a few doors down talking to one of his friends loudly, perhaps telling a story. Minh couldn’t understand a word of it, though he considered his own English pretty fair.

“The colonel has a big one.” The girl was fondling his penis. “Is he

your friend?” Minh said, “I don’t know.” “You don’t know is he your friend? Why are you with him?” “I don’t know.” “When did you know him the first time?” “Just one or two weeks.” “Who is he?” she said. Minh said, “I don’t know.” To stop her touching his groin, he clasped

her to him. “You just want body-body?” she said. “What does it mean?” he said. “Just body-body,” she said. She got up and shut the window. She felt the air conditioner with the palm of her hand, but didn’t touch its dials.

“Gimme a cigarette,” she said. “No. I don’t have any cigarette,” he said. She threw her dress on over her head, slipped her feet into her san

dals. She wore no underclothes. “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “What does it mean?” he said. “What does it mean?” she said. “What does it mean? Gimme a cou

pla quarters. Gimme a coupla quarters.” “Is it money?” he said. “How much is it?” “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “I wanna see if he gonna sell

me some cigarette. I wanna coupla pack cigarette—a pack for me, and

one pack for my cousin. Two pack.” “The colonel can do it,” he said. “One Weenston. One Lucky Strike.” “Excuse me. It’s chilly tonight,” he said. He got up and put his

clothes on.

He stepped out front. From behind him he heard the small sounds of the young woman inside dealing with her purse, setting it on a table. She clapped and rubbed her hands and a puff of perfume drifted past him from the open window and he inhaled it. His ears rang, and tears clouded his sight. He cleared a thickness from his throat, hung his head, spat down between his feet. He missed his homeland.

When he’d first joined the air force and then been transferred to Da Nang and into officers’ training, only seventeen, he’d cried every night in his bed for several weeks. He’d been flying fighter jets for nearly three years now, since he was nineteen years old. Two months ago he’d turned twenty-two, and he could expect to continue flying missions until the one that killed him.