Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

They passed houses, parked vehicles, buildings. Now traffic surrounded them. They’d come a long way in what seemed like three or four seconds. He was out of breath and sopped with sweat.

The crazy bum said, “That’s pretty nifty, man. I think you won that conversation.” “I don’t forgive my debtors. I don’t forgive those who have trespassed

against me.” “I gotta go.” “Yeah, I bet you gotta go, you stupid fuck.” “Where are we?” Houston said.

treacherous coward.” “What?” the guy said. “Listen, don’t fuck with me.” “Don’t fuck with you?” “I think that’s my bus,” the guy said, and sprinted across the street

right through squealing traffic and got behind the cover of a bus. Kinney shouted, “Hey! Marine! Fuck you! Yeah! Semper Fi!” Houston doubled up and vomited all over a mailbox. Kinney didn’t look right. A greasy film covered his eyes. He said,

“Let’s get a drink. Have you ever had a depth charger? Shot of bourbon

in a mug of beer?” “Yeah.” “I could use a bellyful of them bastards.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Houston said.

They found a place with air-conditioning, and Kinney got the two of them set up with beers and shots in a booth in the darkness at the back and began preparing depth chargers.

“This’ll put some torque in your pork. Ever had one of these?”

“Sure, you drop a shot in a beer.”

“Ever had one?”

“Well, I just know how you make one,” Houston said.

Without any sense of the intervening hours, Houston awakened sweaty and all bitten up by mosquitoes and sand fleas, a sagging mattress swallowing him alive, a headache pounding against his skull. He could hear the surf pounding also. His first fully conscious thought was that he’d seen one man shoot another man, just like that.

He seemed to be quartered in some kind of open-air bedroom. He made his way to the faucet in the corner, where he drank deeply of the sweet water and peed, first removing from the sink a wet bedsheet with a large black-rimmed hole burned in its middle. He found his watch, wallet, pants, and shirt, but he’d lost his shoes on the beach, he now remembered, and he was pretty sure he’d left his kit bag at the Y. His seventeen-cent zoris seemed to have walked away on their own.

His wallet held a five and two ones. He collected ninety cents in coins scattered on the bamboo floor. He stepped out to get his bearings. His head swam. The water he’d gorged on was making him drunk all over again.

The sign said KING KANE HOTEL, and it said SAILORS WELCOME.

He kept an eye out for Kinney, but he didn’t see anyone at all, not a living soul. It was like a desert island. Palms, the bright beach, the dark ocean. He headed away from the beach, toward town.

He didn’t return to the Bonners Ferry. He had no intention of getting anywhere near her berth, or anywhere else he might run into Kinney, the last person he wanted to see. He missed the sailing and spent two weeks ashore without liberty, sleeping on the beach and eating once per day at a Baptist mission on the waterfront, until he was confident Kinney was closer to Hong Kong than to Honolulu; then he turned himself in to the Shore Patrol for a week’s recuperation in the brig.

His rate was rolled back to E-3 and he was a seaman again, which meant he automatically lost his Boilerman rating. This was the second demotion of his career. The first had resulted from “repeated minor infractions” during his tour at Subie Bay Naval Base—after he’d taken to the warrens of vice outside its gates.

Houston spent the following eighteen months assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base in Yokosuka, Japan, mostly with rowdy black men, low-aptitude morons, and worthless bust-outs like himself. More often than he liked, he remembered the admiral in Honolulu who’d lowered the window of his white Ford Galaxie and promised, “Hard times are coming.”

Because he now had a girlfriend who let him go all the way, James forgot about the army for a while. Once or twice a week he put an air mattress and a sleeping bag in the back of his mother’s pickup and snuck Stevie Dale out of her unconscious household and made love to her in the predawn desert chill. Twice, sometimes three times in a night. He kept a tally. Between July 10 and October 20, at least fifty times. But not as many as sixty.

Stevie didn’t seem moved to participate. All she did was lie there. He wanted to ask her, “Don’t you like it?” He wanted to ask, “Couldn’t you move a little bit?” But in the atmosphere of disappointment and doubt that fell down around him after their lovemaking, he was unable to communicate with her at all, other than to pretend to listen while she talked. She talked about school, about subjects, teachers, cheerleaders—of whom she was one, just an alternate, but she expected to join the main squad next year—nonstop in his ear. Her gladness was a fist stuffing him deeper into the toilet.

He had more on his mind than his love life. He worried about his mother. She didn’t make much money at the ranch. She exhausted herself. She’d grown thinner, knobbier. She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law husband. James had never accompanied her on these pilgrimages, and Burris, now almost ten, refused to serve as escort—just ran away into the neighborhood of shacks and trailers and drifting dust when the poor old woman started getting herself ready on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

James didn’t know how he felt about Stevie, but he knew his mother broke his heart. Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her? She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. James suspected she was just faking herself out, flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window. Having just about reached a decision in his mind to quit school and see the army recruiters, he stalled for many weeks, standing at the top of the high dive. Or on the edge of the nest. “Mom,” he said, “every eagle has tofly.” “Go ahead on, then,” she said.

The army turned him down. They wouldn’t take minors. “The Marines will take you when you’re seventeen, but the army won’t,” he told his mother.

“Can’t you wait a half a year?” “More like three-fourths of a year.” “That’s a lot of growing and learning you could do in school, for your

education. Then you could graduate and be ready for your service, ready

all the way through.” “I got to go.” “Go in the Marines, then.” “I don’t want the Marines.” “Why not?” “They’re too stuck up.” “Then why are we talking about the Marines?” ” ‘Cause the army won’t take me till I’m eighteen.” “Not even if I sign?” “Not even if anybody signs. I need a birth certificate.” “I have your birth certificate. It says ‘1949/ Couldn’t you just as easy

change it to ‘1948’? Just close up the tail on the nine to where it looks like a eight.”

On the last Friday in October, James went back to the army recruiter with a lying birth certificate and came home with instructions to report for muster on Monday.

The first two weeks of his basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina were the longest he’d experienced. Each day seemed a life entire in itself, lived in uncertainty, abasement, confusion, fatigue. These gave way to an overriding state of terror as the notions of killing and being killed began to fill his thoughts. He felt all right in the field, in the ranks, on the course with the others, yelling like monsters, bayoneting straw men. Off alone he could hardly see straight, thanks to this fear. Only exhaustion saved him. Being driven past his physical limits put a glass wall between him and all of this—he couldn’t quite hear, couldn’t quite remember what he’d just been looking at, what he’d just been shown. He waited only for sleep. He dreamed hysterically throughout, but slept for as long as they let him.