Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Stevie said, “I guess we’ll open presents and all that stuff pretty early,” and placed her loving fingertips on the back of his neck. “What time do you want to come over?”

As he considered this simple question, it seemed to widen until it split his very thoughts open.

He wrenched at his door’s handle and got out into the air and walked past the exploded wreck and stood bent over with his hands on his knees, barely keeping upright, his gaze lifted toward the winter horizon. He wanted somebody to come out of the faint pink and blue distances and save him. Far away he saw the ripples of a mirage—either a horrible burning death in Vietnam, like that of the man pried from this charred Chevrolet, or a parade of years filled with Stevie’s questions and her fingers touching his neck.

Sands stayed overnight in a private room with a bath at Clark Field’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, most of which was devoted to dorm-style living in a collegiate atmosphere, with doors opening and closing and half-dressed young men shouting up and down the halls and the sounds of showers and Nancy Sinatra tunes warring with Stan Getz bossa nova instrumentais, and the stink of Right Guard spray deodorant. He arrived around eight at night. He and the driver got his footlockers into his room. He spoke to no one, turned in early, got up late the next day-New Year’s Eve—and boarded the base shuttle bus and asked the Filipino driver to let him off wherever he could find some breakfast.

Thus Sands found himself at 9:00 a.m. on December 31, 1966, at the snack bar in a bowling alley filled, even at that hour, with airmen pursuing improved averages in a clattering atmosphere. He ate bacon and eggs off a plastic plate at a table alongside rows and rows of bowling balls and watched. Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands determined he’d give it a try as soon as his breakfast settled. Meanwhile, he drank black coffee and read his letter from Kathy Jones. She wrote in a neat hand, apparently with a fountain pen, in blue ink, on flimsy, grayish, probably Vietnamese-made onionskin. Her first few letters to him had been direct, chatty, lonely, affectionate. She’d wondered if they might meet in Saigon, and Sands had looked forward to that. Now these recent letters, these confused ruminations—

I’ve dealt with jokers all my life. Just jokers. No aces, no kings. Timothy was the first ace and he introduced me to the King—Jesus Christ. Before that I went to Minneapolis for college. But I lost my drive so I quit and worked as a secretary and went out for cocktails every night with young guys who worked downtown, young jokers.

—they might have been torn from a journal, addressed to no one. He could hardly stand them. He’d stopped looking forward to seeing her again.

These people here in these lands we’re visiting—look at these peo

ple. They’re as trapped by circumstance as criminals are trapped

by prison. Born and live and die according to the dictates of how

things go—never say, I want to live in that place rather than this place, I want to be a cowboy rather than a farmer. Can’t even be farmers, really-they’re just planters. Tillers. Gardeners.

In the beginning her communiqués hadn’t been long, generally two sides of a page, and had ended, “Well, my hand’s getting tired! I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy” or “Well, I see I’m down to the bottom, I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy.” In the beginning he’d replied, always very briefly. Not, he hoped, curtly. But he hadn’t known what to say. The nature of their connection, clear enough in the heat of it, had become mysterious.

When it comes to the contrast between having a choice and no freedom to choose whatsoever—here’s where it gets as stark as it can get. You, America, your forces are here making war by choice. Your enemy doesn’t have a choice. They were born into a land at war.

Or maybe it’s not that simple—U.S. vs. North Vietnam—no, it’s the young men who get this war forced upon them versus the ones who choose this war, the dying soldiers vs. the theorists and the dogmatists and the generals.

Here was clumsy thinking, and Sands had long ago lost patience with it. Would she like to see a bust of Lenin by the door of every public school? See the Statue of Liberty toppled in an obscene ceremony? Of course she would. And that wrongheadedness appealed to him. Always the sucker for sardonic, myopic, intellectual women. Women quick-witted and congenitally sad. In her face a combination of aggression and apology. Kind brown eyes.

Remember asking me about a place in the Bible claiming there are different administrations on the earth and I said I didn’t think so? You were right-First Corinthians 12:5–6 etc. “And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.”

That must appeal to a G-man like you! (I still don’t believe you work for Del Monte.) If you want to believe that different angelic departments sort of run different parts of the show down here on earth, I don’t blame you. Just going from the Manila airport to Tan

Son Nhut airport in Saigon I’d be almost ready to call it diversities

of deities, diverse universes, all on the same planet.

Come to think of it, in North America various Spanish priests

(the Catholic Church itself?) must have believed that some areas

are under control of the Devil-or of Christ—thus places called “Mt.

Diablo,” “Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” and so on.

He slipped the letter under his coffee mug. No concentrating on it now. Travel excited him. This world ending, the next emerging, the bowlers surrounding him with motion and noise, flinging out black planets, smashing the constellations of wooden pins. Back in his room, other things to set moving: the monster of the colonel’s files, and a duffel bag packed with two pairs of walking shoes and four changes of machine-washable clothing—no suit, no dress apparel—also a small crate woven of cane, a basket, really, but quite sturdy, packed with dictionaries in several languages. Skip had been trained to remember that he came as a civilian and must dress like one, avoid khaki or olive garb, wear brown shoes rather than black, brown belts as well. He’d left behind his custom-tooled carbine and traveled with a secret agent’s kind of weapon, a.25caliber Beretta automatic concealable in a pants pocket. His mind raced over all of it, a result of too much coffee. He gave up the idea of bowling, left the lanes, and went striding through the tropic noon until his brow thudded and his wet shirt clung to him.

The base library looked open. The air conditioner roared on its roof. He approached the door and saw people within beneath fluorescent lights, but the door wouldn’t budge, and he had a moment of panic in which he felt himself locked out and gazing helplessly on the land of books. A man coming out opened it with some effort—just stuck in its frame, swollen with damp—and Sands gained entrance. Jangling from the coffee he flitted from stack to stack and looked into a number of books, never taking a seat. In a copy of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson he read all the chapter epigraphs, looking for one he thought he remembered—something to do with the treasure of a life spent in obscurity— but it wasn’t there. In the children’s section he found some volumes of Filipino folk tales. Nothing from Vietnam.