Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Okay!”

“Tell him that!”

“Okay! I’ll tell him! James,” Rollo said, “James. You got to talk to Stevie. You sure hurt her feelings, James. Stand up, stand up.”

His legs rolled him over to Stevie standing by a stone barbecue pit with a fire in it. He said something, and Stevie kissed him—her soggy teenybopper breath. “And you’re smoking a cigarette,” she said, “and you don’t even smoke.”

“I smoke. I always did smoke. You just didn’t know about it, is what.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I smoke.”

Something else happened and Stevie disappeared and was replaced by, or turned into, her friend Donna. “YouVe hurt her for the last time, James.”

“I smoke,” he tried to say. He could neither shut his jaws nor raise his chin from his chest.

He was back inside the kitchen, where Anne Vandergress seemed no longer beautiful. She seemed old and worn-out. Her hair was frizzy. Her face was flat and red and sweaty and her smile looked dead. She laughed along with everybody else while he announced she was a whore. “It took me a while—but you’re a whore. You’re a whore, all right,” he said very loudly. “I just want you to figure that out like everybody else already did,” he said, “that you’re a complete, slutty whore.” Anne laughed grotesquely. She looked like she’d been pulling a train all night. His mind was stuck in a warp and he kept saying, “What a whore—what a whore—what a whore — “

They threw him on the ground and hosed him down. The dirt turned to slime around him and he crouched in it, flailing, trying to stand upright.

This was not vastly different from certain moments of his basic training. His feet splayed and he flopped on his face and ate mud, thinking: All right, men: here we go.

1967

O n the afternoon of January 1, 1967, Nguyen Hao drove to Tan Son Nhut Airport with Jimmy Storm, a man very close to the colonel. Jimmy Storm almost always wore civilian clothing, though the first time Hao had seen the lad he’d been squatting on his heels outside the CIA-Psy Ops villa taking a break, smoking a cigarette, in U.S. Army fatigues with the hash marks of a sergeant.

This afternoon Mr. Jimmy wore this same uniform, and the entire distance to the airport, Mr. Jimmy, or Sergeant Storm, sitting rigidly upright, with his cap on, in the backseat, where he’d never sat before, said nothing at all—possibly a little nervous, Hao thought, about greeting the new arrival.

But this silence might have come from anywhere. Mr. Jimmy Storm was a strange and complicated young man. By the time they saw William Sands coming down the gangway of the Air America DC-3, ducking his head a bit against the noise of jets and the onslaught of damp wind, Mr. Jimmy had recovered all his volubility and spoke with Sands cheerfully, and too rapidly for Hao to follow.

They put two footlockers in the trunk of the black Chevrolet, and the third had to go in the backseat with the newcomer, who asked his hosts to call him Skip.

“Right, right, right,” Mr. Jimmy agreed, and then he disagreed: “But let me call you Skipper. Skip’s too short. It just skates past.” Now Mr. Jimmy sat up front with Hao.

Hao said, “Mr. Skip, I’m glad to welcome you. Your uncle knows my nephew. Now I know your uncle’s nephew.”

“I have something for you.” The newcomer handed over a carton of cigarettes. From the box they looked almost like Marlboros, but they were the other kind. Winstons. Hao said, “Thank you so much, Mr. Skip.”

A bicycle approached on their right as they waited for traffic. Mr.

Jimmy rolled down his window rapidly and said, “Diddy mao!” and gestured, and the rider veered off.

Mr. Skip said in Vietnamese, “May I speak Vietnamese, Mr. Hao?” and Hao answered in Vietnamese, “It’s better. My English is that of a child.”

“Today is our New Year,” Mr. Skip said. “Soon I’ll be celebrating another, your Tet.”

“Your pronunciation is quite good.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you come many times to Vietnam?”

“No. Never.”

“That’s surprising,” Hao said.

“I took an intensive course,” Mr. Skip said, using the English words for “intensive course.”

“So there it is, huh?—all seven hundred pounds,” said young Mr. Jimmy, reaching back to place his hand on the footlocker. “The keys to the kingdom of the Duke of Earl.”

Hao was suddenly convinced that despite never having met him, Jimmy Storm floundered in a deep hatred for Skip Sands. Skip, for his part, seemed suspicious of Storm and hesitated slightly before saying, “More like two hundred pounds.”

Sundown, and the bellies of the clouds flared red. They entered Saigon and passed along a street of homes where kids played jump rope in the twilight, and snatches of the jumpers’ magical chants reached their ears. Then over to the GI streets, the avenues of wretched commerce, past doorways like mouths, each delivering its music, its voices, its stench, and then across the river and into what was officially Gia Dinh Province and down Chi Lang Street to the CIA-Psy Ops villa where nobody lived for very long, only Jimmy Storm in his cluttered bedroom with its chugging air conditioner, just off the parlor with its rattan tables and kapok-cushioned sofa and nearly empty bookshelves and its bamboo bar—no stools —and a framed painting of horses in a stable on one of its pale yellow walls.

The black Chevrolet stayed at the villa. Hao helped the Americans with the unloading—Mr. Skip’s duffel and his cane basket and the three footlockers—and said goodbye and walked home along the broken pavement beside a sewage canal, seeing his way by a flashlight.

They lived above and behind the family’s defunct shop, he, his wife Kim, and occasional relatives. The shop had come from Hao’s family; the relatives were Kim’s. It had been dark for an hour when Hao entered by the alley, but he heard her sandals scraping in the concrete court out back as she puttered among the fruit plants she raised in large pots. Hao turned on the overhead fluorescent light in the parlor to summon her.

He wanted to talk. It seemed to him that having been asked to meet a member of the colonel’s family on his arrival, he’d now solidified an alliance and crossed a river in his life, which was also hers. She had a right to form some general appreciation of their circumstances.

He sat in his chair before his red plastic electric fan. Quite soon Kim came in, middle-aged, splayfooted, a stick frame with fat daubed onto it, wiry arms and bowed legs with a jutting paunch. Her face had become somewhat like those on the stone frogs in gardens, and somewhat like that of the Buddha’s—jowly, pop-eyed. She sat catching her breath and said, “I’m fine today.”

“It’s a miracle,” he said, because he knew she liked to use such terms.

“I took the asthma remedy from the old story.”

“Ouch,” he said, “that’s a crazy idea.”

“But it worked. I’m fine.”

“Let me get you a checkup with an American doctor. I’m sure Mr. Colonel can arrange it.” “Leave me alone,” she said, as always, “I’m the only one going to fill my grave.” She took good care of things and was a fine friend to him. He held her dear and wished her a long life. But her health wasn’t good.

They sat together while the red fan whirred and the tabletop hummed underneath it. Kim shut her eyes and breathed through her nose, this on the recommendation of yet another practitioner.

It had really been a very long illness, complicated probably by the loss of her nephew some years ago—four years? Often she came back to the topic of Thu’s suicide. Hao could see how she looked somewhere else, longingly, while something, maybe just the sound of her own voice, dragged her down into the discussion against her will: Do you think it could have been an accident, do you think he could have simply been experimenting, wondering, looking, smelling the fuel, I don’t know. And Hao would say, I don’t know either; but Thu had to go to some trouble to come into possession of the gasoline. I don’t like Buddha, she would say.