Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Skip couldn’t tell if they were being serious, or just having fun with the lieutenant.

“Hey,” Jimmy said, “I want to get into sounds. People can be allergic to sounds. Can’t a whole genetic substratum be allergic to one set of vibrations?”

“Excuse me,” Skip said, ” ‘substratum’?” The colonel said, “I myself am allergic to gunfire in certain calibers. Helicopter blades at certain rpm’s.”

The lieutenant suddenly actually spoke: “Do you know what makes me bitter above all? The heretofore unattainable level of bullshit we’re now all forced to engage, and I do mean non-fucking-stop.”

“Excuse me,” Skip said, ” ‘heretofore?”

“Something’s warping you,” Jimmy told the lieutenant. “Maybe it’s your perception of how the brass will see you—but they’re not seeing you at all right now, so it’s a perception of a nonperception, man, which is a perception of nothing, which is nothing, man.”

The colonel complained of marital problems. “She calls our fighting ‘domestic disputes.’ It’s obscene —isn’t it obscene? —to take something that reaches down and rips at your heart, and call it a ‘domestic dispute.’ What do you think, Will?”

Never had he seen the colonel so drunk.

At some point in the zigzag procession of events a woman gripped his arm high above the elbow and said, “Strong! Strong! Let’s go fuck, okay?”

What about that? How much did she charge? But he imagined her sad thinness, her genial kiss-ass terror, or her bitter terror, depending on how she cared to mask her terror … Another danced slowly beside the jukebox, hands hanging, chin dropping to her chest, not even trying to sell herself.

“No, thanks,” he said.

The colonel’s face arose before him like a diseased moon. “Skip.”

“Yes.”

“Did I promise you a shot?”

“Yes.”

“Are you getting a shot?”

“Yes.”

“Cheers, then, sir.”

“Cheers.”

A flashbulb popped in a corner. The colonel seemed to recognize the photographer and went in his direction. They were in a semi-elegant, air-conditioned place. The lieutenant took notes on wet cocktail coasters with a ballpoint pen while Jimmy spoke earnestly at his ear. The colonel returned with a camera in his hands. “He’ll give us copies when he gets the film back. Sit up, Skip. Up straight, now. Young lady, move out of my frame, please. This is for the family.” The flash, the moon drifting. “I’ll send it to the family. Your Aunt Grace was asking for a photo. They’re all very proud of you. We all loved your father very much,” he said, and Skip replied by asking, “What was my father like?” and suddenly they were having one of the most important conversations of his life. “Your father had honor, he had courage,” his uncle said, “and if he’d lived long enough he would have added wisdom to those. If he’d lived I think he would’ve gone back to the Midwest, because that’s the place your mother loves. I think if he’d lived he’d have become a businessman, a good one, a driving wheel in his community. I think he would definitely have stayed out of government.” Yes, yes, Skip wished he could say, but did he love me, did he love me?

While the jukebox played something with trumpets by Herb Alpert, the colonel ignored its music and raised a song in a whiskey baritone further roughened by his cigars:

She buried him before his prime, Down a down, hey down, a down She was dead herself ere evening time, With a down.

God send every gentleman Fine hawks, fine hounds, and such a lovely one, With a down, deny, derry, derry down.

Skip stepped from the evening’s perhaps eleventh tavern and ended his first day in Vietnam walking away from Thi Sach with only a general idea where he lived, amid the swarming throng, through the gritty diesel smoke, past the breath of bars and their throbbing interiors—what songs? He couldn’t tell. There—a recent hit stateside —”When a Man Loves a Woman”—then the music twisted around on itself as he passed the anonymous doorway and it might have been anything. He bartered with a cyclo driver who took him across the river and dropped him on Chi Lang Street. Here among the quieter lanes he breathed the fumes of blossoms and rot, smoldering charcoal, frying food, and heard the distant roar of jets and the drumming of helicopter gunships, and even the thousand-pound bombs exploding thirty kilometers away, not so much a sound as an intestinal fact—it was there, he felt it, it thudded in his soul. What must it be like under those bombs—or above them, letting them loose? To the west, red tracers streaked the sky. This was what he’d wanted. He’d come for this. To be shoved into the forge, an emphatically new order—so to speak a “different administration”—where theories burned to cinders, where questions of morality became matters of fact.

At Ton Son Nhut the previous afternoon he’d witnessed unbelievable airborne activity, an array of fighters and bombers landing and leaving, and cargo planes the size of mountains disgorging heavy armaments as big as houses. How could they fail to triumph in this war?

He found the villa’s door. It wasn’t locked. Inside, behind the bar, stood Rick Voss, who said, “Welcome to our

demented little show.” “And good evening.” “You found us.” “Are you staying here too?” “Always, whenever I’m in the Twilight Zone. Martini? I’ve got the

makings.” “I just spent half the night not getting drunk.” “Welcome to the second half.” “I’m ready to turn in.” “Been clubbing with the colonel?” “Just a wee skosh.” “Has he snagged you? Did he put you on a task?” “Not as yet.” “I have something for you. Just busywork.” “Thank God,” Skip said. “Just keeping you close,” Voss said, and mixed him a surprisingly cold

martini.

Assaulted by the scalding damp, their free hands thrown up against the rippling glare, they wrestled their duffels down the gangway onto the tarmac, PFC James Houston and two other new men of Echo Recon, and made their way to a staging area in a large open hangar where they sat on their gear and drank Cokes until a couple of spec fours came in who seemed to understand who they were.

Neither man actually greeted the three privates. They went on with their conversation as they guided the new arrivals to an M35 carryall big enough to haul a platoon, one saying to the other, “Who I specifically asked for was Carson, but who did he put in my ride? You. And now that means I’m saying, yes, fuck you, stay out of the Long Time, that’s my bar.”

“You mean you’re the only person in hell gets inside the Long Time. You’re their only customer on the planet.”

“No hard feelings.”

“Yes hard feelings, shit hard feelings.”

“Well, then, hard feelings, then. But stay the fuck out of my bar. Are those your orders?” he continued, now addressing the three new ones.

James had collected the papers for all three of them and held them in a tight sweaty grip. “You realize your pay’s gonna be hung up, right?” “Why? What’s wrong with our papers?” “Nothing. They’re all fucked up.” The other one said, “It all gets routed around the world, down your

throat, and up your ass.”

The two hosts rode up front in the cabin and the new ones in the back, in a canvas-covered cavern, as far from the open end as they could manage. They bumped forward as the view of the airfield behind them, the jumble of crates, Quonsets, vehicles, aircraft, then the city, the wildly colored buildings, the streets full of people who didn’t know how strange they looked, gave way to a general vegetation. James had trained for jungle environs in South Carolina and in Louisiana, but only during the fall and winter. His feet steamed in his boots. He took off his helmet. The day was cloudy, but the glare of it behind them through the open tarp made it impossible to keep his eyes open. He nodded forward into a brown stupor and slept until the truck jumped and explosions roared around his head. Fisher and Evans had already flattened themselves on the deck among their duffels. James fell on top of them. The truck had stopped. The doors slammed. The two from up front now both stepped up on the rear bumper and peered in at the tangled grouping. “I told you they were queer,” one said. The other held his cigarette aloft and touched to it what turned out to be the fuse of a string offirecrackers, which he pitched in beside them. Another deafening, rattling burst. The two captors disappeared. The vehicle resumed its motion. The three privates were horrified at the callousness of the joke. James almost wept from fear, and Evans said, “If we had guns we could shoot that guy in the back of his