Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Hao raised another matter: “I just saw the Monk. He showed up at my house and asked me for money. Then I took him here on the back of the motorbike.”

The master only studied him with his eyes. Yes, he’d known the master must have heard from Trung. “How long

since you’ve seen him?” “Not long,” the master admitted. “How long has he been back?” “Who can say? And you? How long since you’ve seen him?” “Many years. He has a northern accent now.” Hao stopped himself

from saying more, stared at his feet. “It disturbed you to see him.” “He came to my house. He wanted money for the cause.” “For the Vietminh? They don’t take taxes in the city.” “If he asked, they must have told him to ask. It’s extortion. Then he

insisted I take him here on the motorbike.” The master said, “He knows he’s safe. He knows you won’t name him to his enemies.” “Maybe I should. If the Vietminh have their way, that means the destruction of my family business.” “And of our temple, probably. But these outsiders are destroying the

entire country.” “I can’t give money to Communists.” “Maybe I can get word to Trung that you have no money. That

you’ve spent it for something.” “For what?” “Something that puts you beyond reproach.” “Tell him, please.” “I’ll just say you’ve done all you can.” “I’m indebted.” Hao could feel tomorrow morning’s mist beginning to shape itself al

most immediately as the sun fell behind the nearest hill to the west, called Good Luck Mountain. The fortunes of the mountain had altered, however. The construction arm of the American military was making an encampment up there, most people guessed a permanent landing zone for helicopters. News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn’t like to see it poisoned.

On account of this American colonel’s possible arrival they delayed the memorial until past four in the afternoon, but the colonel didn’t come, and the risk of ambush would keep him off the roads now, and they went ahead without him. They held the service in the temple. Eight of the villagers attended, seven old men and someone’s grandchild all sitting in candlelight around the temple’s centerpiece without a corpse to look at, only a small crowd of bric-a-brac, mostly wooden Buddhas painted gold. A scintillating battery-run decoration of the type found in GI taverns topped the whole display: a disc on which changing bands of light revolved clockwise. The master was more than audible. He spoke as if he were teaching. As if nobody ever learned anything. “We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.”

The Americans arrived by last light in an open jeep. Either they had no fear of the roads, or they’d bivouacked with the American military construction group above, on Good Luck Mountain. The brawny colonel, in civilian dress as always, had the wheel, driving with a rifle jutting up between his knees, smoking a cigar, accompanied by a U.S. infantryman and also by a Vietnamese woman in a white blouse and gray skirt whom he introduced as Mrs. Van, an employee of the United States Information Service.

They’d brought a projector and a collapsible screen and intended to show a one-hour film to the people of the village.

Colonel Sands bowed to the master, and then they shook hands vigorously, in the American way. “Mr. Hao, we’re going to set up the projector in the main room, if that’s all right. Will you please tell him that?”

Hao translated and told the colonel that the master saw no obstacle. The young soldier arranged the machine, the cords, and four folding canvas chairs—”for the elders,” the colonel said—as well as a small generator which he set going a few meters beyond the temple’s wooden walls and which filled the valley with its racket and scented the whole region with its exhaust. Hao explained that he and the master had to visit a sick villager but might come to see part of the film later on. The colonel said he understood, but Hao wasn’t sure he did. And as dusk arrived, and then the darkness, and as it grew evident that nobody at all would come, Colonel Sands asked to have the show played just for himself. The movie machine, powered by the noisy generator, filled the temple with flickering illumination and a hollow booming voice and strident music. The film, Years of Lightning, Day of Thunder, recounted the brief, tragic, heroic span of President John F. Kennedy’s life. The American soldier and Mrs. Van also watched. Mrs. Van had come along to translate the narrative for the audience, but of course there was no need. The colonel had said it would go on for fifty-five minutes, and five minutes short of that, under cover of the darkness, Hao and the master crept in to join the Americans, the master sitting on his pillow at the head of the room, behind the portable screen, where he couldn’t see anything, actually, and Hao in a chair beside the young soldier. Mrs. Van, sitting behind the colonel, glanced at Hao but seemed to decide he could translate for himself. In fact he couldn’t. To fathom English speech he usually needed faces and gestures. And anyway the colonel was already talking more loudly than the recording, seated with his arms crossed over his fists, addressing himself in bitter tones to the shining spectacle as the music swelled and the view closed in on the eternal flame marking John F. Kennedy’s grave, a squat torch which the Americans intended to keep alight forever. “The eternal flame,” the colonel said. “Eternal? If you can kill the man, you can sure as hell kill his flame. The thing is this: We’re all dead in the long run. In the end we’re dirt. Let’s face it, our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. In the end some mongrel barbarian wakes up in the morning and stands with one foot on a rock and the other on the kicked-over vessel of Kennedy’s eternal flame. And that vessel is cold and dead, and that sonofabitch doesn’t even know he’s standing on it. He’s just taking a piss in the morning. When I get up in the morning and step behind the tent to break wind and void my bladder, whose grave am I pissing on?—Mr. Hao, is my English too fast? Am I getting across?”

Hao made out the colonel’s intent, and, Yes, he wanted to agree, it’s all simply water coursing into larger and then still larger seas, and only what we do in this moment can save us … His vocabulary allowed him to say, “It’s true. I think so. Yes.”

Both men were distracted now by a small rat or frog hopping boldly into the room through the front door. The colonel astonished Hao by reacting to this intrusion violently, flinging himself bodily at the small man and knocking him backward, chair and all, so that the back of Hao’s head struck the packed dirt floor and a pain burst over his sight like an explosion of freezing needles. His vision cleared as the object, for that is what it was, and not some rodent, stopped only a meter from his face, and he understood that it was probably a grenade; it was his death. Something clapped down over the grenade. The soldier had covered it with his helmet and now lowered himself, not rapidly, but with some reluctance, and covered the helmet with his body, staring at first at the dirt of the floor and then looking toward Hao’s face, only inches away, so that his eyes were readable as he curled himself around his terror. Long seconds passed in a voluminous silence.