Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Ah, my friend Hao,” Skip said, “the rain is making me sad.”

Minh tried some English himself: “It’s good to learn to be happy in the rain. Then you’ll be happy a lot, because there’s a lot of rain.” In English it didn’t sound very clever.

Uncle braked, and Minh braced himself against the dash—a water buffalo crossing in front of them. A cargo van coming the other way ran into the animal and seemed to carom from its thick hide, stopping sideways in the middle of the broken pavement.

The buffalo put its head down as if trying to remember something, stood still a few seconds, and walked off into the tall grass wagging its horns from side to side, its rump rocking like two fists alternating in a paper sack. Hao maneuvered the Chevy around the stalled van as the beast faded away among the sheets of rain.

Once they’d left Route Twenty-two all the roadways were bad, almost impassable, but as long as Uncle kept the wheels turning they’d avoid getting mired. “When we come to the big dip,” Hao said, “I will go down fast, because we have to get up the other side.”

“The big dip—what is that?”

“A hill down and then a hill up. There’s mud at the bottom.”

“I understand.” They were speaking Vietnamese.

Uncle Hao headed the black Chevrolet into the long drop and they splashed through the mudhole at the bottom and climbed up the other side, steeply, until the top was nearly theirs and only sky was visible in front of them. The tires broke traction and howled like tormented ghosts while the Chevy slowly slid backward. They rested at the bottom in a foot of gumbo. Hao switched off the engine, and Mr. Skip said, “All right. Here we are.”

Minh removed his sandals, rolled his cuffs above his knees, draped himself in his clear plastic poncho, and waded to the house of the nearest farmer, who followed him back to the car, yanking his water buffalo along by the nose ring, and hitched a rope to the front axle and hauled them out of the bog.

Skip peered through the rear window at where they’d been and said in English, “Out of one hole and into another.”

It wasn’t so bad where Skip was going. He would have a gas stove, some form of indoor plumbing, probably a couple of servants. A hot bath when he wanted one. The villa, Minh understood, belonged to the family of a Frenchman, a physician, a specialist in hearing disorders, now deceased. As far as could be ascertained, this Frenchman had been fascinated with one of the area’s tunnels, had gone exploring, had tripped a wire.

The drumming of the rain lightened to a tapping on the roof. Minh opened his eyes. He’d been asleep. Uncle had stopped the car again. The road seemed to end here, to dive into a creek overrunning its banks, and Minh wondered if now they’d wait for some hooded skeletal boatman to ferry the American across this river to his state of exile. But Hao inched them forward. It wasn’t a creek at all, just a wide rivulet escaping from some creek they couldn’t see.

The rain ceased as they wheeled slowly into the village of Forgotten Mountain. The afternoon sun glittered on the wet world, and already the people moved around outdoors as if no storm had ever visited, carrying their bundles along the road, clearing palm fronds from the front of their homes. By the dirt lanes, in the shaded, drier places, children skipped rope using pale plastic chains.

They stopped in the driveway of the villa, and Minh hardly had a minute to take it in before getting involved in a small adventure—a lot of yelling from behind the house, then an old man who appeared to be a houseboy or papasan ran into view waving a rake over his head and yelling about a snake. Minh leapt to follow, Uncle and Skip close behind, and they came on a monstrous constrictor zigzagging across the backyard, a brindle python longer than any of them, longer than all of them together. “Let me, let me,” Minh said. The old man swiped his rake at it one more time uselessly and gave up the weapon to Minh. What now? He didn’t want to mar the valuable skin. The snake headed for the bank behind the house. He ran after and brought the rake down hard, hoping to trap the reptile’s head, but sank the splines rather farther down its spine, and like that, with frightening energy, the snake wrenched the handle free of his hands and swiveled off wildly, still skewered, dragging the rake into the brush. Minh and the houseman gave chase, beat the wet bushes with their hands, both men sopping now, and the houseman yelled, “Here is the monster!” He came up behind a dripping poinsettia holding the tail. “It’s almost dead!” But it was still writhing and got away from his grip. Minh managed to catch hold of the rake, step on the snake’s spine, extract the weapon from their prey, and bring it down several times on its skull—surprisingly fragile, easily pierced.

The old man’s face positively broke open, all smiles. “Come, come, we’ll take it to my family!”

The region’s Catholic priest had turned up to greet them. He spoke in English to Skip: “It’s not necessary to kill such animals. Many people keep them for a pet. But it’s big enough to take the skin. Too bad it’s not more colorful. Some of them are red and sometimes orange.” A young man in nice clothes, probably from the city, wearing the priest’s collar. “You must visit my residence,” he said, and Skip said he would.

Then Minh and the old man paraded their catch down the main street through the ville, Minh at the head and his friend at the tail and fully four meters of snake bridging the distance between them, their free arms outflung to counter its dead weight, and little children running after, yelling and singing.

Mr. Skip had stayed at the house with the priest, or Minh at this moment would have assured him, “Here is a wonderful omen for your arrival.”

Willia m “Skip” Sands of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency arrived at the villa in Cao Quyen, which meant “Forgotten Mountain,” with his duffel and his uncle’s three footlockers at the very moment a hard rain gave way to fine, sunny weather in which he didn’t feel a participant.

Voss had claimed to have something for him, had claimed he’d keep Sands close. It had come to nothing, he’d kept Sands stashed, not at all close, in an air-conditioned Quonset hut in the MAC–V compound at Tan Son Nhut, as part of a short-lived project devoted to collation of a superabundance of trivia called the CORDS/Phoenix file system, which amounted to every note ever jotted by anybody who’d seen or heard anything anywhere in South Vietnam. The project group, roughly eighteen men and two women, all drafted from the personnel pool, spent most of their energies trying to characterize the dimensions of the material delivered onto the site—boxes of pages that would make an eight-and-onehalf-inch-wide path four-point-three times around the earth’s equator, or completely blanket the state of Connecticut, or outweigh the pachyderms in seventeen Barnum & Bailey shows, and so on. Shock and despair. An appreciation for the victims of sea catastrophes as the cataracts thundered into the hold. One day instructions came to put all the boxes on handcarts and push them along a cinder path under the tropical sun to a storage facility in the same complex. End of project. History.

Next, the waiting in Cao Quyen —”Forgotten Mountain,” “Mountain of Forgetting,” or “Forget This Mountain”—which he thought of as “Damulog II,” once again beyond the last reasonable stretch of roadway and past the end of the power lines.

He and Hao and Minh were served a meal of rice and fish by the Phans, the elderly pair who looked after the place and whom he would address as Mr. Tho and Mrs. Diu, and then his companions abandoned him with promises that Hao would return every week or ten days with mail, and books, and commissary items for the pantry.