Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

stand. “I’ll put it in exactly those words.” “The negotiation is over. I’ve come to ask, and to give.” “What do you ask?” “I want to be done with this life. I want to go to the United States.” Hao couldn’t believe it. “The U.S.?” “Can it be done?” “Of course. They can manage anything.”

“Then let them take me there.” “What do you offer?” “Whatever they want.” “But now. Immediately. What?” “I can tell you the rumors are true. There’s going to be a big push at

the New Year. Everywhere in the South. It’s a major offensive.” “Can you give specific information? Places, times, and so on?” “I can’t give you much, because it’s mostly NVA. But in Saigon it’s us.

Our cell has been contacted. We’ll be working with a sapper team. They’re planting charges in the city. We’ll probably have to guide them to two or three locations. As soon as I have the locations, I’ll pass them to you right here.”

Hao could hardly respond. “The colonel will value information like that.” “I’m almost certain they’re laying these charges for the big push. I believe it’s coming exactly on the day of Tet.”

Four years dancing on the doorstep, and now all this in less than twenty minutes. Hao couldn’t keep his hands in his lap. He offered Trung another cigarette, took one himself, held the lighter for them both. “I respect your courage. You deserve the truth from me. And so I tell you this: The colonel is interested in the possibility that you’ll double. That you’ll go back north.”

“I could probably go back. There’s a program to take tribesmen north for education and indoctrination. The idea is to send them back home afterward, to organize. I’ve had some involvement with the program.”

“You’d really go back north? Why?” “I despair of explaining.” “What about going to the States?” “Afterward.” After going north as a double agent? Hao doubted the existence of

any afterward. Something gripped his heart. “We’ve been friends,” he

told Trung. “When peace arrives, we’ll still be friends.” The two men sat together on the smooth marble bench, and smoked. “There—all right?” Trung said. “We’ve crossed over.”

From Dr. Bouquet’s notes:

Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine—that doesn’t bear the burden of the knowledge of good and evil.

Sands sat on the veranda himself in the heat of the afternoon with the doctor’s notebook in his lap, while behind him moldered and loomed the house full of codes and files and words and referents and cross-referents, examining an illegible line in the doctor’s jottings, the notebook hastily closed on wet ink, the line blotted out. No matter which way he turned the page—

And the strange thing is that those who travel through this region, as if seized by a sleepy paralysis, shut down their senses in order to remain ignorant of everything.

When Nature, by an odd caprice, suddenly portrays in a boulder the body of a man being tortured, one can think at first that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing. But when, during days and days on a horse, he sees the same intelligent charm repeating itself, and when Nature stubbornly manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms return; when the heads of known gods appear in the boulders, and when there emerges a theme of death for which man obstinately pays the price; when the dismembered form of a man is answered by those—become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter—of the gods who have always tormented him; when a whole region of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its people; when one knows that the first men used a language of signs, and when one discovers this language enlarged formidably in the rocks; then surely one can no longer think that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing.

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Thre e weeks short of his scheduled release from the navy, Bill Houston had a fight with a black man in the Yokosuka enlisted mess, in the kitchen, where he’d been detailed with three other sailors to paint the walls. Houston’s unvaried style of attack was to come in low and fast, get his left shoulder into the other man’s midriff while hooking his left arm behind the man’s knee, and upend them both so that Houston came down on top, driving his shoulder into the solar plexus with his full weight behind it. He practiced other moves as well, because he considered fighting important, but this opening generally worked with the tough opponents, the ones who stood their ground and raised their dukes. This black man he was having it out with caught Houston a blow to the forehead as he rushed for the man’s legs, and Houston watched stars and rainbows fly as they both fell onto a five-gallon bucket of paint and spilled it all over the place. He’d never gotten into it with a black guy before. The man’s middle was as hard as a helmet, and he was already squirming away as they slid across the tiled floor on a widening pool of institutional-green enamel. Houston tried to right himself as the man hopped up as lightly as a puppet and aimed a sideways kick from which Houston’s skull was saved only because the guy slipped and went down in the goop, his left hand stuck out to catch the fall. But his hand slipped too, and he made the mistake of going onto his back in the effort to get himself up again, and by that time Houston had his bearings and jumped on his stomach as hard as he could with both feet. This maneuver was called the “bronco stomp” and was reputed to result in death, but Houston didn’t know what else to do, and, in any case, while it ended the altercation and gave Houston the victory, it didn’t do much more than knock the wind out of the guy. Six men from the Shore Patrol arrested the combatants, two green bipeds now racially indistinguishable. As the SPs wiped them down, laid tarps across the seats of the jeeps, and led them away in handcuffs, Houston determined that if they did a stretch in the brig together he would avoid a rematch. Officially he’d put the guy away, but Houston was the one with the great big bruised knot between his eyes, somewhere under all this paint. “What was the fight about?” a patrolman demanded, and Houston said, “He called me a dumb-ass cracker.” “You called me a nigger,” the guy said. “That was during the fight,” Houston said, “so that don’t count.” Still excited from the battle, proud, happy, they felt friendly toward one another. “Don’t call me that no more,” the black man said, and Houston said, “I wasn’t going to anyway.”

Thus Seaman Houston received an early general discharge, and spent his last ten days in the navy not as a sailor but as a prisoner in the brig of the Yokosuka Naval Base.

On his release he was issued a voucher for a commercial jet flight to Phoenix. Traveling by air made him miserable. His ears popped like a hammer on his skull, he felt dizzy, the air tasted dead. The first and last plane ride of his life, this he swore. In the LA airport he balled up the Phoenix portion of his ticket and tossed it in an ashtray, changed into his uniform in the men’s room, and, impersonating a sailor, hitchhiked home with his duffel on his shoulder through the clarity of the Mojave Desert in January. He encountered the outskirts of Phoenix sooner than he’d expected. It was much more of a city now, tires wailing on Interstate Ten and loud jet airliners coming in overhead, their lights shimmering in the blue desert twilight. What time was it? He didn’t have a watch. In fact, what day? Houston stood at Seventeenth and Thomas under a broken street-lamp. He had thirty-seven dollars. He was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t tasted beer in almost a month. Lacking a plan, he phoned his mother.