Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“Not personally. What did you do to piss him off?”

“The question is, what did Brewster do to me? Got me stuck behind a desk almost six months last year and answering a lot of questions. They tried to make it look like some sort of health inquiry. But I knew what it was about.”

“And what was it? Not the business in the Philippines?”

“Hell, no. About Cao Phuc. About my helicopter, about my platoon. And I put him on his ass, and do you know what? The questions stopped. The interlude was over, and I was back here again.”

“Put him on his ass, did you say?”

“Last June,” said the colonel, “I knocked him out.”

“What?”

“You heard right. I invited him to play handball. We suited up in the locker room, we stepped onto a court, and I walked over and I socked him on the chin. Ask any boxer: you don’t want to take a blow to the point of the chin. The first thing they teach you is—tuck your chin. I laid him out, sir, and I don’t regret it, because he’s a slimy, oily, politicking—have you got a thesaurus? I’d have to hunt through a thesaurus to give you Brewster’s full description.”

“I never heard anything about this.”

“I don’t know that he ever told anyone. How could he? No way of putting a good face on it, running to the brass and whining that he got his ass kicked.”

“Have you ever arm-wrestled this old thug?” Storm asked.

“No,” Skip said.

“I didn’t hurt the SOB. Johnny Brewster’s a strong and agile man. He parachuted into northern France for the OSS. But he spent too much time with the Resistance, and they turned him pink. Made him a leftist sympathizer. And he’s an elitest. Wants to get rid of us old thugs. The war shook quite a few of us toads in amongst the goldfish, and they’d like to get us sorted out.”

He signaled to Hao, who sat in the Chevy three yards away with the radio on and the door open. “Hao, Hao. Come on.” Skip saw by the way his uncle cocked his head and waved his fingers that he was drunk now. “Do you need anything? When was the last time you ate? Sit down, buddy, sit down.”

“I can get something in the bar.”

“Sit down, we’ll get you something, sit down.”

Hao sat down and the colonel waved at the mamasan and said, “Actually, I don’t play handball. Those noisy acoustics, and the ball whacking and the rubber shoes squeaking—never play it. It’s harder on your ears than the target range. It’s as deafening as artillery.” The mamasan approached and he said, “Get him something to eat. What can we get you, Hao? What are you hungry for?”

“I will talk to her.” Hao rose and walked off toward the barroom with the mamasan.

“John Brewster,” the colonel said, “wears socks with clocks on them and thinks Washington, DC, is slightly bigger than the universe. What are they going to do to me? Fire me? Jail me? Kill me? Will, young Will, you know something of my history. What can they do to me now? I was a prisoner of the Japanese. What is there left in human experience that they can hope or expect to scare me with?”

The mamasan came over with four bowls of soup and a plate of baguettes on a tray. The colonel tore a baguette in half and said, “I tell you this sincerely: there’d better not be a man at this table who in any way fears death.”

“Hear, hear,” Skip said. “It’s all death anyway,” Storm said. “Oh, I forgot,” the colonel said with a mouthful of baguette, “Mr.

Jimmy thinks he’s a samurai.” “I’m just moving through the motions, Papasan. Death is the basic

condition.” “What do you know about it really?” “No. No. The universe had to come from somewhere, right? Wrong.

It had to come from nowhere. The Big Nothing.” “Mr. Jimmy follows the Buddha.” “I follow a completely different mode of Buddhism.” “Mr. Sergeant Jimmy studies the Tibetan.” “I study the knowledge of the moves after death. The realm of the

Bardo. What to do at each part of the journey after you die. It’s full of wrong turns leading back here, man. Back to Planet E. I’m not coming back. It’s a shit-hole.”

“It’s a shit-hole with fireworks,” the colonel said. “Come back if you want. But don’t expect your current rank.” That his uncle would tolerate, even celebrate this fool. “You tried some meditation over in Cao Phuc —at the temple, didn’t

you, Colonel?”

The colonel squinted at Storm as if trying to summon an answer and after a considerable pause said, “I don’t play handball. Although it’s an ancient game. Sport. Pastime.” He sat back comfortably. “Venerable Irish pastime. Came from Ireland. Came over from Ireland.” His head nodded forward, and he was deeply asleep.

In this way began the Year of the Monkey.

ICathy traveled to Saigon to seek help from anyone she could, starting with Colin Rappaport at World Children’s Services. Vietcong and even stray NVA regulars marauded in the Sa Dec area, the Americans and ARVN had grown ruthless and undiscriminating in the pursuit, supplies weren’t getting to the Bao Dai Orphanage, soon it would all be impossible.

The American helicopters strafed anything moving on the rivers. To reach the road to Saigon she pedaled her bike along the paths by the canals, hard going, not muddy, but unresisting, slowing the tires—how pliant this land, how rich and soft, how deceptive—and out onto the dikes, in the open. A wind came rolling over the paddies and sunlight moved in the green shoots like a thrill under the flesh.

She waited in a dirt-floor café. Tin-roofed, straw-paneled. Sat at a table drinking hot tea from a tin can, awaiting transport across a river about a hundred feet wide. At her feet a little kid played with a bright green grasshopper half the length of his arm. She left the bicycle with the café family, who told her no helicopters had shown in the area since early morning. A sampan woman wearing pale violet formal-gown gloves and a pink face-cloth ferried her across. On the other side lay houses and gardens… A girl in a beautiful dress in a tiny plot of graves, prostrate on one of the tombs in the dappled shade … Kathy caught a lift with a farmer in a three-wheeled truck bearing old rice sacks full of duck feathers toward Saigon. A few miles southeast of the city their ways parted and he let her out.

She wore a calf-length skirt, sandals, no stockings. Sitting in a thatched teahouse beside Highway Seven she felt the sweat running from the crooks of her knees down her calves. She opened her knapsack and took out her Bible to read, but it was already too dark. She held it in her lap, flicking at the bookmark with her finger. Somewhere in the Psalms it said: Against You, You only have I sinned. For a few minutes as the explosions came particularly close the night of Tet she’d felt all pride crushed, all knowledge stopped, all desire, had existed only as naked, abject subjugation. Her sin had seemed small, her salvation or damnation seemed small.

Night came. A man set out red chairs in front of the teahouse.

She took a cyclo into the city. She stayed at a hostel of sorts across from the green-shuttered Jamia Mosque on Dong Du Street. She lay on a cot for half an hour but couldn’t sleep.

She went walking. It was nearly eleven. As she waded through the traffic, a cyclist bearing on his shoulder a three-meter-long sheaf of lumber seemed about to make a turn and possibly knock her head off with the ends of his boards. She stepped backward and was almost run down by a U.S. jeep—they called them “Mutts”—the tires screeched, and one wheel went up over the curb. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” said the wild-faced young infantryman driving. —So; nearly dead. She didn’t care.

She walked down a red-lit alley. In a window—a soldier slapping his woman while a child up on its knees on the mattress howled out of a face like a fist…