Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

jump in their trucks and drive a hundred miles for a shot of whiskey.” “Speak of the devil. You want some Bushmills?” “We forgot! For gosh sakes—what are you staring at?” “Isn’t that allowed?”

“Not when it’s me. I’m an old crone. This sun roasts you like a marsh

mallow. I’m all beat-up.” “You just wear the badge of your adventures.” “Malarkey.” “No.” “You think this place is an adventure?” “Sure.” “It isn’t fun, though. It’s an adventure, but an adventure isn’t fun till

it’s over. If then.”

This impressed him as a truth. He poured two shots of lukewarm Bushmills and brought them to the bed. Scooting back against the wall, she held the small glass in both hands and sipped.

“Do Seventh-Day Adventists usually drink?” “Some do, some don’t. Here in this mess I’d say all of us do when we

get the chance.” “Where were you? On the delta.” “A ville called Sa Dec. But I had to leave. It’s different around there

since Tet. Everything’s chewed up by big American bullets. Everybody has to be careful. Disaster’s just around the corner. For a lot of people it’s already here. It’s a terrible, terrible situation. You get used to it and plod along, then one day you wake up and you’re not used to it anymore. Then after a while you get used to it all over again.”

“So you’re here looking for orphans?” “We don’t have to look.” “Right. Right.” “We’re just liaisoning with missionaries. If we can, we want to get

something going, something better. Bigger. The existing facilities are terrible, every one of them.” At the moment terrible things didn’t interest him. As she spoke he studied her head and wondered what Rembrandt might have tried in such lackluster, truthful illumination.

Kathy said, “And your camera.”

Camera. “I remember you had a camera. Do you still have it around?” “I gave it up. No more photographs. It turns the world into a mu

seum.” “Instead of?”

“Instead of a crazy circus/’ He kept photographs in his dresser drawer, next to the Beretta pistol

he’d never used. “Look here.” He handed her a dozen or so. “Emeterio D. Luis!” “Not a single one of you.” “A jeepney! I miss those things.” “Nearly fifty people riding on it.” “No wonder the tire popped.” A knock. Mrs. Diu asked admittance. “We’ll be down for supper,”

Skip called through the door. “I have the incense. You want?” “All right-She came in with three sticks fuming sweetly in her hand and said,

“Yes, good evening,” and placed them in their holder on a high shelf across the room. “Okay. Supper later. I will tell you,” she said, and went out closing the door softly behind her.

The rain had stopped. Through the screened view, in the two minutes of dusk before black nightfall, he watched Tho ascending one of the papaya trees behind the villa. Because they jutted over the bank and the creek the old man couldn’t simply knock the papayas down, but had to walk up to them on the flats of his splayed bare feet with a kitchen knife in his teeth, clinging to the trunk with both hands, cutting one of the fruit away one-handed and clutching it under his arm, descending backward, and taking the last two feet in a weightless hop to the earth.

“Can I have another drink?” “By all means, comrade.” “Just a wee splash.” Skip felt a little irritated, suddenly, that Kathy had first wrung apolo

gies from him—though he’d made jokes, belittling his atonement—and she’d now forgotten it all. And it occurred to him that the months of solitude had taught him to read himself, to parse himself like a scholar; that one person on this earth had become known to him.

It rained again, and then it was night. She couldn’t return now to the missionaries in Bac Se. They slept together side by side, without sheets, she in one of his rough hand-washed T-shirts and he in boxer undershorts. Following breakfast the next morning she left for Bac Se on her black bicycle, and Skip never saw her again.

1969

Whe n the three Americans appeared at the front door of his home to take him to the Armed Forces Language School, Hao felt uncertain as to the nature of the encounter. The only one of them who spoke, a black man, did so politely, introducing himself as Kenneth Johnson from the American Embassy. They drove downtown in a closed, air-conditioned Ford with diplomatic plates, Hao in the back with one of the two younger men.

At their destination the two younger men both got out, and each opened one of the doors for the passengers. Hao and Kenneth Johnson proceeded alone past the concrete barricades toward the fine new building. Its predecessor had been wrecked in the Tet attacks the previous year. Two or three thousand members of the Vietnam military studied English here. The interior smelled of fresh paint and sawn wood.

As far as he knew, the building housed no prisoners.

Johnson led him down a stairwell to the building’s basement, where a uniformed marine fell in with them. The students thronged the upper stories and their footfalls vibrated in the ceiling overhead, but in this basement hallway Johnson, Hao, and the marine walked alone. At the corridor’s end they came to a door with something like a small adding machine fixed to the wall beside it, four or five buttons of which Johnson now pressed expertly, and the door lock hummed and clacked.

Johnson said, “Thank you, Sergeant Ogden,” and he and Hao entered a hallway lined with closed doors. Here it was quiet, air-conditioned. Johnson led him through the only open door into a small lounge furnished like any parlor with a couch and padded chairs, also a large electric-run cooler, red, with the words “Coca-Cola” on it. The room had no windows. This basement must be far underground.

“You want a Coke?”

Johnson lifted the cooler’s heavy lid, took out a dripping bottle, and, levering off its cap on an opener attached to the cooler’s side, handed the drink to his guest. It was very cold.

Feeling obligated, he took a sip. He pursed his lips and sluiced it down the right side of his mouth and swallowed. He had a bad tooth, a left molar. The colonel had spoken of a dentist.

“Have a seat,” Johnson said, and Hao sat himself on the edge of the couch’s cushion with his feet poised under him like a runner’s.

Johnson remained standing. He was small for an American, with big stains in the armpits of his white shirt. Hao had never before conversed with a Negro.

They’d taken him an hour or so after Kim had left for the market. That meant they hadn’t wanted her to see. That they cared to keep this visit a secret. That no one knew where he was.

Johnson sat down comfortably in the chair across from him and offered him a cigarette. Hao accepted it, though in fact he possessed a pack of Marlboros, and lit it with his own lighter and dragged deep and blew smoke out through his nostrils. Nonfilter. Delicately he spat out a shred of leaf. The fact that this man’s forebears had been a race of slaves embarrassed him.

Mr. Johnson returned his cigarettes to his shirt pocket without taking one for himself, and stood up. “Mr. Nguyen, will you excuse me a minute?” While Hao tried to make sense of the question, the black man went out without shutting the door and left him alone with his thoughts, which weren’t happy ones. He dropped the last of his cigarette into the bottle and it hissed, floated, darkened, sank halfway to the bottom.

Through the open doorway Hao saw his wife Kim, accompanied by another American, passing along the hall. A fissure opened in his soul. She watched her feet as if negotiating a rocky path. Apparently she didn’t notice him.

The black man came back. “Mr. Nguyen? Let’s relocate the discussion, do you mind?” Johnson hadn’t sat down. Hao understood that he didn’t intend to, that he himself must stand up. He let himself be guided only a few steps along the hallway to a second windowless room in which sat a thin, angular, youthful man with reading glasses far down on his nose, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking down and to the left at the contents of a manila folder opened on the table beside him. He smiled at Hao, saying, “Mr. Nguyen, come on in, I want to show you this thing,”