Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

“You enter on your own passport. Whatever you’re traveling with now.”

“Of course.”

As the man paid for their rolls and coffee and rose to go, he assumed an insufferable casualness and mentioned, as if in afterthought, the pass-signs and the time and place arranged for Fest’s briefing in Saigon.

Fest distrusted Hong Kong’s drivers now. He skipped lunch and left for the airport two hours early and arrived without trouble and sat watching his fellow passengers assemble for their journey home, cheery affluent Asians returning from holidays in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Manila with pastel shopping bags, smiles, even laughter. He didn’t know what he’d expected—the beleaguered members of a ravaged populace, hunched shoulders, tight faces—he hadn’t thought much about this war, had never expected to come to it, had been sent, he was sure, ill— advisedly, like everybody else. The stewardess gave him a purple Vietnam Airlines traveling bag and he held it empty in his lap looking down at the clouds and nodded off until late afternoon, when the same stewardess touched his shoulder to tell him they were descending toward Tan Son Nhut.

In a deteriorating terminal crowded with soldiers both American and Asian, the floor piled with boxes and baggage, he found his man, a Negro holding up a small sign saying MEEKER IMPORTS. “Mr. Reinhardt,” the man said. “I’m Kenneth Johnson. Anybody else?”

“I don’t know.” “Me neither. But we’ll take all comers.” A man of good cheer. There was nobody else.

“How was the flight?” “All flights end on the ground.” “That’s what the ducks say. Jesus,” he said, “who thinks up these pass-signs?” “I don’t know,” Fest said, and added nothing, though he understood this was probably the moment for a joke.

They came out through the front entrance to a line of taxis whose drivers leapt up waving, and Johnson said, “You’re all set up under the name of Reinhardt at a place called the Quan Pho Xa. You’re papered for Reinhardt, right?”

“Correct.” “All right. Off you go, Mr. Reinhardt.” “I don’t understand.” “This is as far as I go. I’m just verifying arrival.”

1 see. “You’ll get a glimpse of me tomorrow. Just a glimpse.” “At the briefing?” “Yes. Just a glimpse.” “Will I use the same pass-sign?” “No. I’ll be there to introduce you.” They shook hands, and Kenneth Johnson put him in a cab and spoke

to the driver briefly and was gone. “Do you speak English?” “Yes, sir. Little bit.” “Do you know where my hotel is?” “Yes, sir. Hotel Quan Pho Xa.” “What does it mean?” He got no answer. The taxi entered the city proper, passed down an

avenue crowded with buildings painted pink or blue or yellow, and slowed, stopped, moved a couple of car lengths, stopped. The driver told him it was the New Year. Everyone was going somewhere. “What is New Year this time?” Fest asked. “Year of Dog? Year of Goat?” The driver said he didn’t know. A buzzing tide of motorbikes flowed around the larger vehicles. One went past with a woman passenger seated sidesaddle, ankles crossed, reading a magazine. Engines coughing out exhaust. The palms looked none too healthy. He watched a foursome of street boys who lounged on the pavement playing cards for cigarettes.

Why had they stopped him in Hong Kong to pick up documents prepared in Saigon?

The traffic moved again. On gravestones in a tiny cemetery he saw emblems in a swastika shape, and swastikas carved on the door of its small temple. The sight shocked him. He’d never seen one except in photographs. Including two or three taken of his father. Fest watched for street signs and landmarks, trying to inscribe it all on his mind, to locate himself. He checked his watch. In nineteen hours he’d be briefed as to schedule and method. The brusque treatment at the hands of Kenneth Johnson told him much. His colleagues wanted him only at a distance. Possibly he’d been sent here after an American—even Kenneth Johnson himself.

It was raining lightly but felt no cooler when he got out of the cab at the hotel. A woman sat on her sandals outside the entrance. He guessed Americans didn’t stay here—she was its only protection.

While he checked in, the two girls downstairs in the lobby, the receptionist and her assistant or her friend, sang unintelligible lyrics along with their radio.

“What is your name?” he asked the clerk.

“Thuyet.”

“Thuyet, can I make an overseas telephone call?”

“No, sir. Only cable. Only the telegram.”

She wore a blue skirt and crisp white blouse. She interested him. Bizarre and delicate of face. No jewelry, no paint, but probably all of them were whores.

He showered and changed and went down to the street, wondering where he’d find an overseas telephone to call his mother. It was night now. In the distance above the city, helicopters tore up the air with their rotor blades, and tracer bullets streaked upward into the darker reaches. From over the horizon, bombs thundered. Down here, innumerable little horns and small engines. Radios playing silly local music.

Sandbags lined the curbs. He walked along the fractured sidewalk, picking his way among holes and people’s outstretched feet and parked motorbikes, chased by beggars and pimps and snide, sassy children who offered him “cigarette, grass, boom-boom, U-globe, opium.”

“Bread,” he said.

“No bread because of Happy New Year,” a vendor explained.

He gave up hope of a telephone and had dinner in a place with hostesses wearing fringed red miniskirts and small red cowboy hats and fancy plastic gun belts with empty holsters. The waitress said because of the New Year they had no bread today.

Fest had seen the signs and banners saying “Chuc Mung Nam Moy” and gathered they wished him a Happy New Year, though they could just as easily have meant The Plague Is Terrible.

He woke in the night, as he’d done the night before. He heard gunfire outside. He fumbled with the bed net, and keeping low he crossed the room and chanced a look over the windowsill. A woman walked along in the glow of a paper lantern. Her hand, swinging the light by its wire haft, looked like a claw. Children chased past her in the street, setting off firecrackers. He heard music, and voices singing. He went back to bed. His pattern hadn’t changed yet, he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. He had two books and he’d read them both. The ceiling fan whirred at its top speed but didn’t cool him. Out the window the madness continued. It seemed to him absurd that people surrounded by warfare should entertain themselves by lighting off explosives.

He stayed in bed rereading Georges Simenon, fell asleep at dawn, and woke around ten in the morning.

Not long before his lunch date, he took a cab to Sung Phoo Maps and Charts, only, as the driver had assured him, a few blocks from the hotel, but hard to find. Inside, a brisk young man greeted him in English. When Fest explained he wanted the most current available map of the region, the young man led him up narrow stairs into a chamber full of women seated at drafting tables under circular white neon tubes, and very soon he stepped back into the Saigon morning with three scrolls wrapped together in brown paper and tied with twine: hand-colored, French-language maps: North Vietnam; South Vietnam; Saigon.

The day was sunny, clear, hot, bright, with black shadows on the pavements under the trees. He walked a block and hailed a taxi. The cabbie said because of the New Year he couldn’t turn the meter on and would have to be paid copiously. Disgusted, Fest got out and took a cyclo to his rendezvous and arrived, by his watch, four minutes early at the Green Parrot Restaurant, a very narrow establishment much like a locomotive’s dining car with tables for two—no more than two—along either wall, and an aisle between. No maître d’ greeted him, only a young man behind a cash register, who raised his eyebrows.