Tree of Smoke (21 page)
Authors: Denis Johnson
Tags: #Vietnam War, #Intelligence officers, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975, #Fiction, #War & Military, #Military, #Espionage, #History
Also, quite a rare thing: a letter from the widow Beatrice Sands, Skip’s mother. It felt thick. He didn’t open it.
And here was a letter from Kathy Jones. He’d received several in the last year, each one crazier than the last, had saved them all, had ceased answering.
Are you finally here in Vietnam? Maybe in the next village? I welcome you to the Bible in Panavision and Technicolor. But here it’s good not to be from your United States of America. Too many resentments. They don’t mind the French so much, though. They beat the French.
Do you remember Damulog?
From the next paragraph the word “affair” leapt up at him, and he stopped reading.
Nothing further from the colonel.
He hadn’t seen his uncle in over fourteen months, had concluded that one or both of them had been sidelined owing to the questionable business on Mindanao. Something, anyway, had kept them both from the action. He’d taken his course in Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute, and what started by looking like the sensible prelude to a Saigon posting turned into eleven baffling months spent with a crew of three other translators, not one Vietnamese national among them, working on a project of doubtful utility, that is, pursuing a patent folly—to extract an encyclopedia of mythological references from over seven hundred volumes of Vietnamese literature, an endeavor waged mostly in three basement-level offices of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and consisting mainly of the listing, categorization, and cataloging of fairy-tale figures.
This he understood to be his uncle’s contribution to the Psychological Operations Group of the Military Assistance Command–Vietnam, for which the colonel now served, Skip further understood, as chief CIA liaison. In fact, all but officially the colonel ran Psy Ops for MAC-V, according to an Agency officer from Langley named Showalter, who checked in with Skip’s translation team on a more or less monthly basis; and before long Skip would help the colonel run it. “When does he want me there?” “January or so.” “Outstanding,” Skip said, completely infuriated by the delay. This conversation took place in June.
The fanciful project ended with sudden postings to other places for all the participants, who boxed and shipped to Langley the useless material.
He opened the letter from his mother.
“Dear Son Skipper”—her hand rounded, slanting, large, covering several pages of six-by-eight-inch stationery bond:
I’m sure not much for writing, so first thing, nothing’s wrong. Wouldn’t want you to think it’s only bad news would get me to sit down and send a greeting to you. It’s really the opposite, a really fine day of Indian summer. The bluest sky, not a dab of a cloud anywhere up there. The trains go by with a different sound due to leaves turning on the trees, it’s a happy greeting now, pretty soon we’ll hear that lonely sound of a whistle in bare winter. This afternoon it’s warm enough you want a breeze through the house. Open the windows and hear the redwing blackbirds calling. And the grass is still coming on, you can see where it needs one more cutting before the fall is really official. When I saw how pretty the day was I thought, “I think I’ll write a letter!”
Thank you for the money. I bought a new drier to go with the washer. Got it full of clothes right now and going round and round. But in fine weather like this I like to put the big things like the sheets and bedding out on the line and dry them in the world, and that’s just what I’ve done. Got the sheets on the line like in the old days. Yes, I ordered a drier, I didn’t get a TV. You said get one, but I didn’t. When I feel like I need entertainment I go to the shelves and take down
The Old Curiosity Shop
or
Emma
or
Silas Marner
and read just any old part and nine out of ten times I have to go back to the beginning and read it all. I just have to. Those are good old friends.
I told you about old Rev. Pierce retiring. There’s a new man at the church, Pastor Paul. Pretty young. His last name is Conniff, but he goes by Pastor Paul. He puts his new slant on things. He kept me interested, I went every Sunday all last winter, then the weather relents, the sun shines, things get busy, and I haven’t been since early April probably. No TV, but I try to keep up with the news. Isn’t it terrible news? I don’t know what to think. Sometimes I wish I could talk to somebody about what I think, then I think I better not. I know you joined the government to be of service to the world, but our leaders are sending good boys to wreck another country and maybe lose their lives without any sound explanation.
Well, a half hour’s gone by since that last sentence. That new drier ding-donged and got me running to do the folding while it was still hot. Excuse me for the things I say. Maybe I’ll just say what I want and go back and write this letter over, cross out the bad parts and just send the nice parts. No, I better not. War means something different to me than it does to generals and soldiers. As of next December 7 twenty-six years will be gone since we lost your father, and every day I still miss how it was. After a while I had boyfriends after your father, and really spent some time with Kenneth Brooke before he took a job with Northwest Airlines, but it was a little too soon for us before we’d gotten it all sorted out what we’d do, Ken and I, so when he moved to Minneapolis, that was that. Otherwise I think we would have gotten engaged, which means you would have had a stepdad. But that’s off the subject. What
was
the subject? Goodness, I better not send this letter! I don’t know if you even knew it was a little serious between me and Ken Brooke. Do you even remember Ken at all? Every other Christmas he and his family come back home to visit his folks and his sister. The other Christmases they go back to his wife’s home town, I don’t know where that is. Boy, am I having one of those days.
I’d better get out that old push-mower and do the yard one last time for this year. I’ll have to oil it up. Had it done by the kids all summer, one or other of the Strauss kids, Thomas or Daniel, but they’re in school now. They took turns with their Dad’s big noisy gas-powered monster. Made two dollars each time. That old push-mower is an old friend of mine. Remember how I used to do the yard—“And stay away from those blades with your fingers!”—that’s what I hollered, like those blades would jump up and bite your fingers off, even with nobody pushing. Then one day I hear those blades whirring and look out the window and here comes Skipper in his teeshirt with his skinny arms, pushing past the window like The Little Engine That Could. Did the whole yard on your first try. I hope you remember, because I remember so clearly. I hope you remember how good you felt, and I will too.
I appreciate the little notes you send. People ask about you, and it’s good to have news to relate. Attending the Language Institute, attending the Naval Post-Grad, attached to U.S. Embassy, pretty impressive, makes me feel like a star.
We’ve had a beautiful day all day, but here about three PM it’s gusting up a little, gets the sheets waving and slapping at the wind. That’s the whitest they can get, when they’re dried in the sun and the breeze. And we’re lucky about that breeze, because the tracks aren’t far, but the breeze is always the other way, no grit coming down. Makes me glad we live on the “other side” of the tracks! I remember when I saw you go by that window. I saw your strength of character in a flash. I thought when I saw you, He’s a goer like his Dad, he’ll get himself through college on jobs and scholarships, nothing’s stopping that little lad. And now more study, more grad school. Army, Navy, Embassy, seems like everybody needs you.
Here, six lines from the finish, he had to stop reading and curse himself. He’d spent fourteen months in the States, could have arranged a visit home before he’d left again. But he’d ducked her. Sure: war, intrigue, the fates—certainly, he’d face them. Just, please, not Mom. Not her laundry flapping in the sorrows of springtime. Not Clements, Kansas, with its historical license to be tiny, low, and square. Here, in Manila, at approximately fourteen degrees latitude north and fifty-seven longitude east, he couldn’t get much farther away. But it wasn’t far enough. It hurt him to think of her all alone. Particularly after his time at the Language Institute. True to the colonel’s word (“I’ll send you to the school, we’ll work that out”), he’d been posted, just before that Thanksgiving of 1965, to the institute on a high bluff overlooking Carmel. The view was that of low fog hunched over the coast, or higher fog wrapped around the grounds, or, on the clear days, the pure Pacific heartrendingly removed from him while he underwent his total immersion course in Vietnamese, which meant four weeks’ confinement to the facility followed by four weeks with weekend passes only. On his first leave he took Communion a few miles down the coast at the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a nunnery open to the public for Mass on Sunday mornings. The laity faced the altar, and the sisters, cut off by their vows from the world, sat or stood, no telling which, behind a wall, hidden even from their families, some of whom sat in the pews to glimpse the upturned palms of the cloistered acolytes reaching through a small window to receive the Body of Christ. Watching them that morning, thinking of them now, eased his bonds. Had he taken a vow of separation? No. Whatever his circumstances, he was free, and fighting for the freedom of all. But his mother: Some sort of vow undertaken there. Some sort of walling-in acceded to.
Skip, I pray for you and for the whole country. I’m going to start up with the church attendance again.
I’m sorry I hardly ever write, I do appreciate your notes, but it takes a certain kind of day to make me get out the pen and paper.
Well, there you have it, another letter or something!
Thinking of you,
Mom
Having proved himself with this one, he felt he might face the letter from Kathy Jones. But it had grown too dark to read.
He’d spent some considerable time with these communications, and his taxi hadn’t moved half a block. “Is there a problem?” he asked the driver. “What’s wrong?”
“Something is delaying,” the driver said.
Far around the curve of the boulevard as it followed the contours of the bay, he saw the lights of traffic moving freely. But here they were stuck. “I’ll be back,” he said. He got out and walked toward the trouble, skirting the stalled cars, wending among the rancid puddles. A large city bus held up the flow, stopped by a single man who stood lurching in the middle of the street, drunk, his face covered with blood, T-shirt ripped down the front, weeping as he confronted this vehicle, the biggest thing he could challenge, apparently, after somebody had beaten him in a fight. Horns, voices, gunned engines. Keeping to the shadows, Skip stood and watched: the bloody face, deformed by passion, shining in the bus’s headlights; the head back, the arms limp, as if the man hung by hooks in his armpits. This reeking desperate city. It filled him with joy.
A
t the beginning of James’s furlough his mother took three days off from the McCormick Ranch, and they spent the time watching television together in the small house at the edge of the desert. The day he got back she unpacked his Class A greens and straightened the creases carefully with her steam iron. “Now you’re doing something for your country,” she said. “We have to stand up against the Communists. They’re Godless.” It might have meant something, if she didn’t say the same about the Jews and Catholics and Mormons.
After the old woman went back to work, James saw a great deal of Stevie Dale. The afternoon of Christmas Eve the two of them drove in his mother’s pickup out to the edge of the hills on the Carefree Highway, to the site of a one-car accident in which the driver had been killed.
“See there?” Stevie said. “He hit a saguaro, then a paloverde, then that big rock.”
The blackened wreck had been pried away from a boulder by emergency crews some days earlier, but hadn’t yet been removed. The car had turned turtle and burned.
“He must’ve been flying.”
“Only one in the car. Only car on the road.”
“I guess he was late.”
They popped a couple of beers each, and quickly Stevie got tipsy. They sat looking at the wreck like a charred, upturned hand.
“The driver burned to death inside,” she said.
“I hope he was knocked out,” James said. “For his sake.”
The car had been red, but the flames had melted its paint. Now it showed several patches of bare, bright metal. It might have been a Chevrolet, there was really no telling.
“Every single thing in the world is slowly burning up,” she said.
“Yeah? Is it? I don’t get you.”
“Everything’s oxidizing. Everything in the world.”
He gathered she’d come by this news in her chemistry class.
During basic he’d thought of her continually, but it was nothing personal. He’d thought just as often about at least seven other girls from their high school. Being with her here, even surrounded by these unbounded spaces, he felt trapped in a vise.
He said, “Can I ask you something? The first time we did it, were you—you know—a virgin, or something? Was that your first time?”
“Are you
serious
?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“Are you
kidding
?”
“Yeah. I mean no.”
“What exactly do you think I am?”
“I was just asking.”
“Yes, I was a virgin. This isn’t something you do every day, or
I
don’t anyway. What do you think I am,” she said, “some motorcycle mama?”