Tree of Smoke (33 page)

He said no more.

“Is that the end of the song?”

“The ending. He sees the fish swimming alone.”

“I think you’ve got a little Irish in you, sir.”

“Why?”

“The Irish love to sing.”

“Sometimes there are singing competitions, and I place very well. It’s also my hobby, like yours. Here in this district, every man must sing. We must sing to the demons.”

“Really?”

“Mr. Benét, it’s true, the demons live here.”

“I see.”

“If you do something disrespectful, for instance if you relieve yourself in the forest, you will suffer some tricks from them. Trees may fall on you, huge branches may break off and hit your head, or you might fall in a crevasse and get a broken bone. It might be a shocking way to learn there are spirits here in the forest.”

Skip said, “Yes, I’d be shocked if that happened.”

“Certain Chinese doctors in this district practice their medicine here. They know about these spirits. I’ll take you to the shop sometime. Would you like to go? They keep many fascinating things. He keeps practically all parts of a tiger in jars and tiny boxes. If he grinds the bones and feeds to a dog, that dog will become fierce. Did you know that even the wax from a tiger’s ears can cure you of something? And the tough hairs from the elephant’s tail can ease the woman while she gives birth. They also grind the teeth and bones of the elephant to rub on certain kinds of lesions to cure it. They grind the horns of the deer and mix it up with alcoholic beverage to make an evil kind of drink. It makes a man too powerful in sexual matters. Other animals too. Many snakes, many kinds of animals. Perhaps insects, I don’t know. The Chinese doctor knows these things.”

“I’d probably enjoy seeing a collection like that.”

“Everything is not merely superstitious with these people. Some things are already verified. The tribes make shrines and altars in the forest. A tiny house for the spirits from bamboo, perhaps the coconut shell. The spirits are there, they live there, I must believe it from the evidence. As in the case of a young man who scornfully urinated in front of an altar in the forest, and then he suffered a complete mental breakdown.”

“Shocking.”

“My name is Thong Nhat,” said Père Patrice. “I hope I will be your friend.”

“I look forward to it,” Skip said. “Please call me Skip.”

So it went—tea with the priest, walks when it didn’t rain, a program of calisthenics. He took to puttering among the dead physician’s French magazines, translating passages the physician had underscored. He tended the colonel’s files. Sometimes he heard distant choppers, fighters, bombers, and felt himself captured in a rainbow bubble of irrelevance.

Next visit, Hao brought a letter from Major Eddie Aguinaldo, forwarded by the embassy in Manila to the Saigon Embassy’s APO address in San Francisco.

—“Eddie,” in a flourishing hand.

J
ames dreamt of firefights: shooting useless bullets from an impotent gun. Dreams send you messages, this he knew. He disliked these particular messages, warnings that in battle he’d have no power. Not that he saw battles anywhere outside his nightmares.

The choppers in and out of LZ Delta carried strictly supplies, no battle teams. Once in a while somebody hurt had to touch down in a shot-up chopper that couldn’t make it farther, but Echo only heard about these things.

James didn’t mind the patrols. A patrol took two days. Your squad went west up the zigzag track, through the LZ, and around to the south—along an old track through the open farms, into a patch of jungle, and out into the craggy wasteland made by herbicides—and back to Echo Camp; or you went around to the north, then east up through the LZ, then down the mountain and back to Echo. On the way you camped one night. Nothing ever happened.

On the west side of Cao Phuc it was still Vietnam, untouched by herbicides and full of jungle and paddies where enemy might easily hide in ambush. The west side should have been scary, but it wasn’t. The farmers strung along the hillside, hacking away at their terraces, always waved. Word was their families had never had trouble with the French or the VC or the GIs.

Nothing happened on the north side either, but it was uninhabited, rocky, plunging, cut by ravines, and often a leaf turned wrong caught the light and looked like a flash of white up above a cliff—like somebody hiding there—and terrified him. Any fallen log looked, at first glance, like a sniper in the undergrowth.

“What’s that there?”

“That’s a elephant turd.”

“You suppose they booby-trap them things?”

“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They’ll booby-trap any kind of motherfucker.”

Black Man said, “That’s buffalo shit. No elephants around here.”

“There’s plenty of elephants.”

“Not on this mountain. That’s buffalo shit.”

“It’s big.”

“Buffaloes are big, fool.”

“What’s that growing out of it? Mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms will grow out of any kind of motherfucker. Shoot right up,” Black Man said, “grow so fast you can watch it. Hormonally and such, it’s a trip.”

“Well, anyway, there wasn’t no shockers in that batch.”

“That’s one batch of shit we foxed.”

“We aced that shit pile.”

“Only seventy-six more million to go.”

“Yeah,” Black Man said, “lotta boo-shit coming at you, ratshit, bat-shit…But you don’t take it, you just deflect that shit with your Maximum Mind.”

Right now Black Man was the only soul brother in Echo Platoon. Black Man did this. Black Man did that. Black Man had a name, but it was secret. “I don’t want nobody calling me nothing but Black Man,” he insisted. “I won’t live by the slave name the white man gave my forefathers.” He’d placed adhesive tape over his name patch, wouldn’t tell anyone what it said.

Black Man told them, “I’m a black man with a black dick. But it ain’t that big. Lotta guys wanna brag on their Big Ten-inch. But if they had ten inches like I have
six
inches, this sorry-ass world would be blown in two. That’s how much power I got in my Little Six-inch.”

Fisher and Evans were James’s only friends, friends for life. He thought, also, maybe Sarge approved of him. As for the rest of Echo Platoon, they spoke a strange language, and most of the time James felt scared and angry and left out.

He hurt for home. Now he understood what it must have meant to his brother Bill to dial a number in Honolulu and make the phone ring in his mother’s kitchen. He repented his casual gruffness with his brother when he’d called. Fantasies of talking and laughing with his brother, talking with his friends, dominating these assholes of Echo, dreams of not being here, being anywhere but here, being somewhere that was elsewhere, of never having heard of this place.

You could draw leave and hitch a ride over to the Twenty-fifth Infantry’s big base or all the way into Saigon on one of the trucks from the LZ. Trucks went every day.

The sarge, Sergeant Harmon, wasn’t as different from the others as he’d seemed at first. He swore, he drank beer, though only one or two at a sitting, and his only other vice was chewing tobacco, snuff; some of the guys called it snoose, and they did it too, out of admiration for the sarge. He was older and had these war-movie looks—very light blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a tanned face, and a grin that crawled up on one side like Elvis Presley’s. One of his dog-teeth on that side was chipped, but his teeth were very white, and it didn’t look that bad, and James almost felt he wouldn’t have minded having a tooth chipped like that, like Sarge did. Fisher had a chipped tooth too, but his chip looked like you’d want to get it fixed. And the sarge’s fatigues fit him very neatly. He made it appear as if the tropics weren’t really hot.

Flatt had predicted their pay would never find them way out here in the shadow of Good Luck Mountain, but he’d been wrong, and well into May James sent part of each paycheck to his mother in Phoenix. Once she sent him back a small note in a big envelope, her greeting scrawled on a page of pink stationery she must have stolen somewhere. She thanked him and said, “We’re getting on okay, the Lord is making ends meet.”

The second Friday in June was a little different. James’s birthday had come the day before. He and Fisher and Evans left Echo Camp on a legitimate pass and got as far as the ville. Evans had decided they must all get laid. “Come
on
,” Evans said, “we’re in a
war
. We’re
men
.”

“I don’t see no war.”

“It’s all over the place, or at least somewhere around here, and I don’t want to die in it till I get laid.”

They went to the Purple Bar, and on straw-filled sacks in a row of hooches behind it Evans and Fisher lost their virginity, and James betrayed Stephanie Dale with a girl who at least did not have terrible teeth, or any teeth at all, that he could see, because she didn’t have to smile or talk, and therefore no dishonesty was required to get things started, and no sincerity either, and she moaned like a savage and whirled him upward through a cloud of joyful lust.

The three privates met afterward in the bar. They still had sixteen hours’ leave, but they’d done all there was to do in the world.

Evans raised his glass: “Git some!”

“Come on.”

“What.”

“Don’t say ‘Git some.’ It’s so posed, man.”

“The fuck it’s posed. It isn’t posed. It’s who I am.”

“You are who? You are ‘Git some’?”

“Lemme tell you something, man, lemme tell you something, fucker.” Evans wiped beer from his chin and said, “All right, okay, I was cherry, I hereby admit it. That was my first time ever.”

They stared at him until he was forced to ask, “What about you?”

“Yeah, me too,” Fisher said.

“Well? Cowboy?”

“No. I wasn’t.”

“You’re sticking to that lie.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Fine. You always were a little more advanced.”

“But there’s one lie I’m done with. Today’s not my nineteen birthday, it’s only my number eighteen.”

“What?”

“What?”

“You just turned eighteen?”

“Yep.”

“You mean you
were
…
seven
teen?”

“I sure was.”

“My God! You’re a
child
!”

“Not no more I ain’t.”

Evans reached across the wobbly table to shake his hand. “You’re more advanced than I even suspected.”

In honor of his birthday, James bought several rounds. He was happy and high and laughing. Now that he’d come to where the humidity was awful and the beer cheap and infinite, he really understood beer’s meaning and its purpose.

They drank until night fell. Fisher, a Catholic, came under a black cloud of penance. “I’ll get VD for sure.”

“VD can’t get through a rubber.”

“Yeah,” guilty Fisher said, “that’s if you can get the packet open.”

“What?”

“I didn’t use it! I couldn’t get the little packet open! My fingers were too goddamn nervous!”

“Use your teeth next time, you pitiful fool.”

They walked home in the dark. Fisher refused to be consoled. “I’m gonna get VD from God.”

“Are you gonna go to confession about this?”

“I have to.”

Evans said, “‘Catholic’ sounds very close to ‘cuntlick.’”

Fisher seemed wounded. “That’s a really evil statement.”

“Do you have a religion?” Evans asked James.

“Now I do, I sure do. Now I worship the Holy Fuck.”

None of them had his flashlight. They couldn’t see. The dry mud was like concrete and they stumbled in the ruts. Evans shouted, “We did it!”

“I know! We did it! It’s like…” Fisher was speechless.

“I
know
!” Evans said. “It
is
! God-DAMN! I shot my wad so hard I almost exploded the top of my penis off.”

Fisher begged, “Come on, you guys, for real—did you use a rubber?”

“Hell, yes, I used a rubber.”

“You better use one next time,” James told Fisher.

“What next time? I’ll never do it again.”

“Bullshit.”

“I just hope to God I don’t get VD. It hurts like hell to piss, then the shot hurts too.”

“That shot’s supposed to be like a knife in your butt.”

“It’s the next worst shot to rabies.”

“At least you can’t get rabies from a whore.”

“Can’t you?”