Tree of Smoke (41 page)

Kathy said, “It’s horrible.”

“We’re in a horrible place.”

“It’s a fallen world.”

“I can’t contradict you. That would be stupid.”

There seemed to be ten or so monkeys recuperating on the blanket. All wore cloth diapers.

Mrs. Bingham said, “Sorry we didn’t make it last night. Did things turn out? Better not answer.”

“The mother’s fine.”

“The baby perished.”

“Correct.”

“Sorry. We’ve had our hands full. There’s been a little flu epidemic here. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Kathy placed her knapsack on the table and opened it. She carried a plastic baggie full of loose GI cigarettes to give as gifts, and she passed them all to Mrs. Bingham. “Some of them look broken, eh?” she said.

Mrs. Bingham held the tiny monkey on her knee and both she and the big-browed creature looked at the baggie without comprehension. “We had eleven bassinets,” she said, “but they all burned.”

They’re only monkeys, it was all she could do to keep from shouting, monkeys, monkeys.

In the kitchen was a maidservant—young, in high-heeled sandals and a short skirt—who stopped washing tiny diapers at the sink in order to see to Kathy. “What can I get?” she said.

Mrs. Bingham said, “Get out of my sight,” and the girl returned to the kitchen.

“Is the doctor around?”

“We’re waiting. Some may have escaped. He’s looking for survivors.”

“Can he find them? Can he catch them?”

“If they’re hurt. This is a golden-head.” She replaced the wounded langur on the blanket. It lay back looking upward with its black eyes and seemed to be furiously thinking. “The others are probably dead. It could have been all of us. The bastards. They’re psychotic. Oh, well,” she said, “we’ve all been driven mad, haven’t we, whether we realize or not.”

Soon the doctor came in and gestured at the assemblage of battered animals.

“Behold the Vietcong.”

“Anything?”

He shook his head.

Kathy asked, “Was it mortars?”

“Rockets,” Dr. Bingham said. “Planes. And not just rockets.”

“Napalm?”

“Probably.”

“It must have been.” His wife broke down weeping. “The screams are still in my head—just now as I’m talking. You’ve no idea. You’ve no idea.”

“You just don’t know,” the doctor explained to Kathy. “I’m sorry, but you can’t possibly.”

“Mimi,” his wife said to the servant, “bring Miss Nurse a Coca-Cola, please.”

The servant gave her a Coca-Cola in a glass with ice and they sat in the living room under generator-powered lights while Dr. Bingham spoke of monkeys. The four subspecies of langur had come to be regarded as two separate species, one of which was divided into three subspecies. Of these, the golden-headed
Trachypithecus poliocephalus
had grown, in his words, “excruciatingly rare,” with an estimated five hundred individuals remaining. And now so many less. They allowed Kathy to put the nipple of a baby bottle into the mouth of one of the langurs and hold it while it guzzled formula. The creature was appealing, but blue snot bubbled from its nose, and she wondered if she’d catch her death.

The couple behaved most hospitably, but when the doctor, a large, bearded man in early middle age, a most prepossessing figure, a real jungle bwana, Kathy had always thought, noticed her open knapsack sitting on the coffee table, he said, “What is that,” very coldly, very hatefully. Most strangely.

“It’s a blood pressure device.”

“It’s a tape recorder.”

“It’s a blood pressure gauge.”

“You’re recording this,” he said.

“Dear, it doesn’t look anything like a tape recorder.”

The doctor’s lips were pursed and bloodless. He breathed hard through his nose.

Kathy said, “I’ve turned it off now.”

“See that it doesn’t go back on.”

“He thinks it’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Bingham said.

Kathy reached for the glass of Coke resting on the floor by her chair. Fire ants covered it, rolling in from the blazing day in a phalanx about six inches wide and God knew how long.

“Have you listened to the radio?” Mrs. Bingham said. “The North is attacking all over. They hit the American Embassy.”

“Really.”

“They’ve been repulsed, it seems. So the news reports say. But it’s the American station. They’d want to sound victorious, wouldn’t they? Dear,” she said to her husband, who ministered to one of the small creatures, “she’s dead. Dead.”

“I was arranging her arms.”

“Leave her alone.”

The servant girl attacked the ants with brisk strokes of a short-handled broom, driving them out the front door. The boy guarding the entrance edged a couple of feet to his left. The girl looked Chinese, taller than most, quite tall, with a very short black skirt and long legs.

Kathy asked, “Will you stay on?”

“Stay on?”

“Can you repair things, do you think you can rebuild the facility?”

“What else can we do? Who else would take care of them? There are only seven, but, I mean, nevertheless. Seven left out of one hundred sixty.”

“One hundred fifty-eight,” the doctor said.

“You had a store of antibiotics, didn’t you? I wonder if that’s still true?” She knew they had antibiotics—the second refrigerator.

“Goddamn them, who do they think they are, what are they trying to do? You’re Canadian, aren’t you? You’re not American.”

Kathy said very evenly, “I’m wondering about your antibiotics now. Now that things are so different.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mrs. Bingham said.

“I wondered why you’d come around.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I know,” Kathy said. “It’s just the way of things. It would be such a help.”

“Do you have cold storage?”

“I was thinking of the Bao Dai facility. We have a couple of Frigidaires. It would really help. It truly would. Two hundred children, more or less.”

“We had one hundred fifty-eight,” Mrs. Bingham reminded her.

“Yes,” Kathy said, longing to strike her in the face. She asked them again: “What will you do?”

“We’ll probably stay on.”

“Yes. We’ll stay on,” Mrs. Bingham said, staring at the maidservant as she rinsed out rags at the sink.

“Your generator is working well.”

“Yes, yes. We still have power.”

The doctor said, “Who do you really work for? What are you after?”

His wife leapt to her feet. “Do you want medicine? Do you want medicine?” She ran over to the girl at the kitchen sink and pulled up her skirt from behind. Underneath the girl went naked, she wore no panties—“There,” Mrs. Bingham said, “will we stay on? How could we leave!”

“Let her have the medicine.”

She opened one of the refrigerators wide and shrieked, “Take it over my dead body!”

“Give it to her. She needs it,” the doctor said.

“It was stupid of you to come,” Mrs. Bingham said.

“Take it,” her husband said. The girl went on washing at the sink as though none of this were happening.

A
bove Echo Camp as the sun rose the mountain disgorged black smoke like a volcano. The paddies on the west side, untouched by two wars, were now a wasteland, destroyed by NVA artillery or VC mortars, whichever it was, and by U.S. incendiary ordnance and rockets. Echo Camp lay untouched. Mortar blasts had dug craters a hundred meters off, nothing closer. The ville of Cao Phuc too was safe. But it appeared many of the villagers had been warned—that the VC had warned them—that they’d been contacted, cultivated, turned. The place had been strangely quiet the afternoon preceding the onslaught. The Purple Bar had been inexplicably closed. Before dawn Tuesday came the attack; by midmorning Tuesday the population had crept back home, though some still came, without bags or bundles, as if they’d only been gone a few minutes.

At dawn the colonel had arrived by chopper and come down the mountain in a jeep and toured the area with Screwy Loot and two men from Psy Ops—Sergeant Storm and a civilian the little sergeant referred to as the Skipper.

“Boy, boy, boy,” Screwy Loot said, “those F-16s sure tore the shit out of our mountain.”

The colonel said, “This is just the start. From now on all hell is going to rain down from these skies. It’s a goddamned shame.” The colonel was beside himself. During the fighting these villagers had disappeared, but the farmers on the mountain’s other side had not—except in flames. He slapped at the heads of several local men who sat on their rumps in the dirt in a line, legs straight out with their ankles trussed together and their wrists bound behind their backs. The Kootchy Kooties had captured a man, a VC, they said, who’d come at them with an AK and blown the Indian’s rucksack to shreds, right on his back. The Indian took hold of their blindfolded prisoner’s bound wrists and dragged him backward over the earth into the brush where the Kooties had pitched their tents. The little man grimaced so hard he seemed to unhinge his jaw as his arms popped out of their sockets at the shoulders, but he didn’t make a sound as the Kooties hung him by the wrists from the lopped-off branch of a banyan tree, his toes six inches above the earth.

Echo was messed up over Sarge, who’d been taken to Hospital 12 with wounds in his neck and spine and belly and waited there in a state of paralysis, too critical to be moved stateside. Most of Echo sat in the Purple Bar saying nothing, drinking only a little, silly with grief and nauseated by the violent power of fate. The new black guy sat among them telling whopping lies about people he claimed to know personally back home. He was able to talk because his heart wasn’t broken. He’d never really known the sarge. He came from the boonies in Louisiana and seemed both shy around these men and excited to talk about his home. “I been rode on by a witch before. I know a witch rode me all night once because I woke up tired and dirty with bloody corners on my mouth where I bit on the bridle. You can hang a horseshoe over your bed to keep witches off. Before she can come in your house she got to walk down every single road where that horseshoe been walking. My uncle fetched a rock and broke the arm on a witch one night and next day I swear on Jesus it was Sunday and old neighbor lady singing hymns in church got bubbles outa her mouth and fell down rolling and preacher say Take up her shawl and they took up her shawl and there was her arm bust and bone sticking out right where my uncle broke that witch’s arm and preacher say Drag her to the pit and they dragged her to the pit and preacher say Burn the witch and they burned her up right there in the pit. I swear it’s true. Don’t nobody back home say it ain’t. My uncle told me and everybody knew about it.” He was a pie-faced black youth, very black, the color of charcoal. Nobody stopped him and he might have gone on talking forever, but Nash came in and interrupted, saying, “Hey, you gotta see this, the Kooties are messing with that Vietcong and he’s all fucked up, I am not shitting you, man, you really gotta see this.”

Outside, Black Man watched while eating a mango, peel and all, with his hands. There were always mangoes around—bananas too, sometimes papayas. He said, “Those Lurps all janged up on bennies and goof-balls. Zippy zoodle.”

One of the Lurps, in fact the most randomly unhinged of the colonel’s Kootchy Kooties, the savagely dressed black guy, stood in a bloody puddle in front of the hanging prisoner, spitting in his face.

Screwy Loot stood watching too, along with Sergeant Storm from Psy Ops.

The colonel observed from the shade, from a seat on an old connex crate shot full of holes, with chickens living in it. He and the Skipper didn’t seem interested in making their presence known. The lieutenant went over to them and said, “Well, now, it’s like this, the thing about this kind of thing…” He didn’t finish. He frowned. He chewed his lips.

The black Kooty seemed to be lecturing them while he dug at the man’s belly with the blade of a multipurpose Swiss Army knife. “They are kicking our ass and we gonna find out what’s what. They attacking all over the South. The American Embassy compound even.”

Sergeant Storm from Psy Ops said, “Man, no, don’t,” but not very loudly.

Cowboy says, “Give it to the motherfucker. Make him holler. Yeah, motherfucker. That’s how Sarge hollered. Make him holler.” His face was purple with rage, and he wept.

“There’s something I want this sonabitching muhfucker to
see
.” Now the Kooty went at the man’s eyes with the spoon of his Swiss Army knife.

“Do it, do it,” Cowboy said.

“I want this muhfucker to get a real…good…look at something,” the Kooty said. “Oh, yeah. Sound like a baby girl,” he said in answer to the man’s screams. He dropped his knife in the gore at his feet and grabbed the man’s eyeballs hanging by their purple optic nerves and turned the red veiny side so that the pupils looked back at the empty sockets and the pulp in the cranium. “Take a good look at yourself, you piece of shit.”

“Jesus Christ,” the skinny little sergeant said.

The colonel hopped down off the connex crate and walked over to the scene unsnapping the flap on his holster and motioned Cowboy and the Kooty out of the way and shot the dangling prisoner in the temple.

Sergeant Storm said, “Goddamn fucking right.”

Cowboy put his face directly in the colonel’s. “You didn’t hear the sarge crying and bawling till he lost his voice,” he told him. “One or two things like that, and this shit ain’t funny no more.”

T
he corpse went limp instantaneously and a rag of brain flopped down the side of its face.

Young Captain Minh, as a Viet Nam Air Force pilot, had directed ordnance against countless targets and, from the cockpit of his F-5E fighter-bomber, must himself have finished the lives of hundreds, but these had ended in obscurity, beneath carpets of fire and smoke, and Minh had never seen anyone kill anyone before.

It was a sunny morning. Almost noon. Already uncomfortably hot.

The colonel holstered his weapon and said, “There is a great deal I’ll do in the name of anti-Communism. A great deal. But by God, there’s a limit.”

Minh heard the colonel’s nephew laughing. Skip Sands could hardly stand up, he was laughing so hard. He put a hand against the tent and almost pulled it down. Nobody paid any attention to him.