Tree of Smoke (48 page)

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“This isn’t a tunnel, Skip. It looks more like the man’s own excavation. More like he was excavating a cavern or something—but the geology doesn’t seem the kind where you’d find caverns—don’t you need limestone for that?”

“A cavern?”

“Maybe there’s a subterranean crevasse here. A crevasse in a buried rock.”

“Okay. Yeah. He was definitely fascinated by caverns. Possessed. I looked at his notes.”

“Sure. But it’s not a VC-type tunnel in the least. The VC tunnels aren’t like this at all. The entrances go straight down. Makes it harder to breach one.” Skip couldn’t tell if the colonel was disappointed in the tunnel alone, or also somewhat in his nephew.

They left the mystery behind and went back to see about lunch, Skip dealing with his irritation—the tunnel wasn’t a tunnel. Nor even, probably, a cavern. He felt jilted by the dead man. Bouquet had let him down.

At the villa’s low gate the colonel reached for Hao’s elbow. Clinging to the smaller man’s arm, he stooped to pick up a tree limb thrown down by the recent storm as if he’d grown interested, suddenly, in jetsam, and leaned on it as a staff as he took the last few steps to the entry.

Mrs. Diu had lunch ready. They went directly to the black lacquer dining table, where Tho officiated, Skip thought, with a certain air of accusation: in sixteen months, except for the priest, these were his first guests to a meal. Local fare today, beef noodle soup with mint leaves and bean sprouts. But American-style sliced bread fresh from the oven, and butter too. And Bushmills throughout. No chopsticks, not even for Hao. And no Bushmills for Hao. Dessert was a kind of pudding made from guava.

“To the Irish,” the colonel suggested, having cracked a second fifth, or, Skip feared it possible, a third.

“The name Sands isn’t Irish,” Storm said.

“We don’t speak of it,” Skip admitted.

The colonel said, “We don’t?”

“Well—I didn’t think we did.”

“We started out Shaughnesseys. All of a sudden on the boat over it was Sands.”

“That’s what Aunt Grace told me. All my life my mother treated it like some great mystery and scandal.”

“No, it’s just a source of amusement and minor shame. How’s the news from your mom?”

“All good, I guess. I get letters from her. I send back postcards.”

“Anyway, fellas, I wasn’t toasting a whole nation. Just my old team—the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. I’d say they’re the majority of them Polish. At least we were when I was on the squad—look at Skip. Look at his face. He thinks the old man is about to start.”

“Go ahead, Uncle. I’m drunk enough, if you are.”

“Yes yes yes, I’m full of hot gas. You could raise a balloon with my reminiscences. Go ahead, change the subject.”

“Your paper for the journal. I didn’t understand your paper.”

“I didn’t either.”

“This isn’t exactly changing the subject—if the subject is hot air.”

“I’m impervious to criticism.”

“Lotta wild terms in there. ‘Insulated activity.’”

“Insulated activity: showing initiative, i.e., taking the bull by the horns while the brass sits on its ass.”

“And others.”

“What others? I’m your glossary.”

“I can’t remember.”

“Jargon is important. Consider the potential audience. These folks are all about mumbo-jumbo. Have you read ‘Politics and the English Language’?”

“Um—George Orwell. Yeah.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. And
1984.
”

“Well, 1984 is coming. And it won’t take seventeen years to get here.”

“Anyhow,” Skip said.

“More like sixteen,” Storm announced.

“Sixteen what?”

“Sixteen years till 1984.”

“Wait a minute. Eighteen. Eighteen.”

Storm laughed, waving a slice of bread around beside his crew-cut head.

“Men,” the colonel said, “the enemy isn’t doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Adding and subtracting, Sergeant.”

“What’s the enemy doing, Colonel?”

“They’re cutting up our dud ordnance and blowing off our testicles with it. They’re living in holes in the ground. They’re not having pudding. They’re eating their children in the name of victory. That’s what they eat for lunch. So let’s get with it. We’ve got one of them on our side now. He could whip half our infantry by himself. He’s come in by every gate—you know the VC’s ‘three gates’? Blood, imprisonment, and time in the North, he’s done all three. Hao can tell you—this guy’s been fighting since the French. He was a prisoner on Con Dau. He went north and was reindoctrinated after the Partition. He came back down on Uncle Ho’s trail and he’s been doing his worst ever since. Couple years ago in Cao Phuc he tried to assassinate me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“About a year after Kennedy died, so late ’64, I’d say. Two and a half years ago. He admitted it to Hao.”

He turned to Hao, who’d remained invisible despite his presence at the table, and Hao confirmed it. “He said to me, yes.”

“Tossed a grenade into the temple when I was visiting. He’s the real McCoy. Lousy Chinese grenade.”

Skip felt his mouth hanging open as he regarded his uncle—drunk, obsolete—absolutely unkillable.

“Question is, with that kind of commitment, what’s making him turn? What does he say, Mr. Hao?”

“I don’t know,” Hao said.

“That’s the part I don’t like. Don’t like it at all.”

“I don’t know,” Hao said.

“Listen, listen,” Skip said, suddenly buoyant, “we’ve got to create the bogus thing, the fiction. Maybe I can help with that.”

“That’s what you came seven thousand miles for. Suppose this. Suppose in the embassy bombing last year some papers got loose in the wind. A transcript, say—minutes of a meeting of a few old pirates who think they’ve got a nuclear weapon they can divert. These horrible folks want to smuggle it into Hanoi and put a stop to the nonsense. What they see as nonsense. Which actually
is
nonsense.”

“Wait,” Skip said, “not a meeting actually about the, the—whatever you call it—the plot, not the plot itself. The meeting was about trying to
stop
the plot. These are not the plotters, in other words. They’re the ones trying to investigate the plotters.”

“I get you.”

“I don’t,” said Jimmy Storm.

“The papers aren’t the minutes of people actually conspiring,” Skip said, his ears buzzing from the Bushmills, “not of the actual conspiracy, but of folks assessing the, the”—marshalling his powers—“the progress of the conspiracy. So there’s this coded transcript—”

“Not in code. Just some torn fragments that survived the bombing. A few shreds—” The colonel’s thoughts continued without speech.

Skip regretted getting back to this subject now. The colonel had been right to postpone drinks until they’d discussed it. Now they were discussing it again, and he, for one, didn’t know what he was saying. But the colonel lifted another sip of whiskey to his lips, and it was over. “Give me giants!” he said. “I mean, for the love of—Johnny Brewster? He’s spent the whole war in Washington batting a handball around and scheming how to break up the operation at Cao Phuc. And now it’s broken up—September first, all over, no more. Fucker was OSS. He fought a war: he knows, or once upon a time he musta known—John Brewster must jolt upright in bed some nights and think, Wait a minute, wait a minute, wasn’t this about something else? But before he can remember it’s about the survival of freedom, and human salvation, and the light of the world—the pettiness and bullshit of his dreams drag his head back down to the pillow, and he’s snoring away again. And next morning it’s just about Langley. The war is in Langley, and it’s between guys like him and guys like me, and it’s all about the Agency. I knocked that sonofabitch on his ass. Goddamn these fuckers. What do guys like that think the United States of America is trying to do in Vietnam? Now, wait—and these fuckers in Langley, these fuckers at the Pentagon. These fuckers! They don’t know. They just don’t know.”

He bowed his head.

“Colonel,” Jimmy Storm said.

The colonel raised his head.

“Colonel.”

“Yes.”

“You fuck me up,” Storm said.

“Is that a compliment?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Get me out to the car,” the colonel said.

Hao stood up. He took no initiative beyond that.

“Hey, guys, hey—why don’t you stay the night?”

“No, Skip, no. Best be going back.”

“Take me with you. Let me hang around Saigon. Just for the weekend.”

“We can’t have you in the city, Skip.”

“Come on. I was there for Tet.”

“I took pity. No more of that. You’re a soldier.”

“Hang around. Please. We can play some poker.”

“You got cards?” Storm said.

“Yes. Yes. Stay.”

“No. We’ve got to get back.”

“I’m a pogue.”

Storm said, “He thinks he’s the lost beautiful child.”

“Wow,” Skip said, “it’s the American Century.”

Storm said, “Rocknroll is here to stay.”

Good and drunk, Skip Sands of the CIA stood and aimed himself at the stairwell. He felt steady enough to climb the stairs and find his room but too dizzy to lie down in it, and so sat in a chair with his feet resting on the wave-flung, heaving bed.

He woke from an hour’s nap and went to the veranda to drink hot, strong coffee less reviving than his thrilling vertigo before the vista of his mistakes, all this wrongness he’d wandered into on the tails of his uncle, the aboriginal Man of Action. Neanderthal, had been Rick Voss’s term. Mr. Tho came out with a burning mosquito coil in a dish and set it on the arm of the opposite chair, and there you are, simplicity itself, the ember of the foul-smelling incense, orange bead tunneling along its spiral path toward extinction and nonentity. He felt surrounded, assailed, inhabited by such serpentine imagery—the tunnels, Project Labyrinth, the curling catacombs of the human ear…But over all loomed the central and quite different image: the Tree of Smoke. Yes, his uncle meant to unfold himself like a dark wraith and take on the whole Intelligence Service, the very way of it, subvert its unturnable tides. Or assault it on the handball court.

For its nourishment, he’d asked for real milk in his coffee. It tasted pretty much like the chalky substitute. The new dog came between his knees and shoved its snout into his cup and went at it with a vocal, snarfing sound.

Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud—if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn’t grapple after actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it—not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God—speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely widening.

At any point before now, he realized, he might simply have told his uncle he wanted to go home. But he couldn’t slip out from under this far along, this deep in, and collapse the sky on his uncle’s anvil head. He wouldn’t see that head bowed low.

He called Tho to the veranda.

“What’s the story on this dog?”

Tho said, “Le médicin.”

“It’s a doctor’s dog?”

Tho nodded, gambling on agreement, and retreated.

Soon Mrs. Diu came out. “Mr. Tho says the dog has the spirit of Dr. Bouquet. When the doctor die, after one year the dog is coming.”

“Dr. Bouquet was reborn as this dog?”

“Yes. Dr. Bouquet.”

“Mrs. Diu.”

“Yes, Mr. Skip.”

“Why won’t Tho speak English to me?”

“He doesn’t speak.”

“He doesn’t speak English? Or he doesn’t speak at all.”

“Yes, sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Good,” he said. “I hope that clears things up for you.”

The dog was in the yard now lifting a leg at one of three papaya trees. Nearby Mr. Tho supported himself with the handle of a rake as he crouched to put a match to a pile of household rubbish. Skip admired the papayas with their slender forms and tufted crowns and the fruit clustered around their throats…The old papasan stepped back and watched, making sure of the flame while his reconstituted employer, curled tightly as a doughnut, bit at vermin around the base of his tail.

“Excuse me, Mr. Skip.” Mrs. Diu was still at his shoulder. “You want supper?”

“Let me think about it. I’ll be there in a minute.”

One thing at a time. Maybe he’d send for Père Patrice, have him to supper. As a kind of penance, in the presence of the priest, he would force down a sickening meal. But he’d nodded off, and reached this decision while dreaming. He woke at 9:00 p.m. by his air force wristwatch. Dark like a velvet gauze, the burn pile’s embers, the canine Bouquet snoring at his feet. He was hungry, but life was ludicrous. He went to bed.

T
he Cherry Loot was a tight, muscular, earnest youth with the shirt of his fatigues tucked and the waist pulled up too high. He didn’t smoke, and he drank very frugally, with suspicion. He talked a lot about microbes. Tropical diseases occupied his mind. Apparently he’d read a book about swift, horrific things they couldn’t vaccinate against. As for the enemy, he hardly believed in their existence. They didn’t frighten him at all.

Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, “I’m gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don’t mean fuck to me if it’s illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we’re heroes, tomorrow we’re the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit.” It was an attitude refreshing if not outright inspiring. Everybody else was headed the other way. “I was dating Darlene Taylor until this hippie named Michael Cook took her to a party and gave her drugs and fucked her and turned her into a hippie, and if Michael the evil hippie is against this war, then I am goddamn for it. That’s all I have to know.” The Cherry Loot didn’t seem the least bit cherry. He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.