Tree of Smoke (50 page)

This Artaud sounded tough. Maybe he was in earnest, maybe he was actually after something. But E. M. Cioran. The Cioran. It was decadent. It was—unproductive, and delicious:

He would seek out an English translation, if such existed. To read and feel the meaning erode under the work of his mind—he was hungry for that pleasure. He thought of writing a letter to a friend saying: I think I might be bad, I could actually be evil, and if there’s a Devil it’s possible I’m his ally…Right at the heart of my ability to grasp the truth, I want to be paralyzed, I want to swoon…I want my mind to fail before the truth. I want the truth to flow over me only as something sensual and as nothing else. Want it to wet me—to be real, to be a thing…

He never wrote it down. He didn’t know who the friend was. He had no friend in the world but E. M. Cioran:

No wonder Bouquet had written in his notebook:

He’d actually finished with the colonel’s files. A momentum had developed. Pointless labor, useless trash, but for the bureaucrat nothing’s trash until he affronts his soul by throwing it out.

Why was he not off meeting with villagers in the region, collecting folk tales? Why did he send Tho out to tell Père Patrice he had a fever when the priest came to beg a hot meal?

Reading Cioran he was revisited by the revelation he’d had as a ten-year-old, when a railroader’s son had showed him a small photograph of a woman fellating a large black penis, only the man’s torso visible, the woman’s sickly-happy eyes flirting with the camera—that his curiosity about such acts wasn’t an alienating treason, that it was known, gauged, understood, that others would feed it.

He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.

Alone in this house, alone in this war, with the likes of E. M. Cioran…No wonder Bouquet had gone out to the veranda…

B
etween jobs Bill Houston mooched off his mom, living with her and also with Burris, his twelve-year-old brother, which put him on the same level, it seemed to him, of this strange preteenager, a problem child like the elder two, a flunker and a truant, a glue-sniffer, pot-puffer, drinker of cough-control medicines. A test of faith, the old woman said, a call to prayer. In August, in answer to prayers of his own, Houston got a job on the west side loading raw linseed into semi trucks and soon took a room in the region dominated by Second Street and known as the Deuce, in whose skid-row atmosphere he felt he could forget his mother and wrestle unobserved with his confusion. He’d have headed for the ships again, if not for the general discharge. He wondered about the Merchant Marine, but he believed they wouldn’t have him either. Houston thought of his younger brother James, facing war, assaulted by experience, pulling ahead of him somehow. The whole world had left him in its wake, while at Roy Ruggins Seed, as so often in his work life, he earned his pay performing the same motions over and over. Up before the sun and then hiking a lot of miles in and out of those fifty-three-foot trailers, back and forth, a long way up the ramp and all the way to the front, dragging two eighty-pound sacks with hay hooks. Here and there little points of daylight in the cars’ leaky interiors. Stacking the sacks in each layer at a right angle to the sacks in the layer beneath. Eight layers high. Linseed had a peculiar, sick-making smell. They worked deep-desert summertime hours, five to nine in the morning and five to nine at night, taking eight hours off during the hot of the day. Between shifts trying not to get drunk. Or anyway not too drunk.

After he lost that job he gave up his room and tried the Salvation Army, who rigorously insisted on sobriety, however, and who couldn’t be fooled for long. Expelled for liquor breath, he would have made it all right sleeping daytimes in the square downtown and tramping the streets at night, but a person had to eat, and from the New Life Mission he got only one peanut-butter sandwich at noon and franks and beans for supper, both meals with a cup of reconstituted chocolate milk. While he waited for this fare twice each day in a line of losers, life laughed at his hunger, and he wished he was in a situation with a roof and a kitchen, the navy once again, or again the Salvation Army—even jail. He’d passed three weeks in the Phoenix lockup awaiting trial on a charge of assault and found nothing behind bars to complain about. They served you three meals there and the people were decent—criminals, maybe, but sober and well-fed criminals didn’t behave too badly. Anywhere but his mother’s house. Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there.

In a tavern on Central he met a chubby adorable Pima woman who called herself a half-breed. She took him out to the desert on the reservation way east of town and they sat on the hood of her rattletrap Plymouth in the cooling dusk while the sky turned a nothing-colored shade of blue. They hit it off fine, he and this warm-hearted woman with a brown front tooth in her happy Eskimo face. Short and fleshy. She was in actual point of fact spherical. She took him home to her shack east of Pima Road, just inside the reservation, and within days he married her in a ceremony conducted by a wizened old cretin who claimed to be a medicine man. Houston and his new wife lived in bliss for two weeks, until her darkly, poisonously silent brother showed up and moved in. While she napped one afternoon Houston took six dollars and six cigarettes from her Plymouth’s glove compartment—six, his lucky number, and lucky for her it wasn’t in the double digits—and rode back to the Deuce on a bus. Did he need a lawyer? He doubted it. The woman had burned her way into his heart, but two weeks hardly counted. He didn’t intend to complicate the adventure with a divorce.

A
fter October, after the rainy season, many mornings in Cao Quyen came with sunlight before the inevitable dull afternoon—he thought sometimes of a remark of Jimmy Storm’s: “Ain’t no sky in the tropics”—and with this gift came certain regions of beauty into the villa’s eastern rooms, solid-looking slats of light between the louvers upstairs, the kitchen filled with pinpoint reflections among the utensils, the murky office’s shutters fiercely outlined, also the large rectangular vents near the parlor’s ceiling: flat, stark planes like a painter’s small exercises in perspective…And then the afternoon’s perpetual, uniform, businesslike illumination from overcast skies sank his soul. In the morning he saw it: options always waited open. By afternoon he couldn’t take steps, the ground was gone, doubt had dissolved it.

Mrs. Diu said, “Lady to see you, Mr. Skip.”

He rose from the desk, entered the parlor, and encountered a female stranger, freckled, brown, stringy, in a white blouse with front pockets, a man’s khaki trousers, and he said, “Kathy,” before he realized he knew her.

In Damulog she’d had none of the flushed and frightened—hysterical, or haunted—leaning, overheated look of so many jungle missionaries. She had it now. One hand gripped the rim of a peasant’s conical hat—the nong la. He took it from her and set it on the coffee table in the parlor and she followed it to stand there a little out of breath, keeping her hat near.

“I was told about a Canadian.”

“I can get us some tea. Would you like some tea?”

“Is it you? You’re the Canadian?”

“Speak up, now, ma’am. Tea or no?”

“How about some of that incendiary compound you drop on the villages?”

“I’m, I’m—I’m all out.”

“I might have known. I did know. AID! Del Monte! Canadian! What else? Toronto Symphony Orchestra?”

“Seventh-Day Adventist.”

“All of you, oh, my Lord. You’re too laughable to laugh at.”

“I’m translating the Bible, I’ll have you know.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“Don’t you think I’ve caught on to that? I lost my sense of humor a long time ago. Now, will you have tea with me, Kathy? Or isn’t this a social call.”

“I’m calling on a Canadian.”

“But socially, right?”

“Yes. I’ll bet you’ve got honey.”

“No. Condensed milk, the sugary stuff.”

“No honey?”

“Nothing like that.”

“No? Maybe you thumbed your nose at McNamara. Is that the one?”

“The Secretary of Defense?”

“Yeah. He must’ve put you in exile as a punishment, huh?”

“I like it here very much.”

“You spies are always so perky and so chipper.”

“Have a seat.” With all that had come along to disillusion him, the dismal realities of his work, it lit up his heart to be called a “spy.”

She sat on the edge of a chair and looked around wildly.

“All right, now,” he said, “tea.”

“How are things in Canada?”

“Come on. Please.”

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. I’m just, I’m quite simply—I’m angry.” She got up without any purpose in her face. “I’m leaving now.” As if getting the idea from having expressed it, she went quickly through the entry and out, slapping her hands onto the bicycle she’d parked out there and kicking at its kickstand, a black bicycle.

“Kathy, come on, wait,” Skip called, but he didn’t go after her. She’d said she was angry. He didn’t think she very often felt any other way.

He sat on the divan and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at the magazines on the coffee table—
Time
, and
Newsweek
, a cover photo of two black American Olympic athletes raising the single-fist salute of the Black Power Movement. In Mexico City, he believed, but didn’t know, because he’d stopped reading them.

Back she came. “I never heard from you.”

He waited until she took hold of the large chair facing him, dragged it a little distance away in a show of dissent, and sat down on its creaking rattan. “Well?”

“Well, I sent a few cards.”

“I wrote a slew of letters. I even mailed a few. Do you know why I cut off communication?”

“I hope you’ll tell me.”

“Because when Father Carignan died—did you know he died? Of course you know he died—because news came to us that the priest near Carmen had drowned, and you were the one who brought the news to the diocese, and we were together three weeks, as lovers, and you never mentioned it!”