Tree of Smoke (72 page)

T
he mission had made sense until it had been accomplished. They’d turned up nothing. They sought a secure place to spend the night. An encampment of Special Forces had turned them away. In all likelihood, the presence of Special Forces alone had cleared the area of activity, but no one had been briefed as to their presence. On the basis of obsolete intelligence the six Lurps had dosed up and fared forth when they should have been sleeping in Nha Trang. The mission made no sense.

The incident was more of an assassination than an ambush. For the last half kilometer James had taken point. The night was starless, but the darkness knew what it knew. He followed it. After a few hundred paces more the darkness would widen and they’d have reached a place they knew about where they could break and wait for dawn, possibly call for extraction.

A gun opened up behind him in three short bursts. He fell and crawled back the way he’d come, but stopped a few yards along because his life forked sharply leftward exactly there. Leaves fell down on him as the others returned fire. Feet pounded on the trail. A grenade banged into the trees and he jammed his face into the dirt as it exploded. He rolled left into the bush, following the lifeline, and looked for flashes from across the trail. Nothing. The firing had ceased. The screeching of insects had stopped. The moment was strong and peaceful. The air had ringing depth. Every last particle of bullshit had been incinerated.

He slithered forward through the exhilarating lacerations of the bush until he heard one of his own crawling on the trail, and clicked his tongue. He heard a moan. He smelled shit. The moaning rose to a song but drew no fire.

“Man down! Man down!”

“On the trail! On the trail!” It was Dirty’s voice. James heard boots on the trail and fired three covering bursts and stopped. A man squatted over the wounded one.

“Grab an ankle. Let’s go.”

“Fuck it. There’s no cover.”

Joker strolled up the trail as in a public park. “It’s over.” He put himself at the trailside with his gun at the ready. “It was just one fucker is all.”

“Bullshit.”

“I saw every flash. I never looked down.”

Dirty said to the hurt one, “Look here, look at me!”

“I can’t see nothing but bullshit.”

“Bakers!”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Dirty. It’s me. Don’t shut your eyes!”

“Fuck, I’m not in the world, man. I’m not.”

“You’re here. You’re okay.”

“I don’t feel it. It’s bullshit.”

“You’re here.”

“I don’t feel the world, man.”

“Who threw that grenade?”

“Me,” Joker said. “Fucker pulled the trigger three times and boogied.”

“His eyes are empty.” Dirty leaned close to smell for breath. “Fucked,” he said. “Good and fucked.”

All five of them were here now. James took point again and each of the others took an arm or a leg and dragged Bakers’s corpse to the clearing they knew of three hundred meters down the trail.

“Tag his ass.”

“He went from the feet up. He died right out of himself.”

“But I like what he did, man. He stayed himself.”

“Yeah?”

“He didn’t bug and turn into a little child, man,” Dirty said. Dirty himself was weeping.

James hadn’t known Bakers too well. Gratitude and love filled him that Bakers had eaten it instead of one of the others. Especially himself.

“We’ll catch somebody from one of these villes and make the message known.”

“Fuck the dinks. It’s them Green Berets. Do you believe that shit?”

“No, I do not.”

“If they’d let us in their perimeter, this man right here would be alive. This man would be laughing.”

“Let’s call and get him out.”

“Not yet.”

“Dirty, man, it’s over, man.”

“Leave that radio alone.” Dirty thumbed his selector loudly.

“Sí, señor! I will not touch the fucker.”

“Who’s coming with me?”

Dirty and Conrad went hunting, and the other four stayed with the corpse.

“This guy died because those fuckers wouldn’t let us in their perimeter.”

“Next little Beanie I see in town, I’m gonna follow him around till I can stick him in his fucking back.”

“Let’s call a strike on their cowardly asses.”

James squatted with his back against a tree trunk and rolled a smoke with some grass in it. Licking the paper he could taste the gunmetal on his fingers.

He stood up and lit it as the others bunched around him to hide the glow.

“Did you hear what he said about bullshit? He knew. He knew.”

“His back’s blown out anyway.”

“Good for him. Otherwise it’d be life in an electric chair. That’s the sentence, man. You motorvate by blowing in a tube.”

“It’s lower down than that. He’d have his arms.”

“I wouldn’t use no wheelchair. I’d swing around by a harness in the ceiling.”

James left them and sat against the tree again. He didn’t want to talk about such things while his brain ballooned and finally cooled off. He put his head back and looked at the sky. Darkness, nothing, the pure nothing, just quiet electricity. The soul of everything. “I don’t believe that shit,” he said.

“Them little Beanies got every corner of their program stuck down real tight.”

“They don’t do shit. Got zero in their sacks.”

“Let’s call in a strike on their cowardly fucking asses.”

James said, “Come here,” and the others came close and squatted around him. “I need me a Chinese grenade. Soon as I get me a Chinese grenade I’m gonna frag those motherfuckers into dead red meat.”

“Tonight?”

“Right as soon as I get one.”

“Conrad’s got one.”

“I know.”

“Let’s put some smoke in their night. Take out about twenty a those motherfuckers.”

Conrad appeared among them as silently as a thought.

“You back?”

“Just me.”

“Where’s Dirty?”

“He’s got a woman.”

James stood up. “Let me have that han’gernade.”

“What.”

“You know what I’m talking about. That Chinese thing.”

“I’m taking it home.”

“Home where?”

“Home home.”

“Fuck home.”

“For a souvenir.”

“You can’t take a han’gernade back to the world.”

“Well, fuck. Anyway.”

“I’ll get you another one.”

Conrad carried it in his breast pocket. James reached in and wrestled it out. “You coming with me?”

“Where to?”

“Back to where them Beanies are taking a snooze.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I will if you wait around for the interrogation.”

Dirty came back escorting a small naked creature into the field of James’s night-vision as into a circle of firelight. She had a shiny lower lip that stuck out as if somebody had just called her a bad name. She seemed angry enough to kill, if she’d had a weapon in her hands. They held her down and the others took turns with her, but Dirty was already done and James wanted to keep himself mean for his personal Zero Hour with the Green Berets. When the others were finished she no longer needed holding down. James fell on his knees and put the point of his Bowie knife against the woman’s belly and said, “What’s your rank, sojer? You ever been showed what to do with one a these, sojer? You ever seen one before, sojer? What’s your rank, little sojer? What are you looking at? Do you think you’re my mother? You’re my mother, but who the fuck is my father?” He interrogated her until his hand was too weak to keep hold of the hilt.

P
hoenix seemed to Bill Houston a much bigger city these days. Suburban developments had scattered themselves out across the desert. The traffic was fierce. Many mornings the horizon lay under blankets of brown smog. Whenever it all weighed him down too heavily he took a line and a couple of hooks and sat by one of the wide irrigation canals where catfish waited in peaceful ignorance of the twentieth century. He’d been told they came down from the Colorado River, and he’d been advised to use chunks of frankfurter for bait and a plastic bobber to keep his hook just touching bottom, but he didn’t have a bobber, not even a rod or reel, and he never had any luck. It didn’t trouble him. Waiting and hoping, that was the point, watching the water pass through the ancient desert, considering its travels. Often Houston stayed late spying on the folks who arrived and went in that lonely place, until he was able one night to surprise three hippies doing a dope exchange and rob them of three hundred fifty in cash and a brick of Mexican reefer wrapped in red cellophane. Staring at his trembling machete, the boys told him it was mediocre Mexican dope, regular quality, nothing special, but he could certainly have the stuff. He let them keep it, though he might have found a way to sell it himself. There was a line. He’d bully young kids and he’d steal from them, he might even have stabbed one if he’d had to. But he’d never deal drugs.

Near closing time he stood on the sidewalk in front of a bar’s open doorway bathed in its warm liquor-breath, the country music from inside getting at him, cutting him. A little man came out swearing and trying to close the gaps torn in his T-shirt by an assailant. A skinny rat, too old to be fighting, with a bleeding mouth and one eye swollen shut. He smiled like a punished child. “This will cure me. This is the end.” Many, many times Bill Houston had promised himself the same.

C
aptain Galassi expressed concerns about James’s self-esteem, which he pronounced self-steam. He wasn’t a boy-captain, he was the real thing, here since ’63, field-commissioned and all that, but he’d let himself develop a concern for James’s self-steam, and expressed it, while Sergeant Lorin sat nearby with his fists on his thighs, expressing nothing.

“What’s your first name, Corporal?”

“James.”

“I’m going to call you James instead of Corporal, because you’ll be a civilian here pretty quick. And anyway, in my eyes, you are no soldier. You got anything to say to that?”

“No.”

“They beat you up real bad, didn’t they? They fucked you up pretty good. Do you think you’re gonna get a Purple Heart for that?”

“I already got one. And that was bullshit too.”

“See, James, those are soldiers. Those are fine men. Matter of fact, my sister married a Green Beret. They know what they came here to do, and they’re getting it done. They know who the enemy is, and they’re not gonna kill their own people. They’re people who if their own people try to fuck them up, if an American tries to fuck them up, even throws a grenade in their lap, they don’t kill that American, because that American is not their enemy. They just fuck him up some, because that American is a fucking son of a fucking bitch.”

James made no comment.

“Beat you like you deserved. Are you still pissing blood?”

“No, sir.”

“Can you take solid food?”

“I don’t require no food.”

“Are you gonna tell me you didn’t toss that item?”

“I didn’t throw any grenade.”

“Fucker just plopped down out of the sky.”

“I don’t know fuck-all about no grenade. I’ll tell you this about them Green Berets: they’d as soon leave their people out in the bush to get killed when people ask can we stay in your perimeter. And one of our guys did get killed. Did she divorce him?”

“Who?”

“Your sister.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“What’s your first name?”

“That’s none of your business too.”

“Okay, Jack. You ain’t no soldier to me either. Not if you back them piece-of-shit Special Forces against your own Lurps. Fuck you, Jack.”

“You know what I think? I think the sergeant and I are gonna take you out back and work some shit on you like the Green Berets.”

“Some Green-Beret-style shit,” Sergeant Lorin said.

“I’d just love it. Let’s go.”

“Apologize to the captain.”

“I apologize, sir.”

“Apology accepted. James, I think you have lost your control and your ability to reason in this difficult atmosphere of the pressure of warfare. Don’t you?”

“I think that’s real possible.”

Captain Galassi lit up a Kool. The Quonset hut’s air conditioner didn’t filter entirely the smells from outside, good American smells, grease, frying potatoes, frying meat, reasonable-smelling latrines, not latrines full of slopehead dink Gook shit. Captain Galassi exhaled a cloud of smoke and overlaid the smells.

Screwy Loot would have offered him a Kool. James wished himself back in the days of old Screwy Loot, when the officers were the only crazy ones.

“Can I smoke, sir?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m fresh out.”

“Then I don’t think it’s gonna be possible.”

“Then I won’t.”

“What twisted you? Did you take a lotta Ell, Ess, Deeeee, boy?”

“I don’t use no drugs. ’Cept as indicated.”

“Indicated by who? Your dealer?”

“By the requirements of the mission, sir.”

“You mean speed.”

“I mean what I said, is all.”

“You mean you’re a little Speedy Gonzales. Are you aware how fucked you are? You have long-range reconned straight out beyond the borders of sanity. You gotta go home.”

“I just signed on another go.”

“You won’t be staying. I don’t want you in my war.”

James said nothing.

“The knees of your pants are a mess.”

“I’ve been digging, sir.”

“Or knee-walking drunk on Trang Khe Street four nights ago.”

“Four nights ago? I do not know, sir.”

“How come you don’t go to the Midnight Massage no more with the guys?”

No answer.

“You got yourself something steady. Little steady woman on Tranky Street. Were you on Trang Khe Street four nights ago?”

“I think so. I don’t know.”

“Were you?”

“I think so.”

“Or were you on patrol.”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened.”

“When? On Tranky?”

“On the patrol where a woman was murdered, you fucking murderer.”

James suddenly hated these two sonsofbitches because if they were going to go ahead and do this he should have been given a chair, and a cigarette.