Tree of Smoke (75 page)

James said, “Took you a suicide run.”

“Yeah. Sure did.”

“I been on a couple runs like that.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey. You still got your gun? You want me to shoot you?”

The man looked dapper in a tweed sort of sports jacket over a thin beige sweater, pale blue pajama bottoms, and flimsy cloth house slippers. He took a reflective drag on his cigarette. “I left the gun at home,” he said.

B
ill Houston took his brother James out for a talk the day before his final court appearance. He invited him to a coffee shop rather than a tavern; James had better understand the matter was serious. “Look, you never know. All I know is you want to stay out of max, because somebody’s always cutting up in there, and they’re always locking you down. So while they have you waiting for classification, talk about your education constantly. Any counselors, those guys, anybody like that talks to you, you say ‘education, education.’ You want to finish high school, you want to learn a skill. Just talk about stuff like that, and they’ll put you in medium. Medium is where you want to be. It’s more relaxed. People aren’t so crazy. You’re on the yard just about anytime you want. It’s good. Believe me, you don’t want max.”

“Who all’s in there?”

“Where? Medium?”

“Florence. Anywheres, medium or max.”

“Well—lots of folks.”

“Is the old man in there? Your father?”

“He ain’t my father. He’s your father.”

“Whoever’s father. He in there?”

“Yeah. He’s over in max. No. I think he got out.”

“You pretty sure about that?”

“Yeah. I think he got out. She quit visiting, anyways.”

“She don’t go no more?”

“Not since I got out. Far as I know. So her husband must be somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere else.”

Bill left his younger brother with a final handshake, not sure he’d gotten himself across succesfully, and headed downtown to check on work at the day-labor office, or hang around the park. The desert autumn had come, time for pruning the orchards. He watched men cutting away at the olive trees along the avenues with moaning chain saws and felt it all happening inside him.

He wished for a motorcycle. Wondered if stealing one was difficult. Walked around looking for one outside the taverns, then inside the taverns for happy hours and deals on port wine. As a vintage, port was nobody’s favorite, but people forced to consider these things, like himself, had calculated that it offered the highest proof per penny. “Thick and sickly sweet,” a middle-aged woman said, toasting him sadly. “Not you!” she said. “I mean the port. It’s sweet. You look sour. I’m sour too.” Her problem was, she told him, that her son-in-law had died in Vietnam. Houston said he had a brother just back from there. “No. Really? Come here,” she said, “I gotta make an introduction,” and led him by the hand to a booth to meet her daughter, widowed by the war after a long year’s separation from the boy she’d married only a week before he’d shipped. He’d been killed near the end of his tour. Houston looked at wedding photographs. Not his idea of a party. The ladies bought a round. The young widow drank too many beers, but rather than breaking down crying, she told how she’d cried at her young husband’s funeral, was glad she’d cried, had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to cry. She’d spent these last ten days since the news had come in a state of relief. Now she wouldn’t have to welcome him home and get to know him all over again. In her husband’s absence, she’d changed a lot. She hadn’t known what to do about that. At the funeral they’d presented her with a flag folded into a triangle. “Yeah, I got a flag.”

“No shit. A flag? Oh, you mean an American flag. Old Glory.” Houston had his leg pressed along the length of her thigh.

“Well, they don’t call it Old Glory, do they? It’s something else.”

“It’s something else, I think. Yeah.”

“The Stars and Bars or something.”

“My little brother was over there. Infantry. Won himself a Purple Heart.”

“Really? The Purple Heart?”

“Sure thing.”

“What happened to him?”

“He stepped on a booby trap in a tunnel. One of them punji sticks. Or he ran into it or something.”

“Wow. Gee.”

“It could’ve been worse. Them little VC make some wicked-ass booby traps. His was just a bamboo sliver, really. But it’s a wound. It’s worth a Purple Heart.”

“So, wow. Was he a tunnel rat?”

“I don’t know what he was. He ended up with the Lurps. Man—I used to hold him down and drip spit on his face. You know—drool it and slurp it back.”

“Eew!” said both women together.

“That’s how us sailors handle them Lurps.”

“Eew!”

“Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?”

“My husband divorced me,” the mother said. “That feels the same as if he died. Except they don’t give you a flag, and I still think about killing him every day.”

“Is that your dad she’s talking about?” Houston asked the girl.

“According to the doctors,” she said.

As soon as her mother got up to visit the bathroom Houston said, “You want to go to a sleazy motel and watch some TV or something?”

“If you got the money, honey, I got the time.”

“Look here. See what this is?”

“It’s a Kennedy half a dollar.”

“That’s it, my life savings. I’ll stick it up my ass for fifty more cents. I’ll break a bottle over my head.”

“I got the money, honey. I’m getting war insurance.”

The girl leaned against him and touched her fingers lightly to his chest hair. The desert nights dipped well below fifty Fahrenheit, but Bill Houston went bare-skinned under a black leather jacket. His name on the street was Leather Bill. The rest of his wardrobe were jeans and boots wrecked by the abrasions of life.

“Better find the exit before Mom comes back,” the girl said.

When he opened his eyes in the morning, it developed she’d found the motel’s exit sometime earlier. A man with a mission would have rolled out first, and gone through her purse. Instead he’d snuggled down in dreams he couldn’t remember.

He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease. But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out.

When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? He stayed under the covers in the chilly, Lysol-smelling room until the management knocked on the door. He asked for ten minutes, showered, and went back to bed to wait for the knock that meant business.

J
ames had a roommate, another veteran, a biker named Fred, and Fred’s Harley, which occupied most of the living room. James noticed one day that his friend hadn’t been around in a while, maybe in as long as a month or even two months, and as a way of summoning him back, if he was still alive, James perpetrated the mystical sacrilege of straddling Fred’s Harley and turning the ignition key. Three kicks and it started explosively and sat beneath him growling and shuddering. He let out the clutch and it leapt straight into the wall and he found himself lying beneath it on the living room floor. He could hardly get the machine upright on his own—too much drinking and too much sitting around; he was a mess. No wonder he lost so many fights. But he enjoyed losing, enjoyed a sort of righteous lethargy while he curled in a ball and somebody kicked him in the head and back and legs, enjoyed lying with his face in his own blood while voices cried, “Stop it! That’s enough! You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” because they were wrong. They hadn’t come anywhere close to killing him.

H
ao brought the
New Straits Times
to the kitchen table and turned off the small electric fan in order to read. It wasn’t, Kim understood, the fan’s noise that disturbed him, but its interference with the pages. Each evening he sat here with Dr. Bourgois’s morning edition of the
New Straits Times
, parsing out the news in English in his underwear, and, on Thursday or Friday, the doctor’s
Asiaweek
as well. What was the point reading the newspaper each day in a place not your home? Even if you lived there? She didn’t mind if he reported to her certain miscellaneous events, but she’d forbidden him to mention news of any obscene Malaysian celebrations. Kim was made uncomfortable by the Islamic influences around them, the crying of the mosques and the public ceremonies of circumcision for thirteen-year-old princes. However, this place suited her. Her vigor had returned—as if from her teens. Dr. Bourgois treated her with free medicines from his hospital, and Kuala Lumpur was full of Chinese herbalists who kept her in health. Several promised immunity to everything. She didn’t want it. If illness didn’t kill you, you died of bad luck.

Her husband stopped reading and raised his face to her. He reached for his empty teacup and looked down into it, as if a sudden need to examine it had stopped his reading.

Kim said, “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s something. Don’t say it’s nothing.”

“Someone from Saigon.”

She stood behind him. He covered part of the page with his hand, and she reached over his shoulder and moved it away. “The Canadian?”

“An American.”

“No. It says ‘Canadian.’ I can read ‘Canadian.’ And ‘Benét.’”

“He’s not Canadian. And that’s not his name. But I remember him. I knew him.”

“Where? Here in Kuala Lumpur?”

“Back home.”

“Then don’t think about it.”

D
on’t think about it? But I do. I think about luck…sorrow…gratitude…all mixed in a poison. And we drink it.

Luck and the sacrifice of others had brought them to live here in the servants’ quarters behind the house of the physician from Marseilles. Kim did the laundry and sometimes went about the doctor’s house dusting things, as she’d done all her life, though the doctor had other servants for that; and Hao drove the car. He took the girls to and from school and to piano lessons and dancing lessons. The young girls went to the American School and spoke very good English. With the parents Hao communicated in French. Dr. Bourgois walked a few blocks each day to and from the hospital where he worked as an administrator. Hao drove the wife to shopping, to the bridge club, and to the bookstores. All thanks to luck, and the sacrifice of others. But some of those others hadn’t, themselves, chosen sacrifice. He’d chosen it for them. And there came sorrow. The trick he’d played Trung Than—the lowest thing he’d ever done. Yet not at all difficult. The Americans had made it easy. His most terrible crime, and where had it led? The Americans had thrown Trung into a prison camp and he’d come out a hero of the cause, with a house in Saigon and membership in the party. Historians came asking for interviews. Good for Trung. He’d dodged the wind. And Saigon was Ho Chi Minh City.

Some of those others had chosen sacrifice willingly, however, with the strength of their hearts; and there came gratitude. For the colonel. For the infantryman who’d thrown his helmet over the grenade and then himself over the helmet. And for the other Americans who’d helped them get away. The Americans had remembered, had kept their promises to him, and even to his country. They hadn’t failed to keep such a promise. They’d simply lost the war.

And tomorrow, or the next day, he planned to tell Kim he’d had word from their nephew Minh—this through a Vietnamese family who ran a restaurant in Singapore, longtime emigrants who’d set a worldwide network going to make connections among scattered clans. Minh had survived—who knew what troubles he’d survived?—and lived close to Boston, Massachussets. Minh had located relatives in Texas who fished in the Gulf of Mexico, and they might be persuaded to help their Cousin Hao and his wife reach America. And there, again—luck. He’d chosen the right side. Lucky life!

His wife had started the gas, and the kettle trembled on the stove. He hadn’t noticed. He’d thought she was still behind him, studying the face in the news.

She brought him the teapot. “What does it say?”

“He’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“No. I knew him, that’s all.”