Tree of Smoke: shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

by Denis Johnson

As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.

When his tour was up he enlisted for another, enchanted above all by the power to create his destiny just by signing his name.

Minh had noticed you could talk to the colonel for a long time without recognizing he was drunk.

He moved on down the path. In Saigon they’d given him only the one grenade. Well. He’d been told to wait for the American civilian who brought the film projector. A specific target. He hadn’t asked why then they hadn’t sent a good shot, with a rifle. He guessed the American’s death was meant to seem incidental.

Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside—it was a dream.

The colonel sat shoved away from his dinner, his knees splayed, his right hand gripping his drink and set on his thigh, his back absolutely straight, and the sweat charging down his crimson face.

scores of people half asleep, their hankies draped over their necks, fanning themselves slowly with wilted journals, milling gently but resolutely forward into the blunt faces of the clerks.

What I don’t think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there. If God told them they were in Hell, then the torment of uncertainty would be relieved from them, and their torment wouldn’t be complete without that nagging question—“Is this suffering I see all around me my eternal damnation and the eternal damnation of all these souls, or is it just a temporary journey?” A temporary journey in the fallen world.

“No. The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.”

Do you know what I liked most about it?” Then he paused. “No,” Skip said, “I don’t.” It annoyed him, the colonel’s habit of waiting for answers to rhetorical questions.

“And you don’t know what’s on it?” “How would I know that, Private? I got no fucking idea.” “But, I mean—just a general idea.” Jollet halted, his face toward the sky. “DEAR LORD. I HAVE NOT BEEN TO SEE THE FUCKING THING YET.” “Well, okay.” “I AM ON MY WAY THERE RIGHT FUCKING NOW.” “Okay. Okay.” “I AM ON MY WAY THERE WITH YOU.”

you work that out with the guys as to your rotation, and if I get a lot of whining in my ear about people coming up short on the hot meals and I have to work out a complicated schedule, I’ll be pissed off and looking to make life hell.

“Believe it or not, I like it better here. In this country there’s nothing left but the truth.”

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others.

“The truth is strong. Put it this way: the people’s thirst for freedom has driven us to drink bad water.”

“Nothin’s free on Planet E, brother Bill.”

He still couldn’t determine whether he’d just fought a battle. “Was this whole mountain under attack or not?” He ordered his memory to produce some sort of history of the afternoon. It was all very vivid and disordered.

They realized the enemy were killers, they themselves were just boys, and they were dead. They were glad to hear Hanson’s voice talking about this very moment as if it could be understood and maybe even survived.

It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity.

They threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans.

It was far too hot for such a jacket, but he wore it anyway because it put him in an excellent mood.

He thought he’d better get sober before he went to see the sarge, and before he got sober he’d better get drunker.

He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.

“Express orders, sir, I mean, sir, do you mean written?” “I mean they are clearly expressed inside my mind as I interpret them.

You kind of like it down there, don’t you?” “It ain’t exactly that.” “Well, no, shit no, nothing ain’t exactly nothing no more. But you kind of like it down there.” “You can go ahead and volunteer me if it gets you all hard,” James said.

Skip watched the road beyond the gate. Not thinking about his mother at all. He supposed he’d think about her later. He couldn’t predict the order of these emotional events, his mother had never died before.

Her deeply black hair smelled like vanilla extract. Perhaps she used exactly that as a perfume. He didn’t want her, but something like this was necessary. He’d learned on these operations that he came as a predator, he must violate the land, he must prey upon its people, he must commit some small crime in propitiation of the gods of darkness. Then they’d let him enter.

The heater blowing, the boozy odor of young men in a closed car. His friends had slept and he’d driven the car while music came over the radio, and the star-spangled American night, absolutely infinite, surrounded the world.

For ten minutes Sands sat alone at the conference table with his thoughts banging against 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.