Tree of Smoke

by Denis Johnson

Some of Skip’s childhood schoolmates had come from immigrant parents, Scandinavian, most of them. He’d visited their stuffy homes, felt his lungs clutched by alien odors, looked at unimaginable bric-a-brac and cloudy photographs of military men with feathers jutting up behind the brimless caps of their uniforms, and heard the parents fumble the grammar and drop small words, thick-spoken and sincere, everything about them an affront to their sons, who endured the fathers in silence and rushed past their mothers’ offerings: “Yes, Ma—okay, Ma—I gotta go, Ma.”

Naturally at his age Skip had overlooked these grown-ups, heroes of dogged risk, ocean-crossers, exiles. With their little questions they touched the walls of their children. On the other side, this child for whose sake they’d wagered their lives rolled his sleeves up tightly above his biceps, plastered back his hair with Wildroot Cream-Oil, lied about girls, performed surgery on firecrackers, golf balls, dead cats, propelled loogies of snot at lampposts, laughed like an American, cursed without an accent.

You can’t throw people together and forbid them to leave and tell them they’re a commune united by doctrine.

I thought Marx would give us back our families and villages. That’s because I only thought of the end Marx talked about: I don’t know the English or the French, but he says that at the end of the future the state is like a vine that will die and fall off.

I can only tell you my experience. I know from experience that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from clinging to things that won’t stay.”

He knew only the Word as imparted by Beatrice Sands, his Lutheran mother: This life, she’d wanted to tell him at moments that transported her, moments that embarrassed him because he viewed her as a woman unworthy of them, a woman trapped by clotheslines in a yard of tall grass by the railroad tracks, this life is but the childhood of our immortality.

And the resignation to the truth, the final resignation, the despair that breaks into liberation, where was the word for that in all these books?

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.

Apparently it was possible to call Berlin, but not from the hotel. The concierge had promised to arrange it, to take him somewhere personally. Meanwhile, the old man would die. Perhaps already. Perhaps yesterday while I bought the maps. Right now he’s dead while I shower in tepid, diseased water and a whore stinks in my bed. People die when you’re thinking of something else. That’s the way of it.

Skip was aware of feeling as a child before an adult—before his mother, for instance, in her fits of loneliness—of wanting only to get through the moment, waiting to hear, That’s all, you can go, waiting for an end to this violating intimacy.

I’m fighting for the freedom of real individuals here on this ground in Vietnam, and I hate to lose. It breaks my heart, Skip.” “You think we’ll actually lose? Is that what you think, ultimately?” “Ultimately?” His uncle seemed surprised by the word. “Ultimately I think … we’ll be forgiven. I believe we’ll wander in the darkness for a good long time, and some of what we do here will never be made right, but we will be forgiven. What about you? What do you think, Skip?” “Uncle, we’re in a mess. A mess.”

“Skip, listen to me. There’s no traveling side by side in the narrow places. In the narrow places you climb alone. It has to be enough to believe there’s somebody behind you.”

I read it and I sat by the window with my hands in my lap. I cried so hard the tears fell on my hands, right down on my hands. And I thought, well, that is a poem. A poem doesn’t have to rhyme. It just has to remind you of things and wring them out of you.

I want to be a natural woman, and ten seconds after I’ve been one, behaved like one, I want to run away to God. Whom I don’t like that much. I like you better.

Louisville to Bloomington after a weekend holiday, his hands on the wheel, three in the morning, headlights opening up fifty yards of amber silence in the darkness. 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.

Without the fact of the colonel looming between his sight and these Americans, they stood up clearly as empty, confused, sincere, stupid—infant monsters carrying loaded weapons. The idea that they fought on anyone’s side was foolish.

The others, the children, the aunts, the cousins, the family of which he was the head, sat against the walls, the littlest ones just beyond the bounds of the room, circling the two porch pillars with their backs against them, like prisoners tied to trees.

He’d written himself large-scale, followed raptly the saga of his own journey, chased his own myth down a maze of tunnels and into the fairyland of children’s stories and up a tree of smoke.

For ten minutes Sands sat alone at the conference table with his thoughts banging against nothing.

Crodelle and Voss stood in the doorway with something of the air about them of older brothers who’d just paid his fare at a brothel.

He regretted having to miss the exam. Of the questions they’d prepared for him, he saw one as relevant: “Do you enjoy telling lies?” “Yes,” he would have answered truthfully.

My legs carried me over the mountain, but I never got home.

They laid the muffled weapon on the mattress. It resembled a great cocoon from which emerged, backward, a small pistol rather than a moth.

He felt the weight of innumerable griefs—but so many people had just as much to carry, and even more. But this one. This one was very lonely.

In these damp nights the temperature of human breath she felt a moldering and sleepy grief born, she was convinced, of self-infatuation—a slow, hot, tropical self-pity. She needed to turn outward, to find others, she needed her duties in the countryside. Or she’d sink. Rot in the underneath. Be devoured by this land. Flower up as new violence and despair.

There I go again! Carefully with tears.

Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

The night was starless, but the darkness knew what it knew.

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.

“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.”

I’m writing to Eddie Aguinaldo. The kindhearted Eddie Aguinaldo who took the time and the risk to send me a warning against the danger I’d already dived into in Cao Quyen in Vietnam, the soul-dissolving acid guys like me immersed ourselves in while we politely covered our mouths with handkerchiefs and complained about the DDT and the herbicides while our souls boiled away in something a lot more poisonous than poison.

He felt himself unsuited for the climate of his times. He could only stand outside and laugh at his own class, the educated emulators of British and American manners—his wife, her father the good senator, all those people—a light scum of gentility floating on a swamp.

He was skinny and hollow-eyed and looked like he might even have a soul.

Somewhere along the odyssey of years he’d negotiated a crossing without acknowledging its keeper or paying its necessary tribute. You don’t recognize these entities for what they are until after the crossing. Until after the dissemblances dissolve.

She actually had a wonderful face, ascending and plunging, taking you with it.

I quit working for the giant-size criminals I worked for in t I served when I knew you and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer. And the stakes are plain. You prosper until you’re caught. Then you lose everything.

Once I thought I was Judas. But that’s not me at all. I’m the youth at Gethsemane, the one on the night they arrested Jesus, the sleazy guy who slipped out of his garment when the throng had hold of him, and “he fled from them naked.”

I thought I’d been sidelined. Removed to a place where I could think about the war. But you can’t be sidelined in a war, and in a war you mustn’t think, you musn’t ever think. War is action or death. War is action or cowardice. War is action or treachery. War is action or desertion. Do you get the idea here? War is action. Thought leads to treason.

It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, Don’t interrogate your opportunities,

I was drawn to you because you were a widow, like my mom. Child of one widow, lover to another. You scared me. Your passion and your belief. Your grief and tragedy. My mom had that too, but veiled and polite.

He was impressive at a glance. Prowess, a word she’d never used, came immediately to mind. Dangerous, but not to women and children. That type.