Tree of Smoke

being very polite, and I should be ashamed.” The apology touched her. She sought to frame some gracious acceptance. Sands said, “Who’s this coming with Mayor Luis? The guy’s toting a spear.”

She spied the mayor and two others walking down the thoroughfare of packed mud and shallow puddles, the mayor in his white sport shirt like a muumuu over his vast belly, one of the men with him pointing a long spear toward the clouds, the other one smoking a cigarette, and instantly she knew.

“Oh, my gosh,” she said, and cried, “Mayor Luis! Mayor!” She stood up, and so did Skip Sands. In her left hand she held his white handkerchief, on which she’d been sitting. The men turned and

headed toward them. “She is here, she is here,” the mayor said. They seemed to bring the dusk on as they came. The end of the cigarette flared in the dark. “Kathy,” the mayor said, “it’s very sad.”

She couldn’t remember, at this moment, whether she’d ever really harbored any hope. Mayor Luis seemed to be speaking to Skip: “I’m very sad to be the one. But unfortunately I am still the mayor.” The mayor held out the ring, and in order to take it in her fingers,

she dropped the American’s white handkerchief. “Kathy, we are all very sad tonight.” “I can’t see if it’s inscribed.” “The inscription is there. I have such sadness bringing you this evi

dence.” “So that’s it, then.” “Yes,” Luis said. She held Timothy’s ring in her hand. “Now what? What do I do with

this?” She put it on her right index finger. “I’ll let you folks go on,” Skip said. “No, don’t go.” She had hold of his hand. “It’s truly a tragedy,” he said. “Come, Kathy,” the mayor said. “Skip will pay his sympathies later.” The mayor’s younger companion tossed his cigarette into a puddle.

“We have accomplished a long journey for you.”

Now they had to be paid. Who paid? “Am I the one who gives you the fifty pesos?” she said. Nobody answered. “And do you have, did you bring, isn’t there more?” She turned to the old man with the spear, but his face was blank, he had no English.

“Yes. We have Timmy’s physical remains at my house,” the mayor said. “My wife is beside them, keeping a silent vigil until I bring you. Yes, Kathy, our Timmy is deceased. It’s time to mourn.”

Sands walked by Mrs. Jones’s house three or four times before he saw a light on inside. By then it was past eleven at night, but here people took long siestas and stayed up till all hours.

He mounted the steps and came under her porch light, a neon ring speckled with tiny insects. Through the window he saw her standing in the middle of her parlor looking lost. From her hand dangled a bottle by its neck.

Apparently she was able to see him, too. “Would you like a cigar?”

she said. “What?” he said. “Would you like a cigar?” A perfectly simple question he couldn’t answer. “I’m having a sip or two tonight.” He had to step back as she pushed the door open and came to sit on

the porch railing. She wasn’t steady, and he expected her to fall off into

the dark. “I want you to taste this.” “What is it?” “It’s brandy.” “I don’t care for the hard stuff.” “It’s rice brandy.” “Rice?” “It’s rice brandy. It’s … rice brandy.” “Are you feeling—” He stopped. What a stupid way to begin. Her

husband was dead. “No.” “No?” “I’m not.” “You’re-” “I’m not feeling.” “Mrs. Jones,” he said. “No, don’t go,” she said. “I asked you don’t go before, and you just

left. Listen, don’t worry, I knew all along he wouldn’t make it. That’s why I grabbed your hand that time in the restaurant. I knew it was hopeless. It’s hopeless, so why don’t we all just—go to bed.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t mean right now. Yes, I mean right now. Shut up, Kathy.

You’re drunk.” “You’d better get something in your stomach.” “I have some pork, if it hasn’t turned.” “You’d better have a meal, don’t you think?”

“And rolls.”

“Rolls would probably—” He stopped. He’d meant to say they might absorb some of the brandy, but it was hot, his neck was painfully sunburned, and what was the point of discussing the absorbent qualities of various foods?

“What is it, young man?”

“I’m living without air-conditioning.”

She eyed him closely. She appeared more crazy than drunk.

She said, “I’m sorry to hear about your husband.”

“What?”

Her blouse was half unbuttoned, split slightly almost to her navel. Surprising tiny blue flowers patterned her bra. Sweat dripped down her belly. He himself had a hurtful irritating skin rash from his armpits to his nipples. He wanted ice against his flesh. He wished it would snow.

Mrs. Jones said, “If you come in and have some brandy, I’ll eat some food. It’s air-conditioned.”

The air conditioner was in the bedroom, and they went to bed and made some kind of love. Throughout, he felt awkward. No. Ugly. He got her hands off him immediately afterward, dressed, and walked back to the hotel with the remorse blackening his brain, gumming it up like dirty grease. A new widow, and on the very day she got the news … She, on the other hand, had afterward seemed unashamed, and not so drunk. She’d only seemed angry at her husband for being dead.

He walked by her house the next night but saw no light inside. He tried knocking and got no answer. Any louder and he’d wake the neighbors. He left.

The dry season hadn’t come yet, but it didn’t rain. Immediately after each sunset a lid of clouds pressed the heat down on Damulog and crushed the blossoms and forced its way inside everybody’s head. Slowly the whole town sipped rum. Romy, the young survey engineer, started a fistfight with some Muslims in the Sunshine Eatery and they beat him up out in the square, but nobody even left the tables to watch.

On Saturday night striped wasps and small dragonflies coated the fluorescent tube in the Eatery. Mating energetically, they dropped down onto the plates. One gang after another alighted on this community, crawled all over the illumination, and then was seen no more. Mayor Luis hunted up Sands in the café. His Sabbath over, he looked for company.

“I am going to save you from the same thing every night,” Luis told him, and took him for dinner to his wood and brick home with its strange linoleum floor. They ate spicy pork adobo and they drank painit, a native coffee. And Old Castle Liquor—not Scotch, not Bourbon, just Liquor. With Romy keeping to the hotel, hiding his bruises from the public, Skip had only the mayor for laughs. What of Kathy Jones? “She left to Manila on Tuesday morning,” the mayor said. “She is going to accompany her husband’s remains to the airport.”

The news struck him a blow. “She’s left for good?”

“She will meet her father-in-law, and he will take the remains to the United States.” “She’s not going back with him?” “In fact she is only going to put her husband’s bones on the plane,

then she’s coming back to Damulog. She will not proceed all the way to the United States because of her dedication.”

Next day he went with Mayor Luis and a load of fourinch iron pipe in a multicolored right-hand-drive Isuzu cargo truck to the site of the future waterworks, where a large concrete filtering station stood in a big field. It was plain to see the pipe-laying project was barely off the starting line. Mayor Luis also envisioned a stadium here someday. He paced off the perimeters of guesthouses and ball fields and a swimming pool in the midst of this empty plain of elephant grass, gesturing with his small hands.

The rain held off through the third straight night. Driven from their sweltering homes, people lay out on the basketball court, the only concrete surface in Damulog, looking up at the closed, flat, black heavens, hardly conversing, waiting for dawn.

Each night Sands roamed the town and walked several times past the house of Mrs. Jones, but never saw a light until the fourth night of his wandering.

She answered his knock, but she didn’t ask him in. She looked terrible.

“You’re home.”

“Go away,” she said.

T m leaving town tomorrow.”

“Good. Don’t come back.”

“I could arrange to come back in a while,” he said, “maybe in a couple weeks.”

“I can’t stop you.”

“Can I come in and talk to you?”

“Beat it.”

He turned on his heel and headed off.

“All right, all right, all right,” she called. “Come here.”

Late Monday morning a jeepney turned up in the square and waited there with the hood raised and a couple of men bent over the engine, another man’s legs sticking out from under, and the driver sitting up front pumping the brake, exclaiming.

Sands was the first aboard. He’d hopped these things for short rides in Manila but never traversed any mountains, as he would today. These elongated jeeps looked capable of seating about a dozen people, front and back, but actually carried as many as could be loaded aboard without breaking the axles, and they traveled over any surface, always painted many garish colors and adorned with pennants and chromed trophies and whizzbang doodads of the kind appealing to teenage speedsters, and, emblazoned over the front windshield of every one, always, its title and its claim: Commando; World Champion; et cetera. This one called itself Still Alive.

While the repairs went on, Sands waited on the bench in the vehicle’s passenger section, staring down at floorboards speckled with rice grains, jammed in with many travelers and several folks just looking for a shady place. After two hours, the problem fixed and the vehicle laden with at least twenty voyagers and their kits and sacks, it seemed to Sands the moment had come. But bodies were still being added. He counted at least thirty-two, including eleven pairs of legs draping down from the roof, and two babies, one sleeping, one bawling. He heard baby chicks, too. The travelers had crushed themselves together closely enough to stare at the tiny red flecks of heat damage on the surfaces of one another’s eyeballs, to extend their tongues, if they felt like it, and taste the sweat on each other’s cheeks … His last count, before the thing began moving, budging forward by some supernatural force, drifting hugely out of town, like a greasy, sweaty, iceberg—of what use brakes against such inexorableness?—stood at forty-one passengers, twenty-five in back with him, three up front, one dozen on top. And the driver. And others climbing on at the last second, and still more chasing after and grappling themselves aboard the roof, until they’d built enough speed to leave the last few stragglers laughing and waving farewell. Sands faced an old man like a monkey, a woman like a lizard, and a little girl with the feet of a hundred-year-old crone. Not far out of town they lurched into a low-ceilinged forest of banana plants that muted and filtered the roaring noon, passed tiny, dazed villages of oak-frame huts, drove, at one point, directly through a campfire of burning bamboo in the middle of the shattered road. Then the jeep climbed mountain switchbacks, swaying and moaning. Then a flat tire. Almost everyone jumped off, and Sands had a chance to gather them all together for a photo. Forty-seven people bunched themselves around the conveyance, shrieking with fascination while he tripped the shutter.

At three that afternoon he disembarked in Carmen: an asphalt main street, several two-story stucco buildings, the grandest civilization he’d experienced since Malaybalay a week ago. He found a room for the night, lay down for a nap, and didn’t wake till well past two in the morning. The town slumbered, all but the dogs, and the sinners… At this solitary hour Sands repented his lust for Kathy Jones. In his mind he fell at the foot of the Cross and begged Jesus to pour down his cleansing blood. Mrs. Jones was solid, made for middle age but not yet there. She had a round face, plump cheeks, a corona of thick curly hair almost like lamb’s wool, very soft and kind brown eyes, and hands very soft but also strong. While she talked her tongue touched her small, very even front teeth. She was intriguing, pleasant, attractive, but not nerve-wrackingly so. His soul crawled back and forth between Jesus and Mrs. Jones until he heard the roosters screaming.

Skip had his maps. He’d pored over them daily, hungrily, joyfully, loosed from his body, free as a hawk. The colonel had told him where to find the priest, Carignan; there was nothing on his Mindanao map indicating a place called Nasaday on any river called the Rio Grande. On his map of the province of North Cotabato, however, the urban churches of the diocese were pinpointed, and first thing in the morning he walked to Formation House, the resortish headquarters on the edge of Carmen. He was told that Father Haddag rested. He came out within twenty minutes, a wiry old Filipino with Communion wine on his breath. Together they looked at the map. The priest made a small mark with a pencil. “I think the church is there, or there,” he said. “It’s my reasonable guess.” In a fantastic display of generosity, he loaned Skip a 50cc Honda motorcycle, and Skip accomplished a twenty-mile trip in a bit more than two hours, perhaps a thirty-mile trip, if he factored in the continual diagonal maneuvering thanks to the potholes. And the church waited there on its pencil mark, a lopsided concrete block with olive canvas stretched over its roof, or serving in place of a roof. Skip had passed through several hamlets on the way from Carmen, but this structure stood in awkward solitude a half mile from the nearest, on a stretch of river apparently eating the ground from beneath it.

Father Carignan, of French-Canadian descent, white-headed, leathery, with a tentative bearing and cloudy eyes, had lived here so long—for thirty-three years, in fact, through the Japanese occupation, Muslim uprisings, famous typhoons, and sudden calamitous changes in the river’s course, speaking Cebuano and ministering to these sun-baked native Catholics—that he hardly had a grip on the English language anymore. Asking about Skip’s origins, he inquired who his descendants were, meaning his ancestors.

Carignan made him properly welcome, had tea brought out to a table in the shade, sat across from him with his zoris slipped off and his feet together under the chair and his knees flung apart. He wore faded denim trousers and a T-shirt browned by river water. He breathed through his mouth, smoked Union cigarettes, pronounced them “Onion.” When not smoking he clutched his thighs and rocked slightly in his seat, his gaze sliding down and sideways like a mental patient’s. He made some effort to engage himself; when Sands spoke he faced his guest with an expression —unintentional, Sands was sure—of veiled shock, of friendly disbelief, as if Sands had come here minus his pants. He didn’t appear remotely capable of running guns.

“Do they ever call you Sandy?”

“Do they ever! But my friends call me Skip.”

“Skip,” the priest repeated, saying “Skeep” as would a Filipino.

“I understand you helped with finding the lost missionary. Getting the remains, I mean.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s so, isn’t it?” “Down by the Pulangi River?” “Yes. On the way back, coming up the hill, I fainted.” “But isn’t this the Pulangi right here? That’s what it says on my map.” “It’s a division, how do we call it, I can’t remember—a branch, you

know. This part is the Rio Grande.” “A fork.” “To get to the Pulangi branch we had to hike many miles. Many

miles. At night I dream I’m still hiking! Is your tea all right for you?” “Very good, thanks.” “The water’s all right. We have enough for drinking, but not for

bathing. The tank made a leak.” He was talking about the badly cracked

concrete cistern a few yards away. “Are there quite a few Catholics in your parish?” “Oh, yes. Yes. Catholics. I’ve baptized hundreds, confirmed hun

dreds. I don’t know where they go afterward. I never see most of them.” “They don’t come to Mass?” “They come here in times of trouble. To them I’m not really a priest

of God. They like to use witches to help them. I’m more like that.” “Ah.” “They’ll come tomorrow. A few. Because it’s Saint Dionysia’s feast

day. They believe she has power.” “Aha.” “And you.” “Me?” “Are you a Catholic?” “My mother wasn’t a Catholic. My dad was.” “Well—the father isn’t usually very religious.” “My dad died in the war. I made lots of visits to his Irish relatives in

Boston. They were pretty rabidly Catholic.” “But you’re confirmed?” “Right, I had my confirmation in Boston.” “Did you say Boston? I grew up in Bridgewater. Near there.” “Yes.” They were now having most of this conversation for the second

time. The priest told him, “After I left home, my mother and father moved to Boston. I talked to my mother on the telephone in 1948.1 called from

the new important hotel in Davao. New at that time. Still important, maybe, eh? She said she was praying for me always. Hearing her voice made her sound more far away than ever. When I got back to the parish here, it was like starting all over again on the first day. I felt far from home again.”

Four tiny children, naked but for undershirts, stood at the corner of

the building, staring. When Sands smiled, they screamed and ran away. Carignan said, “I met the other man. He visited us, too.” “I’m not sure who you mean.” “The colonel, Colonel Sands.” “Oh, of course, the colonel,” Skip agreed. “But he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I think the uniforms must be too

hot. So I don’t know what branch of the military.” “He’s retired.” “He is also Sands.” “Yes. He’s my uncle.” “Your uncle. I see. Are you also a colonel?” “No, I’m not with the military.” “I see. Are you with the Peace Corps?” “No. I’m with Del Monte. I think I mentioned that.” “Some of the people are very excited about the Peace Corps. Every

body wants a visitor if possible.” “I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about it.” “And the two others yesterday. The Filipino soldier, and the other

one. “Yesterday?” Carignan knit his eyebrows together and said, “Wasn’t it yesterday?” “Let me get the sequence of events in order,” Sands said. “When did

the colonel come?” “Oh, some weeks ago. Around the feast of Saint Anthony.” “And the other two were here yesterday?” “I didn’t see them. Pilar told me. I went downriver to deliver the last

rites—a very old woman there. Pilar said a Filipino and a white. Not a Joe. A foreigner. They had a palm-boat.” “I see, a palm-boat,” Sands said, feeling the shores erode beneath his feet. “Boston, is it,” Carignan said.

“Yeah, Boston,” Skip said. “Del Monte, did you say?” “Yes, I did. But these two visitors —how strange, huh?” “I believe they’re still on the river. I’ll ask Pilar. She has all the news

from the river people.” “Pilar is the housekeeper? The lady who served us the tea?” “Is it okay? We don’t have milk,” the priest reminded him, as he had

when they’d sat down. “Jesus,” Skip said. The priest seemed to sense Skip’s disarray. He was solicitous. “We all

have a spiritual trial to go through. When I was a little boy I was very hateful toward the Jews because I said they were the crucifiers. I was very contemptuous of Judas too, because of his betrayal.”

“I see,” Sands said, and saw nothing.

Carignan seemed to struggle. The words stuck in his throat. He touched his mouth with his fingers. “Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

“May I snap your picture?”

The priest suddenly looked studious and foreboding, his hands clasped together before his chest. Skip focused and tripped the shutter, and Carignan relaxed. He said, “You are something of a pilgrim, eh? Yes. Me too. I went on a very long hike to the Pulangi River.”

“We can pray for each other,” Skip said. “I don’t pray.” “You don’t?” “No, no, no. I don’t pray.”

Th e Joe liked tea. Insisted on getting it himself. Talking a great deal

with Pilar about the other visitors. Why these people kept coming was a mystery. The Joe had seemed to enjoy riding his motorbike, bucking over the

ruts into the yard, his belt strung through the handle of his cloth satchel and the satchel swinging at his side.

In the Joe’s absence the children materialized around the machine, openmouthed, touching it with their fingertips. “Here he comes!” Carignan shouted in English, and the children scattered.

Why was his English coming back to him these last few weeks? Because he’d been thinking of the American missionary? The bones in a box, saying nothing, but in every language? Maybe because he’d opened a hole in his mind when he’d first spoken to the American visitor, the colonel, the first American in years. In decades.

This colonel had come twice. He’d come alone and had behaved respectfully. He was good, and the locals responded to him with enthusiasm. But good or bad, a strong man causes trouble.

With a sense how it all must look to the visitor’s eyes, Carignan regarded the red muddy path to the riverbank, the cracked cistern, the tarped roof, the mildew crawling the walls. The Joe was probably using the concrete chamber, the “facilities” downstairs—dark, grimy, separated only by a low wall from the kitchen, in which Pilar now cooked rice and sang a song. If she wanted, she could step over and stare into his face as he crouched over the hole. The Joe would want toilet paper. There was a roll of the stuff in the facilities, but it had been soaked and dried out by the weather and really couldn’t be used.

Pilar stopped singing in the kitchen and came out with another tray. Sliced mango and pineapple. “Pilar, I told you: if the American comes again, tell him I’m not

here.”

“It’s not the same one.”

“I don’t like so many Americans.”

“He’s Catholic.”

“So was the colonel.”

“Don’t you like the Catholic? You are Catholic. I am Catholic.”

“You’re being silly again.”

“No. You are silly.”

She resented him for failing to take advantage of her. And he understood. Who would mind if he did? It’s just that he was very ashamed of any kind of touching.

She said, “That old man is coming up the road to see you. I saw him just now from the kitchen. Don’t give him any food. He always comes

back.” “Where’s the American?” She said in English: “Bathroom.” The old man waited until Pilar went inside before he appeared

around the corner of the church, walking sideways out of a kind of deference, dressed only in khaki shorts with the legs turned up to his crotch and the waist cinched around his belly with a rope. Carignan beckoned, and the old man came and sat. Like all of them he was shrunken and almost meatless, an animated mummy. He had the flat, weary features of a very wise Eskimo. He smiled a lot. He had hardly any teeth.

“Bless me, Padair, for I have sin,” he said in English without apparent

comprehension, “bless me and I ask you forgiveness.” “Te obsolvo. Have some pineapple.” The old man scooped up several pieces in his hands and said,

“Maraming salamat po,” thanking him in Tagalog, the dialect of Luzon. The old man’s preliminaries generally seemed to require statements in a variety of tongues.

“I had a visitor in my dreams last month,” he revealed to the old man. “I think he brought me a message.” The old man said nothing, only concentrated on his food, his face as oblivious as a dog’s.

The American guest came back from the kitchen but brought no tea. This pilgrim Joe had a jaunty gait, his limbs moving freely around the great hot furnace in his middle, the fire of suffering he didn’t seem to know about.

As the Joe approached, the old man vacated the chair and squatted flat-footed beside them. “I’m asking him about a dream I had. He can find out its message,”

Carignan told the American. “Hallo, Padair,” the old man said. “He calls you Father,” said Carignan. As the old man finished his fruit and licked his fingers, he said in Ce

buano, “Why do you say your dream has a message?” Carignan said, “It was a strong dream.” “Did you wake up?”

“Yes.” “Did you go back to sleep?” “I stayed awake all night.” “Then you had a strong dream.” “A monk, a holy man, came to see me.” “You are a holy man.” “He wore a hood. His face was a silver cloud.” “A man?” “Yes.” “From your family?” “No.” “Did you see his face?” “No.” “Did you see his hands?” “No.” “Did he show you his feet?” “No.” The old man began speaking to Skip Sands very earnestly and a little

too loudly. “Yes. How do you do,” Sands said. The old man gripped the American’s wrist. He spoke. Paused. The

priest translated: “He says that in sleep, when you sleep, the spirit leaves your body. And the shepherd or herdsman of the spirits takes them up and”—he consulted with the teller—”the herdsman of the spirits chases the spirits, herds them, like sheep, down to the shore, to the seaside.”

The man spoke, the priest queried him, the man tugged at the American’s arm, and Carignan pieced together the tale: Herded to the shore, the spirits sink into the sea, and down there they find the world of dreams. A yellow snake guards the border to the sea of dreams. Anyone who tries to go back and forth between the two worlds will be suffocated in its coils and will die in his sleep. Carignan couldn’t find the English to get it across. “He’s telling a complicated story. He’s a little crazy, I think.”

“This world holds no memory of the before-life, and the afterlife holds no memory of our sorrows. So be happy that death is coming.” Saying this, the old man rose and departed.

“Wait. Wait. What is the prophecy of my dream?” “Didn’t you hear me?” the old man said.

Father Carignan insisted on spending the night in a hammock in the church while Sands slept with the Blessed Host in Carignan’s room, that is, the Host sat sleepless on the priest’s dresser, and Sands tried to sleep on his bed of wooden slats and straw mat under a gauzy net. A monk’s cell, perfectly appropriate to his pilgrimage. He lay in the dark. A mosquito whined outside the netting. He made a mental note to ask Carignan about something the colonel had cited from the Bible—something about there being one God but many administrations. The idea appealed to a government man. A cosmological bureaucracy … Now worry flooded him. The colonel, Eddie Aguinaldo, the German. They’d traveled here, and no one had told him. It wouldn’t do if the colonel withheld things. It prodded at a spot of doubt he harbored, doubt in the colonel’s competence, his judgment, the power of his perception. The colonel was a little crazy. But who wasn’t? The problem was that the colonel might not trust his nephew’s talents, might have sent him on a phony errand. He woke at one point from a dream of biblical force, a prophetic dream, assured that the island of Mindanao held no interest for the United States, that this Catholic priest couldn’t possibly be running guns to Muslims, that life had called him —Skip Sands the Quiet American, the Ugly American—to this place only to enlarge his understanding in aid of his future work. Because here there lay no present work. Not one particular of the dream remained. Only this certainty.

Carignan explained to the Joe that maybe some people would come to the morning liturgy because today they celebrated a saint close to their hearts, Dionysia.

The Joe had never heard of Saint Dionysia. Nobody had. “Yes, she’s very powerful here. Based on her miracles along the river she’d be canonized a saint, if she wasn’t already a saint. She was martyred in the fifth century in North Africa. A stirring martyrdom.”

In a homily decades before, in all innocence, Carignan had made a graphic presentation of Dionysia’s last agonies to an uncharacteristically large gathering of celebrants, and now up and down the river she enjoyed a legendary status, and the people attributed to her many healings and claimed many sightings and visitations, many signs and messages. “So I try to remind people when her feast day comes. But it’s not always easy for the river people to find out what the date is. They don’t have calendars.”

Only a few folks came to the service. Beforehand the priest baptized a newborn on the riverbank, dribbling the muddy water over its forehead. “We don’t have holy water as such,” he explained to the Joe. “So the bishop made a decree that all the river is holy. That’s what I tell them.”

Wrapped in a scarf, the child was limp, eyes shut, mouth open, blowing bubbles of phlegm. The mother was only a child herself.

The Joe said, “This baby looks very sick.”

“You’d be surprised which ones die and which ones live,” he told the Joe. “It’s always a surprise.”

They assembled for the evening Mass. He saw it all anew through the visitor’s eyes: the small gray room, the warped wooden benches, the moldy earthen floor, and the congregation, an ignorant handful, ten, eleven—fourteen celebrants, the Joe included. A few old women, a few old men, some dark-eyed runny-nosed infants. The babies didn’t bawl. Once in a while one or another of them hacked or made a croaking sound. The old women bleated the responses, the old men muttered evasively.

The visitor, sitting on the bench among them in his khaki pants, his dirty white T-shirt, shone forth as if he were the last American, sincere, friendly, a close listener, but at the very center of his eyes a terrified loneliness.

What were today’s readings? He’d lost the book again, the schedule of liturgy. He hadn’t actually consulted it for years, just read what he wanted, whatever verses the Book opened to. “Here’s something.” He read in English: “If there he therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies …” He tried to explain in the local dialect what he thought might be meant by “bowels and mercies,” and ended by saying, “I’m not sure what it means. Maybe how we feel toward our families.”

He sought Matthew 27:5—And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself

And now the homily. “In English today.” He gave no reason why. Maybe it went without saying that the Joe’s presence suggested this courtesy. Not that any of them would understand his thoughts in any language. Superstitious vampire-worshippers. But he himself had once seen the aswang flying with a child’s bloody limb between her jaws.

“I’ve told them I’m going to do the homily in English. I don’t really have anything prepared. We speak of our reading today, about Judas Iscariot the traitor: And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself

“He goes back to the temple, to the ones who paid him to betray his Master. He wants to give back their dirty silver but they won’t take it. Ever think why? Why they turn down perfectly good money? Why is that? ‘And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went out and hanged himself.’

“I’ve made my last confession. Who’s the person in the Bible most like me—who am I most like? Judas. Judas the betrayer—that’s me. What else is there to confess? Nobody paid me to betray Jesus, but what does it matter, eh? I could never pay them back. They would never take back their dirty money.”

In over thirty years he hadn’t spoken at such length in his native language. He let it run on, the English coming out of his head as out of a loudspeaker. “My grandmother used to use that expression, ‘bowels and mercies.’ I never asked her about what it meant.

“I remember how I rejected my grandmother. I loved her very much, I was her favorite, but then, when I came to my early teens, twelve, thirteen, she came to live with us, and I was very unkind to her. She was just some old woman, and I was very unkind.

“I don’t like to remember that. The memory is very bitter. My grandmother loved me, and I treated her with disrespect. I felt no love for anyone.

“Here, of course, where the people are so poor, so sick, you can’t love them. It would pull you under. You would go under. Everyone here knows how to love, but love them back—it’s quicksand. I’m not the Christ. No man is the Christ.

“Other times we’re the thief on the cross, the one who got crucified next to Jesus, the thief who turned to Jesus and said, ‘Remember me when you get to your Kingdom/ And Jesus had mercy and said, This day you shall be with me in Paradise/ I really think we have to be one or the other. We’re either the betrayer, or we’re the thief.

“I look around me and I think: How did I get here to Nasaday? How did I get here? This is just a corner in the maze. Island in the swamp. Judas jumped down a hole and God knows, God knows if he’s ever coming up, huh? It’s entirely up to God. Who are we? We’re Judas sometimes. But Judas … Judas went out and hanged himself.

“These thirty years, and more, that I’ve spent living with barbarians, living with their powerful gods and goddesses, taking inside me the traditions, you know, which aren’t fairy tales, they’re real, they’re real once you take them inside you, and taking inside my mind all the pictures of their tales and living in the adventures of the ancestors, and the years I’ve spent meeting face-to-face with their dangerous demons and saints, saints who have the names of the Catholic saints, but only to disguise themselves … How many times I almost got completely lost forever, how many times I almost wandered into the part of the maze where you can never come back … but always comes the touch of the Holy Spirit at the last moment, before the gods and goddesses destroyed me, always at the last moment I received the reminder of who I am, and why I came here. Only a glimpse, you know, only a reminder of who I really am. And then back down into the tunnel.”

The Mass said, the celebrants departed, Carignan stripped to his undershorts and zoris and went down to the river to bathe.

The sound of a motorized palm-boat, quite rare on this river, made him stop and watch. The craft passed through his view, slowing, the motor throttling down to an idle, the two men aboard peering toward the shore, coming close. Carignan waved. They passed from sight, hidden by the low sago palms growing along the bank.

He waded in up to his waist and bathed.

What a silly sermon. Because of the English, his old vexation had come awake, struggling upright and flailing in its dirty bandages—his soul and his soul’s diseases.

How did I get here?—Judas pops up in the maze.

He stepped from the river with his head down but not watching his feet, preoccupied, troubled by the unkindnesses he’d done in his adolescence, none of them at all serious, but they terrified him now because they’d been perpetrated with a kind of amorality which, had it continued, would have made him very dangerous to the world.

He turned and saw among the sago fronds a most curious sight: a Western man in Western garb holding a long tube to his lips. Something like a bamboo reed. As Carignan examined this sight and prepared to make some sort of greeting, the man’s cheeks collapsed and something stung the padre in the flesh over his Adam’s apple and seemed to lodge there. He reached up to brush it away. His tongue and lips began to tingle, his eyes burned, and within seconds the sensation was that of having no head at all, and then of losing touch with his hands and feet, and abruptly he didn’t know where any part of him was, every part of him seemed to go away. He did not feel himself collapsing toward the water, and by the time he landed in it he was dead.

Having relieved himself beside a bush near the river, Sands came along the path below the church and met two very little boys riding alongside an irrigation ditch on the back of a carabao. They smiled with shyness and doubt. “Padair. Padair …”

Maybe they thought he was Carignan —maybe they thought there existed in all the universe only a single priest who took many forms.

He tossed the kids some gum. One missed the toss and scrambled down off the wide platform of the animal’s back to pluck it from the grass at the ditch’s edge. “Padair. Padair.”

“I’m not your father,” Sands said.

In the sunset light he watched a palm-boat race downriver through a magical rainbow-colored mist churned up by a quite powerful propeller, two figures on board. There was nothing about the boatmen, so far out in the river and veiled by spray, that under any other circumstances would have made him say, “It’s Eddie Aguinaldo and the German,” nothing strong enough to rate them a mention, say, in his report. But those two had been lurking, and now they loomed. He was about to turn and race back to the church for his binoculars, but here was the priest, he suddenly noticed, swimming just offshore, and facedown. Who swims like that? The drowned. Sands waded out in pursuit. He plunged into a hole, and the water closed over his head. He surfaced, saw Carignan floating, turning, heading downstream. Sands began to swim after him, changed his mind, swam to shore and ran along the path beside the water until he’d gotten downstream of Carignan, kicked off his sandals, waded out into the deeper water, and launched out again, trying to intercept the drifting priest. He’d misjudged. Loose-limbed, cadaverlike — perhaps dead—the priest slipped rapidly away at a tangent, downstream and out toward the middle of the quarter-mile-wide water.

Again Sands gave up swimming, turned back, clambered ashore, and headed, now barefoot, down the path. He veered off toward a house, saw a banca-boat overturned on the grass beside it, hollered, no one home, tried to get it right-side up, failed, tried to drag it toward the path. A man stopped him, a muscular young man, barefoot, bare-chested, baffled, wearing red short-pants. He quickly caught the moment’s urgency and grabbed a paddle leaning against the house. Each man took a side and they jerked the boat along to the shore, boarded precariously, and struck out after the corpse, the Filipino paddling and the American pointing, their small craft steadily gaining on the murdered man as he traveled toward Kingdom Come.

The next day Sands returned the Honda motorbike to the diocese and reported the death by drowning of Father Thomas Carignan. Father Haddag was saddened by the loss, and surprised to hear about it so soon. “Sometimes news takes weeks to come from the river people,” he said.

This errand took all afternoon. Afterward Sands booked a room in Carmen and had chicken-on-a-stick and a bowl of rice with three men from the Department of Agriculture whom he simply ran into on the highway through town, all of them wandering up and down it looking for a restaurant. They settled for one of the roadside stands where a man barbecued gaunt legs and thighs over coconut-shell charcoals, dousing them with a mix of soy sauce, spices, and Coca-Cola. Starving dogs watched them eat. David Alverol, the chief among the three Agriculture workers, wanted to knock around town with this American, but Sands was dead tired. The other two kept their poise, while David Alverol seemed so excited to have met the American that the American really feared for David’s sanity. He kept repeating himself, performing the introductions several times, his face shining with sweat and also from an inner illumination. He suggested every two minutes that the American come to his home “for a dialogue.” “You’re very jolly,” he told the American. “My type of guy. Can’t you come with us for one more thirty minutes?” David got more and more insistent, to the embarrassment of his two companions, beseeching the American drunkenly with tears in his eyes as the American got out of their government jeep in front of his small hotel—”Please, sir, please, one half an hour only, sir, sir, I beg you, yes, please …” Sands made an appointment to see them tomorrow, warning them his schedule might prevent him from keeping it. They parted that way, Sands and the two others understanding he’d never be seen again, and David Alverol expecting to meet him first thing in the morning.

Sands hadn’t told Father Haddag of the eight-inch sumpit dart jutting from the neck of Carignan’s corpse.

In his room in Carmen he lay awake thinking about the German killer. What before had seemed in the German effeminate now seemed poetic—his eyeglasses, his thick lips, the pale skin. He trafficked intimately with death, he knew things. Sands had thought him pompous and irritable. Now he seemed the carrier of a transcendental burden.

Just as he got back to Damulog, little red ants hit town. They walked all over his table at the Sunshine Eatery, all over his bed at Castro’s hotel.

He might have continued to Davao City on the island’s southern end and caught a plane for Manila. He went back to Damulog instead. He might have spent a night there at the longest, waiting for a bus. Instead he stayed three weeks while he composed a report containing nothing of substance, based entirely on hearsay from the Mayor Emeterio D. Luis, and drawing no inference as to the nature of the priest’s contacts or the responsibility for his death.

Sands was, in effect, AWOL. He buried his dereliction in his pointless labors and practiced a soldierly detachment from his bitterness. And spent his nights with Mrs. Jones.

9961

Bil l Houston’s Honolulu shore leave commenced with the forenoon watch, too early for a man with money to spend: on top of everything, the navy wished to deny him any nightlife. He took a shuttle bus from the naval station and across the open fields of the air force base and then through town to Waikiki Beach, wandered dejected among the big hotels, sat on the sand in his Levi’s and wild Hawaiian shirt and his very clean shoes—white bucks with red rubber soles—ate grilled pork on a wooden skewer at a kiosk, took a city bus to Richards Street, booked a bed at the Armed Services YMCA, and started drinking in the waterfront bars at one in the afternoon.

He tried an air-conditioned place favored by young officers, where he sat at a table by himself smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking Lucky Lager. It made him feel lucky. When he’d collected enough change he called home on the mainland, chatted with his brother James.

That just made him more depressed. His brother James was stupid. His brother James was going to end up in the military like himself.

He strolled the waterfront with the beer thudding inside his head, a lonely feeling pulling at his heart. By 3:00 p.m. the pavement of Honolulu had baked so hot it sucked at his rubber shoe soles as he walked.

He hid inside the Big Surf Club trading beers with two men slightly older than himself, one of them a man named Kinney who’d recently joined the crew on Houston’s ship—the USNS Bonners Ferry, a T2 tanker manned mostly by civilians, of whom Kinney was one. But he hadn’t just waltzed on board for a tropical cruise. He’d spent time in the navy, lived on ship after ship, and had no real home ashore. Kinney had attached himself to a barefoot beach bum who seemed hopped up on something. The bum bought the table two pitchers in a row and eventually revealed he’d served with the Third Marines in Vietnam before landing back home on an early discharge. “Yeah, baby,” the bum said. “I got the medical.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’m mentally disabled.”

“You seem all right.”

“You seem all right if you buy us a beer,” Kinney said.

“No problem. Fm on disability. Two forty-two a month. I can drink a serious amount of Hamm’s, man, if I sleep on the beach like a Moke and eat what the Mokes eat.”

“What do the Mokes eat? Who are the Mokes?”

“Around here you got the Mokes and the Howlies. We are the Howlies. The Mokes are the native fuckers. What do they eat? They eat cheap. Then there’s a whole lot of Japs and Chinks, you probably noticed. They’re in the Gook category. You know why Gook food stinks so bad? Because they fry it up with rat turds and roaches and whatever else gets in with the rice. They don’t care. You ask them what the fuck stinks around here and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I’ve seen some things,” the bum went on. “Over there the Gooks wear these funny straw hats, you probably seen those—they’re pointy? Girls riding on a bicycle, you grab their hat when you go by and you just about yank their head off, because they’re tied with a string. Yank her right off the bike, man, and she goes down fucked-up in the mud. This one time I saw one where she was all bent like this, man. Her neck was snapped. She was dead.”

Bill Houston was completely confused. “What? Where?”

“Where? In South Vietnam, man, in Bien Hoa. Right in the middle of town, practically.” “That’s fucked up, man.” “Yeah? And it’s fucked up when one of them honeys tosses a grenade

in your lap because you let her get up beside you on the road, man. They know the rules. They know they should keep their distance. The ones who don’t keep their distance, they probably have a grenade.”

Houston and Kinney kept quiet. They had nothing comparable to talk about. The guy drank his beer. A moment almost like sleep came over them. Still nobody had spoken, but the bum said as if answering something, “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.”

“Let’s see some beer,” Kinney said. “Ain’t it your round?” The bum didn’t seem to remember who’d bought what. He kept the pitchers coming.

Jame s Houston came home from the last day of his third year in high school. Got off the bus raising his middle finger at the driver and whooping.

His mother had caught a ride out to work and left the truck in the driveway, as he’d asked. His little brother Burris stood in the drive with a finger in one of his ears, peering down the barrel of a cap pistol while he pulled the trigger repeatedly.

“Watch your eyes, Burris. I’ve heard of a kid got a spark in his eye and

he had to go to the hospital.” “What are caps made of?” “Gunpowder.” “WHAT? GUNpowder?” The telephone rang inside. “I’m not allowed to answer,” Burris said. “Did they turn the phone back on?” “I don’t know.” “Well, it’s ringing, ain’t it?” “Shut up.” “Now it done quit, you fool.” “I wouldn’t answer anyhow. It sounds like bugs talking in there. Not

people.”

“You’re a funny feller,” James said, and went inside, where it was hot and smelled a little like garbage. His mother refused to turn on the evaporative cooler unless the temperature got into the hundreds.

He carried a number of papers from school, homework, report card,

year-end bulletins. He shoved them in the trash can under the sink. The phone rang again: his brother, Bill Junior. “Is it hot in Phoenix?” “It’s almost a hundred, yeah.” “It’s hot here too. It’s sweaty.” “Where you calling from?” “Honolulu, Hawaii. Hour ago I was standing on Waikiki Beach.” “Honolulu?” “Yep.” “Do you see any hula girls?” “I see a bunch of whores is all. But I bet they’ll do the hula.” “I bet they will too!”

“What do you know about it?” “Me? I don’t know,” James said. “I was just saying.” “Goddamn, I wish I was back in good old Arizona.” “Well, I’m not the one who reenlisted.” “You can put me on a nice clean desert anytime you want to. It’s hon

est heat there, ain’t it? It’s dry and burning. This here’s mushy, is what it is. Hey, kid, imagine this, did you ever lift the lid on a kettle full of boiling sewage? That’s what it’s like stepping out on the street in this place.”

“So,” James said, “what-all else is going on?” “How old are you, anyway?” “I’ll be seventeen here pretty quick.” “What are you gonna do?” “What am I gonna do? I don’t know.” “Are you done with school?” “I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know? Did you graduate?” “I’d have to go one more year to graduate.” “Ain’t nothing else to do besides graduate, is there?” “Not where I can see. Or I was thinking about the army, maybe.” “Why not the navy?” “Too many sailors in the navy, pard.” “You’re a wiseass, pard. Better join the army, pard. Because you’d just

get your ass kicked daily in my branch of the service.” James was at a loss. He didn’t actually know this guy. The operator interrupted, and Bill had to deposit more coins. James said, “Are you in a bar, or what?” “Yeah, a bar. I’m in a bar in Honolulu, Hawaii.” “Well, I guess that’s …” He didn’t know what it was. “Yeah. I been in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Honolulu—let me see,

where else, I don’t know—and the tropics ain’t no tropical paradise, I’m saying. It’s full of rot—bugs, sweat, stink, and I don’t know what-all else. And most of the beautiful tropical fruit you see, it’s rotten. It’s mashed on the street.”

James said, “Well … I’m glad you called.” “Yeah,” Bill said. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Bill said. “Hey, tell Mom I called, okay? And tell her I

said hi.” “Okay.” “Okay … Tell her I love her.” “Okay. So long.” “Hey. Hey. James.” “Yeah?” “You still there?” “I’m still here.” “Go in the Marines, man.” “Aah, them are overrated.” “The Marines get a sword.” “The Marines are really the navy,” James said, “part of the navy.” “Yeah … well …” “Well…” “Only the officers get a sword, anyway,” Bill Junior said. “Yeah …” “Well, I gotta go get laid,” Bill said. “Get some!” “What do you know about it?” his brother said, laughing as he

hung up.

James searched the kitchen drawers and found half a pack of his mother’s Salems. Before he got out the door the phone rang—Bill Junior.

“Is it you again?” “Last time I looked, yeah.” “What’s up?” “Say hi to South Mountain for me.” “We don’t see South Mountain no more. We see the Papago Buttes.” “On the east side?” “We’re on East McDowell.” “East McDowell?” “Ain’t that the shits?” “You’re out in the desert!” “Mom’s working on a horse ranch.” “I’ll be goddamned.”

“She knows about horses from when she was a little girl.” “Watch out the gila monster don’t bite you.” “There ain’t any shade, but it’s nice. We’re right up near the Pima

Reservation.” “And you’re in school.” “I been at Palo Verde for a while, since about October, maybe.” “Palo Verde?” “Yeah.” “Palo Verde?” “Yeah.” “When we lived over on South Central, our school used to play Palo

Verde in basketball or something, or football. What was the name of our

school that time?” “I went to the elementary. Carson Elementary.” “I’ll be goddamned. I can’t remember the name of my own high

school I went to.” “Ain’t that the shits?” “Do you ever get to Florence?” “Nope.” “Do you ever see Dad?” “Nope,” James said. “He ain’t my dad, is why.” “Well, you stay out of trouble. Learn by his example.” “I don’t follow none of his examples. I don’t even look at his exam

ples.” “Well,” Bill Junior said, “anyway …” “Anyway. Yeah. Are you really on Waikiki Beach?” “Not really. Not right now.” “We’re right about at Fifty-second and McDowell. They have a zoo

over here.” “A what?” “Yeah, a little zoo.” “Hey, tell Mom something—when is she gonna be home?” “Later. A couple hours.” “Maybe I’ll call her. I want to tell her about something. There’s two

guys on my ship from Oklahoma, so anyway, you know what they both said? Said I sound like Oklahoma. I said, ‘Well, sir, I’ve never been—but my people are.’ Tell Mom that, okay?”

“I’ll do that.” “Tell her she started me in Oklahoma, and I come out like I’m from

there.” “Okay.” “Okay! — that’s short for Oklahoma!” “I’ll be goddamned,” James said. “Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?” “Okay.” “Okay. So long.” They hung up. Drunk as a lord, James thought. Probably an alkie like his father. Burris marched in with his cap gun in one hand and a Popsicle in the

other, wearing his short-pants and nothing else, looking like a little stick

man. “I think I got a spark in my eye.” James said, “I gotta get going.” “Does it look like I got a spark in my eye?” “No. Shut up, you peculiar little feller.” “Can I ride in the back of the truck?” “Not unless you want to get bumped out and killed.” He showered and changed, and just as he was going out, the phone

rang. His brother again. “Hey … James.” “Yeah.” “Hey … James.” “Yeah.” “Hey. Hey. Hey …” James hung up and left the house.

James picked up Charlotte, and then Rollo, and then a girl Rollo liked named Stevie—short for Stephanie —Dale, and they drove out toward the McDowell Mountains looking for a party they’d heard about, a wild unchaperoned outdoor affair, supposedly, off the road and out in the desert away from anything; but if such a gathering actually went on, it was lost in a maze of dry washes, and they steered back to the highway and sat in the back of the pickup drinking beer. “Couldn’t you get it no colder?” James asked.

“I stole it from the icebox in the barn,” Rollo said.

“Can’t even find a party on graduation night,” James said. “This isn’t graduation night,” Charlotte said. “What is it, then?” “It’s the last day of school. I’m not graduating. Are you graduating?” “Warm beer,” James said. “I’ll never graduate,” Charlotte said. “I don’t care.” Rollo said, “Yeah, who gives a flying fuck,” and they all laughed at his

vulgarity, and he said, “We’re country kids.” “No, we ain’t,” James said. “Your mother works on a horse ranch. My dad messes with irrigation.

And there’s a great big barn behind my house, pardner.” “It’s nicer out here,” Stevie Dale said. “No cops.” “That’s true,” James said, “ain’t nobody to bother you.” “Just mind the snakes.” “Mind this snake,” Rollo said, and the girls whooped and laughed. It was a disappointment to James that when the two girls laughed,

Charlotte had to be the one who forced beer out her nose. Stevie was younger, just a freshman, but she seemed simpler and not so nervous. Stevie kept her posture straight, and she smoked in a sexy way. What was he doing with Charlotte? Actually he liked Stevie.

He dropped Rollo off, and then he drove Charlotte home. Stevie kind of ended up still in the truck. He made sure of letting Charlotte off first.

He kissed Charlotte goodbye as they stood out front of her house. She locked her arms behind his neck and clung to him, her lips slack and wet. James held her without much strength, with his left arm only, and let his right arm hang. Charlotte’s older brother, out of work, came and stared from the doorway. “Shut the door or turn off the damn cooler, you fool,” her mother called from within.

In the truck James asked Stevie, “You need to go home?” “Not exactly,” she said, “not really.” “You want to drive around?” “Sure. That might be nice.” They ended up right back where they’d been with the others an hour

before, looking out at the low mountains, listening to the radio. “What’s your plans for the summer?” Stevie said.

“I’m waiting on a sign.” “That means you don’t have any,” she said. “Any what?” “Any plans.” “I don’t know if I should aim for just a summer job, or find some

thing real and permanent—just not go back to school.” “You mean drop out?” “I was thinking I’d get in the service like my dad.” She made no response to this idea. She placed her fingertip on the

dashboard and rubbed it back and forth. James had run out of conversation. His neck felt so taut he doubted he could even turn his head. Not one word to say occurred to him. He wished she’d say something about Charlotte. All she said was,

“What are you so sulky about?” “Shit.” “What.” “I think I’ve gotta break up with Charlotte. I really have to.” “Yeah… I’d say she probably feels it coming.” “Really? She does?” “You’re just not lit up around her, James, not at all.” “You can tell, huh?” “You’ve got a cloud raining down all around you.” “What about right now this minute?” “What.” “Ain’t raining down on me right this minute, is it?” “No.” She was smiling, she was the sun. “Are you really going into the

service?” “Yep. The army or the Marines. I guess you’re gonna let me kiss you

now, ain’t you?” She laughed. “You’re funny.” He kissed her a long time and then she said, “That’s what I like about

you. You’re funny when you’re happy. And you’re good-looking—that’s one thing too,” and they spent a while kissing, until a commercial came on the radio, and he spent some time with the dial.

“Hmmm,” she said. “What is it, Stevie?”

“Fm trying to think, does this man kiss like the army, or like the Marines? Hmmmm,” she said while kissing him. She broke away. “Maybe the U.S. Air Force.”

He kissed her and very gently touched her arms, her cheeks, her neck. He knew better than to put his hands where he wanted to. Tve got one warm beer left,” he said.

“Go ahead. Fm not thirsty.”

He sat against the driver’s door, and she against hers. He was glad the sun was setting so he didn’t have to worry what he looked like. Sometimes he wasn’t sure the expression on his face made any sense.

Now he had to burp. He just went ahead and did it loudly and said, “Greetings from the interior.”

Stevie said, “Your dad’s in prison, isn’t he?”

“Where’d you get that one?”

“Is he?”

“No, that’s more my stepdad,” James said. “Just some guy, really. He’s my mother’s fault, not mine.” “And your real dad’s in the service, huh?” James draped his arms over the wheel and rested his chin on them,

staring out… So now she suddenly thought they should tell their worst secrets to each other.

He got out and went behind some scrub and took a leak. The sun had dropped behind Camelback Mountain southwest of them. The sky was still pure blue above and then at the horizon tinted some other color, a rosy yellow that went away when you looked at it.

Beside her again in the truck he said, “Well, I just made up my mind: I’m joining the army infantry.”

“Really? The infantry, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Then what? Specialize in something?”

“I’m going to get over there to Vietnam.”

“And then what?”

“I’m going to fuck up a whole lot of people.”

“God,” she said. “You’re not with the guys here, you know. I’m a female.”

“Sorry about that, chief.”

She put her hand on the back of his neck and touched his hair ten

derly with her fingers. To stop her doing it, he sat up straight. “That’s an awful thing to say, James.” “What.” “What you said.” “It just came out. I didn’t mean it, I don’t think.” “Then don’t say it.” “Shit. Do you think I’m that evil?” “Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.” They kissed some more. “Well, anyhow,” he said, “what do you feel like doing at the mo

ment?” “What… I don’t know. Do we have gas?” “Yep.” It thrilled him she’d said “we.” “Let’s drive around and see what’s going on.” “Let’s take the long way.” That meant he’d make a serious pass at her. “Okay.” That meant she wouldn’t mind.

James stood out front of the house in the dark as his mother came home from work in Tom Mooney’s convertible Chevy, staring out of the passenger side with her mouth lagging open, her face hidden by a ragged straw hat, a bandanna protecting her neck. Mooney waved to James, and James dropped his cigarette butt to the earth and stomped it out and waved. By then the Chevy had gone.

She went on inside without a word for her son, this silence both unusual and welcome.

It lasted until he followed her into the kitchen. “If you don’t think that ranch has about wore me out, just come feel the muscle a-quivering on this arm. If I heat a can of soup, you better eat it. Don’t make me fuss and then just sit there dreaming your dreams.” She turned on the kitchen light and stood under it looking small and spent. “I’ve got baloney and I’ve got tomaters. Do you want a sandwich? Sit down, and I’ll make us soup and sandwiches. Where’s Burris?”

“Who?” “He’ll be around. He’s always hungry. I lost weight while I carried him to term. I started out one-nineteen, and in my ninth month I was

down to one-eleven. He fed on me from the inside.” Wiping at her face,

she smeared it with dirt from her hand. “Mom. Wash up before you cook.” “Oh, Lord,” she said. “I’m just so tired I forget I’m alive. Open the

can for me, hon.” They ate peanut butter and jelly and Campbell’s soup. “I’ll cut up this tomater.” “I just ate. I don’t want it.” “You’ve got to have vegetables.” “There’s vegetables in the soup. That’s why it’s Vegetable Soup.’ ” “Don’t run away. I mean to talk to you. When is your school done for

the summer?” “It finished up today.” “Come to work at the ranch, then.” “I don’t know about that.” “What don’t you know? Do you know a dollar when you don’t see

one? Because J don’t see one.” “I was thinking about the military. Maybe the army.” “When? Now?” “I’m seventeen.” “Seventeen and crazy.” “Bill Junior was seventeen. You signed for him.” “It didn’t hurt him, I suppose.” “He called today.” “He called? What did he say?” “Nothing. He’s in Honolulu.” “I’ve never seen a dime from him. Not that I’d ever ask it.” “If I get in the army, I’ll send you some.” “Once or twice he sent some money. Not regular. He hasn’t lately.

And I can’t ask him because my pride strangles me.” “I’ll send some every payday. I swear,” James said. “You decide that on your own.” “Does that mean you’d sign for me?” She didn’t answer. He picked up a fork and started eating sliced tomato. “You send me

the envelope every month, I’ll send you some money back inside it.” “Did you talk to the recruiters yet?”

“I will.” “When?” “I will.” “Will when?” “Monday.” “If you have the papers Monday night, and you can show me some

good reasons for the service, I might sign. But if you’re just dreaming, then Tuesday you better wake up and get over to the ranch with me. I’ve got the phone back on, but the rent is waiting on the Lord to move. Where’s Burris?”

“He’ll come when he’s hungry.” “He’s always hungry,” she said, and began to say all over again the same things she’d just told him, because she was unable not to say them.

His mother was unable to be quiet. She read the Bible all the time. She was too old to be his mother, too worn out and stupid to be his mother.

Bil l Houston thoroughly enjoyed beer, but there came a point where it started to stick in his throat. This tavern must face west, because the burning sun poured through the open door. No air-conditioning, but he was used to that in the places he drank in. It was a dive, all right.

He returned from the toilet, and Kinney was still interrogating the

beach bum: “What did you do? Tell me exactly what you did.” “Nothing. Fuck it.” Bill Houston sat down and said, “I got nothing against you boys. Got

a little brother wants to go in the Marines.” The ex-marine was drunk. “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.” “He’s talking like he did something to some woman over there,” Kin

ney said. “Where?” Houston said. “Vietnam, goddamn it,” Kinney said. “Aren’t you listening?” “I’ve seen some things,” the boy said. “What it was, they held this

woman down and this one guy cut her pussy out. That stuff happens there all the time.”

“Jesus God. No shit?” “I did some of it too.” “You did it?” “I was there.” Houston said, “You really” —He couldn’t quite repeat it—”you really

did that?” Kinney said, “You cut up some bitch’s cunt?” “I was right there when it happened. Right nearby, right in the

same—almost in the same village.” “It was your guys? Your outfit? Somebody in your platoon?” “Not ours. It was some Korean guys, a Korean outfit. Those fuckers

are senseless.” “Now shut the fuck up,” Kinney said, “and tell us what the fuck you

did.” “There’s a lot of bad business that goes on,” the man said. “You’re bullshit. The U.S. Marines would never put up with that.

You’re so bullshit.” The guy held up both hands like an arrestee. “Hey, wow, man — what’s all the excitement about?” “Just tell me you cut up a living woman, and I’ll admit you’re not bullshit.” The bartender shouted, “You! I told you before! You want beef? You want scrap?”—a big fat Hawaiian with no shirt on. “This is a Moke right here,” their companion said as the bartender

threw down his rag and came over. “I told you to get out of here.” “That was yesterday.” “I told you to get out of here with that talk. That means I don’t want

to see you yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” “Hey, I got a beer here.” “Take it with you, I don’t care.” Kinney stood up. “Let’s get the fuck out of this shit-hole Moke joint.”

He put his hand up under his shirt at the level of his belt. “You pull a gun in here you gonna do time, if I don’t kill you.” “I get mad easy on a hot day.” “Get out, you three.”

“You making me mad?” The young bum laughed insanely and hopped backward toward the door, dangling his arms like a monkey’s.

Houston hurried for the exit too, saying, “Come on, come on, come on!” He was pretty sure he’d actually seen a gun butt in the waist of Kinney’s jeans.

“See—that’s a Moke, right there,” the bum said. “They act all rough and tough. You get an advantage on them, and right away they cry like little babies.”

They each bought a jug of Mad Dog 20/20 from a grocer who demanded they buy three loaves of Wonder Bread along with the wine, but it was still a bargain. They ate a little of the bread and tossed the rest to a couple of dogs. Soon they walked, drunk, surrounded by a pack of hungry strays, toward a glaring white strip of beach and the black sea and blue froth crashing on the sand.

A man stopped his car, a white, official-looking Ford Galaxie, and rolled down his window. He was an admiral in uniform. “Are you fellas enjoying the hell out of yourselves?”

‘Tes, sir!” Kinney said, saluting by putting his middle finger to his eyebrow. “I hope like hell you are,” the admiral said. “Because hard times are coming for assholes like you.” He rolled up his window and drove away.

The rest of the afternoon they spent drinking on the beach. Kinney sat against the trunk of a palm tree. The bum lay flat on his back with his Mad Dog balanced on his chest.

Houston took off his shoes and socks to feel the sand mounding under his arches. He felt his heart expanding. At this moment he understood the phrase “tropical paradise.”

He told his two comrades, “What I’m saying, I mean, about these Mokes. I think they’re related to the Indians that live down around my home. And not just them Indians, but also Indians that are from India, and every other kind of person you can think of who’s like that, who’s got something Oriental going on, and that’s why I think, really, there ain’t that many different kinds of people on this earth. And that’s why I’m against war …” He waved his Mad Dog around. “And that’s why I’m a pacifist.” It was wonderful to stand on the beach before this audience and gesture with a half gallon of wine and talk utter shit.

However, Kinney did disturbing things. With a dreamy look on his face he tipped his bottle above his shiny black dress shoes and watched the wine dribble onto the toes. He tossed several pinches of sand in the bum’s direction, speckling the bum’s chest, his face, his mouth. The bum brushed it away and pretended not to realize where it was coming from.

Kinney suggested taking the party to a friend’s house. “I want you to meet this guy,” he told the bum, “and then we’re gonna fix your bullshit.”

“Fine with me, asshole,” the bum said. Kinney held up his thumb and forefinger pressed together. “I’d like to get you in a space about that big,” he said.

They headed across the beach to find the house of Kinney’s friend. Houston was in agony, dealing with bare feet on the hot sand, and now on the black asphalt.

“Where are your shoes, you moron?” Houston carried his white socks in the pockets of his Levi’s, but his shoes were gone.

He stopped to purchase a seventeen-cent pair of zoris at a store. They had a sale on Thunderbird, but Kinney said his friend owed him money and promised to take them on the town later on.

Houston had loved those ivory-white bucks. To keep them white he’d powdered them with talc. And now? Abandoned to the tide. “Is this a military base?” he asked. They were in some kind of development of cheap little pink and blue dwellings.

“These are bungalows,” the bum said.

“Hey,” Houston said to their companion. “What is your name, man?”

“I’ll never tell,” the bum said.

“He’s totally full of bullshit,” Kinney said.

Maybe these bungalows seemed a bit slummy, but not compared to what Houston had seen in Southeast Asia. A mist of white sand covered the asphalt walkways, and as the three of them strode among the coconut palms he heard the surf thunder in the distance. He’d passed through Honolulu several times, and he liked it a lot. It simmered and stank as

much as any other tropical place, but it was part of the United States, and things were in good repair. Kinney checked the numbers above the doorways. “This is my

buddy’s house. Let’s go around back.” Houston said, “Why don’t we just ring the doorbell?” “I don’t want to ring the doorbell. Do you want to ring the doorbell?” “Well, no, man. He ain’t my friend.” They followed Kinney around the building. At one of the back windows, where a light shone, Kinney stood on

tiptoe and peered inside, then he pressed himself against the trunk of a palm tree beside the wall and said to the beach bum, “Do me a favor, tap on the screen.”

“Why should I?” “I intend to surprise this guy.” “What for?” “Just do it, will you? This guy owes me money, and I want to surprise

him about it.”

The bum scratched his fingernails along the window screen. The light went off within. A man’s face hovered in the window frame, barely visible behind the screen. “What’s the story, mister?”

Kinney said, “Greg.” “Who’s that?”

Its me. “Oh, hey, man —Kinney.” “Yeah, that’s right, it’s me. You got the two-sixty?” “I didn’t see you there, man.” “You got my two-sixty?” “You just back on the island? Where you been?” “I want my two-sixty.” “Shit, man. I have a phone. Why didn’t you call?” “I wrote you we’d be pulling in the first week in June. What do you

think this is? It’s the first week in June. And I want my money.” “Shit, man. I don’t have all of it.” “How much you got, Greg?” “Shit, man. I can probably get some of it.” Kinney said, “You are a lying piece of genuine shit.”

From his waistband he pulled a blue.45 automatic and aimed it at the man, and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared. Right at that time Houston heard an explosion. He tried to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.

“Come on, come on,” Kinney said. There was a hole through the window screen. “Houston!” “What?” “We’re done. We’re going.” “We are?” Houston couldn’t feel his own feet. He moved along as if on wheels.

They passed houses, parked vehicles, buildings. Now traffic surrounded them. They’d come a long way in what seemed like three or four seconds. He was out of breath and sopped with sweat.

The crazy bum said, “That’s pretty nifty, man. I think you won that conversation.” “I don’t forgive my debtors. I don’t forgive those who have trespassed

against me.” “I gotta go.” “Yeah, I bet you gotta go, you stupid fuck.” “Where are we?” Houston said.

treacherous coward.” “What?” the guy said. “Listen, don’t fuck with me.” “Don’t fuck with you?” “I think that’s my bus,” the guy said, and sprinted across the street

right through squealing traffic and got behind the cover of a bus. Kinney shouted, “Hey! Marine! Fuck you! Yeah! Semper Fi!” Houston doubled up and vomited all over a mailbox. Kinney didn’t look right. A greasy film covered his eyes. He said,

“Let’s get a drink. Have you ever had a depth charger? Shot of bourbon

in a mug of beer?” “Yeah.” “I could use a bellyful of them bastards.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Houston said.

They found a place with air-conditioning, and Kinney got the two of them set up with beers and shots in a booth in the darkness at the back and began preparing depth chargers.

“This’ll put some torque in your pork. Ever had one of these?”

“Sure, you drop a shot in a beer.”

“Ever had one?”

“Well, I just know how you make one,” Houston said.

Without any sense of the intervening hours, Houston awakened sweaty and all bitten up by mosquitoes and sand fleas, a sagging mattress swallowing him alive, a headache pounding against his skull. He could hear the surf pounding also. His first fully conscious thought was that he’d seen one man shoot another man, just like that.

He seemed to be quartered in some kind of open-air bedroom. He made his way to the faucet in the corner, where he drank deeply of the sweet water and peed, first removing from the sink a wet bedsheet with a large black-rimmed hole burned in its middle. He found his watch, wallet, pants, and shirt, but he’d lost his shoes on the beach, he now remembered, and he was pretty sure he’d left his kit bag at the Y. His seventeen-cent zoris seemed to have walked away on their own.

His wallet held a five and two ones. He collected ninety cents in coins scattered on the bamboo floor. He stepped out to get his bearings. His head swam. The water he’d gorged on was making him drunk all over again.

The sign said KING KANE HOTEL, and it said SAILORS WELCOME.

He kept an eye out for Kinney, but he didn’t see anyone at all, not a living soul. It was like a desert island. Palms, the bright beach, the dark ocean. He headed away from the beach, toward town.

He didn’t return to the Bonners Ferry. He had no intention of getting anywhere near her berth, or anywhere else he might run into Kinney, the last person he wanted to see. He missed the sailing and spent two weeks ashore without liberty, sleeping on the beach and eating once per day at a Baptist mission on the waterfront, until he was confident Kinney was closer to Hong Kong than to Honolulu; then he turned himself in to the Shore Patrol for a week’s recuperation in the brig.

His rate was rolled back to E-3 and he was a seaman again, which meant he automatically lost his Boilerman rating. This was the second demotion of his career. The first had resulted from “repeated minor infractions” during his tour at Subie Bay Naval Base—after he’d taken to the warrens of vice outside its gates.

Houston spent the following eighteen months assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base in Yokosuka, Japan, mostly with rowdy black men, low-aptitude morons, and worthless bust-outs like himself. More often than he liked, he remembered the admiral in Honolulu who’d lowered the window of his white Ford Galaxie and promised, “Hard times are coming.”

Because he now had a girlfriend who let him go all the way, James forgot about the army for a while. Once or twice a week he put an air mattress and a sleeping bag in the back of his mother’s pickup and snuck Stevie Dale out of her unconscious household and made love to her in the predawn desert chill. Twice, sometimes three times in a night. He kept a tally. Between July 10 and October 20, at least fifty times. But not as many as sixty.

Stevie didn’t seem moved to participate. All she did was lie there. He wanted to ask her, “Don’t you like it?” He wanted to ask, “Couldn’t you move a little bit?” But in the atmosphere of disappointment and doubt that fell down around him after their lovemaking, he was unable to communicate with her at all, other than to pretend to listen while she talked. She talked about school, about subjects, teachers, cheerleaders—of whom she was one, just an alternate, but she expected to join the main squad next year—nonstop in his ear. Her gladness was a fist stuffing him deeper into the toilet.

He had more on his mind than his love life. He worried about his mother. She didn’t make much money at the ranch. She exhausted herself. She’d grown thinner, knobbier. She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law husband. James had never accompanied her on these pilgrimages, and Burris, now almost ten, refused to serve as escort—just ran away into the neighborhood of shacks and trailers and drifting dust when the poor old woman started getting herself ready on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

James didn’t know how he felt about Stevie, but he knew his mother broke his heart. Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her? She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. James suspected she was just faking herself out, flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window. Having just about reached a decision in his mind to quit school and see the army recruiters, he stalled for many weeks, standing at the top of the high dive. Or on the edge of the nest. “Mom,” he said, “every eagle has tofly.” “Go ahead on, then,” she said.

The army turned him down. They wouldn’t take minors. “The Marines will take you when you’re seventeen, but the army won’t,” he told his mother.

“Can’t you wait a half a year?” “More like three-fourths of a year.” “That’s a lot of growing and learning you could do in school, for your

education. Then you could graduate and be ready for your service, ready

all the way through.” “I got to go.” “Go in the Marines, then.” “I don’t want the Marines.” “Why not?” “They’re too stuck up.” “Then why are we talking about the Marines?” ” ‘Cause the army won’t take me till I’m eighteen.” “Not even if I sign?” “Not even if anybody signs. I need a birth certificate.” “I have your birth certificate. It says ‘1949/ Couldn’t you just as easy

change it to ‘1948’? Just close up the tail on the nine to where it looks like a eight.”

On the last Friday in October, James went back to the army recruiter with a lying birth certificate and came home with instructions to report for muster on Monday.

The first two weeks of his basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina were the longest he’d experienced. Each day seemed a life entire in itself, lived in uncertainty, abasement, confusion, fatigue. These gave way to an overriding state of terror as the notions of killing and being killed began to fill his thoughts. He felt all right in the field, in the ranks, on the course with the others, yelling like monsters, bayoneting straw men. Off alone he could hardly see straight, thanks to this fear. Only exhaustion saved him. Being driven past his physical limits put a glass wall between him and all of this—he couldn’t quite hear, couldn’t quite remember what he’d just been looking at, what he’d just been shown. He waited only for sleep. He dreamed hysterically throughout, but slept for as long as they let him.

They assigned him to Vietnam. He knew it meant he was dead. He hadn’t applied, hadn’t even asked how you apply, they’d just handed him his fate. Four days out of basic, here he carried his lunch toward a table in the enlisted mess, the steamy odor of reconstituted mashed potatoes rising toward his face, and his legs felt like rubber as he stepped toward a future scattered with booby traps and land mines: they’d be on patrol and he’d be too far ahead of the others in a line of guys in the jungle, he’d be in front and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss. There was no sense sitting here, spooning up hjs lunch off a partitioned tray. He should be saving his life, getting out of this mess hall, disappearing maybe in some big town where they had dirty movies that never close.

Two of the guys came over and started talking about dying in battle.

“Are you trying to get me spooked worse than I am already?” James said, trying to sound humorous.

“The odds are you won’t get killed.”

“Shut up.”

“Really, there’s not that many battles or anything.”

“Did you see that guy over there?” James said, and they had: three tables away sat a very small black man in dress greens, a first sergeant. He didn’t look big enough to join the army, but on his chest he wore many ribbons, including the blue one with five white stars signifying the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Whenever they saw a soldier with decorations, James and the others made a point of passing close to get a look. That was it, wasn’t it?—to be drinking a cup of coffee with this person inside of you hardened and blackened by heroic deeds, and kids walking by with a weak feeling in their stomachs, trying not to stare. But in order to enjoy it, you had to get home alive.

When the others left, James returned to the line for another helping. People complained about the food, and therefore James complained too; but actually he liked it.

The black man with the blue ribbon on his chest beckoned him to

his table. James didn’t know what to do but go on over. “Come on, sit down,” the sergeant said. “You got that look.” “Yeah? What look?” “Just sit down,” the sergeant said. “I ain’t that black.” James joined him. “I says you got that look.” “Yeah?” “The look says I wanted to drive a tank or work on helicopter engines,

but instead they sending me to the jungle and get shot at.” James said nothing, lest he weep about it. “Your sarge told me, Conrad, Conroy.” “Sergeant, yeah,” James said, extremely nervous. “Sergeant Connell.” “Why didn’t you think of something to volunteer for, to get you out

of it?” Now James feared he’d laugh. “Because I’m stupid.” “You’re going to the Twenty-fifth, right? Which brigade?” “The Three.” “I’m from the Twenty-fifth.” “Yeah? No shit?” “Not the Three, though. The Fourth.” “But the Three—are they, are they—you know—fighting?” “Some units are. Unfortunately, yes.” James felt if he could only say, Sarge, I don’t want to fight, he would

surely save himself. “You worried about getting killed?” “Sort of, you know, I mean—yeah.” “Nothing to worry about. By the time The Thing eats you, you all

emptied up, you ain’t thinking. Nothing but jazz happening.”

James couldn’t quite take comfort from this statement.

“Yep.” The small black man hunched forward, touching the fingertips of each hand together rapidly. “Come here. Listen,” he said. James leaned toward him, half afraid the man might grab him by the ear or something. “In a combat zone, you don’t want to be a pin on a map. Sooner or later the enemy’s going to hammer on that pin with a superior force. You want to have some mobility options, don’t you? You want some decision-sharing, don’t you? That means you want to volunteer for a Recon outfit. That’s a voluntary thing. You volunteer for that. After that, you never, never volunteer for nothing, nothing, nothing, not even to jump in bed with a red-hot female, not even James Bond’s girlfriend. That’s rule number one, is don’t volunteer. And rule number two is that when in the foreign land, you don’t violate the women, you don’t hurt the livestock, and if possible not the property, except for burning the hooches, that goes with the job.”

“That’s a Medal of Honor you got there.” “Yes, it is. So you listen to what I say.” “All right. Okay.” “I might be black as coal, but I’m your brother. You know why?” “I don’t guess I do.” “Because you’re going over to the Twenty-fifth as a replacement, ain’t

you?” “Yes, sir.” “Don’t sir me, I ain’t your sir. You going to the Twenty-fifth, right?” “Right.” “Okay. And you know what? I came from the Twenty-fifth. Not the

Third Brigade, the Fourth. But anyway, J could be the one you’re replac

ing. So I giving you the dope.” “Okay. Thanks.” “No, you don’t thank me, I thank you. You know why? It’s me you

could be replacing.” “You’re welcome,” James said. “Now: what I just said, you take all this under your advisement.” “Will do.” James enjoyed the way they talked in the infantry, and he tried to talk

that way too. Mobility options. Pin on a map. Superior force. Under advisement. These were the same phrases a recon sergeant had used while delivering a talk to their barracks just two weeks earlier. Now the phrases rang true, they made sense. One fact stood out clear: if you had to be a grunt, you might as well be recon.

After more than a year in the States, in California—two months at the Defense Language Institute in Carmel, and nearly twelve months at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey—Skip Sands returned to Southeast Asia and, somewhere between Honolulu and Wake Island, flying miles above the Pacific on a 707, came into the shadow of the mystery that would devour him.

After the 707 to Tokyo he went by prop plane to Manila, by train to the bottom of the mountain north of there, by car once again to the staff house in San Marcos, ready for a confrontation with Eddie Aguinaldo, and also happy at the prospect of the major’s pointless sweaty jungle night patrols, only to find that the patrols had been discontinued and Eddie Aguinaldo was nowhere around. The Huks had been declared extinct. Anders Pitchfork was long gone. For company Sands had only the household crew and occasional vacationing staff from Manila, usually overworked couriers^who slept a lot. He waited nearly a month for one of them to bring word from the colonel.

Word arrived in a courier pouch, on a photo postcard of the Washington Monument. A yellow seal pasted to a corner warned, KEEP OFFICIAL BUSINESS UNDER WRAPS COUNSEL CORRESPONDENTS TO USE ENVELOPES THANK YOU YOUR AMERICAN POST OFFICE.p>

Merry Christmas somewhat early. Pack your files, the whole show. Head to Manila. See the Section. I’m in Langley bouncing a desk off the walls. Saw Boston last week. Your Aunt and Cousins send warmest wishes. See you in Saigon. Une FX.

But the files were already packed, or so he assumed. His first day back he’d found, in the closet he’d left them in, three olive army-issue footlockers, the lid of each stenciled with the name BENĘT W.F.—the accent applied by hand with a soft-point pen—and each one heavily padlocked.

Having had no word as to the keys to these treasures, he left that matter for another day and did the next indicated thing, which was to travel to the embassy in Manila in a staff car almost entirely filled with his uncle’s project. There he was instructed to keep the car and travel some forty miles beyond the capital to Clark Air Base, where he’d board military transport for South Vietnam.

Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve. His itinerary would have him taking off on New Year’s Day from Clark Field for the airport at Tan Son Nhut, outside Saigon.

At last! Feeling as if he’d already taken to the air, he sat in the staff car on Dewey Boulevard watching the sun quiver on Manila Bay, and by its glorious light, in order to calm himself, he glanced through his mail. An alumni newsletter from Bloomington. Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, both many weeks old. In a large manila envelope he found his final batch of California mail, forwarded from there through his APO address. These letters had chased him for two months. From his Aunt Grace and Uncle Ray—the eldest of his father’s four siblings—came a greeting card envelope with something whacking around inside it, one of the new John F. Kennedy half dollars, it turned out, and a Hallmark card, to which the coin had evidently been taped before coming loose on its ten-thousand-mile journey. Skip had turned thirty on October twenty-eighth, and in commemoration of this milestone here came fifty cents, double the usual, no more quarters for such a big boy.

Also, quite a rare thing: a letter from the widow Beatrice Sands, Skip’s mother. It felt thick. He didn’t open it.

And here was a letter from Kathy Jones. He’d received several in the last year, each one crazier than the last, had saved them all, had ceased answering.

Are you finally here in Vietnam? Maybe in the next village? I wel

come you to the Bible in Panavision and Technicolor. But here it’s

good not to be from your United States of America. Too many re

sentments. They don’t mind the French so much, though. They

beat the French.

Do you remember Damulog?

From the next paragraph the word “affair” leapt up at him, and he stopped reading.

Nothing further from the colonel.

He hadn’t seen his uncle in over fourteen months, had concluded that one or both of them had been sidelined owing to the questionable business on Mindanao. Something, anyway, had kept them both from the action. He’d taken his course in Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute, and what started by looking like the sensible prelude to a Saigon posting turned into eleven baffling months spent with a crew of three other translators, not one Vietnamese national among them, working on a project of doubtful utility, that is, pursuing a patent folly—to extract an encyclopedia of mythological references from over seven hundred volumes of Vietnamese literature, an endeavor waged mostly in three basement-level offices of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and consisting mainly of the listing, categorization, and cataloging of fairy-tale figures.

This he understood to be his uncle’s contribution to the Psychological Operations Group of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, for which the colonel now served, Skip further understood, as chief CIA liaison. In fact, all but officially the colonel ran Psy Ops for MAC–V, according to an Agency officer from Langley named Showalter, who checked in with Skip’s translation team on a more or less monthly basis; and before long Skip would help the colonel run it. “When does he want me there?” “January or so.” “Outstanding,” Skip said, completely infuriated by the delay. This conversation took place in June.

The fanciful project ended with sudden postings to other places for all the participants, who boxed and shipped to Langley the useless material.

He opened the letter from his mother.

“Dear Son Skipper”—her hand rounded, slanting, large, covering several pages of six-by-eight-inch stationery bond:

I’m sure not much for writing, so first thing, nothing’s wrong. Wouldn’t want you to think it’s only bad news would get me to sit down and send a greeting to you. It’s really the opposite, a really fine day of Indian summer. The bluest sky, not a dab of a cloud anywhere up there. The trains go by with a different sound due to leaves turning on the trees, it’s a happy greeting now, pretty soon we’ll hear that lonely sound of a whistle in bare winter. This afternoon it’s warm enough you want a breeze through the house. Open the windows and hear the redwing blackbirds calling. And the grass is still coming on, you can see where it needs one more cutting before the fall is really official. When I saw how pretty the day was I thought, “I think I’ll write a letter!”

Thank you for the money. I bought a new drier to go with the washer. Got it full of clothes right now and going round and round. But in fine weather like this I like to put the big things like the sheets and bedding out on the line and dry them in the world, and that’s just what I’ve done. Got the sheets on the line like in the old days. Yes, I ordered a drier, I didn’t get a TV. You said get one, but I didn’t. When I feel like I need entertainment I go to the shelves and take down The Old Curiosity Shop or Emma or Silas Marner and read just any old part and nine out of ten times I have to go back to the beginning and read it all. I just have to. Those are good old friends.

I told you about old Rev. Pierce retiring. There’s a new man at the church, Pastor Paul. Pretty young. His last name is Conniff, but he goes by Pastor Paul. He puts his new slant on things. He kept me interested, I went every Sunday all last winter, then the weather relents, the sun shines, things get busy, and I haven’t been since early April probably. No TV, but I try to keep up with the news. Isn’t it terrible news? I don’t know what to think. Sometimes I wish I could talk to somebody about what I think, then I think I better not. I know you joined the government to be of service to the world, but our leaders are sending good boys to wreck another country and maybe lose their lives without any sound explanation.

Well, a half hour’s gone by since that last sentence. That new drier ding-donged and got me running to do the folding while it was still hot. Excuse me for the things I say. Maybe I’ll just say what I want and go back and write this letter over, cross out the bad parts and just send the nice parts. No, I better not. War means something different to me than it does to generals and soldiers. As of next December 7 twenty-six years will be gone since we lost your father, and every day I still miss how it was. After a while I had boyfriends after your father, and really spent some time with Kenneth Brooke before he took a job with Northwest Airlines, but it was a little too soon for us before we’d gotten it all sorted out what we’d do, Ken and I, so when he moved to Minneapolis, that was that. Otherwise I think we would have gotten engaged, which means you would have had a stepdad. But that’s off the subject. What was the subject? Goodness, I better not send this letter! I don’t know if you even knew it was a little serious between me and Ken Brooke. Do you even remember Ken at all? Every other Christmas he and his family come back home to visit his folks and his sister. The other Christmases they go back to his wife’s home town, I don’t know where that is. Boy, am I having one of those days.

I’d better get out that old push-mower and do the yard one last time for this year. I’ll have to oil it up. Had it done by the kids all summer, one or other of the Strauss kids, Thomas or Daniel, but they’re in school now. They took turns with their Dad’s big noisy gas-powered monster. Made two dollars each time. That old push-mower is an old friend of mine. Remember how I used to do the yard—”And stay away from those blades with your fingers!”—that’s what I hollered, like those blades would jump up and bite your fingers off, even with nobody pushing. Then one day I hear those blades whirring and look out the window and here comes Skipper in his teeshirt with his skinny arms, pushing past the window like The Little Engine That Could. Did the whole yard on your first try. I hope you remember, because I remember so clearly. I hope you remember how good you felt, and I will too.

I appreciate the little notes you send. People ask about you, and it’s good to have news to relate. Attending the Language Institute, attending the Naval Post-Grad, attached to U.S. Embassy, pretty impressive, makes me feel like a star.

We’ve had a beautiful day all day, but here about three PM it’s gusting up a little, gets the sheets waving and slapping at the wind. That’s the whitest they can get, when they’re dried in the sun and the breeze. And we’re lucky about that breeze, because the tracks aren’t far, but the breeze is always the other way, no grit coming down. Makes me glad we live on the “other side” of the tracks! I remember when I saw you go by that window. I saw your strength of character in a flash. I thought when I saw you, He’s a goer like his Dad, he’ll get himself through college on jobs and scholarships, nothing’s stopping that little lad. And now more study, more grad school. Army, Navy, Embassy, seems like everybody needs you.

Here, six lines from the finish, he had to stop reading and curse himself. He’d spent fourteen months in the States, could have arranged a visit home before he’d left again. But he’d ducked her. Sure: war, intrigue, the fates —certainly, he’d face them. Just, please, not Mom. Not her laundry flapping in the sorrows of springtime. Not Clements, Kansas, with its historical license to be tiny, low, and square. Here, in Manila, at approximately fourteen degrees latitude north and fifty-seven longitude east, he couldn’t get much farther away. But it wasn’t far enough. It hurt him to think of her all alone. Particularly after his time at the Language Institute. True to the colonel’s word (‘Til send you to the school, we’ll work that out”), he’d been posted, just before that Thanksgiving of 1965, to the institute on a high bluff overlooking Carmel. The view was that of low fog hunched over the coast, or higher fog wrapped around the grounds, or, on the clear days, the pure Pacific heartrendingly removed from him while he underwent his total immersion course in Vietnamese, which meant four weeks’ confinement to the facility followed by four weeks with weekend passes only. On his first leave he took Communion a few miles down the coast at the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a nunnery open to the public for Mass on Sunday mornings. The laity faced the altar, and the sisters, cut off by their vows from the world, sat or stood, no telling which, behind a wall, hidden even from their families, some of whom sat in the pews to glimpse the upturned palms of the cloistered acolytes reaching through a small window to receive the Body of Christ. Watching them that morning, thinking of them now, eased his bonds. Had he taken a vow of separation? No. Whatever his circumstances, he was free, and fighting for the freedom of all. But his mother: Some sort of vow undertaken there. Some sort of walling-in acceded to.

Skip, I pray for you and for the whole country. I’m going to start up with the church attendance again.

I’m sorry I hardly ever write, I do appreciate your notes, but it takes a certain kind of day to make me get out the pen and paper. Well, there you have it, another letter or something! Thinking of you, Mom

Having proved himself with this one, he felt he might face the letter from Kathy Jones. But it had grown too dark to read.

He’d spent some considerable time with these communications, and his taxi hadn’t moved half a block. “Is there a problem?” he asked the driver. “What’s wrong?”

“Something is delaying,” the driver said.

Far around the curve of the boulevard as it followed the contours of the bay, he saw the lights of traffic moving freely. But here they were stuck. “I’ll be back,” he said. He got out and walked toward the trouble, skirting the stalled cars, wending among the rancid puddles. A large city bus held up the flow, stopped by a single man who stood lurching in the middle of the street, drunk, his face covered with blood, T-shirt ripped down the front, weeping as he confronted this vehicle, the biggest thing he could challenge, apparently, after somebody had beaten him in a fight. Horns, voices, gunned engines. Keeping to the shadows, Skip stood and watched: the bloody face, deformed by passion, shining in the bus’s headlights; the head back, the arms limp, as if the man hung by hooks in his armpits. This reeking desperate city. It filled him with joy.

A t the beginning of James’s furlough his mother took three days off from the McCormick Ranch, and they spent the time watching television together in the small house at the edge of the desert. The day he got back she unpacked his Class A greens and straightened the creases carefully with her steam iron. “Now you’re doing something for your country,” she said. “We have to stand up against the Communists. They’re Godless.” It might have meant something, if she didn’t say the same about the Jews and Catholics and Mormons.

After the old woman went back to work, James saw a great deal of Stevie Dale. The afternoon of Christmas Eve the two of them drove in his

mother’s pickup out to the edge of the hills on the Carefree Highway, to the site of a one-car accident in which the driver had been killed. “See there?” Stevie said. “He hit a saguaro, then a paloverde, then that big rock.”

The blackened wreck had been pried away from a boulder by emergency crews some days earlier, but hadn’t yet been removed. The car had turned turtle and burned.

“He must’ve been flying.” “Only one in the car. Only car on the road.” “I guess he was late.” They popped a couple of beers each, and quickly Stevie got tipsy.

They sat looking at the wreck like a charred, upturned hand. “The driver burned to death inside,” she said. “I hope he was knocked out,” James said. “For his sake.” The car had been red, but the flames had melted its paint. Now it

showed several patches of bare, bright metal. It might have been a

Chevrolet, there was really no telling. “Every single thing in the world is slowly burning up,” she said. “Yeah? Is it? I don’t get you.” “Everything’s oxidizing. Everything in the world.” He gathered she’d come by this news in her chemistry class. During basic he’d thought of her continually, but it was nothing per

sonal. He’d thought just as often about at least seven other girls from their high school. Being with her here, even surrounded by these unbounded spaces, he felt trapped in a vise.

He said, “Can I ask you something? The first time we did it, were

you—you know—a virgin, or something? Was that your first time?” “Are you serious?” “Uh. Yeah.” “Are you kidding?” “Yeah. I mean no.” “What exactly do you think I am?” “I was just asking.” “Yes, I was a virgin. This isn’t something you do every day, or I don’t

anyway. What do you think I am,” she said, “some motorcycle mama?” That made James laugh, which in turn made Stevie cry. “Stevie, Stevie, Stevie,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He was glad it was Christmas Eve. She’d spend tomorrow with her family, and he wouldn’t have to see her.

But it was only the beer working on her, and in two minutes she’d accepted his apology. “The sunset’s always beautiful when there’s clouds,” she said.

In the dusk it would cool off quickly now. He felt a breeze starting, the day’s last warm breath as it ended. Stevie kissed him many times.

In South Carolina they’d treated him like a beast, and he’d survived. He’d grown bigger, stronger, older, better. But having returned to the world he’d grown up in, he had no idea how to sit in a room with his mother, or what to say to this sixteen-year-old girl, no idea how to get through a few days in his life until he shipped to Louisiana for Advanced Infantry Training, until he got back where people would tell him what to do.

Stevie said, “I guess we’ll open presents and all that stuff pretty early,” and placed her loving fingertips on the back of his neck. “What time do you want to come over?”

As he considered this simple question, it seemed to widen until it split his very thoughts open.

He wrenched at his door’s handle and got out into the air and walked past the exploded wreck and stood bent over with his hands on his knees, barely keeping upright, his gaze lifted toward the winter horizon. He wanted somebody to come out of the faint pink and blue distances and save him. Far away he saw the ripples of a mirage—either a horrible burning death in Vietnam, like that of the man pried from this charred Chevrolet, or a parade of years filled with Stevie’s questions and her fingers touching his neck.

Sands stayed overnight in a private room with a bath at Clark Field’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, most of which was devoted to dorm-style living in a collegiate atmosphere, with doors opening and closing and half-dressed young men shouting up and down the halls and the sounds of showers and Nancy Sinatra tunes warring with Stan Getz bossa nova instrumentais, and the stink of Right Guard spray deodorant. He arrived around eight at night. He and the driver got his footlockers into his room. He spoke to no one, turned in early, got up late the next day-New Year’s Eve—and boarded the base shuttle bus and asked the Filipino driver to let him off wherever he could find some breakfast.

Thus Sands found himself at 9:00 a.m. on December 31, 1966, at the snack bar in a bowling alley filled, even at that hour, with airmen pursuing improved averages in a clattering atmosphere. He ate bacon and eggs off a plastic plate at a table alongside rows and rows of bowling balls and watched. Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands determined he’d give it a try as soon as his breakfast settled. Meanwhile, he drank black coffee and read his letter from Kathy Jones. She wrote in a neat hand, apparently with a fountain pen, in blue ink, on flimsy, grayish, probably Vietnamese-made onionskin. Her first few letters to him had been direct, chatty, lonely, affectionate. She’d wondered if they might meet in Saigon, and Sands had looked forward to that. Now these recent letters, these confused ruminations—

I’ve dealt with jokers all my life. Just jokers. No aces, no kings. Timothy was the first ace and he introduced me to the King—Jesus Christ. Before that I went to Minneapolis for college. But I lost my drive so I quit and worked as a secretary and went out for cocktails every night with young guys who worked downtown, young jokers.

—they might have been torn from a journal, addressed to no one. He could hardly stand them. He’d stopped looking forward to seeing her again.

These people here in these lands we’re visiting—look at these peo

ple. They’re as trapped by circumstance as criminals are trapped

by prison. Born and live and die according to the dictates of how

things go—never say, I want to live in that place rather than this place, I want to be a cowboy rather than a farmer. Can’t even be farmers, really-they’re just planters. Tillers. Gardeners.

In the beginning her communiqués hadn’t been long, generally two sides of a page, and had ended, “Well, my hand’s getting tired! I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy” or “Well, I see I’m down to the bottom, I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy.” In the beginning he’d replied, always very briefly. Not, he hoped, curtly. But he hadn’t known what to say. The nature of their connection, clear enough in the heat of it, had become mysterious.

When it comes to the contrast between having a choice and no freedom to choose whatsoever—here’s where it gets as stark as it can get. You, America, your forces are here making war by choice. Your enemy doesn’t have a choice. They were born into a land at war.

Or maybe it’s not that simple—U.S. vs. North Vietnam—no, it’s the young men who get this war forced upon them versus the ones who choose this war, the dying soldiers vs. the theorists and the dogmatists and the generals.

Here was clumsy thinking, and Sands had long ago lost patience with it. Would she like to see a bust of Lenin by the door of every public school? See the Statue of Liberty toppled in an obscene ceremony? Of course she would. And that wrongheadedness appealed to him. Always the sucker for sardonic, myopic, intellectual women. Women quick-witted and congenitally sad. In her face a combination of aggression and apology. Kind brown eyes.

Remember asking me about a place in the Bible claiming there are different administrations on the earth and I said I didn’t think so? You were right-First Corinthians 12:5–6 etc. “And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.”

That must appeal to a G-man like you! (I still don’t believe you work for Del Monte.) If you want to believe that different angelic departments sort of run different parts of the show down here on earth, I don’t blame you. Just going from the Manila airport to Tan

Son Nhut airport in Saigon I’d be almost ready to call it diversities

of deities, diverse universes, all on the same planet.

Come to think of it, in North America various Spanish priests

(the Catholic Church itself?) must have believed that some areas

are under control of the Devil-or of Christ—thus places called “Mt.

Diablo,” “Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” and so on.

He slipped the letter under his coffee mug. No concentrating on it now. Travel excited him. This world ending, the next emerging, the bowlers surrounding him with motion and noise, flinging out black planets, smashing the constellations of wooden pins. Back in his room, other things to set moving: the monster of the colonel’s files, and a duffel bag packed with two pairs of walking shoes and four changes of machine-washable clothing—no suit, no dress apparel—also a small crate woven of cane, a basket, really, but quite sturdy, packed with dictionaries in several languages. Skip had been trained to remember that he came as a civilian and must dress like one, avoid khaki or olive garb, wear brown shoes rather than black, brown belts as well. He’d left behind his custom-tooled carbine and traveled with a secret agent’s kind of weapon, a.25caliber Beretta automatic concealable in a pants pocket. His mind raced over all of it, a result of too much coffee. He gave up the idea of bowling, left the lanes, and went striding through the tropic noon until his brow thudded and his wet shirt clung to him.

The base library looked open. The air conditioner roared on its roof. He approached the door and saw people within beneath fluorescent lights, but the door wouldn’t budge, and he had a moment of panic in which he felt himself locked out and gazing helplessly on the land of books. A man coming out opened it with some effort—just stuck in its frame, swollen with damp—and Sands gained entrance. Jangling from the coffee he flitted from stack to stack and looked into a number of books, never taking a seat. In a copy of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson he read all the chapter epigraphs, looking for one he thought he remembered—something to do with the treasure of a life spent in obscurity— but it wasn’t there. In the children’s section he found some volumes of Filipino folk tales. Nothing from Vietnam.

He was delighted to chance, next, on a book about Knute Rockne. He sat down and turned its leaves until he found on page 87 a photo of Rockne on the fields of Notre Dame in 1930 with the last team he’d coached; and among them, in the middle of the third row, with more abundant hair and his wrinkles erased and the familiar, eager sincerity on his face: Uncle Francis. A second-string freshman, but nevertheless one of Rockne’s blunt, confident young men—chests out, chins up, peering ahead no further than two or three minutes into the life to come. Francis’s older brother Michael, Skip’s father, had graduated from Notre Dame the year before and moved to his bride’s hometown of Clements, Kansas. Francis would join the army air force and leave it in 1939 to fly with the pseudo-civilian Flying Tigers in Burma. Michael would grow restless selling farm equipment and join the navy in 1941 and go down six months later with the Arizona in the first few seconds of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Death had too often visited prematurely among his father’s people—wars and accidents. The colonel had a daughter, Anne; a son, Francis Junior, had drowned one Fourth of July while sailing in Boston Harbor. A brother and a son, both claimed by harbors. There had been brothers and sisters and plenty of cousins, and many children from those sources, and everybody had somebody missing. It was a loud, sad family.

Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children. They stared back at him. An old ache sang its song. Only child of a widowed mother. Somehow he’d entered their world without becoming a man.

He shut the book and instead opened the fragile pages of the letter from Kathy Jones:

They were born into a land at war. Born into a time of trial that

never ends.

What I don’t think has been talked about is the fact that in or

der 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.

And I might as well tell you, my faith has gone dark, because I started reading Calvin, wrestling with Calvin, and I lost the fight and got dragged down into Calvin’s despair. Calvin doesn’t call it despair but it’s despair all right. I know that this is Hell, right here, planet Earth, and I know that you, me, and all of us were made by God only to be damned.

And then suddenly I scream, “But God wouldn’t do that!” —See? The torment of uncertainty. Or I guess as a Catholic, you might ask yourself if this is a jour

ney through Purgatory. You’ll sure ask yourself that when you come to Vietnam. Five or ten times a day you’ll stop and ask yourself, When did I die? And why is God’s punishment so cruel?

He spent the afternoon in the cool of the library and rode the shuttle bus back to the BOQ.

He’d hardly been back in his room a minute when somebody knocked at the door, a man about his own age, wearing civvies, holding in each hand a bottle of San Miguel beer.

“These are the last in the bucket, my man.” The quality of the man’s smile was disconcerting. “The Skipper needs a beer.” Skip said—”Hey!” “Quantico!” He accepted a bottle and they shook hands, Skip flushing with a

warmth of recognition, although the name escaped him. They’d done a twenty-one-day ciphers program together at Quantico just after his training at the Farm—never buddies, but certainly, now, well met. They sat around chatting about nothing, and after a few minutes Skip felt the moment for getting his friend’s name had slipped past. “Where’s your home station now?” he asked the man. “Still Langley?”

“They’ve got me stashed in the District. At the State Department, the big building, Pennsylvania Avenue. But I make the rounds—Saigon, Manila, DC. What about you?”

“I’m being transferred. Saigon.”

“You get a good deal in Saigon —share a house, servants, that order of existence. Run of the place whenever you can get away. Hell —every weekend. Most weekends.”

“I hear it’s a beautiful country.”

“Surprisingly beautiful. You step out of a hooch to take a leak, shake off the last drop, and look up—God, you can’t believe it, where’d it come from?”

“Just like here, in other words.” “Considerably more dangerous. You do earn your hazard pay.” “I’m looking forward to it.” “You’re in Operations, am I right?” “Right,” Skip said. “Officially. But I seem to work for Plans.” “Well, I’m in Plans, but I seem to work for State.” “What brings you to the base?” “A free ride back to the war at twenty hundred hours. The clock’s

running out for me, son. Last chance for a San Miguel. Wish I could

take a keg with me.” “Do they sell San Miguel by the keg?” “Come to think of it, I’m not sure. But they sell it by the bottle at the

Officers’ Club. Let’s go.” “I’m all grimy. Should I meet you?” “Should I wait? —Or what about going into town?” “Well,” Skip said, “if you’re leaving at twenty hundred — ” “Or we could swing by the Teen Club, find out what the officers’ kids

are up to.” Skip said, “What?” “Say, that reminds me —I mean, speaking of officers’ kids. Aren’t you

related to the colonel himself?” “Which colonel, now?” “Aren’t you close to the colonel? The colonel Francis Xavier?” “I’m one of his favorite people, if we’re talking about the same guy.” “There ain’t but one Colonel.” “I guess not.” “I took that Psy Ops course of his. He’s a man with a message.” “He’s got vision, all right.” “You took it too? He titled it wrong. ‘Reminiscing and Theorizing’

would be more like it.”

“That’s the colonel.” “He’s put some of his thoughts in an article for the journal. Have you

read it?” “In the journal? You mean in Studies?” “Yowza.” They referred to the Agency’s in-house organ, Studies in Intelligence.

The colonel’s thoughts in the journal? What to say to this? Nothing.

He gulped his beer and wiped it from his mustache. He’d gone through the bushy Kennedy phase. Now they were all back to crew cuts again, flattops—proving they weren’t the Beatles. But Skip had kept his mustache. It was luxuriant.

“Do you read the journal much, Skip?” “I catch up in Manila. We didn’t have it in the boonies. I was up in

San Marcos.” “Oh, yeah—the Del Monte place.” “Ever been there?” “No. You haven’t read his piece?” “I can’t believe he’d get anything into shape for actual publication.” “It hasn’t been published. It’s just a draft.” “How did you happen to see it?” “I wondered if you’d seen it in a rough form.” “Man, I didn’t know he ever put a pen to the page. How’d you get

hold of it? Are you with the journal?” “So you haven’t seen it.” Skip now felt his heart coming to a halt. “No,” he said, “like I said.” “Well, I’ll be open with you. The piece is a little puzzling. One expla

nation is it’s meant to be satire. But if he’s submitting satire to the house organ, that’s puzzling in itself. That’s troubling too; that in itself is puzzling.”

“I see,” Skip said. “Look, obviously I remember you, but I’ve forgot

ten your name.” “Voss.” “Rick, right?” “C’est moi.” “The face was familiar, but—” “I’m getting porky.” “If you say so.”

“I got married. We had a kid. I got fat.” “Boy or girl?” “A little girl. Celeste.” “Nice name.” “She’s eighteen months.” “That makes it hard, huh? Traveling and all.” “I’m glad I travel. I’m like the moon, I come and go. To tell you the

truth, I don’t think I could take it day after day. Women and children frighten me. I don’t understand them. I’d rather be somewhere else.” He’d been sitting on the bed; he got up and sat on one of the footlockers. “And whose gear is this here?”

“I’m just delivering it.” “Who’s W. F. Benęt?” “The recipient, I guess.” “Or maybe the sender,” said Voss. “I’m actually not familiar with the name.” “What’s the W for? William?” “Beats me,” Skip said. “And what about the F? What’s his full name?” “Rick … I’m just a blind courier on this one.” Voss said, “Wanna arm-wrestle?” “Uh, no,” said Skip. “If we arm-wrestled, do you know who’d win?” Skip shrugged. “Do you care?” “No, I don’t,” said Skip. “Neither do I,” said Voss. “We don’t need muscles. We’ve got a private

army now. These Green Berets are like human tanks. They’re death machines. One of them could tear the two of us to shreds, huh? And they work for the Agency. Well, the point is, from here on out we’re gonna keep the tough guys in uniform. They don’t graduate from the field, they don’t get behind a desk and start running things. This ain’t the OSS. That war is history.”

Skip clinked his bottle against Voss’s. Both bottles were empty. “If we were halfway through a case of this stuff,” he said, “I’d just figure we were having a bull session. If it was four a.m. and we were half sloshed.”

“But we’re not.”

“No.” “Yeah.” “When are we gonna get those beers?” Skip said. “Well, how about right now?” They both stood up. Skip said, “Oh, drat. Wait a minute.” “What.” Skip said, “My watch is stopped. What time is it?” “Fifteen-twenty.” “Darn, I’ve got a little briefing in forty minutes. Fd better get my gear

in order.” “Then what? Right to Saigon?” “As far as I know.” “Fll probably see you there.” “All right,” said Skip, “and then we can have those beers. What do

they drink in Saigon?” “Tiger Beer. Then they puke.” “Good enough,” Skip said. Voss stared at the floor and concentrated before raising his gaze,

preparing to speak. “You’ll be heading off, then,” Skip reminded him. Voss stood up. “Rain check,” he said, and as he departed Skip sent

him half a salute. The colonel had always said: When you hit the wall, take a shower and change your clothes.

Skip did both, and then he took the day’s apparel downstairs to the laundry room with the intention of traveling to his new post completely clean. For over an hour he sat on a plastic chair among the thudding machines—hiding, essentially, evading scrutiny—in a rising tide of confusion and dread. He climbed out of it momentarily to fold his clothes and was dragged back down. He sat upright in his chair, back straight, hands in his lap. He remembered that his life was nothing. He focused on that point on the horizon, the solid, the fixed, the prominent goal: the defeat of Communism. The panic subsided.

Soon he stood out front of the BOQ under a dark but rainless sky. Shuttles came four per hour. He boarded the next one and traveled at the base limit of “15 MPH/24 KPH” through this town of green buildings

with identical corrugated roofs, out to the last stop just inside the gate, and then in a taxi into the town of Angeles, a main street of asphalt, tangled dirt lanes, bars and brothels and shanties. “Would you like to meet some ladies?” the cabbie asked. “No, thanks.” “Then will you go to the carnival?” Yes, why not, he’d go to the carnival, what had he come to town for anyway? Two acres of dirt was all this carnival needed for its mildewed brown tents with shuddering frayed hemp ropes, its half dozen rides, its loudspeakers playing the local radio station, its grand, faded murals raised up in front of the sideshows. As he paid his driver, pleading children boxed him in, and angry vendors chased them away. He bought peanuts wrapped in a page from a magazine. Liked the look of the Mermaid of Sulu on a mural and went in to see. He was the only patron. She had long black hair tied back with plastic flowers. Her small breasts were cupped, clasped, by a bikini top. Of what material the tail? He couldn’t see, some kind of cloth. It didn’t swing like a fish’s. With her arms she shoved herself back and forth in a glass tank about four feet high and eight feet long, set on a platform three feet above the earth. She came up for air, went down, back and forth, back and forth. Broke the surface again and reached for a white towel hung on the tank’s rim, dried her hands and face, took cigarettes and lighter from their perch beside the towel, lit a Marlboro skillfully with damp fingers, smoked a minute, waved her hand at him to leave, to go away, and turned her back. He left and made for another tent—the Five Dwarfs of Bohol. Where was Bohol? Somewhere in these islands, he assumed, he’d look at a map sometime. For now he’d only meet some of its citizens, the small, jolly, bearded men depicted on a huge banner stretched above the entrance, two of them working their gold mine with their glinty-pointed picks, the other three hauling a barrow heaped with winking nuggets —Franco, Carlo, Paulo, Santo, Marco, odd names, magical men. But inside were not these men. In five large bassinets the dwarfs lay in dirty diapers, blind, spastic, comatose, with their names, ages, and weights displayed on cards. Between seventeen and twenty-four years old. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-three pounds … Not beards, but long filaments of peach fuzz never trimmed. Their limbs jerked, their milky eyes shivered in their heads … Flies landing on them … Sands limped outside and boarded the roller coaster, nothing too impressive, the kind of thing disassembled and trucked from town to town, and yet what it lacked in

height and depth it made up for in speed and torque, and as the cars swooped down an incline or rammed into a bend, as the whole structure lurched and swayed, death stopped his throat, for who oversaw the assembly, who looked after this ride, who vouched for its safety?—No one. Expect a tragedy. Good and dizzy, he descended from this amusement and stood once more in front of the tent of the mermaid, the wet prisoner. Sunset now. New Year’s Eve. Throughout the afternoon, fireworks had sounded sporadically, now more and more. Not whistles and bangs. A peripheral crepitation, pops and bursts from off somewhere. On the tall poster the mermaid smiled and didn’t seem the type to smoke Marlboros. He had an impulse to go in again and further oppress himself.

An air force jeep pulled up quite near, driven by an airman. Voss was the passenger. He disembarked and they stood together before the gigantic discolored illustration. “Was this your appointment?”

“Yes.” “Your briefing?” “Right.” Feeling frightened, hilarious. “Do you want to go in?” “Actually, I was here a couple of days ago. You go ahead.” “I’ve already been,” Skip said sadly. “Let’s talk a little more.”

sure.

The two Americans sat at a vendor’s linoleum table, each with a bottle of San Miguel. Looking most out of place. Voss wore a pin-striped shirt, brown slacks, brown wing-tip shoes. He looked like a Bible salesman. So did Skip.

Skip said, “So this isn’t a coincidence.” “Surely you understand I have a purpose here.” “Yeah. I just said so.” “I’m here to shake you up.” “You haven’t succeeded.” “Good enough,” Voss said. “I just hope I’ve been heard.” “All I’ve heard is a lot of ungrateful nonsense.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Look, I agree there’s such a thing as evolution. Things are changing,

we’re a new generation, but—what have you got against the old guard?” “Nothing at all. They’re running the show. But not the colonel, right? The colonel’s a show unto himself.”

“Do you know him at all? Aside from the course of his you took?” “I know him. I worked for him.” “Really?” “All last summer and fall. Old F.X. He kidnapped me. Had me doing

research.” “Research on what?” “Anything and everything. He called me his clerk. I think his idea

was if he had to be a prisoner in Langley, he’d better take a prisoner of his own, you know? But I owe the guy. I’ve gone up two grades since then.”

“Wow.”

bince June. “That’s fast.” “Like lightning.” “He did that for you?” “Skip, no. It wasn’t the colonel who got me promoted. But after I’d

been with him, folks took an interest.” “Good. That’s great.” “No, no, no. You’re not picking this up fast enough.” “What. Tell me.” “Folks took an interest in me because folks have taken an interest in

the colonel.” Here was a moment for staying still, betraying nothing. “… An in

terest?” “Now you’re getting it.” “I mean, when you say he was ‘a prisoner’ in Langley …” “Now he gets it.” The next question would have to be whether the colonel had landed

in real trouble, fate-provoking, career-wrecking difficulty. But the question to follow that one was whether the colonel still had trouble, and then, after that: Who else has trouble? Am I, for instance, in trouble?

Therefore he swallowed all questions. And Voss was spitting them out now. “What happened in Mindanao fourteen months ago?” “I guess you must have seen the report.” “I read it. I did the decode. I was sitting right by the telex when it

came in ‘Eyes Only.’ ” “Well, if it came in Eyes Only, why did you decode it?” “Eyes Only is not a legal classification, Fm sure you know. It’s out of

James Bond.” “Well, still—as a courtesy.” “As a courtesy to whom?” “As a courtesy to me, and to the recipient.” “We look at everything directed to the colonel. Or from the colonel.” “Then you know how things went down there.” “Yeah. The colonel botched it.” “That’s not what my report says, Rick. Read it again.” “Can you tell me why he’s wasting valuable time and resources trying

to run down newsreel footage of a ball game?” “No, I can’t. Baseball?” “Football. A football game. He tried to commission a transpacific

flight for some cans of film. Does he think he’s the president?” “The colonel has his reasons for whatever he does.” His blood roared.

He was ready to hit Voss with a bottle. “What football game?” “Notre Dame versus Michigan State. The one last month.” “I have no idea.” “The colonel’s collecting more intelligence on the Notre Dame-Michigan State game than he is on the enemy.” Voss looked at his watch,

signaled the airman. “Are you carrying his football film to him?” “Skip. Skip. Nobody’s giving him any football film.” He stood up and

held out his hand. As firmly as he could, Skip accepted it. “Look,” Voss said, and as he searched for words his eyes broadcast human sympathy. “See you in the war.” His jeep was running. He turned away.

Sands drank two more beers, and when darkness had fallen he wandered away from the fun and ate fish and rice in a café. Through the doorway he watched a minor spectacle in the street, a drunken young man with one burned and bandaged arm in a sling, who nevertheless was able to light a succession of firecrackers and toss them at the feet of leaping, squealing passersby. By 9:00 p.m. the town rattled all over with celebratory explosions. Independence Day in San Marcos had impressed him, but this was wilder and decidedly more dangerous, full of actual gunfire and large booming cadences, as if the entire night were under attack. He thought he’d probably find it more peaceful in South Vietnam.

He strolled into the red-light district—Angeles consisted of little else — the slop, the lurid stink, the thirsty, flatly human, openmouthed stares of the women as he passed dank shacks beating with rocknroll music, as hot and rich with corruption as vampire mausoleums. The wanton mystery of the Southeast Asian night: he loved it as passionately as he loved America, but secretly, with dark lust; and he admitted to himself without evasion that he didn’t care if he never went home.

Beginning two days after Christmas, James ceased calling his friends, stopped taking Stevie’s calls. He spent the days watching cartoons on television with his tenyear-old brother, Burris, sharing as best he could in the serenity of a mindless childhood.

On New Year’s Eve he went to a party. Stevie was there. She was angry, and she left him alone. She stayed out back in the dark with Donna and her other friends, the alternate cheerleaders and future runner-up prom queens, huddled under a cloud of resentment. Good. The one he’d really always wanted was Anne Vandergress, who’d come to Palo Verde High School the same year as James and who stood now in the doorway of the kitchen looking beautiful, talking to a couple of guys he’d never seen before.

He drank rum. He’d never before tasted it. “We call this a three-ohtwo,” somebody said. If he was going somewhere to be blown up by a mortar or something, then he wished he’d never started going around with Stevie Dale. “Well, hell. That three-oh-two goes down easier’n beer does,” he agreed.

“Now put you some in a Coke.”

It was Anne Vandergress talking. She was a honey-blonde who always wore nice makeup, and he’d never approached her because to him she’d seemed too young and pure and elevated, then his last full year in school he’d heard she was dating a football player, a senior, Dan Cordroy, then another one, Cordroy’s buddy Will Webb, then half the goddamn team, all seniors, and he’d heard she was putting out for every last one. “You’re so fucking beautiful, you know that?” he said. “I never told you that,” he said, “did I ever tell you that?”—though it seemed to James she was a littie less beautiful than he remembered, a little heavier, thicker in the face. More grown-up, but not in a good way; instead in a way that reminded him of middle age.

One particular swallow of rum stalled in his throat and nearly gagged him, but then it went down all right, and after that his throat felt numb, and he could have swallowed nails or glass or hot coals.

He rushed through an hour like a physical thing, a hallway. His lips turned to rubber and he drooled while saying, “I’ve never been this drunk in my life.”

People seemed to be circling him, laughing, but he wasn’t sure. The room tilted sideways and the very wall knocked him on his ass. Hands and arms grappling him upright like the tentacles of a monster …

He arrived in his body from some dark place, and he was standing outdoors holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.

Donna loomed like a wreck coming at you. Mad as fire. “Why would you say that? Why would anybody talk that way?” Stevie in the background with her head bowed, weeping, girls around her patting her hair and smoothing away the grief.

Rollo held him upright in the yard. Donna dive-bombing him, you couldn’t shake her. “Donna, Donna — ” Rollo was laughing, snorting, barking—”He can’t hear you, Donna. Stop the lecture.”

“Stevie was almost pregnant. Don’t you realize she was just about pregnant? How can you act like this?” “Almost pregnant?” Rollo said. “A/most?” James was on his knees with his arms around Rollo’s legs. “She thought she was pregnant, okay, Rollo? Okay? He can’t just spit her out the last night he’s in town and just go to Vietnam. Okay, Rollo?”

“Okay!”

“Tell him that!”

“Okay! I’ll tell him! James,” Rollo said, “James. You got to talk to Stevie. You sure hurt her feelings, James. Stand up, stand up.”

His legs rolled him over to Stevie standing by a stone barbecue pit with a fire in it. He said something, and Stevie kissed him—her soggy teenybopper breath. “And you’re smoking a cigarette,” she said, “and you don’t even smoke.”

“I smoke. I always did smoke. You just didn’t know about it, is what.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I smoke.”

Something else happened and Stevie disappeared and was replaced by, or turned into, her friend Donna. “YouVe hurt her for the last time, James.”

“I smoke,” he tried to say. He could neither shut his jaws nor raise his chin from his chest.

He was back inside the kitchen, where Anne Vandergress seemed no longer beautiful. She seemed old and worn-out. Her hair was frizzy. Her face was flat and red and sweaty and her smile looked dead. She laughed along with everybody else while he announced she was a whore. “It took me a while—but you’re a whore. You’re a whore, all right,” he said very loudly. “I just want you to figure that out like everybody else already did,” he said, “that you’re a complete, slutty whore.” Anne laughed grotesquely. She looked like she’d been pulling a train all night. His mind was stuck in a warp and he kept saying, “What a whore—what a whore—what a whore — “

They threw him on the ground and hosed him down. The dirt turned to slime around him and he crouched in it, flailing, trying to stand upright.

This was not vastly different from certain moments of his basic training. His feet splayed and he flopped on his face and ate mud, thinking: All right, men: here we go.

1967

O n the afternoon of January 1, 1967, Nguyen Hao drove to Tan Son Nhut Airport with Jimmy Storm, a man very close to the colonel. Jimmy Storm almost always wore civilian clothing, though the first time Hao had seen the lad he’d been squatting on his heels outside the CIA-Psy Ops villa taking a break, smoking a cigarette, in U.S. Army fatigues with the hash marks of a sergeant.

This afternoon Mr. Jimmy wore this same uniform, and the entire distance to the airport, Mr. Jimmy, or Sergeant Storm, sitting rigidly upright, with his cap on, in the backseat, where he’d never sat before, said nothing at all—possibly a little nervous, Hao thought, about greeting the new arrival.

But this silence might have come from anywhere. Mr. Jimmy Storm was a strange and complicated young man. By the time they saw William Sands coming down the gangway of the Air America DC-3, ducking his head a bit against the noise of jets and the onslaught of damp wind, Mr. Jimmy had recovered all his volubility and spoke with Sands cheerfully, and too rapidly for Hao to follow.

They put two footlockers in the trunk of the black Chevrolet, and the third had to go in the backseat with the newcomer, who asked his hosts to call him Skip.

“Right, right, right,” Mr. Jimmy agreed, and then he disagreed: “But let me call you Skipper. Skip’s too short. It just skates past.” Now Mr. Jimmy sat up front with Hao.

Hao said, “Mr. Skip, I’m glad to welcome you. Your uncle knows my nephew. Now I know your uncle’s nephew.”

“I have something for you.” The newcomer handed over a carton of cigarettes. From the box they looked almost like Marlboros, but they were the other kind. Winstons. Hao said, “Thank you so much, Mr. Skip.”

A bicycle approached on their right as they waited for traffic. Mr.

Jimmy rolled down his window rapidly and said, “Diddy mao!” and gestured, and the rider veered off.

Mr. Skip said in Vietnamese, “May I speak Vietnamese, Mr. Hao?” and Hao answered in Vietnamese, “It’s better. My English is that of a child.”

“Today is our New Year,” Mr. Skip said. “Soon I’ll be celebrating another, your Tet.”

“Your pronunciation is quite good.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you come many times to Vietnam?”

“No. Never.”

“That’s surprising,” Hao said.

“I took an intensive course,” Mr. Skip said, using the English words for “intensive course.”

“So there it is, huh?—all seven hundred pounds,” said young Mr. Jimmy, reaching back to place his hand on the footlocker. “The keys to the kingdom of the Duke of Earl.”

Hao was suddenly convinced that despite never having met him, Jimmy Storm floundered in a deep hatred for Skip Sands. Skip, for his part, seemed suspicious of Storm and hesitated slightly before saying, “More like two hundred pounds.”

Sundown, and the bellies of the clouds flared red. They entered Saigon and passed along a street of homes where kids played jump rope in the twilight, and snatches of the jumpers’ magical chants reached their ears. Then over to the GI streets, the avenues of wretched commerce, past doorways like mouths, each delivering its music, its voices, its stench, and then across the river and into what was officially Gia Dinh Province and down Chi Lang Street to the CIA-Psy Ops villa where nobody lived for very long, only Jimmy Storm in his cluttered bedroom with its chugging air conditioner, just off the parlor with its rattan tables and kapok-cushioned sofa and nearly empty bookshelves and its bamboo bar—no stools —and a framed painting of horses in a stable on one of its pale yellow walls.

The black Chevrolet stayed at the villa. Hao helped the Americans with the unloading—Mr. Skip’s duffel and his cane basket and the three footlockers—and said goodbye and walked home along the broken pavement beside a sewage canal, seeing his way by a flashlight.

They lived above and behind the family’s defunct shop, he, his wife Kim, and occasional relatives. The shop had come from Hao’s family; the relatives were Kim’s. It had been dark for an hour when Hao entered by the alley, but he heard her sandals scraping in the concrete court out back as she puttered among the fruit plants she raised in large pots. Hao turned on the overhead fluorescent light in the parlor to summon her.

He wanted to talk. It seemed to him that having been asked to meet a member of the colonel’s family on his arrival, he’d now solidified an alliance and crossed a river in his life, which was also hers. She had a right to form some general appreciation of their circumstances.

He sat in his chair before his red plastic electric fan. Quite soon Kim came in, middle-aged, splayfooted, a stick frame with fat daubed onto it, wiry arms and bowed legs with a jutting paunch. Her face had become somewhat like those on the stone frogs in gardens, and somewhat like that of the Buddha’s—jowly, pop-eyed. She sat catching her breath and said, “I’m fine today.”

“It’s a miracle,” he said, because he knew she liked to use such terms.

“I took the asthma remedy from the old story.”

“Ouch,” he said, “that’s a crazy idea.”

“But it worked. I’m fine.”

“Let me get you a checkup with an American doctor. I’m sure Mr. Colonel can arrange it.” “Leave me alone,” she said, as always, “I’m the only one going to fill my grave.” She took good care of things and was a fine friend to him. He held her dear and wished her a long life. But her health wasn’t good.

They sat together while the red fan whirred and the tabletop hummed underneath it. Kim shut her eyes and breathed through her nose, this on the recommendation of yet another practitioner.

It had really been a very long illness, complicated probably by the loss of her nephew some years ago—four years? Often she came back to the topic of Thu’s suicide. Hao could see how she looked somewhere else, longingly, while something, maybe just the sound of her own voice, dragged her down into the discussion against her will: Do you think it could have been an accident, do you think he could have simply been experimenting, wondering, looking, smelling the fuel, I don’t know. And Hao would say, I don’t know either; but Thu had to go to some trouble to come into possession of the gasoline. I don’t like Buddha, she would say.

There are many gods, she would say, with Buddha things are too simple,

just look around, do things look simple? No, no.

Because in order to talk to her he must enter her world, he asked, “What do your dreams tell you lately?” “That my breathing will stay clear and my cousin will be married

soon.” “Cousin? Which cousin?” “Lang! Do I have to take you to the side room and show you Lang

sleeping on her pallet?” “I forgot which one was staying with us.” “There are two! Lang and Nhu.” “It’s time to talk about our situation.” “Talk.” “You realize Mr. Colonel has a project near Cu Chi, around Good

Luck Mountain.” “It’s dangerous to help him. Can you dodge the wind?” “I’m already helping him. I’ve talked to several headmen, I’ve

marked the location of tunnel openings on his maps.” “If you take sides, what will happen to us?” “I’ve taken a side. I believe we have to consider what happens when

the country’s reunified. I think we’ll have to leave.” “Leave?” “Leave the country. Emigrate. Go to another country.” “But we can’t!” “What keeps us? There’s nobody left in the household.” “There’s nobody left because you don’t have work for them. Why did

you sell the other two shops when this one was already closed? Anyway, there’s Minh.” “Minh has his own opportunities and will make his own arrange

ments.” “You mean sooner or later he’ll be killed.” “Wife, please, it’s time to consider these matters carefully.” Often when they spoke of things that upset her, she stood up and

moved around without realizing it. Picked up the pillows and tossed

them between her hands and clapped the dust from them, or used a knee-high whisk to stir the lint on the wooden floor. Hao’s mother had used such a broom. His grandmother too. There’d been one in every household he could remember having entered.

“I met Mr. Colonel’s nephew. His name is Skip. Let’s have him to

dinner.” “It’s not good to have Americans in the house.” “If we don’t choose sides, neither side will trust us. We’ll be the peo

ple in the middle. That kind of person is eventually put into a camp

somewhere, no matter which side wins.” “So you’ve joined the Americans. If the Americans win, we can stay.” “No. The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their home

land. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to

fight awhile and then leave.” “Hao! Then why help them?” “They can’t win, but they can prove themselves a friend to their

friends. And I believe they’re honorable and will do so.” “But you have friends in the Vietminh.” “They’re called the Vietcong now.” “Trung. Trung Than is your friend.” Hao said, “I don’t want to talk about the Vietcong. The Communists

believe only in the future. In its name they’ll destroy everything, they’ll

fill the future with nothing. I want to talk about the Americans.” “Talk. I can’t stop you.” “If I help these Americans, we don’t have to be refugees, they’ll help

us get away. Maybe to someplace like Singapore. I believe it can be done. Singapore is a very international place. We won’t be made to feel like outcasts.”

“Have you talked to them about Singapore?”

“I’ll talk when the time is right. There are other places too. Manila, maybe Jakarta, maybe Kuala Lumpur. As long as we don’t have to be refugees in a camp.”

“I’ll pray the Americans destroy the Vietminh.” “I don’t hold any hope, Kim. There’s an old saying: The anvil outlasts

the hammer.” “Which one are we? We’re neither one. We get smashed between.” “And another: Every cock fights best on his own dunghill.”

“Hah! Here’s one more old saying: A rooster is a chicken, but men are like a bunch of hens.”

“I never heard this saying.”

She laughed with delight, heading toward the kitchen.

“I know,” Hao called, “you’re happiest when you make a fool of your husband.” But it warmed him to hear her laugh, she did it so seldom since Thu had gone. She’d treasured Thu as a gift. The two brothers had come from her dead sister. They were all she had. Now she had only Minh.

In the kitchen Nguyen Kim lit the Primus stove under the teakettle. Paused before the shelf and uncapped, one by one, her small bottles of fragrances and inhaled from each. The therapy of breath occupied her much. These days rosemary in particular intrigued her. She wanted to blend it with the extract of patchouli, not as a curative but just for the perfume, and she couldn’t find a way; concocted, they seemed to produce a third fragrance, not entirely pleasant.

Her asthma remedy had been delivered to her in a dream. She hadn’t told him that. And she used a syrup from a Chinese herbalist in the Cho Lon District. He wouldn’t say what it was but she’d heard they used the meat and skin of the gecko. Hao disapproved of these things.

Kim viewed her husband as a gambler and a dreamer. He’d surprised them all by selling two of their dry-goods stores and leasing the third to a man who’d quickly lost the business. Now her relatives camped among its naked shelves. Rather than putting his money into something else, Hao used it to meet their daily needs and had instead invested all his time, his very soul, in these Americans. Did he think that wasn’t clear? Did he think she had to be told?

She appreciated the two girls living with them, Lang and Nhu, they helped out, cousins from her ville who couldn’t be called servants. She had no way of telling them that under certain circumstances she wished they’d behave like servants. But it was no good unless they understood this, unless their good-for-nothing mother, her aunt, had already told them this—

She steered her mind away from ungenerous thoughts.

She believed that when the blood exhaled a disease it took with it certain spiritual impurities, and the convalescent experienced a fleeting state of purity.

In such a state, she believed, clear thought was possible. Even inspiration, perhaps.

Hao didn’t discuss finances with her other than to say if they didn’t make major purchases, they could go on as they had before. That was good enough. Gambler, dreamer, yes; but he was a dependable man, and she respected him. His father, bringing native goods down the Saigon River to trade with the French, had built a good business. Hao— cursed with a childless marriage, the scion of a dwindling line —Hao had overseen its slow destruction. She wouldn’t ask him to stay here. If he wanted to run, they’d run. And why cry about tomorrow? Maybe long before they had to tear up their roots they’d be dead.

She carried the pot and two cups out to him where he sat with his hands on either arm of the chair, his eyes closed, meditating in the breeze from his electric fan.

She settled herself and poured for them both. “I need an oath from

you,” she said. “Tell me.” “I want you to promise me that whatever happens, you will take care

of Minh.”

ŤT • 77

1 promise. “Too quick!” “No. Understand me, wife: when I said Minh had his own opportuni

ties, I meant he’s already making his way. He no longer flies jets, you know. He flies U.S. transport helicopters —only for transport, and only for the colonel. He’s already safe. And Mr. Colonel and I will keep him safe. Hear me again, wife: I promise.”

“And one more.” “How many more?” “Only this: If we leave, will we ever come back?” “If it’s possible.” “Promise me.” “I make this vow to you. If it’s possible, we’ll come back home.” “Even if I come back as ashes,” she said.

T o hear Kim speak openly of her concerns surprised him. She’d never said anything like this, was careful always to hide her best hopes from the scrutiny of the powers, from the vague assembly of her innumerable gods.

The conversation thrilled him. She was more than considering the move, she was bargaining over it, compromising, as with something inevitable. They went upstairs, and despite the heat, which always stayed a bit longer in the top of the house, he embraced her and held her until she slept. War and war and war like a series of typhoons against their lives, and now, on the other side of it all, a distant peak of safety, a place to travel toward. And Kim’s breath came quietly, just as she’d claimed, no more of the wheezing, at least not tonight.

He moved to his own bed, putting his clothes and his sandals on the floor just outside the net—his plastic sandals, which said on the instep, in English, “Made in Japan.” The high walls between cultures were dissolving. Collapsing as mud. He and Kim might go anywhere. Malaysia. Singapore. Hong Kong. Even Japan was possible. He laughed to think he could walk out into the road now and remark to someone, “Japan is possible.”

Kim woke him in the night. He looked at the clock’s radium hands. Quarter to four. “What is it?”

She said, “Dogs were barking down the lane.”

“Sleep. I’ll listen for a while.”

Until she slept again he lay quietly, watching the tiny ember of insecticidal incense burning on the dresser across the room. From out in the lane he heard Trung—of course it was Trung, who else could it be?—imitating a gecko’s warble. Trung had never before arrived this late. But a cautious man would vary his approach.

Hao reached down and drew up the netting and swung his feet out. He took his trousers, shirt, and Japanese sandals to the head of the stairs and dressed there and stood in the darkness hearing nothing, tasting his own breath. Headed downstairs as softly as he could. The cousins slept right below his feet, in the shop of which the staircase made the slanting ceiling. There was no way to go quietly, every tread had something to say. At the bottom he waited until he was sure he hadn’t wakened the two girls.

He made his way into the kitchen, to the window behind the gas stove, and turned the clasp. As soon as he opened it he heard a small cough just outside.

1 rung? “Good morning.” “Good morning.” “I’m sorry to disturb you.” “I can’t offer you anything hot. Would you like a glass of water?” “Thanks for your kindness, but I’m not thirsty.” “I’ll come outside.” He went out the kitchen door into the tiny courtyard, where Trung

stood by the wall in the dark. “My cigarettes are upstairs,” Hao said. “I don’t think we should smoke. We might be seen.” The two men squatted side by side against the wall beneath the

kitchen window. Hao said, “You take a chance coming into the city.” “It’s a risk to be anywhere now. Just a couple of years ago, I could

travel in a wide area. Now we’re fugitives anywhere in the South.” “And coming to the house, it’s a risk for both of us.” “More of a risk for me, I’d say.” “I’m protecting you, Trung Than. I give you my word.” “I believe you. But it’s best to assume the worst.” “Trung, I understand completely that you have to feel protected every

step we take.” “Don’t push ahead too fast. I don’t yet agree we’re taking steps.” “Each meeting we’ve had has taken us a little farther, don’t you

agree?” “Farther toward an understanding, maybe. But we haven’t actually

taken any steps.” “Are you ready to change that?” “No.” A ploy, in Hao’s opinion, and not an actual refusal. “Before we go any farther,” Trung said, “I have to make sure I’m un

derstood.” “Please tell me. I’m listening.” “It took three days to go north on a Russian ship. That was in ‘54.

They said we’d come back to a reunified country in two years.”

“Go on,” Hao said. “Six years later it took me eleven weeks to get back by Ho s trail, and

on the way I nearly died a hundred times.” Hao said, “I’m listening.” “In ‘64 I realized I’d been waiting ten years to come home. And yet

by then I’d already been back in the South for four years.” “In all these numbers I hear the massing of resentments. You’re dissatisfied,” Hao said. “I’ve been living a contradiction. It isn’t going to go away.”

1 see. “I’ve been a coward. I have to resolve this for myself.” “I’m here to help you any way I can.” “I know that,” Trung said. “But what do you want from this?” “I want to be helpful to an old friend.” “We need to talk honestly. You say you want me to feel safe, and then

you lie. Tell the truth: What do you want from this situation?” “The survival of my family.” “Good.” “And what do you want?” Hao asked. “The survival of the truth.” What now? Philosophy? Hao said: “How can the truth be threatened?

It’s the truth.” “I want the truth to survive inside me.” Hao thought, I’m a businessman; let’s talk profit and loss. But said

only, “I’m trying to understand.”

“I don’t think words can take me any farther in explaining what I’m doing. I just want you to understand that nothing forces me. I’m not in any trouble. I don’t need money. I just need to steer closer to the truth.”

Hao disbelieved him. He was betraying his comrades, what could be the motive for that? Not philosophy.

Squatting at Hao’s side, Trung leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. It seemed he might make his farewell. “All right,” he said instead, “let’s have a smoke together.”

Hao crept back upstairs and found his cigarettes and his American Zippo lighter. At the head of the landing he got two going and brought them downstairs, wondering if the Monk would still be waiting. There he was. Very good. Tonight they’d take important steps.

Hao said, “He wants to meet you.” “He wants too much.” “He’s willing to protect you.” “As long as he can’t identify me, I won’t need his protection.” “He wants to protect you from his own people. From his side, not

from yours.” “I’ll be the one to worry about both sides.” They smoked, each with his hands cupped around the glow, Hao

thinking, I can’t even light a cigarette for my friend, he can’t survive a light on his face. It’s years since I’ve seen his eyes. “Trung, in order to get where you’re going you need a protector, and this protector has to trust you.” “It’s not time yet.” His friend scraped the ember from his cigarette and put the butt in his shirt pocket. Hao said, “Three years ago, shortly before you first contacted me

again, my nephew burned himself alive behind the New Star Temple.” “I know about it.” “Is that what you’re doing too? Destroying yourself?” What a slow, thoughtful man the Monk had become. He’d always

had a dogged sincerity, but this was deeper. His silences were searches. They were inspiring. “There’s been a lie told. I’ve told it. I’m going to let the truth reclaim me. If I can’t survive that process, so be it.”

“We have to express a more intelligible motive.” “No. The truth. They’ll assume I’m lying anyway.” “It takes time to gain trust. They’ll need something. Can you give me

something?” “This time I’ll tell you something they probably already know. Next

time a little more.” “Ah. We’re going to cross, but we’re not going to jump.” “The ones returning from the North say a big push is coming. Not

soon. Probably around the next Tet.” “I’ve heard nothing about this.” “Your colonel has. Surely he’s heard rumors. But I’m telling you it’s

not a rumor. Everyone can feel it. It’s coming.” “He’ll want to debrief you. A few days’ interrogation. It’s standard.” “Don’t expect me to be stupid.” “Forgive me.”

“Fm the one controlling the process. I have to be.”

u \ yy

As you say. “I need time before I give him something specific, something he can

confirm.” “All right.” “I need time. Fm not ready to cross.”

Th e neighborhood roosters crowed for the third time. Trung had just the frailest dawn by which to make his way out of Hao’s neighborhood— fruit trees, dirt yards, wood homes, fluorescent lights glowing in the kitchens of the early risers, a sewage ditch winding down among the yards. He envied his friend this simple peace.

When he reached the thoroughfare he paused to light his cigarette butt and watch a couple of baker’s boys on their bikes, gliding by in the silence with the morning’s bread.

He remembered walking arm in arm with Hao at just such an hour in quite another universe: reeling and wild, two lads too drunk on purloined rice brandy to care how Master might punish them. Remembered precisely the size and color of that night’s moon and the unbounded friendliness of the young world, and their voices singing an old song: “Yesterday I followed you down the road … Today I chose a flower for your grave …”

A t lunchtime on January 2, his first full day in-country, Skip Sands waited for his uncle at the Club Nautique beside the Saigon River. Junks and sampans and shanties choked the opposite bank downstream, but not much moved on the brown water. He studied the menu, all appetite gone, and played with his utensils and listened to a loud miscellany of birdcalls, some of them almost sentimentally musical, others angry. Sweat trickled down his spine. His eye fell on a patron at the next table, an Asian man with an incomprehensibly large black growth descending from his scalp and covering the nape of his neck. Across from this man sat a woman with a monkey in her lap. She scowled, the monkey gave her no cheer, the menu made her unhappy.

A single very loud blast—mortar? rocket? sonic boom? —caused a lot of consternation. The monkey lunged to the end of its leash and danced from side to side under the table. Several patrons stood up. The tables went quiet, and waiters gathered at the railing to peer up the river toward downtown. Someone laughed, others talked, the dinnerware clinked again on the porcelain, the moment resumed.

Colonel Sands was just entering the terrace and said, “My boy, settle yourself.”

The colonel had traveled by chopper from Good Luck Mountain, so Sands understood. Red mud speckled his canvas combat boots and his cuffs, but he wore street clothes and looked alarmingly usual, as if all he cared about were the local sights and the golf. Already he had an amber highball in his hand.

Sands took a seat across from him. “Is everything good? You’re stashed at the billet.” “Yes.” “When did you get in?” “Last night.” “Seen anyone from the embassy?” “Not yet.” “What are we having today?” “Colonel, let me start right out by asking you something about San

Marcos.” “Before we eat?” “I need to clear something up.” “Sure.” “Were you passing orders to the major?” “The major?” “Aguinaldo? The major?—the last time we saw each other.” “Right. The Del Monte House. San Carlos.” “San Marcos.” “Right.” “Aguinaldo? The Filipino?” “Yes. The Filipino. No. I wasn’t running any Filipino.”

“What about the German? Was he yours?” “It’s the Political Section in Manila runs everybody. I’m not the Polit

ical Section. I’m just a sick dog they can’t force themselves to shoot.” “All right. Maybe I won’t press it.” “No, no. You’ve started, so don’t quit. What’s the problem?” “Maybe I’m out of line.” “Come at me. We work together. Let’s get it done.” “Fine. Then what about Carignan?” “Who?” “Carignan, sir. The priest on Mindanao.” Now, he sensed, his uncle appreciated how serious he was. “Oh, yes,”

the colonel said. “Father Carignan. The collaborator. Somebody put

him out of his misery.” “Which somebody?” “If I remember right, that operation originated with the Philippine

Army command. That’s how we understood it from the report.”

“I wrote the report. I rode a donkey all the way to the VOA substation near Carmen and sent a coded report to Manila to be forwarded to you, as instructed. And I only mentioned the local army—barely mentioned them.”

“I believe it was a Philippine Army operation. And I further believe it was run by our friend Eddie Aguinaldo. And we had every reason to believe that this Carignan was involved in the transfer of weapons to and among Muslim guerilla groups on Mindanao.”

“The priest was killed by a dart. A sumpit, they call it.” “It’s a native weapon.” “I’ve never seen one except in the hands of that German at the Del

Monte House.”

I see. “You weren’t running the German.” “I’ve said I wasn’t.” “That’s good enough for me.” “I don’t care if it is or it’s not.” “Fuck you, sir.” “I see.” While the colonel considered a reply and ran a finger, a trem

bling finger, around the rim of his highball, Skip wilted. He’d armored his soul for this assault. But he hadn’t expected to strike flesh. “Well,” the

colonel said, “I’m repeating myself, but what’s the problem?” “I just worry,” Sands was able to say. For the moment the colonel said no more. Skip’s fire was out. Why

hadn’t he known he could hurt this giant? So ignorant of these older men: Why don’t I have a father?

The colonel said, “Look. These things happen rarely, but they happen. Somebody’s name gets mentioned by more than one source, somebody gets a notion, somebody issues a report, somebody wants an adventure—you know how that one goes, don’t you?—and pretty soon there we are. That you’ve witnessed this kind of cock-up will turn out to be an invaluable experience, Skip.”

“I’d say I was more than just a witness.”

“My point is you see the power of the beast we’re riding. Take care how you prod it.” His bulldog face seemed to speak of a special sadness. He sipped from his drink. “Are my files secure?”

“Yes, sir, they are.” “How did you like Monterey?” “Unbelievably beautiful.” “Order me a hot dog in Vietnamese.” A waiter was pouring water. Sands spoke with him. “He says it’s

buffet-style, please be his guest.” “Remarkable. But I did understand ‘buffet.’ And you met Hao

Nguyen.” “Hao? Oh, right.” “He picked you up at Tan Son Nhut. Did you speak Vietnamese to

him?” “Yes, sir, I did.” “Are you hungry?” “I might order off the menu.” “Skip.” “Yes, sir.” “Are we going to feel bad about talking frankly to each other? Be

cause I don’t want that. We can’t have it.” “All right. I appreciate that.” “Good.” The colonel took himself to the buffet.

When he rejoined his nephew he carried a bowl of crab in a white sauce; he sat down and forked and swallowed several bites, hardly chewing. He took a slug of his drink. “What about Rick Voss—Voss? Was he at the house last night?”

“Rick Voss? No.”

“You’ll meet him soon enough. Too soon.”

“I met him at Clark before I left. He came looking for me.”

“He did?”

“Mainly to ask about you.”

“And what was the line of inquiry?”

“He wanted to talk about an article you’d submitted to the journal.”

“I don’t give a curse for some of these young pups coming up. Present company excepted.” “I hope so.” He thought he heard his uncle sigh. “I tell you, Skip, the world has

turned and carried me into the dark. I got a letter from your cousin Anne just last week”—Anne the colonel’s daughter—”and she’s taken up the anthem of the college leftists, can you believe it? She writes, ‘I think you should look at the motives of our government in Vietnam.’ She’s dating a beatnik, a mulatto. Her mother was scared to tell me. I had to hear about it from your Uncle Ray. ‘The motives of our government’? Jesus Christ. What better motive can the government have than to defy Communism at every turning?”

Skip remembered Anne Sands squatting flat-footed on the sidewalk in a checkered sun suit, bouncing a tiny red ball and scooping up jacks from the pavement; he could summon effortlessly the picture of Anne skipping rope, braids flapping, devoting herself to chants and flying footwork. To hear of her letter made him angry, but her loss of patriotism was secondary—her offense was in passing beyond the clichés of girlhood … A mulatto beatnik?

“Now,” the colonel said, “let’s cheer up, and meet someone.”

He pointed to this someone as he approached, a skinny young man in army fatigues from the waist down, yet sporting a colorful box-cut madras shirt, open and displaying his olive undershirt.

“Sergeant Storm,” Skip said.

“You know him?”

“He met me at the airport last night.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the colonel said. “Jimmy, sit down. Do you want a drink, either of you?”

Skip said no and Jimmy said, “American beer.” Skip was seeing Jimmy for the first time by daylight. A sun-browned face and bright, small, earnest eyes, the same color as Skip’s own —categorized on his IDs as “hazel.” He had spectacular tattoos and a couple of teeth. Stenciled on his undershirt: STORM B.S.

The colonel signaled for a waiter and ordered a beer and a highball and said, “Well, now, here’s a respectful gesture: Jimmy’s buttoning his shirt for us. I think you’re committing a brig offense with that shirt.”

“I’m fashionably insane.” “And you’re appearing in public with your pant legs unbloused.” “I’m not in uniform.” “I think that’s the offense.” Storm said, “Did you eat already, Skipper?” “Not as yet,” Skip confessed. “Skip says you were there to welcome him last night. I thank you for

that.” “Not a problem.” “And Skip says he met Voss. Voss found him at Clark before he even

got here.” “Don’t ruin my beer with funny talk,” Jimmy said. “Voss asked him about an article I’ve been working on.” To Skip the

colonel said, “I’ve withdrawn that piece. It lacked an organizing theme, to say the least. I was just flailing at the pond of my notions with a fat paddle and going in circles. Making much spray. What did he talk about?—Voss.”

“I kind of shook him off before much got said.” “Did he describe the article?” “No, he didn’t. Can I get a look?” “Why don’t you help me write it?” “I don’t know. If I see the draft—” “If I can find the draft. It was a garbled mess. I picked it up after a

year in a drawer, and I couldn’t follow my own ideas.” “Well,” Jimmy said, “that’s what you get for spending a year in a drawer.”

“Look, I didn’t submit that draft to the journal. Voss undertook that

on his own.” “Isn’t that overstepping?” “Goddamn right it’s overstepping. It’s an act of sabotage. What else

did he say? I mean at Clark.” “Well, let’s see,” Skip said. “He talked about your interest in a football game.”

“Notre Dame-Michigan State. Incredible game. Very instructive. I’m trying to get some film of it and work up a lecture. I’d like to take it around to the troops. Morale in this theater is dismal. The land itself sends up a scent that drives you crazy. Skip, it’s not a different place. It’s a different world under a different God.”

“This is getting to be a regular philosophical obsession,” Jimmy said. Skip said, “Philosophical obsessions win wars.” “Touché,” Jimmy said. Sands said, “Touché?” “How’s the French coming?” the colonel asked. “I’m always at it,” Sands assured him. “Skip and I got to reminiscing,” the colonel said. “I haven’t briefed

him.” Jimmy said, “Can I get some of this chow first?” “Go to it. I’ll visit the gents’.” Both men excused themselves, and Jimmy soon returned with a plate

in one hand and a large bread roll in the other. While Storm tried to eat, Skip quizzed him in the Agency’s sweat-room style: let your man have a cigarette, but ask questions so fast he can’t smoke it.

“Where are you from, Jimmy?” “Carlyle County, Kentucky. Never going back.” “Your name is B.S. Storm?” “Correct. Billem Stafford Storm.” “Billem?” “B-I–L-L-E-M. It was my grandfather’s nickname. My mother’s father,

William John Stafford. It doesn’t really solve the puzzle, man, it just puts in a crazy piece that doesn’t fit. You start out confused and end up mystified.”

“And they don’t call you Bill.” “Nope.”

“Or Stormy.” “Jimmy’s good. Jimmy gets you a response.” Skip said, “Are you army Intelligence?” “Psy Ops. Just like you. We want to turn those tunnels into a zone of

psychological mental torture.” “The tunnels?” “The VC tunnels all over Cu Chi. I’m thinking: odorless psychoac

tive substance. Scopolamine. LSD, man. Let it seep through the system. Those bastards would come swarming out of those holes with their brains revved way past the redline.”

Gee.

“Psy Ops is all about unusual thinking, man. We want ideas blown up right to where they’re gonna pop. We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

“Rick Voss isn’t Psy Ops, is he?” “Nope.” “But you deal with him as a regular thing?” ” ‘Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer.’ ” “Who said that?” “The colonel.” “Well, but he’s quoting somebody.” “He’s quoting himself.” “He usually is.” “Voss is an evil prick.” “Then it’s good he’s on our side.” “Whose side? In a liquid situation, the sides get stirred together.” “He’s quoting Attila the Hun, or Julius Caesar.” “Who?Voss? — Oh.” “The colonel.” “Right. So those files, man. Is that the whole kaboodle? The whole

Tree of Smoke?” “Oh, a little of everything.” Skip let him eat. Storm was having the crab, and thin, delicate fries,

which he ate with his fingers. He broke a small silence by saying, “Do you think the guys who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, did they ever feel bad about it later?”

“No, they didn’t,” Skip said quite confidently.

“Here comes the chief.” As the colonel rejoined them Skip said, “Jimmy tells me he’s interested in tunnels.”

The colonel held a can of Budweiser and an empty glass. He carefully poured one into the other and sucked the foam away and took a long draught before saying, “Right-o. Now for the skinny. Sergeant Storm is the Psy Ops liaison with CDCIA, and I am the CDCIA liaison with Psy Ops. Together the sergeant and I run a very small, tight program called Labyrinth. Mapping tunnels. I’m sure you know about the VC tunnels.”

“Sure.” “Today they’re VC tunnels. When we have them mapped, their status

changes.” “Mapping. That sounds more like Intelligence. Or Recon.” “Well, now,” the colonel said. “I describe Labyrinth as tight, but our

mission parameters are very elastic. I’d say we’re operating without bene

fit of any clear parameters at all.” “But-Psy Ops?” “Matter of fact, we do have a Recon platoon. And a permanent LZ,

which we’re not allowed to call a base.” “Who does?” “I do. And a real nice bunch of infantry looking after it.” Skip’s blood leapt. “Naturally I’m at your service.” His hands tingled,

and suddenly he wasn’t sweating at all.

“William, I believe we have something in process now that you’ll be a very important part of. A crucial part of. But your part doesn’t begin anytime soon. I’m afraid what I’m going to ask you to do right now involves a whole lot of waiting.”

“Waiting where?” “We’ve got a little villa in the boonies.” Skip’s joy died in his heart. “A villa.” “This is something I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do.” Skip forced himself to say, “I’ll go where you put me.” “I think we like this guy,” Jimmy said. “We’ll have you all set up within the month. In the meantime, if any

of our bunch want you here in Five Corps, you’re at their service, too.” “Very good.”

Jimmy said, “We want to turn those tunnels into a region of hell.” “Jimmy went to mining school.” “You’re kidding.” “It’s all part of a master plan,” Jimmy assured him. “Did you graduate?” “Fuck no,” Jimmy said. “Do I look like a graduate of anything?” After coffee, during which Skip had his lunch—a sweet roll as pallid

and lumpy as his spirits—Storm drove them in the black Chevrolet to the Continental Hotel, where the colonel kept a room on the ground floor, in the back, removed from the noisy lobby. Evidently he kept it permanently—boxes of books and record albums, a typewriter, a phonograph, a desk for working, another desk that served as a bar. The colonel set a record spinning. “This is Peter Paul and Mary in Concert. Listen to this one.” And he bent over the player and squinted and with his thick fingers set its arm down on the trio’s rendering of “Three Ravens,” the melancholy ballad of a fallen knight and his doomed lover. They sat in silence, Skip and Jimmy each at one of the desks, while the song played and the colonel changed his pants and shirt. His mood, the mood Skip had put him in, had passed. He sat on his bed and slipped his feet into a pair of loafers while saying, “That Mindanao mission. That was a good report. 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 wait

ing for answers to rhetorical questions. “What I liked about it was you didn’t mention me.” “I think I had legitimate reasons for being less than complete.” “I think you have an instinct for discretion,” the colonel said. “I assumed you’d be the first to read the report.” “The first and last, my boy. That was the intention, anyhow.” “I assumed you’d let me know if you required more detail.” “This guy has his jive down,” Jimmy said, resting his arm on the back

of Skip’s chair. “He knows how to skate.” The colonel looked very directly at Jimmy and said, “This man is

family in every sense of the word.” “Message received,” Jimmy assured him. “All right, then.” The colonel stood and said, “Guess who flew over

with me from Cao Phuc? Our good lieutenant.”

“Screwy Louie,” Jimmy said. “Now, now. Disrespect.” “That’s how his tag should read. The grunts call him ‘Screwy Loot.’ ” “He’s probably downstairs.” “Screwy Louie went blooey.” “Now, Skip, we are dealing with the American infantry. Let me sug

gest that we take our allies as we find them.” “He’s talking about the lieutenant,” Storm said, “not about me.” “I’ve got nothing against the army. I’m an old army air force man. But

the infantry isn’t what it used to be.”

“He’s a psychological operation all by himself.”

“Now, young William,” the colonel said, rummaging in his desk drawer, “I’ve got your document.” He tossed his nephew a maroon passport.

Skip opened it to find his own face looking out at him over the name

William French Benęt. “Canadian!” “Your rent’s paid by the Canadian Ecumenical Council.” “Never heard of them.” “They don’t exist. You’re out here on a grant from the council. Trans

lating the Bible or something.” “Benęt!” The colonel said, “Come on, Benęt, let’s get some coffee.” In the large, frantic lobby they sat in rattan chairs under one of a mul

titude of whirling fans. Around them beggars and urchins crawled at the feet of exiles and campaigners—at last, a wartime capital, a posh lobby full of sagas, busy with spies and cheats, people cut loose and no longer accountable to their former selves. Deals struck in a half dozen languages, sinister rendezvous, false smiles, eyes measuring the chances. Psychos, wanderers, heroes. Lies, scars, masks, greedy schemes. This was what he wanted—not some villa in the bush.

Sadly he asked the colonel, “Will I be seeing you out in the boonies?” “Sure thing. We’re getting you all set up. Anything special you’ll need?” “Just the usual. Pens, some paper, that sort of thing. The usual.”

“Paper cutter. Rubber cément.” “Very good. Wonderful.” “I’ll get you a typewriter too. I want you to have a typewriter. And lots

of ribbons.” “I’ll write your memoirs for you.” The colonel said, “The heat’s got you all prickly.” “Can I be disappointed for a half hour or so?” “Come on, it would be worse if you stayed in Saigon and worked for

our bunch. They’ve got fifty interrogation stations in the South. That’s one mighty mountain after another of reports to go through. It all stays in-country. They’ll put you in a hole and have you cross-indexing references till you’re shitting five-by-eight cards. You’d rather be out there in the villes getting to know the people—the land we’re at war in. We’re getting you squared away someplace nice, never fear. And eventually you’ll do important work for us.”

“I believe you, sir.” “Any questions at this point?” “In the files.” “Shoot.” “What is the significance of the phrase ‘Tree of Smoke’?” “So you’ve come to the T’s in the files.” “No. I just heard the phrase today.” “Jesus,” Storm said. “I mentioned it, but I thought we were all kind of

sharing our germs and diseases here, you know?” “He’s family,” the colonel reminded him. “So what’s the meaning?” Jimmy said. ” ‘Tree of Smoke.’ ” “Oh, God, I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s embarrasingly poetic.

It’s grandiose.” Skip said, “That doesn’t sound like you.” “To be poetic and grandiose?” “To be embarrassed.” Jimmy said, “Here’s a question: Who said, ‘Keep your friends close,

keep your enemies closer’?” “Is this an interrogation?” the colonel said. “Then let’s have cocktails.” Cocktails were served in a succession of louder and danker establishments mostly on Thi Sach Street, tavern darknesses where during a sin

gle play on the jukebox whole eras passed before the vision like scarves. In each one Skip nursed a beer and tried to stay alert, taking it in, though there was nothing to take in but pop tunes and small joyless go-go dancers. He felt dazed, didn’t know why he didn’t go home. At some point, he hadn’t noticed when, the lieutenant had joined them, the one they called Screwy. He certainly seemed it—his tense face, his eyes deliberately widened, as if his message to the world were, Look at me, you’ve made me a frightened child—certainly inviting no conversation. Meanwhile, “I’ll tell you what tells me about Voss,” the colonel was saying. “First time I met Voss we sat down for San Miguels in Manila. He ordered one and he never once touched it. It sat at his feet like a prize.”

Skip said, “In my presence he drank half a beer,” making sure he followed this statement by taking a sip of his own.

The Screwy Loot seemed hypnotized by the knees of a go-go girl skipping, four feet away, to the Caribbean rhythms of Desmond Dekker while Sergeant Storm shouted in his ear, “Ain’t no big shit whether we win or lose this thing. We live in the post-trash, man. It’ll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity’s leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there’s been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one. If we let this door close, another will open.” The lieutenant paid no mind.

The colonel also seemed deaf to Jimmy’s nonsense. He drank deeply of his zillionth highball and announced, “The land is their myth. We penetrate the land, we penetrate their national soul. This is real infiltration. It may be tunnels, but it’s in the realm of Psy Ops most definitely.”

Skip couldn’t tell if they were being serious, or just having fun with the lieutenant.

“Hey,” Jimmy said, “I want to get into sounds. People can be allergic to sounds. Can’t a whole genetic substratum be allergic to one set of vibrations?”

“Excuse me,” Skip said, ” ‘substratum’?” The colonel said, “I myself am allergic to gunfire in certain calibers. Helicopter blades at certain rpm’s.”

The lieutenant suddenly actually spoke: “Do you know what makes me bitter above all? The heretofore unattainable level of bullshit we’re now all forced to engage, and I do mean non-fucking-stop.”

“Excuse me,” Skip said, ” ‘heretofore?”

“Something’s warping you,” Jimmy told the lieutenant. “Maybe it’s your perception of how the brass will see you—but they’re not seeing you at all right now, so it’s a perception of a nonperception, man, which is a perception of nothing, which is nothing, man.”

The colonel complained of marital problems. “She calls our fighting ‘domestic disputes.’ It’s obscene —isn’t it obscene? —to take something that reaches down and rips at your heart, and call it a ‘domestic dispute.’ What do you think, Will?”

Never had he seen the colonel so drunk.

At some point in the zigzag procession of events a woman gripped his arm high above the elbow and said, “Strong! Strong! Let’s go fuck, okay?”

What about that? How much did she charge? But he imagined her sad thinness, her genial kiss-ass terror, or her bitter terror, depending on how she cared to mask her terror … Another danced slowly beside the jukebox, hands hanging, chin dropping to her chest, not even trying to sell herself.

“No, thanks,” he said.

The colonel’s face arose before him like a diseased moon. “Skip.”

“Yes.”

“Did I promise you a shot?”

“Yes.”

“Are you getting a shot?”

“Yes.”

“Cheers, then, sir.”

“Cheers.”

A flashbulb popped in a corner. The colonel seemed to recognize the photographer and went in his direction. They were in a semi-elegant, air-conditioned place. The lieutenant took notes on wet cocktail coasters with a ballpoint pen while Jimmy spoke earnestly at his ear. The colonel returned with a camera in his hands. “He’ll give us copies when he gets the film back. Sit up, Skip. Up straight, now. Young lady, move out of my frame, please. This is for the family.” The flash, the moon drifting. “I’ll send it to the family. Your Aunt Grace was asking for a photo. They’re all very proud of you. We all loved your father very much,” he said, and Skip replied by asking, “What was my father like?” and suddenly they were having one of the most important conversations of his life. “Your father had honor, he had courage,” his uncle said, “and if he’d lived long enough he would have added wisdom to those. If he’d lived I think he would’ve gone back to the Midwest, because that’s the place your mother loves. I think if he’d lived he’d have become a businessman, a good one, a driving wheel in his community. I think he would definitely have stayed out of government.” Yes, yes, Skip wished he could say, but did he love me, did he love me?

While the jukebox played something with trumpets by Herb Alpert, the colonel ignored its music and raised a song in a whiskey baritone further roughened by his cigars:

She buried him before his prime, Down a down, hey down, a down She was dead herself ere evening time, With a down.

God send every gentleman Fine hawks, fine hounds, and such a lovely one, With a down, deny, derry, derry down.

Skip stepped from the evening’s perhaps eleventh tavern and ended his first day in Vietnam walking away from Thi Sach with only a general idea where he lived, amid the swarming throng, through the gritty diesel smoke, past the breath of bars and their throbbing interiors—what songs? He couldn’t tell. There—a recent hit stateside —”When a Man Loves a Woman”—then the music twisted around on itself as he passed the anonymous doorway and it might have been anything. He bartered with a cyclo driver who took him across the river and dropped him on Chi Lang Street. Here among the quieter lanes he breathed the fumes of blossoms and rot, smoldering charcoal, frying food, and heard the distant roar of jets and the drumming of helicopter gunships, and even the thousand-pound bombs exploding thirty kilometers away, not so much a sound as an intestinal fact—it was there, he felt it, it thudded in his soul. What must it be like under those bombs—or above them, letting them loose? To the west, red tracers streaked the sky. This was what he’d wanted. He’d come for this. To be shoved into the forge, an emphatically new order—so to speak a “different administration”—where theories burned to cinders, where questions of morality became matters of fact.

At Ton Son Nhut the previous afternoon he’d witnessed unbelievable airborne activity, an array of fighters and bombers landing and leaving, and cargo planes the size of mountains disgorging heavy armaments as big as houses. How could they fail to triumph in this war?

He found the villa’s door. It wasn’t locked. Inside, behind the bar, stood Rick Voss, who said, “Welcome to our

demented little show.” “And good evening.” “You found us.” “Are you staying here too?” “Always, whenever I’m in the Twilight Zone. Martini? I’ve got the

makings.” “I just spent half the night not getting drunk.” “Welcome to the second half.” “I’m ready to turn in.” “Been clubbing with the colonel?” “Just a wee skosh.” “Has he snagged you? Did he put you on a task?” “Not as yet.” “I have something for you. Just busywork.” “Thank God,” Skip said. “Just keeping you close,” Voss said, and mixed him a surprisingly cold

martini.

Assaulted by the scalding damp, their free hands thrown up against the rippling glare, they wrestled their duffels down the gangway onto the tarmac, PFC James Houston and two other new men of Echo Recon, and made their way to a staging area in a large open hangar where they sat on their gear and drank Cokes until a couple of spec fours came in who seemed to understand who they were.

Neither man actually greeted the three privates. They went on with their conversation as they guided the new arrivals to an M35 carryall big enough to haul a platoon, one saying to the other, “Who I specifically asked for was Carson, but who did he put in my ride? You. And now that means I’m saying, yes, fuck you, stay out of the Long Time, that’s my bar.”