Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Author:Denis Johnson [Johnson, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Vietnam War, Intelligence officers, Vietnam War; 1961-1975, Fiction, War & Military, Military, Espionage, History
ISBN: 9780330449212
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2008-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kathy traveled to Saigon to seek help from anyone she could, starting with Colin Rappaport at World Children’s Services. Vietcong and even stray NVA regulars marauded in the Sa Dec area, the Americans and ARVN had grown ruthless and undiscriminating in the pursuit, supplies weren’t getting to the Bao Dai Orphanage, soon it would all be impossible.

The American helicopters strafed anything moving on the rivers. To reach the road to Saigon she pedaled her bike along the paths by the canals, hard going, not muddy, but unresisting, slowing the tires—how pliant this land, how rich and soft, how deceptive—and out onto the dikes, in the open. A wind came rolling over the paddies and sunlight moved in the green shoots like a thrill under the flesh.

She waited in a dirt-floor café. Tin-roofed, straw-paneled. Sat at a table drinking hot tea from a tin can, awaiting transport across a river about a hundred feet wide. At her feet a little kid played with a bright green grasshopper half the length of his arm. She left the bicycle with the café family, who told her no helicopters had shown in the area since early morning. A sampan woman wearing pale violet formal-gown gloves and a pink face-cloth ferried her across. On the other side lay houses and gardens…A girl in a beautiful dress in a tiny plot of graves, prostrate on one of the tombs in the dappled shade…Kathy caught a lift with a farmer in a three-wheeled truck bearing old rice sacks full of duck feathers toward Saigon. A few miles southeast of the city their ways parted and he let her out.

She wore a calf-length skirt, sandals, no stockings. Sitting in a thatched teahouse beside Highway Seven she felt the sweat running from the crooks of her knees down her calves. She opened her knapsack and took out her Bible to read, but it was already too dark. She held it in her lap, flicking at the bookmark with her finger. Somewhere in the Psalms it said: Against You, You only have I sinned. For a few minutes as the explosions came particularly close the night of Tet she’d felt all pride crushed, all knowledge stopped, all desire, had existed only as naked, abject subjugation. Her sin had seemed small, her salvation or damnation seemed small.

Night came. A man set out red chairs in front of the teahouse.

She took a cyclo into the city. She stayed at a hostel of sorts across from the green-shuttered Jamia Mosque on Dong Du Street. She lay on a cot for half an hour but couldn’t sleep.

She went walking. It was nearly eleven. As she waded through the traffic, a cyclist bearing on his shoulder a three-meter-long sheaf of lumber seemed about to make a turn and possibly knock her head off with the ends of his boards. She stepped backward and was almost run down by a U.S. jeep—they called them “Mutts”—the tires screeched, and one wheel went up over the curb. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” said the wild-faced young infantryman driving.

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