Tree of Smoke Read Free Page A

bed. He hadn’t wanted her. He wasn’t sure about these Filipino people.
    Then today, toward the end of the morning, they’d gone into the club to learn that the President of the United States, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been murdered. The two Filipinas were still with them, and each girl took one of the colonel’s substantial arms and held on as if keeping him moored to the earth while he brought his surprise and grief under control. They sat at a table all morning and listened to the news reports. “For God’s sake,” the colonel said. “For God’s sake.” By afternoon the colonel had cheered up and the beer was going down and down. Minh tried not to drink very much, but he wanted to be polite, and he got very dizzy. The girls disappeared, they came back, the fan went around in the ceiling. A very young naval recruit joined them and somebody asked Minh if a war was actually being waged somewhere in Vietnam.
    That night the colonel wanted to switch girls, and Minh determined that he would follow through as he had last night, just to make the colonel happy and to show him that he was sincerely grateful. This second girl was the one he preferred, in any case. She was prettier to his eyes and spoke better English. But the girl asked to have the air conditioner on. He wanted it off. He couldn’t hear things with the air conditioner going. He liked the windows open. He liked the sound of insects batting against the screens. They didn’t have such screens in his family’s house on the Mekong Delta, or even in his uncle’s home in Saigon.
    “What do you want?” the girl said. She was very contemptuous of him.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Take off your clothes.”
    They took off their clothes and lay side by side on the double bed in the dark, and did nothing else. He could hear an American sailor a few doors down talking to one of his friends loudly, perhaps telling a story. Minh couldn’t understand a word of it, though he considered his own English pretty fair.
    “The colonel has a big one.” The girl was fondling his penis. “Is he your friend?”
    Minh said, “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know is he your friend? Why are you with him?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “When did you know him the first time?”
    “Just one or two weeks.”
    “Who is he?” she said.
    Minh said, “I don’t know.” To stop her touching his groin, he clasped her to him.
    “You just want body-body?” she said.
    “What does it mean?” he said.
    “Just body-body,” she said. She got up and shut the window. She felt the air conditioner with the palm of her hand, but didn’t touch its dials. “Gimme a cigarette,” she said.
    “No. I don’t have any cigarette,” he said.
    She threw her dress on over her head, slipped her feet into her sandals. She wore no underclothes. “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said.
    “What does it mean?” he said.
    “What does it mean?” she said. “What does it mean? Gimme a coupla quarters. Gimme a coupla quarters.”
    “Is it money?” he said. “How much is it?”
    “Gimme a coupla quarters,” she said. “I wanna see if he gonna sell me some cigarette. I wanna coupla pack cigarette—a pack for me, and one pack for my cousin. Two pack.”
    “The colonel can do it,” he said.
    “One Weenston. One Lucky Strike.”
    “Excuse me. It’s chilly tonight,” he said. He got up and put his clothes on.
    He stepped out front. From behind him he heard the small sounds of the young woman inside dealing with her purse, setting it on a table. She clapped and rubbed her hands and a puff of perfume drifted past him from the open window and he inhaled it. His ears rang, and tears clouded his sight. He cleared a thickness from his throat, hung his head, spat down between his feet. He missed his homeland.
    When he’d first joined the air force and then been transferred to Da Nang and into officers’ training, only seventeen, he’d cried every night in his bed for several