Tree of Smoke Read Free Page B

weeks. He’d been flying fighter jets for nearly three years now, since he was nineteen years old. Two months ago he’d turned twenty-two, and he could expect to continue flying missions until the one that killed him.
    Later he sat on the porch in a canvas chair, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, smoking—he actually did possess a pack of Luckies—when the colonel returned from the club with his arms around both the girls. Minh’s escort had a pack in her hand and waved it happily.
    “So you explored the briny deeps today.”
    Minh wasn’t sure what he meant. He said, “Yes.”
    “Ever been down there in any of those tunnels?” the colonel asked.
    “What is it?—tunnels.”
    “Tunnels,” the colonel said. “Tunnels all under Vietnam. You been down inside those things?”
    “Not yet. I don’t think so.”
    “Nor have I, son,” the colonel said. “I wonder what’s down there.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Nobody does,” the colonel said.
    “The cadres use the tunnels,” Minh said. “The Vietminh.”
    Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, “This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.”
    Minh had noticed you could talk to the colonel for a long time without recognizing he was drunk.
    He’d met the colonel only a few mornings back, out front of the helicopter maintenance yard at the Subic base, and they’d sought each other out continually ever since. The colonel had not been introduced to him—the colonel had introduced himself—and didn’t appear to be linked to him in any official way. They were housed together with dozens of other transient officers in a barracks in a compound originally constructed and then quickly abandoned, according to the colonel, by the American Central Intelligence Agency.
    Minh knew the colonel was one to stick with. Minh had a custom of picking out situations, people, as good luck, bad luck. He drank Lucky Lager, he smoked Lucky Strikes. The colonel called him “Lucky.”
    “John F. Kennedy was a beautiful man,” the colonel said. “That’s what killed him.”

 

    N guyen Hao arrived safely at the New Star Temple on his Japanese Honda 30 motorbike, in dress pants and a box-cut shirt, wearing sunglasses, the pomade melting in his hair. It was his sad errand to serve as his family’s only representative at the funeral service for his wife’s nephew. Hao’s wife was down with chills. The boy’s parents were deceased, and the boy’s only brother was flying missions for the air force.
    Hao looked back to where he’d dropped off a friend from his youth named Trung Than, whom everybody had always called the Monk and who’d gone north when the country had been partitioned. Hao hadn’t seen the Monk for a decade, not until this afternoon, and now he was gone: he’d hopped backward off the bike, removed his sandals, and padded off barefoot down the path.
    Hao made sure to take the motorbike slowly over anything looking like a puddle, and when he reached the rice paddies he walked the machine most carefully along the dikes. He had to keep his clothes clean; he’d be overnighting here, probably in the schoolroom adjacent to the temple. The village wasn’t far from Saigon, and in better times he might have motored back in the dusk, but the critical areas had expanded such that nowadays after three in the afternoon the back roads over to Route Twenty-two would be hazardous.
    He set his straw bedroll on the earthen floor just inside the schoolroom’s doorway, so as to be able to find his bed later in the night.
    No life showed itself among the string of huts other than foraging chickens and stationary old women visible in the doorways. He pulled aside the wooden lid of the concrete well and lowered the bucket and drew himself a drink and a wash from out of the dark. The well was deep, drilled by a machine. The water came clear and cool into his hand and onto his face.
    No sound from the temple. The master