Tree of smoke Read Free

him, I’d’ve gone eight weeks without closing both eyes.”
    The brothers drank from their mugs simultaneously and then sought, each in his own mind, for something to talk about. “When that guy got shot in the ass,” James said, “he went into shock immediately.”
    “Shit. How old are you?”
    “Me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Almost eighteen,” James said.
    “The army let you enlist when you’re only seventeen?”
    “Nope. I done lied.”
    “Are you scared?”
    “Yeah. Not every minute.”
    “Not every minute?”
    “I haven’t seen any fighting. I want to see it, the real deal, the real shit. I just want to.”
    “Crazy little fucker.”
    The band resumed with a number by the Kinks called “You Really Got Me”:

    You really got me—
    You really got me—
    You really got me—

    Before very much longer the two brothers got into an argument with each other over nothing, and Bill Houston spilled a pitcher of beer right into the lap of somebody at the next table—a Japanese girl, who hunched her shoulders and looked sad and humiliated. She sat with a girlfriend and also two American men, two youngsters who didn’t know how to react.
    The beer dribbled off the table’s edge while James fumbled to right the empty pitcher, saying, “It gets like this sometimes. It just does.”
    The young girl made no move at all to adjust herself. She stared at her lap.
    “What’s wrong with us,” James asked his brother, “are we fucked up or something? Every time we get together, something bad happens.”
    “I know.”
    “Something fucked-up.”
    “Fucked-up, shitty, I know. Because we’re family.”
    “We’re blood.”
    “None of that shit don’t matter to me no more.”
    “It must matter some,” James insisted, “or else why’d you haul yourself all this way to meet me in Yokohama?”
    “Yeah,” Bill said, “in the Peanut Bar.”
    “The Peanut Bar!”
    “And why’d I miss my ship?”
    James said, “You missed your ship?”
    “I should’ve been on her at four this afternoon.”
    “You missed it?”
    “She might still be there. But I expect they’re out of the harbor by now.”
    Bill Houston felt his eyes flood with tears, choked with sudden emotion at his life and this place with everybody driving on the left.
    James said, “I never liked you.”
    “I know. Me too.”
    “Me too.”
    “I always thought you were a little-dick sonofabitch,” Bill said.
    “I always hated you,” his brother said.
    “God, I’m sorry,” Bill Houston said to the Japanese girl. He dragged some money from his wallet and tossed it onto the wet table, a hundred yen or a thousand yen, he couldn’t see which.
    “It’s my last year in the navy,” he explained to the girl. He would have thrown down more, but his wallet was empty. “I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I’m all different.”

    T he afternoon of that November day in 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Captain Nguyen Minh, the young Viet Nam Air Force pilot, dove with a mask and snorkel just off the shore of Grande Island. This was a newfound passion. The experience came close to what the birds of the air must enjoy, drifting above a landscape, propelled by the action of their own limbs, actually flying, as opposed to piloting a machine. The webbed fins strapped to his feet gave him a lot of thrust as he scooted above a vast school of parrot fish feeding on a reef, the multitude of their small beaks pattering against the coral like a shower of rain. American Navy men enjoyed scuba and skin-diving and had torn up all the coral and made the fish very timid so that the entire school disappeared in a blink when he swam near.
    Minh wasn’t much of a swimmer, and without others around he could let himself feel as afraid as he actually was.
    He’d passed all the previous night with the prostitute the colonel had paid for. The girl had slept on the floor and he in the bed. He hadn’t wanted her. He