Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Page A

his Hawaiian-patterned shirts. He was both barrel-chested and potbellied, also bowlegged, also sunburned. He didn’t stand much taller than the Filipino major but seemed mountainous. He wore a silver flattop haircut on a head like an anvil. He was at the moment drunk and held upright by the power of his own history: football for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, missions for the Flying Tigers in Burma, antiguerrilla operations here in this jungle with Edward Lansdale, and, more lately, in South Vietnam. In Burma in ’41 he’d spent months as a POW, and escaped. And he’d fought the Malay Tigers, and the Pathet Lao; he’d faced enemies on many Asian fronts. Skip loved him, but he was unhappy to see him.
    “Eddie,” the colonel said, taking the major’s hand in both his own, moving the left hand up and gripping him above his elbow, massaging the biceps, “let’s get drunk.”
    “Too early!”
    “Too early? Darn—and too late for me to change course!”
    “Too early! Just tea, please,” Eddie told the houseboy, and Skip asked for the same.
    The colonel looked with curiosity at the package under Skip’s arm. “Fish for dinner?”
    “Show him!” Eddie said, and Skip laid the M1 on the brass coffee table, nested in its open wrapping.
    The colonel sat down and held the rifle across his knees just as Skip had done in the car moments ago, reading its intricate engravings with his fingers. “Fantastic work.” He smiled. But he looked at no one when he smiled. He reached beside him to the floor and handed Skip a brown paper grocery bag. “Trade you.”
    “No, thanks,” Skip said.
    “What’s in the sack?” Eddie asked.
    “Courier pack from the ambassador,” the colonel said.
    “Ah! Mysterious!”
    As ever, the colonel drank from two glasses at once. He waved his empty chaser at the houseboy.
    “Sebastian, are you all out of Bushmills?”
    “Bushmills Irish whiskey coming up!” the young man said.
    Pitchfork said, “The servants seem to know you.”
    “I’m not a frequent visitor.”
    “I think they’re in awe of you.”
    “Maybe I’m a big tipper.” The colonel rose and went to the bucket on the sideboard to scoop ice into his glass with his fingers and stood looking out at the grounds with the air of somebody about to share a thought. They waited, but instead he sipped his drink.
    Pitchfork said, “Colonel, are you a golfer?”
    Eddie laughed. “If you tempt our colonel out there, he’ll decimate the landscape.”
    “I stay out of the tropical sun,” the colonel said. He stared lovingly at the rear end of a maidservant as she set out the tea service on the low brass table. When the others all held something in their hands, he raised his glass: “To the last Huk. May he soon fill his grave.”
    “The last Huk!” the others cried.
    The colonel drank deeply, gasped, and said, “May the enemy be worthy of us.”
    Pitchfork said, “Hear, hear!”
    Skip carried the paper sack and the beautiful gun to his quarters and laid both on his bed, relieved to take a minute alone. The maid had opened the room to the day. Skip cranked shut the louvered windows and turned on his air conditioner.
    He poured out the contents of the sack onto the bed: one dozen eight-ounce jars of rubber cement. Such was the stuff of his existence.
    The colonel’s entire card catalog system, over nineteen thousand entries ordered from the oldest to the latest, rested on four collapsible tables shoved against the wall either side of Skip’s bathroom door, over nineteen thousand three-by-five cards in a dozen narrow wooden drawers fashioned, the colonel had told him, in the physical plant facilities at the government’s Seafront compound in Manila. On the floor beneath the tables waited seven thirty-pound boxes of blank cards and two boxes full of thousands of eight-by-eleven photocopies, the same nineteen-thousand-card system in duplicate, four cards to a page. Skip’s main job, his basic task at this phase of his life, his