Free Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Page A

conditioners labored to life here and there in the building. “Eat that ice cream anyway,” the colonel told Sebastian.

     

    Following dinner they adjourned to the patio for brandy and cigars and listened to the electronic bug-destroyer and talked about the thing they’d avoided talking about all through dinner, the thing everybody talked about eventually, every day.
    “My God, I tell you,” Eddie said, “in Manila we got the news around three in the morning. By dawn everybody knew. Not even by radio, but from heart to heart. Filipinos poured into the streets of Manila and wept.”
    The colonel said, “Our President . The President of the United States . It’s bad stuff. It’s just bad stuff.”
    “They wept as for a great saint.”
    “He was a beautiful man,” the colonel said. “That’s why we killed him.”
    “We?”
    “The dividing line between light and dark goes through the center of every heart. Every soul. There isn’t one of us who isn’t guilty of his death.”
    “This is sounding—” Skip didn’t want to say it. Religious. But he said it. “This is sounding religious.”
    The colonel said, “I’m religious about my cigars. Otherwise…religion? No. It’s more than religion. It’s the goddamn truth. Whatever’s good, whatever’s beautiful, we pounce, and whap! See those poor critters?” He pointed at the wires of the bug-killing device, where insects crashed and flared briefly. “The Buddhists would never waste electricity like that. Do you know what ‘karma’ is?”
    “Now you’re getting religious again.”
    “By God, I am. I’m saying it’s all inside us, the whole war. It is religion, isn’t it?”
    “What war are you talking about? The Cold War?”
    “This isn’t a Cold War, Skip. It’s World War Three.” The colonel paused to shape his cigar’s ember on the bottom of his shoe. Eddie and Pitchfork said nothing, only stared at the darkness—drunk, or exhausted by the colonel’s intensity, Skip couldn’t guess which—while the colonel, predictably, had surfaced clear-eyed from the cloud he’d seemed lost in earlier. But Skip was family; he had to show himself equal to this. To what? To scaling that social Mount Everest: an evening of dinner and drinks with Colonel Francis X. Sands. In preparation for the ascent, he took himself to the sideboard.
    “Where are you going?”
    “I’m just pouring myself a brandy. If it’s World War Three, I’d better have some of the good stuff.”
    “We’re in a worldwide war, have been for close to twenty years. I don’t think Korea sufficiently demonstrated that for us, or anyway our vision wasn’t equal to the evidence. But since the Hungarian uprising, we’ve been willing to grapple with the realities of it. It’s a covert World War Three. It’s Armageddon by proxy. It’s a contest between good and evil, and its true ground is the heart of every human. I’m going to transgress outside the line a little bit now. I’m going to tell you, Skip: sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the goddamn Alamo. This is a fallen world. Every time we turn around there’s somebody else going Red.”
    “But it’s not just a contest between good and evil,” Skip said. “It’s between nuts and not nuts. All we have to do is hang on until Communism collapses under the weight of its own economic silliness. The weight of its own insanity.”
    “The Commies may be out of their minds,” the colonel said, “but they aren’t irrational. They believe in central command and in the unthinkable sacrifice. I’m afraid,” the colonel said, and swallowed from his snifter; the hesitation made it seem the end of his statement: that he was afraid…He cleared his throat and said, “I’m afraid it makes the Communists uncontainable.”
    This kind of talk embarrassed Sands. It had no credit with him. He’d found joy and seen the truth here in a jungle where the sacrifices had bled away the false faith and the center of command had rotted,