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nt, he’d asked for real milk in his coffee. It tasted pretty much like the chalky substitute. The new dog came between his knees and shoved its snout into his cup and went at it with a vocal, snarfing sound. Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud —if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn’t grapple after actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it—not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God—speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely widening. At any po cheap mbt shoes int before now, he realized, he might simply have told his uncle he wanted to go home. But he couldn’t slip out from under this far along, this deep in, and collapse the sky on his uncle’s anvil head. He wouldn’t see that head bowed low. H mbt shoes e called Tho to the veranda. “What’s the story on this dog?” Tho said, “Le médicin.” “It’s a doctor’s dog?” Tho nodded, gambling on agreement, and retreated. Soon Mrs. Diu came out. “Mr. Tho says the dog has the spirit of Dr. Bouquet. When the doctor die, after one year the dog is coming.” “Dr. Bouquet was reborn as this dog?” “Yes. Dr. Bouquet.” “Mrs. Diu.” “Yes, Mr. Skip.” “Why won’t Tho speak English to me?” “He doesn’t speak.” “He doesn’t speak English? Or he doesn’t speak at all.” “Yes, sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know.” “Good,” he said. “I hope that clears things up for you.” 346 TREE OF SMOKE The dog was in the yard now lifting a leg at one of three papaya trees. Nearby Mr. Tho supported himself with the handle of a rake as he crouched to put a match to a pile of household rubbish. Skip admired the papayas with their slender forms and tufted crowns and the fruit clustered around their throats . . . The old papasan stepped back and watched, making sure of <a href="http://www.cheapnikeairforceones.com/"><strong>air force 1 shoes</strong></a> the flame while his reconstituted employer, curled tightly as a doughnut, bit at vermin around the base of his tail. “Excuse me, Mr. Skip.” Mrs. Diu was still at his shoulder. “You want supper?” “Let me think about it. I’ll be there in a minute.” One thing at a time. Maybe he’d send for Père Patrice, have him to supper. As a kind of penance, in the presence of the priest, he would force down a sickening meal. But he’d nodded off, and reached this decision while dreaming. He woke at 9:00 p.m. by his air force wristwatch. Dark like a velvet gauze, the burn pile’s embers, the canine Bouquet snoring at his feet. He was hungry, but life was ludicrous. He went to bed. Th e Cherry Loot was a tight, muscular, earnest youth with the shirt of his fatigues tucked and the waist buy mbt shoes pulled up too high. He didn’t smoke, and he drank very frugally, with suspicion. He talked a lot about microbes. Tropical diseases occupied his mind. Apparently he’d read a book about swift, horrific things they couldn’t <a href="http://www.cheapnikeairforceones.com/"><strong>cheap air force one</strong></a> vaccinate against. As for the enemy, he hardly believed in their existence. They didn’t frighten him at all. Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, “I’m gonna make the best of this ########-a-monkey show. Don’t mean ######## to me if it’s illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we’re heroes, tomorrow we’re the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit.” It was an attitude refreshing if not outright inspiring. Everybody else was headed the other way. “I was dating Darlene Taylor until this hippie named Michael Cook took her to a party and gave her drugs and ########ed her and turned her into a hippie, and if Michael the evil hippie is against this war, then I am goddamn for it. That’s all I have to know.” The Cherry Loot didn’t seem the least bit cherry. He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in mbt shoes clearance sale the universe. mbt lami 1968 347 He was fast, precise, devoted. It took him two days to catch up to the time zone, and on the morning of the third he sprang awake, looked around with clear eyes, and demanded to have brought before him any material and personnel that might enlarge his understanding of the local VC tunnels. This came down to a few of the guys and a couple of wrinkled drawings the Cowboy Corporal had made for the old, the previous, the former, the Screwy Loot. Screwy Loot, it was said, had gone to Tan Son Nhut, hitched a ride on a MAC flight to Honolulu, and melted away into the gigantic heaven of stateside. Cherry Loot spent a morning in his Quonset hut with the Cowboy Corporal’s drawings spread out on the collapsible table serving as his desk. He demanded creative input from his sergeant. “Isn’t there some radar or sonar we can use to deal effectively with this shit? I mean, we only want to know where these tunnels are located. We don’t have to crawl around inside to figure that out, do we? Are we bugs or snakes or some shit like that? Or are we upright rational humans on two legs with brains so we can attack this problem?” “I don’t think we really have to d mbt shoes clearance o this, sir.” “What?” “I don’t think we actually have to map these holes.” “I’m under express orders to accomplish this. It’s our whole purpose for being here. Otherwise you know what we do? We get down along Route One and breathe some stuff s gonna kill us. That’s the alternative assignment. Clouds of God-knows-what that’s gonna fuse up your lungs and no doubt sterilize your balls.” “Express orders, sir, I mean, sir, do you mean written?” “I mean they are clearly expressed inside my mind as I interpret them. Do you want me to hassle somebody to clarify in writing? Because ROTC didn’t teach me fiick-your-mother about how to survive one day in this shit but t mbt clearance hey did teach me not to go yanking the coat of my superiors or catch their attention in any way.” “I encourage you to make mbt shoes clearance that policy, sir,” Burke said. “But there’s squads they call them tunnel rats will go down in there for you. I can check if they can get assigned over here.” “We’re under Psy Ops-CIA till September first, then there’s a chance we all go home. I’m saying a chance.” 348 TREE OF SMOKE “Sir. Consensus is that Colonel F.X. has ripped his stitches.” “Leave it alone. You don’t know the history of this <a href="http://www.cheapnikeairforceones.com/"><strong>air force one shoes</strong></a> thing.” Cherry Loot paced the camp hatless under the smoldering clouds of noon. He seemed profoundly afraid, but not of the war or of his responsibilities in it. Of something bigger. Cosmically worried. Echo found very irritating the difference in the way litter was handled by Screwy Loot and by Cherry Loot. Screwy had just let the trash scatter itself around until the sergeant, at first Harmon and then Ames and finally Sergeant Burke, hustled them to police the area, but Cherry wants it done by the clock, everything tick-tock, wants it all relentlessly squared away. In a number of ways the Cherry Loot was screwier than the Screwy Loot. Screwy Loot hadn’t been entirely irrational about garbage. Just extremely twitchy about all else. Blac k Man was snapping his fingers, wrinkling his face, squinting his eyes, then popping them wide—all ripped up over whatever he was trying to get across even as James was still approaching the Cherry Loot’s Quonset hut—saying to James: “And you go up against Mr. Charlie, right into him, right through each other, and you swap yourselves and it ain’t you coming up here with us, man, with your buddies. It’s him. And it mbt shoes sale ain’t him coming up over there and getting with the other Charlies, squatting down and shovel that sticky rice up into their face, man, it ain’t him. It’s you. Oh, they just mickey mousing us every which goddamn way.” “Black Man.” “Yeah, baby.” “It’s me.” “Oh. Oh. Shit, yes. Yes, it is. You going in to see the new boy?” “Looks like it.” Black Man ch mbt discount ewed his lips nonstop today. “He’s cherry but he act like he don’t know it.” James said, “How’s it going?” “Okay. Okay. One or two demons have quit eating me.” James hadn’t seen Black Man in a long time. Since Tet. cheap mbts “I thought you were gone.” 1968 349 “It wasn’t nothing. All that blood turned out to be from one little vein or something. Shit. Didn’t you hear I was dead almost?” “You got hit?” “No. I got cut over there at the Tu Do Bar. Nigger followed me in the John.” “You got in a knife fight?” “Muh########er broke a bottle and jabbed my shoulder right here while I was pissing.” “You get a Purple Heart for that shit?” “Almost ate it for my muh########ing country, now I’m back here smelling you. And you stink.” “I didn’t know nothing about it.” Black Man’s eyeballs were shaking mbt in his head. James said, “I saw the sarge. Remember Sergeant Harmon? Staff Sergeant Harmon?” “Yeah. Harmon. Sarge. Yeah. You saw him? Just now?” “No. Right after.” “Right after the bad thing?” “Yeah,” James said. They stood in the parallelogram of shade on the Quonset hut’s east ern side. James sat down and leaned back against the wall, but Black Man couldn’t sit. “Hey, man. Tell m mbt lami e your name.” “You dreamin’!” “Please tell me at least your first name.” <a href="http://www.gordumgecirdim.com/manager/view_entries.php"><strong>Blogs » Cancer Colony (Powered by phpFoX)</strong></a> “Charles. Charles Blackman.” “Blackman?” “That’s what I mean. Tha Filed: Debt Consolidation