Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  Her name was Vicki Cepak. We’d known each other since college, but as far as I could remember, this was the first time we’d slept together. Then I remembered another time, dozens of times, but I couldn’t remember last night. She was watching the Cubs game on the ancient black-and-white television. Randy Hundley, the Cubs catcher, wobbled in a dream toward the bunt Lou Brock of St. Louis had just laid down. He got out of his crouch the way your father gets out of his chair after a big dinner. Hundley overthrew first base and Brock cruised into third. Vicki smoked a cigarette and leaned against the wall at the head of the bed.

  “About time you woke up,” she said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Third inning.” If you lived in Chicago, you knew what she meant. On summer afternoons, you didn’t tell time by the clock. The game started at one thirty, so it had to be around two thirty.

  “How did the interview go?”

  “I can either stick tubes down people’s throats or make balloons of mice intestines.”

  “Charming,” she said, like Lauren Bacall. So that’s who she was today. Yesterday it was Ethel Mertz. She could be cute and flirty or cranky and wise, but she was always trying to be somebody else—that’s how you knew it was Vicki. Today, she was whiskey-voiced and sexy, letting her red wavy hair hang over her shoulders, but mostly she was a girl from Wisconsin who’d learned to smoke last year. I thought maybe we liked each other for all the faults we shared, but I couldn’t say if it was love. One thing was for sure. Her period was ten days late, and she’d come down from Richland Center to get a pregnancy test. She’d gone to the clinic yesterday to give a urine sample, and they said to call back in about two days.

  I took a drag on her cigarette and developed an erection. It wasn’t something you could hang your hat on, but it was sure there. One thing about living in the sixties was, you didn’t have to worry about how much noise you made. We did it head-on, sideways, and upside down. We did it loud, soft, and moderate. Right at the end, Vicki got very soprano, like a small locomotive straining uphill, finding its plateau, and coasting down the other side with happy shrieks. We were sweating a lot by now. My head was butting the wall where Rose the Poet had painted a muddy Christ figure. Applause could be heard from the kitchen, just outside the bedroom door.

  Right now, Vicki looked like she was fifteen years old. She had small soft features and thin bones. When she was happy, she was pretty, and when she was angry, she looked kind of mousy. Lately, she had been incredibly happy, a Pre-Raphaelite madonna with half-closed eyes.

  “Hey, what’s the score in there?” It was Rose the Poet, one of the roommates, and he didn’t mean the game.

  “Tied!” shouted Vicki, already going back to sleep.

  I gave her a kiss, put on some jeans, and went into the kitchen to greet David Rosenstone, whom we called Rose the Poet, sitting in front of a bowl of brown rice. He ate it often, with a sixteen-ounce Coca-Cola. The rice was supposed to clean the system and make you a better person. Everything he did had some philosophical purpose, but the more rice he ate, the weirder he became. Or maybe it wasn’t the rice, but all the drugs he’d taken. He’d recently resigned his job writing the Playboy Advisor column and was living on his profit sharing, which would give him about a year of free time. One day he just got tired of writing articles on the joys of mutual masturbation, rose from his desk, and never returned. The first day of his “retirement,” he took some speed, wrote thirty poems in two hours, all containing the words pink and electric in capital letters, and had a nervous breakdown. Often, in the middle of the night, we’d find him testing the door to see if it was locked. He would stand in front of it for hours, opening and closing it, a look of doubt on his face. He also liked to walk around in the nude, and sometimes he answered the door that way. Once this caught the landlady by surprise, and she plunged back down the dark stairwell, mumbling an apology, as if she had committed the indiscretion. There was so much residual lysergic acid in Rose’s system you could start a car with it if you could get him hooked up to the jumper cables. At least that’s what the Selective Service psychologist said when he declared Rose emotionally unfit for the army.

  “You look well rested,” he said, staring into the rice he’d warmed up from yesterday. The congealed leftovers were still in a pot by the stove, next to some remaining shallots and a bottle of Tamari.

  “Looks good,” I said, “but maybe I’ll eat some wallpaper instead.”

  “Was that the game on in there?”

  “Yeah. Cubs and St. Louis. You want to check it out?”

  “All right!” he said, with more enthusiasm than expected. He wasn’t much of a sports fan, but we’d gone to Wrigley Field a couple of times out of what Rose called “sheer sensibility.” He also spoke eloquently of the “pastoral aestheticism” of the game, but I suspected he’d read the phrase somewhere. He said he didn’t believe in competition, though he was an intrepid competitor, giving the impression on the tennis court of an explosion in a bell-bottom factory. Neither of us played very well. The real players in their perfect whites stared at us with contempt. We always played in jeans and T-shirts. Once Rose even went onto the court in street shoes, which drove a middle-aged man on the next court into a rage.

  We decided to go to the game. I kissed Vicki, who wanted to sleep, and threw on some clothes. We were halfway out the door when the phone rang. It was Bolger. He had another interview for me and I’d better be there first thing in the morning. If it all went all right, he said, I could be a unit manager on the evening shift, for twice the money the other positions offered. There was something in his voice between a growl and a purr, which I took to mean, “I like you, kid, but don’t fuck around.”

  I said I’d be there, and off we went in my car. Rose broke out his grass, and we got so slowed down and high that everything rose up in front of us like a billboard or monument. A bag lady crossed the street in front of us and showed us happy teeth. I couldn’t tell whether the car was moving or standing still.

  Looking in the rearview mirror, I realized we couldn’t have appeared any more different from each other. He had long black hair parted in the middle and wore farmer jeans and basketball shoes. I had on beige stay-pressed chinos, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and brown penny loafers. My blond hair was neatly combed.

  About three years later we arrived at Wrigley Field. I parked the car illegally in front of the Sports Corner bar at Addison and Sheffield, then we bought general admission tickets and headed up the zigzag ramp leading to the upper deck. Half-way up, we stopped and looked back at the street, where a fat cop, his foot on the front fender, was giving my car a ticket. There were already fifteen or so forming a warped bouquet on top of the dashboard. He looked at them in irritation. We laughed and climbed the last ramp, which suspends you over the general admission seats.

  On the upper deck we were almost overwhelmed by the pointillist fervor, the bloom and buzz, of the crowd. They chatted, dozed, ordered beer, and rose suddenly to cheer the double tying the game: it was like watching a human flag wave in the breeze. We watched with pleasure as cheering rolled out of the park and down Waveland Avenue to the lake, then over the park like a great balloon, swelling up Sheffield, past old couples on lawn chairs, and entering Graceland Cemetery, where Louis Sullivan, Potter Palmer, and other famous Chicagoans lie beneath beautiful stones.

  The color of the grass was amazing, as if painted, and on it players moved like threads of neon. For no apparent reason, a beer vendor handed us two beers and said they were on the house. For the rest of the game we strolled the concrete walkway separating the box seats from the general admission, watching the game, taking in the crowd, and goofing around with the Andy Frain ushers, who looked like they’d just escaped from a marching band. Rose loved the white gloves they wore, which reminded him of Mickey Mouse, and we listened to the swish of fabric as a beautiful young usher walked by, a stern look on her face. Then someone hit a fly ball that hung in the air so long it was evening befo
re it landed. We stood with our jaws open, staring at the sky and getting older.

  That night Vicki and I sat on the couch, and Rose sat on the floor next to the television set with a quart of beer. As usual, the news was all about Vietnam. In the field, a camera jaggedly took pictures of some mud and weeds, machine-gun fire rattling softly in the background. The cameraman had gotten caught in a cross fire and fallen in a ditch. The legs of soldiers flickered by on the road above, and you could see a couple of abandoned trucks in the distance. If the GIs couldn’t see the enemy to shoot them, how could cameras catch their quick shadows? Then Walter Cronkite reported that fifty-three U.S. soldiers had died in the war that day. It seemed like a lot.

  One of them was Terry Grubbs of Tin Cup, Indiana, who’d lived in the same dorm as me at Rhineland College and become one of my best friends. I couldn’t believe it. They had prepared a special story about the small town he was from, and how everyone had known him. There were pictures of him from different times of life—Terry in the fifth grade with a silly-looking crew cut, Terry on the basketball team. They interviewed one of his high school teachers, who wore a flowered dress and looked very mean, like she was trying not to cry. Then there was a film clip of metal caskets being unloaded at an air force base in Delaware while an honor guard stood by. It was the same film they had shown yesterday and the day before, taken from a file. Terry had stepped on a mine, the reporter said, and the body inside the metal casket was terribly broken. Vicki had known Terry, too, and she cried and held me tight.

  Terry had lived just down the hall from me in college. He was a phys. ed. major and president of the roller skating club, which had about four members. He also used to play Mantovani and Johnny Mathis records when everyone else was interested in rock and roll. He even thought he could sing like Mathis, but his voice was terrible. From the beginning of the war, he talked about wanting to fight in it, but he worried about being too tall. He was 6’6” and 250 pounds, and he feared they wouldn’t take him when he enlisted after graduation. He got his local congressman to send a letter to the draft board on his behalf, indicating his value to the army. He did push-ups and sit-ups and ran in place. He cursed the television when there were scenes of draft resistance. I thought he was one of the stupidest people on earth about politics, but we were still friends.

  Suddenly I was on my feet, punching a hole in the wall by the TV set. Rose scrambled for cover, plaster dust in his hair, and Vicki held her hands over her mouth. There was blood and plaster dust on my knuckles. I walked to the door, went downstairs into the street, threw up in some bushes, and headed toward the park.

  Terry had always owned a gun, even when we were in college. One day he called me into his room, locked the door, and took down a dictionary from the shelf. Inside, where he had cut out the pages, there was a very real, cold, and heavy pistol.

  “It’s for protection,” he whispered, looking furtively at the door. He was big enough to throw me out the window, and he needed a gun for protection? The college was located in a little town in the middle of cornfields. There weren’t too many criminals around.

  “It’s just in case,” he said. “Dad gave it to me for my birthday. He said I would probably need it up at the college, what with all the draft dodgers and all.” He looked at me with no special significance. His paranoia had a certain sweetness, and in some ways he was a true innocent. It was his father who’d made him think these things. He took to such opinions the way other kids make model airplanes.

  His father, Russell, was a furious crypto-fascist who lived for illicit arms, survivalism, and antisemitic tracts on cheap paper. He ran an insurance agency for a living but didn’t do too well, so he sold Knapp shoes door to door, meaning farm to farm, for extra money. There was always a copy of Soldier of Fortune or Plain Truth in his truck, bleached by the sun. The world was coming to an end anyway, and Russell Grubbs wanted to be there when it happened. He wasn’t about to lose the final battle—he’d already lost all the others. The real desolation angels weren’t motorcycle outlaws and suburban beatniks; they were ordinary grocery clerks, mechanics, bank presidents, and housewives who believed in the inevitability, therefore the beauty, of the first nuclear dawn. They were the phoenixes that would rise from the ashes of small-town America, and they knew it; that’s what gave them such frightening confidence in their daily hatreds.

  Terry said his dad attended survival training camp every summer. He and his buddies would enter a wilderness somewhere in Idaho, where they would shoot at each other with live ammunition all morning and share a can of Spam for lunch. During one of these exercises his dad dropped from a tree onto a deer and killed it with his pocketknife. Then he drank the blood from a neck vein because he’d read Genghis Khan used to do that. The Khan, next to Hitler, was his biggest hero. His father was a harmless-looking guy, the kind you might see at Sears, pricing a set of wrenches.

  In spite of our differences, I spent a lot of time with Terry, especially in the summer. We were thrown together by a lack of other choices. I’d just moved to the area and didn’t know many people, and Terry was a loner naturally. We’d drive around looking for girls. Once in a while we’d get lucky. In Kokomo, Indiana, we picked up two girls at a place called Sam and Flo’s Horn and Hoof (they served only red meat) and drove to one of their houses. While Terry went inside with his date to watch TV, my date and I took the chaise lounge on the porch. We kissed for a while. I felt her bony chest. Afterward, when the light was better, I saw that she was wildly cross-eyed. Terry kidded me about Penny the Planaria for a long time after that.

  Heading down Armitage toward the park, I put my hands in my pockets, as if by making them disappear I might make myself invisible, too. I wanted to get as far away from television as possible; but at the corner of Armitage and Hudson there was a fire in an apartment building, and the television crews were just arriving. Four or five fire trucks were already there: flames blew like curtains from the third-floor window. A crowd of neighborhood people had gathered, excitedly talking and pointing, while their kids played among the hoses covering the street. The rest of the building was on fire, too, including the restaurant on the first floor. It appeared that the restaurant owner had torched the place because of a lack of business and somehow overdone it. The fireman looked sensational silhouetted against the flames.

  I crossed Clark Street and passed a Park District building where old people in lapidary science classes polish stones until they disappear in their hands. Stockton Drive: the public rest rooms where Rose said guys meet to give each other blowjobs. In fact, two men in tight jeans stood outside, smoking cigarettes and checking out the slow-moving cars. At the lagoon, green scum and potato-chip wrappers floated along the edge among the metal boats nobody ever rented, the weeds being too thick for navigation. I could smell the oxygen coming off the water, and stood there for a while watching a sliver of moon in the evening sky. To the left was the Farm in the Zoo, where antiseptic pigs and chickens slept on immaculate straw—no mud, shit, and rusting farm machinery in evidence. Its most popular attraction was the Clydesdale horses, huge and frightening, like something you’d ride into war. A small red barn with perfect white trim could be seen through the trees. It was the kind of barn rich people build on their estates to store their extra Ping-Pong tables.

  Off I went in a different direction, toward the dead end of the zoo nobody ever visited, down a long narrow walkway next to a chain link fence, on the other side of which was a large wooden bowl with bright grain spilled around it. The grass was worn down to mud where the animal had been anxiously pacing in the same pattern. There, in fact, was the animal, an ostrich with patches of feathers missing, as if it had taken bites of itself. It stepped from behind some trees and came straight at me, stabbing its head straight at my face. This was not hunger; it was hatred. Stride for stride, it followed me the length of the fence, making low choking sounds, pink eyes gleaming. I looked back and saw the ostrich still glaring at me, dipping its wedge-shaped head. No, I
thought to myself, this grotesque animal has nothing to do with Terry’s death; but I walked back to the apartment differently, as if pursued.

  Rose the Poet was testing the front door in his underwear when I got home. He seemed unconcerned with what had happened earlier that evening. He said hello with a grunt and wave of the hand and returned to his consuming task like someone studying a movement in chess.

  Vicki was reading The Floating Opera in bed when I climbed in beside her. It was still early in the evening, but when she was visiting we stayed in the bedroom because of the roommates.

  “Are you all right?” she wanted to know. I breathed in the affirmative and stared at the ceiling. You could hear the building settle, the way old wood does on summer evenings. It sounded like someone was climbing the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, putting her head on my shoulder. “Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was another Terry.”

  “It was him, all right. There are only eight houses in Tin Cup, Indiana, and only one Terry Grubbs.”

  “It isn’t fair!” she said, kicking the book off the bed.

  “If I know Terry, he was probably relieved it happened,” I said. “I mean, if you die at least something important has happened to you.”

  She leaned on her elbow. “That sounds kind of cold, you know. Who knows what will happen with any of us?”

  “The way I see it, Terry’s mission in life was to die as soon as possible. He’d drive his car like crazy and take all sorts of chances. Once he threw himself out of his dorm window on a dare and broke both arms. He even asked some guys to tie him to the railroad tracks one night, but the train didn’t come through as scheduled, and he only caught a cold.”