Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  Nixon appeared, his entire being neurotic, like a failed high school principal. He seemed always on the verge of crying or breaking something on his desk. Whenever he was on the air, I had to check the air above him for wires, since his erratic head and arm movements suggested puppetry.

  I thought back to Lyndon Johnson’s announcement, in the spring of 1968, that he would not seek reelection. Those of us who watched the speech on television in the student union were nearly dizzy with glee and amazement, and we leaped around, hugging each other. But the war dragged on anyway, and Terry Grubbs went and got killed in it.

  Earlier in the war, Walter Cronkite had gone on the air with similar gravity in his voice. Some Viet Cong commandos on a suicide mission had invaded the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon and destroyed much of the facility before they were killed. The last commando had been tracked down in the hallways of the compound by an assistant undersecretary of something or other, who’d been handed a pistol through a broken window. The small bodies of the dead commandos, wearing civilian clothes, were laid out in a neat row on the perfectly groomed grass of the embassy. Soldiers and bureaucrats stood around in their crew cuts and tans looking worried, as if the frail bodies might leap to their feet and start fighting again. The tone of Cronkite’s voice expressed what everyone already knew, that this war was going to be different. Everybody was going to get hurt this time. The war was outside the door right now, breathing the night air of Indiana.

  While Nixon talked, my father’s face screwed up with emotion. As a member of the Church of Peace, he despised Nixon’s policies, but his respect for the office itself drove him nearly to tears. It was too much. I excused myself, went out to the car, and drove fifteen miles through the summer darkness to Tin Cup, the small town where Terry Grubbs’s family lived. Along the way I passed through Need, an unincorporated village consisting of a mom-and-pop store with a gas pump in front. I imagined other towns on the road with names like Pride, Avarice, and Kindness.

  I found the Grubbs’ house easily enough, since there were only eight houses in the whole town. Besides, the windows were ablaze with light, in contrast with the dimness of the surrounding properties. Slashes of light fell onto the ground, as if from a spaceship. There were no curtains. You could see everything inside very clearly, as if lighted for a theatrical performance. I had turned off the lights of the car when I rounded the corner, so I sat in darkness, the engine noisily idling, watching Mr. and Mrs. Grubbs stand in the living room. He wore dark green work clothes and held a can of beer in his right hand. She wore a bright green apron and what looked like a wig, the color of orangutan fur. She also held a frying pan at waist level, as if she’d just left the stove. Neither moved an inch.

  I felt a little guilty watching them, if they were the Grubbs and not wax models. They were absorbed in something I couldn’t see, perhaps the Nixon speech on television. It was also possible they’d gone catatonic, but then Russell Grubbs was always crazy. On Halloween he would lie on his yard under a blanket, wearing commando gear and waiting for kids to soap his windows. If some poor kid so much as stepped on the property, he was on his feet like a demon, chasing him with a club. As a result, people went out of their way to vandalize whatever he had, lobbing paint balloons from passing cars. His high-speed pickup truck, with rifle rack and CB antenna, was parked in the yard, facing the road and looking lethal.

  The longer I watched, the creepier I felt, as if I’d entered Russell Grubbs’s state of mind. He was reduced to a statue of himself in his living room, and I had become the paranoid watcher. My gaze careened along the side of the house like a spotlight, licking the paint, teetering along the edge of a window, making the spidery figure of a bullet hole in the pane of glass framing Russell Grubbs’s skull. What if he turned and saw me? In my immobility, I was prey. It was as if we had entered a dome of blue light, American icons in fixed positions.

  I eased the car past the neighboring houses and out of town. As soon as I thought Terry’s father couldn’t see, I turned the lights back on and followed the river road, which curved under trees in full summer leaf. Every now and then I would look in the rearview mirror to see if his truck was following, but the only lights were those from farms.

  The Calvary Holiness Chapel was an old brick country church the Pentecostal Holiness congregation had bought from some failed Presbyterians. They’d removed the stained-glass windows and put in plain glass, since decoration was next to sin. Every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, they rolled on the floor, shook tambourines, and spoke in tongues of fire, but they wanted an austere building in which to practice these things. They had also inherited the Presbyterian dead, who were interred in the cemetery on the rise behind the church, I figured this was where Terry would be, if he was anywhere in the world.

  I drove the car through the gravel parking lot and up the hill into the cemetery as far as I could go without knocking down a stone. Then I put the lights on high beam and started walking toward the far end of the cemetery, where the new graves were probably located. The car lights made my shadow enormous against the hill, so that walking became a grotesque kind of dance. My shadow’s head disappeared into the darkness above the cemetery.

  Terry’s grave had to be the one with the small American flag provided by the local American Legion. I knelt by the stone, which was small and flat to the ground, and ran my hand over the lettering. Memories shivered through me. I thought of Terry the night he threw the steering wheel hard with one hand, like he wanted to send us into the trees. The car went into a controlled wobble from one side of the road to the other, and an oncoming car pulled onto the shoulder, the driver’s eyes as big as tires. Another time, Terry grabbed the steering wheel while I was driving, forcing the car off the road and across someone’s lawn. He was so strong I couldn’t fight him off, and he laughed like crazy. I saw him climb to the top of a small country bridge and step casually off, his huge body an absurdity in midair, landing in the deepest part of creek water.

  Someone had left flowers in a glass tube beside the neighboring grave, which was that of a little child. A teddy bear leaned against the stone, but it wasn’t yet weathered, as if someone had left it there that afternoon. I pulled the glass tube out of the ground and transferred it to Terry’s grave. Then I stepped back and stood for a while in respectful silence. The wind came up and jerked the little American flag on his grave to momentary attention. It was all very peaceful and sad, but everything was also made strange by the car lights. Even the grass was menacing and larger than life. I shuddered because I imagined Terry lying in his casket, mouth open like a lady’s purse.

  It was enough. I started walking back down the hill. I had no prayers to offer, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. The lights of the car dimmed as the engine turned over, and I thought for the moment that it wouldn’t start. It growled weakly and finally roared, and I backed quickly across the lot, spinning gravel in my haste. The car lights flashed on the church windows as I bumped and swerved onto the highway. I threw the car into forward gear and nearly floored the pedal. The old Nova swooned down the road. All the way home, it was Terry this and Terry that, tears streaking down my face.

  My parents were in bed when I got home. I watched Johnny Carson for a while, but his humor seemed pretty lame. He kept winking at the audience to get their sympathy, and it worked. The lamer he was, the more they liked him, as if the whole point of entertainment was to show your vulnerability.

  I turned off the TV and went to bed. My room was the last one on the right, across from my grandmother’s. When I got to the door, I could see her lying sadly in bed, and a wave of guilt went over me. I’d forgotten to say hello to her earlier, and Dad had probably told her I was home.

  The night light was on. Her bed was in the corner. As I got closer, she startled me by turning her milky blue eyes in my direction. She had been awake all along, listening to the house, its aches and movements. I kissed her cool cheek and held her bony hand with its slim, crooked fi
ngers. She couldn’t talk anymore, due to the stroke, and she could only see me in pieces, but she was aware of everything. She knew how I was feeling just by holding my hand. There was irony in that, because much of what I thought and said was offensive to her. She was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. My parents had never told her I was a conscientious objector, because she thought the war was good, in spite of the church’s position.

  Tonight, however, there were none of these differences. I held her hand, and pictures of things ran through my body. I saw old photographs of her and Grandfather, after whom I was named, standing in front of their ancient farmhouse, constructed of fieldstone. I saw him lying dead on the shady, slanting lawn of the same home a few years later, having died in his forties while working on the farm. It was only a few minutes after his death. His face was gray and his cheeks were strangely sunken for so young a man.

  I kissed Grandmother good night again and went to bed in my old room with its high school memorabilia and musty country smell. Someone had left the window open to air out the room, and the cool breeze felt good. I lay on sheets so fresh they were scratchy, listening to dogs bark on neighboring farms. The extended arm of an old trophy, about to loft its basketball, could be seen in outline against the window.

  18

  BREAKFAST WAS GRITS AND eggs. We ate in silence for a while. Then my mother said Vicki had sent a nice photo of her little boy.

  “What do you mean, little boy?” I asked.

  “We wrote you about it,” she said.

  “I didn’t even know she was married.”

  “Oh, yes,” Dad said. “We wrote you about that, too. That happened not long after you started working at the hospital. Who was it she married, Lizzie?”

  “The name was Miller, I think.”

  “That would be Tom Miller,” I said, feeling my throat constrict. He’d been Vicki’s boyfriend in high school. He’d attended Beloit College, where he was president of the local Campus Crusade for Christ.

  “That was the name, I think,” said my mother, looking at my dad. He looked at me with sympathy, holding his knife and fork in his fists like a little kid.

  “We shouldn’t have told Jim about that,” he said with gentle conviction. “Vicki was his sweetheart.”

  “They don’t call it that anymore, Dad.”

  “What do they call it then?”

  “I hate to tell you,” I said.

  “Main squeeze,” said my mother. “That’s what I saw on television.”

  “That’s in bad taste,” he said, forking some eggs into his mouth.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. “It makes love sound like adultery.”

  “There’s a tooth in my egg,” he said, reaching into his mouth. Sure enough, he extracted a small piece of his own tooth.

  “You better see a dentist,” Mother said.

  “I haven’t seen a dentist in eight years,” he said proudly, “not since I bought these shoes.” He lifted one of his shoes to where we could see it, beyond the edge of the table. It was the black tie pair I’d worn in junior high school. They’d gone out of style, and he’d adopted them.

  “Snazzy,” I said.

  “Haven’t even had to resole them,” he declared. “Had to replace the laces, though.” He put the tooth, which was jagged and yellow, carefully at the edge of his plate.

  “Be careful you don’t eat that, Richard,” said my mother, scowling at the table.

  “Imagine that,” he said, “a person eating his own teeth—that’s age for you.” He laughed at his own joke. Then he tested the other teeth with a finger to see if they were about to collapse.

  I finished breakfast and looked out of the window. It was a beautiful day and there was nothing to do. I went to the closet in my parents’ room, which smelled of lavender, mothballs, and talcum powder, and pushed aside the three suits Dad had inherited from a friend of his, a train engineer who had worn them only on Sundays for about thirty years. Dad hadn’t bought his own clothes, except maybe for underwear and socks, for years. He waited for hand-me-downs from the dead, and he had no squeamish self-consciousness about the symbolism. I secretly admired him for these practical economies. Sometimes when water was running from a tap, I would nearly panic at the sight of it.

  The .22 rifle was still standing in the rear corner of the closet. I picked it up by the barrel, found an old box of shells on the shelf, and went into the yard. There was a slope near the barn I could fire into. I grabbed a couple of empty soup cans from the garage and walked across the field. It was recently plowed and soft, and my feet sank into the carpet of it.

  It made me think of a local man named Barnhart, who had been out walking on his property one day and found a canvas bag of money that had fallen from the sky. There had been a skyjacking attempt, but the criminal had lost his grip in parachuting. The newspaper said he’d landed three miles away and hitchhiked all the way to Michigan City before the police picked him up. He was a high school teacher from Nebraska, and it was his first crime. All his neighbors were frankly shocked. He had not only been a good citizen; he was also afraid of heights.

  Barnhart carried the money back to his living room and spilled it onto the floor. He and his wife sat beside it in their easy chairs, thinking and praying about what to do. The next morning, in spite of the debts he had on the farm, he turned it all in to the Malta sheriff. There wasn’t a dime of reward, and within a year his marriage of forty years broke up, one of his children got divorced, and another was arrested for holding up a grocery store. Barnhart walked back to the spot where he’d found the money and shot himself in the mouth with a starter’s pistol. There was no bullet, but the wad of air from the shot pressed into his brain, and he fell down dead. The starter’s pistol had been in a kitchen drawer for years, next to a measuring tape, refrigerator bulbs, and a wide assortment of broken tools. It had been his son’s, from the days when he coached the local track team. It took three days, they said, to find the body.

  The thought of Adam Barnhart was strong in my mind because I used to help him bale hay when I was about thirteen. He had thick red hair and a square jaw. I was scared to death of him because he looked like he’d just stepped from a fire. He would work you in a hot barn until you nearly passed out. Then, to give you a rest, he would make you turn over bales in the field, to shake the dew out of them.

  I set the cans on the slope, walked about twenty steps away, and loaded the single-shot rifle with a .22 long. It took me five shots to put a hole in the one on the right, but I was firing and reloading as fast as I could. Each time I pulled the bolt, the small brass shell would fly out of its housing and land at my feet. Pretty soon the ground around me was littered with shells. The box of cartridges was nearly empty. I had three left, so I went down on one knee in a rifleman’s position, steadied the gun, and squeezed off a round, like soldiers did on television. The shot made a small, hollow sound and the can on the left tipped backward at an angle. I did the same to the can on the right but missed. Then I stood, loaded the final shell, aimed a high-arching shot in the direction of town, and pulled the trigger. Since a .22 long travels only a mile or so, there was no danger. The bullet would come down harmlessly in a field. It was something Terry used to do for the hell of it, and in this way I honored him.

  I walked back up the hill, opened the trunk of the car, and tossed the gun inside, where it looked like a toy. That was where it remained when I left the next day.

  It wasn’t too hard to find where Tom and Vicki Miller lived. Tom was always a very organized person, so you could count on finding him. According to Vicki, he’d made a brilliant discovery in economics when he was in college. It had something to do with the fact that the more you earned, the more you tended to spend. It sounded obvious enough to me, but he had the statistics to back it up, and the professors and foundations were certainly impressed. He’d been promised an excellent job, Vicki had once said, at a Milwaukee brokerage house. It took about five hours t
o get to Wisconsin, bypassing Chicago on the tollway.

  The phone book said they lived on Atlantis Circle. The guy at the gas station said that was in a new development out by the mall. He said the word mall with exaggerated pride, and I looked at his face to see if he was kidding.

  Atlantis Circle was situated in Oceanic Estates, which used to be a cornfield. They’d put in a few trees, but they were so scrawny it looked like somebody drew them with a pencil. There was a man-made lake at the center of the development to give a nautical flavor. A few ducks stood on the bulldozed banks of the lake, staring at the homely water.

  Taking the winding access road, I passed the entrance to Pacific Shores, a part of the development where the houses were smaller and had only a single window at the center of each. This was the low-rent district. A mangled tricycle was inexplicably located, with sculptural perfection, near the entrance sign. Under the words Pacific Shores, a winking red-mouthed dolphin was depicted.

  Next was La Mer Charmante. The French name revealed the higher station of this community. There were three or four designs to the houses, instead of one as in Pacific Shores. The sign contained a tasteful, near-abstract drawing of waves, and a green arrow with a small tennis racket next to it pointed down the road.

  Atlantis Circle was the best of the lot. The houses were mostly classic white-frame structures of varying design that were blown up to epic proportions. They would have looked charming in a New England setting, tucked behind some pines, but here the cottage effect made one uneasy, as if the structure concealed a munitions plant instead of a well-to-do young family.