Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  During the movie, Vicki whispered that the lab had called earlier that day. She was pregnant for sure. She could have a second test, but they were rarely wrong.

  I was stunned. It was not me watching the pretentious movie; it was someone else’s body I was visiting for a few years, on a trial basis. This was the body that embraced Vicki and kissed her, not on the mouth, but softly next to it. I rattled around inside it, and the movie began to make sense for the first time. One of the characters stood in the middle of a field while the camera moved around him in a full circle, and then another one. He talked about politics as usual, and a fly landed on his forehead. We left just as one of the characters was slitting a pig’s throat with a long-bladed knife. Blood slid heavily from the wound and soaked the muddy ground. The camera jerked around as if the cameraman had lost his footing. We heard the pig’s desperate cries as we hurried up the aisle. We could still hear them on the other side of the doors as we headed for the street.

  4

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT the hospital at nine in the morning for my physical, the place was bustling with activity. This was the time when all the surgeries are scheduled and most of the tests are conducted. The hallways were littered with patients on carts or in wheelchairs, waiting their turns for the X-ray or operation that possibly would save their lives. I entered through the front door this time, where an Egyptian-looking doorman helped people in and out of cabs, a service only to be found at a place like Metropolitan. At City Hospital, located in a bad neighborhood, there was no doorman. There you were lucky if you could get the broken doors to open on your own, and if someone reached out, it was probably to steal your wallet. The doorman gave me a big smile full of gold teeth and opened the door. He looked very happy in his work, and the gold stitching on his brown coat said “Mama.” It was a good name for him. He looked like he might pick you up in his arms and rock you right to sleep.

  The lobby looked like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. A red tapestry with an abstract design hung from the high ceiling, and the walls were Indiana limestone. The place seemed to breathe dignity and money. To the right, unobtrusively set in an alcove with oak trim, was the cashier’s office, and to the left was the Ladies’ Auxiliary Gift Shop, filled with get-well cards, stuffed animals, and magazines. It was always crowded, with a huge line at check-out, because all the clerks were volunteers and didn’t know what they were doing. But they were awfully nice, and everybody forgave their incompetence. The gift shop smelled of cough drops, perfume, and old ladies with silver hair.

  I took the elevator to the basement, where Health Services was located, next to Nuclear Medicine. The cancer patients had their tumors reduced there with gamma rays, down the hall from a long winding tunnel leading to the medical school.

  Health Services consisted of two small rooms, one for the doctor and one for an aged male volunteer wearing a white smock over a Brooks Brothers suit. He might have been a distinguished lawyer thirty years ago.

  “May I help you?” he asked, peering at me over his reading glasses.

  “My name is James Holder,” I said. “I was told to report here for my employee physical.”

  The desk was clean except for a clipboard containing a single sheet of paper. He consulted it with shaking hands, holding the board close to his face.

  “It’s Holder,” I said, “spelled H-o-l-d-e-r.”

  “Not related to Ernest Holder, are you? Fine fellow, Ernest.” You could tell Ernest had been dead for years.

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “A fine man for golf, Ernest. Wicked with the mashie niblick.” He chopped down with his right hand, and the long white fingers shook. They were so white they almost looked blue.

  “I play golf,” I said unnecessarily.

  “Well, that’s fine, young man, just fine!” He was glad I’d offered the information. It made all the difference to him.

  I shifted my weight, trying to peek into the doctor’s office. A white light filled the room, a quality of light you only see in hospitals or doctors’ offices.

  “Here it is, young man. Holder. That you?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Holder, just plain Holder.”

  A short blond doctor appeared in the doorway. She was about fifty years old, and appeared to be very serious. She looked me up and down and without another word waved me into the office.

  “You are Mr. Holder, I suppose,” she said with a German accent.

  “That’s right.”

  “I am Dr. Waldheim. I am told you seek a position in management here.” She seemed to doubt this was possible. There was a pause, because I didn’t answer. It seemed perfectly clear who I was and why I was there.

  “I am waiting for your answer,” she said crisply. She crossed her arms and impatiently tapped one foot on the floor.

  “Yes,” I said meekly. “I’ve applied to be a unit manager, in the Service Department.”

  “And you feel that you can be of service to our patients?” She said “our” as if they were her patients only. In fact, she had no real patients. She was only a medical service physician on a base salary, hired to prevent goldbricking by nursing aides and orderlies.

  “Well, yes,” I said, “I do believe I can be of help. I’ve always been a helpful person.” I looked around the room for pieces of paper to put in the wastebasket. What proof did she want, anyway?

  She reached onto a shelf, grabbed a small plastic cup, and handed it to me. “Take off your clothes,” she said coldly, “and put on one of those gowns. Then fill this cup with urine. You can use that room.” She pointed to a bathroom set into the wall and watched as I entered. She was in the same position when I came out again, clothes heaped in one hand, the cup of warm urine in the other.

  Dr. Waldheim took the urine and told me to put my clothes on the chair and sit on the examination table, which was covered with a long sheet of paper. She held the urine up to the light and looked through it. Then she dipped some litmus paper into it. She seemed satisfied with these results, because she didn’t say anything.

  The examination was thorough. I was probed, poked, and stared at. I coughed, sweated, and let her look in my ears and mouth. When she grabbed my front teeth with two fingers and wiggled them back and forth, my whole head shook.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  “The teeth are loose. They are not real.” Excited, she made a mark on the chart. Her manner changed from suspicion to gleeful discovery.

  “One is false,” I said. “The other one is mine.”

  “You have had much trouble with your teeth. The teeth are very bad.”

  It was true, but so what? My mouth contained about five pounds of silver, and hardly a tooth was spared. I never yawned on dates, because they might see the dark clots of silver.

  When she asked me to stand and drop the gown, I did so, but with embarrassment. Suddenly I had a horrible fear of getting an erection, and the more I thought about it, the more it became a possibility. My balls were shriveled from cold or fear, and the penis began to twitch. I cleared my throat and tried to think ugly thoughts: spiders crawling up and down my legs. It worked. Cold sweat ran out of my armpits, down both sides, and onto my hips.

  She walked around me as if I were a statue. She asked me to bend my knees and stand sideways, then backward. I touched the tip of my nose with an index finger and held my ear with the other hand. Then, holding this position, I hopped up and down on alternate legs. I bent over while she looked for hemorrhoids with a flashlight. When she inserted her middle finger into my rectum, pressing hard on the prostate, I groaned. I coughed obediently while she stuck a long finger, like a sharpened broomstick, under each testicle. Dr. Waldheim looked up my nose, under the fingernails, and behind my ears. She counted the hairs on my chest and under each armpit. She smelled my breath for something funny. Blood was drawn, X rays were ordered, and questions were asked. Did I smoke and how much? Was I an alcoholic, a pederast, smuggler, scholiast, or seminarian? Was I vegetable, mineral, or comp
osed of various cosmic gases? What was the nature of my dreams, and what did I do with the property of others after I’d stolen it?

  As an afterthought, she looked at my wrists. There was a scar on the left one, which she spanked and stroked with the tips of her fingers.

  “What is this?” she asked with a menacing smile.

  “That is called a scar,” I said. The old man in the other room was humming a song, just loud enough to be heard.

  “How did you get it?”

  “I’ve had it since I was a year old and fell on the sidewalk with a jar of pennies. They had to rush me to the doctor to have it sewed up. It looks funny because the doctor was in a hurry to stop the bleeding and didn’t do a very good job.”

  She leaned so close I could feel her breath on my face. “You can tell me the truth, you know,” she said. “It’s nothing to embarrass you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This,” she said, jabbing a finger at the small twisted scar, “is clear evidence of a suicide attempt. I insist that you tell me about it.”

  She was a bounty hunter, paid to catch employees with drug habits, frailties, old suicide attempts. Her teeth had small crack lines that had turned brown. She looked like a vase put together again.

  “I told you the truth,” I insisted. “The scars are twenty-two years old.”

  “Tell me about your mental depression,” she said. “Tell me how you put the blade to the skin and twisted it. Tell me about your cowardice, your refusal to face life. You know nothing about life!” She had made a tight little fist as if squeezing a fly to death. In her anger, her sallow face almost took on color.

  “You’re crazy!” I said.

  My clothes were in the corner. I pushed past her, stark naked, and bundled them into my arms. Should I rush into the hall and search for a bathroom? Fly past the volunteer in a pink panic? Already I could see Mulroony’s gloating face as he sent me off to Vietnam, marking the orders with a flick of his wrist.

  I tried to be calm. I sat in a chair and put on my shoes and socks. Then I stood up and put on my pants, hopping around the room. They were too tight because of the shoes on my feet. Nervously I fastened each button on the shirt, and wrestled on the sport coat. There was only one thing wrong. I’d forgotten to put on underwear. Alone on the chair, they were proof of the doctor’s assertions. I picked them up and held them in my right hand.

  All along, Dr. Waldheim had said things like, “What do you think you’re doing?” and “Where do you think you’re going?” But now she said, “My report will go to Mr. Bolger as soon as possible.”

  “And?” I said.

  “I shall disrecommend,” she said crisply and coldly.

  By this time the noise had reached the other room. The ancient volunteer opened the door a crack and peeked in. I waved and he waved back.

  “You vill never, never work in this hospital,” said the doctor.

  “I do not give a damn,” I replied, storming out of the room. In my anger, I felt about six feet wide in the basement hallway.

  That night, at home in bed with Vicki, I started to worry about it all. Here she was pregnant—which is why our backs were turned to each other—and I’d screwed everything up. I spent the night tossing and turning, but in the morning Bolger called and then Janush. I had the job, no problem. They’d gotten the report from Waldheim, all right. She had walked it up to Personnel herself and stormed around the office. That’s what she always did. They’d gotten used to her, and the blood tests and X rays were mainly what they needed anyway. They figured the rest out on their own. Janush offered congratulations and hinted that he and Waldheim used to date each other. I imagined them doing the bunny hop in a German restaurant.

  But I had another theory about Waldheim. Her real name was Rosa Teal, and she’d escaped from the psych ward the night before. She’d hidden in a laundry basket and emerged wearing a white lab coat with “Dr. Waldheim” stitched on the vest pocket. It was a simple matter, with such credentials, to become the doctor she had always dreamed of being. Now she was Elsa Waldheim, a simple girl from the mountains, but one with a mission.

  5

  THE NEXT DAY I ARRIVED at Janush’s office for orientation, walking down the hall in the direction of the crease in my pants, which today was straight ahead. Janush wasn’t in, but Yvonne, the secretary, was.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Carumph,” she replied, pointing to her mouth. I saw she had half a piece of chocolate in the other hand, hidden behind the desk.

  “Candy,” she finally managed. “You want some?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, “they make me break out.”

  “How about some Sanka? I got Sanka.”

  “No, really. I’m fine.”

  “Gary will be here in a minute. You just have a seat.”

  I sat in a chair near Janush’s desk, and in sauntered a guy wearing a gold sport coat, black pants, black shirt, black tie, and black shoes. He had bright red hair combed straight forward, but the front was butch-waxed up to a point, like a gangster Woody Woodpecker. He had a pencil-thin red moustache in the middle of a pale white face. Even though he was about my age, he seemed of an earlier generation;

  “Hey, how’re you doing?” he said, as if we were old acquaintances.

  “Fine.”

  “Ee-glosh,” said Yvonne.

  “Name’s Ed Grabowski,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Jim Holder.” His hand was surprisingly warm. He took the seat next to me.

  “This is orientation, right?”

  I told him it was. Yvonne nodded yeah.

  “I look forward to this here,” he said. “This management thing is just my line of work.”

  I said that was good.

  “Fits right in with my plans, being around the bodies and all.”

  Bodies?

  “Yeah, Nancy’s old man owns Princetti’s, the funeral parlor on Cicero and a hundred and fifth. You know the place?”

  I didn’t, but Yvonne was listening with interest.

  “Got a hell of a good business. Three, maybe four funerals a week. It’s not bad money, you know.” He unbuttoned his coat, thrust his arms through his sleeves, and leaned back in his chair. “The old man lets me do some embalming when they get busy. I get a hundred bucks for the drain and flush,” he said with pride.

  Yvonne looked down with disgust at her half-eaten chocolate.

  “The old man’s gonna set me up in my own-business someday. This here’s kind of a sideline while I study undertaking. You know Merrymount Academy on Western and Ninety-seventh?”

  Yvonne said she did. That was her neighborhood.

  “Well, that’s the one,” he said.

  We were quiet for a moment, then he leaned close and whispered, “Tell you what, though….”

  Yes?

  “You can make some good contacts here with the doctors. Who do you think tells them where to find a funeral director?”

  “The doctor?”

  “Damn right,” he said.

  Janush, dressed in a blue suit, entered with a tall black-haired woman in her late twenties, whom he introduced as Barbara Stevens. He put his hand around her waist. She gave him an irritated glance, but he didn’t notice.

  We followed Janush down the hall to a conference room filled with men and women, in roughly even numbers, wearing tan lab coats and plastic name tags. Most of them were fairly young. Everyone sat on folding chairs.

  “First,” he said, “let’s welcome three new members to the service team. They are—stand up, Ed, attaboy—Ed Grabowski, who comes to us from Merrymount Academy, where he’s studying hospital management; Barbara Stevens, recently of City Hospital, where she worked as an assistant in Medical Records; and Jim Holder, who recently graduated from Rhineland College in Indiana. He’s young, boys and girls, but he’s willing. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s been reported that people aren’t handling the syringe disposals right. There have been two major stickings re
sulting in gamma globulin shots this week. Remember, please, to ask the nurses to twist off the needles with the pliers provided and dump both syringe and needle into the box. They’re putting in the needles attached, and the damned things are punching back out through the cardboard. Ellie McCarthy, the nurse on Fifteen North, got a used needle right through the palm of her hand.

  “Second, make sure you get these carts out of the hall. They’re piling up by the elevators, and there’s no room to move. Arrange them up and down the hall where there’s room, and no hoarding carts and wheelchairs! You people on the surgical floors have got to stop your raiding of the medical units.”

  A few of the older hands were giving each other the eye. You could tell who the hoarders were, just by their smart-assed looks.

  “And you people on the evening shift,” continued Janush, “Bobby Leonardi tells me there’s been some going home early. No hitting the elevators until the stroke of midnight. Romona will speak to the issue.”

  From a corner of the room came a short fat woman with gray hair pulled so tightly, it must have given her a headache. Her red lipstick aggressively overran her lips, perhaps to make them look fuller; but the effect was somewhat grotesque, as if there were blood on her mouth. She held a clipboard in one hand and a skinny cigarette in the other. This was Romona Fisk, our supervisor on the evening shift. She was never without the cigarette or clipboard, even when dancing. Standing next to Janush, she took a drag and started to talk, but it didn’t amount to much. You could tell she thought the meeting was a bore, and on the evening shift she’d run things her way.

  Janush and she mumbled on for a while, and Grabowski reached over Barbara to hand me something. It was a photo of his wife, standing on the bedroom stairs in a blue negligee. The picture was pretty murky, but it looked like she had nothing on underneath. You could see the shadows of nipples under the frothy nightgown, which was the “shorty” style popular at the time. She’d recently had her hair done, and her teeth were extra-shiny because of the photographic flash; but it was an honest smile.