Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  “You are, Anna,” he replied.

  “The Blind Bat Swordswoman is the wife of a shogun who’s being held for ransom. The ransomer offers to release the husband if she will sleep with him, and he’s also holding their two children. It is hers alone to save the family, because their lands have been lost and all the warriors and servants dispersed. It is a medieval time of outlaws and itinerant killers, and she goes out on the road, dressed in blue and purple silks, her only protection the small sharp sword she keeps inside a bamboo cane. Along the way, she is blinded by a band of rapists, but this does not deter her. A white horse comes down the road and nuzzles her bleeding face. In the next scene, we see her riding it, looking peaceful and serene. She’s blind now, but still in search of her family, and she seems to have special powers.”

  “She’s very strong,” said Randy with admiration.

  “Soon we discover just how powerful she is,” continued Anna, making two fists that melted back into hands. “When the next band of outlaws sets upon her, she pulls her sword and kills them all, in spite of her blindness. She can hear and feel them coming at her, and she cuts them to shreds in a killing dance.”

  “A killing dance?” I said.

  “Whirling and turning,” said Randy.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Anna.

  “And she saves her husband and kids?” I said.

  “No,” Randy said. “It’s a series.”

  “If she saved them,” said Anna, “there would be no quest.” She looked through the window at the street below, where her motorcycle was chained to a tree. “Without a quest, there is no life,” she declared heroically, slapping the coffee table with the full flat of her hand.

  This morning, after Rose and Penelope left, Randy told me what had happened. They’d gotten into a tiff over a movie interpretation, and she’d knocked him down, sat on his stomach, and slapped him black and blue.

  “The worst part was,” he said, “we were in bed. We’d just made love, but it hadn’t worked out very well, and I think she was pissed about that.”

  “It’s nothing to punch somebody over.”

  “I guess not,” he said, gingerly touching a welt on his cheek. “It’s just that she makes such strong demands.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see,” he said, looking embarrassed, “Anna likes to play these games. We can’t just make love; there always has to be a plot of some kind.”

  “Sounds kinky. Don’t tell me—the Blind Bat Swordswoman?”

  “Promise you won’t tell?”

  “No problem.”

  “Anna likes me to pretend I’m violent. It really turns her on. She wants me to throw her back on the bed, rip off her clothes, and slap her around.”

  I was trying to imagine this, but failing.

  “So it really wasn’t the movie,” I said. “She was showing you how she wanted it done.”

  “She got kind of carried away,” he said. “She really got into it.”

  “Are you going to see her again?”

  “This afternoon,” he said sheepishly.

  I figured we all were crazy, so there was no point now in giving advice. Rose came upstairs with the mail, and in it was a letter from Terry Grubbs, dated three months ago, with the return address of South Vietnam.

  The letter had been forwarded from my parents’ home address, and the envelope looked like it had been around. Inside, the handwriting was what I’d remembered from Rhineland College, a tiny script belonging only to geniuses or morbid obsessive types to whom detail is everything. He’d been “in country,” he wrote, for only a couple weeks when they sent his company out on some heavy missions. He’d been given the job of walking point, so if they got ambushed he’d be the first to get shot, except perhaps the lieutenant, and that would come from behind. On the second day, they took some fire, but they got off easy because only one guy got hit. The problem was, you couldn’t see anything until it was too late, and then you were fucked. One night, while sitting ambush, he’d killed three gooks with claymores, which must have been some kind of bomb from the way he described them. He couldn’t see them coming, but knew they were there by the smell of woodsmoke on their skin. He pushed the plunger three times, and in the morning they were lying together like dolls with arms and legs missing. Now he knew his father was right. Taxation was purely a waste, since the ordinary taxpayer can’t choose who he wants killed or how. Lots of ammunition was being wasted every day, money down the drain. The American people had no idea how right this war could be, nor how poorly it was being run. The grunts were doing all the work, and all the credit went to the lifers, who, by the way, got five of his company killed because they couldn’t read a map. They’d ordered one of their own tanks to fire on them. Basic had been good, however. He’d met a captain at Camp Lejeune who’d taken a liking to him and invited him home for dinner. After steaks and beer they’d played war games in the living room, hiding behind the chairs and sofas, and the captain had won. Then he said with tears in his eyes how Terry was going to be his man in Nam. The captain wanted to be assigned there real bad, but had a hunch he wasn’t going to make it. Whenever they took fire, he felt bad that the captain wasn’t with him. In a firefight the other day, a guy got his leg blown off, and before he knew what he was doing, he picked it up and hopped over to the medic, who freaked out there and then. The medics got blown away all the time, but they were a bunch of stupid COs anyway. When he got out of Nam, he was going to move someplace like Idaho scrub-brush country where even his goddamn mother couldn’t find him. The other day, a bunch of them had sat on an embankment downwind from a fire in a field of marijuana, and it was such good shit they could smell their own blood in the air. He felt these horns and spikes coming out of his back, like a dinosaur or something. He was ancient, he was leather. He was just plain fucking pissed.

  About a week after I got Terry’s letter the evening news showed a suspected Viet Cong being shot by a South Vietnamese officer on the streets of Saigon. He had a fragile skull like you see on children, and the officer quickly put a small gun to the temple and fired. The pistol looked so much like a toy, it was surprising how fast he fell, his thin arms tied behind him. He went down like laundry, and everyone watching wondered how it came to be that you could see such things on television. It used to be Sid Caesar making a face at Imogene Coca or Charley Weaver reading a letter from the people back home, and now you couldn’t even watch the evening news without turning to stone on the sofa.

  9

  EMORY ASHWORTH WAS A black nursing assistant on Orthopedics and the spinal cord unit. During the day he was studying to be a florist at Dominion College, a diploma mill. He weighed about three hundred pounds and was “queer as a three-dollar bill” in the words of Normal Cane. Everyone liked him a lot, especially the patients. He wanted to sleep with me.

  One night I was sitting in the stationery closet on the sixth floor, counting how many drug requisitions we had, when the door closed and the light went off. I didn’t see who it was, but it was something large and warm, and it spoke in a seductive voice.

  “Let me make you happy,” it said.

  “Open the door, Emory.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a bore.”

  “Open the door, please….”

  “Or you’ll scream? Oh, my dear!”

  He opened the door, and I stepped out, virginity intact. “I could have given you such pleasure,” he said, patting his hair with a pudgy hand, but we both knew he was camping it up. His offers were only half serious and partly made as entertainment for the other employees. A number of them were laughing and pointing as we stepped from the closet. By way of seduction, he’d given me a rug for my bedroom, but I was too innocent, or too greedy, to understand the tactic. A couple of weeks later, he rang the bell unannounced and asked to see the rug. When I showed it to him, his eyes yearned for the bed, but that was all that happened.

  One of Emory’s favorite stunts was to put a sheet around him so he looked just like a nun.
Then he’d sit in a wheelchair and have another assistant push him from room to room, where he posed as Sister Bernadetta, hearing the patients’ fears and confessions and holding, their hands. As the sister, Emory also had a bawdy sense of humor, but nobody seemed to mind. Nor did they notice he was the orderly who had brought a snack tray or removed a bedpan a few minutes later. When they told him about “that wonderful Sister Bernadetta,” he’d say what a comfort the sister had always been to him.

  It was Christmas Eve when Emory came out of 675 holding a very large pistol with thumb and forefinger, the way you’d hold a wet towel. He had it by the handle, so the barrel pointed down at his foot, swinging as he walked.

  “Holder, honey, would you look at this?”

  Another nursing assistant came out of the room behind him and said they’d found it in Jack Triplett’s locker while they were straightening up. It had fallen out of an open gym bag and landed on the floor.

  It was a real gun, all right. Emory put it on the desk, and we all leaned over and stared at it.

  “What’s Jack Triplett doing with it?” I said. “He’s a quad.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” said one of the nurses.

  “OK, I will,” I said, “but first we’ve got to get rid of the gun.”

  “How about the narcotics drawer?” said the nurse, getting out her key.

  It was fine with me. I picked it up by the handle and placed it next to the vials of morphine. The nurse closed the drawer and locked it, and I told the station clerk to call Security. They were such clowns, they’d probably kill themselves with it on the way downstairs, but it seemed the right procedure.

  I headed toward the room with Emory behind me. Jack Triplett was in bed one, the first on the right, in a four-bed ward. Everyone in the room was a paraplegic or a quadraplegic. Jack was a partial quad, meaning he had no use at all of his legs and only vague movement of the arms. While the paraplegics had the run of the hall in their wheelchairs, doing wheelies, having races, and even going out to the movies with special permission, the quads could only lie around on carts, usually on their stomachs. Jack liked to swing his arms around when a nurse was pushing his cart and pretend he was pinching her ass. Most of them would let him have a quick feel, and a couple others did more than that. Emory said Yolanda, the LPN, would draw the curtains every Tuesday after dinner, flip Jack over on his Stryker frame, and give him a hand job, using the same lotion the nurses used for back rubs. I said I thought quads couldn’t get a hard-on. He said it was just the other way around. Sometimes they couldn’t get rid of one. It would wave around like a flagpole, even though they couldn’t feel it. They couldn’t come either, he said with a sigh, but stroking it down with lotion was a lovely gesture anyway, like sending a birthday card. It wasn’t just Yolanda who was giving such favors, from the pleased look on Emory’s face.

  Jack was facedown on the Stryker frame when we entered the room, the tray with his half-eaten dinner beneath him. He had curly black hair and a tattoo on one arm. Once he’d been a big man. Now his arms and legs were thin from disuse, so only his torso showed the strength he had once had.

  “Jack,” I said in a friendly way, “there’s a little bit of a problem.”

  “Wha’s that?” he said to the floor.

  “There’s a gun in your locker.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said casually. “What about it?”

  “Well, you can’t have guns in the hospital.”

  “You can get ʼbout anything else,” he laughed.

  “Only you can, Jack,” said Emory.

  “Hey, faggot,” said Jack, “turn me over on this thing.”

  “Only if you’re nice,” Emory teased, but immediately he loosened a couple wing bolts on the frame and turned the frame so Jack was facing up. Locking the bolts again, he untied the seatbelt-like straps around the chest and legs, and removed a long canvas-and-aluminum piece that Jack had been lying on. Now the frame looked more like a regular bed, although a very narrow one. The catheter bag was still half filled with brown urine, but now it was on the other side of the bed. A large dressing on his hip was stained yellow. Like most of the spinal cord patients, Jack had trouble with bedsores. He didn’t get very good care at home, and a bedsore had deepened, like a cavity in a tooth. Since the pain couldn’t be felt, the sore grew and grew. It’s finally infection that kills such patients, if not kidney disease from urinary problems. A nurse said they were taking pieces of bone from Jack’s hip when they changed the dressings.

  “Tha’s better,” he said, in a drawl that was both southern and alcoholic. “My pecker was gettin’ sore.”

  “We can correct that in other ways,” said Emory.

  “About the gun,” I said.

  “It’s a gift from my old man. He brought it the other day,” he said, lifting his right arm like a wing.

  “But why?”

  “For protection, why the hell do you think?” He blinked at me as if I were crazy. Didn’t I know what a gun was for?

  “Why do you need protection here?”

  “Ol’ Louie over theah cussed me out the other day, the son of a bitch. He said he was gonna fix my ass good.” He nodded toward the opposite corner, where a thin black guy named Louie Bottoms, completely broken and helpless-looking, was staring at the ceiling.

  Jack couldn’t pick up a toothpick, much less a pistol. To keep them from atrophying completely, the nurses had braced both his hands with Ace bandages and specially shaped pieces of plastic. This kept them from curling into birdlike claws from sheer disuse, something that occurred when the tendons overpowered the opposing muscles.

  “How are you going to use a gun?” said Emory with such tactlessness it became tact again. “You can’t even feed yourself.”

  “I wasn’t gonna use it, unless he fucked with me. Then I’d figure a way somehow.” He began to laugh, which caused him to cough; then he turned red in the face.

  Emory waved good-bye and went back into the hall. He had better things to do.

  “Tell Holder how you got here in the first place,” said the patient from bed two, a paraplegic who rolled over in his wheelchair with surprising finesse. This was Honest John, and he was in and out of the unit for simple diabetes. Otherwise, he looked in perfect health. He was extremely handsome, with the slightly sharp features of a Polish aristocrat, and from the waist up he was very well built, because he worked with weights.

  “Aw, hell, not that again,” said Jack.

  “Gunshots,” said Honest John. “Go ahead, Jack, tell the man.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ to tell. I was fuckin’ around with this woman and her husband got wise. So one day he laid waitin’ in some bushes, tha’s all.”

  “Jack is at the top of the apartment stairs, knocking on her door, and her old man steps in at the bottom. He shoots all six bullets, bam, bam, bam, just like that, and Jack falls down the stairs and lands at his feet.” Honest John gestured the entire scene, holding the gun with both hands, like cops on TV shows.

  “And then the motherfucker kicks me,” said Jack indignantly, “just for good luck.”

  “Pretty good, huh?” said Honest John, relishing the story yet another time.

  “He was a lousy fuckin’ shot, though,” said Jack. “Only one of them shots hit home.”

  “One’s enough, my man,” said Honest John, and the entire room seemed to murmur assent.

  There was a silence. Then Jack said, “I laid there, thinkin’ this ain’t so bad. If I’m dead, I can still look around, and it don’t hurt too bad. Never did hurt, by God.”

  “It’s like a pinprick is all,” said Honest John, “a little bitty pinprick.”

  “It’s when you try to move,” said Jack, “and the phone call don’t go through.”

  “I got mine in a diving accident,” said Honest John, “one night in a quarry. A bunch of us was drunk and somebody said we should jump off this cliff about fifty feet in the air, into the water. There was water all right, just not enough of it. Landed my ass
right on a big damned rock that was under the surface.”

  “Ol’ Louie got his in a car,” said Jack. “Hey, Louie, how’re ya doin’?”

  There was no answer. Louie stared at the ceiling as if we weren’t there.

  “That Louie is on another plane of consciousness,” said Honest John. “He is so far into being fucked up, he can’t see out again.”

  There was a fourth guy in the room, but he was turned onto his stomach and didn’t say anything. You couldn’t tell if he was asleep or listening to all of this.

  “That’s Wilson,” said Honest John. “He doesn’t like us much.”

  “Fuck off,” said Wilson in a loud clear voice.

  “Hee, hee, hee!” giggled Honest John. He was the only one in the room who could move around, and it gave him a certain authority, somewhere between ambassador and talk-show host. He had all the confidence of a weight lifter, but his legs were remarkably thin under the blanket that covered them.

  “If you want the gun, Jack,” I said, “you can get it when you leave, downstairs in the cashier’s office.” The security officer would place it there, inside a yellow “patient’s valuables” envelope, because that was the rule.

  “Sure, man,” he said, completely unconcerned. I saw Yolanda, the LPN, standing at the door with a jar of lotion, washcloth, soap, and towel. She was pretty in a horsey way, with a long face to match her long legs. For a moment, jealousy made a sweet ache that started in my chest and ran out to the hands.

  “Time for your skin treatment,” she said.

  “Is this Tuesday?” I said, looking at my watch.

  Honest John knew when it was time to leave, and so did I. We went into the hall. Honest John smiled and did a wheelie that was nothing less than spectacular. He reared up in an instant and did a full 360 before dropping lightly down.

  “All right!” I said, slapping his open palm.

  “Be cool,” he said and blasted smoothly down the hall toward the nursing station. He was going down there to flirt with the nurses, as he usually did in the evening. His diabetes was bad, however, what the doctors call “brittle.” In time it was going to mean a lot of trouble for him. A cut on his foot would turn gangrenous and he’d have to have it amputated, but for now he was as lively and good-looking as he would ever be.