Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  Around the corner, passing Honest John with imperial dignity, came Emory dressed as Sister Bernadetta. Nicky, the nursing assistant, pushed him in the wheelchair. They headed toward 675, where Jack Triplett was having the time of his life, as usual.

  I dropped by Romona’s office, where the unit managers often hung out, and found Barbara and Romona smoking cigarettes. Barbara had obviously been crying, and her hand shook as she lifted the cigarette to her mouth.

  “Oh, Holder,” she said, as if she might start crying again.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Romona.

  “You know how Janush always wants the hallways clean?” she said. “Well, Barbara was straightening up the carts on Nine South when she saw a used Chux under one of them. She thought she’d do the nurses a favor by tossing it out, but when she picked it up, there was a baby inside.”

  “Oh,” I said with dread, not wanting to hear the rest. Chux were blue disposable pads the nurses put under the patients, in case they soiled the bed.

  “It may have been stillborn,” Romona said, “and then again…” Her voice trailed off, and she rolled a look at Barbara.

  Barbara studied the lengthening ash of her cigarette, which was bound to fall any second. “It was a little dead baby, with dead hands and dead fingers,” she said. “Somebody must have given birth to it here in the hospital and left it to die.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Romona, concerned about her morbid tone. “I think maybe it was stillborn, Barbara, either here or at home, and the poor mother didn’t know what to do with it. She probably thought the hospital was the right place to take it. If it was alive, it would have cried, and somebody would have found it.”

  We thought about that for a while. The smallness of the room was never more apparent. Though it was mid-winter, the room was stuffy, and a small circular fan throbbed in the corner. It didn’t put out much air, however, and only added to the oppressive feeling in the room. Sometimes when the office was crowded, Ed would sit on its sturdy, flat top and pretend the vibrations were “getting him off,” as he put it. I gave an involuntary shiver and looked at my watch. It was still two hours until break time, ten o’clock. We had nothing to do but sit here together, thinking of other topics for discussion. Romona sighed and studied her nails. She’d brought a romance novel with her but felt it wasn’t the time to drag it out of her purse. Barbara stared fiercely at the wall, wondering why, of all people, she had to find the body. I sat wondering about the same injustice.

  10

  IT WAS ABOUT THE time of the Christmas show that Barbara and I started dating. She was older than I was, but that didn’t matter. She said from the beginning that she had no intention of getting married again, but she did want a baby before she got too old, and she needed a man to carry out the project. She assured me that wasn’t her only reason for dating; but sometimes when we were having dinner with Ed and Romona in the cafeteria, I could sense her sizing me up, as if judging the quality of my gene pool. It was easy to imagine what sort of kids we might have had, since both of us were tall and thin. They’d be lanky kids with long teeth who were awkward on the dance floor.

  We started going out with the others first, to a lively piano bar on State Street called Janie’s. Romona was the one who discovered it, and it was very much of her era. There was a long bar along one wall and a piano in the corner with a bar built around it, in the curving shape of the instrument. Our group of five or six would always arrive around twelve thirty and sit at the piano, requesting songs from the Damon Runyonesque characters who took turns playing and singing. Usually it was a short skinny Irishman named Roark who looked like Hoagy Carmichael. He was always drunk, but that was the idea at Janie’s. Nobody ordered beer, unless a shot came with it. Roark would lean into a song with his left cheek next to the keys, and you couldn’t tell if he was hypnotized by its beauty or had fallen asleep. Suddenly he would lurch into the next phrase of a great talk song like “Scotch and Soda” or “My Funny Valentine,” and Romona would toast him with tears in her eyes.

  Barbara and I always sat together, feeling part of the group and not. It was like we were visiting another culture, a society that hadn’t changed since World War II. They were a sturdy generation—almost unkillable, it seemed—and ours was fragile in comparison. How many of us had the strength to become the colorful characters lining the bar, wearing outdated clothes and living fearlessly in the present?

  “Hey, Tony!” Romona yelled to a roly-poly bald guy behind the bar. “Sing ‘Danny Boy.’”

  “No, no!” He waved her off with a pudgy hand.

  “C’mon, Tony,” rasped Roark from the piano bench. “Sing it for Romona.” His voice was almost a whisper, but Tony, a dark-skinned Italian in a white shirt who tended the long bar, responded to it. He nodded to Roark, braced both stout arms on the bar, and waited for the piano to give him a note. Roark played a single note, and Tony took off with the corniest, most operatic a cappella version of the old classic you ever heard. The noisy bar went silent as his song filled the room. Even a flashy salesman and his sexy girl friend looked up from making out in a corner, their faces bright in the shadows. The scene was so wholesome and seedy at the same time, I expected thick snow to start falling past the single small window.

  Tony finished the song and went back to washing bar glasses, and Roark did a pretty good “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” while his dangling cigarette got smoke in his watery eyes. Then Romona surprised us by doing a successful “Misty.” She talked her way through it but had good presence and timing, and we were all proud of her.

  “You didn’t tell us about your hidden talents,” said Barbara, while Roark took a break, which meant drinking as many ryes as he could with money from his tips.

  “I used to be an entertainer,” she confessed, “back when there were lots of clubs. Used to travel with an all-girl group called Eloise and the Flames. We played lots of big rooms, too, in Detroit, Cleveland, Albany.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, half believing.

  “We really drew the crowds,” she said. “It was a combination big-band and dance act, with some novelty numbers thrown in. I was a dancer in the chorus and did a roller-board act.”

  “What’s a roller board?” said Barbara.

  “You ever watch Ed Sullivan? It’s where you put a short board on a cylinder, then stand on the board, rolling back and forth. Sometimes I’d sing while balancing, and sometimes I’d juggle things.”

  We thought that was amazing.

  “Who was Eloise?” Barbara wondered.

  “Oh, she was really something,” Romona said with admiration. “She led the band, of course, and played the trombone. A very beautiful girl. In the opening number she’d come out dressed as a moth, and we’d all dance around her in our flame costumes—it was beautiful.”

  Roark came over to us, loose in the joints, and gave Barbara a moist kiss on the mouth, which surprised her. She started away from him as if death itself had taken the liberty.

  “That’s a pretty girl,” he muttered, swaying back and forth.

  Romona apologized and hurriedly walked him away from us. The couple making out in the corner looked up again for a second, a dazed look on their faces. Her face was very white and round, with full red lips, and his was dark and angular, with heavy eyelids.

  Barbara wanted to leave, so we said good-bye to Romona and the others and I walked her north on State. It was about two in the morning. Along the way we saw a guy in long blue overalls take a butchered lamb out of the trunk of his car and carry it over his shoulder into a building. It looked like a lamb, anyway. I’d seen them hanging in the window of a Greek butcher on Taylor Street. It made Barbara shudder, and we walked arm in arm the rest of the way. By the time we got to her door on Goethe Street, it had begun to snow, and she asked me in. Five minutes later we were in her bed, completely wrapped up in each other. We made love like we were starving, pushing ourselves fiercely inside each other. She tasted sweet all over. I tasted he
r mouth, her neck, the back of her knees, and her sweet spot until she shook like a kid with a fever. It was exciting how athletic we were, because Barbara seemed anything but athletic with her clothes on. She even walked carefully, the steps measured and arranged, like a horse in a canter. Now she was somebody else, throwing her pelvis rudely into my mouth and pulling on my hair. She pulled me into her, petting and stroking, and when I came, it was down to the last nerve ending. We collapsed on the pillows and talked for a while. Then she got up on her knees in bed and showed me how one breast was larger than the other, but I couldn’t see any difference. Barbara looked great like that, so I got on my knees, too, and we faced each other like skinny wrestlers, touching each other sweetly here and there. We made love one more time, and once she called me Jack, her husband’s name. I said I didn’t mind, because while we were doing it, I kept thinking of Vicki.

  It had been a busy evening at the hospital. Romona was down in X-Ray, gossiping with Don Leland, one of the technicians, when a body flew by the window. That is, it bounced on the third-floor roof outside the window. Romona and Don rushed over, and sure enough, there was a middle-aged man in a hospital gown. Don opened the window and stepped onto the tar-and-gravel roof, but the man wasn’t dead. He looked up at Don with clear eyes and said, “Hello,” as if they’d met at a bus stop. It turned out that he had attempted suicide by jumping from his room on the eighth floor, but because he’d failed to look down, he landed square on his knees on a roof level with the sixth floor. The impact put two large indentations in the roofing, but he wasn’t hurt. He stood up, shook himself off, and walked over to the edge. It was a sunny winter day, so he decided to jump again, but this time he landed by the X-Ray waiting area, and to his disappointment, he still wasn’t dead. That’s what he told Don and the doctors who carried him back through the window, put him onto a cart, X-rayed his spine, and declared him in perfect health. When asked why he tried to kill himself, he said it was because he never succeeded at anything. Besides, hospitals filled him with dread. He wound up on the psych ward, where he became the unit’s Ping-Pong champion.

  That night, all hell broke loose on Twelve South, which was ENT. They called a Dr. Blue for room 1201, right next to the nursing station, and when Barbara, Romona, and I got there, Ed was going crazy. It was his unit, and nothing was stocked right. They needed all sorts of things that could only be found in obscure locations, like the emergency room and surgery. He was in a lot of trouble, and he knew it. I never saw him looking so scared. As well as we could, we tried to cover for him.

  None of us realized, until we got to the room, that it wasn’t the usual cardiac arrest. It was what they call on ENT a “carotid blow,” meaning the carotid artery, which runs up the neck, had literally blown like an oil well. This sometimes happened after radical neck surgery, usually done for smoking-related cancer, because the neck muscles that keep the artery in place are no longer there. They try to pack the wound with dressings so this won’t happen, and drugs are administered to lower the patient’s blood pressure, but the carotid, being so near the heart, has to withstand tremendous force, and its walls can simply give out.

  This had happened to Mr. McKechnie. When Ed got to the room, right behind the nurse, McKechnie was sitting up in bed, desperately waving his arms. Blood was shooting from his neck, splashing all over the room, and his eyes were wide in fear. The nurse, a recent nursing-school graduate, pressed on the neck with a dressing, but already the room was slick with arterial blood.

  The doctors were working furiously on the patient when I got there, and the resident was angry. A scope they used for such emergencies had a dead battery, and the nearest one was on the first floor. Ed called to have them send it up by way of the pneumatic tube, but that wasn’t going to work. The person who worked the tubes in Central Supply would often nod out and tubes would pile up for as much as half an hour. I yelled to the station clerk to have them hold it in the Emergency Room and headed for the stairwell. The elevator would be too slow, so I sailed down all twelve flights, leaping and swinging out on the railings. At the bottom of the stairs, holding the scope like a baton in a relay race, was the Emergency Room nurse. I grabbed it without a word and headed back, taking three stairs at a time. By the seventh floor, I was starting to give out, and by the twelfth I thought I was dead. Ed grabbed the scope as I fell to the floor by the nursing station, but after a minute or so, he returned, still holding the scope. Mr. McKechnie had died.

  Patricia, the nurse on Twelve South, sometimes went out with us after work. I never saw her look so stricken. It was her first blow, and she broke down. Miss Cheever, one of the nursing supervisors, held her hand and talked with her. The nurse on the other unit came over and helped out for a while, but when she had stopped crying, Patricia still had to mop up the blood and dress the body for the morgue. Now she understood why all the nurses on ENT are required to keep a second uniform on the unit, in case the first one “becomes soiled.” The blood had sprayed all over her, even up into her hair.

  The four of us were waiting to take the body downstairs when Dr. Rocks came onto the unit. McKechnie was his case, and he’d been called by the resident to meet with the family. It looked like he’d just come from a dinner party, because he was wearing a tux under his coat, and his face was even more flushed than usual. He’d operated on McKechnie just that morning, but it wasn’t his fault necessarily. Radical neck surgery has a large failure rate. Romona said only 5 percent survived three years after the surgery, and those were terribly disfigured. As a result, ENT surgeons were a very depressed group. Their suicide rate was high, even worse than dentists.

  “Dentists?” I said.

  “Yeah, how would you like to stare into people’s mouths all day and have little children scared of you?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “There was a case at City when I was there,” said Barbara. “An ENT man came to study a chart, and began looking out a window at the rear of the station. It was spring, and there was a park outside. After twenty minutes, he hadn’t moved a muscle, so we checked on him. He’d turned catatonic. Dr. Ellsworth was his name. They carried him away in a stretcher. I heard he’s still in a mental hospital somewhere.”

  “There was a baseball player like that,” Ed offered. “He went bananas right in the middle of a windup.”

  “Baloney,” said Romona.

  “It’s true,” I said. “It was in the newspapers.”

  “I don’t care,” she insisted. “Baseball players don’t go nuts.”

  “They do now,” I said, and Ed nodded his head in agreement.

  “Next you’re gonna say firemen like to start fires.”

  “As a matter of fact…,” Barbara began, but Romona cut her off.

  “A bunch of hogwash!” she said. “It’s all the fault of what’s-his-name, the shrink with the cigar.”

  “Freud?” said Barbara.

  “That’s him,” she said, poking the air with her cigarette hand. “Freud the fraud.”

  “You’re probably right,” Barbara said. “I certainly wasted enough on psychoanalysis.”

  Romona was shocked. A nice girl like Barbara seeing a shrink? It was hard to understand.

  “Just remember,” I said, “Freud means ‘joy’ in German.”

  “Aw, go on,” said Ed.

  Dr. Rocks came out of the room, looking tired but no less arrogant, and met the family in the visitors’ lounge. Ed said they took the valuables home a couple of days ago, including even the toothbrush, and two of McKechnie’s relatives had fought over his wristwatch. Pretty soon, Rocks reappeared with the family. They wanted to go back into the room.

  “Could be trouble,” said Romona. “You heard about Rocks, of course. He’s the least respected surgeon on the staff. For one thing, he’s some kind of a nut. He won’t perform surgery when the moon is full, because he says there are tides in the blood. It makes the pressure too high or something.”

  “Could be he’s right,” Ed said. “You
should’ve seen it in there.”

  “And he’s a terror in the operating room. They say he bounces instruments off the wall and screams at the nurses. The nursing school won’t let their students go into OR when Rocks is there. What’s more, the interns and residents refuse to call him ‘doctor,’ that’s how little respect they have.”

  “What do they call him then?” I asked.

  “Mr. Rocks,” said Romona.

  Rocks and the family came out of the room again, but instead of escorting them back to the lounge, he brought them straight over to us.

  “Mrs. Fisk,” he said. “This is the McKechnie family.”

  “How do you do?” said Romona with a nervous smile.

  There were three in the family, a tall, stoop-shouldered man in working clothes, a thin woman in a black dress who appeared to be Mr. McKechnie’s wife, and a younger man with a vacant look who must have been in his twenties. They didn’t smile when they were introduced.

  “We have an unusual situation,” said Rocks. “The family would like us to release the body to them. Is this in any way possible?”

  “You mean they—you—want to take the body yourself?”

  “That’s right,” said the woman in a country accent, “no funeral home.”

  Romona stiffened. “That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s against the law.”

  “We don’t care about the law,” said the older man.

  “Let me get this straight. You want to carry the body yourself, down on the elevator, and out of the hospital?”

  The older man closed his eyes and nodded yes.

  “You’re going to take the deceased home in your car?” Romona’s disbelief sent her voice into the upper registers.

  Barbara, Ed, and I looked at each other. Would they stuff him in the trunk or prop him with a seat belt? And how would things go when a cop pulled them over for speeding?