Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  Dr. Rocks displayed his impatience by glancing at his watch.

  “I’ll leave you to work out the details. I’ve an important engagement,” he said, offering his hand to the widow.

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said.

  “Let me know how it works out, Mrs. Fisk,” he said, and walked to the back elevator. He was going back to his dinner party, where the bubbles in his champagne were still rising.

  “What do you propose to do with the body once you’ve got it home?” Romona asked the wife.

  “That’s our business and none of yours,” said the man.

  “We’re gonna bury him ourselves,” the woman volunteered, “just like we always done in our family.”

  The young man nodded agreement to this. “We take care of our own,” he said.

  The Reaper arrived just in time. Ed, Barbara, and I stepped down the hall so they could hash things out. You could see the Reaper’s head snap back when he learned their intentions, and pretty soon he was waving his clipboard at the family. Romona had to step between Cane and the other men. Would there be a tug-of-war in the hallway, the body stretched between us and the family?

  “How weird,” said Barbara.

  “Cane is right,” said Ed. “The law is the law.”

  Rose the Poet was talking about something like this just the other day. There was a hippie movement called Freedom for the Dead. They believed you had the right to do what you wanted with your body, since, after all, what was more yours, than your corpse? The state and the church conspired to tax even the dead, said the leaders of the movement, by means of requirements like embalming and watertight concrete vaults. A free death meant a return to the old ways of dying; the family put you in a plain pine box and buried you in the backyard. One night when he was high, Rose phoned his parents and said he wanted to be buried the natural way; he hoped they felt that way too, when their time came to die. He couldn’t understand why they hung up on him, since it was only midnight in Boston.

  “Maybe the McKechnies are right,” I said. “There are so many laws already.”

  “You’re full of yellow tomatoes,” said Ed.

  Two security officers came to the floor, and Normal Cane and the family left with them. Romona came over and said Cane would have to call the Board of Health, since the family wouldn’t sign the papers releasing the body to the funeral home. The Board of Health could take possession of the body after seventy-two hours. Meanwhile it would have to stay with us. All those years of life, I thought, and when you die you’re an orphan.

  When we entered the room to take the body to the morgue, the walls were still bloodstained, in spite of having been washed. Maintenance would have to repaint the room. I was also surprised to see a half-pack of Camels on the bedside table. McKechnie had died of cancer, and he had cigarettes in his room? Ed said he’d seen the guy smoking, but he didn’t know it made any difference. When we put Mr. McKechnie onto the slab, a puddle of blood remained on the cart, and a Rorschach of blood was blossoming on the shroud. Before we left the morgue, I gave him a snappy salute, because I thought he deserved one.

  The Christmas talent show was an institution, though it was only five years old. It was the brainchild of Jimmy Toedte, the feisty public relations head who was nearing retirement, and Romona, who always loved a show. To our disappointment, Romona herself didn’t perform, but there were some pretty good acts. Barbara and I got chairs together just as the show began, and lights went down in the first-floor chapel, the unlikely but useful location every year.

  Jimmy Toedte came out first and did a recitation that was in the Christmas spirit. It was the old O. Henry story about the woman who cut her beautiful hair to buy a gold watch chain for her husband, but meanwhile the husband had sold the watch to buy a barrette for her hair. Barbara and I rolled our eyes, but several people near us, including James the Diener and his girl friend from Food Service, were wiping the tears from theirs. Jimmy Toedte was an elfin man with ruddy cheeks, and as he told the story, he clasped his hands in front of him and rose up on tiptoe. The applause he got was sustained and sincere, and it was a good beginning.

  The next act, introduced by Romona after her “Thank you, Jimmy,” was the Marveltones, three black guys from the laundry room who sang doo-wop songs from the fifties. The singing was excellent, but the choreography was less than great. They snapped their fingers, did little turns, and changed positions, depending on who had the solo, but you could feel them thinking through each action, and they often turned in the wrong direction. The result was unexpected comedy. I was so charmed by their awkwardness that tears ran down my cheek, though only from one eye.

  Then Arnold Egger, the head of Accounting, sang “What’s New, Pussycat?” and it was exactly what you’d expect from an accountant singing a Tom Jones number. He rolled his hips and furrowed his brow. We could have died of laughter. It was like being a teenager again, trying not to laugh in church. Romona gave us a reproving look from where she was sitting.

  After a few more numbers, including Mrs. Godlewski from Central Supply, who displayed her doll collection and spoke in doll voices, Emory Ashworth came out in a white satin costume and sang “The Candy Man” while holding a large candy cane. After the phrase “the candy man can,” he’d lick the tip of the cane in a cutesy way, as if he were Shirley Temple. A number of black nursing assistants thought this was a howl, laughing and nudging each other. Then Santa Claus came out, who was really Henry, a maintenance man. He gave out little presents. Several employees had brought their children, and they shoved them toward the front. Henry played the role to the hilt; everyone thought it was funny when one of the kids slugged him in the stomach. The evening was warm and cheery, and it didn’t matter who died that night. Death was simply part of our business. There was no point in sighing when the EKG went flat in our faces or the young husband died in Intensive Care. His wife and kids still had to sign for the belongings—the wallet with six dollars, the shirt he’d been wearing—and make the long drive home. During the following days, the widow would still have to decide if the shirt should be laundered and hung in the closet, and whether the money should be transferred to her purse, just for spending.

  11

  RANDY’S FACE LOOKED NORMAL again after Anna’s fit of rage, and Rose the Poet had finished his epic, “The Stuffing of America,” which came to eight hundred pages. It included not a single revision—“My nose is my gesture,” he said. Meanwhile, Penelope joined an anarchist group that met every Wednesday night to make banana bread and discuss the abolishment of prisons. Their belief was that people are born innately good; it is society that makes them do bad things like rob and kill. One evening we were discussing her involvement in this group when Edgar returned from Mexico. He was taller and darker than I’d imagined. He had three or four days’ growth of beard, and his hair was also fashionably unkempt. He seemed to be one of those people who looked good no matter what he did. His patched leather aviation jacket was just the right combination of down-and-out and L. L. Bean, and he could fit in with any company he kept. At his father’s club in the Loop, he was the promising lad from Princeton, the college he had in fact attended. With us, he looked like the anarchist madman who tosses bombs into First National Banks. When Randy answered the door, I thought he was going to fall down and kiss Edgar’s feet, that’s the kind of charisma the guy had.

  With him, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, was a black guy named Carlo he’d met at the Kropotkin Institute. Carlo was from Chicago, too, but from Cabrini-Green, the public housing project, not Winnetka. He was shorter than Edgar, but elegant nevertheless. He wore a long black coat with a Persian lamb collar, a purple beret, and black canvas shoes from China. His eyes were intensely muddy, but they did not communicate inattention. He seemed to catch everything that happened, even dust falling through sunlight.

  We went into the front room. Randy made some green tea. Edgar wondered if they could stay with us for a while, until they found another apartment. W
e thought that was fine. They could set up sleeping bags on the living room floor. Penelope thought it was more than fine. She couldn’t keep her eyes off Edgar. John Reed came out of the back room with Rose and recognized Edgar, slinking over to him more like a jackal than a dog. Edgar gave John Reed a patronizing pat on the head, but otherwise there was no affection. It made you wonder why he had the dog in the first place, unless its pathetic condition symbolized something for him.

  Edgar said Marielle and he had gotten together all right, but she had changed. They spent a couple of weeks together, and it was one fight after another. She wanted to put curtains in the window, but curtains were bourgeois. He’d ripped them down and thrown them into the street. He couldn’t imagine how Marielle had become so domestic at fifteen years of age. It was her adolescent raptures that had so attracted him in the first place. If he’d wanted a mother, he said, he’d have stayed home in Winnetka.

  Carlo pulled out some makings and started rolling a joint. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen, the size of a middle finger. He lit it up and passed it around, and within seconds we were so high we couldn’t see the ground. Carlo saw how well it was working on us. He smiled broadly.

  “This is some fine shit,” he said, “pure Colombian.” Rose was impressed. The stuff he smoked was usually pure window box or Indiana roadside.

  “Marielle was a hausfrau,” said Edgar through the smoke. “One afternoon, while she was taking a nap, I gathered all my things, called her parents, and cleared out. Her father was so well connected, I was only three blocks away when the police blew down the street. Five minutes later, they were going back in the other direction, and she was sitting in the backseat.”

  “Did you kiss her good-bye?” asked Penelope.

  Carlo thought that was funny. He was slapping his knee and laughing. “Man, this bitch is something!” he said.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Penelope.

  “Your head is up your ass,” said Carlo. “My man Edgar ain’t gonna kiss no bitch good-bye.”

  I thought for a moment Penelope would leave the room, but she only shook her head, as if to clear the smoke from it.

  “Did you and Carlo meet in Mexico?” I asked.

  “At the Institute,” said Edgar. “As you know, I’m a student of Trotskyism. Kropotkin is the center for Trotsky studies in this hemisphere. Carlo and I met in a seminar on the new economics.”

  Rose asked what that was, and Carlo explained that it was the gradual replacement of “daylight economies” with black-market or “midnight” economies.

  “Isn’t it essentially the same money?” I asked.

  “It may be the same monies physically,” Edgar interjected, “but once it is ours it is shaded by us metaphysically. The political intention of the money is also darkened and corrected.”

  “Bad money becomes good?” I said.

  “Now you got the idea,” said Carlo.

  “You’ll be interested to know that Carlo just got out of federal prison,” said Edgar.

  “What for?” said Randy.

  “Destroyin’ draft records,” said Carlo. “In Joliet.”

  “How fascinating,” said Penelope.

  Carlo and Edgar explained that they were part of the Union for a Free Union, known for short as the FU. While Edgar had not been implicated in the Joliet affair, he’d been a part of its planning. Carlo, a white college student named Tim, and two white women from Loyola University, one of whom was a professor of history, drove down to Joliet in Tim’s car in the middle of the night. They checked the place out in advance and brought along a crowbar. Carlo pried open the back door, which proved incredibly easy, since in a place like Joliet they didn’t expect this sort of thing. In no time at all, they poured glue into the typewriter, pulled all the current records from their files, and piled what they could into the car. Since the office was on a downtown street, where of course nobody went in the evening, they were able to carry the stuff right out the front door. They filled up the trunk and most of the backseat, leaving hardly any room for themselves. Then, for good measure, they poured ketchup over what remained and nailed a pair of shoes to the floor.

  “Nailed shoes to the floor?”

  “Yes,” said Edgar, “shoes that belonged to Trotsky himself.”

  “How do you know they were Trotsky’s?” I asked.

  “Believe me,” said Carlo, “we know.”

  “Well, they looked like Trotsky’s,” said Edgar.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell them no one in Joliet had any idea what Trotsky’s shoes looked like, nor understood that they symbolized the immobility of capitalist society.

  Edgar said that Carlo was a victim of society. That’s why they’d asked him to come along. Carlo wasn’t an original member of the group, which was mostly college students, but they felt illegitimate without some representative of the underclass. Elizabeth, who was majoring in sociology at Loyola, and Tim, who claimed “life experience” among the poor, went out on a mission to find someone who fully represented the horrors of modern society. That was how they found Carlo, a former member of the P Stone Nation, drug addict, burglar, unsuccessful pimp, alcoholic, you name it. They waited outside Cook County Prison for three days and interviewed each person that came out. On the third day, at two in the afternoon, they had their man. He had just been released on an armed robbery charge because the only witness, a Pakistani grocer, had been murdered.

  “That’s too bad,” said Penelope.

  “Yeah, that broke my heart,” said Carlo.

  Elizabeth and Tim brought Carlo back to the FU and began his revolutionary education. They gave him revolutionary books, bought him some revolutionary clothes, cooked lots of pasta fiesole, boeuf bourguignon, and other sturdy, no-nonsense foods, and let him sleep with all the women in the cadre. After two or three months of this diet, they’d taken some of the prison edge off Carlo. He no longer slept with a knife in his hand, and he didn’t curse in his sleep. The main thing was, he could listen to groups like the Beatles and songs like “The Eve of Destruction” without collapsing in laughter. Carlo had become a true revolutionary, and he was going to lead them into Joliet.

  Edgar had been in touch from Paris, where he was studying the structuralism of foreskins. He had a theory about the “maiming of male beauty” that had to do with Richard Nixon and LBJ, and not only did the University of Paris have the best library with regard to the penis, the city was beautiful that spring. The best approach, he wrote in code, was to properly advertise themselves. What use was the Joliet action unless there was proper publicity? While they couldn’t notify the TV stations nor send out a press release, they could leave some memorable sign of what they represented. Edgar suggested the shoes, and Professor Kunkel thought ketchup would be vivid, since it represented blood without the shedding of it. Tim thought they should also smear the FU acronym all over the place, and it was absolutely necessary to leave certain tracts behind, certain sensible but very dark tracts. Edgar had written them, of course, but the author would be known only as Cyclops, the eye. Edgar thought the pseudonym had a “monadic intensity and mystery.” The eye would radiate the truth of their action. In Professor Kunkel’s apartment, above the offices of Chicago Bowler and the Progressive Workers of America on Webster Street, they printed the Cyclops tracts on a tabletop press, making sure to include the logo of the printer’s union, even though none of them were members, so they wouldn’t offend their brothers and sisters in the struggle. They wanted to include some of the PWA in their action, but Edgar wrote that half the membership of thirty-seven were FBI, and the other half had missing fingers of one kind or another, apparently from industrial accidents. Tim and Elizabeth thought this was a little too icky. How could those rickety old farts understand the needs of this generation?

  The tracts were ready and plans were made. Tim went to a Standard Oil station and stole a copy of the needed map. This took some daring, since there was a junkyard dog between the cash register and the map rack, but Ti
m pulled it off. Not only was it important to conserve funds (the map cost twenty-five cents), but the group was also unwilling to give its money to Standard Oil. Sure enough, the map of northern Illinois had an inset for Joliet. There was the prison, there was St. Francis College, and there was Water Street, where the draft board was located. One afternoon, after synchronizing their watches, Tim, Elizabeth, and Professor Kunkel got into Tim’s Dodge Dart with push-button drive and drove out to Joliet. It was decided not to bring Carlo along on this preparatory trip, since they might be stopped if a black man was seen in their company. Some discussion ensued about Carlo’s traveling in the trunk, but caution won out in the matter. Tim, who was an excellent cook, prepared some sandwiches for the occasion, consisting of homemade bread, bean sprouts, garlic butter, and raw Bermuda onions. These proved purifying to their systems, if not altogether satisfying. The travel time and notable landmarks were noted by Professor Kunkel in her “Metaphysical Journal,” which consisted of revolutionary meditations written on water-soluble paper. If they were arrested, she could erase the evidence with a simple glass of water.

  The most daring part of their research involved Tim’s going into the building on the pretext of joining the army. The draft board, it turned out, shared offices with the army recruiter, so while Tim bullshitted Sergeant Cannon, he could check out the location of files. Meanwhile, Professor Kunkel, using only the perspective of imagination, drew an aerial map of that part of the city, at about the height a pigeon might fly. There was no need for such a map, but it did look attractive in the journal.

  Research concluded, the group returned to Chicago. Tim calculated his gas mileage, round-trip, at nearly twenty-four miles per gallon, which satisfied all concerned. They had reservations about the use of fossil fuels, but the ends seemed to justify the means, and the automobile did offer certain advantages over ten-speed bikes or the train. Carlo proved persuasive about the need for the car (“You stupid honkies can walk, but I’m sure enough gonna ride”), and soon his street experience and forceful advice became crucial to the group.