Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, never mind,” I said, not wanting to talk about leukemia on a day like this. She drank the water as if dying of thirst.

  It had been overcast on the way down, but now the sun broke through. It gave everything a piercing brightness, reflecting off the cars outside, the silverware, and the windows, which hadn’t been washed since the fall. It gave me a headache, and the waitress gave me two aspirin from a bottle she kept right in the pouch of her official Country Kitchen apron.

  On the way to the funeral home, Janush mentioned Martin for the first time.

  “We never suspected anything like this,” he said. “He seemed like such an old-fashioned kid.”

  “Maybe too old-fashioned,” I said.

  “He used to talk about change,” said Barbara as we passed an old Victorian home that doubled as a doctor’s office. “He said if a person could only empty himself enough, he could stop things from changing. He talked about how sad it was that time kept moving in such a straight line, so that things would drop off the edge.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Janush.

  “He said if things went in tighter circles, it would be more reassuring,” she continued. “We would know who we were and where we were going.”

  “Sounds like somebody lost in the woods,” Janush said. I had an image of the boss stalking through Canada with a rifle, looking for deer.

  “The world is dark,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Martin used to say how dark the world was. It was our own craziness that made it dark, but craziness also holds the world together.”

  “He’s got that right,” said Janush.

  The funeral service was in another Victorian house downtown. The casket was laid out among lots of flowers, but it wasn’t open, thank God. We sat in the second row on some creaky folding chairs with the funeral home’s name stamped on them. Back when it was really someone’s home, this room had probably been the parlor, where company was greeted on special occasions. It still had that little-used smell. In front of us was a podium with a light, and an antique organ was at the rear of the room. We were a little early, but after a while the room started to fill behind us. In came an extremely thin brunette in her twenties wearing a white coat and business suit, and Barbara tugged at my sleeve.

  “That’s Earline,” she said, “his wife.”

  “I didn’t know he had a wife,” I said.

  “They broke up. That’s why he came to Chicago.”

  “No kidding.”

  “She’s a real bitch. Her father runs a hardware store, and when he didn’t want to work in it, she started dating other men. She would even have them over to their house, but first she would throw all his things in the closet. It was as if he didn’t exist. She wouldn’t even bother to put his things back, so he would have to straighten up the house after each of her affairs.”

  “Brazen hussy!” I said.

  “What’s going on?” asked Janush, leaning close.

  I whispered the story again, and he sneaked a look at Earline over his shoulder. She looked at everyone there with undisguised contempt, or so it seemed to us.

  A family that was unmistakably Martin’s came in the door. The father and Martin’s two brothers had the same hair, and the mother was dressed in black. She had Martin’s chin and small, strict mouth. As soon as they entered, the funeral director signaled the organist, and she began to play a dirge very softly.

  To our surprise, the music continued throughout much of the service, rippling and sobbing in the background. A Protestant minister with wonderful black hair got up and talked for a while about the Baum family and what they meant to Mickle. He said what a hardship it was for Lloyd and Florence, but what a strength their two remaining sons, Lloyd, Jr., and Tom, had been. It was a shame that what God had given, a human soul could take away, but we lived in strange times indeed. At this, a murmur of agreement went up through the crowd. He remembered when Martin was a paper boy and always did his job correctly. There was never any problem at all with Martin, as far as anyone knew. Many felt, quite frankly, that trouble began when he moved to the city and met people of indifferent character. It had brought him down. The world outside was full of sin. The world was a dangerous place, he said, pointing at a window that looked out over some white-frame houses, and it was getting crazier all the time. We must sacrifice our separate wills to the higher will of God. God was the light, but when he was angry he came as darkness, blotting out the soul of the unbeliever. Yea, verily, though I walk through the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.

  We all bowed our heads as he prayed for Martin, for Earline and Martin, for Lloyd, Jr., and Earline, who were soon to be married, for Lloyd and Florence, and for the sick children at Gale Storm Middle School. Outside, the sky alternately darkened and brightened. The ground was a patchwork of light and shadow that worked like a flag.

  The organ music got louder after the service was over, and everyone filed to the back. There we were introduced to the family. The father and younger brother Tom even stood the same way as Martin, a little too stiff in the back. The mother was very grateful that we had come and invited us out to the farm, but we had to get back to the city. I kept touching Barbara on the elbow, because I sensed her filling up with grief. We avoided talking to Lloyd, Jr., and Earline, who were standing on the porch, smoking cigarettes and talking to another young couple. At the cemetery, Janush joined the graveside ceremony beneath a blue tent. Barbara stayed in the car. I stood at the near edge of the service, barely able to hear what was said. After a while I started wandering around, reading the names on the stones and watching the April wind shake the budding branches of trees. There was a feeling of fullness in the air, a perfumed smell to the soft ground and new grass. The clouds moved with dreamlike speed. My feet were wet and muddy when I got back into the car, and I was dazzled with the physical presence of things, the shape of the blue tent, where a few people were sadly standing, the starkness of the trees, the smell of Barbara’s hair.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “We were a lot alike, Martin and I,” she said.

  “Not like this, you’re not.”

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  “You’ve never tried it, have you?”

  “I’ve only thought about it, the way you’d think about going to Texas.”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” I said, “I think I’m too young.”

  “It’s the other way around. You think about it in your teens, but later it seems sort of childish, like a way of getting attention.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I used to have this fantasy in church of throwing myself from the balcony, flying over the crowd and landing splat in the aisle.”

  “I’d be too embarrassed. I couldn’t stand to be found not looking perfect,” she said, sitting up to look in the rearview mirror. “But my worst fear is getting killed on the street. There I would be, my dress over my ears and people looking at the color of my panties.”

  She shuddered and laughed at the same time. The ceremony was over, and Janush was walking toward us, sober as a deacon. He climbed into the car, sighed, and turned the key in the ignition. Nobody said anything until we got back on the highway, and then we had a wonderful time, telling stories and singing snippets of rock songs from the fifties. In no time at all we were back in Chicago.

  13

  CARLO THOUGHT ROSE’S HABIT of walking around in the nude was hilarious, but the obsession with locking the front door rubbed off on him, maybe because of Carlo’s time in prison. When Rose would go into his lengthy inspections, Carlo would assist, standing outside on the stairwell landing, turning the knob, and shouting through the door. Edgar spent much of his time at a small typewriter, working on the political tracts he signed “Cyclops,” but in the evening and on Saturday morning he’d be more sociable, watching TV with Rose and Randy. Since he’d become a revolutionary, Edgar said, he didn’t have time for television. Moreover, it was the primary to
ol of capitalist education. When he watched Randy’s favorite shows, he did so as a scholar, analyzing the plot and themes until the imperialist guilt of Krazy Kat and Bugs Bunny was revealed.

  Randy differed in the matter of Bugs. Wasn’t it true, as the French surrealists believed, that Bugs Bunny was an anarchic hero of the Left? His outrageous behavior symbolized revolutionary youth, the mad and dispossessed, while Elmer Fudd was the bourgeois ideal of militarism (Fudd as hunter), imperialism (Fudd evicts Bugs from his home), and the leisure class (Fudd has no discernible job).

  Edgar thought about that. While Randy had a point about Fudd, Bugs Bunny was also a landholder, in spite of the “underground” metaphor of his living conditions. And his frequent recognition of the audience, by winking or waving in its direction, was a formalist gesture characteristic of the most retrograde antisocialist and decadent phases of modern Russian literature. Bugs was “avant-garde” on the surface, but his embracement of the paying audience was no different from that of a butcher shaking a pork chop in a housewife’s face.

  Randy scowled and worked his hands together. He believed in the antiauthoritarian stance of cartoon characters, most of whom conspired with the youthful audience to subvert parental authority. If Bugs Bunny were co-opted by the status quo, then revolution would be in a sense impossible, opposition reduced to an adolescent gesture, to be outgrown as one entered adult society. Children understood better than their parents what it was to be free, and they must teach their anarchism to the Fudds of this world.

  Edgar thought Randy was a revolutionary simpleton. Randy had to understand that the whole medium of television was empowered by capitalism. It was saturated with the values of that system and reiterated them. Weren’t there commercials for toys and cereal between the cartoons? What about the violence? Even when Bugs kissed Fudd on the face, causing him to blush, he was performing a bourgeois act. Capitalist technology was designed as a hymn to itself, and that included movies and television.

  “Not books?” I asked from the dining room.

  “Certainly not,” said Edgar, “because there the technology is so archaic the medium has entered the populist realm. It is roughly equivalent to speech, which is free. Virtually anybody can get his hands on a printing press.”

  “But the education that shapes that speech is not free,” I said. “What school did you attend?”

  “Princeton,” he said.

  “Rhineland College,” I said, pointing at my chest.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “There you go,” I said.

  “It proves nothing,” Edgar replied.

  We argued for a while about the relative value of our educations, and I asked Edgar how he made a living. The question caught him off guard and his eyes narrowed.

  “I can’t talk about that,” he said.

  “Because you get your money from home?” I asked.

  “Certainly not!” he said. “At least not at the present time.”

  “Tell the man where you get your bread,” Carlo said, looking at me with yellow eyes.

  “I did get a certain amount from my trust fund,” Edgar said, “but that is no longer necessary. Now I have my own income, earned through my own efforts.” He seemed very proud of his abilities as a wage earner, yet I’d never seen him go to work.

  “But what do you do exactly?” I asked.

  Edgar looked around the room, and Carlo nodded OK, as if giving him permission to talk. “Actually,” he said, “I go around the world cashing stolen traveler’s checks. I get them from an associate who works hand in hand with the owner of the checks. The owner buys ten thousand dollars’ worth in large denominations and gives them to my friend, then goes to American Express and claims they’re missing. They give him replacements, but meanwhile I travel from London to Amsterdam to Paris, cashing the checks as quickly as I can. I go only to the largest banks, where the size of the checks will prove no problem.”

  “You got to work fast,” said Carlo, “before the list gets around.”

  “They compile a list of missing checks,” said Edgar, “so all transactions must be complete within two days. Of course, the original owner gets a share, and my associate and I keep the rest.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?” asked Rose, in awe of Edgar’s life of adventure.

  “There is some risk involved,” Edgar said coolly, “but the rewards are very good. There was a real problem on only one occasion.”

  “Dallas,” said Carlo, laughing to himself.

  “I was scheduled to receive the checks directly from the owner, whose name was Howdy Brown, but when he showed up, he was already being chased by the state police. He picked me up in front of a suburban motel and sped off in his blue Cadillac convertible at a hundred miles an hour. We were a few miles down the road, heading into the desert, when I heard the siren. It was pretty far behind us, but getting closer. None of this concerned Howdy Brown in the least. He was a big red-faced cowboy, and he made normal conversation about football and the weather before pulling the checks out of his jacket.”

  “Tell ʼem about the baby,” Carlo said, gesturing with a quart of beer.

  “The craziest part was Howdy Brown’s little boy,” Edgar said. “He’d been sitting on the backseat the whole time, playing with some toys, but when the cops got nearer, Howdy thought he would have some fun. He yelled at the kid, whose name was Goober, to climb up in front with us. Goober had blond hair and couldn’t have been more than two. He was still wearing a diaper. But he climbed over the back of the seat, which is difficult at that speed, and stood at the steering wheel. Howdy sat in the middle with his foot on the gas, and Goober held the wheel with both hands, jumping up and down with excitement. The wind blew into his face so hard, it made him look Chinese. He was an excellent driver. Most of the road was dead straight ahead; he kept it right in the middle, so we cut the white line right through the middle of the hood ornament. When a car came in the other direction, he’d ease the Cadillac over into the right lane without any problem. Evidently, he’d done this kind of driving before.”

  Carlo loved the story, even though he’d heard it many times. So did Randy, who’d forgotten his philosophical differences with Edgar. Rose seemed to regard Edgar as a celebrity.

  “So what happened?” I said. “Did you get away from the cops?”

  “It was a supercharged engine, according to Howdy. They were chasing him on a speeding violation. He let them pull up next to us, laughed at their reaction to the baby driver, and floored it. They didn’t have a chance against us.”

  About this time we decided to go down to the Loop for a demonstration against the war. We hated the war, we especially hated the government, but most of all we hated LBJ showing his surgical scar to the nation on television. It was all right if your uncle did it, between the fourth and fifth beer, but the president wasn’t allowed. It symbolized the crassness of our leadership, its essential mediocrity.

  The demonstration was to take place on State Street, in the heart of the shopping district. Carlo and Edgar had something to do with it, indirectly, through the Union for a Free Union. Randy and Penelope were going with them, and Rose and I planned to meet them later. Around noon we climbed the subway stairs into warm sunlight. A large crowd looked on from the sidewalk, mostly office workers on their lunch breaks. A smaller group of about two hundred white college students sat in the middle of the street. They were relaxed and cheerful, as if on a senior-class picnic.

  Rose had been smoking joints all morning in preparation for the event, but grass had begun to make me nervous, so I was laying off. He talked softly to himself in a rhythmic fashion, as he often did—a list of the states and their capitals in alphabetical order. He was up to South Dakota. I told him I’d always liked the sound of “Helena, Montana.”

  We had expected a stage and microphone, some minimal preparations, but there was nothing. The stage was the street itself. The idea was to stop traffic, and it had worked. Buses and cars were lined
up to the south and north as far as you could see. Not too far from us, two buses were side by side with their doors open; the drivers leaned on their steering wheels, watching the demonstrators through the enormous windshields. They seemed in no hurry. The faces I saw through the windows were all black. Some looked restlessly down at the crowd, but most were reading or staring into space. The sky was a perfect blue, a shade you see only in Chicago, or maybe Oslo. Every blink of the eye was a perfectly developed picture. Rose looked straight in the air, and people around us looked up, too. A few people leaned from office buildings. A couple of pigeons struggled over the crowd, as if inconvenienced.

  I saw Randy and Penelope sitting on the curb across the street. They had half entered the demonstration, like bathers testing the water. Carlo was not in evidence, but Edgar was at the rear of the crowd on the other side, taking photographs of the FBI with a small camera. Poorly disguised as students, they walked blatantly among the seated demonstrators, taking their photographs. The two agents in plain clothes pointed to each other, indicating a sector of students that had been missed. I wondered what kind of files they must have, to go to this kind of trouble.

  The crowd began to stir as the agents moved through. One of them must have stepped on someone, because a young guy with brown hair and a denim jacket shoved the agent from a sitting position. The agent shoved him back, and suddenly the crowd began to writhe, like planarias around a particle of food. Some of the demonstrators stood, trying to calm things down, but it didn’t work. The guy in the denim jacket, possibly a provocateur, leaped on the agent’s back, and the whole street went up for grabs. The agent swung around in anger and threw him over his shoulder onto a group of women. One of them screamed and held her face; blood ran between her fingers. A few Chicago cops, who had been standing at the edge of the crowd trying not to call attention to themselves, waded into the street with clubs, knocking people aside. Most of the demonstrators jumped to their feet and danced away from the blows, but a few more stalwart types linked arms and stayed where they were. It was a classic nonviolent position to take, but the cops hadn’t read Gandhi. They laid into the group with the ends of their sticks. People ran and screamed, and Edgar spun this way and that, recording fragments of chaos. The two bus drivers had closed their doors and dropped out of sight. Passengers were looking at the street with horror; one elderly black man screamed something that could not be heard.