Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  The Service Committee was at the end of the hall. The office consisted of two large rooms with old desks and a few antiwar posters on the wall, including the famous one of a Chicago cop leaning on his motorcycle and giving the photographer the finger. Another had a large photo of a gas mask, superimposed with an excerpt from Shakespeare that began, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!”

  Two counselors were on duty, young men with white shirts, black vests, and wireless granny glasses. As I watched them counsel the men ahead of me, I realized they were twins of some kind. There was a basic resemblance, but one was puffier in the face and looked like he’d been in a motorcycle accident. While I waited, I looked through a black ring binder that was on the table. It was a list of available CO jobs, and it wasn’t in very good shape. Pages had been torn out, and much of what was left didn’t look current. There was a job as a milk tester and collector of bull semen in Delaware. There was another working as a laboratory animal in New Jersey. You let them inject you with drugs, and they hooked you up to a machine that measured the resulting spasms. There was another working in a home for children who liked to set fires, or so I gathered from the garbled description the home’s administrator had provided. That was about it.

  “We don’t recommend any of those,” said the thinner twin, who sat down across from me. He reminded me of Strelnikov, the heartthrob Communist youth in Dr. Zhivago.

  “Why not?”

  “We keep those around for the CO types who want to cooperate with the system,” he said, straddling the folding chair and twisting an old copy of The Chicago Seed in his hands. “Our thrust is to defeat the war machine altogether. We do that by recommending resistance.”

  “You mean you tell all these guys to go to Canada?”

  “Or to jail,” he said calmly. “In fact, jail is the higher form of resistance ethically. Judges put the sentence at an average of twenty-six months.”

  I looked around the room. Most of the previous clients had left, but one guy in secondhand fatigues and blue jeans was reading a pamphlet called Doing Time.

  “Name’s Rudy,” said the counselor, extending his hand.

  “Jim,” I said.

  “That’s my brother Carl,” he said proudly, indicating the other counselor. “He just got out of Leavenworth—thirty-six straight months!”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Yeah, Carl’s the best,” he said, and the brother looked in our direction. A thick red scar ran across Carl’s neck and into his hair behind the ear. His lower lip looked like it had been sewn back together.

  “Are you identical twins?” I asked.

  “We used to be,” said Rudy, looking down at the backs of his hands. It was dear that Carl’s injuries had occurred in prison, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask what had happened.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Have you been in jail, too?”

  “I was convicted the same time as Carl,” he said a little sadly, “but my lawyer’s appeals have slowed everything down. To tell the truth, I’d like to have it over by now.”

  I explained my case to him, and he studied the floor for a minute. “I’m afraid we can’t be of much help,” he said, “unless you want to go the resistance route. Then we can provide legal services. Our priorities, frankly, are as follows: jail, going underground, and Canada. Most of the COs just figure things out for themselves.” He said “COs” with a hint of sarcasm, as if it were ethically akin to selling used cars.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, my face getting red. “You act like being a CO is the same as serving in the army.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

  “COs do a lot of good,” I said. “They help people in hospitals and things like that. They also aren’t in Vietnam, killing a lot of innocent people…killing anyone for that matter.” But my indignation was hollow, because I’d already begun to wonder if Rudy wasn’t right.

  A guy wearing a lumber jacket and work boots entered the office with his girl friend, who wore an India-print dress and long earrings. He had a batch of papers in his hands. They both looked worried.

  “Gotta go now,” Rudy said, rising. “Good luck to you.” He walked over to the couple, and an earnest conversation began. It was obvious that the kid had been drafted, and I could see Canada all over his girl friend’s face.

  I was lost in thought when Carl tapped me on the shoulder. This close, his scars were frightening, but his eyes and voice were gentle. “Consider prison,” he said. “It’s what you can do for your country.” I left the office with that advice in mind, feeling as if I were buried in my own flesh. The chatter of brokers on LaSalle Street brushed by like so much fuzz.

  17

  MY FATHER HAD GIVEN me some old luggage, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. All my clothing fit into two pillowcases and a cardboard box, but there wouldn’t be room for the books. From the stack along a bedroom wall, I chose Rabbit, Run by John Updike, The Great Gatsby, and a weird book on Victorian sexual practices by David Brain, a captain in the Salvation Army. There was a picture of him, overweight and chinless, on the back of the wrinkled, sun-bleached book. It had been left behind by a previous tenant, and I thought someday I would read it for the charming oddity of its prose—a text full of typos, blots, blurs, and goofs.

  It was eight in the morning, and the day was beautiful. Sunlight cut deeply into the apartment and found me standing at my bedroom door. I’d slept only briefly, wearing the clothes I’d come home in. That sweet odor of gasoline and flowers was me: I went to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, stepped into the shower, and turned it on full-blast.

  After dressing in some fresh jeans and a white dress shirt, like someone getting his senior-class picture, I went to the refrigerator. There was nothing in it but an empty milk carton, a dozen bright apples, and two tired-looking potatoes that had slowly grown eyes. I took two apples and stuffed them into one of the pillowcases.

  I made a smooth exit without any awkward good-byes. Randy and Penelope were probably in one of their bedrooms, sleeping off their astonishment at having paired off. Wherever Rose was, he was probably dreaming about doors.

  At the bottom of the front stairs, Gus and Larry, the giant neighbors, were in warm-up outfits that said “Temple University” across the front. Gus was wearing roller skates and making surprisingly graceful figure eights on the sidewalk. Larry was jogging in place.

  “Leaving town?” said Larry jerkily.

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyplace special, like Aruba?”

  “Just home,” I said, “to see my parents.”

  “See you later,” said Gus, executing a brilliant backward leap and turn on his skates. He landed so softly, you could barely hear the skates click on the sidewalk. All of his great height seemed to unwind and regather during the maneuver.

  “So long!” I said, but they were already moving away.

  I drove to the Metropolitan, parked the car in front, and left the keys inside. If somebody stole it, I wouldn’t go anywhere. If it was waiting when I returned, the fates had decided.

  The Hospital was bright and busy. Patients were being wheeled off to tests and surgery. Volunteers and candy stripers walked here and there, carrying out the useless tasks to which they were fairly accustomed, their very inefficiency a sign that somebody cared.

  Janush’s secretary was in the office, but he wasn’t, which both pleased and disappointed me. On the one hand, I wanted to get even with him, as Harvey Kolwitz had done when Gary fired him a few months ago. In anger, Harvey had swept everything off Gary’s desk, including the prized pictures of his family. On the other hand, I didn’t want the aggravation of seeing him again. The secretary was on the phone with a friend, so I pointed to my paycheck, which was on the desk in front of her. All the paychecks were there, since that was the routine every other Friday. I picked it up and waved goodbye with it as I headed back down the hall. Neither of us spoke a word. In the elevator, I opened the envelope and t
here was a letter of termination inside, signed by Bolger. Having no use for the letter, I handed it to a kid from Pediatrics who was being wheeled down for an X-ray or test. He gave me a smile and tucked it into the Mickey Mouse coloring book he had on his lap. He would draw on it later. The other people in the car—an intern, a dietitian, and the transportation aide—smiled mechanically and looked up at the floor numbers blinking over their heads.

  The car was where I had left it, keys in the ignition. I started the engine and steered dreamily to the Hancock Building, which soared to a point overhead. The doorman at the side entrance on Delaware Street didn’t challenge my parking there, even though the 1963 Chevy Nova had rust spots around the door and gave off blue smoke. In fact, he held the door for me, and I entered the lobby regally.

  The Lake Shore National Bank was on the second floor. I cashed the paycheck, which amounted to $230. Then I wrote a check for the balance of the account: $189.10. The teller had to check with the manager, but after a while she handed me the cash with a look of commiseration, as if she wanted to go somewhere, too.

  The doorman opened the car door, which squeaked on its hinges. I offered him a dollar from the bank envelope I’d stuffed my money into, but inexplicably he refused it, tipping his hat and smiling. It was so nice of him, I waved goodbye as I made an illegal U-turn in the direction of Lake Shore Drive. All the lights were timed in my favor. Soon I was a part of the high-speed traffic flowing out of the city as if fleeing a storm or god. All around me, people had two hands locked on the wheel, their eyes straight ahead, intent on where they were going rather than on where they had been.

  The car wasn’t prepared for any kind of trip. It was hardly ready to go around the block. A blue pigtail of smoke trailed behind, and the engine could be heard roaring through a hole in the floor, which was covered with a cheap rubber mat. Even with the pedal floored, the engine compression was so bad that the car could only do fifty miles an hour. It was all my fault. I’d never learned the least rudiments of car care. You were supposed to change the oil every few thousand miles, but I couldn’t imagine going to all the bother. As a result, I’d gone through a few used cars in pretty quick succession, as if they were designed to be thrown away. The old Chevy Nova was about to go under, too. When I got to the Interstate, I removed the rubber mat covering the hole in the floor and watched the road fly under my feet. This was a lot of fun on a country road when no traffic was coming. The idea was to straddle the middle of the road so the white line flashed across your vision like a blinking light.

  It took about three and a half hours to get to Malta, Indiana, the “Circus City.” My parents lived about six miles on the other side of town. Malta used to be the winter headquarters for the Barnum & Bailey Circus, among others, because the railway lines crossed there. The town was filled with retired circus people: jugglers, clowns, roustabouts, and acrobats. Every summer they had their own little circus to remember the glory days, but mostly it was the local people who showed up, in spite of the chamber of commerce’s ambitions for tourism. About a mile from my parents’ home in the country, you could often see the heads of giraffes and elephants sticking from the windows of a barn near the highway, but today the doors and windows were all sealed and the gate across the entrance road looked rusty. Had they died from a mysterious fever, or had the owners given up the location? Malta itself had looked small and empty, as if people were sneaking out of town in the middle of the night.

  My mother, Elizabeth, was in the yard poking at the ground with a stick when I pulled up. She seemed not to recognize me at first, squinting and staring. She always was slow to acknowledge people anyway, as if she were thinking about something else.

  “Hi, Mom!” I shouted as the car got close enough.

  “Oh, Jim,” she said, squinting with confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  “This is where I live, remember? What are you doing with that stick?”

  “Testing the ground,” she said, “to see if anything will grow here.” She always had an enormous garden, from which we were fed from July until the first frost. Over the years it had gotten so large that it surrounded the white frame house almost entirely, except for a shady part near the outside cellar door where nothing would grow. As with most country homes, no one entered through the front door. Even the Bible salesmen came to the kitchen door in back.

  I got out of the car and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s in the house,” she said, pointing with her stick, even though it was only a few feet away. For a moment, I thought I saw my father’s dark round face at the window, like a figure in a gothic novel. He preferred the indoors, where he sat reading mystery novels and religious literature. It was my mother who seemed more comfortable outside, in spite of a pale complexion that caused her to burn easily.

  “You go on inside,” she said, returning to her agriculture, “I’ll be along in a minute.” As I carried my belongings to the door, I watched her poking at the ground with great concentration. She had always been the pioneer woman, and the developing age of suburban ease was foreign to her character. One day she opened a kitchen cabinet and a mouse, made frantic by its discovery, leaped out at her. She batted it down with one hand, watched it scramble along the counter and fall into a wastebasket. Then she calmly bent down and smashed the animal with her hands, the only available weapons. At nine years of age, I was more impressed than you could possibly imagine.

  My father sat in the living room, reading a detective story with oversized print. He looked up the way someone looks up in a library, with a pleasant, abstracted smile on his face. He was half in the book and half out of it.

  “Oh, hello, Jim,” he said, as if I’d just come back from an errand. “I saw you come up the drive through the window there. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

  “I left on the spur of the moment,” I said.

  “You’re not in any kind of trouble, I hope.” His face clouded over.

  “No trouble. I haven’t been home in a while, and it seemed a good time to come.”

  “Well, we’re glad to see you,” he said, glancing at his book as if I’d already left.

  I sat at the center of the sofa, the cardboard box and pillowcases at my feet.

  “What you got there?” he asked.

  “Oh, just some clothes.”

  “Why don’t you use that nice Samsonite luggage we got from Mother?”

  “This seemed easier,” I said.

  His eyeglasses flashed window light in my eyes. Mother was his mother, Earnestine Summers Holder, and she had a room upstairs. She was eighty-two years old, but she’d nearly lost her vision from a fall and her speech was impaired by a stroke. She had been visiting some relatives in Georgia, and one night they were sitting on the back porch, eavesdropping on the neighbors. Leaning to hear better, she’d lost the edge of the chair and landed hard. The jolt had shaken loose pieces of her retina. Because they were opaque, she could see only a small part of anything, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

  “How’s the car running?” he asked, looking up from Mission to Madrid.

  “Oh, great. Just great.”

  “Thought I saw some smoke coming out of its tail.”

  “Needs a tune-up, that’s all.”

  “If you take care of a car, it will take care of you. Dad used to say that. You getting good gas mileage?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, but I was thinking how funny the conversation was. I’d been at country get-togethers where nothing was discussed but gas mileage.

  “You should say hello to Mother,” he said. “Before dinner.”

  “I will.”

  We sat in silence then. My body felt heavy, my eyes weighted down; my feet were sinking through the floor. I leaned over, put my head on the couch, and entered a deep, profound, and useful sleep. This was what I always did when I came home for a visit. When I woke up, my father was shaking my shoulder gently and the dinner table was set. My be
longings were gone, except for the two apples, which were on the coffee table. In my drowsiness, I looked twice at them, confused. I knew instantly that my mother had washed and ironed my clothes, what there was of them.

  We went into dinner and ate mostly in silence, as usual. Every now and then, Dad would say something like “The weather today was really something” without having a real point. He felt something had to be said in order to make the meal pleasant. The only thing mother said was “Richard, don’t eat so fast,” because she wanted him to lose weight. I said nothing at all. In this way, we finished our meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes, which was the best I’d ever eaten.

  After the dishes were done, we went back into the front room and turned on the TV. By now it was getting dark outside, but they didn’t turn on a lamp in order to save on electricity. We sat bathed in the blue-and-violet light of “Bowling for Dollars,” their favorite show. They were never more animated than when this show was on, and the host, Sammy Speaks, delighted them. The format was pretty simple. Sammy would briefly interview people, then they would try to get two strikes in a row. If they were successful, they got the money that had built up in the pot, which was now at $350. If they got one strike and a spare, they got a Ping-Pong paddle or something. Sammy always asked guests the same question, “What do you like to eat?” They acted like it was a tough question and screwed up their faces in intense concentration. Yes, that’s right, it’s coming to me now—I like spaghetti, or steak, or fried chicken! Everyone in the studio audience would laugh warmly and sympathetically, because they liked those dishes too. I felt an overwhelming affection for my parents as they enjoyed their television show.

  “Bowling for Dollars” was over, and since no one had won the big pot, it went up to four hundred dollars. Then the evening news came on, and Walter Cronkite announced in his avuncular fashion, laden with tragedy and importance, that a major bombing raid had been carried out in Cambodia, as ordered by President Richard Nixon. Many of the enemy had no doubt lost their lives, but what was the cost in terms of foreign policy? The NATO allies were in disagreement. How far would the U.S. go to turn the tide of the war? It was announced that momentarily the president would speak from the Oval Office, explaining his decision.