Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  The Millers lived at 207. A huge lawn separated the house and the lake. There was no car in the drive, and all three garage doors were closed, so you couldn’t tell if anyone was home. A lamp could be seen in the window, but it wasn’t on. An American eagle emblem decorated the lintel, and the doorbell, which gave off pale light, was situated at the center of a marble Liberty Bell.

  The white door hushed open: there was Vicki, standing partly in the dark. On her arm was an overwhelmed, suspicious infant about a year old, eyes red from crying. Vicki was pretty but looked a little worn. When she saw who it was, a look of vast irritation came over her face.

  “This had to happen sooner or later,” she said, holding open the storm door. “Come on in.”

  “Where’s Tom?” I said, in what I hoped was a neutral tone.

  “He’s at the office,” she said, disappearing through a doorway with the baby. “Make yourself at home.”

  I sat in a chair with a red, white, and blue diamond pattern. A few rooms away, Vicki could be heard talking to the child with reasonable moderation, as if it were an adult. “You must go to sleep now,” she said. “Mother has many things to do at this time. It is ten in the morning. Now is the time for napping, and later is the time for recreation.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. She never used to talk that way, as if she were reading from a script. It then occurred to me that she was reading from a script, a child-development book of some kind.

  Vicki came back down the hall and leaned against the wall, dragging on the cigarette and looking a little Lauren Bacallish, with Lucy and Desi undertones. “What do you want?” she said, squinting at me through hair and smoke.

  “Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I replied.

  “Well, if you want to go to bed, you can forget it,” she said.

  I held up my hands as if she were holding a weapon.

  “That was quite a speech you gave the baby,” I said. “Where did you get it, Dr. Spock?”

  “Tom wrote that out. He says we have to deal with Michael on a contractual basis. We make these agreements, then we live up to them.”

  “Does the kid have a lawyer?” I asked. “You have to watch out for the fine print these days.”

  “You’re a riot,” she said, pretending to gag on her finger. This gesture had always endeared her to me. She had a way of mixing crudeness and refinement that made her seem smart and sexy.

  She went over to the shiny blue couch and sat clinging to one of the arms. Her long red hair dropped over her eye again, and she brushed it back with a hand full of expensive jewelry.

  “Married life seems to suit you,” I observed.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “How about you? Got any girl friends?”

  I held up ten fingers twice, and there was silence, like the Simon and Garfunkel song, “Dangling Conversation,” she liked so much.

  “Michael was conceived after the marriage,” she volunteered.

  “That’s nice. I was worried.”

  “I thought you might think it was yours,” she said coyly.

  “Mine?”

  “I just thought you might think that.”

  “Well, I don’t think that,” I said with childish sarcasm. There was meanness in the room. If it didn’t vanish, we would soon be making love.

  “This is a nice house,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “It’s only temporary,” she said, collapsing back on the couch. “Tom got another promotion at work, and we’re moving into a larger place.”

  “What did he do, come up with another theory?”

  “Something like that. He figured out that as people get older, they tend to save more money. It makes a big difference in the way you sell bonds, so they gave him a raise and a bonus. He’s a vice-president now, in charge of futuristics.”

  “Sounds impressive. What is it?”

  “You know, the future. Like who’s going to die when, and who’s going to be born in what year.”

  “Then he’s God,” I offered. “You married God.”

  “They have a computer list on just about everybody in the country. We could go down there right now and look us up,” she said with pride.

  “You’re saying Tom can tell me when I’m going to die?”

  “Give or take three months,” she said.

  “Have you checked on your own life expectancy?” I asked.

  “Tom has checked on all of us,” she said matter-of-factly, “but he won’t tell me what it is.”

  “That’s manly of him,” I said.

  “Always good to plan ahead,” she said, jabbing the air with a new cigarette. She lighted it with a coffee-table ornament that looked like a sea gull. Its head snapped back on a hinge, revealing the lighter.

  “How about Michael? Has he checked on that, too?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “So he knows when Michael is going to die?”

  “Give or take three months,” she said.

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said with sudden enthusiasm, “you want to watch some television? There’s ‘Love, American Style’ and ‘The Price is Right.’” Her eyes searched the top of her head, as if mentally flipping through TV Guide.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “How are things at the hospital?” she asked.

  “Oh, great,” I said, “just great.”

  “I don’t like the smell of hospitals,” she said.

  “You get used to it after a while.”

  “Not me,” she insisted, “I don’t even like to drive by them.”

  “I’m sorry the way it worked out, Vicki.”

  Her hand shook as she put the cigarette to her mouth. “Don’t talk about that, Holder. That was then. We were different.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What did you really come for?” she asked.

  “I probably wanted to see if you were doing better without me.”

  “And…?”

  “It looks like you are,” I said.

  Little Michael appeared at the end of the hallway, holding a teddy bear and a water pistol that looked like a German luger. He had apparently climbed out of the crib. He stared at us with curiosity while sucking on the end of the barrel.

  “For God’s sake,” said Vicki. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “I’ve got to be going now.” I stood up and moved toward the door.

  “It’s been real,” she said, walking with me.

  “Right.”

  “Oh, you know what?” she said as I stepped out the door into the recently remodeled sunlight of Atlantis Circle.

  “What?”

  “Tom did look you up on the computer.”

  “And you can’t wait to tell me, right?”

  “Put it this way,” she said. “It’s not what you were hoping for, but it’s not all that bad, either.” She winked at me and tossed her hair, one hand on her hip like Annie Oakley. It was something she used to do when we dated, and a twinge of regret went through me. I wanted to go back and kiss her good-bye, but I was frozen in my tracks. Desire and inertia were sliding into each other like two bodies of water.

  “Thanks for the information,” I said, opening the door of the car and waving good-bye. Michael appeared beside his mother, still holding the bear and water pistol. He looked sternly in my direction and followed me with his eyes as I backed down the drive.

  The money was still in the glove compartment. I stopped by the front sign of Oceanic Estates, took it out of the envelope, and counted it again. Mostly tens and twenties, it impressed me with its bulk. I pulled out a ten and put it into my shirt pocket.

  About twenty miles down Route 94, headed south, I pulled into a Sinclair station with a busted-up statue of Dino the Dinosaur standing outside. A mean-looking attendant with a thin black beard came over to the window. He wore the official green-and-white uniform, with a Dino patch over his pocket that said “Killer.” The uniform was incredibly dirty, and
his hands were darker and shinier than dirt ever was.

  “What do you want?” he said, as if he knew me.

  “Do you have a phone here?” I asked.

  “In there,” he replied, gesturing toward the station.

  I got out of the car and he followed me into the building. The phone was next to a calendar from the Ridgid Tool Company. The Ridgid Tool girl was sitting in a chair with a wrench between her legs.

  “You got change for a ten?” I asked, handing him the bill from my pocket. “For the phone.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, and disappeared with the money through a door to the service area. “D-i-v-o-r-c-e” by Tammy Wynette ended on the dirty white radio and “Okie from Muskogee,” the Merle Haggard number, began. A minute later, he returned with a fat man whose hair was the color of dust.

  “Whatchu want this money for?” he asked, snapping the bill and holding it up to the fluorescent light.

  “Have to make some long-distance calls,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  “That’s my business,” I said firmly.

  “OK, Steve,” he said, handing the bill to Killer. “Give him the money.”

  Killer looked disappointed but gave me the change, after counting it twice at the register. There was a five-dollar bill and the rest in quarters and dimes.

  The phone rang eight times. Barbara answered.

  “Guess who?”

  “You jerk,” she replied. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Parts unknown.”

  “You made us all crazy,” she said. “We thought maybe you were dead or something. Your nutty roommates didn’t know where you were, so we checked the morgue again.”

  “I’m in Wisconsin,” I said. “It’s only like a morgue.”

  “Guess what?” she said with professional interest. “We saw a body that looked a lot like you, only it was bald.”

  “I’m glad you could share this with me.”

  “Ed thought for a minute it was you, because of the nose and lips.” She laughed nervously at this, then she said, “Romona cried, if you can believe it.”

  I did believe it.

  “When are you coming back?” Barbara asked.

  “I guess I won’t be,” I said.

  “Why not? You have only a few weeks to go.”

  “Didn’t you hear? Janush fired me because of Cane and Graven.”

  “People have been asking about you,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard what I said. I could hear scratching, as if she were combing her hair near the phone.

  “What do you mean, people?”

  “People from the administration. Bolger and Cane came by a couple of times, asking questions about your roommates and how you lived. Janush said there was a man from the FBI or something, wearing a. gray suit, and he had this folder on you.”

  “FBI!” I nearly screamed. “Why the FBI?” Killer heard this and grinned malevolently as he leaned against the wall.

  “Cane said they had your college grades and asked if anyone knew what ‘Peace Studies’ meant.”

  “I got a B in that,” I said. “I had problems with conflict resolution theory.”

  “It’s a course, you mean?”

  “Sure, you read Tolstoy and things like that.”

  “That was some weird college. The FBI said they thought it was some sort of Communist place, where they gave you credit for not fighting.”

  “It’s a pacifist college, Barbara. You know, religious.”

  “Cane said you were probably a member of a Communist drug ring. You planned to steal morphine and sell it to crazed hippies.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Does the FBI think that?”

  “Not really,” she said. “They just think you’re AWOL. There was some talk of issuing a warrant.”

  “I’ve only been gone a couple of days.”

  “You know what I think?” she said. “I think you should come back right now and settle things. Then they’ll just forget about it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not coming back.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Who knows?” I said. “It’s a big country.”

  “But…” Her voice was in confusion.

  “Love you,” I said.

  “You stupid idiot!” she shouted, but it was muffled as I hung up the phone.

  Killer eyed me all the way out of the station. I got into the car, swung it around toward the highway and started driving. Either direction would do, I figured, but west seemed a good way to go, under clouds shaped like Viking ships and cowboy hats, crisply outlined on this beautiful day. West would take me places I hadn’t thought of going. My head was incredibly clear. My body felt so light, I thought my molecules would scatter, like towns on a map.

  Route 94 rolled smoothly under my feet. It was easy to blur my eyes a little and imagine the road moving instead of the car. It was a frictionless ribbon that transferred me from one state of mind to another. When I was a kid driving with my parents to church, there was always a stretch of road where the morning sunlight would project the car’s shadow against an elevated bank of grass. I could see the outlines of both the car and its occupants—father, mother, and child. As the car moved higher and lower on the rolling road, the shadow would change its shape and size, like a flag. I would always wave my hand, to interfere with this magic and to confirm it.

  Route 94 led to I-80, and by six o’clock that evening I was already west of East Moline, eating a sandwich and having a cup of coffee at one of those off-ramp gas stations. The coffee helped, and I did the Nova’s limit into Iowa. The Mississippi River was astonishingly wide, as if an entire city might float down it. As night came on, semitrailers swept around me, their many lights shining. To pass the time, I listened to the radio, especially the wonderfully corny country stations. “Tiger by the Tail” by Buck Owens played every twenty minutes on one station, and as it dimmed I picked up another that carried a replay, from the previous winter, of an important local high school basketball game. It sounded like it was being played inside a shoebox, but I could follow most of the action, and I was sorry when this station also faded—I’d started to favor the Redfield Indians over the Panora Huskers. As the announcer’s voice became obscured behind static, it seemed to pass into history, drifting through summer and time. In high school and college, I’d been on the basketball teams, but the war had made that kind of competition seem unimportant. Nevertheless, the blare of the timer’s horn, announcing the end of a quarter or the substitution of a player, made me shiver with painful nostalgia. I imagined a raw-boned farm boy with a blond flattop haircut going up for a jump shot. The ball rose into the lights and descended toward the rim, as his father, tanned below the hat line, rose to his feet in expectation.

  My legs were stiff from driving, and I had a headache from listening to the dull drone of the engine through the floorboard. But I kept on driving, until I was sleepily leaning at a forty-five-degree angle, both hands on the wheel. The car drifted onto the shoulder, and the rush of dirt and gravel suddenly woke me up. I took the next exit. Half a mile down the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse that had turned gray in years of weather. I pulled the car around back, where it couldn’t be seen from the road. It was hard to sleep at first. I was too tall, so I opened the car door to make room for my legs. Sounds seemed to come from the house, as if the families that had lived there were gathering to admonish me. At six A.M., I woke up with dew all over my feet and sat up quickly, as if someone were watching me. It was nothing, but my nerves were jumping as I started the car, which turned over poorly in the morning dampness. Pulling out of the yard, I saw a blur of white in a window of the house that might have been a face; but it was only a flap of ruined wallpaper.

  Back on I-80, I kept looking in the rearview mirror, as if I were being followed, even when the road was empty. Scenes from old crime movies like White Heat kept appearing in my head—an endless stream of police cars racing from a garage, gri
m cops at the wheel. The lips of the dispatcher clearly pronounced “Nebraska” as I fled in the wake of my own fantasy. All the anxiety of the last few days—and the enormity of what I was doing—flooded over me. Laboring toward Grand Island and Cheyenne, I was lost in America, and even the landscape of the plains was foreign. The sky and trees met at awkward angles. Space was dizzy with its own size. I was homesick for the Midwest, with its thick woods and barns leaning toward each other. Here I was the missing piece in every puzzle. There were thousands of places, invisible from the highway, where I didn’t belong. The highway itself was the only safe place, since travelers at least shared the idea of a destination. Not that I knew mine. I was free to go in any direction, but the possibility of pure aimlessness panicked me, and I kept the car pointed straight ahead.

  The Nova had never had an oil change, at least by me, and it ran more sluggishly than ever. It had so little power, I might have been driving on Saturn. I had to nearly floor the pedal to keep the needle at 50 mph. In Canada, I imagined, a Chevy Sting Ray was tooling from Moose Jaw to Swift Current at a comfortable 100 miles an hour, and the driver had a French surname. It was a country where no one drove north, since few roads ever led there. They went east and west, like cracks in ice. But Canada wasn’t a direction for me, and the scenery passed so slowly, I might have snatched it off some wall. It seemed I was spreading in every direction rather than traveling forward.

  I daydreamed fretfully. Wearing a cap and gown, I was standing again on the lawn of the college, in a line of two hundred other graduates. The sun was bright, the grass vivid. I was amazed. It had never sunk in that I would actually leave college someday, that in roughly two hours I wouldn’t be allowed to stay. After the ceremony, Vicki held my arm while my father took our picture, aiming the camera, as he always had, mainly at our feet. His photos came out strangely, with people cropped out of the shot or standing with missing heads. But this one turned out well. Beaming confusion and satisfaction, Vicki and I looked very much in love, while all around us the future teachers and insurance agents of America were posing for their parents. She stayed at our house near Malta that night, and we sneaked out to the car, making love in the front seat. The moon reflected off the Nova’s hood. Vicki was beautiful and wild, straddling my lap and arching her back. We were already passing through each other, and didn’t know it yet. In the morning, my mother discovered us sleeping in the same bed and backed out of the room without saying a word, then or later.