Saigon, Illinois
Page 23
Crossing an overpass for a local road named simply “X,” I thought of Romona telling off Cane every day of her life; saw her on the roller board, winking at GIs just home from World War II. Then I remembered the gangster’s wife, scheduled for surgery, who stood outside her room, petting the poodle the hospital let her keep, while a half-dozen hoods stood around nonchalantly. I remembered Ed’s “new” car, a 1959 Chevy Impala with fuzzy dice, plastic Jesus, and naked-lady deodorant strips. One night, after drinking a bunch of old-fashioneds at a bar, he’d driven me down Lake Shore Drive at five miles an hour, exactly his kind of crazy. I remembered piles of linen, empty rooms, and Barbara pulling my mouth toward hers. I was dancing again in a black neighborhood, where one of the station clerks lived. Her husband played jazz so loud it could have held back dam water, and he walked around with joints on a plate instead of hors d’oeuvres, singing “What a Swell Party This Is.” I told him they looked like shrouded corpses, and he squinted at my eyes, as if there were someone else inside. I was going to miss all of them. Already they were in sepia-tone, slowly disappearing.
In Winnemucca, Nevada, I bought four brand-new tires because Buddy, an attendant at the Fli-Hi station, said I wouldn’t make it across the desert without them. It cost $160 for the steel radials, the only kind Buddy stocked. I paid from the envelope. While he changed the tires, I had a Kayo soda, the chalky taste of which lingered to the California border. The state trooper at the agricultural check point, between Verdi and Truckee, asked to look in the trunk for out-of-state fruits and vegetables and found the 22 rifle. I’d forgotten it was there, or I would have thrown it out before Reno. My name and address were taken, a phone call was made, and the trooper gave me a Mount Rushmore look, but that was all. I was so relieved that three miles down the road I pulled over and, both shaking hands on the barrel, flung the rifle over the highway embankment and into a gulley of pines.
I’d never been to California. The steep tree-covered hills surprised me: they looked so perfect, like an entrance to paradise. It was here that I would live underground or be arrested—whatever fate had in stores—but real life was in Indiana, as removed as the contents of a time capsule. My mother would go on tending her garden, and when frost seized the plants each fall, she would fold into herself, private, almost to the loss of speech. My grandmother would lie in her bed, so sensitive she could feel the light on her skin. Day after day, she would ask my father “Where’s Jim?” and listen for some hint in his voice, but he couldn’t tell her. Maybe he wouldn’t even know. When she died, I would probably be in prison.
It was evening by the time I pulled off I-80 at Berkeley, taking University Avenue up the hill to Shattuck. On the corner was an apartment hotel with a metal security door that belonged in San Quentin. A number of street people stood near it, smoking and looking dangerous. Something about their outcast stance made me uneasy, a mood that was confirmed when a dazed young man ran down the street backward, circling the intersection and stopping traffic in all four directions. Down the street, a homeless hippie couple were camped out in front of Crocker Bank, their belongings in a shopping cart. They had wrapped themselves together in a brown blanket too warm for the weather. She was smiling out at the street. He was shaking his head with eyes closed, as if singing.
In first gear, the car made it to the top of the Berkeley hills, from which I could see the lights of ships and bridges out on the bay. I imagined that the freighters leaving for the Pacific were carrying rifles and grenades painted a dull green. When they arrived in Vietnam, tanks of green metal would be unloaded, floating on motor oil and American optimism through the jungle. Inside one, a twenty-year-old sergeant was fumbling with headgear that made him look like a praying mantis. His tank was headed for an ambush, and soon he would be on fire, writhing inside the metal housing like the smoke he was becoming. I thought of Terry lying on the ground in pieces, his head twisted sideways like a crazy pillow. Now Terry was at home, and I was somewhere else.
I fell asleep in the front seat, on a quiet residential street. At five in the morning, I woke up more wrinkled and dirty than I’d ever been. The car’s windows were covered with my breath, and I wiped the inside of the windshield with my sleeve. When the car wouldn’t start, I put it in neutral and pushed on the doorjamb with my shoulder until the weary Nova lumbered downhill. I leaped in, swerved left onto a major downhill street, and popped the clutch with the ignition on. It worked, but an hour or so later, in the town of Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco on Highway 1, the car died altogether. It was where I planned to go, but not where I planned to be stranded. I pushed the old heap into the parking lot at the beach and squared it up in a parking space. For good measure, I left the keys dangling from the driver’s door, where anyone could see them. If someone wanted the car, that was fine with me. All my belongings could be carried, and I concentrated my attention to that end, slogging in heavy sand to the beach. I carefully arranged my things on the dry part of the beach near the tide line and buried the envelope where I could find it later. Looking at the mist-covered hills leading back to San Francisco, I took off my clothing, including the underwear. Even though it was July, the ripest part of summer, the breeze from the water was chilly, so I moved quickly into even more frigid water. At first it took away my breath. Seaweed clung to my arms; but then the swimming got easier. I extended my arms toward an invisible point to the west, and I felt stronger and cleaner, stroke by stroke, a breath at a time.
About the Author
Paul Hoover is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He is coeditor of New American Writing and the editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry. He is the author of fifteen books of poetry, a book of literary essays, and Saigon, Illinois, his only novel. He has also translated poetry from German, Vietnamese, and Spanish.
Acknowledgments
I AM INDEBTED TO Pat Mulcahy for her encouragement and astute editing; likewise to Veronica Geng of The New Yorker. I would also like to thank Maxine Chernoff for early readings of the novel.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 13 was originally published, in a slightly different form, in The New Yorker.
Copyright © 1988 by Paul Hoover
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-5693-8
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