There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  It was fading from the Hit Parade but still played on the radio at four thirty A.M. while I sat folding the papers once across their width and then tucking the ends into each other and stacking them in my white bag soiled with newsprint. The fresh papers smelled vaguely like fish, and the lines of my fingerprints were filled with ink, as if I were marked by the Rockford Morning Star.

  At five thirty A.M., I slow my bicycle in front of Roger Hartinger’s house and toss the Morning Star in a looping arc through the still-dark sky toward his porch. My first paper delivered.

  “He’s got you and me, brother, in His hands,” I sing as I ride off to deliver the second one.

  11.

  “Ach, ja, this is just a diversion, this story of yours,” Albert Speer says. “A diversion.”

  He’s recently been visiting my dreams. So vivid, in a kind of hypercolor, as if I am more than really there.

  In my dream, Albert Speer and I are standing together at the edge of a garden attached to a country house. It’s summer. The slow hum of fat bees, and golden butterflies cruising by.

  “How do you say, Herr Ryan, you make a diversion? Do I say that correctly? My English is technical but nicht idiomatisch.”

  In my dreams Albert Speer always worries about his English, and yet he seems to understand everything, even what isn’t said.

  “Ja, das habe ich auch getan.”

  “I did that, too, Herr Ryan. I made diversions. I distracted my inquisitors. I kept changing the subject. I told them about my childhood. I showed them pictures of my family. I showed them plans for buildings. I talked about everything except the Hitler time. Die Hitlerzeit. I had a soft look in my eyes. Goering was such a fool—all that bluster, as if he believed he could intimidate the Americans. I knew better.”

  He cups his hands together behind his back and bends into his thought.

  “Wars are never our fault, are they, Herr Ryan?”

  “But Albert,” I say. I always call him Albert in my dreams, as if he’s my uncle. “I wasn’t in a war. I avoided the war.”

  Albert Speer’s smile is both wise and ironic.

  “Ach, Herr Ryan, wars could not be fought without people like you. Those who go along with everything, who do what they’re told. The Cult of Cooperation. You were the bedrock of Adolf Hitler. We needed you. It was people like you who guarded the prisoners in the concentration camps. Of course you had your doubts. Who wouldn’t? But, you: you were a good soldier, weren’t you? You got a medal—isn’t that what you told me? You did what you were told.”

  “What choice did I have, Albert? I did the best I could.”

  “Ach, ja. ‘What can any of us do?’ we say as another box of bullets is shipped to the front.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I always liked that word ‘front,’ ” Speer goes on. “I got so I wondered where the ‘back’ was. What’s behind all this, I wondered as I sat in prison.”

  He paused, looking at me.

  “But, Albert, you were one of the leaders. People followed your orders, didn’t they?”

  He’s not listening to me.

  “Ach ja,” Albert says, “so many wars, and no one’s to blame.”

  12.

  I was safe in Janesville, wasn’t I? We were an important place, we told ourselves.

  In fourth grade, my teacher Miss Soley put up a bulletin-board display: JANESVILLE’S PLACE IN THE WORLD, her cutout letters said, and those were surrounded by pictures of the courthouse and the stores on Milwaukee Avenue and the offices of Parker Pen out on Highway 51 and, of course, the blessed Chevrolet plant, which assembled millions of Chevrolets over the years.

  How could Janesville go wrong? General Motors controlled more than 50 percent of the car market. The company was so self-confident that its executives thought about asking President Eisenhower to drop an atomic bomb to commemorate the completion of their Technical Center in 1956.

  Janesville was important, that’s for sure. I already told you once: we were thirty-fourth on the Russian list of cities to bomb.

  But then it all went wrong. The Chevrolet plant closed, perhaps forever, at the end of 2008, and there it stands, an empty shell, the sad memento of an industry based on cheap gas and outrageous styling: there it sits, between the Rock River, where the Black Hawk Indian wars were fought in the 1800s, and the house I lived in. It looks, well, almost as if a neutron bomb had gone off there: the building stands, but the people are gone.

  13.

  In the summer of 1959, my mother took me aside and asked that I volunteer to be my father’s rodman when he worked his new job as a land surveyor. She wanted me to keep an eye on him after his nervous breakdown.

  “He still seems sad to me,” she said.

  It never would have occurred to any of us back then that he was killing himself right in plain sight, and no one lifted a finger.

  Even though he’s been dead for forty years, I can still see him—legs apart, bent at the waist, holding his cap in his left hand, which is, in turn, braced against his thigh. He stares into the telescope of the transit. He squeezes a lit cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand as he makes small adjustments in the gnarled brass focus knob of the transit lens. I’m standing maybe 100 yards away in a field, my pants legs covered with burrs, holding the flat-sided pole with a row of numbers on it. My dad’s trying to get a fix on those numbers in the telescope lens of his transit. He straightens up, puts the cigarette between his lips, and waves his cap at me—signaling that I can relax. Then he writes in his leather surveyor’s notebook. When he finishes copying down the number he just saw on my rod, he flips the telescope of the transit straight up. This signal means that I’m to join him for further instructions.

  When we get ready to leave the job site, I can see the thick veins on the backs of my dad’s hands, his flat fingernails as he unscrews the knobs that hold the transit on its tripod. The instrument is mostly covered in honey-golden-colored brass and looks like a fifteenth-century sextant. He carefully slides it into its green velvet-lined wooden case. Then he pulls out the four-by-six-inch notebook and sketches out the dimensions of the property with one of his beloved green Eberhard 4-H pencils with a pointed red eraser tip. He winds a rubber band around the left-hand side of the pages to keep them from blowing.

  The two of us talked about math in those days.

  “Math cleans up the world,” he told me that summer of 1959 as we rode from surveying job to surveying job in his old Ford work car, with those iron marking stakes rattling around in the trunk. “It puts corners on that mess you see out there.”

  He waved a hand holding one of the unfiltered Camel cigarettes he chain-smoked, as if he were flicking the messy world away. He had rubber bands looped over the shift lever.

  I asked him if Mrs. Downy was right, if we could defeat the Russians with algebra.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’d choose trigonometry. That’s what they use to aim artillery shells. It’s called triangulation.”

  Surveys began with known points, often section markers or those for the US Geological Survey. My father located them with a large magnet in a leather-covered box he held by its strap.

  “If you think about it,” my dad said, “everything goes back to a known point.”

  What is the known point for murder?

  On my birthday in 1959, when I turn fourteen, my aunt gives me the John Gnagy Learn to Draw set, which consists of a square of soft plastic that you put on your television screen and a grease pencil for sketching the images that come and go beneath the soft plastic.

  Makes Drawing Easy, the box says.

  Draw What You See, the goateed John Gnagy says.

  I put the plastic on the TV screen. I start with cartoons. Bugs Bunny. I get an eye and part of an ear and then he’s gone.

  “What’s up, Doc?” he asks before he vanishes.

  I try for days to capture one—just one—of all the images flitting by: Captain Kangaroo, Tom Terrific,
Daffy Duck, The Three Stooges, Beaver Cleaver—but they disappear before I can finish them.

  I try the news, but I’m just getting Walter Cronkite’s moustache when he turns into a diagram of iron-poor blood being resuscitated by Geritol. I wipe away Walter’s moustache and then start copying the man with the microphone standing in the jungle of the Cuban mountains with the rebel soldiers.

  “This is a revolution,” he says, and I get part of a palm tree, and then here’s Eric Sevareid telling me what that means, and I keep ending up with grease-pencil lines connected to nothing.

  In the movie Network, an aging William Holden, playing a broadcast executive, tries to explain the savagely ambitious soul of the youthful Faye Dunaway character, who will stop at nothing to achieve her ends.

  “She’s from the television generation,” Holden says. “She learned life from Bugs Bunny.”

  By the time I was in high school, I wanted to hang around with Brian Jeffrey and Steve Agard. I couldn’t have cared less about my dad. While I still worked occasionally with him as a rodman, he would embarrass me by working his tongue beneath the silver bridge that held two false side teeth and sticking out the bridge on the tip of his tongue at café waitresses where we had lunch.

  “Oh, Mr. Ryan,” the waitresses said.

  I have preserved my dad’s homemade, leather-covered notebook, its pages filled with sketches of surveys and various coordinates, all done in that fine, gray, almost ghostly penciled printing of an Eberhard 4-H pencil. The entries are like some kind of code about the world.

  “SPIKE IN ELM,” he writes in neat capital letters followed by “5.55” and “7.89.”

  I wish now I could ask him what this meant—go back in time, apologize for being such an arrogant shit, and then start from one of those known points and find a better ending for the story.

  Yes, if only I could find the known point.

  I wish I could find my dad.

  I try to hear his voice. I want him to tell me about the lost days, the days I no longer remember.

  For Rockland Lot 14 Block 3 1st Hawthorne Park Northerly 57.75 Lot 2 and Southerly 38.50 Lot 3 Block 11 Sumac.

  In the pictures of my dad as a young man, he’s curly headed and strong but, as the years go by, he becomes more careworn and gaunt.

  He wanted me to become a real engineer.

  “Engineers solve problems, and the world will never run out of problems,” he said. “You’ll never lack for work.”

  He also wanted me to apply for a commission at West Point. He loved the military look. One of the happiest pictures of my father was taken when he was a foreman for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Here he is in a kind of Eisenhower-cut leather jacket and jodhpurs and tall riding boots.

  “Jodhpurs,” I say to myself. “In Iowa. Jodhpurs in Iowa.”

  My father had been too old for World War II, and it both-ered him that he’d missed it.

  “You don’t want to miss your generation’s war.”

  Of course, that turned out to be pretty bad advice, but what did my dad know?

  Later, when I had a summer job assembling Chevrolets to pay my way through college, one of my workmates, a gray-faced man in a holey T-shirt who installed interior lights, put matters differently. Speaking around the Pall Mall that always dangled from a corner of his mouth, he crawled into the seatless interior of the car, held up the chromed plastic frame of the dome light by one hand, shook the air compressor hose attached to his power screwdriver to straighten it, and said over his shoulder, “Avoid the draft? Are you kidding?” With three zaps of compressed air turning each of the two screws, he mounted the fixture, hopped back out of the car, flicked the ash from his Pall Mall and went on, “You can’t avoid the draft! If you don’t go in the army, what will you have to talk about in taverns later on?”

  Back then, pretty much everyone thought that war was a good idea.

  One day in the late fall, I went to the city assessor’s office in Janesville, and a clerk helped me locate Rockland Lot 14 Block 3 1st Hawthorne Park Northerly 57.75 Lot 2 and Southerly 38.50 Lot 3 Block 11 Sumac. She brought out these enormous three-foot-by-three-foot books covered in gray fabric with red leather spines. In Volume 264, she showed me where Lot 3 Block 11 became 3622 Sumac Street.

  I had so little information about my dad, I drove there to see if the place might speak to me.

  It was getting dark when I got to the address. At the time my father surveyed it, Lot 3 was part of a farm field owned by Cecil Whitlock. Sometime in the 1960s it got turned into a subdivision. Now a tired rectangular box of a house sits there. The house probably has three small bedrooms and two bathrooms with mildew in the corners of the tile. It and the other houses around it look somehow like coffins.

  A MasterCraft waterski boat painted in a silver-flaked purple color that glitters from the light of a nearby mercury-vapor streetlight is parked beside the driveway to Lot 3. I pace back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, thinking the place will tell me something when I see . . . is it really possible? . . . a section marker.

  A section marker! The term comes unbidden from my subconscious. My father looked for them all the time when he did surveys. The country is gridded with them, I remember suddenly. At the corners of all the 160-acre plots all over the United States. I remember my father talking about them. Little three-inch-by-three-inch square concrete posts with a US Geological Survey emblem centered in the top, a round copper medallion that turns green with the patina of age.

  Suddenly, yes, I see one there just under the MasterCraft, and I look around to see if anyone’s watching me, and I lift up the boat cover and squat down, studying the ground.

  “Hey there, Mister,” a voice yells, a little uncertain. “What you doing there under my boat?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I thought I spotted a section marker here. I actually am looking for my father.”

  “He’s not there.”

  I stand up, forgetting that I’m beneath the boat’s canvas, which now wraps around my head. I breathe in its dusty smell. My speech is muffled. I sound like someone in a tape recording that’s running too slow.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Don’t mean any harm.”

  “You better come out of there.”

  I go to walk out, but the canvas seems to be holding me. I look down and see feet of the owner pacing back and forth in front of me.

  “See there’s a section marker here. See.”

  I bend over, but the section marker turns out to be an old Heileman’s Special Export beer can.

  “Hey, this is funny, I say. Special Export was the beer when I was in college.”

  “You and your father better come out of there.”

  14.

  “You told me this book is about Nazis,” my wife, Carol, says as she goes over the manuscript. “But here it is, Chapter Fourteen, and I’ve only met one Nazi, Albert Speer.”

  Ah, but maybe you’ve met more than you know.

  Nazis didn’t start their childhoods in uniform, those lightning bolt Waffen-SS emblems on their collars, Nazis for all the world to see, Stahlhelme covering their heads and their ears; their calf-high, polished boots, goose stepping. Look at Goering, see, his fat cheeks, in his school uniform, the little leather knapsack on his back. See, he’s singing. Hear him? It’s “Heidenröslein.” The Schubert song from the Goethe poem. He’s his mother’s boy. Such a thin, sweet voice, don’t you think? Cute in his lederhosen. He’s not sending the fighters off on another mission. And Goebbels—the little brat: he’s arguing with his teacher. Oh, and Hitler’s over here doing those watercolors of his. Bormann, so serious as he hits the chalk erasers together, standing ghostlike, haloed by the chalk dust. And Uncle Rudi. Didn’t everyone in Germany have an Onkel Rudi? Onkel Rot, the children called him, because of his red face. Uncle Red. So happy, coming back from camp in that Hitlerjugend uniform. Just a boy, really, even though everyone called him Onkel. Later he’s an SS officer—and look, behind him, come the other boys, legi
ons and legions of boys from all the centuries all over the world, boys who will later go to war, now coming home for supper, and somewhere there I am, too, just a boy—a little boy. See me there: kicking the ball on the playground, going down the slide, at the other end of the teeter-totter from you. I have freckles. I throw my head back when I laugh.

  Nazis? Hardly. Little boys on their way.

  That’s it, you see, the way it just kind of creeps up on you from somewhere. That’s what I’m trying to figure out—how that bouncing blue-eyed baby of me ended up working with Nazis. Why, they were the villains, weren’t they? Everybody knew that, right? Anyone who’d watched Walter Cronkite narrate You Are There knew that.

  Me—how did this happen to me? Me, of all people. A pal of the Nazis arresting black soldiers?! Come on. I was a good guy, wasn’t I? I had almost worked for the civil rights movement in the sixties. I watched war protests and visited hippies. Me, of all people. Me, my mother’s darling young son.

  You know those school questionnaires about what you’re going to do with your life? Who would answer by saying, “Oh, I’ll go to college, study poetry and then I’ll go in the army so I can work with old Nazis. Yes, my long-term goal is working with Nazis.” Who would say a thing like this?

  15.

  “We’re lucky, Mrs. Ryan—in these modern, scientific days of ours, we can see into things. Atoms and X-rays, Mrs. Ryan— no more mysteries. Atoms and X-rays to make the purchase of a new pair of shoes a matter of science and not of guessing.”

  This is Mr. Dreyhouse of Dreyhouse Shoes on Main Street in Janesville speaking to my mother. It’s still 1959.

  He gestures as he speaks, raising up his arms and turning his hands as if he’s conducting an orchestra.

  “You see, Mrs. Ryan,” he says. “Little Rickie will need these feet all his life, and the Adrian X-Ray machine will give him a better fit scientifically. Ah, the lovely Adrian X-Ray machine will allow us to look right into his feet, you see. It’s the scientific thing to do.”