There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  He holds his hands toward the Adrian and bows. He then walks over and pats it. The wooden exterior of the device is streamlined and edged with aluminum, like a cabinet from the Normandie, “The Ship of Light,” that’s somehow been left off in Janesville.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to look inside the human body?” my mother asks.

  “Why, it’s dangerous not to. Here, Rickie, step up here and peek at all the secrets you thought were locked away.”

  He bows again, and I step up on a riser at one side of the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope and tuck my feet into an opening banded with aluminum around its edges. On the top of the machine are three built-in viewfinders that look vaguely like the stereopticons my grandmother had. One viewer on top of the fluoroscope is for the owner of the feet, one is for the companion to the owner, and one is for the shoe salesman.

  “Here we go,” Mr. Dreyhouse says, throwing a large Bakelite toggle switch. “Let the science begin.”

  The machine hums beneath my feet, and the black marker needle in a round gauge rises as the electricity warms up the X-ray tube. I make sure my feet are all the way into the opening. The shadowed black outline of the bones in my feet slowly comes into view. The little bones appear to float in a watery green solution. How strange it is to wiggle my toes and see my bones move a moment later. It’s like watching a shadow of me with a skeleton inside.

  “Yes, Mrs. Ryan, the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope will save your son years of health problems. It’s been awarded the famous Parents Magazine Seal of Approval, you know. Now that should give you confidence.”

  Unfortunately, Parents Magazine didn’t have quite enough science to evaluate the Adrian. It didn’t know about all those roentgens: the radiation climbing through our three bodies and ricocheting around the shoe store. Bam from the penny loafers to the stiletto heels. Wham from the bedroom slippers over to the Jack Purcell tennis shoes. Parents didn’t know that the Adrian Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope might be more dangerous than Sputnik beeping overhead through our skies. The Adrian might, in fact, be more dangerous than the Communists.

  Oh, it was such a dear, sweet era, wasn’t it, with those giant cars with their sulfurous exhausts, ruining our lungs, killing us. But we didn’t know that. No, we were checking our gas mileage. We studied those instruments in the dashboard. That was all we needed to know, right? The speedometer here in one circle and, in the other circle: TEMP, AMP, OIL, and GAS. All we needed to know, right there. TEMP, AMP, OIL, GAS.

  Who could have known? Not Mr. Dreyhouse, surely, standing there in his striped sport coat and tousled hair. Looking over the glasses at the end of his nose as he answered our questions, he looked like a Norman Rockwell figure. He couldn’t have known that his machine was sending out rays sharp as carbon-steel knives. Who could blame him?

  Why even Marie Curie, who probably died of radiation poisoning, would go out to her lab at night and see her vials of radioactive material flickering on the shelves in the dark. “The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights,” she wrote. She didn’t know that these “wonderful compounds” could kill as well as cure.

  So strange, isn’t it—the way ignorance goes hand in hand with science. My mother, Mr. Dreyhouse, and I there, convinced we were learning something—when really, we were just killing ourselves for no good reason at all.

  Nazis? Why, Nazis are always a long way from fourth grade.

  My friend, he called me, Albert Speer did. My friend.

  Yes, for five minutes, it was Albert Speer and I, the best of friends, but it took me years to get there.

  16.

  Oh, there it goes in my dreams, floating along, the head of Henry Kissinger, tall as a five-story building, floating sixty feet overhead, filled with gas, a huge Macy’s balloon, floating over the marching soldiers. In their gray camouflage uniforms in the gray air, a moving mass.

  Thousands of men, marching, marching, marching.

  “Go to your left, your right, your left.”

  The reverberating clump of all those boots hitting the ground in unison.

  The giant, floating head of Henry Kissinger turning slowly back and forth, his eyeglass lenses becoming opaque when the light hits them.

  Millions of men beneath him, marching, marching, marching.

  Clump. Clump. Clump.

  “Go to your left, your right, your left,” marching, marching.

  The head of Henry Kissinger nodding.

  Clump. Clump. Clump.

  He turns to me and smiles, Henry Kissinger does. His teeth are sharp like saw teeth. Brilliant white saw teeth.

  “Sehr schön, nicht wahr?”

  Beautiful, isn’t it?

  “Der Krieg ist die Wahrheit.”

  War is the truth.

  His voice is like the Arctic wind.

  Why is he speaking in German? But then I remember. He is, in fact, German.

  The head floats along, nodding, above the marching soldiers.

  Clump. Clump. Clump.

  The opaque eyes looking in the distance, looking suddenly at me. His face suddenly in front of me, his mouth open, his teeth like a spiked fence, beyond it a dragon howling, hissing fire, howling.

  Clump. Clump. Clump.

  Millions and millions and millions of men, marching, marching, marching.

  17.

  I graduated from high school in June of 1963. That summer I worked for Bostwick’s, a men’s store in Janesville. This was the first of a series of summer jobs that helped pay my way through college.

  I secretly believed that good clothes would somehow give me a new family. They would help me escape the haunting of my family. I’d have a sane father with a better car than an old Ford with iron surveying stakes in the trunk and rubber bands on the shift column, and a mother who didn’t spend the day in her faded housecoat drinking coffee and discussing how the family fortune had been lost.

  “What a man needs,” Bill Bostwick, one of the store owners, always said, “is a new Botany 500 suit and a set of matched Samsonite luggage. Those items, along with a half Windsor knot beneath the collar of a new Arrow shirt, will take you to the highest promontories of life.”

  In August of 1963, when I left for little Cornell College in Iowa, I followed Bill’s advice pretty closely. I had that brandnew Botany 500 suit (just like one that Dick Van Dyke wore on his TV show), some Arrow shirts, and a matched pair of Samsonite Ultralite suitcases in Colorado Brown my aunt and uncle gave me. I borrowed a device that made hard plastic label tapes with raised lettering, so my Norelco electric razor was clearly identified as belonging to “Ryan.”

  “Let me get this straight,” my friend Tom Bamberger says. “You graduated from high school in 1963, and you were putting your name on your electric razor because you were worried that someone would steal it?”

  “And my alarm clock—oh, and my clothes brush, too. I even put labels on these wooden hangers I had. They had these clamps to hold your pants.”

  “You had wooden hangers in the fall of 1963? You had a clothes brush?”

  “For my Botany 500 suit.”

  “What’s wrong with you? The sixties were just getting started in 1963, and you were worried about creases in your suit. Bob Dylan is writing ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and you’re suiting up with The Four Freshmen.”

  Look, Tom: I thought I was keeping up with the times. I thought we were pretty hip there in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

  When John Kennedy was assassinated in the fall of my freshman year, I was sitting in my dorm room reading aloud from “The Fable of the Final Hour” by Dan Propper. I thought this was a pretty hip moment.

  Of course “The Fable of the Final Hour” hasn’t completely stood the test of time. I mean, how many times have you pulled this poem off the shelf in the last few years? How many times has anyone you know read this poem? Have you, in fact, ever heard of this poem? With its slightly offbeat spacing and incantatory rhythms, it seemed a piece of early 1960s hip. Now, though, the poem seems almost as earnest as the era i
t wanted to enlighten.

  In the 37th minute of the final hour a Bop version of the Star-Spangled Banner was proclaimed official arrangement of the United States Marines

  As I read to my bored roommates from “The Fable of the Final Hour” that chilly November afternoon, I began to feel pretty hip myself, with the syncopated flow of those anapests running along:

  In the 51st minute of the final hour Texas was declared Incapable and assigned a guardian

  This was the exact sentence I was reading the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, when Freddie Sarnack came running into the room.

  “The president,” he said, out of breath, trying to get enough wind for a full sentence. “The president . . . the president has been shot.”

  This is probably the one and only moment in my life when I was somehow completely in tune with the subterranean, homesick blues of my time.

  “I think you’re kidding yourself, Rick,” Tom Bamberger tells me. “That isn’t a real sixties story. Real sixties stories involve pot or sex or war protests—not reading bad poetry. Did you ever have to wash the smell of tear gas out of your clothes?”

  “I was close. There were war protests in Madison. I grew up only forty miles away in Janesville. I visited a lot.”

  “You visited the sixties,” Bamberger tells me. “That’s funny.”

  Oh—and there was the time I was almost a civil rights protester.

  18.

  In 1965, I can see Dr. Larry Stone, professor of religion, stapling posters to the trees on campus. They announced a trip in March to join a big civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

  Be Part of the History of Your Time.

  Join hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  END

  Racial injustice in the South.

  We SHALL Overcome

  I had my first real girlfriend then, and sex got mixed up in my politics.

  Jenny was a folksinger and always talked about how strict her father was and how he would be apoplectic if he discovered his daughter participating in left-wing causes, so she had to be careful, Jenny told me. She wouldn’t, therefore, be going to Selma, no—but when I mentioned that I was kind of, sort of thinking about going, her body became electric, and she sang “We Shall Overcome” softly in my ear and let me caress her inner thighs.

  At this point, Mr. Cock became involved. While caressing a young lady’s thighs covered by the denim of blue jeans wasn’t, perhaps, exactly an admission to her inner sanctum, Mr. Cock reasoned that I was on my way.

  At this point, Mr. Cock made the decision for me—he was sending himself to Jenny Gleason’s vagina via a voter registration program for Negroes in Selma, Alabama.

  The information meeting drew a healthy crowd—maybe fifty or sixty students, including one of the conservatives, who sat in the back row holding up a poster that said SPONGE— Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.

  “This is,” Dr. Stone said, his voice turned into echoes and screeches by the bad PA system, “one of the profound moments of our time. Years from now, your grandchildren will ask you where you were when Dr. King and his followers joined hands and marched to Montgomery, Alabama. When the histories of the twentieth century are written, these days will have a prominent place. Your grandchildren will ask you where you were that fateful day.”

  I picked up a schedule and a form I was to have my parents sign. Since I wasn’t yet twenty-one, I needed their permission to go. Now this was a problem. My parents—while basically good, kind people—were also white people of their times.

  “Those Negroes,” my father once told me.

  “Yes?”

  “Those Negroes have to help themselves out, you know. We can’t do it for them.”

  “This country has brutalized the Negroes,” I said, quoting Dr. Stone.

  “Well, you’ll see. We can’t do it for them.”

  What did that mean, I wondered. When I got angry with him, I yelled it out, “What does that mean? We have to help; it’s our duty!”

  “You can’t sit this game out,” Dr. Stone said. “If you don’t help the Negro gain the basic rights of citizenship, then the blood of the Negro is on your hands. You are as guilty as some Klansman in a white sheet setting fire to a Negro church. Think about it.”

  “The government is up to no good,” my dad said, picking up a flake of tobacco from his tongue. “No good at all.”

  “Oh, baby” is what Jenny Gleason said when I told her I was going with Dr. Stone on the trip to Montgomery. Suddenly, in the middle of Iowa, I, who hadn’t been out of the Midwest in my life, slurred “Montgomery” as though I were a southerner.

  Jenny leaned back on the couch and spread her legs, as if inviting me in, and I began stroking her crotch, which seemed to soften like melting ice cream. I was underneath the bra in no time. Her nipples were as erect as my cock.

  “Oh, baby,” she said.

  “Ryan. Rick Ryan,” I said to Dr. Stone the next morning, and he checked me off his list, which had thirty or forty names.

  Three other people eventually showed up—Wade Leonard, Jeannie Farago, and Mary Rombauer.

  We met in front of Lennox Hall, the men’s dormitory.

  “Wait a minute,” Dr. Stone said. “I can’t believe we don’t have more students than you four. My meeting had ten times that many people, didn’t it?”

  He said that to Mary Rombauer, who just giggled, unable to answer.

  “Look at this. They signed up. Joe Everling, Dawn Moore, Everette Gordon . . . thirty-two people. They all signed up, gave me their parental permission sheets. They were all ready to take freedom south.”

  He walked up and down the road as if his movement might bring the volunteers in.

  “I suppose we won’t be needing the school bus,” Dr. Stone said after another half an hour. He sighed and then slowly walked over to a yellow Blue Bird bus. The bus drove away, and the five of us got into Wade Leonard’s 1959 Ford station wagon, which smelled vaguely like dirty jockstraps. It was a kind of testosterone odor. Wade was a varsity wrestler and wore the purple and white letterman’s jacket of the college.

  Just as we were about to pull out, Steve Unger, my folk-singer roommate came clomping over in his engineer boots. He carried his big Gibson in a guitar case and wore oversized sunglasses. He looked like a celebrity.

  “Did you bring a change of clothes along?” I asked, ever the boy from Janesville.

  “I’m a troubadour, man. Got clean underwear and a tooth-brush in my guitar case.”

  It was a tight fit, but all six of us got into the old Ford.

  Wade’s car engine turned over slowly, as if it were worried about such a long trip. Once the engine caught, the engine and then the car body and then the six of us vibrated.

  Just as we were pulling out of the parking lot, Steve began singing “We Shall Overcome.” Only Jenny was there to see us off, and her clear alto voice echoed back to our off-key harmony, and then we were on our way, to save the Negroes in Alabama.

  Dr. Stone passed out copies of mimeographed materials with titles like “Tips for Dealing With Racists,” “What To Do If You Get Arrested,” and “Avoiding Injury and Death.”

  “Ah, Dr. Stone,” Mary Rombauer said, “on the second page of ‘Avoiding Injury and Death,’ where the specific advice is supposed to be—well, it’s empty. I mean the page is blank.”

  “Oh, my. I was in such a hurry, maybe I forgot.”

  He began rummaging through a battered leather briefcase.

  “Let’s see if I have a copy.”

  I was only halfway listening to this, because I wondered when Dr. Stone would realize that he didn’t have an OK from my parents. While he had, as it turned out, forgotten the sheets on avoiding injury and death, he pretty quickly did remember that I hadn’t turned in my permission slip.

  “Tell you what, Ryan, with so few people on our good pilgrimage, why don’t you try calling your parents. A verbal go-ahead would be enough for me.”
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  As Wade Leonard’s car drove south on 218, Dr. Stone said we should stop at the first phone booth we saw. It was beside a drive-in restaurant. I went into the phone booth and folded the door closed behind me. I laid out a stack of quarters on the little shelf in the booth, took a deep breath, and rehearsed what I was about to say. I figured my mother would answer.

  “Mom,” I’d say, a little too brightly. “Mom, I’m going on this field trip.”

  The phone at the other end kept buzzing, and no one answered.

  “She’s not home,” I said when I came out of the phone booth. “Look. We can keep calling as we go.” Maybe we’d get there before I reached her.

  “Mom,” I’d say, “you’ll just never guess where I am.”

  Just before Mount Pleasant, in the middle of a discussion about how to roll yourself up into a ball if a policeman started whacking you with a billy club, Wade rear-ended a Cadillac. Truth be told, hearing these stories about the ferocity of Southern law enforcement officers had made us all nervous. The car crash seemed inevitable somehow.

  The driver of the car we hit got out, carefully arranged a kind of Frank Sinatra straw businessman’s hat on his head, walked to the rear of his car, looked at the damage. The car bumpers of the old Ford and the new Cadillac were hooked together like two male deer racks. One of the Ford’s headlights was shattered.

  The Cadillac driver leaned over the interlocked bumpers and opened his trunk. He pulled out a Speed Graphic camera and began photographing the damage. Done with that, he asked us to step out of the car and photographed all of us.

  “Never know just what photographs you might need,” the man said with a smile.

  Then he did a sketch of the accident on graph paper and told us that he was an insurance agent.