There's a Man With a Gun Over There (37 page)

Blam.

Everything seemed to stop, a frozen moment.

The woman's mouth formed an O and, in slow motion, she looked at Hellman, at me, and then down at her belly, where a red blotch began to appear.

“O O O O,” she screamed.

The pressure of my hand on Hellman's arm made him point the gun toward the ceiling, and a couple of more rounds went off. Blam. Blam. I suddenly remembered the smell of gunpowder in the basement of my childhood. Blam. Blam.

The room smelled like gunpowder and peas.

“
Hey da, hey da
,” Rudi yelled. He was standing at the door, looking like Oliver Hardy in the midst of chaos. He walked over and put his enormous hand around the gun Hellman held. The gun vanished, as if Rudi had performed a magic trick.

The woman sank to the floor, moaning.

“You know what,” Goldberg said. “I think you and I should get the hell out of here. I don't think this is our problem.”

I knelt down beside the woman.

“Are you all right?”

She seemed to be breathing. I lifted her up. A section of her back stuck to the floor. Yellow and red viscera stretched like partially dried glue. I briefly thought of airplane models I'd glued together as a child. I remembered the doll the sergeant had shot at Fort Gordon during my MP training.

“My God,” Carol says. “You never told me this. Did she die? She must have.”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“I don't know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I don't know.”

“I think we should get out of here,” Goldberg says again. “I mean, I'm leaving, and I think you should come, too.”

“What have I done?” I asked.

“Your job, Ryan, your job,” Goldberg said. “Just remember that. You were just doing your job. None of this is your fault. You were just doing what they told you to do.”

The man who wasn't there arrives.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

61.

A
ch, ja
, Herr Ryan. So good to have you here.

Albert Speer bows at the front door, welcoming me.

We've been expecting you. Many of your friends are already here. Mr. Rostow has been asking after you. Come.

He holds out his hand, and I take it. It feels cold, ice cold, like death.

The head of Henry Kissinger is overhead, and in the distance the sound of the drums starts. I am afraid I will hear them forever.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

Boom. Boom. Snare.

62.

“
O
K, what they're saying is that you shot the woman.”

It's a gruff voice on the phone.

“They're saying that you grabbed the gun and shot the woman.”

It's the operations sergeant at headquarters. A wave of cold goes through my stomach.

“That's not true,” I say. “I was trying to get the gun away from him. I was trying to save her life. I was just doing my job.”

“The colonel's not happy.”

I begin to shake. Maybe I did kill someone. Jesus. I'd never been in this kind of trouble before. The Man Who Wasn't There Arrives. It's all so perverse and wrong. I looked down at the bloodstain on my Harris Tweed sport coat. I got it when I leaned over the woman and haven't been able to get it off.

“They're saying your fingerprints are on the gun and that you fled the crime scene.”

I don't know what to say.

“The German police want to talk with you.”

I try to speak but can't form the words.

“What happened to the woman?”

I am shaking so much I can't hold the phone to my ear.

“Let me talk with Edwards.”

Lance nods at me when I hand him the phone. He nods some more when he gets on the line.

“Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh,” he keeps saying, holding the phone close and occasionally looking at me.

“What'd he say?” I ask when Lance hangs up.

“You gonna get your ass out of Deutschland and the army, Ryan. Once you get out of the army they can't touch your civilian ass. Don't worry. You're lucky. That German Badguy Group is messed up in this.”

“Baader,” I say. “
Baader-Meinhof Gruppe
.”

“Whatever. They'll save your ass. That couple—they're working for them. Bad-guy stuff all over the house. Posters, AK-47s, shit like that. The Germans will blame them.”

“Saved by the sixties. How funny.”

“But to be sure, you need to get your ass out of the army. Then they can't touch you. You'll be long gone.”

“Oh.”

“Got that Ryan? Long gone.”

“How about the woman?”

“She's not your problem. The way I see it, she's German Customs's problem. And, by the way, here's this. No time like the present.”

He hands me a large, white envelope.

“What is it?”

“Open it up.”

It's an ARCOM—an Army Commendation Medal.

“Congratulations.”

“This seems like kind of a funny time . . .”

“You deserve it, Ryan. You did what you were told. Congratulations. You've been a good soldier.”

“What about the woman?”

“You've got other things to worry about.”

“Under sometimes difficult circumstances, Sergeant Ryan faithfully executed his duties as a customs military policeman,” reads the citation.

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.

63.

I
n this dream, the light scours everything. It's blinding. It's so white it turns everything else into a shadow. Looking hurts my eyes, and I try to turn away, but I can't.

The shadow of the pregnant woman slowly rises from the floor. I can see the dark blood dripping from her back. She shakes her head, as if refusing something.

“Why?” she asks in a quiet voice.

The light feels like razor blades across my eyeballs.

“Why did you shoot me?”

I didn't, I want to say, but that's not true.

“Why?” she asks again.

“You called me a Nazi.”

“Weren't you? Weren't you a Nazi?”

“Not a real Nazi.”

“They didn't mean to hurt people either. Most of them were just doing their jobs.”

“But they hurt people.”

“And you didn't? Look at me.”

She turns, and I can see the organs inside her body, make out the pulsing dark mass of her heart, which is slowing down. It's hardly beating at all.

“Look at me,” she says again. “You did this to me. You. You. You.”

I keep waiting for the next beat of her heart, but it never comes.

64.

O
n June 1, 1972, the sky over Germany is blue, and it would be hard to believe there's trouble anywhere in the world. I'm back in uniform. Good Sergeant Ryan, carrying my duffel bag with its silver-painted identification across the parade grounds at
Gutleut Kaserne
, where I'd once scrubbed the cobblestones with my toothbrush. I've got my ARCOM and a Good Conduct Medal they handed me at headquarters. Most importantly I've got my separation orders.

“Ryan, huh?” the clerk says. “I got a call this morning, and they want you out of this man's army pretty pronto. Here.” He looks at a folder of plane schedules. “Is tonight soon enough?”

And then I'm going through the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit line and getting on a plane and looking over my manila folders and seeing the picture of me and Jenny taking ski lessons at Berchtesgaden and then I'm getting on a bus at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for the airport near Columbia.

And then Carol and I are talking. It's decades later. Jenny and I divorced in 1977. I married Carol in 1979. She wasn't there, in my MP days.

“You really shot her didn't you?” Carol asks.

“Shot her?”

“The pregnant woman.”

“Oh you're back to that.”

“How could I forget?”

“This is just a story.”

“But I want to know.”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I don't know. This is just a story. I get lost in it myself.”

“Let's start at the beginning. How about Mr. Niederman? Is he true?”

“That's not his real name, but the story is mostly true.”

“But how about Sergeant Perkins and Mrs. Downy and
Minor Memories
and all that?”

“The Sergeant Perkins story is true, and so's Mrs. Downy, though her real name is Mrs. Davies, and we never had an Algebra Squad. The real name of my junior high yearbook is
Young 'Uns
. I never liked that title. I think
Minor Memories
is better.”

“And the pregnant woman, Rick. What about the pregnant woman? The shooting? What about her?”

I didn't want to hear that question.

“And Grimes Poznik,” I said. “Don't forget about him. The trumpet player. He's real. He became The Human Jukebox at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Dead on the streets of alcohol poisoning. Steve Unger's real, too. One of the most talented people I ever knew. They made him a door gunner in Vietnam.”

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.

65.

W
e've come a long way from eighth grade algebra and Mr. Niederman and Buddy Holly, haven't we?

Oh, Mr. Bauch, there are so many facts of the matter to consider.

This one, for instance, from Wikipedia:

George Stephen Morrison (January 7, 1919–November 17, 2008) was an admiral and naval aviator in the United States Navy. Morrison was commander of the US naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of August 1964. He was the father of Doors lead singer Jim Morrison.

Another fact might be some of Jim Morrison's lyrics:

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of everything that stands
The end

And perhaps we could then finish with this paragraph from Robert McNamara's obituary in the
New York Times
:

Congress authorized the war after [President] Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. The attack never happened, as a report declassified by the National Security Agency in 2005 made clear. The American ships had been firing at radar shadows on a dark night.

Did Fleet Commander Morrison know that the intelligence which escalated the war in Vietnam was at least suspect and maybe plain wrong? Did he know that millions would die for nothing? And what did Jim Morrison know?

Radar shadows on a dark night.

When asked, Jim Morrison often said that his family was dead.

Soon everyone from this little story will be dead, and even these few remaining pieces from the jigsaw puzzle will be lost in the dusty interstices of time.

66.

O
n my way out of Janesville, after touring the house at 863 East Memorial Drive with Patsy Apple, I drive downtown for a kind of last loop through my past. Many of the businesses of my childhood have vanished: Harrison Chevrolet, Wisconsin Bell, and Woolworth's are gone. The Clark gas station has been turned into a parking lot, though the little plaque is still there:
On this spot in 1898, Carrie Jacobs Bond wrote “I Love You Truly.”
On Main Street, another store of my childhood is about to go. The inside of its display windows are papered over.