There's a Man With a Gun Over There (4 page)

How did this happen to me? I keep asking myself this question over and over, and suddenly I'm back in school, walking up the steps of Marshall Junior High in Janesville, Wisconsin.

After Sputnik was launched in 1957, the Russians were on everyone's minds. In 1958, twenty-three of us eighth graders were chosen to learn algebra early.

“You're Janesville's brightest, and you're going to be America's first line of attack against the Russians,” Mrs. Downy, the math teacher, told us as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt.

If you look on page twenty-four of the 1958-59 Marshall Junior High
Minor Memories
yearbook, you can see us there.

“Janesville's Algebra Squad,” the caption reads.

A little platoon of kids on the steps of the school beside Mrs. Downy in her harlequin glasses. How serious we all look. There we are—Judy Stryker, Roger Polanski, Jane Martin, Ralph Witfield and sixteen others—squinting into the sunlight of the future. Look at the boys in their pressed chinos and the girls in their buttoned-up blouses. We look like extras from
Leave It to Beaver
.

“The future,” Mrs. Downy told us, “belongs to you.”

But that future also worried us. Would there be enough fallout shelters to protect all of us in the event of a nuclear attack? Would there be enough of those green drums with yellow triangles labeled EMERGENCY SUPPLIES?

At school, we whispered to each other that someone . . . who? . . . someone important . . .
someone
had seen lists of cities the Russians planned on attacking once they built a space station with all the satellites they would shoot into the air, and Janesville was a prime target. We were marked for death.

Janesville, while not the absolute first city to be attacked, was near the top of the list, not far below Chicago. We were, someone told us with authority, the thirty-fourth most important target in the country. I would look out the window of my room before I went to bed and, on clear nights, stare at the stars in their slow circle overhead.

Sputnik was up there, people said, shooting by, night after night, sending its secret signals back to Russia.

In the summer of 1959, Marshall Junior High School offered its first summer-school course in Russian History, and Mrs. Downy recommended that we take it.

“In the future, when we go to war against the Russians, we will understand them first and then blow them to pieces with our superior knowledge of algebra. History and math will be the weapons of the next war.”

“Russia is a huge, poor country,” Mr. Niederman said on the first morning of our summer school Russian History class. “A country with great writers, a country trying to escape itself by moving ever westward.”

“So Russia really
is
coming to Janesville,” Judy Stryker said, underlining “westward” in her notebook and circling it with stars.

Mr. Niederman was short and harried. His glasses had the gray plastic frames that I would later know as GI glasses. A chain-smoker, he pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes from his coat pocket and locked himself in the closet of the classroom during the ten-minute breaks between the hours of the class, which lasted all morning. At the end of each break, he emerged in a haze of smoke, as if his enthusiasm had set him on fire.

We had to memorize the dates and the names of Russian leaders in a fat history book, identify cities on a variety of historic and contemporary maps, and read
The Brothers Karamazov
.

“I went into the army when I was eighteen,” Mr. Niederman said one day, about halfway through the course. When he spoke he nodded, encouraging people to agree with him. As he did so, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and he pushed them back up.

“I went to Korea, in the infantry. Oh, how cold it was. You couldn't ever get warm.”

His voice floated off in his reverie.

“They shot me. That's why I majored in history when I came back and went to college on the GI Bill. I wanted to find out what happened to me. I wanted to understand why I got shot and why my friends got killed.”

That day, Mr. Niederman had brought in a slide projector. He pulled the heavy black window shades down.

“Is Korea part of
Russia
?” Judy Stryker raised her hand and asked. Judy liked to line up her facts.

Mr. Niederman didn't seem to hear the question. Grainy black-and-white images flickered on the wall. Mr. Niederman kept changing the focus on the projector, but the people remained a blur.

“That's Tom Riley there. See. Charpentier is to his right. See the other guy with the BAR? The big gun. That's a Browning Automatic Rifle. See it there? Johnson's holding it. He was my best friend. A mortar shot got him about ten minutes later. See him with that goofy grin, waving—how blurred his hand is.”

“Are these
Russian
soldiers?” Judy Stryker asked, as if she were an inspector from the Board of Education.

“There. See,” Mr. Niederman said. The slide stuck, and the next slide gave the blurred images of Johnson and the rest a different background. “It's a little bakery just set up along the road by some peasants. We had cakes and tea after Johnson died.”

Mr. Niederman sobbed then, his breath came in heaves.

“Mr. Niederman, Mr. Niederman,” Judy Stryker asked, “are you all right? Should we take a break now? Do you want to go in the closet and have a cigarette?”

She walked to him. He was bent over, holding on to the podium at the front of the classroom, gagging on his tears. The rest of us looked at our notebooks or walked out of the room.

In the hall, John Rogers said, “What the fuck was that all about?”

“Some war our parents had to fight,” Ron Moriarty said.

“Does this mean we're not having a test on that novel about the brothers?” Bill Philippi asked.

“What the fuck was
that
all about?” John Rogers asked again and looked at me.

I didn't know what to say. Mr. Niederman and the Korean War were unknowns in a kind of algebra I wouldn't learn about until I got drafted into the army ten years later.

When Judy Stryker walked him away from the podium, those of us in the hall just stared through the doorway at Mr. Niederman as if he were in another world. The features of his face undone by tears, he looked at us as if he hoped we might throw him a lifeline, but we all began to study the floor.

“This is just too weird,” John Rogers whispered.

Yesterday, I looked up Joel Niederman on the Internet and found one in Janesville, at 716 Adams Street, 608-352-2906, so I decided to call him.

The voice that answered was frail, elderly.

“Mr. Niederman?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Niederman, did you teach at Marshall Junior High School in the fifties and sixties?”

“Who is this?”

“Rick Ryan. I was a student of yours. Do you remember a Russian History course you taught in 1959?”

“Who did you say this is?”

“Rick Ryan, Mr. Niederman. I'm calling about the time you cried. It was 1959, Mr. Niederman. Do you remember 1959? Do you remember that, when you were showing us slides from Korea?”

“Korea?”

“Yes, do you remember?”

“Korea was a long time ago. Are you calling from the Veterans?”

“The Veterans . . . yes, I guess I am. I'm calling to tell you I finally understand.”

“Who did you say you were?”

5.

I
didn't answer him. I didn't say anything. I just stood there holding the phone, listening to his raspy breath, waiting for him to say something.

Neither of us hung up, and pretty soon I realized that we were both waiting for the other to speak, two veterans across the decades.

And then it hit me: what kind of a story did I have to tell? I'd never been in real combat, though maybe I'd killed someone.

I saw the blood stain on the woman's chest and the blood oozing out from underneath her back and then I got scared and rattled the phone into the receiver and stood there breathing in my own raspy way.

Who was I kidding?

This was all getting too close to home.

Who did you say this is? Who? Who?

6.

T
he truth is, I don't know exactly who I am. I've been living in made-up skin so long I don't know what I look like anymore. I walk around in a permanent Halloween costume.

Look: I can tell you who I'm not.

Maybe that's a good way to start. Yes, let me start there.

I'm not some homeless veteran with his greasy cardboard sign and grocery cart filled with cans and bottles and feces-smeared blankets. I'm not some grimy figure lurking around construction sites to steal pieces of copper.

Not at all. I'm a published poet. I'm a published novelist. I've won prizes and, miracle of miracles, I earn a good living, too, though my employer probably wouldn't enjoy being pulled into this foolish story.

Let's just say that I have a great day job that supports my poetry habit. I earn a damn good living. I have investments and clients. I own Hickey Freeman suits and Allan Edmonds shoes. I counted the other day. I own $3,000 worth of shoes. I drive a BMW.

I've made my dreams come true, but I can't make the nightmare of the army go away. Those days keep sneaking up on me.

Maybe this all started when we moved earlier in the year, and I had to clean all that stuff out of the attic.

It was terrible work: the past had become an inexplicably literal burden. My wife, Carol, and I had been good children and saved so much of our parents' stuff. Old quilts that had belonged to great aunts I'd never met, locks of my great-great-grandmother's hair, deeds to forgotten pieces of property marked CANCELED, my aunt's high school yearbooks with best wishes from people named Berty and Mugsy—and on and on it went that hot summer afternoon in the attic at 332 East Acacia Road until I came across a box with my army uniform inside.

In the upper left-hand corner of the box, hand printed in fat marking-pen ink, are my rank and my last army address. The writing looks new to me, as if, in spite of everything, sergeant continues to be my title, as if Detachment A, Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit remains my permanent address. In the reddish purple ink of the cancellation stamp's circle, US ARMY is at the top, APO 09166 is at the bottom.

“What's this?” my son wonders, looking at the box. He's helping me empty out the attic.

His right index finger taps the date in the middle of the cancellation mark. He taps it.
22 May 72
. Eleven years before he was born.

“That was a long time ago,” he says. “Ancient history.”

“Is it, now?” my grandmother used to say. “Is it, now?”

My son opens the box.

“You were in the army,” he says, surprised. He stares at me, as if I might be a stranger. “Did I know that? How did that happen? You're a poet, right?”

“You're a trained killer,” is what Goldberg says when I visit him.

My old army buddy. We've been friends for more than forty years.