There's a Man With a Gun Over There (8 page)

“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 1
^st
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 1
^st
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.

“
Y
ou 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, legions 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.

“
W
e'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.”

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.