There's a Man With a Gun Over There (10 page)

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.”

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.

“I always travel equipped for moments like this. It's a life of accidents, you know.”

Then we all sat on the bumper of the Ford and bounced it a few times. The two cars, as if done with their business together, pulled apart.

We started south again. The old Ford keep steering to the right, as if the accident had frightened it and now it wanted off the road.

At a gas station outside of Keokuk, just before we left Iowa, my uncle answered the phone at our house.

“Hi, Uncle Gene,” I said. “I'm calling about this school civil rights trip.”

He heard me out and then said, “Your father's just been diagnosed with lung cancer. You don't have time for civil rights.”

When I walked back to the old Ford, I suddenly saw the whole scene—Dr. Stone, Steve Unger, the old Ford, and all the rest—behind a cloudy scrim. I was on one side, and my old life was on the other. I tried to reach across, but my attempt bounced back, as if I had tried to punch a trampoline. The scrim kept me on my side, all by myself.

I hitchhiked back to my little college. When my ride, a retired farmer, heard about my bad news, he drove me all the way to the campus.

“I'm so sorry,” he said when he let me off.

That was what Jenny said and what my teachers said and what my uncle said when he came to get me.

19.

I
t was a simple proposition. The doctor told my mother that if he called her an hour into the surgery, the news wouldn't be good: the tumor would have spread too far, making it inoperable. He would close my father back up. If, on the other hand, he called two or three hours after the surgery began, why, then—then my father had a fighting chance. The doctor would dig the cancer out of his lungs.

I can see my mother in the kitchen the morning of the surgery, wearing an apron and a new dress, baking banana bread and doing dishes, as if becoming a perfect housewife would help my father's chances. My brother is playing with sticks.

The truth is, my mother hardly ever wore an apron or a new dress. Dressed in an old housecoat with a washed-out design that looked like the memory of green-stemmed irises with purple blooms, she liked to sit at the kitchen table smoking Larks and discussing how the family fortune had been lost. She let the dishes pile up. She was really an intellectual who'd been trapped by family life. She'd written a novel—typed it on four-by-six-inch notebook paper and kept it in her little University of Iowa three-ring binder. When I was three or four, I scribbled drawings on the back of her work with my set of giant Crayola crayons, and then the notebook disappeared. She probably threw it away.

Ring
. The sound of the phone came an hour into my mother's kitchen chores. After that abrupt first ring, time slowed down. A second seemed to take an hour. The second ring went on forever, its sound broken into separate, jangling tremors, each one of them draining color from my mother's face, as if a faucet slowly closed, turning off her supply of blood.

My brother came over and stood beside me. He held my hand.

“It's probably my friend Brian Jeffrey,” I said.

In slow motion, each step covering an infinity of ground in an infinity of time, I went to answer the phone, which was in its own little nook built into the wall, with a dark wood shelf and a dark wood panel underneath that hid the connector for the wires. That nook was one of the few elegant touches in our tiny house.

My mother stands frozen in the kitchen, moving so slowly, as if through the slurry of partly frozen water.

“Hello,” I say, picking up the receiver.

The center of the phone dial has our phone number. It begins
PL
in oversized letters. The beginning of
Pleasant
. PL8-7810 is the whole number. When I was little, you didn't have to dial it all—just 7810 was enough. Then it became 8-7810. By the time my father was sick, it was 758-7810. I look at those numbers as if they somehow will save my dad.

“Is Mrs. Ryan there?”

“Who's calling?”

“Dr. Chen.”

Yes, Janesville's first Chinese doctor, back there in 1965. I hold the phone out toward my mother in the kitchen. She steps toward me, the film in frame-by-frame slow motion. When I hand her the phone, she drops it, and it spins on the floor, like the turning arrow on
Wheel of Fortune
, pointing at me, my mother, nothing.

“Yes? Oh, I see,” my mother says after she picks up the phone. “Yes. Of course. Right away. Yes. Yes.”

My mother is taking off her apron as she speaks. She looks at her shoes.

“Right away. Yes. Yes.”

She hangs up and stares off into space.

“How is he?” I ask. “How'd the surgery go?”

“We've got to leave now,” she says. “Be there when he wakes up.”

She wants to drive, and I let her, even though I haven't passed up a chance to drive a car since I got my driver's license.

Traveling Milton Avenue to the Main Street Bridge, we pass through downtown. The stores have been there forever, I think. Forever. Time slows again . . . slower and slower the stores go by. They never change. They'll
never
go away, will they? Not the Clark gas station with its little plaque—
On this spot in 1898, Carrie Jacobs Bond wrote “I Love You Truly.”
Not Harrison Chevrolet, Wisconsin Bell, Woolworth's . . . slowly, slowly going by. My mother bent over the steering wheel, looking straight ahead, hypnotized by the vaporous draw of an opaque future.

“Where's my watch?” my dad says when he wakes up. “What time is it? Did he get it all?”

“There, there, Earl,” my mother says. A nurse propels the gurney my father's lying on through the warren of hallways in the basement of Mercy Hospital. My mother and I trot beside it, trying to keep up. My mother tries to hold my father's hand as we move along, but the nurse keeps pushing him out ahead of us, as if my father is on his way to an urgent meeting somewhere. A second nurse trots along with an IV on wheels. Its tube is hooked to my father's arm. A clear plastic bag sits on the end of his bed, holding dark blood and tissue, the black, oozing detritus of his surgery.

“It's kind of early, isn't it?” my father asks the world, the heavens over him.

I look over at my father. He has fat tears in his eyes. Since he's lying down, they don't drain away. He shakes his head. “No.” He seems to be mouthing the word, “No.” His mouth quivers with his silent crying. My mother pats his hands as she trots along, saying, “There, there,” over and over. My father sobs, gagging on his tears.

20.

T
ime passed in a dream. Days, I worked in the Janesville Chevrolet assembly plant, earning money to pay for my last years of college. Nights and weekends, I took care of my father.