There's a Man With a Gun Over There (7 page)

At five thirty
A.M.,
I slow my bicycle in front of Roger Hartinger's house and toss the
Morning Star
in a looping arc through the still-dark sky toward his porch. My first paper delivered.

“He's got you and me, brother, in His hands,” I sing as I ride off to deliver the second one.

11.

“
A
ch, ja
, this is just a diversion, this story of yours,” Albert Speer says. “A diversion.”

He's recently been visiting my dreams. So vivid, in a kind of hypercolor, as if I am more than really there.

In my dream, Albert Speer and I are standing together at the edge of a garden attached to a country house. It's summer. The slow hum of fat bees, and golden butterflies cruising by.

“How do you say, Herr Ryan, you make a diversion? Do I say that correctly? My English is technical but
nicht idiomatisch
.”

In my dreams Albert Speer always worries about his English, and yet he seems to understand everything, even what isn't said.

“
Ja, das habe ich auch getan
.”

“I did that, too, Herr Ryan. I made diversions. I distracted my inquisitors. I kept changing the subject. I told them about my childhood. I showed them pictures of my family. I showed them plans for buildings. I talked about everything except the Hitler time.
Die Hitlerzeit
. I had a soft look in my eyes. Goering was such a fool—all that bluster, as if he believed he could intimidate the Americans. I knew better.”

He cups his hands together behind his back and bends into his thought.

“Wars are never our fault, are they, Herr Ryan?”

“But Albert,” I say. I always call him Albert in my dreams, as if he's my uncle. “I wasn't in a war. I avoided the war.”

Albert Speer's smile is both wise and ironic.

“
Ach
, Herr Ryan, wars could not be fought without people like you. Those who go along with everything, who do what they're told. The Cult of Cooperation. You were the bedrock of Adolf Hitler. We needed you. It was people like you who guarded the prisoners in the concentration camps. Of course you had your doubts. Who wouldn't? But, you: you were a good soldier, weren't you? You got a medal—isn't that what you told me? You did what you were told.”

“What choice did I have, Albert? I did the best I could.”

“
Ach, ja.
‘What can any of us do?' we say as another box of bullets is shipped to the front.”

He shakes his head.

“I always liked that word ‘front,' ” Speer goes on. “I got so I wondered where the ‘back' was. What's behind all this, I wondered as I sat in prison.”

He paused, looking at me.

“But, Albert, you were one of the leaders. People followed your orders, didn't they?”

He's not listening to me.

“
Ach ja
,” Albert says, “so many wars, and no one's to blame.”

12.

I
was safe in Janesville, wasn't I? We were an important place, we told ourselves.

In fourth grade, my teacher Miss Soley put up a bulletin-board display: JANESVILLE'S PLACE IN THE WORLD, her cutout letters said, and those were surrounded by pictures of the courthouse and the stores on Milwaukee Avenue and the offices of Parker Pen out on Highway 51 and, of course, the blessed Chevrolet plant, which assembled millions of Chevrolets over the years.

How could Janesville go wrong? General Motors controlled more than 50 percent of the car market. The company was so self-confident that its executives thought about asking President Eisenhower to drop an atomic bomb to commemorate the completion of their Technical Center in 1956.

Janesville was important, that's for sure. I already told you once: we were thirty-fourth on the Russian list of cities to bomb.

But then it all went wrong. The Chevrolet plant closed, perhaps forever, at the end of 2008, and there it stands, an empty shell, the sad memento of an industry based on cheap gas and outrageous styling: there it sits, between the Rock River, where the Black Hawk Indian wars were fought in the 1800s, and the house I lived in. It looks, well, almost as if a neutron bomb had gone off there: the building stands, but the people are gone.

13.

I
n the summer of 1959, my mother took me aside and asked that I volunteer to be my father's rodman when he worked his new job as a land surveyor. She wanted me to keep an eye on him after his nervous breakdown.

“He still seems sad to me,” she said.

It never would have occurred to any of us back then that he was killing himself right in plain sight, and no one lifted a finger.

Even though he's been dead for forty years, I can still see him—legs apart, bent at the waist, holding his cap in his left hand, which is, in turn, braced against his thigh. He stares into the telescope of the transit. He squeezes a lit cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand as he makes small adjustments in the gnarled brass focus knob of the transit lens. I'm standing maybe 100 yards away in a field, my pants legs covered with burrs, holding the flat-sided pole with a row of numbers on it. My dad's trying to get a fix on those numbers in the telescope lens of his transit. He straightens up, puts the cigarette between his lips, and waves his cap at me—signaling that I can relax. Then he writes in his leather surveyor's notebook. When he finishes copying down the number he just saw on my rod, he flips the telescope of the transit straight up. This signal means that I'm to join him for further instructions.

When we get ready to leave the job site, I can see the thick veins on the backs of my dad's hands, his flat fingernails as he unscrews the knobs that hold the transit on its tripod. The instrument is mostly covered in honey-golden-colored brass and looks like a fifteenth-century sextant. He carefully slides it into its green velvet-lined wooden case. Then he pulls out the four-by-six-inch notebook and sketches out the dimensions of the property with one of his beloved green Eberhard 4-H pencils with a pointed red eraser tip. He winds a rubber band around the left-hand side of the pages to keep them from blowing.

The two of us talked about math in those days.

“Math cleans up the world,” he told me that summer of 1959 as we rode from surveying job to surveying job in his old Ford work car, with those iron marking stakes rattling around in the trunk. “It puts corners on that mess you see out there.”

He waved a hand holding one of the unfiltered Camel cigarettes he chain-smoked, as if he were flicking the messy world away. He had rubber bands looped over the shift lever.

I asked him if Mrs. Downy was right, if we could defeat the Russians with algebra.

“I don't know about that,” he said. “I'd choose trigonometry. That's what they use to aim artillery shells. It's called triangulation.”

Surveys began with known points, often section markers or those for the US Geological Survey. My father located them with a large magnet in a leather-covered box he held by its strap.

“If you think about it,” my dad said, “everything goes back to a known point.”

What is the known point for murder?

On my birthday in 1959, when I turn fourteen, my aunt gives me the John Gnagy
Learn to Draw
set, which consists of a square of soft plastic that you put on your television screen and a grease pencil for sketching the images that come and go beneath the soft plastic.

Makes Drawing Easy
, the box says.

Draw What You See
, the goateed John Gnagy says.

I put the plastic on the TV screen. I start with cartoons. Bugs Bunny. I get an eye and part of an ear and then he's gone.

“What's up, Doc?” he asks before he vanishes.

I try for days to capture one—just one—of all the images flitting by: Captain Kangaroo, Tom Terrific, Daffy Duck, The Three Stooges, Beaver Cleaver—but they disappear before I can finish them.

I try the news, but I'm just getting Walter Cronkite's moustache when he turns into a diagram of iron-poor blood being resuscitated by Geritol. I wipe away Walter's moustache and then start copying the man with the microphone standing in the jungle of the Cuban mountains with the rebel soldiers.

“This is a revolution,” he says, and I get part of a palm tree, and then here's Eric Sevareid telling me what that means, and I keep ending up with grease-pencil lines connected to nothing.

In the movie
Network
, an aging William Holden, playing a broadcast executive, tries to explain the savagely ambitious soul of the youthful Faye Dunaway character, who will stop at nothing to achieve her ends.

“She's from the television generation,” Holden says. “She learned life from Bugs Bunny.”

By the time I was in high school, I wanted to hang around with Brian Jeffrey and Steve Agard. I couldn't have cared less about my dad. While I still worked occasionally with him as a rodman, he would embarrass me by working his tongue beneath the silver bridge that held two false side teeth and sticking out the bridge on the tip of his tongue at café waitresses where we had lunch.