There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  “That poem?” At first I can’t recall what he’s talking about.

  “Yeah, that poem. You scared everyone. Creeped us out. Don’t you remember? You were channeling murderers.”

  Of course. Yes. The poem.

  THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE ARRIVES

  for the assassins

  My life has been a pretty dull affair,

  Spent in towns you didn’t know were there.

  My high-school annual left my picture out,

  And I began to put myself in doubt

  When people said they’d seen me other days

  Walking briskly on the Champs Élysées

  Or throwing pennies in Niagara Falls.

  “But no,” they’d say, “it wasn’t you at all.

  He had a darker face, a finer nose . . .

  Something in the way he wore his clothes.

  Still I can’t help but see him in your face.”

  They’d walk away, thinking of another place,

  A man I’ve never known.

  Someday, for a laugh,

  I’ll tell them “Yes, that was me you saw at Banff,

  Hooded face, looking thin and pale,

  Or in Kansas stomping through the wheat for quail.

  Think . . . I took pictures of your accident;

  I cleaned the sickroom for your dying aunt.

  I’ve lived with you like leaves with fall,

  You’ve heard me walk behind you down the hall.

  And like the leaves, all my faces mean the same.

  They will someday drive you to my name.

  Next time you’ll know it’s me that’s come.

  When I arrive, there’ll be no place to run.”

  “Look, Dennis,” I told him. “That’s not me speaking. It’s a dramatic monologue—the kind of thing Robert Browning made famous. That poem’s in the voice of a killer. It’s not my voice.”

  “Don’t give me that literary bullshit. Something dark was running through you. Remember what Whitehead said?”

  Jim Whitehead was my poetry teacher.

  “You scare the shit out of me” is what Jim said. “You scare the shit out of me.”

  24.

  Remember the old Twilight Zone episode—“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street?” In the voice-over, the show’s creator, Rod Serling, said:

  “This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street, in the last calm and reflective moments . . . before the monsters came.”

  My friends and I memorized that when we were kids. We liked to go around growling those sentences, pretending that we were the monsters, scaring ourselves and then laughing.

  There weren’t any monsters, were there? And if there were monsters, they weren’t us, were they?

  I once lived on one of the world’s Maple Streets. 531-A East Maple Street, to be exact. 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas, if you want the whole address. I was in graduate school, writing poems and studying for a degree in creative writing.

  It was 1968. Just as we’d planned, Jenny and I got married on December 30, 1967. It was a sweet time. We figured the war would end any day. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of the summer of love. It was an auspicious time. No monsters anywhere, right?

  Jenny and I thought seeing John Lennon on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone was cute. Remember that? He was dressed as a World War I soldier. He had a part in the movie How I Won the War. It’s all a little period drama. Just a little bit of history. Nothing to do with us, right?

  The specifics of the new year slowly come back to me, or at least some of them do.

  It’s New Year’s Day, and I have the flu, an aching, gut-wrenching flu. Oh, I remember now. It’s the Hong Kong flu, and then Jenny gets it, and we begin our married life fighting off this attack from Asia, so, OK, there were microscopic monsters and, then, for some reason, the world starts spinning faster. And then it’s hard to keep up with 1968, as if we’re running to jump on a carnival ride. Faster and faster, it goes. Round and round, and up and down. Nineteen sixty-eight. A Tilt-A-Whirl of a year.

  It’s the year of the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring, which promises freedom from the Russians until it spins round and becomes the assassination of Martin Luther King on that motel balcony. That baby floating in space at the opening of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey falls like innocence abandoned down to where Bobby Kennedy dies on the kitchen floor of a Los Angeles hotel as the crackle of small-arms fire in Chicago at the Democratic presidential convention punctuates the night while the musical Hair opens and the Age of Aquarius dawns on Broadway, and Congress repeals the requirement for a gold standard, and Elvis, in his leather suit, makes the girls squeal, as if they’re orgasmic, coming right there on network television.

  Me, I’m watching much of the year go by in the grainy black-and-white pictures of my little Magnavox thirteen-inch TV.

  Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

  “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Lyndon Johnson solemnly announces as if trying to drown out those chants.

  Yes. Nineteen sixty-eight was quite a year. My generation thought that we would save the world. Isn’t that what the rock-and-roll lyric says? “We can change the world/Rearrange the world.” Mimeograph a list of demands. Take to the streets with some posters, and it’s as good as done.

  The little, tiny, hardly noticed part of 1968 that barely gets a mention is the end of graduate school deferments.

  Hello, Rick, it’s Nazi time for you, my friend.

  Boom, boom, snare.

  It’s first two beats on the bass drum and then one on the little snare drum for the army and air force ROTC students every Friday during the school year as they form up and then march in tight formations across the lawn of the university.

  Boom, boom, snare.

  I am in a classroom on the second floor of a building erected in the decade after the Civil War. The windows of the building must be over ten feet tall. The course is English prosody, and we are studying the Robert Browning poem, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”:

  I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

  “Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

  “Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;

  Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

  And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

  “Mostly anapests,” Professor Jim Whitehead, with great exuberance, declaims.

  Out there on the spring lawn the ROTC cadets in their blue and green uniforms arrange themselves into ranks and files and then march across the lawn to the tune of the war’s booming anapests.

  Boom, boom, snare.

  Boom, boom, snare.

  Yes, the ancient anapests of war. They form squares and rectangles and then single lines that meet and turn.

  I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

  The young girls with the snapping flags behind them and the rattle of the drum to their left watch their boys group and regroup. The girls in their tight uniform blouses and ascots. Saluting as the boys pass. Their breasts cinched into pointed brassieres that make their chests look like twin traffic cones.

  They’re the Angel Flight, but is anyone really thinking of what angels might have to do with the military? Is anyone really thinking of death this spring afternoon?

  I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three . . .

  Boom, boom, snare

  Ah, yes, 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight is the year of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive and the First Battle of Saigon.

  Does anyone remember those battles anymore?

  “A cold, gray fog lifts on the bodies of American soldiers killed at the perimeter of Khe Sanh, Walter,
” John Laurence of CBS says on The Nightly News.

  Those were the monsters, I suppose, but they were a long way from Maple Street, weren’t they? They couldn’t come here, could they?

  I don’t know that my graduate school draft deferment is coming to an end while I amble along Maple Street toward the university, though I’m sad. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot the night before, and that troubles me a little. Like many other people my age I’ve sat around singing “We Shall Overcome.” I’m in favor of integration, but, truth be told, I haven’t done much about civil rights except be sentimental, so I am having an appropriately sentimental moment as I walk along Maple Street toward the university. Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights are a long way off.

  Yes, I am walking west from my little apartment, carrying my yellow, college-ruled notebook and a copy of The Form and Theory of Poetry by Paul Fussell.

  I think I’m going to be a poet, but the world has other plans.

  Ah yes, 1968: that Tilt-A-Whirl of a year is stopping to pick me up.

  Oh I almost forgot: the Big Mac was introduced nationwide in 1968. America was at war, and it was getting fatter, too.

  25.

  Ah, graduate school. I’d arrived there in the fall of 1967. I was in the writing program, and that attracted women, so even though I’m engaged to marry Jenny Gleason I began trying to sleep with as many women as I can. Hey, it’s right after the Summer of Love, isn’t it? I felt like it was my turn.

  I also began meeting real poets. Jim Dickey, who would later be famous as the author of the novel Deliverance, came to Fayetteville as a visiting writer that fall. He liked my poems, but mostly what we did was get drunk in his hotel room and call various women he knew. Once they came on the line, he would say something like, “There should only be joy, joy, joy in the world,” and then he’d shake his head and make a kind of wattling noise.

  In 1969, not long before I went in the army, I drove Allen Ginsberg and his friend Peter Orlovsky around. My 1967 Chevelle had something called a reverberator installed under the dash. It changed the sound of the radio with its single control knob. Initially, it produced a crude stereo effect, but, as you turned the knob, it created the sound of an echo chamber. Songs like The Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” sounded like something sung deep in a cave. The song came out as “I-I-I Ca-Ca-Can’t-Can’t Ge-ge-ge-get-get-get No-No-No Sat-Sat-sat-satis-satis-satis-satisfaction.”

  If you turned the unit all the way up, that line—and, in fact, the whole song—became one consonant stuttered out: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.”

  Peter loved that unit and kept fiddling with it as I drove him and Allen around.

  “This is all the poetry we need,” Peter said over and over.

  Oh yes, did I mention that one of my girlfriends kind of hung around after I got married?

  Did I mention that?

  I didn’t mean to have a girlfriend. It just sort of happened. She was a holdover from my single days. What could I do? She wouldn’t go away.

  I met her at one of the weekend parties, where girls hung around members of the writing program as if we were football stars. Sarah was sitting in a chair with her legs tucked beneath her, and she kind of raised one up, exposing her panties, and she looked at me and smiled and pretty soon we were rolling around on her bed, and I was coming like I’d never come before and this went on for weeks and then I was married and Jenny was sick and sweaty with the Hong Kong Flu and I made up my mind right then and there that one more time with Sarah would be it—absolutely, for sure it—because a marriage vow was a marriage vow. Sickness and health and all that sort of thing, and we only fucked two or three more times after that, Sarah and I—or maybe it was four or five times. It couldn’t have been, I swear to God, more than ten times.

  And then she moved away, and I was a good boy again.

  Yes, 1968, back and forth and round and round.

  More than forty years later. I go to the Street View option at Google Maps and type in 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas. What comes up is a leaf-strewn neighborhood on a gray day. Maybe it’s fall or late winter. I spin the viewer around, but I can’t find the little building of my apartment, which, as I recall, was set back some distance from the street. Maybe it’s been torn down. What I remember, after all, happened long ago.

  Using the arrows of Google Street View, I move up and down the street, but I don’t recognize anything. The scene is far different from the neighborhood I remember. I can’t find my old apartment building. Nothing looks the same as it did in 1968.

  Google has a white line down the center of Maple Street, and, in the netherland of technology, I follow the line west, crossing College Avenue. The names of the streets I pass sound familiar, but nothing looks familiar.

  How frustrating. Should I travel to Fayetteville, get on an actual airplane and see the real place, I wonder, to get the details right? But then, who cares about this story of mine? Do I even care?

  And yet, I obsess over it. I can’t get it out of my mind. Why?

  I sit in front of my computer, my head in my hands, trying to answer that question. I look like a man praying.

  What I really wish I could do is travel back to January 1968. That’s when my troubles began, though I certainly didn’t know it at the time. I wish I could go back there, to those innocent days, to that little one-bedroom apartment and warn my new wife and me that the monsters are definitely coming to Maple Street.

  “Look,” I’d tell Rick and Jenny, “things are going to get bad. All those promises they made to you—you know, Rickie, back in junior high when you were a bouncing, bright kid on the Algebra Squad—and, Jenny, when you were singing those folk songs and believing that you’d fix the world with love: all those promises they made to you both about how important you would be—those promises are lies. All lies. Things aren’t going to work out so well for you. The government’s not going to help you. The government might, in fact, be the enemy. The government might just be plotting to kill Little Rickie Ryan.”

  It’s like those green cardboard barrels labeled Emergency Supplies. Remember? The ones with the yellow letters and the round emblem with the triangle in the middle. Civil Defense supplies. Take care of people in trouble, right? Well, the ones I found in the basement of the Janesville Post Office when I had a summer job there in 1967 were empty. Empty. They were a public relations scheme.

  And if I were really brave, I’d pull Jenny aside and tell her that Rickie was a two-timing asshole. That Rickie might just, in fact, be one of the monsters.

  Yes, that little apartment on Maple Street, though I can’t find it anywhere on Google Earth. It’s gone now, I guess.

  But I can see it in my memory: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen. All tiny. Barely room to move in. My first wife and I there in the soft focus dream of the 1960s. I have a goatee, and Jenny wears bell-bottoms. We’re sitting down to The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The iris eye of the CBS logo sees everything, doesn’t it?

  The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite for Tuesday, January 30th, begins, the way it usually does, with an image of the newsroom in New York, a profile shot of Walter Cronkite at the circle desk tapping his papers as if he’d just arrived there, fresh from typing up what he was about to say. Teletypes clatter in the background. Walter looks at the camera. Walter is now facing us.

  Jenny and I sit there with our dinner. We eat in the living room, using an old black steamer trunk as a coffee table.

  “The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

  Our little living room is shaped like a rectangle, television at one end, me at the other, putting a bite of pork chop into my mouth. On one side sits Jenny and on the other is a six-foot bookshelf made from boards and cinder-block bricks. I look over and see the books grouped by genre and alphabetized within each group. Neat. There’s Ha
mlet and New Poets of England and America and The Works of Edgar Allen Poe among the books I’ve read. Then there are the books for next semester: Lord Jim and In Cold Blood and Crime and Punishment. These are books for the second semester freshman composition course I will teach.

  “How crimes happen,” the director of the Composition Program tells us. “The slow creep of criminality. The effects of crime on the criminal. The metaphor of crime.”

  Metaphors, similes—all those techniques of writing. A life of sensitivity. A life of the mind in my little apartment.

  “The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

  Jenny’s mouth is open slightly, her arms are crossed on her chest.

  I wish I could walk into this memory and talk to us back then. Warn us.

  “You’re in danger,” I would say, a ghost from the future.

  “Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Viet-namese conflict,” Robert Schakne says.

  It’s comfortable, sitting there, in that tiny apartment at 531-A East Maple Street in Fayetteville.

  The books on the wall announcing my brilliance. A man who will soon know about crime and punishment.

  I try to close my eyes and hold that moment there, but it flits away, just as it did beneath the soft plastic screen of my John Gnagy Learn-To-Draw set.

  I didn’t know anything about the war in Vietnam. I didn’t, for instance, know the names of the battles I just looked up in the history book. In 1968 I’d never heard of Allelbora and Leatherneck Square and Masher and Double Eagle and White Wing and Dak To and Hill 881 South and Cedar Falls.

  So much about the 1960s I didn’t know back then. I didn’t know that Huey Newton started a jail sentence in January of 1968, that the American Indian Movement was founded in July of 1968, and the Yippie! party in 1967.