Read Online There's a Man With a Gun Over There by R. M. Ryan - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œHello,” 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.
    â€œIs Mrs. Ryan there?”
    â€œWho’s calling?”
    â€œDr. 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.
    â€œYes? 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.
    â€œRight away. Yes. Yes.”
    She hangs up and stares off into space.
    â€œHow is he?” I ask. “How’d the surgery go?”
    â€œWe’ve got to leave now,” she says. “Be there when he wakes up.”
    She wants to drive, and I let her,