Free There's a Man With a Gun Over There by R. M. Ryan

be like that, I vowed.
    I wanted to be out with my friends drinking beer and howling at the night. I wanted to sit in parked cars with girls, kissing them and feeling their breasts flop loose from their brassieres. But no, I had chores. In the evening, when I got home from work, I had to take care of my dad, while my mother, exhausted from being with him all day, sat downstairs in the living room watching television and smoking and drinking coffee.
    I sat inches away from my father’s gaunt and yellowed face, pulling his razor through the lather on his sunken cheeks. At first we talked, but then he stared at me as if I were a stranger.
    He was like a man slipping down the face of a mountain. I tried to stop his fall, but I could just feel his touch as he slid out of my hands, see the stunned terror in his eyes as he slid farther and farther away.
    Every morning I drove off to the Chevrolet assembly plant, where I stood on a riser made of steel grating. I wore a heavy rubber apron and stiff, unwieldy rubber gloves and washed down the passing bodies of Chevy Biscaynes, Bel Airs, and Impalas with dry cleaning fluid so they’d be free of dirt and dust when they went into the spray-paint booth. One primergray-covered automobile body a minute jerked by on the squeaking and clanking assembly line.
    Arch McConnell, my coworker, caught fire one afternoon. Or the naphtha fumes did. He stood there with his arms out in flames, the fire burning a few inches all around his body, fueled by the chemical fumes. He looked like the painting of Blake’s Glad Day.
    â€œThe fuck . . . the fuck . . . the fuck!” Arch screamed.
    He wasn’t burned. The fuel somehow protected him; the flames burned a few inches away from his skin and then simply went out.
    At the end of my shift, I drove home, listening to WLS in Chicago, where the hit of the summer was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones.
    When my father’s bowel movements turned black from internal hemorrhaging, we took him to the hospital. The cancer was now eating through his guts. Just before he died, he looked up at the crucifix on the wall of the Catholic hospital and announced, “That’s Don Quixote.”
    My father—incomprehensible as the coordinates he left in his surveyor’s notebook—must have known something about Cervantes. And yet he hardly ever read and was not, as far as I knew, a literary man, and I have puzzled over his remark for years. It was so far from what he seemed to know and said so close to his death that his announcement seemed to contain knowledge from beyond the grave.
    My father died on July 23rd, 1965, the day after my twentieth birthday. On one day, I left my teenage years behind and on the next I lost my father. The last sight I had of him he was a yellow-green corpse with a slight smile on his face, as if Don Quixote had finally told him the punch line to a joke.
    â€œDaddy dead,” my brother said when we told him the next morning. “Daddy dead?”
    As if he couldn’t quite grasp what we were telling him.
    Gary, my brother, died almost exactly a year later in 1966, as if he wanted to search for my father.

    After we put my father’s hospital bed in my room, I moved into his room. I hung my clothes in his closet and slept in his bed. I felt as though I was somehow impersonating him, trying to live in a space that was properly his.
    On Saturdays and Sundays, I would quietly go there and try on his clothes, which were exactly my size. They didn’t quite fit me, though. The wrinkles and the break points of the fabric were suited to his body, not mine, and the clothes hung on me with the memory of someone else.
    The day after my father died, I was so depressed and anxious that I walked quietly upstairs, went into his room, closed the door, and lay on his bed. Even after a month of sleeping there, the smell of the bed, of the pillow, even of the room itself were