The Magical Stranger (4 page)

Not that he was alone. As a junior officer he was often flying circles over Iraq enforcing no-fly zones. Port calls were rare, so you had to take advantage when you could. Back then, Tupper, Roast, and his buddies were all binge drinkers, if you wanted to put a label on it. One night, Tupper and the rest of the squadron were partying in a Singapore hotel suite. Tupper found the conversation so scintillating that he didn't want to leave to urinate, so he grabbed a hotel glass and relieved himself. He put it back on the table and watched with horror as his skipper came dangerously close to downing his piss. He almost got a new call sign: D-Hop, for “drinks his own piss.” Tupper was glad it didn't take.

He was getting a reputation as a cowboy in the cockpit. Toward the end of a 1999 cruise, Tupper brought his Prowler into the
Constellation
on a tuck-under break where he flipped the Prowler on its back and rotated 270 degrees on his approach. This was dangerous and forbidden, but Tupper couldn't resist. The men thought it was badass. The skipper was pissed. Tupper didn't care.

In a way, Tupper was just following his superiors. Back in Anacortes after a hard night of drinking, one of his early skippers asked him to throw him through a store window. The cops intervened before Tupper could execute a direct order.

Things changed as he got older. He made lieutenant commander in 2003 and was assigned to the Scorpions of VAQ-132 for his department head tour, a stint that would decide if he'd make command. It was time to put childish things away, or at least store them on a higher shelf. Tupper made one of his trademark wiseass remarks early in his tenure, and the squadron's XO took him aside. The commander showed Tupper the paper trail on his career up to that point. It read something like this:

Incredibly competent, will do anything and move mountains, leader, rock star, going places, and he has a tendency to light his hair on fire. There's risk there.

Tupper read the words and told his boss he heard him loud and clear. He stopped drinking with the junior officers and did his best to keep his mouth shut.

But tonight was an ode to the old days. They smoked and drank and bullshitted for hours. Tupper protested that it was getting late, but he loved it. He had joined the Navy for this, the sheer unpredictability of it all, a midnight flight over Kandahar or the possibility that even in early middle age in sleepy Anacortes a night might go to dawn. Sure, he'd rather not have to talk Roast out of shitting in his front yard when he left, but that was just the cost of doing business.

He had already stocked his garage fridge with cases of beer in preparation for the day his Black Ravens green-lighted him, another Navy tradition: a junior officer calls the skipper and just whispers “Green Light,” a sign that the entire squadron is about to raid the skipper's house demanding pizza and beer.

Roast and friends cleared out around four, just as morning twilight began creeping up in Anacortes. Tupper filled the dishwasher and wiped down the counters—he had an OCD streak a mile wide—and grabbed three hours of sleep.

He woke before seven and showered and shaved quietly, trying not to wake Beth and the girls. He noticed his dress uniform was missing its command pin, so he ducked out of the house with his father and drove to Whidbey Naval Air Station and waited for the Navy Exchange to open.

Together alone, Tupper and his father often couldn't find the words even though they were close. While Jim and Cindy Ware waited on the birth of their first son, Jim's brother Bev was killed in Vietnam and awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Jim Ware would be the first to tell you he never fully recovered from that day. He adored his first son. There would be two more, even if he was so exhausting—Hunt was found scaling a fence trying to escape on his first day at day care—that they put off having another child until he was five.

When he was fourteen, Hunter and Jim joined some other Boy Scouts and dads for a weekend sailing trip up the Chesapeake on two sailboats. The weather turned ugly soon after the group left the Sassafras River and headed into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Thunder sounded and rain fell sideways. The dad-in-charge panicked. He shouted contradictory instructions as visibility deteriorated. The boats rammed each other. Jim Ware's son vanished below deck. Hunter turned on the boat's navigational system, an antiquated gizmo that told you your position based on sonar buoys in the water. He had never seen the system before, but he mastered it in fifteen minutes. His father shouted down to his son.

“Which way should we go? What do we do?”

Hunt told him to relax. He started issuing commands to Jim on the bridge: steer the boat to the left; steer it a little to the right. Hunter had both boats snugly anchored in a quiet cove within an hour.

Tupper and his old man picked up the pin and settled into his new office with Styrofoam cups of coffee and stale doughnuts. They didn't say much. But at that moment—before the band began practicing—the silence was welcome. His dad flashed him a proud smile. That was all Tupper needed.

L
ater that morning, Hangar 8 filled with over two hundred people. Two gleaming Prowlers separated rows of folding chairs. Kids in blue blazers chased each other around as Alix and I took our seats.

I thought of Dad and my only memory of him in this same hangar. I was twelve, and there was some paperwork he wanted to pick up after Sunday Mass on base. We walked into the hangar, and Dad spotted a young enlisted man on guard duty. His nightstick was twirling down around his waist. Dad strode directly toward him, looking as imposing as a man in a turtleneck, leather sports jacket, and flared plaid pants can look. He moved the baton back up the sailor's shoulder.

“This is how it is to be worn. Got it?”

The sailor, a kid really, whispered a response.

“Yes, sir.”

I was embarrassed and proud. Now I looked through the crowd at the sons and wondered what would happen to them without their fathers. Would they remember them? Would their example carry them through? Or would they crumple under the weight of what was expected and be lost?

The band began to play. The base commander welcomed everyone and a chaplain gave his blessing. Doogie spoke, mercifully briefly. Then he and Tupper met in the middle of the stage and saluted. Tupper read his orders, relieving Breining of command. Everyone clapped.

Tupper strode to the microphone. He took off his hat, fished his speech out of the hatband, and put the hat back on, all in one motion.

“That's an old Navy trick.”

Beth and the girls sat in the front row. Tupper thanked his family and paid his respects to Doogie. Then he paused and looked out at the men and women of VAQ-135 standing in formation.

“We have sacrificed much in the nation's defense, and we will sacrifice much more in the years ahead. Some of us will lose loved ones, some will lose relationships, and some will miss the birth of our children.”

He looked down at Beth holding hands with the girls.

“Others, such as myself, will return home to children very different than the ones we left. We accept these trials with open hearts and also with the determination that these sacrifices not be made in vain.”

The ceremony ended. There were a few minutes before the reception at the officers' club, so Alix and I walked across the street to a mothballed EA-6B Prowler. In front of the plane were bronze statues of two small children, frozen in play as if captured in a light moment at the park. But their eyes gazed on golden plaques at the base of the Prowler. Each one contained the names of the twenty-eight men who had been killed flying the Prowler. I found Dad's name and something dawned on me: the kids' faces were frozen in the moment before they were told that their father was dead.

I wiped tears away and we headed over to the officers' club where I remembered dining with Dad once or twice on special occasions. The club's walls were covered with beer mugs and wooden cruise plaques celebrating the exploits of squadrons with nicknames like Scorpions and Flying Lizards on deployments to the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I stared at the names, recognizing one or two of Dad's friends. An old man tapped me on the shoulder. It was Zeke Zardeskas.

“If you want to talk about it, I'll tell you what I know.”

I told him I'd think about it. It was time to go. I looked for Doogie to say good-bye. Whatever his faults, it was his kindness that brought me here and I wanted to thank him. I found him alone, relieved of command; none of his men feeling bound to talk with him. I thanked him for inviting me and asked if he'd seen Tupper. I then saw Doogie Breining genuinely smile for the first time.

“Tupper's been delayed. He'll be here in a few minutes.”

Commander James Hunter Ware III had been skipper for an hour and he had lost his keys.

Chapter Five

I
learned on my Whidbey trip that the Black Ravens' cruise was going to be the last one with Prowlers. They would begin transitioning to the EA-18G Growler, an electronic warfare version of the Hornet, when they got home.

I'd thought of writing about Dad and his flying days through the prism of modern pilots, but I always passed, the pain of examination too great to bear. But now the Prowler was on its last cruise. It was now or never. I called Mom not long after Ware took command of the Black Ravens and told her I wanted to write about Dad and the squadron. She had a question.

“Hon, is it going to be fiction or nonfiction?”

I took a breath and counted to ten.

“Mom, it's nonfiction. Have I ever written fiction in my life?”

“Okay, dear, I just was wondering.”

I hung up a few minutes later. The more I thought about it, the more relevant her question became. My vision of my father was incomplete, a sort of fiction. Framed images of a serious man in a black uniform with an American flag behind him hung on the walls of my childhood home. On the mantelpiece were models of his planes, and inside a glass case there was a folded American flag presented on behalf of a grateful nation. What it all meant I didn't know.

T
his is what I remember.

A little boy knows some things. Mom and Dad come from different places. It's not about class or money; those are things I don't understand. It's geography, a word I can't quite pronounce but whose answers lie in a big blue book kept on a high shelf. He is from the North, she is from the South, and we live in the West.

I see it best on vacations. Dad is one of six kids, raised in Brockton, Massachusetts, home of somebody named Rocky Marciano. In December 1972, we drive there from somewhere in a storm arriving just in time for the wedding of Dad's baby sister, Marie. We go straight to the church and I fall asleep in a pew.

Then we go to his home. We live in a suburban tract home with air-conditioning and two bathrooms. My grandparents' home is old and smelly. The carpet is faded green, the ceilings are slanted, and an old cat slinks around the place. There is only one shower in the two-story home on Herrod Avenue, so we bathe in shifts that seem to last the whole day long.

Grandpa Rodrick is just sixty, but he seems to be the oldest man in the world. He just got laid off from his job in shipping at a shoe factory but still slicks his hair back with Brylcreem and eats franks and beans for breakfast every morning. The house has a family room just like ours, but there isn't much family about it. Right at 7:00 p.m., Grandpa retires to his La-Z-Boy and scowls at the
Boston Globe
while the Bruins skate around on Channel 38.

The kids are all adults now, but they still tiptoe around the old man. He tolerates me as long as I stay quiet. I plow through
Time
magazine's Year in Review from the 1930s and 1940s stacked on a bookshelf. Every once in a while, I asked a question. Who was Tojo? Where was Ethiopia and why did Italy invade? Sometimes, he answers, sometimes he just mutters.

“Jiminy Christmas, you knucklehead. Why do you need to know that?”

Grandma Rodrick is the exact opposite. On her wrist is a jangle of bracelets holding charms with pictures of her rapidly multiplying grandchildren. She still works for Kelly Girl, a temp agency, filling in at offices three or four days a week. I sit in the backseat with her and Mom on the way home from Mass. She sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and nuzzles my face with her whiskery chin, smelling of Avon. Sometimes, she talks about grown-up things when she thinks I'm asleep. I hear about a miscarriage and a day driving around Brockton when she thought of ditching Grandpa.

Where Dad fits in his family is clear. He is the hero. Dad's family isn't exactly poor, but they are far from rich. Their pilot son gives color to their black-and-white world. The neighborhood is equally invested; I run errands with his sister, Lyn, and the grocer and the baker ask after Pete.

His black Irish features make him seem fierce, but he has a crinkly smile that makes you know he doesn't think he's better than you. His brothers and sisters approach him with serious looks and grown-up questions.

Dad's just about to turn thirty.

H
is family views Mom just as I do: she is the prettiest creature, with light in her eyes. There's usually a touch of lipstick on gapped teeth inside a mouth that is always working a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. She's from Virginia Beach, Virginia, less than 600 miles from Brockton, but she might as well be from Mars.

Her dad is the cartoon opposite of Dad's dad. Bill Gentry is a joker; wisecracks slip from his mouth almost as quickly as marriage proposals. He's on his fourth or fifth rodeo. It is hard to get my parents to cough up details, but I'm smart and nosy and get it from here and there.

Sometimes, he takes me on his rounds in his sky blue boat of a car plopping me on a stranger's couch in front of a
Leave It to Beaver
rerun. A nice lady gives me a sandwich and pats my head. They disappear into another room, and Grandpa emerges precisely one Lumpy Rutherford episode later with a grin and sweat on his forehead.

He is cashless on the drive home. Grandpa Gentry pulls up to an automated tollbooth and fake-tosses coins into the collection box. He acts shocked and angry when the gate won't open. I can't stop laughing. The gate opens.

He golfs all the time and keeps soft-porn novels in easily accessible drawers. I read them behind paperback covers of
Johnny Tremain
. His humor is rough and crass, full of mugging and jiving, which seems strange since he calls blacks “the colored” and prides himself for no longer using the n-word. The older I get, the sadder he looks. Mom laughs at his jokes but worries behind his back. The message is clear: don't be like him.

Mom has one sister and no brothers, so her father is her only male reference point. Well, except for Mel. Sarah, Mom's mom, got sick of Grandpa Gentry's silly ways and set her sights on a more grown-up guy. That would be Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Melvin Gunter. He fought in three wars, has two Purple Hearts, and drinks Budweiser like I drink cherry Kool-Aid. Mel and Sarah moved to his Alabama hills after he retired in 1973. We visit every spring. They raise pigs and peaches, tomatoes and cows, on sixty acres. Their home is near the end of a road that pitches and winds like crazy. Mel's momma lives up the road and shucks corn and green beans barefoot. She smiles without teeth and tells me about a no-good welfare cheat collecting from two counties.

“He's just trash.”

Northerners are not welcome around here. Not even us, really. A man in overalls stops by one morning and tells Mel that he saw our Massachusetts license plates and wants to make sure he was okay. He then jokes about slashing our tires. Or maybe he isn't joking.

Every morning, Mel works in his peach orchards in a white T-shirt and army surplus pants. Down comes his ax; up goes a Budweiser tall boy. It is 7:30 a.m. After breakfast, we go fishing in his catfish pond. One afternoon, we catch a giant one, maybe three pounds, throw it in the now empty beer cooler, and drive his blue tractor back to the house. He gives me a wink and gets a hammer and nail. He pounds the catfish to the wall and skins it. I puke in the driveway.

He is asleep in his lounger by 2:00 p.m. I lift a Marlboro out of his hand and snuff it out in an ashtray. I sneak into his living room and stare at snapshots of dead Korean boys preserved behind cellophane in a dusty photo album. He wakes up and thumps me on the head.

“You're not old enough to see these things.”

My glimpses into a man's world vanish as quickly as they happen. Mostly, I'm around women all day and night long. Mom's mom flies wherever we are and visits for weeks at a time. The good news is she makes me chicken and dumplings and a chocolate cake with golden filling for my birthday. The bad news is she's the most scared grown-up I've ever met. She doesn't drive and hasn't been to the movies for twenty years. That seems like a long time. Grandma only likes to talk about two things: how dangerous Dad's job is and how men are jerks. She seems only to be happy when she's talking about being unhappy. She wants everyone to be as scared as she is. Then, Grandma tells Mom that Dad is doing men's work and there's nothing she can do about it. She works Mom into a panic and then seals the exits.

How a boy and a girl from different sides of the Mason-Dixon line come together is a story I can't hear enough. Here's how it goes. Dad starts at the Naval Academy in 1960. The following year, he goes down to Virginia with the academy's brigade to watch Navy play Duke in a football game called the Oyster Bowl. There is a dance after the game filled with crew-cut boys and nice girls from Norfolk and Virginia Beach. My parents meet toward the end of the night. When she gets ready to leave, Dad—pushed forward by his friends—asks for her number. She gives it with a sugary smile.

Then he doesn't call for a month! I never find out why. He probably is just busy. He invites her to Annapolis for another dance. He is quiet. She is not. They like that about each other. They start going steady. Every weekend, she and a few girls carpool up to Annapolis. The girls stay in houses with housemothers who watch what goes on. Dad doesn't like this, so he borrows a car so they can go watch the submarine races. One weekend, she sits under an oak tree and watches Dad march off demerits for eating a cookie in math class. That's when Dad knows she is the one.

Dad proposes down on the Cape, not far from Kennedy's Camelot in Hyannis, on a summer weekend in 1963. Mom's ring is a little smaller than Jackie's. There's just one catch: Mom is a Baptist. She gets pamphlets in the mail from her almost father-in-law about mixed marriages. This confuses her. She thought mixed marriages were between black and white folks. Mom takes classes for six months and gets baptized just before Dad graduates from the Naval Academy in June 1964. It's a hot day and Dad gets a watch for being good at math.

He has leadership classes to take, so they put off marriage until after Christmas. Then, it finally happens. Dad's family flies down to Norfolk; it's the first flight for his brothers and sisters. Our Lady of Victory Chapel at Norfolk Naval Base is filled with naval officers, nanas in white gloves and Southern girls with bird-nest hats. My mother wears a white bridal gown of Alençon lace styled with long sleeves and a floor-length bell skirt. (Or at least that's what the
Brockton Daily Enterprise
says in a clip I dug out of Mom's closet.) Dad is in his dress uniform. The priest pronounces them man and wife. They leave church under an arch of swords provided by Dad's classmates. They jump into Dad's Corvette after the reception. Dad fishtails the car in the Virginia slush and they head south. Flight school starts in Pensacola in eight days.

Mom spends her first year as a Navy wife in a shotgun shack with a puke bucket by the bed. She is pregnant with Terry six weeks after the wedding. Mom's best friend, Brenda, married a Navy flier too, and she lives down the road. Every morning, Dad drops her off at Brenda's on his way to work. She slips into Brenda's bed, snuggles up until she has to puke again.

They move a few months later to Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, where Dad learns how to fly the E-2, a turboprop sub chaser. Terry arrives late on Halloween. There are no breaks. Mom becomes pregnant with me right after she recovers from childbirth. I arrive the following September, a month early and barely five pounds. Mom is twenty-four and has two children under the age of one.

It is September 30, 1966. We are an American family. Our story will never be this simple again.