The Tank Man's Son (21 page)

It was a pit. I probably had the messiest desk at school. Looking into my desk was like trying to see through pea-soup fog, so the boys began to fumble around with their hands, gingerly, as if they didn’t want to get cooties from all the junk. When that didn’t reveal a turtle, at Mrs. Woolerth’s urging, they began to lift things out and set them on the floor. All the while David Visser sat crying at his desk, surrounded by a sympathetic knot of kids who were trying to console him by patting him on the back and whispering insults about me.

“Teacher, there ain’t no turtle in here
 
—we checked!” complained Michael, and Dick nodded his agreement.

“Everyone sit at your own desk. Now!” snapped our teacher. She looked like she wanted to strangle me.

I sat down and began to refill my desk, wondering where in the world the turtle had gone. Two rows up on my left, I could see David Visser’s head was slumped on his arms, and his shoulders were heaving up and down. Mrs. Woolerth gave us the angriest, fastest history lecture in the history of the world, then told us to write an essay until the next bell rang.

Thirty minutes later I dared to reach one arm into my desk, aiming for the spot where I’d placed the stolen pet. Ever so quietly I felt around, until
 
—at the very end of my reach
 
—my fingers brushed the familiar edge of a shell. Soon I had the turtle in my pocket, and the minute the bell rang I walked out the door, head down, feeling the burn of Mrs. Woolerth’s eyes and hearing the fresh sobs of David Visser.

Back at home that afternoon, I left the turtle in my pocket while I went inside and grabbed a piece of Wonder Bread and a cup, then returned to the pond. After I ripped off some bits of bread and sprinkled them near the edge, I took the cup in my left hand and a fist-sized rock in my right. When Sheri’s goldfish came for the bread, I scooped it up in the cup and then tipped it onto the cement rim of the pond. It flopped and flapped for a second or two, and then I brought down the rock on top of it.

I was elated. My turtle, my pond, and nothing to interfere. I took my new turtle from my pocket.

“Here’s your new home.”

I slipped my hand into the water and opened my palm, and the turtle slid off and swam away. I watched it circle once, twice
 
—magic in motion
 
—and then it climbed onto one of the rocks. I stared at it for a long time.

Then I looked down at the body of the goldfish. I had been wrong to kill it. Not just wrong.
Evil.
I’d wanted to protect my turtle, to have my pond all to myself, but I’d killed something defenseless. I quickly flicked the fish’s body into the water, feeling my throat tighten.

I heard the rumble of Dad chugging up the driveway, and I shivered. I had acted just like him.

D
AD MARKED MY BODY
with his belt and his hand more times than I could count. So often it began with a phrase from which there could be no escape.

“I thought I told you . . .”

He went to great lengths to force an answer from me, widening his eyes like he was waiting for my response, or asking again and again, “Well?
Well
?
”

The moment I opened my mouth
 
—
wham!
 
—my words were slapped away. I tried to spread my legs wide enough to withstand the coming blow, but Dad was simply too powerful. My head would bounce off the fridge, the door frame, or even Jerry or Sheri if they happened to be standing near.

Dad’s words were powerful too, and they seemed to be seared on my soul with a branding iron. How long did it take for the worst bruise to fade
 
—a week? But I could still hear every name, loud and clear, that Dad had ever called me.

Imbecile.

The village idiot.

Good-for-nothing.

Any moment of the day
 
—on the bus, slouched at my desk in school, on my back in bed
 
—I could picture Dad standing over me, hands on his hips, declaring the truth.

Not very smart, kid.

Often after a beating, he would say, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” That wasn’t a figure of speech
 
—Dad was stating a fact. I was completely powerless.

Dad even had the power to turn me against Jerry. We were brothers in suffering, and if we never said it out loud, it was because we both knew it: we were on the same team. Dad’s worsening temper, along with our differing reactions to it, had made us more isolated. Still, we were the closest thing to a friend either of us had at home, and we never forgot that.

It was always different with Sheri. When she was younger, she spent more time with Mom, more time playing inside with her dolls and her Easy-Bake Oven instead of tramping through the woods
 
—and sure, more time being pushed around by me and Jerry. As she grew older she became a social butterfly, making countless plans and dates with her friends. The biggest difference between her and us, though, was her relationship with Dad. It became obvious that Dad was hurting us boys more and Sheri almost never. He needed no excuse to slap or beat us, whereas Sheri could sometimes get Dad to back down.

If he looked like he might be warming up to spank her for leaving the laundry unfolded, she might shout back, “Well, you didn’t give me enough time to do it!” Jerry and I would cringe, picturing what would happen if we even
thought
that, and meanwhile Dad might stalk off, muttering to himself, allowing Sheri to escape scot-free.

Dad understood the bond between Jerry and me, which is why he
used it against us. Once, when he heard us arguing about some pointless thing in the kitchen, he hollered at us to follow him outside.

“Thought you boys wanted to be men. From now on you’ll settle things like men do. Now fight!”

Jerry and I were still standing shoulder to shoulder, looking at Dad, and the understanding of what was about to happen felt like it was reaching my brain in slow motion. We took too long to move, so Dad shoved us apart and spun me so I was facing Jerry.

“Now
fight
,” he repeated.

Wanting to get it over with, I threw some halfhearted punches at Jerry, and he allowed a few of them to land before hitting me back a few times. We made the sort of noises that seemed like fighting noises, wrestled around a bit, and then broke apart, wondering what would happen next.

Dad put his hands on his hips and looked at us.

“You don’t think I know when you’re pulling punches? When I say fight, you fight,” he said, looking us up and down. “Now fight!”

What alternative did we have? If we didn’t fight, Dad would just beat us senseless anyway, and chances were his beating would hurt worse. Jerry’s eyes turned flat as he came at me. He wasn’t Jerry anymore.

“Harder!” yelled Dad.

And the first time one of his punches lanced real pain into my chest, I changed too. We were no longer boys but animals tearing into each other with genuine violence. Dad had forced us, for one dark moment, to hate each other.

“Harder! Harder!”

The more we hit each other, the more we hated Dad and what he was doing to us. We pummeled each other’s bodies until we both were crying.

As quickly as it had started, Dad yelled, “That’s enough. Now remember this next time you two want to fight.”

He stalked off, leaving us staring at each other, panting and continuing to cry. We hadn’t hit each other in the face
 
—nothing could make us do that
 
—but we
had
hit each other. Hard.

Mom called us back into the house.

“What happened? You boys should know better than to fight! Now go clean up, and don’t let me catch you doing that again.”

On the ship Dad had briefly become a different person. Authoritarian still, but less evil. Like the movies he’d watch by himself in town, starring men like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Dad played a role when he was at sea, and I wondered if he simply liked being
captain
so much that he forgot to be the father who beat his family. He assigned jobs to his crew and directed the whole show, a confident and capable man of leisure who had the means to vacation on a ship he owned and piloted.

Back home, though, Dad became himself again. One morning, after Dad had really laid into me for losing something of his, I limped down the driveway to wait for the bus. On the ride to school, the bumps were painful, but I didn’t give it much thought. It wasn’t the first time a beating had made the day just a little bit worse. When it was time for gym class, I stood in front of my locker and pulled my pants down to my ankles, stepping out of them so I could pull on my athletic shorts. I glanced down at my legs and panicked: they were completely covered, from thigh to shin, in purple, red, and yellow bruises. I tried to leap into my shorts, only to realize that they weren’t going to hide a single mark.

Then, from behind me, came the words I dreaded. “Hey man, what happened
 
—did your dad beat you?”

My mind raced for an excuse that made even a shred of sense. I came up with nothing. “Yes,” I admitted, “he did.”

My classmate’s reply was a snarl. “If my old man tried to beat me, I’d kick his ass.”

I didn’t respond, but as I walked out to the field, I thought,
You’d be dead if you said that to
my
dad
. Maybe his dad was smaller than mine. Or less mean. Jerry was the biggest of us kids, and even he wasn’t close to a match for Dad’s thick arms and solid body.

Gym class was torture that day. I tried to move slowly and carefully. I tried to keep my legs hidden. And I tried not to think about how my latest pet turtle
 
—the one I’d stolen
 
—had also disappeared. My efforts were not successful.

O
NE
S
ATURDAY
I decided to earn some extra money, not because I had anything I was saving up for, but because I wanted to be more like other kids. I’d heard a boy at school bragging about how much money he made mowing people’s lawns, and that sounded promising
 
—how hard could it be to mow a lawn? Dad never tired of reminding Jerry and me that we knew how to do things most grown men couldn’t do
 
—which really meant we were used to doing chores that only adults did, like wielding a shovel for five hours straight. We did own a lawn mower, which Dad had picked up for next to nothing, just in case he got the urge to mow down the sandburs, and we always had gasoline around.

Neighbors were few and far between, and after the Dietzes, I had no idea who the next closest neighbor with grass might be, but I figured there had to be someone
 
—it wasn’t like we lived at the North Pole. I walked up the road, away from town, until I found an employer about a mile away. A man was standing outside his house, looking at the road, and he had a lawn big enough to land a small airplane.

“Hey, mister!” I hollered. “Can I mow your grass?”

He looked at me, looked at his lawn, and hollered back, “I’ll give you three dollars.”

Three dollars was a pretty good chunk of change. I jogged the mile back to my house to grab the mower, and just as I reached the driveway, I spied Mike Dietz in a nearby field, riding his two-stroke motorcycle. I waved him over, and after I explained my good luck, he agreed to help me by towing me and our lawn mower back up the road. I grabbed the mower out of the shed, used a jerry can to fill it with gas, and then pushed it down to the road. When I met Mike, I flipped the lawn mower around so its handle was facing up the road, and then I hopped on behind him, grabbed the mower, and told him to punch it.

Punching it meant going pretty slow up the road, it turned out, but it was still faster than pushing the mower. When we arrived, the man was nowhere to be seen, but I fired up the mower anyway and got to work. Nearly finished, I reached the back corner of the man’s grass, and I spied something that made me stop and stare: a kennel full of bounding, whining puppies. I dropped the mower, letting it turn off, and beelined for the kennel fence. The dogs were all the same kind
 
—floppy ears, long legs and tails, colored with large patches of white and candy-bar brown. They crowded the fence where I was standing, forcing their wet noses and long, rough tongues through the gaps toward me.

Suddenly I knew what I was earning money for. I raced back to the mower, finished my job, and then sprinted around the property until I found the owner, and before I could think better of it, I asked if I could buy one of his dogs. He looked at me like he was measuring something.

“Yep.”

“Okay
 
—lemme ask my mom!” My answer came out as a single word, shouted as I was already sprinting back down the gravel road. One mile later I raced to my front door, threw it open, and yelled, “Mom, Mom, can I have a puppy?”

She was in the kitchen. Her look said I wasn’t giving her enough
information, and when I stumbled through an explanation, she said, “If you promise to take care of it. You’ll have to feed it and give it water and do all the other stuff that comes along with having a puppy.”

“Promise promise promise!” I called as I bounced up and down. Mom gave me a smile that had a drop or two of sadness in it, and then she turned back to the dishes she was stacking in the cupboards. I waited half a beat to make sure there were no further conditions on my dog ownership, and then I spun and raced back out the front door, on the way collecting Jerry from the living room.

“Jer, you should see him,” I panted, as we jogged up the road together. “He’s just. So cute. And perfect.”

“Cool.”

“Maybe you. Can get. One too!”

We reached the man’s house, and I quickly led my brother around to the kennel. The man
 
—I still didn’t know his name
 
—was waiting for me there, leaning against a corner of the garage and chewing on something. When I raced up, he spit on the ground and then pointed to one of the dogs.

“This one should be a good hunter.” As he said this, he leaned over the top of the kennel fence and picked up one of the animals. “He goes hunting with his mama every chance he gets. He’s yours, no charge.”

With that pronouncement, the man placed a wriggling puppy in my waiting arms. My dog. I held him in the crook of my left arm, the fingers of my hand splayed out to cradle his front legs. With my right hand I stroked the top of his head, and it was the softest thing I’d ever touched.

That afternoon, Jerry helped me slap together a doghouse in the corner of the shed, and then I tossed some hay inside. We cut a hole through the wall and built a square chain-link enclosure outside with some fencing and pieces of lumber we found lying in a scrap pile.

“This is where you’re gonna live, Zeke,” I told my dog, and since that name sounded right, I kept on using it.

That first night Zeke whined and howled for what seemed like
hours. I lay awake in my room, terrified that Dad would hear him. I knew from experience that making my father angry in the middle of the night was about as bad as bad ideas came. Zeke was so small that a well-placed kick would seriously injure him
 
—or worse. But Dad seemed to be sleeping through the noise, or ignoring it, and at last I drifted off to sleep, soaking up the feeling of receiving something I hadn’t even realized I’d been longing for.

Zeke became the fourth kid in our family, and like the rest of us kids, he felt Dad’s wrath on more than one occasion. When I left for school, I’d make sure Zeke was in his kennel, and then I’d tell him to be a good dog while I was gone.

He didn’t always take my advice.

One morning, with nothing better to do, Zeke began to gnaw an opening between two boards of his doghouse. At first this project went entirely unnoticed. Day by day he shaved away little bits of wood, gradually loosening the nails and random screws that held the whole thing together. It took Zeke months of focused chewing, but eventually he created a hole large enough to stick his head through.

Now when Zeke began that project, he didn’t have an endgame in mind. Biting through the wood was just something to keep him busy. Fate was on his side, however, because the first time he crammed his head through that hole it had taken him months to create, he discovered something amazing: a giant rubber chew toy.

Dad owned an inflatable life raft
 
—a yellow, six-person affair he stowed on the ship whenever we were living on it. During the winter, however, he deflated it, rolled it up like a sleeping bag, and stored it in the shed, on top of Zeke’s doghouse. When Zeke poked his spotted head through the hole he had created in the roof of his doghouse, his eyes must have doubled in size. It was like doggy Christmas.

By morning the raft was in about seven thousand small pieces,
strewn all across the shed as if a small bomb had gone off inside the tightly rolled boat. I discovered this when I heard Dad screaming. I raced outside in time to see him stomping back toward the house.

“What in the holy hell, Mark? Do you know what that stupid dog of yours did? Do you? I should ram my shoe so far up his ass that his teeth shatter!”

I ran toward Dad, intending to throw my body between him and Zeke. He was a good dog
 
—so good that I guessed my life for his would be a fair trade. He probably had a brighter future than I did.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’ll pay for the raft, I promise! I’m sorry!”

I kept shouting my apologies again and again, straining to be heard over the top of Dad’s cursing. Dad was stomping around outside the shed rather than going for one of his guns or bladed weapons, so Zeke wasn’t in any immediate danger, but just in case, I stationed myself at the entrance to Zeke’s doghouse.

By this time Jerry, Sheri, and Mom were all standing outside. My brother and sister wisely kept their distance
 
—this was my fight with Dad, and Zeke was my dog. Mom, though, walked straight toward the shed. She stuck her head past me to survey the damage and then turned to face my father.

“It’s your own fault!” she yelled.

We froze. Even Dad.

“You were a fool to keep that raft anywhere near Mark’s dog
 
—what did you
think
was going to happen?” She snorted derisively and walked toward the house without looking back.

Dad stood there for a few seconds while we waited for him to explode . . . and then he walked away. Jerry raised his eyebrows at me as if to say,
Close one!
Then he and Sheri went back inside to get ready for school.

The only ones left were me and Zeke. I could hear him whining, so I went and sat beside him on the dirt. He laid his head across my lap, waiting for me to knuckle the spot right between his ears. After a few minutes
I told him I needed to clean up, and he seemed to understand. While I picked up the pieces of rubber and shoved them into a bucket I found, I thought about Mom. Sometimes she could do that: stop Dad’s anger in its tracks. The trouble was, it didn’t work every time and not as often as we needed or wanted. At least it was something. I guessed a desert had to take rain whenever it came, not complain when it didn’t.

It took me three buckets to get all the pieces. Dad’s raft was busted, like so many other things around our house. Like the carplane. Dad had raced it down a dead-end road, deep into a valley, and he couldn’t get it back up the hill without opening up the throttle. The engine had shaken so hard that the muffler ripped loose and slammed into the propeller, tearing off more than six inches of one of the blades. He’d limped the contraption home, parked it out back with the rest of his junk, and forgotten all about it. Why fix it when you could let it rust?

I hammered a few scraps of wood across the hole Zeke had made. It wouldn’t hold him for long, but now I knew what to look for. “And I’ll be looking,” I promised Zeke, because who knew what would happen the next time he angered Dad. “I gotta get to school,” I told him, holding his head between my hands, “so be good while I’m gone.”

Mom saved Zeke’s bacon another time too. One night while I was in bed, he managed to climb up and over the chain-link fence, no doubt egged on by a raccoon that had been visiting a mountain of garbage.

The next morning, while I was fixing breakfast, I heard Dad screaming at me to come outside. The minute I saw him, I knew something bad had happened. Zeke was out of his kennel and keeping his distance from Dad, and Dad looked as mad as a hornet.

“Look what your dog did!” he screamed at me. “Look at it! I’m going to kill him this time, I swear!”

I looked where Dad was pointing, but all I saw was a patch of sand just outside Zeke’s kennel and an upright fuel drum
 
—one of the
fifty-five-gallon kinds that was too heavy even for Zeke to knock over. What was I missing?

“Your f
 
—ing dog knocked open the valve on that drum last night
 
—there’s not a drop left!” He grabbed the fuel drum with both hands and rocked it back and forth. “Do you have any idea how g
 
—d
 
— expensive fuel is?”

My stomach dropped. I raced over and dropped to my knees. That close to the ground, I could smell the truth of Dad’s accusation. The sand stank of gasoline, and the valve
 
—which was a simple handle that flipped open and closed in a ninety-degree arc
 
—was open all the way. Positioned just where it might be if a dog landed beside it on the ground and then ran off, whacking the handle with one of his paws.

Dad was walking toward Zeke, hands swinging loose and ready at his side. Zeke, looking from Dad to me and back to Dad again, moved slowly backward, head and front legs low to the ground. I chased after Dad, begging him not to hurt my dog.

“I’ll pay for it, Dad! I promise I’ll find a way to pay for it!”