The Tank Man's Son (24 page)

With a grunt that became a screech, she tipped forward. Down went her front leg into the hidden hole, the rug wrapping itself around her ankle and disappearing, while her other leg splayed backward across the floor, straining her skirt’s stitching to its limits.

“Oh
no
!” Mom shrieked, and leaped to her feet. “I’m
so
sorry. There’s a hole there we haven’t fixed, and . . .”

Jerry ran to the woman’s side and tried to help Mom lift her out of the hole. After a bit of struggling, the woman slowly wobbled to her feet, still unsure of what exactly had happened to her. Her leg slipped out of the hole, but her shoe stayed folded up in the rug below, forcing Jerry to lie on his stomach and reach into the crawl space.

“I’m
so
sorry,” Mom repeated. “We all know the hole is there, so we just naturally avoid it. I’m so,
so
sorry.”

“Wow, I
wondered
what had happened. The floor just disappeared from under me!”

She straightened her blouse and skirt, then reached for the phone again.

We moved back to the couch. “Why didn’t you
say
something?” hissed Mom.

“I tried, but . . . ,” Jerry said, shrugging.

“And we all know it’s there, so . . . ,” Sheri added.

Mom sighed, then we all waited for the woman to finish her call. She
hung up and made her way back to the couch. “So, is there anything else you’d like to see?”

Mom could see the woman wanted to escape. “No, not now. But maybe . . . ?”

“Yes, here’s my card. Call me when you’re ready to place an order.”

She hastily gathered her samples and haphazardly placed them in the leather case.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said, standing. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. . . .”

“Bouman.”

“Good-bye now, Mrs. Bouman.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mom said, opening the front door. Mom followed her outside, apologizing the whole way. We stayed behind, staring down into the hole.

“Did you see how fast she dropped?” Jerry whispered, motioning with his hand. “Zooooom, down she went!”

We laughed until our stomachs hurt. I wished Dad had been there to see the whole thing. He would have loved it.

E
VER SINCE THE YEAR
we had spent an entire summer on the
Patrol
, the ship had become more Dad’s toy and less a family activity. He and his buddies still used it for diving, and the five of us made only occasional trips to the Grand River
 
—a weekend here and a weekend there. While driving back to Belmont after one such trip, I spotted a turtle on the highway up ahead. It was large enough for me to see from the backseat of our Ford, even driving sixty, and Dad saw it too. Dark and disc-shaped, the mud turtle was hauling its bulk across the two-lane highway. It was a kind I usually avoided in the waters of the Grand River. While my favorite paint turtles were gentle and safe, bigger species like the muds and snappers seemed to have an unpredictable dark side.

“Hey, Mark, want me to stop so you can grab that turtle?”

It took me too long to process what Dad had said, so unexpected was his consideration. We passed turtles on the road all the time, and Dad had never even commented on one, let alone offered to stop so I could
pick one up. He decided for me, slamming on the brakes and skidding the car to a stop on the shoulder in a cloud of dust and flying gravel. Recovered from my initial shock, and still in disbelief about my luck, I leaped out of the backseat and then raced along the edge of the road before swerving toward the yellow centerline. I scooped up the turtle with two hands and sprinted back to the waiting car. There was no way Dad could change his mind now.

My door was still open, and as I slid into my seat, I held the turtle in one hand and yanked the door closed with the other. Right away Dad pulled back onto the highway, having left the engine idling while I claimed my prize. Sheri was sitting beside me, and Jerry was on the other side of her, and both leaned over to inspect my find. It was a beauty. At least a foot across, its shell was a mix of flat, dark green
 
—like an underwater plant
 
—and lustrous brown. It opened and closed its mouth as we peered at it, giving the impression of asking what in the world had just happened to it.

Soon we were back at highway speed, and as our car hummed along, I stared at my new friend. Dad rarely allowed talking or singing or game playing in the car. Usually we all sat in silence, but if he was in a particularly bad mood, and one of us made a noise, Dad would nearly drive off the road while wildly trying to smack us from the front seat. Having a large turtle in the backseat, however, presented a whole new set of entertainment possibilities.

My first thought was to scare my sister. Holding my new pet in both hands, I eased it upward, inching it closer and closer to my sister’s face. At first she didn’t notice but kept on staring straight ahead, moving her lips slightly to some internal dialogue or song. When the turtle was less than a foot from her face, staring right at her and still opening and closing its mouth, Sheri reentered reality with an audible scream and a full-body spasm. Her legs leaped off the floor, her elbows dug into Jerry and me, and her head jerked back, away from the turtle.

The sound of breaking glass was unmistakable, even over the noise of driving with all the windows down. There was only one thing it could
be: the antique lamp Mom had found at an estate sale on our way to the
Patrol
several days earlier. Dad had balanced it on the shelf beneath the rear window and told us not to touch it. Sheri’s head had done far more than touch it: she’d knocked the lamp backward so hard that its leaded-glass shade had shattered against the rear window.

Without taking his left hand from the steering wheel, Dad spun around and slapped Sheri hard, right across her face. “I told you to be careful!” he screamed.

Gasping, she yelled back, “But Mark scared me with the turtle!”

Dad put his right hand back on the wheel. I could see the muscles in his shoulders knotting, flexing.

“Mark,” he commanded, “you throw that thing out the window!”

“But Dad, it’s
 
—”

“Do it now!”

The entire car was frozen. In the front seat, Dad white-knuckled the wheel and Mom stared straight ahead. In the backseat, Jerry gaped at me, bug-eyed, while Sheri’s face was a red-welted mask of confusion and pain. I was frozen too, still holding the turtle suspended, its small mouth open. The rush of hot highway wind was the only noise.

Then the turtle peed, its warm urine running down my arm and staining my shirt and pants.

Dad broke the silence. “What are you waiting for?” he screamed. “Throw that f
 
—ing turtle out the window!”

So I did.

With one reflexive motion, I tossed the turtle to my left like water from a bucket. When it hit the slipstream it disappeared, instantly, spinning away into oblivion.

Dad pushed the car up to fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five. The rest of us sat in stunned silence, pinned to our seats. I pictured the pavement behind us, unwinding like the wake of a ship. I thought of the turtle in midair, windmilling his legs in slow motion, and of how it had no idea, as it spun toward the road, what was waiting for it.

O
NE NIGHT
I
WAS
heating some water on our gas stove. After holding the lit match to the burner, I blew it out and flicked it into the garbage pail. Dad had been sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book, but he was in my face in an instant.

“What the f
 
— was that? Do you have any idea what you just did?”

My shocked stare was answer enough.

“You just tried to burn down the house, you imbecile!” He reached into the garbage and pulled out the spent match. Holding it between two fingers, he waved it in front of my face. “This match was hot when you threw it in there, and a hot match still burns!”

Before I could process what he told me, he flicked the first match back into the garbage and grabbed a new match. Holding it in his right hand, he lit it and then grabbed my wrist with his left hand. Then he blew out the lit match and shoved its smoldering tip into the palm of my hand.

“How does
that
feel?”

“Ow!
Ow
!
” I tried to jerk away, but Dad held on tightly.

“Did that burn you?” he asked, almost amused.

“Yes, yes,” I whimpered.

“Then why the f
 
— did you drop it in the trash? So you could burn down the house? What an idiot. When are you going to be more careful? At least you learned never to do that again.”

He released my wrist, and I snatched my burned hand back. The match was still resting in my palm, and I stepped to the sink and ran both my hand and the match under cold water. Dad, meanwhile, had sat down at the table. I tossed the wet match into the trash, but Dad didn’t even look up.

That was the kind of lesson Dad liked to teach. Practical, he said, and something we wouldn’t soon forget.

I was learning something different, though: that I could never trust my father. I took that lesson to heart and avoided him every chance I got. He was the source of our pain at home, so less Dad meant less pain. I wasn’t bright when it came to math, but even I could see the end of that equation. If less Dad meant less pain, then no Dad would mean no pain.

But could I actually kill him?

I knew how to use a gun well enough, and my shotgun could certainly kill a man. That wasn’t in doubt.

What I doubted was my courage. Perhaps if he was sleeping, or facing the other way. But what if he woke up, or turned around, and I had to look into his eyes as I pulled the trigger? Then there was the possibility of missing. If Dad was alive after the first shot, I knew I wouldn’t get a second. He would certainly murder me.

And what if I succeeded? Say I pulled the trigger: who would I become? I’d no longer be the Tank Man’s son. Instead, I’d be the kid who killed his father. The police would probably understand my plight, and perhaps even look the other way. But even with my poor record of church attendance, I was convinced that God would still hold me accountable. And if God was anything like Dad, I wouldn’t get off easy.

I spent every minute I could with Zeke. Sometimes I was too tired or too depressed to hunt, and he seemed to understand. We’d walk together until we found a patch of grass or a fallen log, and then I’d sit and pull him into my arms and cry. During the loneliest years of my life, my dog was my companion and friend.

But even Zeke couldn’t shield me from a growing awareness of my near-total isolation from other people and of the constant agony of living. I felt as if darkness were clinging to me, and everything I saw was shadowed. Pain seemed to take on an almost physical form.

Pain knew all my habits, all my haunts, and there was no place I could go where he wouldn’t find me. I spent most days apart from Zeke, stuck at school, but Pain followed me everywhere. I had tried for years to run from him, but he always found me. Pain covered me like a blanket, there for me after the beatings when I cried myself to sleep. He was waiting for me at school each day
 
—in the locker room, in the lunchroom, in my classrooms
 
—reminding me that he would never leave me. Pain greeted me when I walked the halls, when no one else would even acknowledge me.

Pain shared my silent world. He was a constant presence looking over my shoulder. Whenever my spirit groaned from not being free, he reminded me that being utterly alone would be even worse. His friendship deadened my emotions. Life began to pass at half speed. Living each day was like shouldering a heavy weight, but what choice did I have? Life was leaden, but at least it was predictable. Lift, suffer, sleep. Repeat.

Pain was rough around the edges
 
—not the sort of friend to show off
 
—and he didn’t want to share me with others. It was easier to bend to his will. To stare at the ground instead of other people’s eyes. Life became a series of wanderings through desolate places, and he went with me. I hated him, yet it seemed he was the only one who refused to leave my
side. He would be my constant companion. There was nothing I could do to change that fact.

I felt altogether alone
 
—so alone that I almost welcomed Pain’s company.

Another afternoon, and more hours spent exploring with Zeke
 
—but this time something new happened.

As Zeke ran ahead of me, I’d been asking myself what would happen when I became a man. Before Dad was twenty-one, he was already married. He already had two kids. He had already been kicked out of the Navy. I wondered if I’d even make it to twenty-one.

My only goal in life was survival. I watched other kids in school gain confidence and chase dreams and learn to do things that were unavailable to me. The world was moving forward, and I was falling behind. From what I could tell, life happened fast once you grew up. And life could get bad fast, too, and then keep getting worse.
What will I be doing in ten years?
I wondered.

From out of nowhere, a sentence rose into my head, fully formed:
You’ll be in Montana, in the military.

The voice was quiet and clear, and it surprised me
 
—mostly because I knew it wasn’t my idea. I knew Montana was just a big wilderness of high mountains and old timber
 
—how many times had I fantasized about running away there?
 
—but why in the world would I move there as an adult? Was there even any military in Montana? And what did it mean that I was hearing voices?

Here came the questions again. That still, small voice had seemed like something helpful for a second, like a real answer, until the thought of it faded into the dusk. It was just me and Zeke, like always
 
—and Pain, always Pain
 
—and the future was still far enough away that I tried to put it out of mind. However scary it was to imagine life as an adult, the terror of being a kid had a way of demanding my focus.

The next day after school, I sprang Zeke from his kennel, grabbed my shotgun and a few shells, and headed out. I paused behind the house to load my gun, even though I was planning on just roaming that day, not hunting. I called my dog over and showed him the gun, and he instantly went on alert, ears up and tail straight back. I waggled my eyebrows at him. “Want to go hunting, boy?” I swung the gun slowly back and forth across the tree line, pretending to be looking for animals. Zeke’s head followed the barrels exactly. “Look
 
—there!” I joked with Zeke. “There goes a rabbit!” With that I swept the gun quickly to my right where the imaginary target was, touching the trigger and saying “Boom!”

Unfortunately, when I said “Boom,” so did my shotgun.

I had forgotten to set the safety after loading my gun, and I’d just discharged a real shell at a pretend rabbit. Worse, my pretend rabbit had been hopping through the weeds in the direction of a mahogany motorboat sitting on a trailer in the yard. Dad had been restoring it for weeks.

It took me longer than it should have to cross the thirty yards to the boat, partly because I was praying so hard
 
—
Please, God, don’t let me have hit the boat, don’t let me have hit the boat
 
—and partly because I was squinting my eyes. Through my narrowed lids the boat was a dark, flickering blur, still in a state of limbo between tenderly restored and totally ruined. When I could reach out and touch the boat, I could no longer put off the inevitable, and I opened my eyes all the way. To my horror, the boat had taken a direct hit. My gun had been loaded with pellets, and in thirty yards the hundreds of them had expanded to a cloud. It didn’t look like a single pellet had missed the boat.

My brain shut off. There was no way I could process the extent of my screwup. I hyperventilated, shotgun drooping from my right hand, left palm spread on the boat’s chewed-up side, head tipped forward to lean against the wood.

Then a single emotion powered me back up, jump-starting my brain.
Panic. What in the world was I going to do? Maybe Dad wouldn’t notice. I stepped back a few paces. It was even more obvious. The side of the boat looked like a giant had sprinkled black pepper on it. Could I run away? It was already too late
 
—Dad would be home in less than an hour, and that wasn’t enough of a head start. But maybe that was enough time to repair the damage! I safetied my gun, set it down, and whipped out my pocketknife. Choosing the thinnest blade, I inserted the tip beneath a pellet and tried to pry it out. It was wedged in tight, though, and I had to dig around it to loosen the wood’s grip. Finally the pellet popped free and I pulled the knife away. Instead of a tiny hole with a speck of metal at its center, now I was looking at a larger hole with rough edges, and the lighter colored wood beneath the exterior varnish shone like a beacon.

There would be no covering up what I’d done. I was dead. Not get-in-real-bad-trouble dead, but dead dead. Dad was going to murder me.

My body began to shake. Zeke hopped around my legs, whining and throwing an occasional yelp my way. My panic folded in on itself and became a hard knot of terror that hung in my gut. Only a few weeks before, Dad had beaten me so bad that I had trouble sitting down even three days later, all because I’d left a half-eaten pot of oatmeal congealing on the stove. I had no illusions about how shooting his boat compared to that. I’d be killed in cold blood. I became physically sick to my stomach.
My life is over.

Then a sudden wave of calm washed over me. Since I had less than an hour left to live, I might as well go out doing what I loved. Yes: I would go for a final hunt with Zeke. It was my dying wish. I picked up my gun, cleaned it off, and walked down the hill toward the trees.

Zeke was out ahead in an instant, scouting for scents. He had already put our strange detour to Dad’s boat out of his mind. When Zeke told me he’d found a rabbit, I thought about where the rabbit was probably hiding
 
—in that shallow gully that ran crossways past the top of the pond
 
—and how I might be able to get around the other side and be ready when he made a break for safety. I thought about which way
the wind was blowing, about how many shells I had in my pocket, and about what it meant that Zeke’s barking was getting louder.