The Tank Man's Son (25 page)

I lost myself in the hunt, or perhaps the thrill of the hunt swallowed me, but the events of that day were erased, like a miracle, from my mind. As Zeke and I disappeared into the wild, all thoughts of Dad’s boat disappeared as well.

A few days later I was in the shed, looking for some twine, when Dad called me from his workbench.

“Mark, come here for a minute.” His tone told me something was wrong, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of what. I’d kept a clean slate so far that day
 
—or at least I thought I had.

Dad looked at me, still holding on to the part he was cleaning. I approached him but kept myself out of his reach, all the while scouring my brain for what I might have done wrong. Then he simply asked, “What did I ever do to you that would make you so mad that you’d shoot my boat?”

The boat!
The memory came crashing back like an explosion. The shotgun, my final hunt before Dad was due to murder me, and then the strange oblivion that followed. I literally hadn’t thought about it since it had happened. But Dad knew. I’d managed to live a few extra days, somehow, but
now
I was going to die.

“Dad, it was an accident!” I blurted, sure I had just spoken my last words.

“Okay, son. That’s all I wanted to know.” Dad turned back to his bench and continued working in silence.

I stood rooted to the floor, mouth hanging open. I watched Dad’s shoulders rise and fall, saw his watch glint as he reached for a tool and brought it back into the circle of his work lamp. There was a round window in the shed, made from the lens of a searchlight, and for some reason, the light streaming through made me think of a bee’s eye.

In a daze I walked out the door. Outside the sun was shining like I’d never seen it shine. The sky was blue all the way to forever. I knew in my gut that I’d just come out the back side of a miracle. It was a small one, maybe, compared to what other people needed, but that day it meant life to me.

“T
HE
P
ATROL
’
S GOTTA GO,”
Dad told us at supper. As if any of us cared. His announcement simply created a blanket of silence that covered the table.

He went on and on about it. Fuel costs were rising, dock space was getting more expensive, and ship maintenance was becoming a nightmare. The hull was suffering from dry rot, which meant that the bilge pump was under constant strain as new leaks sprang. When the ship was docked, the pump could keep up, but the
Patrol
could no longer sail. Even if Dad could afford to put the ship in dry dock and overhaul the hull
 
—which he couldn’t
 
—he was probably fighting a losing battle. And if the ship sank at its mooring, the Department of Natural Resources would stick Dad with a huge fine.

That night we heard the sound of bedsheets ripping and tearing. “The DNR is gonna ride me like a cowboy!” Dad shouted in his sleep, waking all of us up. “She’s sinking, she’s sinking
 
—I’ve gotta plug the hole with this sheet!”

By the time Mom woke him up, the bedding was in tatters and Dad was drenched with sweat. We all went back to sleep, and over the following weeks, Dad went to work on the ship, pulling everything off that was worth more than fifty cents, from the brass compass in the pilothouse down to the life jackets in the stern chain locker. Then he hired a demolition crane to knock down the superstructure and pull it off the ship, leaving the
Patrol
as nothing more than an empty, leaking hull. Dad then ordered two dozen tons of sand and spread it throughout the hull.

Then came the wait. Sinking a ship in Lake Michigan was illegal seven ways to Sunday. It wasn’t that Dad
wouldn’t
do something so illegal
 
—just that he’d be plenty careful about how he did it. If he had been worried about the DNR’s reaction to the
Patrol
sinking at the dock, he was terrified of them finding out he’d scuttled his ship in deep water. That was the sort of stunt that went far beyond a hefty fine and a pile of paperwork. He’d be looking at jail time.

The perfect opportunity arrived when a cold front pushed down from Canada, bringing with it thick sheets of rain and miserable cold. Visibility on the Lake was under twenty-five yards, and the water was heaving. No sane person would be out on a boat unless his livelihood depended on it.

Dad convinced one of his buddies who owned a big boat to motor to the dock in the Grand Haven harbor, and together they attached lines to the
Patro
l
’s deck. There was a harbor watchman on duty that night, but a quick scouting trip convinced Dad that he would be staying inside his shack for the rest of the night, trying to keep warm and dry.

Four hours later they were five miles out into the Lake. Five hundred feet of water would be plenty to hide the
Patrol
from prying eyes. With his friend’s boat idling nearby, Dad detached the lines. Then he climbed down to the first level, scooting around the piles of sand, and found the back steering gear by headlamp. The
Patrol
would sink on its own, given enough time, but time was one thing Dad couldn’t afford. He needed to ensure no one could see his boat, because no one would fail
to recognize it
 
—what he needed was for it to sink like a stone. So first he opened the ship’s seacocks, a series of valves that formerly connected the engine’s cooling system to the water. As more water poured into the hull, Dad picked up a tool he’d stashed when he first decided to scrap the ship: a heavy, four-foot crowbar. He knew which areas of the hull were weakest from dry rot, and he intended to help things along with a few well-placed holes.

He nearly lost the crowbar on his first attempt, so decayed was the hull. The metal punched through the wood like a needle through skin, and it was all Dad could do to keep it from continuing out the hole and into the Lake. A moment later Dad struggled to keep his footing as a great geyser of water shot into the boat. Dad could see the edges of the hole widening as the force of the water tore off bits of rotten wood. He hurried to the next few sections of weak hull and punched additional holes in them, finding the steep stairway again as water swirled around his knees. Moments later he emerged on deck and hollered for his friend to pick him up.

Dad wrapped himself in a wool army blanket, and they spent the next hour watching as the
Patrol
sank lower and lower in the water. “Fifteen minutes and she’ll be gone,” said Dad’s friend. Dad grunted and tried to stay warm.

Except that fifteen minutes later, just as the waterline reached the deck, the
Patrol
stopped sinking. No more water could flow into it since it was already resting level with the top of the Lake. The ship was staying afloat, barely, because of its wood hull and decks. It would get waterlogged eventually, and the ship would sink, but Dad needed it to sink right then, not later. His worst fear until that moment had been the DNR discovering he’d sunk the ship, but now he feared the DNR discovering he had
almost
sunk the ship, creating a partially submerged navigation hazard. He would be able to wallpaper the living room with the tickets he’d get for pulling a stunt like that, right after he got out of jail.

Fifteen minutes became an hour. The
Patrol
was still stubbornly at the surface, clinging to its last bit of buoyancy as if it were treading water.

Dad couldn’t wait any longer. “Screw it
 
—let’s ram her.”

His buddy maneuvered the boat into position perpendicular to the keel of the
Patrol
. “Hit it,” Dad said, and the moment the bow of the other boat edged up onto the hull, the
Patrol
rolled over and slipped below the surface.

They idled in the area for the next half hour, making sure the sunken ship didn’t resurface. A few boards and other bits of flotsam bobbed to the surface, but nothing of any real size. Then there was nothing for it but to motor back to the Grand Haven harbor. If the harbor watch saw the boat tie off at the dock, he must have wondered why two men had been out on the Lake on such a miserable night and why one of them was wrapped in an army blanket. It might also have occurred to him to wonder where the
Patrol
was. But the harbor watch remained safely inside all night, and Dad’s operation went off without a hitch.

Still, he was shaken and sad. We stayed out of his way even more than usual. He had loved being the captain of that boat
 
—and what could replace it? Nothing. It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

In the following weeks, Dad heard through the grapevine that he was a prime suspect in the
Patro
l
’s disappearance. “The DNR ain’t the sharpest tools in the shed,” Dad proclaimed. “They got nothing on me.”

He was right, though. The consequences of his actions that night never caught up with him.

T
HERE WERE OTHER CONSEQUENCES
he couldn’t outrun, however.

One morning Mom woke up and realized she was done. Done with absolutely everything. Done living in a tiny shack that had a sunken tub. Done working overtime to pay for Dad’s toys. Done driving her car over crushed battery cases. Done forcing herself to stay in another room while Dad beat her kids. And most of all, done with Dad
 
—and she told him so.

We learned this later that afternoon. Dad shouted at us to line up in the living room. We stood side by side, a small platoon of soldiers obeying the orders of our drill sergeant.

“Your mother and I,” he said, pacing in front of us, “are getting a divorce.” He stopped suddenly and studied our faces, starting with Sheri and ending with me. He was hoping to get a reaction out of one of us that would embarrass Mom into changing her mind. But he’d taught us all too well to never show our emotions. If Dad knew we were happy
about something, he’d take it from us. If Dad knew we were afraid of something, he’d use it against us.

And so we were stoic, save for the one emotion it was allowable to express. It began on the outside of the eye, which tightened ever so slightly. It continued in the lower lip, which pushed out and downward. It flowed through a neck too weak to support the head, which then tipped forward. And it finished in shoulders that curled like they were cringing. The emotion was defeat, and all of us spoke it fluently.

Jerry, with the gangly six-foot-four body of a man, spoke it, from his size 14 feet all the way up to his shock of black hair.

Sheri, looking more like Mom all the time, spoke it.

And I’d known how to speak it for what felt like forever.

We were defeated, so defeat was the only thing Dad found as he examined us. When Dad was studying Sheri, I stole a glance at my brother, and he looked exactly as I did. Crushed by our father.

“Well,” Dad said, as if that explained everything.

He walked outside. Mom and Sheri left next, headed toward their rooms. I looked at Jerry. He was still wearing his mask. But he whispered to me, looking at the floor, the same words I had been ready to whisper to him.

“I’m glad we’re finally going to get rid of Dad.”

O
N
M
OM’S ADVICE,
the lawyer served Dad the divorce papers while he was at work.

He quit coming home and sold the tank for a song. Leaving behind piles of broken junk stacked in the shed and scattered willy-nilly across the gun range and the sand, he took his collection of guns and books and records and moved into his mother’s basement, not yet twenty years after he had moved out.

That left four of us in our house
 
—five if you counted Zeke
 
—and a load of fearful questions. What if Mom changed her mind? What if Dad did something crazy? He was capable of anything, and we all knew it.

None of us dared to speak a single word about what might happen. It was as if the divorce were a house of cards that could tumble down at any moment.

So we went to school. We did chores. We kept our heads down. And the three of us kids, despite thoughts and hopes that must have been
nearly identical, lived like silent strangers under a single roof. We were holding our breath, collectively, waiting for the surprise ending where Dad came tearing back through the front door.

It never happened. Four months later, Mom told us at dinner that the divorce was final.

“So will we have to see Dad anymore?” Sheri asked right away.

“It’s up to you,” Mom answered. “I’m getting the house and five acres, and I’ll sell it for whatever I can get. Your father is getting the other six acres. We won’t stay here a moment longer than we need to.”

Jerry had recently left for college, and my sister and I silently adjusted to the news that Dad would never come back home. Our home wouldn’t even
be
our home for much longer. It was a lot to take in. I set the few remaining dishes in the sink, careful as ever to avoid touching the steel rim. Sometime way back, Dad had spliced some wires together during a project, and an exposed connection was touching a metal water pipe. That meant a stiff shock whenever one of us stood in the wrong spot and touched the sink. It was one of those things that had always seemed normal, like a father who drove a tank, but the idea of moving made me wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else.

In the following weeks, Mom sold her share of the land and the house for $22,000, but the buyers put a condition on the sale: the valley of trash needed to be covered. They had found someone to haul away the junk, but the festering pile of waste
 
—now approaching the size of a large pond
 
—was going to get them in trouble with the county.

Jerry, home to help with the move, shoveled beside me at the garbage pile, scattering a thousand shovelfuls of dirt across almost two decades of moldy, half-melted Bouman trash.

“Just like old times,” I said.

“Except no Ike to charge us when we’re finished.”

Mom bought a small home in Grand Rapids. The day the moving
truck arrived, and while the others loaded boxes and dragged out the few pieces of salvageable furniture, I slipped away with Zeke. I looked back at the house and the hills surrounding it. Everything was quiet. No roar of gunfire. No growl of a tank. Dad had left the washing machine behind, still sitting on what was once the gun range, its rusted corpse riddled with what must have been ten thousand bullet holes. A few small saplings were beginning to spring up next to the crushed trees, and some of the ruts made by the tank treads were beginning to grow weeds. The door to the shed stood open, and inside I glimpsed a scattering of sand, the only remaining testament to the tsunami that had filled it.

I was finally leaving. Leaving the house and leaving Dad. But if I’d hoped so long for that to happen, why did part of me feel sad?

Kneeling beside my dog, I knuckled his head. A new house, a new school, a life without my brother and my father. At least I was taking Zeke with me, the only deep-down good thing I’d ever known.