The Tank Man's Son (3 page)

“Dad, is our new house ready yet?”

I was trying to keep still so as not to bother Dad while he was working, but the sand and burs in my shoes made me shift from foot to foot.
Our new house wouldn’t have sand in it like the trailer did, and now that the construction was almost done, I was starting to think about it more and more. I’d never lived in a house, but I could imagine what it would be like to live somewhere without mold growing on the walls, somewhere with a room big enough that I wouldn’t bump into my family whenever I moved. I could also imagine my own bed. Jerry and Sheri and I were all crammed onto a single mattress, and between Jerry elbowing and kicking me and Sheri wetting the sheets, there weren’t many nights when I got enough sleep.

“About a week,” Dad answered.

Dressed as always in black leather shoes, white socks, khaki pants, and an untucked white shirt, he was working in front of a cinder block wall, just below one of the square window openings. I’d watched him use a trowel to smear wet cement in a line around the edge of the opening, and now he was holding a pane of glass in a thin frame. He lined up the glass with the opening and then pressed it against the wet cement, which oozed out around the edges like jelly from between two slices of Wonder Bread.

“There’s another one done. I gotta finish a few things before we can move.”

Dad turned to look at me. He seemed like a giant, building a house by hand and carrying windows as if they were one of our plastic dinner plates. Then he turned back to his work, lowering himself to one knee and pulling off his elastic silver watch with a single motion and slotting it in his pocket. His hands worked down in the cement bucket, kneading, then returned to the water bucket. When he drew them out, I watched water run down through the black hair on his powerful forearms. His wrists and hands were huge. Dirt and grime marked the creases of his fingers and the lines of his hands, and the edges of his fingernails were wide, black arcs.

More cement, another window, and no further conversation. I thought about the room behind the window Dad had just finished. It would be dry and warm and full of space. Dad continued to work in
silence, and I watched. As he worked, his arms swung heavy and slow, slightly away from his body, as if they were too muscled to swing where everyone else’s did. He walked differently than others did too
 
—he’d pick a point ahead of him and march toward it without slowing. Tagging along in his wake at a store or a gun shop or a swap meet, I had watched people step aside for him, parting like grass in a strong wind. When I walked behind him, when I watched him work, his smell was a mixture of machine oil, sour sweat, and sunshine.

The gusting breezes ruffled Dad’s hair, up and down and up again, like a bird’s wing. When Mom called from the trailer behind us, it didn’t seem like Dad heard. He switched on the outside light he had recently wired up and continued to work. I waited a minute longer, feeling the wind pick up speed. I could hear grains of sand spattering against the wall of the house and on the new windows. Then I turned my back on the house and walked home to the trailer.

When Dad came back from building, he yelled at Mom. “Potatoes? Again? Why can’t you cook some real food?”

“Because you spent your paycheck on movies in town!” she yelled back.

Jerry and I were sitting on our bed, playing army men in the mountains and valleys of the blanket, and Sheri was lying beside us, sucking her thumb. I thought about how cool it would be to go to a war movie in town with Dad, but he always went to movies alone. When Mom stuck her head in and told us to get our jackets on, we knew all of us would be eating dinner at Grandma Jean’s. Dad’s mom had pointy eyeglasses and a house full of curtains and carpet. On the drive over, we rode in silence, and I saw lightning flash in the distance.

By the time dinner was over, rain was beating down on Grandma’s roof so loudly that we had trouble hearing one another talk. By the time Dad had polished off the apple pie and decided it was time to brave the storm,
rain was pelting sideways against the windows. Our car swerved and shook as we drove back to the trailer.

We turned off the gravel road. “I hope you can make it up,” Mom said.

Deep ruts cut back and forth across the sand driveway as if a giant crayon had scribbled them. The torrential rain had gouged them even deeper, and the car lurched back and forth as Dad tried to steer around the worst of them. The headlights, when they were pointed at the ground, showed us a driveway that looked more like a muddy river than a road. An occasional flash of lightning revealed oaks waving and bending all around us. One of Mom’s hands was pressed to the ceiling, and in the backseat we bounced crazily into one another. It might have been fun if it hadn’t been so frightening.

There was a sudden pitch forward and the engine died, and in the second or two of relative silence that followed, I could hear gasoline sloshing in the tank. Dad opened the door and stuck a leg out, announcing as he did that we’d just walk the rest of the way and get the car out in the morning. But his instructions were interrupted by Mom’s near-hysterical voice.

“Wait, the light! Why can’t we see the light up at the house yet?”

As rain poured in the open door, Dad squinted through the windshield into the darkness. The car headlights were aimed too low to help. The only thing we could see ahead of us, up the driveway, were raindrops and blackness. Dad turned to face Mom. “Don’t worry. The house is still there.”

Dad stepped out into the night, leaving the driver’s door open. He trudged up the driveway, spanning the ruts without breaking stride. Lit by the headlights, he turned back to the car, cupped one hand around his mouth and shouted, “The power is probably out! Stay here while I get a flashlight!” Then he disappeared into the storm, and we were alone in the car. Mom’s breath came faster and faster.

Several minutes later Dad’s white shirt floated down toward us out of the darkness. He climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
Raindrops ran out of his hair and down the back of his neck. He put both hands on the steering wheel.

“We’re going back to Grandma’s,” he announced.

He cranked the engine once, twice, and when it caught the third time, he yanked the gearshift into reverse and floored it. There was a moment when nothing happened, and then the wheels found just enough traction to propel us backward down the hill. Dad spun the wheel hard right, and Jerry, Sheri, and I were smashed into one another in a pile against the door. Then we were bouncing down the driveway, sliding out onto the road, accelerating.

Mom stared at Dad. In a voice barely loud enough to hear, Dad answered her silent question. “It’s gone.”

Mom began to cry into her hands. I grabbed the back of the front seat and levered myself to my feet, ready to shout one of the dozen questions I’d just thought of. Jerry did the same. Dad killed our questions before they could begin with a single gesture, his right hand coming up into a fist below the rearview mirror. We plopped down and closed our mouths.

We drove back to Grandma Jean’s through the black night. The drone of the car was interrupted only by Mom’s sobs in the front seat. When Grandma opened the door, wearing her nightgown and holding a flashlight, she didn’t seem surprised to see us.

The next morning, Grandma’s voice woke us, calling us to the kitchen for oatmeal.

“Where’s Mom?” Jerry asked.

“She and your father went to look at the house,” Grandma answered, setting three steaming bowls in front of us and handing us silver spoons.

“But is Mom okay?” Sheri worried.

“She’ll be fine,” Grandma answered. “And you’ll be fine if I get you some milk, hmm?” She poured it from a tall porcelain pitcher that matched our bowls.

Jerry lifted his bowl slightly off the table, examining the delicate designs traced around its rim. “Where’d you get these, anyway?”

“From England,” Grandma replied. “Aren’t they nice?”

“They look like they could break.”

“Yes, they could,” she agreed. “So we’ll be careful, won’t we?”

We nodded, Grandma nodded, and we ate the rest of our oatmeal in silence. It wasn’t until lunchtime that Mom returned. Her face was still puffy and streaked with red. Sheri ran to her.

“Mom, are we going home now?”

“Yes, we’re going back. The trailer is okay.”

Jerry frowned. “The trailer! But what about the house?”

“It will . . .” Mom tried to answer, but stopped speaking until she could battle back a fresh round of sobs. Eventually she was able to finish. “It will be a while before we can move into the house, kids. There was a tornado.”

Grandma walked us to the front door, and while we sat to tug on our shoes, she pressed a wad of money into Mom’s hand.

“It’ll be okay,” she offered.

Mom nodded, but didn’t speak. Grandma watched from the front door as we climbed back into the car and pulled away.

Back at home, we managed to inch our way up the driveway. There was the trailer, right where it always was, looking no worse than it always did. And there, at the top of the hill, perched jumbled piles of cinder blocks, topped with splintered wood. The walls had all been blown out, as if scattered like one of the sand castles Jerry and I liked to build and then destroy. The roof was lying in the valley behind the house.

Dad was still too stunned to say much. He kept walking around the pile of rubble, stopping now and then to touch a cinder block or a length of pipe.

“Mostly intact,” he said more than once. “Mostly intact.”

We kept living in our trailer. Dad had a deep well drilled near the top of the hill. And three months later, Dad announced that he was finished rebuilding the house and we could move in. The trailer stayed where it was. Dad tried to get rid of it, but no one would take it, even for free.

I
N ONE WAY,
moving into our new home drew a sharp line
 
—on one side were our cramped, primitive trailer days, while on the other stretched a future filled with luxuries like our own beds, running water, and a living room where we could lie on the floor and play games of Monopoly by the woodstove. In other ways, however, life went on much the same as always. A different dinner table, maybe, but the same chronic shortage of food
 
—and the same wandering days filled with exploration and battles and boredom and sand.

When Jerry started school, I didn’t think much of it. While he was gone, I played by myself
 
—except when Mom forced me to play with my sister
 
—but since I slept late and the bus brought him back early, my routine remained much the same.

I had a vague sense of the year passing by and summer arriving
 
—then Jerry and I
both
slept in
 
—and suddenly it was time for me to start school as well. From what Jerry had told me, school wasn’t anything
much: just somewhere you had to go, and when the bell rang, you had to come back home again. Lunchtime sounded like one of the only bright spots. You could get a hot meal with fish sticks and Jell-O in a little cup and mashed potatoes that they slopped onto your tray with an ice cream scoop
 
—for free. Recess didn’t sound bad either, since you could play on a field of grass so big that it took a whole minute to run across it, with not a sandbur to be found.

Our refrigerator at home never had more than a few things in it: milk, a tub of leftovers from the night before
 
—nearly always potatoes and some dry, flavorless meat
 
—maybe some eggs, and a stick or two of butter. When Mom wanted to make us a treat, she’d use a boxed mix to bake a cake in a low, wide pan. She’d slide it, unfrosted, onto the bottom shelf of the fridge, and we’d use forks to scoop out however much we wanted to eat. I couldn’t wait to try the cafeteria Jell-O.

On that first day, Dad didn’t send me down the driveway to wait for the bus with Jerry. Instead, after I dressed in the same thing I always wore
 
—brown corduroys, brown leather lace-up shoes, and a dirty T-shirt
 
—I climbed into Dad’s pickup truck. When we arrived at school, Dad led the way to my classroom, never turning to see if I was following. He walked directly to the front and interrupted the teacher, who was talking with another parent.

“If you have any problems with him, let me know. I’ll take care of him when he gets home.”

The teacher stammered that nothing like that would be necessary.

“Well, if you need to slap him upside the head, that’ll be fine too. You won’t hear any complaining from me.”

The teacher looked past Dad and found me. Then a quick glance back to my dad. “No, no, that won’t be needed, Mr. Bouman,” she managed. “Ah, thank you anyway, but . . .”

Dad, without saying good-bye, was already out the door, forcing the incoming kids to step aside. I found my desk and sat down with
my arms crossed. Then I found the wall clock and tried to count the minutes until lunch.

Despite starting school, though, the eleven acres of sand on Blakely Drive remained my world. Apart from school, we rarely left home, and if I wasn’t doing a chore, and if there wasn’t a blizzard or an ice storm, I spent almost all my time outside, usually with Jerry and sometimes with Sheri tagging along. Mom had a stock response to our complaints of boredom
 
—complaints that only increased as we grew older and the shine of living alone in the boonies faded.

“Go outside and
play
,” she’d always say, looking up from her laundry or her pressure cooker or her dustpan. “And take your sister with you!”

Jerry and I would slouch out the door, and nearly every time Sheri would ambush us.

“Where ya going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Well, can I come?”

“We’re just gonna walk around.”

“But I wanna come too!”

Jerry and I would stand there, hoping she’d disappear. It wasn’t that we didn’t like our kid sister
 
—it was that she ruined our fun just by tagging along.

“You know,” I’d say, “we aren’t even
going
anywhere.”

“Yes you are! You already said so!”

“Fine.
Fine
. We’re going to walk up that hill, through those thick, scratchy bushes.”

We’d set off at a fast walk, and Sheri would have to pump her shorter legs to keep up. It didn’t take long for the whining to start.

“Wait!” we’d hear from behind us. “
Wait
!
”

“We’re going exploring, Sheri, and if you want to explore, you have to keep up!”

“But where? I’ll meet you!”

“We don’t
know
where
 
—we’re exploring! Come on!”

“Forget it!” she’d yell and tromp back toward the house. Jerry and I would shrug, watch her go, and return to our exploration.

It didn’t always happen like that, of course. Sometimes she managed to keep up with us for hours. She was a tough little kid, and she knew better than to try for sympathy from Jerry or me when she acquired a new scrape or bruise. Other times we managed to leave her at home by just sitting around outside until she became so bored that she wandered back inside, at which point we’d race into the woods without her. If she suggested a game, we’d ignore her, even if it was what we already wanted to play, like hide-and-seek. And when Jerry or I suggested a game, we tried to pick one she wouldn’t want to play, like exploring or staging yet another skirmish in the sand with our army men.

Sheri’s face was covered in freckles that stood out against her red cheeks whenever she worked hard or stuck her tongue out at us. Her toes had always pointed inward, which didn’t so much slow her down as make her look like she was about to fall over when she raced ahead of us across the dirt or through the oak trees. She usually wore plaid pants
 
—dirt-and-sand-colored plaid
 
—and Mary Jane shoes, along with a white shirt, also stained.

Mom sometimes brought home toys Sheri could play with by herself, like an Easy-Bake Oven or small pieces of plastic furniture for her dolls, but Jerry and I made most of our own toys out of whatever grew and whatever we could scavenge from the junk Dad was always bringing home.

Jerry and I knew our property by heart, as if we’d built it for one of our miniature battles. From the street, our driveway lanced directly uphill for about a hundred yards, and at the top of that first hill sat our house. On one side of the house was the well pit, and on the other side was Dad’s shed
 
—which he had covered with a generous supply of tar paper. Leaning up against the shed were piles of hoses, pipes, and
unfinished projects. Next to that, a broken generator perched atop its trailer, the trailer’s tires long since empty of air. Wedged between the generator and the shed were large piles of rusted steel that had been lying there long enough that weeds grew up around them.

Next to the house was a level area where we parked Mom’s Ford Custom and Dad’s Ford pickup. There were two small valleys behind the house, both of which Dad figured out uses for. The first was our personal garbage dump, while the second was where he tossed or dragged his ever-growing collection of discarded vehicles. One, a rusting VW minibus, was filled with old tires, as well as what seemed like a million dead leaves that had blown in through the open windows. Beyond that rusted a motley collection of other equipment he’d acquired at swap meets, auctions, and estate sales.

The rest of the eleven acres was mostly rolling hills covered in trees and scrub, although there was also one noteworthy hill, a short jog past the edge of our property, that was covered in a thick grove of oak and maple trees. At the foot of the hill was a pond. Years before, whoever owned the land had attempted to dig a basement for a home, but it had filled with water, so he abandoned the whole project. It was deep enough that we had our own private swimming pool, as long as we didn’t mind trespassing, swimming in cold, dirty water, and then hoofing it the half mile or so back home.

Even better, someone had tied a rope to one of the highest branches of the biggest oak atop the hill. We would grab the rope and walk backward until we stood on tiptoe with our arms stretched above our heads. Then we would race forward and leap, white-knuckled when the rope took our weight, watching the ground drop away below our windmilling legs as we swung, laughing, far into the air.

We couldn’t spend all our time outside, of course, and although we had officially moved into the house soon after the tornado, Dad never
properly finished it. The list of what was broken, unfinished, or ramshackle was nearly endless. Maybe he’d been building things more carefully at first, but after the tornado, he cut corners with a will. He even had a go-to response when an issue came up. It didn’t matter whether the trouble was a missing chunk of drywall, an electric outlet that didn’t work, or a door that wouldn’t shut all the way
 
—when a concern was brought to Dad’s attention, he would fire back, “You know good and well I’m no finish carpenter!”

One night after Mom complained about something and Dad fed her his line, Jerry asked Dad exactly what he meant by the finish carpenter part. I was on my stomach in the living room, drawing with Sheri, and I looked up in time to see Dad slap Jerry across the face.

“I mean what I said, you imbecile!”

Jerry ran to his room and Mom raced after him while Dad went outside, slamming the door behind him. When Mom came back to the living room, I went to check on Jerry. He was on his bunk in the bedroom we shared, staring at the wall.

“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Forget it.”

“All right.”

With nothing else to do, I lay in my bunk and looked around the room. The ceiling was bare Sheetrock, with the brand name and dimensions still stenciled on its peeling, yellow surface. When I was bored enough, I counted the hammer marks on it. Our closet was a single length of steel pipe held parallel to the wall with two brackets, and our dresser drawers fell onto the floor if we pulled them out past halfway. The window, like all the others I’d seen Dad install before the tornado, was a single pane of glass set against the cinder block wall with a flimsy frame and no insulation. When a really strong wind howled up, flakes of snow would eddy through the gaps around the window and float down to our floor, where they would slowly melt on the flower-patterned linoleum. In other words, our new room was a million times better than the trailer.

With Dad already outside, I hoped it would be a night we wouldn’t be called upon to fix the pump in the well. Dad had cut a rectangular hole into the dirt around the well and installed an old pump and a reservoir tank. It was insulated so poorly, however, that the pump often seized, and Dad liked to say that Jerry and I were “just the right size” to climb down into the well and bash an old hammer against the side of the pump until it began running again.

When the well was first drilled, we were all grateful to have running water. However, the water contained so much iron and other metals and minerals that we could almost feel the grit between our teeth. Mom spit out the first sip she took, declaring it unfit for humans.

Dad must have tasted it too, because he didn’t seem surprised when a salesman came a few days later to tell us about the latest in water-softening technology. We watched with interest as he collected water from our well in a small vial, then added drips and drops of various chemicals, periodically checking tables of colors and numbers in a three-ring binder. Then he announced that we had some of the hardest water he’d ever tested and that we’d need two complete filtration and injection systems, along with double the normal amount of salt.

We bought a single system. Jerry and I were supposed to add salt to the machine each week, but that lasted only until the initial supply of salt ran out, because when we told Dad it was time to buy more, he shrugged. From then on our softening system simply served as a conduit for our freakishly hard water. Mom still had to walk to the Dietzes’ for drinking and cooking water every few days, taking Jerry with her to help lug it back. Dad had found an orange five-gallon plastic cooler, and it lived on the kitchen counter next to the sink. For the washing machine, however, Mom was forced to use the well water, and everything she washed turned yellow. T-shirts and underwear were the color of lemons after one wash, the color of urine after two, and a ruined, rusty orange not long after that. Evidence of the hard water collected all over the house: an orange stripe ringed the toilet, the water that came out of the
showerhead turned two of the bathroom walls orange, and beneath each faucet that dripped
 
—which was every faucet
 
—there was a dark spot the size and color of a penny.