The Tank Man's Son (6 page)

“This is dirty,” he said. “Start over.”

We hated it, but we had no choice. Sheri and I lifted everything we’d cleaned back onto the counters. Jerry added more hot water and Comet to the sink and scrounged up some dry towels. We washed in silence
 
—rewashed every single glass, mug, plate, dish, and piece of silverware we’d already cleaned.

We finished sometime after three in the morning. The pots and pans were still stained, but the dishes and silverware were glistening. Jerry held up the top few blue plates against the light and made sure they were spotless, and we prayed Dad would forget about the pots and pans by the morning. Sheri walked back to her room, and Jerry and I walked back to ours. We knew that we needed to get back to sleep, since only a few hours later Dad would wake us up to get ready for school.

W
E KIDS DIDN’T UNDERSTAND
why, but Dad was changing. He was moodier and less predictable. He was starting to slap Jerry and me, and sometimes Mom
 
—though rarely Sheri. And he was growing obsessed with all things military. The shelves in our living room were filled with dozens and dozens of books: illustrated histories of various wars, guides to the weapons and vehicles of various countries, codes of conduct, manuals on how to make and deploy booby traps, political theory, German dictionaries, biographies of famous generals, infantry tactics. He seemed to have books on every conceivable military subject, and he scoured swap meets and auctions for more. Mounted on two walls of the room were several of his favorite guns and bayonets, one of which had been used, he told us, “to gut a man clean up the middle.” There was a German army helmet and a grenade Dad said was almost certainly inert, and if we pulled open the second drawer of the end table, perhaps hunting for a pencil to use on a Yahtzee score sheet, we’d see the gleaming metal of a pistol.

The compulsion even prompted Dad to start his own business. One afternoon he rummaged around the shed and found a can of black paint and a small brush. Then he strolled down the driveway to the mailbox, opened the can of paint, and got to work. An hour later, Dad completed the final stroke in the words
Boumar Custom Gun Company
 
—and that was as official as things were going to get. The “mar” at the end of “Boumar” was actually the first part of Terry Marion’s last name, a friend of Dad’s who lived down the road and helped with gun projects, although for some reason the fifty-fifty split between their two names was lost on most people. At least it wasn’t the only odd sign on Blakely Drive. Just down the way, the initial
R
had fallen off our neighbor’s mailbox, which from then on proclaimed that “ay Guy” lived there.

As word of the gun company spread, Dad became a sort of clearinghouse for people looking to sell or buy weapons that Dad liked to call “collector’s items” and “guns from when they still knew how to make guns.” If you wanted a standard rifle, you’d be better off visiting the local shop in Grand Rapids. But if you wanted something a bit more exotic, you simply needed to grab some cash and drive out to the Bouman place.

As more and more people did exactly that, Dad kicked things up a notch. His first improvement was to construct a gun range. He used a borrowed bulldozer to carve out a flat, level rectangle into the side of one of the hills behind the trash valley, leaving a high wall of dirt as a backstop. He pushed the extra dirt into mounds on the sides, forming a large area where he could place various targets. With the help of some gun buddies, he dragged an old, broken-down washing machine to the center of the range. It made the perfect backstop for most bullets, although some of the largest-caliber slugs were capable of punching a hole in both the thin metal at the front of the machine and the thicker steel at the back of it. While the front of the machine looked like the surface of a sponge with its countless smooth holes, the back looked like the claws and teeth of some mechanical nightmare. We kids
 
—especially Jerry and me, who began to spend more time helping Dad with his guns,
while Sheri spent her energy avoiding Dad
 
—quickly learned to walk a wide berth around the back of the machine, since its jagged edges could slice open skin and clothing like a scalpel.

Once the gun range was up and running, it was guaranteed that on Saturdays and Sundays, Jerry and I would be in constant demand as reloaders and spotters. From somewhere he wouldn’t reveal, Dad had acquired a World War II–era antitank gun, which was basically a gigantic rifle capable of penetrating
 
—through sheer, brute force
 
—the armor of a tank. Once Dad found a guy who could sell him shells for it, he began to charge people to fire the weapon. Jerry and I helped him set up targets made of plate steel, and then whichever guys happened to be hanging around could buy ammo from Dad for three bucks per shot. Each shell was an inch across and nearly as long as my forearm, and there was so much recoil that the gun needed to be fired from a prone position. The shells loaded through a curved magazine on the top, and the gun’s long barrel rested on a short tripod. Since each shot was so precious, the guys would take their sweet time: loading, sighting, standing up and discussing what might happen, checking the wind, resighting, and so on. It was almost like a religious ritual for them, the climax of which came when their shot punched a hole through a couple inches of solid steel. Dad would preside over the shooters, hands on his hips, smirking as if he’d built the gun with his own hands.

After building the range, there was the problem of where to put everyone who wanted to shoot. During the busiest times, there might be six or eight of Dad’s friends out behind the house, each with a weapon or three, so Dad built a two-story gun tower off to one side of the house, next to the shed, about two hundred yards from the range. The first story was all braces and pilings, along with a ladder, and the second story was a flat platform
 
—about the size of a large bedroom
 
—accessed by a hatch in the floor. From the second level, the guys could shoot and brag and cuss and swap guns to their hearts’ content.

Mom hated the gun range, but not because she hated the guns.
When she and Dad were dating, they had gone rat shooting at the dump with .22s, and they had even driven all the way to Montana once to hunt bear. No, what galled Mom was that Dad considered it part of his business
 
—that blowing up a bunch of junk with his buddies counted the same as her cooking and cleaning and mending or the same as one of her part-time jobs as a receptionist or clerk in town. But what could she say? The proof was right there on the mailbox: it said Dad was running a gun
company
, not a hobby.

“Your father likes his playtime,” she would sometimes say, “but it’s not playtime you boys need to be part of.”

That was her opinion, but Dad had a different one. We
did
have to be part of his playtime, whether we liked it or not. At least when he was inside with his buddies, he forgot about giving us jobs. He would invite guys over, and when they knocked, he would open the front door with his left hand. Then he’d bang his heels together and stick his right arm out in front of him, like he was pointing at the sun.

“
Sieg heil
!
”

His friends would do the same thing back, and often they were dressed in tan or camouflage uniforms. If the weather wasn’t good for shooting, they would sit around the living room, playing records with German songs and talking about guns and Jews and wars. Their favorite leader was Hitler, and they all agreed he should have won the war. He was trying to keep his country safe and strong, but his other generals and communists and Jews lied to him and caused him to lose. But Hitler’s ideas were still alive, Dad said
 
—they were just waiting for the right time to rise again.

Guns began to take up increasingly more space in our lives. The gun range and the gun tower were obvious to anyone, but more subtle signs of the Bouman weaponizing were everywhere: oil stains on towels Dad used to clean gun barrels, large drums of gunpowder in the laundry room, and shell casings littered all over the property, winking up from the ground. Jerry and I got used to answering Dad’s call, expecting to
be given some chore or a tongue-lashing, only to have Dad show us a weapon that was inside a crate.

“You kids don’t tell
anyone
you saw this,” he’d say. “If someone asks, you don’t know a thing!”

We quickly lost track of which guns we were allowed to talk about and which ones were hush-hush, but it scarcely mattered. Most kids in elementary school had no understanding of weapons, so they wouldn’t have cared about our secrets, and most adults wouldn’t have believed that kids our age knew the difference between a legal M1 carbine and an illegal German broomhandle Mauser that could fire on full auto.

A police officer once came to my classroom to give a talk about neighborhood safety. When he asked if anyone had any questions, I piped up. “Do you guys ever have to deal with gas bombs?” He gave my teacher a strange look, then asked if there were any
other
questions.

I never had any big plans. Most days all I wanted to do was play, eat, stay out of trouble, and get a good night of sleep. I didn’t like my chores, and I didn’t like school, but what could a guy do? They were just part of life.

Dad’s behavior, though, caused me to change the way I lived. Jerry, Sheri, and I started to pay more attention to him, specifically so we could avoid him. If we were at home and Dad wasn’t, we kept our senses on constant alert, ready to scatter at the sound of his truck.

“Dad’s home!” one of us would yell. It was like yelling
Fire!
in a movie theater. If we were inside, perhaps playing cards, we’d toss the cards back in the drawer and either race outside, assuming we could get out and away before Dad parked, or else race to our rooms and try to look busy. If we were outside, we’d head for the hills, getting far away as fast as possible. Who knew what job we might be given? One weekend he forced us to shovel sand and dirt into the driveway ruts for two backbreaking days, and then Monday morning he kept us home from school to finish the job.

Sometimes Dad snuck past our radar, though. One afternoon, when Jerry and I were lounging on the living room floor drawing, Dad suddenly appeared in the doorway. “I need you boys to come help on the range.”

We knew better than to dawdle, so we tugged on our shoes and jogged around to the back of the house toward the gun tower. Four of Dad’s buddies were already there, hanging around the bottom of the ladder, packing guns that looked big enough to bring down an elephant. They nodded, then went back to ignoring us. Dad showed up a minute later and shoved a stack of paper targets at Jerry, then tossed a roll of masking tape to me. We knew the drill by heart. While Dad and his friends climbed into the tower with their rifles and cases of ammunition, we ran the two hundred yards across the field to get everything ready for them. Jerry and I taped the first target to the front of the washing machine, and then we clambered up the mound on the left and took cover behind the dirt.

The first shot rang out: a sharp, staccato crack, followed by an echo that rolled up and down the hills.

Jerry took the first turn spotting. He ran back to the target, leaned over to look at it, then straightened and screamed back toward the tower, “Inch high, two inches left!” Five seconds later, he was leaping over the dirt berm and sliding down toward me.
Crack!
Then it was my turn to check the target and scream back the information. Every few trips, one of us would tape a new target to the front of the washing machine to ensure we didn’t mix up which bullet hole was which.

Twenty minutes later, we were both sweaty, covered in dirt, and desperate for a chance to rest our aching legs. One of the guns was having trouble sighting in, and a job that usually took us ten minutes or less was stretching on and on.

Crack.
Run, check, holler, run.
Crack.
Run, check, holler, run.

As the minutes wore on, we stopped hiding our entire bodies behind the dirt and began crouching at the top of the rise. When my next turn came and I ran back from the washing machine, I couldn’t face climbing
all the way up the slippery berm for what seemed like the hundredth time. I simply scrambled up partway, then turned to watch the next shot come in.

Each time a bullet hit, the entire washing machine shuddered and the dirt behind it kicked up. Whatever rifle they were firing was powerful enough to shoot clear through the target, ripping it apart in the process.

Crack.
Another shot
 
—and my right leg buckled beneath me. I collapsed in a heap and rolled down the hill, stopping in the weeds at the bottom.

“Jerry!” I screamed. My right ankle felt like it was on fire. Panicked, I tried to stand up but immediately collapsed again. I couldn’t put any weight on my foot, which felt like a piece of dead meat that someone had attached to my body.

I dared to look down. Blood, and a lot of it. “Jerry!” I screamed again. My mind raced to comprehend what had happened to me. I tried to stand again but collapsed. Why couldn’t I feel my ankle anymore?

My hands shook and my breath came in gasps. I could feel my right foot again, but for some reason it was growing warmer and warmer. I sat up and grabbed my ankle, trying to relieve the pain, but it hurt worse than ever. I pulled away hands covered in blood.

Jerry sprinted to my side. “Stay down and don’t move
 
—Dad’s coming!”

I squinted up at my brother. He was cradling his right arm, and blood was oozing through the fingers of his left hand. Before I could say anything, he asked, “Did you get shot too?”

Suddenly I realized why my leg didn’t work
 
—I
had
been shot. It was a realization that caused a fresh wave of panic. We were just kids
 
—what in the world was happening to us?