The Magical Stranger (5 page)

Chapter Six

T
upper and Beth watched
Kindergarten Cop
with their girls on his last night home. He picked at a piece of German chocolate cake Beth had baked especially for him and watched his girls curl up with their poodle, Gretl. He blinked back tears and thought to himself, “I've taken command and it's breaking my heart.”

He couldn't show the girls; that would be too much for them. That's what his journal would be for. Beth had given him some leatherbound books for his birthday because she knew that writing his thoughts down calmed him.

The girls were getting too old for Tupper to tuck them in, but they made an exception that night. After the girls went to sleep, he and Beth went over the bills a last time and talked dreamily of some land they owned a mile away high on a bluff overlooking Burrows Bay. Someday they hoped to build their dream house there, maybe even next year. He bottled up the last of his hard cider until midnight and then tried to get some sleep.

It didn't take. Tupper woke the next morning long before the 5:00 a.m. alarm clock. He packed his bag in the dark, muscle memory taking over. He looked out the window at the evergreens swaying in the gloom. He thought of when he first moved here with Beth in 1996. They had to look up Whidbey Island on a map and they thought at first it was small and remote, but thrilled at the adventure. They now loved it as much as they loved the girls. He hated to leave.

Tupper headed downstairs and labeled all the wine bottles with green, yellow, and red stickers for Beth. Tupper had become a bit of a wine snob since the family did a tour of duty in Germany beginning in 2005 and he'd acquired about a hundred bottles. He'd returned from his last cruise to find that Beth and some friends had uncorked a $100 bottle of 1997 Castelgiocondo Brunello di Montalcino at the end of a girls' night out. That wouldn't happen again with his sticker system.

He then took a long, hot shower, slowly turning off the nozzle, knowing it would be the last one for months. Beth and the girls got up, and the family headed over to Penguins, a local coffee place. Tupper indulged himself with an orange-cranberry scone hot out of the oven. The family then piled into their SUV and made the ride up to NAS Whidbey Island under a blue sky.

On base, Beth and the girls held it together as Tupper spun through the gate that separated the parking lot and the Black Ravens' hangar. But then he looked back a last time and saw Caitlin looking away, tears running down her cheeks. He wouldn't be able to get the image out of his mind for weeks.

T
upper had plenty of work to make him forget how much he missed his family. Taking over from Doogie was proving even harder than Tupper knew it would be. Half the squadron kept their heads down, hoping their new master wouldn't kick them as hard as the last guy, while the other half dropped their packs; a Navy term for fed-up sailors going through the motions, doing the minimum just to get by. Tupper spoke often to his sailors about this being a new day for the Black Ravens, but they were skeptical; Tupper had been Doogie's second-in-command, and there was no evidence he'd do things any differently.

That was only half of the problem. Everyone knew this was the Black Ravens' last cruise with the ancient Prowlers. With VAQ-135 beginning transition to the EA-18G in a little more than a year, Tupper was like a general manager of a baseball team relocating to an excited new city with one more lame-duck season to play in a decrepit stadium before a handful of pissed-off fans. He had to keep sailors motivated to repair and mother Prowlers that would be scrapped for parts and metal next year.

There was a personal preservation angle as well. There would be seven squadron skippers on the
Nimitz
and only two of them would be recommended for further command. The rest would see their once-promising careers shunted to middle-management posts. But it wasn't a level playing field. He'd be competing against the COs of Hornet and Super Hornet squadrons. A head-to-head comparison of the Prowler and Hornet was not pretty. Hornets can fly at 1,200 miles per hour—nearly twice the speed of sound. Prowlers top out at 650 mph, slightly faster than a 737 flying between Indianapolis and Detroit. The Hornet carries Sidewinder missiles capable of obliterating enemy aircraft twenty miles away. The unarmed Prowler sends out electromagnetic waves to make enemy radars go snowy. The Hornet can drop three tons of bombs ranging from bunker busters to tactical nuclear weapons. The Prowler has the ability to absolutely wreck a terrorist's cell phone network.

There were going to be three Hornet squadrons on board the
Nimitz
, so squadrons could swap parts easily if something broke. The Black Ravens were the
Nimitz
's only Prowlers and most were built during the Reagan administration, before some of their pilots were born. Break something on a decaying Prowler and you'd be on the phone with a fat man at NAS Jacksonville's parts depot who may or may not surrender the part. Then you'd wait days for the part to be flown out to the boat on the goddamned COD—Carrier Onboard Delivery, the carrier's transport squadron whose reputation for efficiency was slightly lower than a cut-rate East European airline. Your best option was cannibalizing parts from the Hangar Queen, aka the Prowler that never flies except on to the boat at the beginning of cruise and off at the end.

That was the hand Tupper was dealt. No use crying over it. There were 145 sailors and 22 officers under his command. They ranged in age from seventeen to fifty, men and women, black, white, and Latino. Some of them were pimple-faced seaman apprentices from broken homes and some were middle-aged chiefs who knew more about the Prowler than Tupper ever would.

The chiefs made up the squadron's middle management known in the Navy as the Goat Locker. If a skipper's Goat Locker was top-notch, his planes launched on time and his sortie completion rate was near 98 percent. That made the skipper's boss at Carrier Air Group happy. CAG was the captain who oversaw all the squadrons on a carrier, and if a skipper wanted to scramble up another rung on the Navy ladder he needed CAG's blessing. A crappy Goat Locker meant downed jets, backed-up paperwork, and CAG screaming through the telephone. If that happened to Tupper, the only thing he'd be commanding next was Caitlin's soccer team.

Tupper's Goat Locker was a mess, a by-product of Doogie's command and good people getting out because they couldn't handle being deployed eight months out of the year, every year. Those who remained were calling in sick and dragging their feet on paperwork and generally setting a bad example for sailors.

The fact that Dan Whittle, VAQ-135's master chief—the head of his Goat Locker—was missing in action did not help. Whittle had served nearly a quarter century in the Navy and was the veteran of multiple Prowler cruises. He was loved by his men, but he was never around. The Navy had given him limited duty to deal with family issues for the past six months, and he'd been a ghost around VAQ-135. He was back now—or so Tupper thought.

On his first morning as skipper, Tupper called Lieutenant Kevin Marshall, one of the squadron's nonflying administrative officers. He quickly went down his sailors, double-checking that they were all good to ship out for cruise in two weeks.

The conversation went quickly until Tupper got to Whittle.

“Is Master Chief Whittle ready to go?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, sir.”

“Kevin, get in here.”

Marshall walked down the long hall to Tupper's office.

“Kevin, we're less than two weeks away from cruise, and you're telling me my master chief can't deploy?”

Marshall explained where they were. Whittle was dealing with two kinds of trouble. One of his children had been seriously ill last year and he'd taken time off to deal with her problems. Tupper knew about that, but there was something else.

Two wars had stretched the Army to its limits, so the Pentagon had taken to borrowing Navy personnel to fill noncombat slots in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Navy they were officially called IAs for Individual Augmentee but were known among the men as “goddamned IAs.” Whittle had just returned from a Black Ravens cruise when the Navy sent him to Afghanistan in 2008 to train non-commissioned Afghan officers. But at night the officers tended to fade back into the countryside and their Taliban roots. That left Whittle and thirteen sailors supervising military convoys on the roads in and out of Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan. Whittle and his men lived in constant fear of car bombs and other improvised explosive devices. Their fears were realized on September 20, 2008, when one of the trucks bound for Kandahar hit an IED, killing Army captain Bruno de Solenni and two Afghan soldiers. It fell to Whittle to ID and body-bag the three victims. He was never the same.

Tupper had a decision to make. Ship out with a burned-out master chief or ship out without a master chief. He thought about it for a day and then called the chief in his office. He'd already made his decision.

“Chief, are you ready to ship out?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, you're not. I'm leaving you at home.”

Whittle began to cry, tears of shame and relief. Tupper handed him a box of Kleenex. The two men talked for a few minutes. Whittle suggested maybe he could meet the Ravens in Singapore, a month into the cruise. Tupper knew that wouldn't happen. His sailor couldn't stop apologizing.

“I'm so sorry, sir. I'm letting you down.”

“Shipmate, you're not letting anybody down. You have your own war to fight. But I can't take you with us.”

Tupper and the Black Ravens had not even left Whidbey yet, and he was already a man down.

Chapter Seven

I
don't remember much about my baby days, but I'm told that Dad helps out more than most men. He does the dishes, changes diapers, and lets Mom head out with the girls. But he isn't home alone all day with two screaming babies. He's at work flying or at game two of the 1967 World Series with his brother-in-law, or he's renting a small plane, letting his baby brother Paul take the controls as they circle above the Prudential Building in Boston.

We move to Meridian, Mississippi, in 1968. That's where Dad learns to fly jets and that's where he crashes his first plane. Two years later, it's on to Monterey so Dad can get his master's in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School. That's when I begin to remember things. One evening, Mom can't find me in our small yard in base housing. She grows frantic. I hear her before I can see her.

“STEPHEN THOMAS RODRICK.”

I'm not really lost. I am playing catch with someone else's father. She is pissed.

“You can't wait for your father? Fine, you don't get to play with him either.”

I whine that this doesn't seem fair. Dad Substitute cringes and pats me on the head.

“Good luck, buddy.”

Mom is always there—she makes the sandwiches, she gives me my bath, she reads me
Cat in the Hat
—but Dad's cameos are more dramatic. It is the last day of kindergarten in Monterey. I'm sitting outside of my classroom wearing Garanimals, a blue shirt and plaid pants that I hate. Inside, Mom and my teacher make small talk. They are killing time, waiting for someone. And there he is, Dad. He is late and runs down the hallway in black shoes and khakis, right past me, and closes the door behind him.

I am five and small, but can already name the starting nine for the Oakland A's. I also cry a lot: when my sister punches me, when I can't make my hands do what I want them to do, most any time, really. The teacher wants to hold me back because of my size and emotional issues. Dad will not hear of it.

“He will be bored. It's a mistake. Don't do it.”

End of discussion. That memory is blurry, an underexposed Polaroid probably explained to me later. More in focus are two sweaty men in dusty green uniforms. Dad is buying them sandwiches. They are from the Mayflower Moving Company. Dad's been transferred to NAS Alameda, so we're moving from Monterey to Pleasanton, California, thirty miles outside of San Francisco. It's a hot day in August. After the men finish eating, Dad peels off some bills from his black wallet. He shakes their hands and we head home.

Our new garage is filled with boxes and crates. Our garage is always filled with boxes and crates. Some of them with Florida and Rhode Island addresses predate me. Even when we are settled, we are not. Green and gray stickers from moving companies remain on the side of Dad's desk until Mom gives it away forty years later. Dad says everything is always ready to be packed up and shipped because there could be a disagreement with the Russians. I don't understand; the Russians seem like pretty decent folks in the Soyuz scrapbooks Dad gives me on my birthday.

Dad is stuck flying A-3s out of NAS Alameda. I don't understand much, but I know this makes him mad. Vietnam is winding down and he never got in the fight. Late at night, Mom and Dad talk of classmates shot down and in prison camps or dead.

“Pete, you've got two small kids. Thank God you're not there.”

I'm pretty sure Dad doesn't thank God. His buddies are flying Skyhawks and Intruders. He's flying something named a Skywarrior, but everyone calls it “the Whale.” I think this is an odd name for a plane. One day, Dad gives me a mimeographed piece of paper with the history and photo of the plane. He reads it to me. The A-3 was created big and heavy in the mid-1950s so it could launch from an aircraft carrier and deliver nuclear bombs a thousand miles away. But the Whale's mission was made obsolete by intercontinental ballistic missiles that could deliver twice the nuclear payload twice as quick. The A-3 was turned into a tanker, circling carriers and refueling planes as they went off to bomb Vietnam and Cambodia.

In the early 1970s, the A-3 is converted into a radar-jamming plane hoping to stop the surface-to-air missiles killing Dad's friends in the skies over Vietnam. But Dad misses that too. His first A-3 cruise begins in the summer of 1973, just as naval air operations over Vietnam are ending.

I don't understand all that. I've got sports. Dad is a casual Celtics and Red Sox fan, but my interest is something else. I memorize the sports section of
The Guinness Book of World Records
and torture neighbors with stray facts about quarterbacks who caught their own passes. Mom and Dad have season tickets to the Oakland Raiders, but I'm too young to go. (Or so they tell me.) I listen to the three-hour pregame show and then watch the game with a babysitter.

The Raiders are my heroes. One day while Dad is gone I see an ad in the
Oakland Tribune
for a charity fundraiser featuring future Hall of Famers Gene Upshaw and Art Shell. I beg a neighbor to take me. He says no at first, but I turn on the waterworks and he gives in. Upshaw and Shell are the first black men I've ever touched or talked with. It is the greatest day of my life. But Dad isn't there. He isn't there when I burst into tears when the Raiders lose to the Steelers on something called the Immaculate Reception. But Mom is there.

“It's only a game. Jesus. Don't be a baby.”

She tries but doesn't understand. I'm starting to get it. Dad's never there. I learn a new term: workups. This means Dad gets up at five or six in the morning, throws his duffel bag in his car, and vanishes for three weeks at a time. He explains it to Terry and me one night.

“Before we can go on the big cruise, we need to do little cruises.”

I don't know what a big cruise is. Let's face it. I have some issues. School is
so
hard. I am seven and I can barely write my name and I definitely can't ride a bike. And I can't tie my shoes. I sit on my bed, practicing for hours, but never get my fingers to move my laces up and around. I go purple and cry.

I do the same thing at school, especially during art class. One day, we are making tepees for Thanksgiving. The other kids cut their paper, put on glue, and draw on their new creations with Crayolas. I spend a half hour trying to complete the first step, cutting a triangle out of my paper. There are no green-handled lefty scissors, so I try to cut with my right hand, more like my right claw. I bawl and tell my teacher I can't do it. She watches me fumble with the scissors. She then grabs my face and yanks it toward her own.

“Stop joking around and acting stupid.”

It takes her a few minutes to catch on that I'm not acting stupid. I just can't do it. She pulls out a manila envelope and stuffs my crappily cut-out paper inside and dashes a note off to Mom. I take it home on the bus. Mom reads the note and sighs.

“You know you're embarrassing me, right?”

Immediately, she regrets saying it. I can see it in her eyes. She's trying so hard. And I know she loves me. She cooks and cleans and listens to my long monologues about the Raiders and third-party presidential candidates. For hours, she listens. And then Dad comes home and I fly to him.

There are things I can do. I can read and I can run my mouth. Mom and Dad give me a boys' history of the United States for Christmas, and I memorize all the small-type bios in the back. Who's Alger Hiss? John Nance Garner? No one cares but me. There's not a subject that I don't have a thousand questions for: When was Halley's comet coming back? How could Joe Rudi hurt his shoulder while lifting a bag of groceries? Why did Ronald Reagan always look so happy?

This is California in the 1970s. My second-grade year is spent in a pod classroom where three teachers roam between ninety students. Everyone is always shouting with my voice rising above all the others until Mrs. Monaghetti loses it.

“Can you please shut up for a while?”

I try, I really do. My teachers don't understand. I take tests and finish in the top 1 percent, but I can't build a one-story house with Legos. At home, Mom says she's trying her best, but I'm driving her to the loony bin. I believe her. One afternoon, she puts bright red lipstick on and picks me up early from school. We drive the forty-five minutes to the base, me chattering away, her preoccupied with traffic and our destination.

I meet with a Navy doctor with tired eyes. We talk about Dad and what he does for a living. We talk about school and how boring it is. We talk about me getting along with Mom. After an hour, he pats me on the head, and Mom leaves the hospital with a bottle filled with white tablets.

It's Ritalin. I take one in the morning and then one from the school nurse around lunchtime. I can't tell you if they help or not. Probably not, because the school comes up with a new idea: I'll spend half the day with my regular class and half the day with special-ed kids.

This is a disaster. I spend afternoons with retarded boys and girls a half foot taller than me who outweigh me by sixty or seventy pounds. I cry and they cry too, but their tears come with rage. One day, a kid with a crew cut throws a Chinese checkers game at my head, marbles and all. I hide in a closet.

After that, Mom moves to straight bribery. Mom and the base psychologist come up with Snoopy Dollars; every day I keep my mouth shut and make my bed I get a fake dollar with a beagle on it. Once I reach twenty Snoopy Dollars I can buy baseball cards with the proceeds. It sort of works, and by summertime I have an almost complete collection of 1974 Topps cards, but Mom grows tired of keeping track. The contest ends.

“I shouldn't have to pay you to be good.”

What does Dad say? Not much. He is a ghost.

O
ne Saturday, Mom says she needs a break. She takes Terry shopping. Dad is in the garage working on his MG. He's wearing a white T-shirt and stained khakis. We live at the top of a hill in a new subdivision; I'm a little bit up the street riding my new blue bicycle. Well, riding it is a big fat lie. I'm six or seven, but still can't exist without training wheels. So I push-pedal up the street. I go by Mr. Lewis's house—the nice man who took me to meet Gene Upshaw—I've got so much new information for him! It's about Reggie Jackson and Fred Biletnikoff and that song “Seasons in the Sun.” But he drops the garage door just before I get there. A couple of neighbor kids surround me. One boy starts in.

“You can't really ride that bike.”

‘‘Yes, I can.”

“No, you're a baby. You need training wheels.”

“Can too.”

“Okay, ride it down the hill.”

By now there are four or five kids around me. I hope for rescue, maybe the ice-cream truck? No, too early. Dad? Nope. His head is buried in the MG. I look down the hill. It is steep but clear, just one car at the bottom. The kids keep talking, crowding in on me.

And then I'm off. Did I jump or was I pushed? Doesn't matter. I'm flying down the pavement, picking up speed. I've never gone this fast in my life. And I'm not tipping over!

But then I start heading left. This isn't surprising. I do everything to the left. I'm heading straight for the car, actually a yellow pickup truck. I try to steer to the right, but I can't do anything to the right. I lean hard; maybe I'll miss it.

No.

How long have I been lying here? Thirty seconds? A minute? Ten minutes? Where did the kids go? My bike's front fender is twisted in. I see a small, sharp dent in the truck's grill. Mom isn't going to be happy. There are splashes of red on the handlebars. Where did that come from? I breathe in and hear a whistling noise. This is weird since I can't whistle. I feel a breeze on my gums. That's not supposed to happen. I put my hand to my mouth and touch teeth where there should be skin.

Only then does it hit me. My face is ripped open below my lip. Still, I feel calm. I never feel calm. I know Dad will kill me if I just leave my bike here, so I slowly walk it back up the hill. The bent front wheel scrapes and wheezes every time it turns. My red shirt is a darker crimson by the time I get home. I walk into the garage and put my bike where it's supposed to go. Dad is bent over with a wrench. I pull on his belt loop and he turns around.

“Dad? Don't be mad.”

“Jesus Christ.”

It's the first and last time I hear Dad swear. He picks me up and carries me inside. He wraps ice in a towel and holds it to my chin. For a second, he panics. What does he do? I see an opening.

“Dad, I just want to stay here and watch
Sesame Street.
Just one show.”

That snaps him out of it. We're in his MG and the top is down. I don't even ask why we pass two hospitals so we can drive thirty miles to NAS Alameda. My chin is crusty and shredded, but I'm happy. I'm with Dad. We pull up to the base hospital and he half carries, half walks me through the doors. A nurse looks at me strangely. I know her from somewhere. Then it hits me: I know her from here. I've been here so many times the doctor told Mom that I should wear a helmet.

“Not you again. This is becoming once a month.”

Dad blushes purple, just like me when I get angry! The nurse takes us into an examination room and peels off my blood-soaked shirt. I give up my towel and a compress is pressed against my chin. Someone comes in and gives me a shot. I look up at Dad. He gazes back, his face covered in a five o'clock shadow even though it is barely noon. He brushes the hair out of my eyes. I'm about to get nine stitches inside my mouth and nine more on the outside to close the wreck that is now my chin. And yet I'm smiling, so much that I can feel the crusted blood cracking on my face. I'm here with Dad and it's just the two of us. So what if I had to lose a pint of blood for it to happen? Doesn't matter. It happened. I drift away to sleep. I am happy.

B
ut not for long. Dad goes away for seven months. This makes me a minor celebrity at my non-Navy school. The idea that a parent can vanish for most of the school year seems like an episode of
The Six Million Dollar Man
.