The Tank Man's Son (12 page)

“Fire it up!” he yelled.

The backwash blew off his beanie within the first few seconds, and then he was wobbling and leaning his body this way and that, like a bowling pin deciding whether it was going to fall over. We heard the airplane engine rev up another notch, and suddenly Dad was running rather than skiing. The bindings and boards had ripped from the skis, and Dad, the rope still secure on his forearm, found himself trying to sprint while wearing wooden platforms on the bottom of his boots. He was a living cartoon.

Like most cartoons, his attempt ended in a tangle of body parts. Jerry and I raced down the road toward him. By the time we got to the carplane, Dad was already back on his feet, laughing with his buddy about his exploit. Then Dad’s buddy slipped over into the passenger seat, Dad got behind the wheel, and without a glance at us they roared back to the house, leaving us standing on the snowy road.

“Why’d they ditch us? And what should we do with them?”

I looked at Jerry but didn’t answer his questions.

“With the
skis
,” Jerry clarified, nodding downward. They were right next to each other in the snow, pointing away from the house. Both had jagged nail holes ripped in their decks.

“Well,” I finally responded, “we’ll keep them, I guess.”

We each took one ski under an arm and trudged back home. When we got to the shed, we tossed the skis in a corner and shut the door. The VW was parked nearby, empty. Dad and his buddy were back in the house
 
—I could see Dad’s snow boots on the porch, the bindings and small boards still attached.

Jerry went inside, but I stayed out in the cold for a while longer. His guns, his tank, his carplane: all Dad’s stuff, and us just along for the ride. Or not, as the case might be. I shivered. Beside me I could hear the
tick-tick-tick
of the airplane engine as it shed its heat into the frozen air.

O
UR DRIVEWAY HAD
always been a disaster, ever since the time one of its ruts tried to swallow our car whole on the night of the tornado. Whenever it rained, the driveway became a maze of rough patches and deepening ruts. Over the years, beginning when the shovel handles stood taller than our heads, Dad had tasked Jerry and me with making sure the driveway was drivable.

We never made much progress. Jerry and I could spend an entire day shoveling sand back into the ruts
 
—something we did too many days to count
 
—but as soon as the next rain arrived, all our work would be washed away. It was no easy job for Mom to avoid the ruts when she drove us somewhere. Veering back and forth across the driveway, Mom would attempt to steer around the worst of them, but some looked deep enough to swallow Sheri. They snaked back and forth across the path of the car, and if a tire slipped into one of them, we all knew we’d be walking the rest of the way to the house.

“Rats!” Mom snapped one of the times it happened, banging her hand on the steering wheel. We all climbed out and met Mom at the trunk. She handed each of us a bag of groceries, and we began the long walk up to the house.

“The car’s stuck partway down the driveway,” Mom announced in Dad’s general direction as we trooped through the door. I looked back at the car, still trapped in the rut, tipped forward like it was bowing toward the house.

“What!” Dad’s voice, coming from the living room, sounded like Mom had just informed him that she planned on punching him in the face.

Mom sighed. While she stacked cans of green beans on the counter, she repeated herself, first in a near shout, then more quietly when Dad marched into the kitchen.

“Again? I must’ve told you a thousand times not to drive it into a rut after a g
 
—d
 
— storm!”

Mom banged one of the cans down on the counter, then crossed her arms and faced off against Dad. “I wouldn’t have driven into a rut if
you’d
fixed the driveway like
you’ve
promised a
thousand
times!” Mom fired back. “The last storm was more than a week ago! If you took as much time to fix the driveway as you do fixing your . . .”

Halfway through Mom’s rant, Dad stopped looking at her. It was as if Mom had suddenly ceased to exist. Mom’s words trailed off as Dad turned and rambled away.

“Like talking to a wall,” Mom mumbled. “Worse.” Then she walked into her bedroom.

Jerry reached into the grocery bag and finished unloading the food onto the counter, and Sheri and I helped him. While I worked, I thought about how Mom had gotten lucky. Their fights used to end one of two ways: shouting or silence. Dad had chosen silence this time. But there was another ending Dad had begun to choose more and more often with Mom. I’d noticed black eyes, bruises.

The time I’d noticed a cut lip, I responded the same way she did when Dad hit me.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Mark, why?” Then she answered her own question, touching the tip of her tongue to her lip and running off to the bathroom.

When she came out, her lip looked fine, and she touched my shoulder and said, “Mark, your dad has been tired a lot lately. We should all do what he asks and try to make things easier for him.”

That hadn’t sounded quite true
 
—
we
were all tired, but that didn’t mean we needed to attack one another. But what could I say? Mom had told me she was fine. And I was fine after Dad hit me, too. What else could we be?

On the subject of the driveway, though, Mom had made a good point. Dad probably
could
fix the driveway if he wanted to
 
—this was the guy who drove around in a tank, after all
 
—but instead he kept yelling at Jerry and me to fill in the ruts with sand and more sand.

“As long as it’s our job, Dad can blame us, I guess,” I suggested.

Jerry looked at me and nodded. Sometimes Dad even tried to blame Sheri, which was a stretch, even by Dad’s standards.

Dad wasn’t much interested in anyone else’s ideas. If we started a sentence with, “I thought . . . ,” Dad would instantly cut us off.

“That’s your problem right there: you
though
t
! Don’t think, just do.”

We learned not to voice our opinions. Dad’s opinions and ideas were the only ones that mattered. And one day he had an idea about how to fix the driveway. The perfect solution
 
—meaning both free and involving the tank
 
—came to Dad in a fit of inspiration: car battery cases. He drove over to a business in Grand Rapids that recycled old car batteries. They would collect the discarded batteries from all the dealers and repair shops in the area, then slice the tops from the batteries and remove the lead inside, which they would sell to a scrap-metal business. Once the lead was
extracted, the battery company used a massive front loader to push the empty cases into piles as tall as two-story homes.

Dad convinced the owner that the best way to make space for more battery cases on his lot was to give all the old cases away
 
—to Dad.

Dad must have made a good point, because one Wednesday a beat-up diesel dump truck rumbled and rocked up our driveway and unloaded thousands of chunks of old battery cases. One load. Another load. Soon we had half a dozen dump trucks’ worth of plastic cases piled in mounds up and down the driveway. Dad’s grin grew wider with each load. When the last driver gave Dad a quick nod and a salute before leaving, Dad climbed into his tank and fired it up.

Three hours later, the driveway problem was solved.

His tank spread and pulverized the case pieces
 
—each about the size of a tortilla chip
 
—in the process filling every rut in the driveway and creating a permeable, nonabsorbent surface that would instantly drain even the worst downpour. It also made the driveway look like it had been constructed by a child out of black Lego bricks, and it filled all the sand around it with hazardous chemicals. But Dad always said that progress comes at a price.

The next time it rained, the surface of the driveway held firm. Never again did we slog up a rutted driveway carrying armloads of groceries. We had our own, one-of-a-kind Bouman gravel that resisted rutting and drained water like a sieve. We also had what I suspect was the only toxic driveway anywhere in the nation. And whenever Mom complained about Dad not fixing something, he had a ready answer.

“Back off
 
—I fixed the damn driveway, didn’t I?”

O
NE MOMENT
D
AD,
like a magician of the mechanical, could build a snowspeeder with his own two hands, yet the next moment he could slap us for any reason, or no reason, and then go back to whatever he’d been doing as if nothing had happened.

The uncertainty of what he would do wore us down. We kids didn’t feel like we could ever really relax. We always had to keep our guard up
 
—not that we had any guard that could block Dad.

“You’re just grass, and I’m the lawn mower,” he liked to say, and that was a promise he made sure to keep.

We all had our own ways of coping. I stayed outside as many hours of the day as I could. Jerry spent more time at the tiny, lopsided table in our room, doing and redoing his homework. Sheri would sass Dad, something Jerry and I would never dare. Once, when Dad was shouting at us during dinner, Sheri smacked her hand on the table and screamed, “I wish I lived at Monica Mitchell’s house and not here!”

We froze. Dad would have beaten Jerry or me straight to the floor for even a fraction of that disrespect. But Dad just looked down at his plate, suddenly interested in his congealing mac and cheese. Mom looked back and forth between the two of them, on the edge of saying something, but then she closed her mouth and left the table. Once she was gone, Dad glanced up at Sheri. She didn’t look back. And that was the end of another fine Bouman supper.

That night in our bedroom, Jerry said something for the first time.

“I hate it, Mark. How Dad treats you and Mom.”

I pictured Jerry’s smile, which was now missing a front tooth, courtesy of a slap from Dad the week before. I didn’t wonder whether I’d be next.

“I know,” I said at last. “I wish I could run away. Anything is better than this. Right?”

“I’m just hoping to get away from here as soon as I can,” Jerry said. “Anything is better than this.”

I sighed. Jerry sighed. We went right on sitting in our beds, doing nothing and saying nothing. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I was resigning myself to the idea that things might never change.

I was lying in bed, and over the sound of Jerry’s breathing I could hear wind whistling through the gap around the windowpane. Sometimes on cold nights I doodled with my fingernail on the frost that formed inside the window. Neither my brother’s breathing nor the wind was loud enough to drown out Dad’s shouting at Mom in the kitchen.

“Is that too much for you? To actually do something
right
around here?”

“Something? I do everything right, just like you do everything wrong!”

“The hell? You don’t know how lucky you are to have a man like me!”

“Cursed, you mean! You don’t work, don’t save, don’t help
 
—you don’t do anything!”

“If I really did nothing, you’d know it. You and your f
 
—ing whining. I work my g
 
—d
 
— hands off, and this is what I get?”

“And
this
is what
I
get?”

Mom must have banged a pan on the stove to emphasize her point. What time was it? They could go on like this for hours. Mom and Dad had been out on a date, which was fine by me, until they came home arguing. I pulled my blanket up around my chin and ears, hoping not to hear the rest of their argument. Part of me was glad that Dad wasn’t focused on
me
 
—but a bigger part of me was sad that Mom was feeling what I was more and more often, a feeling equal parts fear, anger, and helplessness.

The shouting went on and on
 
—so far it was only shouting
 
—back and forth from kitchen to bedroom to kitchen to living room. It grew louder then softer, like the wind, like Jerry’s snores. I stopped listening. I listened to my breathing instead, and to the noise my blanket made when I slid it back and forth across my face. I wondered if I had dreamed the shouting and the slamming and the curses. Sleep whispered that everything would be better in the morning, and I believed it.

Suddenly my bedroom door flew open and slammed against the wall. “Mark, get out of bed!”

An instant later I was standing, adrenaline pumping through my bare chest. The hall light shone directly in my eyes, and I squinted at the silhouette of my father. He was holding something. “Didn’t I tell you to dump the garbage before you went to bed?” he shouted.

“Yes! But it wasn’t all the way full. So I
 
—”

“Not full? Not
ful
l
?” He crossed the room. “What do you call
this
?”

In time with the shouted final word, he raised the garbage can above my head and thrust it roughly past my shoulder. Then he turned it upside down and shook it. Everything inside slid out, some spattering my ear, neck, and shoulder, and the rest slopping across my bed.

Then he was screaming. “Clean this mess up! You want to live like a pig? Then I’ll
treat
you like a pig! I should take a
belt
to you!” He threw
the pail on the ground, and I watched it tumble, turn, and finally come to a rest. I glanced up, and Dad was already gone.

I grabbed the pail and set it upright on the floor beside my bed. As quickly as I could, I scooped the contents back into it. The chicken bones were easy, as long as I grabbed each one inside a fist. The mashed potatoes and gravy were trickier, so I linked my fingers and plowed the potatoes across my blanket and into the pail. The gravy was like Jell-O, so I formed my hands into small ladles, returning it to the pail as best I could. Apple cores, banana peels, burned curves of clotted oatmeal, potato peels
 
—all of it I scooped and plucked and scraped from my pillow and blanket and sheet back into the garbage pail. Some of the food fell to the floor, and once my bed was clear, I knelt beside it and picked up the rest.

Jerry risked a quick glance from his bed, then he rolled over with a sigh and faced the wall. We were getting to the point where trying to help each other could cause more trouble for everyone.

I stripped my bed and ran to the laundry room, stuffing everything in and starting a load as quickly as I could. Then I ran back to my room, pulled on pants, grabbed the garbage, and jogged into the kitchen, since my boots and coat were by the door. Outside there was a ton of snow and no light. Holding the pail in both hands, I high-stepped toward the trash valley, and when I got near it
 
—who could tell in the dark?
 
—I did my best imitation of a bucket brigade and chucked the contents. Then it was back through the snow to the house, where I could see a finger of light from the kitchen door pointing across the snow.

And then I saw another light, past the house. It resolved into two: the headlights of Dad’s truck slipping and sliding down the driveway. Where in the world was he going in the middle of the night?

I learned the answer back in the kitchen. It
wasn’t
the middle of the night
 
—it was five thirty, and Dad was on his way to work. Exhausted by fighting with Mom the night before, he must have fallen asleep, only remembering to deal with me after he’d woken up. If he’d waited thirty
minutes, Mom would have woken me to get ready for school, and I could have simply taken the trash out then.

Dad had seen a better way to teach me a lesson, though, and he was nothing if not a dedicated teacher.

I peeled off my boots and put the garbage pail back in the kitchen, then went to the laundry room. By the time I finished putting my bedding in the dryer, Jerry and Sheri were both awake and in the kitchen, Jerry fixing oatmeal and Sheri watching him, her legs swinging beneath her chair. I wasn’t hungry, and I passed through without a word. Back in my bedroom, I sat on the edge of my mattress, clamping my knees together with my hands and trying to get warm. Trying not to think about anything
 
—to pretend it was a normal morning, whatever that meant. I could hear Jerry and Sheri brushing their teeth in the bathroom. I saw Mom walk past my doorway, a silhouette in the hallway, her hands up at her mouth, and it looked like she was crying. I could hear the wind through the gap around the window frame. I could hear me telling myself to stop thinking.

At last I grew warm, and it was time to catch the bus. Since I was already wearing my pants and jacket, I stepped into my boots and walked out into the snow for the second time that morning.

At school, I stumbled off the bus, tugged open the heavy front door, trudged down the wet hallway to my classroom, and walked to the coatroom in the back. I unzipped my jacket, and it was when I began to pull it over my shoulders that it hit me: I wasn’t wearing anything under it. Before I could zip my jacket back up, another boy saw me.

“Hey, everyone, Mark Bouman came to school with no shirt on!”

Panicked, I tried to make up a reason, but all that came out was stammering nonsense. Other kids began to gather, whispering and pointing and laughing. I imagined
 
—I hoped I was imagining
 
—a glob of gravy dripping between my bare shoulder blades and sliding down my spine.

My teacher arrived to investigate. It took her a long moment to figure out what had happened, and an even longer moment to decide
whether she could believe her own senses. I wanted to crawl under a desk and stay there forever. Mercifully, my teacher walked out of the coatroom and appeared seconds later holding a T-shirt she had retrieved from the lost-and-found bin. It was nicer than anything I owned.

“Why don’t you go change in the boys’ room, Mark. Take as much time as you need.”

Laughter chased me out of the classroom and down the hall, and the smell of bleach welcomed me in the restroom. Every step I took echoed off the endless grid of small, square tiles that covered the floor and the walls. Standing in front of the mirror, I took off my jacket and let it fall to the floor, and a dirty, half-naked boy stared back at me. What would happen if I stayed in the restroom all day? It wouldn’t matter. I was starting to understand that Dad’s power could reach me anywhere.