The Tank Man's Son (14 page)

After quickly getting dressed, I crept down the stairs, wondering how much TV church I’d missed and how angry Grandpa would be.

Grandpa’s red face was even redder than usual, and he looked away from me quickly when I reached the bottom of the stairs. I sat down beside Jerry and Sheri, who were both watching
 
—and who must have decided it was every kid for themselves, since they hadn’t woken me. Reverend Falwell’s choir was singing the closing song, and I was already contemplating how I could make peace with Grandpa, when his voice from the armchair surprised me.

“Mark, I forgive ya.”

I turned around, and he nodded at me once before turning his attention back to the television for the close of the service.

We heard Mom’s car in the front drive a few minutes after Grandpa clicked off the television
 
—we weren’t allowed to watch other programs on the Lord’s Day. Grandma heard it too, and she went to the front door and held open the screen. We didn’t have anything to gather, since we’d worn the same clothes all weekend, so we filed through the door, down the steps, and into the waiting car. Things at home must have returned to normal once again.

I
N FACT, THINGS WERE
so
normal that Mom and Dad made it all the way through a conversation at the dinner table one night without some kind of conflict.

“This pot roast is looking smaller than last week’s, which was smaller than the one before that.” Dad announced this at the dinner table while he was chewing one piece of beef and cutting the next, and he did so without even a hint of anger or accusation. It sounded like he was commenting on the weather.

“The prices keep going up,” Mom ventured, “so we just can’t get as big a piece as we used to.”

Dad chewed some more, thinking. “We should raise a beef cow.”

“That might save some real money,” Mom agreed.

“All right then.”

“I like cows,” added Sheri. Dad nodded at her, Mom smiled at her, and that appeared to be that.

I snuck a look at Jerry. He widened his eyes the tiniest bit, one of our brotherly expressions of surprise that we could almost always hide from Mom and Dad. Who were these strange adults sitting at our dinner table, discussing the price of meat so calmly? Was this what other family dinners were like all across the great state of Michigan? It was almost impossible to imagine, but I spent the rest of our peacefully quiet dinner trying: mothers and fathers chatting about raising cows and other such topics, children listening in and offering their opinions whenever they liked, and everyone basking in a sense of harmony.

Ike became part of our family the next week, and he caused us headaches from the moment Dad prodded him out of the truck.

The first hitch was that absolutely none of our eleven acres was fenced. Ike could wander wherever he wished, and it became immediately obvious that he wished to wander almost everywhere, causing Dad to add a new sentence to the list of chores he growled at us.

“Go get Ike.”

That usually meant Mom had returned from town and it was time to feed our cow. In order for raising a cow to actually save us money, Mom had started scavenging food from the Dumpsters behind the grocery store, which yielded things like rotten vegetables, moldy fruit, and an occasional intact watermelon. Mom would pack the whole sloppy mess into boxes and bags as best she could and then dump it all behind the house. Then Jerry and I had to find Ike and convince him to walk back toward the house, where the pile of decomposing food was waiting. He was enthusiastic about the watermelons, but once they were gone, he would look at us and moo pitifully before poking his nose into the rest of the garbage. Sheri, despite her dinnertime declaration of affection for cows, didn’t help much with Ike. The day Dad brought Ike home, Sheri told him that she wanted a horse instead of a cow, after which he stared at her for a moment and then walked off, muttering.

Mom’s Dumpster diving lasted about three weeks.

“People are starting to call me names around town,” she announced at dinner.

“Well don’t look at me,” said Dad. “I’m not diving into any Dumpsters.”

Then he proposed an idea that seemed simply brilliant.

“Look, everyone knows that cows are wild animals, right?”

We all nodded.

“So that means Ike is perfectly capable of taking care of himself,” he finished with a grin, “in the wilds of Michigan.”

Ike became a nomadic terror. Growing scrawnier by the day and craving calories, he took to covert warfare. Jerry and I were the ones who had to take out the trash from the kitchen and toss it into the garbage dump in the valley behind the house. Pre-Ike, this was a boring but thankfully brainless task. There was virtually no way we could screw it up and incur Dad’s wrath, not counting the time Dad chose to dump the garbage on my bed.

Ike changed all that. He learned to lurk behind some short, scrubby trees and wait for one of us to approach the dump. If we weren’t careful, Ike would charge forward and ram his head into our backs, knocking us down and scattering the garbage we carried all over the ground. Then, as we climbed back to our feet and tried to clean ourselves off, Ike would lower his head and begin eating the freshly spilled garbage. Why he didn’t simply wait for us to toss the garbage into the pile was a mystery to me, though Jerry’s theory was that Dad had uncovered the wild animal in Ike.

“One of you boys needs to take out the trash,” Mom said one night.

“I’ll get it,” Jerry volunteered, “if Mark is the lookout.”

I peered out the window while my brother slung the black plastic bag over his shoulder.

“Okay, he’s on the far side of the yard. Try walking real slow so he won’t notice you. I did that a few days ago and he never looked my way.”

“I don’t know . . . he
always
seems to notice me when I head to the garbage pile.” Jerry stood at the door, shifting his feet.

“He’s still on the far side,” I updated.

Jerry made a decision. “I’m going to try to outrun him. I think I can get there and back without him horning me in the back. Hold the door open so I can get a running start.”

I did, and Jerry bolted out at full sprint. Ike noticed him immediately and headed toward Jerry at a trot.

“Jerry, he
sees
you!”

Jerry had made it fairly close to the garbage pile, so he flung the bag and spun around on a dime, sprinting back to the house at full tilt.

“Run, run!” I yelled. “He’s coming closer!”

Jerry tried to find another gear, but Ike caught him anyway. At full run, Ike lowered his head and slammed Jerry square in the back, lifting him into the air for a moment
 
—and then, just shy of the door, Jerry ate dirt.

“Mom! Mom! Ike got Jerry!”

She ran past me, but Jerry was already on his feet, wailing and limping toward the house. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Mom returned, grabbed a broom, and stalked back out the door.

“That damn cow! I don’t know why your father can’t make a fence, or at least tie it up!” Ike was still nearby, and Mom sprinted toward him, broom held high.

“She’s gonna brain him,” I told Jerry.

“Good,” he managed to sniff.

Ike saw the threat, however, and bolted, kicking his heels high into the air as he ran off. Mom came back to Jerry’s side and lifted his shirt.

“Let me see,” she soothed. “You’ll be all right
 
—just a bruise, but no blood. Go wash your face.”

Such attacks were simply too much for us. Even on his diet of garbage, Ike was pushing four hundred pounds, so getting hit by him in the back didn’t feel much different from getting run over by a car. Mom demanded that Dad do something about
his
cow, which it had officially become the minute it started ramming her boys.

“Fine,” he said, then walked outside.

Jerry and I raced after him, morbidly curious.

“You don’t think Dad will . . .” I left the question unfinished, picturing a solution that involved the tank.

“Nah,” Jerry said, sounding mostly convinced.

Dad’s actual solution was perfectly simple and totally ineffective. He stalked through the yard, with us trailing at a distance, until he found Ike. Then Dad picked up the closest rock.

“Hey! Ike!”

Ike stared at Dad, who let fly with the rock. Ike, being in excellent running condition, dodged easily.

Dad picked up a second rock. Ike stared.

“F
 
— you!” Dad yelled, tossing the second rock. Ike dodged again.

Dad returned to the house, grabbed the broom, and came back. Marching straight up to Ike, who unwisely stood his ground this time, Dad raised the broom above his head
 
—“I said, ‘F
 
—
you
!’”
 
—and brought it down with enough force to snap the handle in two across the cow’s back. Ike jumped, spun around, and raced off through the trees.

“Don’t know why I have to solve all your mother’s problems,” Dad griped, and then he walked back to the house.

Soon after that
 
—probably sensing that the grass was literally greener on the other side of the Boumans’ nonexistent fence
 
—Ike made a trip over to the Dietzes’. Despite the trouble Ike caused us, Dad had been bragging about how smart he was to be raising his own cow, so the Dietzes had got themselves a cow too. Theirs was still a calf that they kept tied up near the house. When Ike discovered the calf, he rammed it at full speed and killed it. Not finished with his mischief, Ike entered a staring contest with the mermaid who sat at the center of the Dietzes’ cement water fountain. She must have blinked first, because Ike rammed her as well, and the fountain was reduced to rubble.

Dad had to pay the Dietzes back for the dead calf
 
—though not, for some reason, for the mermaid
 
—at which point even he couldn’t pretend
that Ike was saving us any money. Still, Ike soldiered on, eating oak bark and ramming us and leaving mounds of poop in the sand.

Until one Sunday morning when a strange knock woke us up early.

“Who’s at the door?” Mom said, still in bed.

“Just a minute, I’ll see,” Dad said, pulling his pants on. He opened the door to find two police officers, guns drawn.

“Freeze! Police! Hands in the air! Now!” One lowered his gun and pulled Dad out of the house, while two more officers pushed inside.

“Who else is here, Mr. Bouman?” came the shouted question.

“My family,” Dad answered.

“What’s
happenin
g
!” yelled Mom, peeking her head out the bedroom door.

“Who
else
is here?” the officer demanded.

“Our children!”

“Well, keep them out of the way!”

Meanwhile, another officer had cuffed Dad. “Mr. Bouman, did you sell a machine gun to Robert Kovalcek?”

The question caught Dad off guard.

He grimaced. For years Dad had kept a fully operational machine gun around, and he’d take it out periodically and fire it for his buddies. It was awesome
 
—and incredibly illegal. Recently he’d sold it, but before doing so he’d replaced the barrel with one that was plugged so it couldn’t be fired. Apparently Robert had re-replaced the barrel, bragged around town about his automatic weapon, and then ratted out Dad. The sheriff had come to check out the status of Dad’s permits, but permits and Dad weren’t the best of friends. That was probably why the sheriff decided he needed to pay a visit to the so-called “Tank Man” with six heavily armed deputies in tow.

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” Dad growled.
What lawyer?
I thought.

“Hey, there are tons of police cars outside!” Jerry whispered to me. “How much trouble is Dad in?”

Dad was escorted to the closest car. “He’s headed to jail, I guess,” I speculated to Jerry.

That was when Ike burst out from behind the house and blindsided one of the officers at full speed. The man’s hat flew off and he hit the dirt, face first.

“Ike just rammed a cop!” Jerry shouted, partly terrified but mostly giddy.

Ike spun around and kicked his heels in the air, then raced off.

“What the hell was
that
?” shouted the officer, getting shakily to his feet and jogging for the safety of his squad car.

“A damn cow!” shouted another officer, scuttling for safety behind his car.

Meanwhile, two more officers were searching the house from top to bottom, looking for any other illegal weapons, and Dad was finally being loaded into the back of one of the squad cars.

Less than ten minutes after it had all begun, we stood outside with Mom. Dad and the officers were gone, Ike was gone, and things seemed eerily quiet.

“Well, I suppose we should go eat breakfast,” Mom said.

All of which explains why Dad’s one-day stay in jail coincided with Ike disappearing, only to return to us several days later in the form of a month’s worth of T-bones, rib eyes, and ground beef.

Family dinners didn’t always feel good, but finally eating Ike sure did.

O
NE DAY,
while Dad and I were cleaning the shed, I saw him crouch in front of a small, wooden box with rope handles. It was partly hidden beneath some other junk and covered by a thick layer of dust. Dad brushed his fingers across the side of the box, revealing some words I couldn’t make sense of. Dad stared at them for a moment and then stood up and faced me.

“Mark, come help me pull this box out and set it on the work table.”

After grabbing the rope handles and swinging the box up, we hovered over it like doctors beside an operating table. Dad used a small knife to pry off the cover. The inside of the box was about two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches deep, and it was filled with what looked like brown candles that someone had dripped dark, sticky honey across.

Dad froze. That was never a good sign. “Mark, grab your handle again. Let’s get this thing outside. And
slowly
.”

Dad walked backward, I shuffled forward, and soon we had the box
resting in the sand a short distance away from the shed. I had no idea what I was looking at, and no more information seemed to be forthcoming. “So . . . what
is
this, anyway?”

“Dynamite,” Dad replied. “It’s left over from a job I had blowing stumps to clear a new runway. I guess this box found its way home with me when I quit.” Then his voice became more serious. “I need to do something with this, though. I’ve had it way too long.”

“Why, what’s wrong
 
—are you talking about all that honey?”

“That ain’t honey. Dynamite’s just sawdust mixed with nitroglycerin and wrapped in paper, and when the dynamite sits too long, the nitroglycerin bleeds through the paper. Very sticky,” he said, letting the tip of one finger graze the dynamite, “and
very
unstable. Even a sudden change in temperature can set this stuff off. We’ve got to get rid of this before something bad happens.”

Dad stood up and put his hands on his hips, slowly scanning our property. That was how he did his best thinking. Sometimes he’d stay that way for a dozen minutes or more, elbows out, eyes staring into the distance. And when he finally worked out a solution, nothing would stop him
 
—he was like a bulldog with a bone. This time the answer came to him after only a minute or two, but that was plenty long to be standing next to a boxful of bombs, as far as I was concerned.

Dad dropped his arms from his hips and strode down the hill. “Go get your brother,” he called over his shoulder, “and grab some shovels.”

I raced off to find Jerry. “Dad found a box of dynamite, and we’re gonna help him with it!”

“Help him do
wha
t
?”

“I don’t know
 
—he just said to grab shovels!”

“So it sounds like we’re gonna help him
dig
.”

Shovels in hand, we caught up with Dad at a huge tree stump. He was looking at it with a smug expression. The stump was waist high and three feet across, and it probably weighed a thousand pounds. It was all that was left of a mighty oak that had been destroyed by the tornado.
He kicked it with his black leather shoe. The stump sounded thick and solid. It didn’t move an inch.

“Okay, boys,” he announced. “That dynamite we found is gonna make my life a lot easier. I need you boys to dig a hole
 
—and make sure it goes all the way under the stump. It’s gotta be deep enough so the dynamite will lift it.”

“Got it,” we both said, then set to work digging with a will. We threw shovelful after shovelful of dirt into the air.

Jerry held up his hand for me to stop after a few minutes. “Mark, don’t throw the dirt too close
 
—some of it’s falling back into the hole, and we’ll have to dig it twice.”

“How deep do we have to dig?” I asked.

“Not sure, but Dad said make it deep enough to get underneath the stump.”

I sighed. “Yeah, but this stump is huge. It’ll take us forever.”

“Just keep digging.” Helping Dad with dynamite was looking worse by the minute. Still, I wasn’t keen to have the dynamite blow up on its own above the ground, so I dug with a bit more enthusiasm than normal. Dad watched as our shovels cut through a foot of sand, then another foot. We had to dig a foot or two sideways for every foot we dug down, owing to all the sand that kept sliding down the slope and refilling the hole. From time to time Dad returned, each time carrying something he’d need for the project: blasting cap, a roll of fuse, matches, and last of all, the box of dynamite, which he dragged along the sand at a snail’s pace.

With every trip, he looked at our hole and said the same thing. “Nope, not yet.”

At last
 
—long past the time my arms had begun to feel like spaghetti
 
—Jerry and I stood at the bottom of a six-foot-deep hole that was at least ten feet across
 
—and arching and twisting all around us and above us was the stump and its network of roots. Taproots as thick as my thigh snaked off in all directions, and the body of the stump itself was massive.

“That should be deep enough,” hollered Dad, and we scrambled out
of the pit, panting, and knelt at the edge of the hole to watch Dad. He lifted out the sticks of dynamite, one at a time, and set them in a pile directly below the stump. It reminded me of a tiny log cabin.

“That’ll do,” he pronounced, looking at the pile of explosives. But then he looked back at the box, which still had half a dozen more. He gave a small shrug. “You know what? Let’s just use it all on the stump
 
—it’ll be all right.”

Jerry and I were ecstatic. We grinned at each other like maniacs. All the digging had been worth it. Dad was going to blow up the entire box at once! Dad attached the blasting cap and fuse, climbed out, and ran the fuse to a safe distance.

“You boys go hide under the tank,” Dad told us. “You’ll be safe there.” He readied a match to strike as we sprinted off, calling a final warning: “And do
not
come out early!”

We sprinted to the tank and slid underneath its near edge, then commando-crawled backward until it covered us. Past experience had taught us that safety was never at the top of Dad’s priority list, so if he told us to put twenty tons of steel above our heads, something big was about to happen.

“And make sure you plug your ears!” Dad yelled.

I grinned at Jerry and shoved a finger in each ear. Dad touched the match to the fuse, and then he sprinted away from the stump as fast as he could.

The trail of smoke from the burning fuse took forever to crawl across the sand to the stump. Ears firmly plugged, I could hear only the sound of my heavy breathing and the beat of my heart. At last the smoke trail reached the edge of the pit and disappeared into the hole. Any minute now . . .

The entire world hiccuped. The ground punched me in the stomach just as the loudest sound I’d ever heard hammered my body. Everything became a violent blur of brown that resolved, an instant later, into a towering column, like Old Faithful made of smoke and sand. Fear and
wonder flooded my body. I watched the smoke column drifting slowly from right to left, growing taller and more transparent.

I turned toward Jerry. He looked like he’d just been run over by a school bus, but he was grinning at me.

We scrambled out from beneath the tank. “Did you plug your ears?” Jerry yelled at me.

“Yeah, why? Did you pl
 
—?” I began.

“I didn’t!” Jerry yelled proudly.

We saw Dad jogging toward the pit, so we did too, and before we got halfway there, it started to rain wood. Pieces of all sizes were falling around us, the larger chunks hitting the sand with audible thumps while the smaller bits and splinters cartwheeled and drifted down. Dad threw his arms over his head but stayed where he was, and we did the same. As the cloud of sand and dust slowly dissipated, the rain of wood continued for five seconds, ten seconds. Jerry and I stood in awe. It was the most incredible thing either of us had ever witnessed.

When the wood shower finally dried up, we sprinted to where the stump used to be. In its place was a crater filled with pure sand, about twice the size of our bedroom. It was as if the stump had never existed.

“Guess maybe we didn’t need
all
that dynamite,” Dad said happily.

The three of us were like clones, each grinning at the hole in the ground with our hands on our hips. Mom, with Sheri following, came tearing out of the house. One hand held a sponge, and an apron was tied around her blouse. “What in the world just happened? I heard a
boom
, the roof went
bang
, and then the power went out!” She stopped in front of the hole, panting and waiting for my father to answer.

Dad didn’t say anything. He was still staring at the hole. But Jerry, who’d turned his attention to the surrounding landscape, blurted out much too loudly, “Hey
 
—what’s that sticking out of the roof of the house?”

It was part of the stump, of course. The dynamite had launched a huge hunk who knew
how
high into the air, and it had arced across the fifty yards to the house before punching right through the roof and
the ceiling. We discovered, when we all trooped back into the house together, that a small section was still embedded in the roof, but the remainder of the chunk had plowed straight on through, coming to rest on the floor just in front of the couch. It was surrounded by a scattering of insulation, ceiling tiles, and splinters of wood. When I looked up, I could see the sky through a hole the size of a five-gallon bucket.

“Well I’ll be . . .” reflected Dad.

“And what about the
power
,” chided Mom.

“Mark,” said Dad, “go check the breakers and see if any are tripped.”

I reported back to Dad that all the breakers looked good, which perplexed him
 
—why
was
the power out? He stood for a long while in the living room, looking at the stump. We stood in the living room, too, looking at Dad look at the stump. Suddenly Dad ran outside.

“Wow, the stump just
barely
missed the couch,” Jerry yelled.

“Amazing,” I added.

Sheri stood mute at Mom’s side, unable to take in what had just happened. Mom alternated between staring at the hole in her ceiling and asking, “Are you two all right? Sure?”

“We’re fine,” I reassured her. “We were safe under the tank.”

“One of these days your father is going to kill someone,” Mom said, disgusted.

I kept staring at the hunk of stump, comparing it in my mind to the original. “I wonder what happened to the rest of the stump
 
—this piece isn’t even that big.”

“It
had
to have been blown up,” Jerry said, his volume returning closer to normal. “I saw, like, a million pieces flying through the air.”

He turned to Mom and Sheri. “They were landing
all
around us.”

“Yeah!” I added. “And a couple big pieces landed right next to us!”

Mom frowned. “I thought you said you were
 
—”

Dad burst into the house. “Found it!” he said triumphantly. “Knew I’d figure it out! Come on!”

We followed him outside, then down the hill about a hundred yards.
Another chunk of the stump had flown along a different trajectory, crashing not into the roof of the house but directly into the transformer atop the power pole at one edge of our property. The transformer wasn’t built to withstand the impact of a dynamite-propelled stump, and it had been knocked right off the power pole. It was lying on the ground, its insulators shattered and a huge stump-shaped dent marking the side of its casing.

“Well, don’t expect me to pay thousands of dollars to fix something that wasn’t my fault!” Dad proclaimed, looking at the ruined transformer.

“Not your fault?” clarified Mom.

“It was an
accident
,” Dad answered, “and therefore not my fault. Jerry, clear out the chips and splinters near this power pole. I’m gonna drag this big hunk clear with the tank.”

Mom threw up her hands. “Come on, Sheri, we’re going back inside, and
hopefully
no more
trees
will land on us!”

It wasn’t fifteen minutes later that Dad was speaking with someone from the utility company.

“Yeah, I need to report a problem,” he began, and there was no way, once he started his story, that the guy on the other end of the line was going to come out ahead. Dad was a great storyteller, and he never thought twice about embellishing the facts
 
—or inventing some out of whole cloth.

By the time Dad hung up the phone a few minutes later, the power company was convinced that a freak lightning storm had knocked our transformer to the ground. Or, if they weren’t quite convinced, there was nothing they could do to prove otherwise
 
—especially when the guy complaining was the Tank Man.

“They said they’d come right out and take care of it,” reported Dad.

When the lineman arrived, he didn’t make even a single comment about the blue skies we’d had for days on end or about the lack of burn marks on the transformer. He did remark that in all his years of repair work, he’d never seen lightning damage a transformer in quite that way. But if he didn’t believe Dad’s story about lightning, so what? It’s not like he would have believed the real story either.