The Tank Man's Son (20 page)

My turtle filled my imagination at school. I pictured what he was doing without me, and I could almost feel like I was there with him at the fountain. Algae and moss had begun to grow in the water, green stains competing with the bright orange color so familiar from our hard water. My turtle loved to leave one of his feet in the water while he sunned on a rock, and when he dived, he always spun toward the side of that trailing foot. His tiny head, no bigger than one of my fingernails, lanced across the water at the point of a wide, expanding
V
, sometimes disappearing completely before reappearing, seconds or even minutes later, in some other part of the pool.

When I wanted to hold my turtle and speak so it could understand me, I would find a beetle and hold it in the water, and more often than not the ripples would attract him. When he swam close enough, I’d slip my hand into the water behind him, scooping him in a motion so smooth that his legs continued to swim the air, even as his head retracted in surprise.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I just want to say hello. You’re safe.”

I would have been content to stay inside those memories from the homeroom bell to the release bell, but school knew the trick of lifting me back into reality. It always started with the sound of my name.

“Mark, where is your homework?”

“Forgot your gym clothes again, Mark?”

“Why does Mark have to be my partner?”

My name became a synonym for something unwanted, unpleasant, and all I could think about was how to escape. I had grown up hearing the story of a hunting trip Dad and Mom had made to Montana. Dad had shot a black bear and two mule deer, and for the trip home he
tied the bear to the hood and lashed one deer to each door. When they stopped for fuel and a restroom break, they were forced to climb in and out of the windows. I imagined what it would be like to escape to such a place, a wilderness filled with animals. A place of endless trees where my name was never spoken.

As the school weeks stumbled past, my daydreams began to coalesce around the very place where my parents had traveled. One day during social studies, the word
Montana
took on an individual and urgent voice, walking into my head and whispering of endless forests and vast lakes, isolated places where I could wander forever without hearing the syllable of my name pronounced. In Montana I could choose my own name, maybe, a new name that would make me a new person. And there were turtles there just waiting for someone to find them.

“Mark? Isn’t he the weird one?”

“Mark always gets the worst grades.”

“This seat’s already taken, Mark.”

Time and time again I was called back to a classroom or a locker room or a lunchroom filled with kids who were smarter and faster and cooler, while I was stuck being Mark, living on a hill of sand with a bookworm brother, a kid sister with a ton of friends, a dad who smiled before he hit me, and a mom who seemed powerless to stop him
 
—and no amount of imagining was going to get me to Montana.

One day Sheri announced that she’d won a goldfish at school
 
—which drew an apathetic grunt from me
 
—and then she said that she had put the goldfish into my pond. “Now your turtle can have someone to play with,” she gushed.

That elicited an outraged grunt, along with a half-shouted, “He doesn’t want someone to play with. He has
me
.”

“But
you
can’t swim with him, dummy. He wants to have another creature to swim with.”

I could feel the anger rising. “You’re the dummy, and your fish is even dumber. I hope my turtle eats it!”

Sheri giggled. “He can’t eat my fish
 
—my fish is almost as big as your tiny little turtle!”

She ran off while I raced down to the pond, fuming. Every so often I caught a glimpse of my sister’s fish, a quick flash of bright orange and a tiny ripple in the surface of the water. My turtle was sunning on the largest rock in the center.

“C’mon, boy, don’t you want to go get that stupid fish?”

Either my turtle didn’t hear me or it didn’t care. But I did. My sister’s fish was an intruder. I’d created the pond for my turtle so it could be safe and happy and do what it pleased. I didn’t want it to have to compete for space or fight for survival. I wanted the pond to be a place of solitude
 
—and now Sheri was horning in on it without even asking me. A goldfish was a little girl’s pet. It made my pond feel like a toy. The turtle pond was my slice of riverside, my reminder of the peace that I’d discovered during the summer. The only times I’d been content since coming back from the river were when I spent time with my turtle. I hated school, and I hated how there was nothing to do in my room and how everything in the house seemed to be broken or breaking.

Just recently Dad had walled off part of the living room to make the master bedroom bigger, and since that blocked off the entrance to the living room, he used a power saw to cut a new doorway in the kitchen wall, directly through the middle of the cabinets and the counter. Worse, Dad discovered a bunch of pipes on the floor, across his new doorway, and decided they would be too much trouble to move. His solution was to toss a small, dirty carpet over them and tell us to “get used to it.” I didn’t have to think about that kind of thing when I was with my turtle. I could sort of shut down my brain and just sit without thought or worry or fear.

I tried to calm down, hoping everything would get back to normal soon. The fish was bound to die. I studied my turtle’s shell, which still carried a faint shine from the last time he’d climbed from the water. After
several minutes of sunning himself, he turned and slipped back into the water. He could go anywhere and do anything
 
—which at that moment, sadly, did not appear to include attacking and killing my sister’s fish. I decided to feed the turtle, and after a few minutes of searching the nearby trees, I discovered a praying mantis perched on a twig. I pulled off its wings, carried it back to the pond, and set it afloat on a leaf. My turtle slipped off the rock and disappeared beneath the water, and a moment later he reappeared beside the mantis, pulling it into the water and devouring it.

School didn’t get any better with time, and home
 
—apart from my turtle
 
—was how it always was: moments of fun, moments of terror, and lots of sitting around waiting for time to wander past.

Jerry and Sheri seemed like they were each on a raft, and both were drifting away from me in different directions, while I was stuck on an island. I knew what life was like on that island, and I knew they might end up somewhere better than me, but I just couldn’t seem to move.

Sheri had a whole pack of friends, and she was constantly at a sleepover or a fair or a restaurant with one girl or another. Jerry seemed like he was digging deeper into his books, finding a place to escape that eluded me. None of us understood what was happening at home, like what it meant when Dad would choose one of us to teach a special lesson to, or why we could never afford new clothes. What could we say to one another? What could we do for one another? It seemed the only thing that worked was to put our heads down and try to live in a world of one.

The kids at school knew who my father was, and plenty of them would have been first in line to come over and ride the tank or shoot guns, but that idea terrified me. Dad might be fine, but he might
not
be. It was safer to never invite anyone over and safer still to never speak about what happened at home.

I had plenty of time to think while riding the bus to and from school each day. I’d imagine my way inside the houses we passed, watching kids sit at clean kitchen tables, watching fathers announce their arrival home from work with hugs and questions about school, watching mothers fold fresh laundry and bake cookies. When we left the neighborhoods behind and drove through the countryside, I’d imagine I was standing on an expanse of black steel and an unseen force was pushing me toward the edge of an abyss. Closer and closer, yet I never quite fell in. And so my thoughts would turn to my turtle
 
—the closest thing I had to a friend, though it didn’t seem like much.

One afternoon, home from school, I noticed the water level was dropping in my turtle pond, so I hooked up the hoses and draped one end over the rim.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when I stopped to watch my turtle on the way to the bus stop, that I discovered the hose was still running. Water was slowly pouring over the rim, and while Sheri’s fish was still swimming, my turtle was nowhere to be seen. I dropped to my knees on the downhill side, where the sand was wet, hoping to discover the telltale tracks I knew so well from the hours of stalking up and down the river. Seeing nothing, I ran in circles, wider and wider, scanning the ground for any sign.

Nothing. My turtle was gone. Panting, not knowing what else to do, I turned off the hose. I could hear the bus coming, and I ran. The whole trip to school, my chin kept wanting to shake, and I wove my fingers together to keep them still. Dad was right: it really was pointless to waste good stuff on us kids, since we’d lose or break it anyway.

That week I replaced my missing turtle by stealing David Visser’s. He had brought his pet for show-and-tell, bragging about his fancy aquarium with its fake island and its heat lamp while the whole class oohed and aahed.

“Well, wasn’t that just delightful and so fascinating,” chirped Mrs.
Woolerth. “If you have any more questions for David, you may ask him at recess. Class dismissed
 
—except for you, Mark.”

I sighed and sat back down while everyone else poured out the door, laughing and shouting. I hadn’t completed my homework, again, and my teacher decided that keeping me inside would teach me a lesson. Left alone in the classroom, silent except for the playground noise that seeped in through the windows, I couldn’t take my eyes off the turtle. And when it turned its head to look at me, I quickly walked to the front of the room, grabbed it out of the aquarium, and jogged back to my desk with the turtle in hand. I shoved it deep into my desk, pushing my cupped hand past crumpled papers and books and pencils before releasing the creature as far away from the opening as I could.

I was just in time. Mrs. Woolerth opened the door and held it wide while the rest of the class trooped back inside. David Visser hadn’t been in the room more than ten seconds when he freaked out.

“My turtle is gone! My turtle is gone!” He was hopping up and down at the front of the room, his hands flapping at his side like bird wings.

Mrs. Woolerth knew exactly what had happened. “Mark Bouman, did you take David’s turtle!” It wasn’t really a question.

“No,” I shot back, “I didn’t!”

“I don’t believe you. You give David his turtle back this instant!”

Why had I said I didn’t take it? I was dead meat. Before I could decide what to do, Mrs. Woolerth decided for me.

“Dick, Michael, check Mark’s pockets, then check his desk
 
—I want that turtle back!”

The boys had seen enough episodes of
Adam-12
and
Dragnet
to do a pretty thorough job of frisking me, and when I came out clean, they moved to my desk. I was going to get caught for sure. It wouldn’t mean any trouble at home, because Mom and Dad would never find out, but it might mean trouble for me at school. David Visser had a lot more friends than I did. As I backed away, pulling my chair with me, the teacher’s two lackeys crouched down and peered inside my desk.