How to Train Your Dad

by Gary Paulsen

  Carol had been in the trailer with me, studying me closely, and as I moved away from the sink and turned to put the mini pink squirt gun in my pocket, she jumped up, grabbed the gun neatly—almost surgically—from my hand, and, levering her vise-like jaws (and we’ve already talked about pressure per square inch in terms of her bite if you’ll recall how she eats Dairy Queen vanilla soft-serve cones), made it into a not-squirt gun. What she made it into was, in fact, a handful of little wet pink plastic splinters.

  She looked a little bewildered at first, at the spray-splash of water, then she spit-shook the wreckage onto the floor, and smiled at me, peering intently into my right eye.

  All right, I thought, she didn’t like that one.

  She growled at me. Sound like distant thunder. Sound like maybe I was going to die here. Sound werewolves make when they’re ready to attack. Sound you might hear as you’re circling the drain …

  But I steeled myself, took out another squirt gun, turned back toward the sink to start to fill it. This time, she jumped up, snatched it out of my hand before I could start filling it with water, and crushed it.

  There had been four squirt guns in the plastic wrapper bag, and she systematically destroyed all four of them, and then grabbed the empty bag from my hand and ripped it to pieces like it was a skunk that had grated on her last nerve.

  So she didn’t like squirt guns, I thought, relieved that I still had both hands. I chewed on that for a bit while I dried the floor and swept up the plastic shards.

  Carol had come from a hard place Back When—before we found her and brought her home and she started shoplifting at garage sales when she wasn’t eating soft-serve cones and killing skunks—and perhaps there were some bad memories of firearms in her mind.

  In deference to her past trauma, because even though she smiles at me scary-like and tries to stop me from training SP, I have a lot of respect for her resilience and I appreciate that she’s still loving and sweet despite her bad start in life (which is more than I can say for a lot of people). I realized I would have to figure out a different way to squirt water because I thought I was onto something with this strategy; the pamphlet raved about the efficacy of squirting water as a training tool.

  So I bought a small squirt bottle—they were sold as plant misters, but the nozzle could be adjusted from mist to stream and they’d get the job done—at the drugstore.

  Which Carol didn’t seem to mind.

  And which worked perfectly.

  And which I started to use right after my father accidentally tried to kill Pooder.

  DEATH BY WATER SKI

  So far this chronicle here has primarily been about my father’s philosophies and the effect they had on me. The negative effect they had on me. The really negative effect they had on me. So negative I thought they might be ruining my life.

  Like that level of negativity.

  But Pooder has been reading along as I transcribe this, even proofreading at certain places and offering some solid editorial advice, like how I should add undercarriage to the story and make sure the catalyst is clear, and I love him for that even though it’s not my style but I know he wants the best for me and my book—and he downloaded a grammar book to have on hand so that he could tell me the difference between a predicate and a diphthong and other writing technical stuff like that.

  * * *

  Sorry for the break here, but we had to look up diphthong. Lots of definitions, but the simplest one is that it’s a sliding vowel. Which still doesn’t make a lot of sense but now Pooder says I have to tell the joke that went around when we were in the fourth grade: What do you get if you shake a can of alphabet soup? A vowel movement … Not great, I admit, you’d be in stitches if you were nine years old. (Pooder’s still laughing.)

  So anyway, Pooder has been reading and proofing this all along and has decided he should—how did he put it?—oh yeah, he wants to be more evident in the story.

  I pointed out to him that this history wasn’t really about him. I was the one wearing the pink bibs and straw hat held down with baler twine playing around in a dumpster full of trash and splashed—and that’s a good word for it—splashed across the television screen for all the world to see, and in the final analysis, it wasn’t his father, but mine. Then I ran a word search and found that we had plenty of Pooder already in the book—one hundred and thirty so far, to be exact.

  “Still,” he countered—and since he had recently decided again to be a famous lawyer he could, actually, counter—holding one finger up. “I have read this as you go and offered good criticism that kept you from making big mistakes, so I think it’s natural and fair for me to be in there more often.”

  And because he’s a good friend and persuasive and—when it’s all said and done—he had a lot to add that was helpful at the very end, and he is the next part of this story anyway, here goes.

  But first, a few quick descriptive notes, thoughts, and actions of, on, and by Pooder:

  The most important thing to consider about him is that, although he can seem ridiculous and off-the-wall when he’s working at his crazy and far-fetched what-he’s-becoming phases, they are real to him.

  Pooder has the admirable if mind-boggling and sometimes annoying and almost always confusing ability to live in his dreams to the extent that he knows, absolutely knows, they could come true; he firmly and totally believes with every fiber of his being and every last cell of his body that he could become that Viking or fighter pilot or lawyer or judge, not only become, but eventually be the best Viking or pilot or lawyer or judge ever. Or linguistics professor, English teacher, Brit-forensic-scientist-slash-detective … you get the picture.

  I hate to admit that he’s really amazing.

  But.

  And there’s always a “but” just as there’s always a “thing.”

  But.

  The but is that he drags this sureness, this imaginary potential ability, into everything that comes along.

  He thinks he becomes an expert at anything he sets his mind to even if it’s something he’s never done before, and this has led to some complications and difficulties in his and my life. Because he is so persuasive, it’s easy to get swept up in his actions, especially when he thinks I need to take my mind off my troubles, and by “my troubles,” I mean my dad.

  Plus, he said, summer was coming to an end and he had some bucket-list items he hadn’t checked off yet that he needed to get done before we went back to school. It was only fair. The whole rest of the summer he had listened to me chew on the problem of training my dad; he deserved a good wingman for a couple weeks.

  I didn’t think he’d take it that literally.

  He dragged me off to Murchinson’s Hill, an elevation south of town that’s high enough to draw people who want to use their hang gliders for relatively short trips.

  It was cool to watch them, and I thought we were going to sit on the hill and make bets on how long everyone stayed up and how far they went, but Pooder got that look in his eye, and before I knew what happened, he had convinced one of the hang gliders (shockingly easily, if you ask me; I would have guessed it would have been tougher to sweet-talk your way into a death-defying leisure time activity that is surely riddled with insurance policies and indemnity clauses) that he, Pooder, was nearly an expert at hang gliding and wouldn’t it be okay, glider guy to glider guy, if he “took a short hop.”

  That’s how Pooder put it—a short hop.

  Well.

  It wasn’t a hop and it wasn’t short.

  They strapped him in and he trundled off down the hill like a more or less ruptured duck, wobbling under the weight of that hang glider. The helmet he borrowed was too large and it slipped down and twisted around his head until it was blocking his forward and peripheral vision.

  I guess I should have been worried about his complete blindness, but since it was clearly obvious that he didn’t know the first thing about hang gliding, I was convinced he wouldn’t get airborne at all. I figured I�
�d be picking him out of a faceplant in the grass in another twenty seconds or so.

  But.

  There was a “wind snort,” which is how Pooder put it later, ripping up the hill, and it snaked in under the wing and instantly, violently shot the glider and an attached-but-blinded Pooder up forty or fifty feet, exactly high enough, Pooder said, that he could feel the atmospheric pressure change and make his ears pop, like in an airplane, and he thought he might mess his pants.

  That’s not quite as graphic as he put it, but we’ll go with that here.

  He took off like a shot, away from the hill, hanging limply in the glider and, I thought, screaming, but he swears he wasn’t, for nearly a mile to the edge of Happy Buckaroo Riding Stables—a charming little place where people brought small children to ride the ponies.

  The wind held steady for a beat, and the glider, you know, glided, despite the fact that the alleged pilot didn’t have a single clue what he was doing.

  But gravity being what it is (an immutable fact of nature, Pooder wants me to say), he eventually came down. With the same surprising force that took him up in the first place.

  He landed—plunged like a clay pigeon in an Olympic skeet-shooting event, to be accurate—in the center of a small pasture where fifteen Shetland ponies were peacefully grazing.

  Here’s a note to file away for future reference: Shetland ponies are small, you might even go so far as to call them cute because they look like you could cuddle and hug them, but the truth is they can be as mean as junkyard dogs when startled, and all of them, from the first to the last in the history of the breed, have the famous Napoleon complex: If you’re small, fight. Right now. Just jump in the middle of it and kill it. No matter what it is.

  And all of them, led by a vicious little monster named Clyde, centered their startled, high-strung, purebred-pony rage on the multicolored bird of prey that had crash-landed in their field.

  They descended on Pooder and the glider like four-legged avenging Huns.

  Pooder, still half blinded by the twisted helmet, crawled—I thought a more apt word might be slithered—away from the herd of tiny but furious horses and under a fence where he collapsed and started breathing again.

  “I am,” he said, gasping as I arrived (the other hang gliders had given me a lift from the takeoff spot to the farm and even provided me with a pair of binoculars so I could track his flight pattern), “suddenly very sympathetic with the frogs from the altitude experiment, even the ones from the non-lethal attempts, and frankly just glad to be alive.”

  And while he/we never again talked of his short-lived but quickly aborted (we hightailed it out of there while the other hang gliders rescued the glider from the ponies) career as a hang-glider pilot, it remained as a good example of the trouble he could find even on a soft summer day with a breeze at the top of a gentle hill with the best of intentions and the heart of a Wright brother.

  That he lived through this disaster at all is only a matter of luck—the Shetland ponies alone could have killed him—and that makes it doubly strange that in the end what nearly finished him was something he genuinely did know how to do, was an expert at doing.

  Water-skiing.

  Two things to note:

  First, in spite of his father’s discovery of the difference between day wine and night wine and all the sports channels on television and how comfortable the recliner could be after a long workday, Pooder’s family had taken an annual summer vacation north in the lake country. The resort they went to had all sorts of summer activities, including water-skiing, and Pooder spent almost every day skiing around the lake behind a relatively fast speedboat being piloted by a bored resort worker while his parents lounged by the pool. The resort lived in terror of being sued so they warned the personnel not to do anything wild or risky, which meant they were only allowed to make large, slow circles on the lake with the water skier.

  While it was very tame and safe, Pooder did a huge amount of water-skiing and became something of an expert—not doing jumps, except small ones over the boat wake, or spins or any out of control tricks—but he was a proficient and able skier.

  The other thing to note is that my father had fixed up an old Ford F-150 and later swapped it for a fiberglass speedboat with what he called a “significant” outboard motor and a trailer to haul it around in back of our pickup. As I previously mentioned, we live on the edge of a river—where the Harley came to disaster—and in front of our place, the water was about a quarter of a mile across. It wasn’t too pretty—Pooder said it “wasn’t resorty”—and the shore was muddy, but it was still a good-size body of water and someone before us had put in a small dock in front of the property.

  Dad slid the boat into the water and we had to hand-paddle it over to the dock with two canoe paddles that came with the boat because—and this is important, a strongly pivotal moment—the motor wouldn’t start.

  Didn’t even fire. Just a click and then silence.

  And as I headed for the trailer to dry off and change and my dad headed for his workshop, I heard him mutter—more pivotable information that will make sense to you from earlier in the book—“I think there’s something wrong with the fuel system.”

  Well, sure, I knew where this could go.

  A minute later I watched him head back to the boat with his toolbox and a gleam in his eye that made me think immediately of the wood chipper and the Harley and his penchant for making fuel systems become something just short of nuclear-grade powerful.

  But the boat was in the water, I thought.

  And water is soft, I thought.

  How could anything go seriously wrong when you’re only dealing with something as soft as water?

  Oops.

  It turns out that any activity that involves coming into contact with water also involves the absolute science of velocity. At slow speeds, water is definitely soft and, in fact, could be called gentle and even inviting.

  But at high speed, things change dramatically and impact at even twenty or thirty miles an hour can give plain water some of the characteristics of hardened cement.

  And as we have learned, anytime my father dives into a fuel system, it always ends with a serious increase in power.

  Which usually equals a similar increase in velocity.

  So it came to pass that a few hours later, when I returned from a ride on my recumbent, he pronounced the motor repaired and, as he put it, “humming like a clock.”

  I had been away from the dock area and had not heard the motor humming like a clock or anything else. But when my father said he’d fixed the enormous outboard, I immediately called Pooder, eager to finally see his skiing skills in person because I was sure his stories about his annual water-skiing exploits were highly exaggerated and—may all the creatures that dwell underwater forgive me—told him to bring his skis and a towrope for the first test run.

  He arrived in bathing trunks on his bicycle, wearing a ski vest, with the towrope over his shoulder and the skis tied with clothesline rope to the rear carrier rack.

  “I’m ready,” he said. “Let’s get our ski on.”

  He looked so happy, with the golden sun shining down on his light hair and that big smile. I must have been grinning, too.

  My dad was beaming and even Carol was wiggling all over.

  I like to think back sometimes to how confident we all were, how sure of ourselves, how dry and mud-free and safe and static on dry ground we all were.

  Good times.

  We tied the towrope to a cleat on the rear transom of the boat and coiled the rope for quick release. Pooder sat on the dock holding the crossbar handle at the end of the rope.

  He insisted on the dock-start, which he said he’d done many times at the lake.

  Carol and I sat in the stern of the boat looking back, and my father sat at the controls in the bow.

  Then he started the motor.

  I had never before listened carefully to the sound of an outboard motor, but I remembered later that, inst
ead of the promised humming, the motor more or less snorted, a deep, thrumming sound that echoed off the water and sent vibrations through the boat. I could feel the vibrations deep in my chest.

  When my dad nudged the control lever to the forward position, we chugged slowly away from the dock. I watched the towline gradually uncoil, and when it came nearly to the end, I called, “All right!”

  My father evenly increased the speed and everything started out textbook perfect. The rope grew taut and Pooder left the dock cleanly and was almost instantly standing on his skis and even gave a quick wave to show it was going well. I threw my arm around Carol and settled back in the seat.

  Pooder had a beautiful dry start.

  Flawless in every way.

  Except.

  The motor behaved perfectly at first, but as I said, it didn’t sound very happy. It sort of coughed and snarled and even I could sense that it somehow wanted more than the gentle, controlled pace my dad kept, a moderate proper skiing speed.

  A flicker of alarm passed through my brain. The motor seemed impatient and frustrated to be so reined in.

  Near the center of the river, with a sickening lurch and a ferocious roar that made my bones vibrate, the motor went ahead and broke free, going full throttle.

  We found later that Dad had decided that the systems governing fuel delivery to the firing chambers in the motor was in some way restricted, and that’s why it hadn’t been running when he took delivery.

  But being the mechanical wizard he is, my father “tweaked” the fuel delivery system to, as he put it, “open wide on demand and accept all the fuel that was available.”

  So the motor started gobbling gas like it was dying of thirst, and the result was both immediate and openly terrifying.

  A ripping snort erupted from the exhaust pipe and then a high-pitched whining sounded as the motor went insane, and the prop dug into the water like a million shovels all at once.