Shane Comes Home

by Rinker Buck

  But the horse country, God, there was such great horse country within easy reach of Oceana—the standardbred tracks along the Delmarva Peninsula, the jump-show circuit in middle Virginia, all the new quarter-horse stud farms in the Carolinas that were coming on so strong during those years. For a ferociously energetic and curious boy like Shane, Joe’s fun-loving, vagabond style was ideal, but it also served the Childers marriage pretty well. By the end of the week Judy was exhausted from managing the maniacally active Shane and his younger brother Sam. Shane in particular was so active, always pestering adults with questions and looking for something new to do, that Judy couldn’t find a babysitter willing to take him on more than once. She was more than happy to hand him off to Joe for the weekend and finally enjoy some peace around the house. Joe had his own theory about it. “Shane was a kid that you just had to distract, keep him busy, work him, you know, like a racehorse. But, boy, then he would just calm down real nice, real good. I just loved it, working Shane hard and watching him fall into harness like that.”

  So Friday night, fun-fun, load up the pickup with tools and the shoes. While Judy fussed in the kitchen making sure that Shane had a proper change of boots, his jean jacket and cowboy hat, Joe gave him a final, military-style inspection at the door.

  “Therrel Shane Childers, young man, are you good to go?”

  “Good to go, Dad. Can we leave now?”

  They drove and shoed hard all weekend. By the time he was four, Shane was a capable smithy’s assistant, knowing just when to hand over the clippers, the rasp, the nails, then the small ball-peen and the nail stop. They ate in diners or in the kitchens of the grand estates where they were shoeing, they camped together beside rivers and in the barns. Like his father before him—Wilton to Joe to Shane—the new lad of the family learned conversation, storytelling, just the entertainment value of that, the Childers gift, talk, talk, talk, shoe another horse, talk some more, the ethic of hard work and talk. Shane knew that there was a rationale behind his father’s restlessness, the frenetic weekend pace, and all the men laughed when he volunteered it. “We’ve got horses to shoe!” Shane would chirp out. “We’re saving for a farm.” Joe was proud of the way that Shane matured into a natural horseman and worker. He loved holding the lead line while Joe shoed, talking to a skittish colt, running back and forth to the pickup all day for more shoes. By Saturday noon, Shane was settled down into what Joe called “his working personality, Shane’s groove,” a boy who was calm now, but still very eager. During the long drive back to Oceana on Sunday nights, Shane slept on the pickup bench seat, using his father’s leg as a pillow. They were sunburned and tired when they finally pulled in but Judy was always relieved to see them. For the next day or two, Shane’s hyperactivity seemed miraculously cured.

  One quality stood out, even then, when Shane was still young. He was insatiably curious about people and burned with inquisitiveness to learn more about them. At first this was expressed by the boyish fascination for men and their tools. “Dad, what’s a veterinarian? How do you get into that work?” He was equally fascinated by Midas Muffler welders or horse-sale auctioneers. In the steeplechase country of Virginia, some men trained horses, some owned them, some cropped them over the jumps. “Dad, why? What’s the difference?”

  It drove Joe nuts sometimes, completely nuts. Riding along in the pickup, with all that gorgeous Choptank or Rappahannock River country going by, Shane would push his father right to the precipice of madness with his obsessive questions. Dad, I don’t get it. If you don’t need college to become a welder, why do you need it to become a doctor? Okay, okay. But what about a truck driver? Joe enjoyed off-loading his knowledge for Shane, but he began to notice something important. There were questions that his son asked that Joe couldn’t answer, and when that happened Shane would sit quietly in his corner of the pickup cab, push back his cowboy hat and stare through the windshield to the farmlands they were passing, looking pensive and dreamy.

  “It was very clear, early on, that Shane just wanted to take his mind somewhere, go places, that maybe his family couldn’t really provide for,” Joe later said. “He was dreaming big and had the confidence for that. But he just didn’t know yet how he would do it.”

  There were other subtle changes as Shane grew, and the weekend curriculum of horseshoeing journeys proved ideal in other respects. Shane was so gregarious and winning with people that as his confidence grew he just asked men about their jobs himself, and Joe could see that they would share things with his son that perhaps they said to no one else. Shane also graduated from just wanting to know about men and their tools to becoming interested in them as people, who their sisters and family were, why they practiced this religion, not another. Joe gently smiled to himself about it sometimes, looking up from his work on a hoof and watching Shane with people. Shane was a better listener than he was and didn’t just fill the air with grand talk. And he was very social, effortlessly social, oblivious to class. If something or someone interested him, Shane would ask, no matter who they were. He asked about the meaning of words that he didn’t know yet, and then turned thoughtful and bright-faced as it was explained and the knowledge sunk in. Joe’s social awareness about himself—that he was the son of modest West Virginia farmers—never seemed to affect Shane. There was a mobility about him, between people, places, ideas, that seemed innate.

  It was the emergence of a lifelong trait. The restless Childers gene, the attention-deficit default, was expressing itself through a new and improved model, Shane. Whereas Joe cluttered his life with extra possessions and indulged a hoarding disorder, racing from event to event without much of a daily plan, Shane got his work done first, listened, and then raced from person to person, insatiably committed to them, and curious about what made them tick. He hoarded people, friends. Joe valued conversation as entertainment, engaging bluster that maybe covered up a lot. Shane seemed to need conversation as an engine of personal growth.

  The big Childers family move to the Middle East, which would prove so formative for Shane, came about because of a curious anomaly of Joe’s. He was famously disorganized about a lot of things except for his military paperwork, which was always thorough and up to date. Joe’s records at Oceana showed that the children were all inoculated for foreign travel, certified as fit for school, and that an emergency plan for their care was in place. As it happened, Joe was the only member of his unit to have his paperwork in order when an adventuresome new assignment, a classic Childers opportunity for travel, turned up in the fall of 1977.

  The American embassy in Iran was looking for a jack-of-all-trades Seabee to fill its “one man post” at its large compound in Tehran. It was a time of rising tensions in the Mideast, with the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi unraveling in the face of an uprising by the Shi’ite followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and renewed threats of an OPEC oil embargo. The shah was one of the last unquestioned American allies in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and a huge military lift was underway to keep him in power. At the American embassy compound in Tehran, a feverish security effort was underway, and someone was needed to supervise the installation of new cameras, locks, alarm systems, and communications gear. In a pinch, the Seabee engineer would also have to be able to fix generators or boilers and make other emergency repairs—anything the compound needed during a hectic time. Joe Childers seemed perfectly cast for the job. His Seabee commanders were already impressed with his record during assignments in other unstable Third World locations. He was ingenious and fiercely independent, and never complained about the lack of tools or spare parts at remote African or Asian bases. He was pure West Virginia and could shit-rig anything. The job always got done.

  Judy had trepidations about going to Iran, but this was exactly the kind of foreign adventure they wanted to have. The children would get to see an exotic foreign land, there were good American schools in Tehran, and Joe, who had done considerable reading about horses, knew that wealthy Persians had been importing choice Arabian and Thoro
ughbred bloodstock for centuries. The mountains outside Tehran sheltered some of the best stud farms in the world, and he couldn’t wait to get there, check out the stallions, and start shoeing. After Joe received glowing recommendations for the Seabee post in Tehran and was told he had the job, the Childerses quickly packed their personal belongings and left their furniture and washer and dryer behind in storage. Their car, a 1973 Mercury Comet, and Joe’s blacksmithing tools, were shipped ahead of them. They left in early September 1977, to get to Tehran in time to enroll Sandra and Shane in their new school.

  Tehran was beautiful and fun at first, even more exotic than the Childerses expected, but there was an undercurrent of instability and impending violence. At the big American base in Isfahan where they landed, there were hundreds of American fighters and assault helicopters on the ramp, and the hangars and warehouses nearby swelled with shipping crates filled with American military equipment. Ayatollah Khomeini was then in exile in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, and every time he issued a new fatwa or gave an interview denouncing the Americans and the shah, massive street demonstrations broke out. These were in turn brutally suppressed by the shah’s police and military units, which reinforced a strange sense of tension, and very real social divisions, that could be felt on the streets. Most of the Shi’ite supporters of the ayatollah were crowded densely into the bazaars and narrow alleys of Tehran’s residential districts, the block upon block of low-rise stucco houses fronting on the main squares, and the large open plazas around the mosques. The shah’s middle class and wealthy supporters hardly participated in the life of the city, however. They all lived in the gaudy starter-mansions that climbed the foothills north and east of town. At night, Judy and the children were often awakened by the sounds of gas stations or bank buildings being blown up by pro-Khomeini rebels, and then the pro-shah forces would be bused in from the suburbs and throng into the streets, banging cooking pans with large wooden spoons. Occasionally, Joe would be detached for a month’s work in nearby countries—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait—and Judy would sit up at night comforting the children while they listened to sirens and explosions rumbling throughout the city.

  Still, they thrived in Tehran and loved their life there, roaming the streets and bazaars on warm evenings, with the veiled women and donkeys highlighted against the orange twilight as the sun fell over the smoky city. The Childerses went camping on weekends in the mountains and took the children to the small, goofy neighborhood amusement parks with Ferris wheels and rides that looked as if they dated to the nineteenth century.

  After living on the embassy grounds for a month, Joe and Judy found an apartment in a three-family house at 18 Alley Sharood, five blocks from the embassy. (The landlady in the building, who befriended Judy and looked after her while Joe was away, was pro-shah, but everyone else was pro-Khomeini.) While Sandy repeated first grade at the American School, Shane entered kindergarten and made an immediate, strong impression. When Joe and Judy attended their first parent-teacher conference that fall, Shane’s teacher was so emotional about having him in his class that Joe thought he might cry. He just loved having a student who was so eager and energetic about learning, and there was one other quality that amazed him. If the class got out of hand, or couldn’t settle down in the morning, Shane would stare up front to the teacher, establish eye contact, and then spread his arms wide to the other pupils. The room immediately hushed.

  “I just can’t get over this boy,” the teacher told the Childerses. “What have you done to raise him this way? The other children just want to follow him.”

  Shane entering school was a relief for Judy—she finally had her rambunctious older son out of the house for most of the day. But neither she nor Joe were deceived by the glowing reports they received from his school. Shane was still very restless and hyperactive, requiring constant activity management. In the evenings or on weekends, Joe would take over and work that hot-blooded colt of his. Joe was obsessive about finishing a project once it was begun, and after dinner at home he often returned to the embassy to work, and would bring Shane along. The five-block walk to the embassy was colorful and fun—Dad, why do they wear veils? Why do they paint their cars like that?—and the embassy grounds were spacious and safe, with lots of room for Shane to roam while Joe finished his work in one of the buildings. Shane loved the embassy and soon became a popular foreign-service brat.

  Shane’s favorite activity was car washing. On cool evenings and on Saturday mornings, the Iranian embassy staff rolled the compound’s large fleet of cars—the ambassador’s limo, the security-force Fords, all the jeeps and pickups—out of the motor-pool garage and gave them a cleanup. When Joe left Shane one day with the American supervisor of the motor pool, Shane jumped right in. He loved the orderliness of it, the tangible results—spray with the hose, wash, wax, and then buff—with all the Iranians chattering in Farsi around him, the American motor-pool mechanics smoking cigarettes while they enjoyed the cool spray from the hose. They adored him and Shane became the motor-pool mascot. Oh God, here comes that Childers kid again. Boys, roll out the vehicles.

  They loved watching him do it. Go-go-go, Shane, wash those jeeps. He was a bundle of energy and purpose, a miniature piece of work. When he was done, they lifted him up to the passenger seat, taught him how to shift the jeep gears, and then careened him around the grounds once or twice before they stowed the vehicle away. It was an enduring image from his childhood that Shane later enjoyed joking about.

  “I was an Iranian car-washer once,” he liked to tell friends in the marines and at The Citadel. “That was my boyhood. Washing and waxing the ambassador’s limo in Tehran. It wasn’t good enough until I could see the reflection of my face in the freaking paint. We even ironed the freaking little flags that hung from the fenders. I was a total freaking fruitcake about it, washing those embassy cars.”

  Joe was pretty good about his family life at first. Islamic fundamentalism made him nervous about life in the city, the safety of his family, and he would often rise early to get over to the embassy so he could knock off in the afternoon, walk the children home from school, and then return to the embassy at night with Shane. They all enjoyed the life of the city, the weekend camping and hunting trips up to the Lar Valley northeast of Tehran, or meeting friends at the embassy while the children splashed around in the pool.

  Islamic fundamentalism, however, could not cure Joe’s itch. He was as passionately in love with horses and horsemen as ever. One day, at the Farrabad racetrack in Tehran, he met a wealthy Armenian-Iranian businessman, Mike Malikian, and they started talking. Like so many others before him, Malikian fell under the Childers spell. Malikian had his horses spread across several farms around the country and owned a large hog operation as well. Before long Joe was visiting the Malikian farms to take care of his horseshoeing, then handling shoeing for all Malikian’s friends, and he became a regular at Farrabad too. Joe loved the track, especially early in the morning—the horses and jockeys warming up, the camaraderie of coffee and cigarettes, the smell of saddle leather and hot iron as he shoed—the way all horsemen do. He became well known and was given a nickname, “the farrier at the barrier,” because he was particularly skilled at making last-minute fixes on shoes at the last barrier before the horses entered the track. By the winter of 1977, he was rising at 4 A.M. on weekends to get over to Farrabad, shoeing all day, and then running off with Malikian or his friends somewhere, and not getting back home to Alley Sharood until midnight.

  “Judy would complain, you know, but then I would just buy her flowers,” Joe said. “She appreciated that I was making extra money. We were saving for that farm.”

  But if Joe was an absentee spouse again, he wasn’t always an absentee father. He took Shane on most of his best horseshoeing junkets, all around Iran. They mostly traveled by train and were picked up at distant stations by the farm employees of large estates. It was just like their earlier times together in Maryland or Virginia, except that now the moody views were of brow
n, sandy mountains and cypress stands, falling off to the Dasht-e-Kavir desert or the aquamarine horizon on the Caspian Sea. There were trips north, almost to Azerbaijan, where Joe shod the horses of friends of the shah. At the Malikian farms, Shane chased hogs, learned to ride ponies or ran for more nails. Everyone enjoyed it when the “farrier at the barrier” showed up with his son. Yes, it was a strange country with different views, and not many people to query in English, but Shane was happy. He was off shoeing horses with his father, listening all weekend to his incomparable talk.

  One particular image, a photograph in his mind almost, became fixed for Shane—he would often describe it later to relatives and friends. It must have symbolized to him the joyful beginning of those distant, dreamy weekends in Iran. Joe and Shane would arrive quite early on Saturday morning at the main train depot in Tehran, find some food in the small bazaar outside the station, and then board the train. First, Joe hoisted his son up through the passenger door of the car, and then Shane would chase along the aisle until he found an empty seat and throw open the window. Then Joe lifted his box of blacksmithing tools up to Shane.

  “Good to go, Dad. Get on the train.”

  The continued American support for the hapless shah was based on a faulty premise, mostly because Islamic fundamentalism had not overthrown a government yet. The Shi’ite branch of Islam had generally disdained politics in the past, its mullahs and fervent followers devoting themselves to doctrinal matters relating to the interpretation of the Koran. But this began to change in the 1970s as the shah instituted a series of reforms that directly attacked Islam—emancipating women, changing property and domestic relations laws to favor secular principles and not the Koran, even seizing the vast lands of the Shi’ite clergy. The pace intensified in October 1978, a year after the Childerses arrived in Tehran, when Ayatollah Khomeini was deported from Iraq after issuing a series of virulent condemnations of the Pahlavi regime and its American supporters. From his new base at a chateau outside Paris, Khomeini was now free to reach his followers through the international media and issued new tirades almost every week. The street demonstrations and clashes between the anti-shah and pro-shah forces were now almost a daily occurrence.