by Mark Bouman
We couldn’t spend all our time outside, of course, and although we had officially moved into the house soon after the tornado, Dad never properly finished it. The list of what was broken, unfinished, or ramshackle was nearly endless. Maybe he’d been building things more carefully at first, but after the tornado, he cut corners with a will. He even had a go-to response when an issue came up. It didn’t matter whether the trouble was a missing chunk of drywall, an electric outlet that didn’t work, or a door that wouldn’t shut all the way—when a concern was brought to Dad’s attention, he would fire back, “You know good and well I’m no finish carpenter!”
One night after Mom complained about something and Dad fed her his line, Jerry asked Dad exactly what he meant by the finish carpenter part. I was on my stomach in the living room, drawing with Sheri, and I looked up in time to see Dad slap Jerry across the face.
“I mean what I said, you imbecile!”
Jerry ran to his room and Mom raced after him while Dad went outside, slamming the door behind him. When Mom came back to the living room, I went to check on Jerry. He was on his bunk in the bedroom we shared, staring at the wall.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Forget it.”
“All right.”
With nothing else to do, I lay in my bunk and looked around the room. The ceiling was bare Sheetrock, with the brand name and dimensions still stenciled on its peeling, yellow surface. When I was bored enough, I counted the hammer marks on it. Our closet was a single length of steel pipe held parallel to the wall with two brackets, and our dresser drawers fell onto the floor if we pulled them out past halfway. The window, like all the others I’d seen Dad install before the tornado, was a single pane of glass set against the cinder block wall with a flimsy frame and no insulation. When a really strong wind howled up, flakes of snow would eddy through the gaps around the window and float down to our floor, where they would slowly melt on the flower-patterned linoleum. In other words, our new room was a million times better than the trailer.
With Dad already outside, I hoped it would be a night we wouldn’t be called upon to fix the pump in the well. Dad had cut a rectangular hole into the dirt around the well and installed an old pump and a reservoir tank. It was insulated so poorly, however, that the pump often seized, and Dad liked to say that Jerry and I were “just the right size” to climb down into the well and bash an old hammer against the side of the pump until it began running again.
When the well was first drilled, we were all grateful to have running water. However, the water contained so much iron and other metals and minerals that we could almost feel the grit between our teeth. Mom spit out the first sip she took, declaring it unfit for humans.
Dad must have tasted it too, because he didn’t seem surprised when a salesman came a few days later to tell us about the latest in water-softening technology. We watched with interest as he collected water from our well in a small vial, then added drips and drops of various chemicals, periodically checking tables of colors and numbers in a three-ring binder. Then he announced that we had some of the hardest water he’d ever tested and that we’d need two complete filtration and injection systems, along with double the normal amount of salt.
We bought a single system. Jerry and I were supposed to add salt to the machine each week, but that lasted only until the initial supply of salt ran out, because when we told Dad it was time to buy more, he shrugged. From then on our softening system simply served as a conduit for our freakishly hard water. Mom still had to walk to the Dietzes’ for drinking and cooking water every few days, taking Jerry with her to help lug it back. Dad had found an orange five-gallon plastic cooler, and it lived on the kitchen counter next to the sink. For the washing machine, however, Mom was forced to use the well water, and everything she washed turned yellow. T-shirts and underwear were the color of lemons after one wash, the color of urine after two, and a ruined, rusty orange not long after that. Evidence of the hard water collected all over the house: an orange stripe ringed the toilet, the water that came out of the showerhead turned two of the bathroom walls orange, and beneath each faucet that dripped—which was every faucet—there was a dark spot the size and color of a penny.
Dad looked at his honey-do list, looked at the condition of the house, and decided the next logical step would be to obtain a luxurious bathtub. One day he marched into the bathroom with a saw and cut a rectangular hole in the floor. He sawed right through the floor joists as well, and soon we could see clear down to the sand beneath the house, several feet below.
“I got a deal” was all he’d tell us.
When Mom got wind, she crossed her arms and declared, “This is going to look absolutely ridiculous—a sunken tub, in this house?”
Dad grinned like she’d walked into a trap. “You know, lots of the finest homes have sunken tubs.”
The following day a man drove up in a truck and helped Dad unload the tub and muscle it into the bathroom. Dad took over from there, sliding it into place with pry bars and lowering it into the hole he’d cut. The top of the tub stuck up about six inches above the floor, creating a serious tripping hazard. The length, however, was an even bigger problem. The hole Dad had cut was about a foot too long.
“Not my fault,” Dad grumbled. “They gave me the wrong dimensions! Jumbo tub, my ass.”
There really wasn’t a good way to cover the hole back up, given that Dad had removed all the joists, so he simply gave up on the entire project, leaving us with a semisunken tub and a one-foot gap.
The hole in the bathroom floor wasn’t a problem for us kids. We loved it. One of our never-ending chores was to sweep up the sand that seemed to multiply in the house, and the hole made a perfect place to dump it without going outside.
The sand bothered Mom the most, and she got it in her head that a cement front porch would make a good place to kick off our sandy shoes, thus keeping the floors clean. Dad refused to pour one.
“Why don’t you do it yourself if you’re so fired up about it?” he griped.
The next day Mom called a cement truck. She scrounged some old pieces of wood from the yard and nailed them into rough forms around the front door. When the driver arrived, he took one look at the forms and refused to pour. He knew Mom’s handiwork would simply buckle and allow the wet cement to ooze across the sand. After he and Mom just stood there for a minute, the driver asked Mom for Dad’s toolbox and rebuilt the forms himself so that he could pour the cement. Since Mom didn’t have any cash, she raided Dad’s stash of ammunition and gave the man a few boxes of shotgun shells.
Two days later, when it dried, we had a real porch sure enough—although if it made any difference in the amount of sand inside, I couldn’t tell.
The constant sand invasion was the reason for our excitement when a traveling salesman stopped by to demonstrate a Kirby vacuum. We actually dared to dream that our sweeping days would be over, since the vacuum, we were all assured, could run on both carpet and hard floors. We gathered in the living room, Dad in his armchair and Mom on the couch with the three of us. The salesman stood in the center of the room, talking about its wind-tunnel design and lifting capacity and precise manufacturing tolerances, after which he made eye contact with Mom and asked, “Ma’am, would you like to see a demonstration?”
He unwound the power cord with a practiced flourish and plugged it into the wall. On the way back to his machine, he made a show of walking slowly over our carpet, studying its gold, scarlet, and green designs. Then he clicked on the vacuum and ran it over a particular spot, back and forth, back and forth. By the third pass, the vacuum was leaving a thin but clearly visible line of sand in its wake. When the salesman ran the vacuum back across the trail of sand, the vacuum sucked it right up—and then deposited a fresh line of sand in a slightly different spot.
Jerry and I elbowed each other and counted our lucky stars—this was one time someone else would get the blame for not cleaning up all that sand! The salesman was visibly
withering. With each pass of the vacuum across the carpet, his shoulders slumped a bit lower. His forehead wrinkled. He pushed and pulled the vacuum more and more frantically, and I could see his lips moving silently.
Suddenly, he turned off the vacuum. For several seconds he stared at it, and we stared at him. Then he crouched down and plucked some sand from one of the long lines marking the carpet. He rubbed his fingers and the sand fell back to the carpet.
“Well,” he said, “what in the heck?”
“I’m sure—” began Mom, but the salesman interrupted her with a quickly raised hand.
Without speaking, he flipped the vacuum upside down on the carpet, unplugged it, and began taking it apart, all the while muttering about what might be ailing his incredible machine. As soon as he had it all put back together, he turned it back on and tried again. The vacuum traced the same lines of sand across the carpet with each pass. In desperation, the salesman pulled the collection bag off the back of his machine. He unfastened the clasp, unrolled the top of the bag, and reached his hand in. When his hand came back out, it was full of white sand, which ran through his fingers and down onto the carpet. The bag looked like it was already more than half full.
Mom started to laugh, her hands floating up to the sides of her mouth, and her laugh was like the first rock in an avalanche. Soon all of us were laughing, even Dad and the vacuum salesman—laughing so hard our sides hurt.
“You know,” chortled Dad, “that fancy vacuum of yours actually works pretty good. Just look at all the sand it picked up!”
And so as the laughter died away, we resigned ourselves to ongoing sand duty—part of what Dad called “policing the place,” though we had no clear idea of what that meant—each time carefully pouring the collected sand into the hole beside our sunken bathtub.
Our house was too far out in the country to have garbage pickup. There was a municipal dump, of course, but Dad decided that driving our trash to the dump would be a waste of effort when we had a perfectly empty valley right behind the house. Each time a trash can in the house filled up, one of us would dump it outside—which meant that every so often Dad would notice the trash pile was getting out of control.
“You boys go out back and get some burning done.”
We always tried not to smile when Dad handed down that particular task, fearing he’d decide to do it himself or even give the job to Sheri. Compared to sweeping the never-ending sand in the house and our newest chore—filling the ruts in the driveway—burning the trash pile was nearly a treat.
We had a routine. On the way to the garbage pile, Jerry and I would each grab a long, sturdy stick. Then as soon as we reached the pile, we’d look for something like a frayed tarp or a garbage bag, which we’d divvy up and wrap tightly around the ends of our sticks. A flick from one of the Zippos we both carried and—fwoosh—we were explorers, holding aloft our torches. Flames ready, we’d clamber to the center of the pile, holding the torches well away from our bodies, since more than once a blob of molten plastic had dripped onto our exposed skin, searing us for an instant before sputtering out. Once we were in the center, we worked our way outward, touching our torches to anything that looked flammable: phone books, shredded shirts, the odd scrap of lumber. All the while, our plastic-fueled torches burned a bright, nearly neon blue, even in the sunlight, and the sound of their flames—ship ship shiiiip—became a private language, telling where to step and what to burn.
After we set fire to everything that wasn’t wet, metallic, or made of glass, we would retreat to the edge of the pile. Still holding our torches, we’d stand and watch the flames spread in fits and starts across the discarded landscape, sometimes stepping back into the pile to prod or relight some object. I could imagine I was a giant, watching an entire countryside burning, from the rotting valleys all the way to the peaks of rusty iron.
Dad’s chore was pointless. The flames never consumed the pile—there was far too much that couldn’t burn—and over time it grew and grew. The valley was glutted with garbage, trash so damp and compacted that no burning short of an explosion could have altered its shape. Dad must have understood that. He knew the trash pile as well as anyone in the family, and he knew the shape of fire even better. Yet every few weeks he sent Jerry and me back to burn. And so my brother and I would stand, shoulder to shoulder, and watch flames become embers become smoke and ashes, and then we’d walk back up the sandy hill to the house, content for a moment that we’d done exactly what our father required.
Once, when Jerry and I were trudging back from the trash pile at dusk, Dad barked at us to get some two-by-fours from behind the shed because he had something to unload from his truck. We knew the drill. Dad came home with strange objects all the time, and more often than not we had to help him transfer whatever it was—nearly always something mechanical and too heavy for one man and two boys to move safely—from the truck to the yard. We had no idea what this particular item was, but we could tell Dad was excited about it.
“This baby was on a destroyer in dubya-dubya-two, boys,” he said. “Got ’er off a guy near Detroit for a song, and I’m about to get ’er working.”
“But . . . what is it?” I asked.
“A searchlight, Mark,” he answered, motioning us to come closer. He unbolted something on the back of the thing and pulled off a hatch, pointing to a deeply concave mirror.
“This reflects the light and concentrates it.” He stopped to look at us, savoring the moment before adding, “Concentrates it enough to see things two miles away.”
He nodded happily as we gaped at the mirror. “Yep, two miles. Don’t look into it or it’ll blind you. It gives out as much light as one hundred twenty thousand candles.”
Jerry and I both blurted the obvious. “When are you gonna turn it on?”
“I’ll hook it up and we can try it out,” he answered. I’d never heard him happier. As he began to fiddle with the searchlight, Sheri wandered out to watch.
“What is that?”
“It’s a searchlight from a destroyer!” I bragged.
“What’s a destroyer?”
“A ship,” I said impatiently. “Now let Dad work.”
It took Dad a while to get everything ready. He never seemed in doubt about what to do but moved around the searchlight quickly and purposefully, adjusting and tightening and lubricating, ignoring our questions until we stopped asking.
Finally it was time. Dad had run a thick cable from the searchlight to a nearby generator.
“This’d be useful on a ship—it’s what it was made for, after all.”
He looked at his audience, winked at Mom, and flicked a switch on the back of the searchlight.
“And . . . There. It. Goes.”
We stared, stunned. It was brighter than the sun—the brightest thing I had seen in my life. The beam of light was like a solid thing, like a bridge of brightness you might be able to walk on wherever it pointed. No object was too far away for Dad to touch: the bottom of the driveway, the stop sign down Blakely Drive, the radio tower on the far hill.
“Don’t get in front of it,” he warned. “You will get burned.”
He spun a small wheel with a handle attached to it, and the eye of the searchlight narrowed to a small hole. Then he spun the wheel the other way, and the light expanded.
“Amazing,” I sighed, pulling the word out across the seconds while I followed the beam.
I heard Mom snort behind me, and then I heard the door open and close. Dad knew he still had an audience, however, and he pointed the searchlight at the ground, then suddenly flicked it up toward the sky. The beam lanced through the night, up and up until it lit the underside of a cloud.
A cloud. I could scarcely understand what I was seeing.
That night, as I curled beneath my blanket in bed, I remembered what I’d seen. The searchlight seemed part of my father, as if he were really the one illuminating the distant trees. Tall and proud—taller than nearly every other man I knew—Dad could force the worl
d to bend with his bare hands and wide shoulders.
That was how time passed. Week in, week out, month in, month out. We panted through the summers and shivered through the winters. When the weather was bad enough, we drew or played board games or stared at the fireplace, and we always did whatever chores Dad assigned us: taking out the garbage, watering whichever plants were currently surviving near the house, sweeping, washing and drying dishes, washing and folding laundry, and shoveling ruts in the driveway. He assigned jobs that even we, inexperienced schoolkids, could tell were baloney. More than once he looked at Jerry and me and growled, “Get outside, and whatever’s out of place, put it back!” Since almost everything outside was either broken, messy, or out of place, and nothing we did could change that, we interpreted his instructions to mean that we should look busy until he stopped noticing us. Dad noticing us wasn’t something we particularly wanted. Better for him to do his stuff and for us to do ours.
We bused to school and bused home, too, caring very little about what happened between the two trips. But apart from those minor interruptions, we wandered wild and free—with an emphasis on free. Mom was always working at home or trying to work in town. She talked about making ends meet and scraping by. Dad seemed like he was always playing with guns and old vehicles at home, or working in town and then staying in town to play by himself. Almost none of the Bouman family’s meager resources of time and money trickled down to us kids.
We lived hour by hour, not thinking about what might come next, doing as we liked and liking a decent amount of what we did. Somehow whole seasons passed that way, and I had little inkling that folks lived other ways, or that my own way of life was soon to change.
