by Mark Bouman
His answer was brutally efficient. “No.”
Mom stood there, staring venom, but he flopped onto the couch and cracked open a manual on the inner workings of an assault rifle. Mom caught us looking longingly at Dad.
“Let’s go,” she said in disgust. There was nothing for it, so we headed out the door, limping in our stiff shoes and itchy pants.
The church was a large, white building, set back from the road on a swath of neatly mowed grass. Its steeple came to a precise point, high above the largest trees on the church grounds, and wide steps led up to the double front doors. In the sanctuary, dim light from the yellow windows drifted down over brown carpet and row after row of long, wooden pews that had been polished to a gleam by generations of sliding dresses and slacks.
Since Mom always made sure we arrived in time for Sunday school, however, we entered the building through the parking lot and headed down the stairs to what was called “the education level,” which in reality was a cold basement that smelled like damp paint. Jerry and Sheri and I would find our separate classrooms, and then I would be alone. I always chose one of the metal folding chairs close to the back of the room. I came to church just often enough that no one had to treat me like a visitor, but no one was my friend, either. Mostly I stared at the floor and waited for time to pass.
“Who wants to play a game?” the teacher liked to ask. His chipper voice was too loud for the small classroom. “Are you ready? Where is John 3:16? Whoever can find it in their Bible first will win a prize!”
We were all made to hold our Bibles over our heads with two hands until the teacher was satisfied that everyone was ready. He would look around dramatically, playing up the moment, and then punch his fist into the air and shout, “Go!”
All around me I could hear the sounds of Bibles hitting laps, covers being tossed open, and impossibly thin pages turning and turning like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. I no sooner opened my Bible at random and began saying to myself Matthew, Mark, Luke, John than a small blonde girl jumped out of her seat, yelling, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” She read the verse aloud to verify her claim, but to me it sounded like she had already known the words before looking it up. “ForGodsolovedtheworld, thathegavehisonlybegottenSon, thatwhosoeverbelievethinhim, shouldnotperishbuthaveeverlastinglife.”
“Correct!” announced the teacher, and he reached across several children to hand the girl a piece of candy.
I closed my Bible and returned to thinking about how uncomfortable my pants were and how my leather shoes were starting to rub a raw spot on my left ankle. It was obvious I wasn’t one of the good kids. While the teacher walked back to the front and the rest of the kids bantered about who would win the prize during the next “sword drill,” I wondered for the hundredth time why Mom dragged us to church at all.
Even before I opened the door at home after church, I could hear one of Dad’s German marching songs blaring from the record player. I’d barely entered the living room when he looked up from his book and barked, “Why’d you leave your breakfast dish on the table?”
I stood there, uncomfortable as ever in my church clothes, wondering what to do. Many times when Dad upbraided me for something, I felt I deserved it—even if I was innocent in that particular instance, I’d probably been guilty some other time.
That day, however, I was feeling just a pinch of self-righteousness. I had just endured three hours of church on a sunny Sunday, after all, while Dad had lounged on the couch with his shirt off.
I piped into his expectant silence, “I didn’t leave it, Dad, honest to God!”
He crossed the space between the couch and me in the blink of an eye. His slap to the side of my head stunned me, but I didn’t move. I was rooted to the floor. “What did I tell you about using the Lord’s name like that?” he shouted at me. “Who the f— do you think you are? You’re nothing!”
He marched into the kitchen and returned with a bar of Zest soap. I opened wide—what was the point of resisting?—and watched down my nose as Dad’s brawny fingers forced the soap into my mouth.
“Now bite down, dammit!”
My teeth sank into the waxy bar. The gag reflex was hard to suppress, but spitting the bar out would only reset my punishment. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to flare my nostrils, desperate to pull air into my lungs that wasn’t soap flavored. My cheek and ear were still ringing from Dad’s slap. I knew Jerry and Sheri had already fled to their rooms. We hated watching one another get punished, partly because Dad had a way of spreading punishment around, but mostly because watching one another suffer was its own kind of suffering. Why suffer when you didn’t have to?
“Now get out.”
Dad’s pronouncement came minutes later, and I ran for the bathroom. I vomited the bar of soap into the sink, my stomach heaving as the soap bounced around and settled near the drain. When I calmed down, I set it on the counter so I could carry it back to the kitchen later.
I grimaced at myself in the mirror. Some of the chunks of soap stuck between my teeth were obvious, and I picked them out with my finger and flicked them into the sink. Other bits, however, hid between my molars, and no amount of picking could dislodge them. I cupped my hands and slurped water into my mouth, swishing until I couldn’t stand the soapy flavor any longer, then spit. I knew it would take quite a few rinses to clear my mouth out, which meant I had plenty of time to think.
About how it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been forced to go to church. About my punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain. And about what Dad had muttered as he shoved the bar of soap past my lips: “Just a g—d— good-for-nothing kid.”
8
IT WAS SOMETIME AFTER the soap incident that heaven smiled down on my father and blessed him with an unexpectedly awesome weapon.
He saw a report on television about a World War II tank soon to be auctioned. The Military Inn, a fixture of the Dearborn veterans’ community, needed to get the M19 off its property. The proprietor owned one of the largest private collections of weapons in the world, but the tank had to go. Dad dialed the number on the screen.
“What’s the story on the tank?” he asked the manager at the television station.
“It’ll be auctioned off to the highest bidder. If you’re interested, you need to place your bid before the weekend.”
“It might be worth six hundred bucks to me,” Dad replied. He gave the manager his name and phone number and then hung up.
On Monday morning the phone rang. “Mr. Bouman, how are you going to move your tank?” Turned out Dad wasn’t just the highest bidder, he was the only bidder.
Dad drove over to Dearborn to see his new acquisition. The M19 was twenty tons of steel with twin 40mm guns in an open turret. The barrels and breaches were torched so they couldn’t be fired, and the engine hadn’t been run in years, but that didn’t bother Dad. The Navy had taught him how to repair just about anything that burned gas or diesel. He contacted a heavy moving company, then contacted Mom.
“A tank?” Mom thought she’d misheard. “You haven’t even finished your house yet, and you bought a tank?”
“I got a good deal.”
“The last thing this family needs is you spending money on a tank!”
“Money, money, money—is that all you think about?”
“It wouldn’t be if you’d quit spending it like we have lots of it. And spending it on toys.”
She couldn’t do more than complain, though. Dad was the owner of a tank, and there was no going back.
Blakely Drive wasn’t much wider than a single lane, and since it was unimproved gravel, it didn’t have shoulders. When the moving equipment arrived, with the M19 on top, it was almost as wide as the road, so none of our neighbors could get past until the tank was delivered. Dad had the moving crew drop the tank on our property within spitting distance of the road.
Jerry and I didn’t say much—we didn’t have to. We just kept play-punching each other on the arm and nodding our heads and
grinning. Even Sheri was excited. Having a tank was definitely at the top of the list of good surprises we’d enjoyed.
It didn’t take long for the Dietz clan to come over. “I was wondering why the road was blocked,” called Mr. Dietz, “and now I know. You bought a tank!”
“Yeah,” Dad said, practically bursting with pride. “Thought I’d build my own army.”
The Dietz boys ran up behind their father.
“Is that a real tank?”
“What are you gonna do with that?”
“How big’s the engine?”
“Geez, those guns look like they could take out a house!”
Dad laughed, patting the air with his palms as if to slow the flow of questions.
“It’s got two 125-horsepower Cadillacs, and they run, but I gotta do some work on ’em,” Dad said, as if repairing tanks were something he did every day.
Now Mrs. Dietz had arrived as well, and she marched right up to Dad. “Bouman, what have you gone and done—are you going to get into trouble with that thing?” Then she laughed and stepped closer to the tank so she could pat it.
Jerry and Sheri and I had already climbed onto it, and the Dietz kids were right behind us.
“What are these for?” Mike Dietz wondered, opening and closing some boxes beside the guns.
“I think they hold the ammo,” I answered, running my hands along the barrels.
“But why are there holes in the guns?” asked Sheri.
“Looks like the holes were cut out with welding torches, see?” I stuck my finger into one. “Maybe to make sure you can’t start a shooting war?”
We all grinned, and Jerry jumped down into the gunner’s seat, pretending to blast a passing car.
“Don’t, Jerry!” I warned. “We might get in trouble for something like that!”
“Aw, they can’t really shoot,” he said, pretending to attack a nearby building.
We crawled from one end of the tank to the other, and from top to bottom, searching out every compartment and hatch and cranny. Inside the tank, where the driver sat, was easily the coolest. Mrs. Dietz agreed.
“I gotta try this, Bouman—how many housewives around here can say they’ve sat in a tank?”
Dad climbed up and helped Mrs. Dietz, who completely disappeared down the hatch.
The Dietz boys couldn’t contain their glee.
“Mom’s gone!”
“She’s so short she can’t even see out!”
“Watch out, Mom! Turn left!”
Her happy voice shouted back from the driver’s seat, “At least I can reach the pedals! All right, Bouman, help me outta here!”
As Dad helped pull her out, he looked at Mr. Dietz. “Want to give it a try, Les?”
“Nope, I’d probably end up crushing something,” he joked.
“Lemme have a turn then!” one of the boys chortled. “I’ll run over Mom!”
“You just watch yourself!” she threatened with a smile, sliding back to the ground and dusting herself off. That made me think of our mom, and I looked all around, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Once the excitement faded and our neighbors got tired of staring, they headed home, and Dad got to work, disappearing inside the engine with his tools. After a few days of banging and clanking, and a few hundred curses, Dad declared the engine was ready to run for real. The three of us—Mom was still avoiding the tank—gathered in a knot to watch as Dad lowered himself into the hatch. The engine choked, sputtered, and belched thick clouds of blue smoke. The noise was incredible—like a hundred cars stacked together—and I guessed the whole neighborhood knew that my father had finally gotten his new tank working.
The tank made my father a local celebrity, and not just when neighbors came by to drive it over anything crushable. Most places he went, people knew who he was. Sometimes it was just whispers he overheard—there goes the guy who got himself an honest-to-goodness tank—and other times it was a free bottle of Coke or game of bowling. So it wasn’t long before he got it in his head to upgrade, and he put word out that he was looking for a new engine. A man called him soon after, a man who had the 450-horsepower Ford engine from a World War II M36 tank retriever. “It’s still in the crate,” he told my father. He’d purchased it to install in one of the construction cranes he owned, but it had been too large to fit in the casing.
“What do ya gotta have for it?”
“Oh, how about two hundred bucks?”
“I’ll give ya one fifty.”
Dad borrowed a truck and lugged home the new engine, then promptly set about removing the old Cadillac engines from the tank. Of course, he hadn’t bothered to check whether his casing was big enough to fit the Ford engine—it wasn’t—but he didn’t waste time moaning about it. He simply rotated the new engine and dropped it in backward, and it fit just fine. He didn’t bother to dig up a manual for the new engine either, so he took his best guess at how to hook up the transmission linkage. Once he got everything installed, he took his tank out for a test run. The new Ford workhorse ran like a champ and gave Dad a hair over ten miles an hour driving forward, but in reverse it went over thirty. “Too much work to fix it now!” he declared, and that’s the way his tank remained, faster backward than forward.
That summer, Dad got a call from a few towns over, asking if he would drive his tank in the annual Fourth of July parade and if he’d be willing to park it at the police station a few nights early, to set the mood for the festivities. Dad was thrilled—until two nights before the parade, when someone broke into his tank and tried, unsuccessfully, to take it for a joyride. Dad didn’t like that idea one bit, but the hatch didn’t have a lock. Figuring the thief might strike again, Dad carefully affixed a military smoke grenade, the kind meant to mark a landing site for helicopters, to the underside of the driver’s seat, setting it to go off if a person sat down.
The police called Dad the next morning to tell him that the tank was still in the parking lot, but the driver’s compartment and the hatch were bright red. Dad must have told that story a dozen times that morning alone, and when it came time for the parade, and we all drove over to watch, Dad kept his head on a swivel for anyone with a guilty look who happened to be the color of a tomato. He never discovered the would-be tankjacker, but he did discover that the attention his tank brought was like a drug.
We could see it just by looking at him when he was with his tank: the way he held his head higher, the frequency with which he puffed out his chest, how he would look off into the distance as if he possessed vision that others did not. The greater the attention Dad received, the more he ignored us. Driving his tank down a boulevard filled with cheering spectators came naturally to him.
Once at a gun show, when he went to pick up a special order, Dad told me that most people are sheep. I knew that Dad wasn’t most people, though, so I guessed that made him the shepherd. Seeing Dad in his tank, I felt certain that what he said was true. Some people really were born to lead, which meant the rest were born to follow.
One of the men who liked to hang around Dad helped him paint the tank with authentic World War II camouflage, and when the project was finished, they selected a prominent place on the side, just above the treads, and added an iron cross, one of the military symbols of Nazi Germany.
It was official. In the eyes of everyone in town, as well as within a fifty-mile radius, Dad had become the Tank Man, and that meant I had become the Tank Man’s son.
PART TWO
A TANK
9
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for my new identity—the Tank Man’s son—to spread past Blakely Drive. One of my classmates learned about the tank, and he stopped me outside the door to our classroom. “My dad saw your dad parking it on a hill,” he said, nodding to himself, “so that’s how I know it’s true!”
The news spread like spilled milk across a cafeteria table. A knot of kids formed around me.
“Your dad really has a tank? A real army tank?”
“Yeah,” I answere
d.
“And he gives you rides in it?”
“Yeah, all the time.”
“No way! Do you get to shoot the gun?”
That question was answered for me by another kid. “The guns don’t work, dummy!”
“But why did your dad buy an army tank anyway?”
That question was trickier. Why had he bought the tank? Probably for the same reasons he bought all his toys. Because he liked it, and because he could.
I shrugged. “Just to have one, I guess.”
My classmates’ opinion of Dad soared. To them my father was a legendary figure: a bold, fun-loving man who bought and drove an army tank for no other reason than the thrill of it. I knew a more complicated reality, but I saw no reason to change their minds.
And part of me had to admit they were right. It was cool, sometimes, to be my father’s son. One ordinary school day, when Mom was picking up Jerry and Sheri for some reason, I rode the bus home alone. Emma, our driver, was so short that she’d asked the guys down at the maintenance yard to add wooden blocks to the clutch, brake, and gas pedals. She was shaped like an apple and had a tongue like a whip, and we kids rarely dared to test her.
As the school bus slowed down near my stop, I could hear—even over the pounding of the bus’s compression braking—another roar that could only be Dad’s tank. I strained my eyes to see through the trees. Sure enough, Dad was chugging down the hillside, cutting toward the bus at an angle. He had the tank pushed to its limits, and smoke belched behind him as fans of dirt churned up from the treads. Dad beat the bus to the head of our driveway by a few seconds. When the bus stopped with a jerk, Dad was waiting, revving the tank’s engine and watching from the driver’s hatch, his mouth a half grin. All the kids jumped from their seats and ran over to gawk, and Emma didn’t say boo. Even if they’d heard of the Tank Man, few had actually seen him driving. I walked the aisle toward the front, while every kid stayed glued to the right side of the bus, staring at my dad, with him staring right back.
