The Tank Man's Son

by Mark Bouman

  “How?” we asked together.

  “I told him to take a look at my work. He crawled into that small space to take a look-see, and I stood right up against the opening so he couldn’t get out! Well, he started to push and cough, trying to get out of there quick as he could, and the smoke was getting thick.”

  We stared at her, waiting for the punch line.

  “And when I finally moved out of the way, he came out of there so fast, he just about fell over!”

  We burst into satisfied laughter, and Grandma giggled as she finished her tale. “I told him now he knew why I needed air—and after that, he never bothered me again!”

  After breakfast, Grandma told Jerry and me to go find Grandpa, while Sheri had to stay inside with her. The womenfolk were going to organize what Grandma called the “savin’ bins,” where she kept nearly everything: old bread bags, rubber bands, hairpins, pennies, buttons, and all manner of bits and pieces that could be useful but, as far as I knew, had never left the bins. Grandma even saved the old curls and scraps of soap bars in a large glass jar.

  Grandpa was outside in the garden doing man’s work. At least half his work consisted of sitting in a fraying lawn chair, listening to gospel music on his radio, and smoking an endless supply of plastic-tipped cigars that came in a box with an old-fashioned American guy wearing a curly white wig. Grandpa’s skin was dark red and wrinkled from all the time he spent in the sun, and he pulled his hair straight back across his skull in thin white lines. He had been a carpenter until he got hurt on the job and shattered his hip, and now he and Grandma lived on Social Security and his homegrown vegetables.

  “Mornin’, boys. Been waitin’. Got some weedin’ for us today.”

  Grandpa was typically a man of few words but many chores. Jerry and I sighed but dutifully wandered into the garden to look for weeds. The garden covered more than an acre, and Grandpa could be counted on to find endless chores in it for Jerry and me. It was strange, working so hard in a place where Dad never showed his face, but Grandpa had a set of lungs on him, too, and I got my share of tongue-lashings. Grandpa had turned the color of one of his prized beets the time Jerry accidentally shredded a row of flowers with the riding lawn mower. As long as we did our chores correctly, though, things were dull. And dull was a nice change sometimes.

  I was weeding alone in one of the back rows when I found one of Grandpa’s cigar tips. I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I mimed taking a pull, mimed Grandpa’s contented face, mimed blowing a thin line of smoke into the humid air and letting the rest trickle out my nostrils. Grown-ups could do whatever they wanted. They could leave a place. They could never come back if they didn’t want to. They could decide something and that thing would happen.

  But Grandpa’s cigar tip smelled awful, and I tasted dirt and sawdust, so I spit it back onto the ground.

  The next morning when I woke up, the amount of light in the room told me I’d missed TV church. Grandpa got up early Sunday mornings, dressed in his only suit, and sat in his recliner to watch Reverend Falwell preach on a tiny television set. He expected us to sit on the green couch and watch too, although it was hard to get excited by a show that was just a guy talking—and people sitting in rows watching the guy talking—along with a bunch of people in robes singing. Still, Grandpa was very clear that the three of us kids were to watch if we were there on a Sunday.

  Much better were the shows we’d watched the night before with Grandma while Grandpa stayed outside with his lawn chair and his Tiparillos. Grandma loved the Lawrence Welk Show, and I loved Cannon, a show about a fat cop with a snub-nosed .38 who, even though he could barely run, still managed to catch the bad guys every time.

  After quickly getting dressed, I crept down the stairs, wondering how much TV church I’d missed and how angry Grandpa would be.

  Grandpa’s red face was even redder than usual, and he looked away from me quickly when I reached the bottom of the stairs. I sat down beside Jerry and Sheri, who were both watching—and who must have decided it was every kid for themselves, since they hadn’t woken me. Reverend Falwell’s choir was singing the closing song, and I was already contemplating how I could make peace with Grandpa, when his voice from the armchair surprised me.

  “Mark, I forgive ya.”

  I turned around, and he nodded at me once before turning his attention back to the television for the close of the service.

  We heard Mom’s car in the front drive a few minutes after Grandpa clicked off the television—we weren’t allowed to watch other programs on the Lord’s Day. Grandma heard it too, and she went to the front door and held open the screen. We didn’t have anything to gather, since we’d worn the same clothes all weekend, so we filed through the door, down the steps, and into the waiting car. Things at home must have returned to normal once again.

  16

  IN FACT, THINGS WERE so normal that Mom and Dad made it all the way through a conversation at the dinner table one night without some kind of conflict.

  “This pot roast is looking smaller than last week’s, which was smaller than the one before that.” Dad announced this at the dinner table while he was chewing one piece of beef and cutting the next, and he did so without even a hint of anger or accusation. It sounded like he was commenting on the weather.

  “The prices keep going up,” Mom ventured, “so we just can’t get as big a piece as we used to.”

  Dad chewed some more, thinking. “We should raise a beef cow.”

  “That might save some real money,” Mom agreed.

  “All right then.”

  “I like cows,” added Sheri. Dad nodded at her, Mom smiled at her, and that appeared to be that.

  I snuck a look at Jerry. He widened his eyes the tiniest bit, one of our brotherly expressions of surprise that we could almost always hide from Mom and Dad. Who were these strange adults sitting at our dinner table, discussing the price of meat so calmly? Was this what other family dinners were like all across the great state of Michigan? It was almost impossible to imagine, but I spent the rest of our peacefully quiet dinner trying: mothers and fathers chatting about raising cows and other such topics, children listening in and offering their opinions whenever they liked, and everyone basking in a sense of harmony.

  Ike became part of our family the next week, and he caused us headaches from the moment Dad prodded him out of the truck.

  The first hitch was that absolutely none of our eleven acres was fenced. Ike could wander wherever he wished, and it became immediately obvious that he wished to wander almost everywhere, causing Dad to add a new sentence to the list of chores he growled at us.

  “Go get Ike.”

  That usually meant Mom had returned from town and it was time to feed our cow. In order for raising a cow to actually save us money, Mom had started scavenging food from the Dumpsters behind the grocery store, which yielded things like rotten vegetables, moldy fruit, and an occasional intact watermelon. Mom would pack the whole sloppy mess into boxes and bags as best she could and then dump it all behind the house. Then Jerry and I had to find Ike and convince him to walk back toward the house, where the pile of decomposing food was waiting. He was enthusiastic about the watermelons, but once they were gone, he would look at us and moo pitifully before poking his nose into the rest of the garbage. Sheri, despite her dinnertime declaration of affection for cows, didn’t help much with Ike. The day Dad brought Ike home, Sheri told him that she wanted a horse instead of a cow, after which he stared at her for a moment and then walked off, muttering.

  Mom’s Dumpster diving lasted about three weeks.

  “People are starting to call me names around town,” she announced at dinner.

  “Well don’t look at me,” said Dad. “I’m not diving into any Dumpsters.”

  Then he proposed an idea that seemed simply brilliant.

  “Look, everyone knows that cows are wild animals, right?”

  We all nodded.

  “So that means Ike is perfectly capable of taki
ng care of himself,” he finished with a grin, “in the wilds of Michigan.”

  Ike became a nomadic terror. Growing scrawnier by the day and craving calories, he took to covert warfare. Jerry and I were the ones who had to take out the trash from the kitchen and toss it into the garbage dump in the valley behind the house. Pre-Ike, this was a boring but thankfully brainless task. There was virtually no way we could screw it up and incur Dad’s wrath, not counting the time Dad chose to dump the garbage on my bed.

  Ike changed all that. He learned to lurk behind some short, scrubby trees and wait for one of us to approach the dump. If we weren’t careful, Ike would charge forward and ram his head into our backs, knocking us down and scattering the garbage we carried all over the ground. Then, as we climbed back to our feet and tried to clean ourselves off, Ike would lower his head and begin eating the freshly spilled garbage. Why he didn’t simply wait for us to toss the garbage into the pile was a mystery to me, though Jerry’s theory was that Dad had uncovered the wild animal in Ike.

  “One of you boys needs to take out the trash,” Mom said one night.

  “I’ll get it,” Jerry volunteered, “if Mark is the lookout.”

  I peered out the window while my brother slung the black plastic bag over his shoulder.

  “Okay, he’s on the far side of the yard. Try walking real slow so he won’t notice you. I did that a few days ago and he never looked my way.”

  “I don’t know . . . he always seems to notice me when I head to the garbage pile.” Jerry stood at the door, shifting his feet.

  “He’s still on the far side,” I updated.

  Jerry made a decision. “I’m going to try to outrun him. I think I can get there and back without him horning me in the back. Hold the door open so I can get a running start.”

  I did, and Jerry bolted out at full sprint. Ike noticed him immediately and headed toward Jerry at a trot.

  “Jerry, he sees you!”

  Jerry had made it fairly close to the garbage pile, so he flung the bag and spun around on a dime, sprinting back to the house at full tilt.

  “Run, run!” I yelled. “He’s coming closer!”

  Jerry tried to find another gear, but Ike caught him anyway. At full run, Ike lowered his head and slammed Jerry square in the back, lifting him into the air for a moment—and then, just shy of the door, Jerry ate dirt.

  “Mom! Mom! Ike got Jerry!”

  She ran past me, but Jerry was already on his feet, wailing and limping toward the house. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Mom returned, grabbed a broom, and stalked back out the door.

  “That damn cow! I don’t know why your father can’t make a fence, or at least tie it up!” Ike was still nearby, and Mom sprinted toward him, broom held high.

  “She’s gonna brain him,” I told Jerry.

  “Good,” he managed to sniff.

  Ike saw the threat, however, and bolted, kicking his heels high into the air as he ran off. Mom came back to Jerry’s side and lifted his shirt.

  “Let me see,” she soothed. “You’ll be all right—just a bruise, but no blood. Go wash your face.”

  Such attacks were simply too much for us. Even on his diet of garbage, Ike was pushing four hundred pounds, so getting hit by him in the back didn’t feel much different from getting run over by a car. Mom demanded that Dad do something about his cow, which it had officially become the minute it started ramming her boys.

  “Fine,” he said, then walked outside.

  Jerry and I raced after him, morbidly curious.

  “You don’t think Dad will . . .” I left the question unfinished, picturing a solution that involved the tank.

  “Nah,” Jerry said, sounding mostly convinced.

  Dad’s actual solution was perfectly simple and totally ineffective. He stalked through the yard, with us trailing at a distance, until he found Ike. Then Dad picked up the closest rock.

  “Hey! Ike!”

  Ike stared at Dad, who let fly with the rock. Ike, being in excellent running condition, dodged easily.

  Dad picked up a second rock. Ike stared.

  “F— you!” Dad yelled, tossing the second rock. Ike dodged again.

  Dad returned to the house, grabbed the broom, and came back. Marching straight up to Ike, who unwisely stood his ground this time, Dad raised the broom above his head—“I said, ‘F— you!’”—and brought it down with enough force to snap the handle in two across the cow’s back. Ike jumped, spun around, and raced off through the trees.

  “Don’t know why I have to solve all your mother’s problems,” Dad griped, and then he walked back to the house.

  Soon after that—probably sensing that the grass was literally greener on the other side of the Boumans’ nonexistent fence—Ike made a trip over to the Dietzes’. Despite the trouble Ike caused us, Dad had been bragging about how smart he was to be raising his own cow, so the Dietzes had got themselves a cow too. Theirs was still a calf that they kept tied up near the house. When Ike discovered the calf, he rammed it at full speed and killed it. Not finished with his mischief, Ike entered a staring contest with the mermaid who sat at the center of the Dietzes’ cement water fountain. She must have blinked first, because Ike rammed her as well, and the fountain was reduced to rubble.

  Dad had to pay the Dietzes back for the dead calf—though not, for some reason, for the mermaid—at which point even he couldn’t pretend that Ike was saving us any money. Still, Ike soldiered on, eating oak bark and ramming us and leaving mounds of poop in the sand.

  Until one Sunday morning when a strange knock woke us up early.

  “Who’s at the door?” Mom said, still in bed.

  “Just a minute, I’ll see,” Dad said, pulling his pants on. He opened the door to find two police officers, guns drawn.

  “Freeze! Police! Hands in the air! Now!” One lowered his gun and pulled Dad out of the house, while two more officers pushed inside.

  “Who else is here, Mr. Bouman?” came the shouted question.

  “My family,” Dad answered.

  “What’s happening!” yelled Mom, peeking her head out the bedroom door.

  “Who else is here?” the officer demanded.

  “Our children!”

  “Well, keep them out of the way!”

  Meanwhile, another officer had cuffed Dad. “Mr. Bouman, did you sell a machine gun to Robert Kovalcek?”

  The question caught Dad off guard.

  He grimaced. For years Dad had kept a fully operational machine gun around, and he’d take it out periodically and fire it for his buddies. It was awesome—and incredibly illegal. Recently he’d sold it, but before doing so he’d replaced the barrel with one that was plugged so it couldn’t be fired. Apparently Robert had re-replaced the barrel, bragged around town about his automatic weapon, and then ratted out Dad. The sheriff had come to check out the status of Dad’s permits, but permits and Dad weren’t the best of friends. That was probably why the sheriff decided he needed to pay a visit to the so-called “Tank Man” with six heavily armed deputies in tow.

  “I want to talk to my lawyer,” Dad growled. What lawyer? I thought.

  “Hey, there are tons of police cars outside!” Jerry whispered to me. “How much trouble is Dad in?”

  Dad was escorted to the closest car. “He’s headed to jail, I guess,” I speculated to Jerry.

  That was when Ike burst out from behind the house and blindsided one of the officers at full speed. The man’s hat flew off and he hit the dirt, face first.

  “Ike just rammed a cop!” Jerry shouted, partly terrified but mostly giddy.

  Ike spun around and kicked his heels in the air, then raced off.

  “What the hell was that?” shouted the officer, getting shakily to his feet and jogging for the safety of his squad car.

  “A damn cow!” shouted another officer, scuttling for safety behind his car.

  Meanwhile, two more officers were searching the house from top to bottom, looking for any other illegal weapons, and
Dad was finally being loaded into the back of one of the squad cars.

  Less than ten minutes after it had all begun, we stood outside with Mom. Dad and the officers were gone, Ike was gone, and things seemed eerily quiet.

  “Well, I suppose we should go eat breakfast,” Mom said.

  All of which explains why Dad’s one-day stay in jail coincided with Ike disappearing, only to return to us several days later in the form of a month’s worth of T-bones, rib eyes, and ground beef.

  Family dinners didn’t always feel good, but finally eating Ike sure did.

  17

  ONE DAY, while Dad and I were cleaning the shed, I saw him crouch in front of a small, wooden box with rope handles. It was partly hidden beneath some other junk and covered by a thick layer of dust. Dad brushed his fingers across the side of the box, revealing some words I couldn’t make sense of. Dad stared at them for a moment and then stood up and faced me.

  “Mark, come help me pull this box out and set it on the work table.”

  After grabbing the rope handles and swinging the box up, we hovered over it like doctors beside an operating table. Dad used a small knife to pry off the cover. The inside of the box was about two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches deep, and it was filled with what looked like brown candles that someone had dripped dark, sticky honey across.

  Dad froze. That was never a good sign. “Mark, grab your handle again. Let’s get this thing outside. And slowly.”

  Dad walked backward, I shuffled forward, and soon we had the box resting in the sand a short distance away from the shed. I had no idea what I was looking at, and no more information seemed to be forthcoming. “So . . . what is this, anyway?”

  “Dynamite,” Dad replied. “It’s left over from a job I had blowing stumps to clear a new runway. I guess this box found its way home with me when I quit.” Then his voice became more serious. “I need to do something with this, though. I’ve had it way too long.”