by Mark Bouman
It was too early for anyone to be swimming, so no one else was at the lake. The surface was a mirror of the pale sky, except for where bits of mist still floated above the water. I walked to the end of the dock and sat. The sun rose all the way, and I counted the bits of mist as they burned toward zero. When the surface of the water was clear, I stood up and walked back to my cabin. Everyone was gone, and I took the six dollars and stuffed it into the back pocket of the other boy’s jeans.
That night the boy discovered his money. It was quite the camp mystery: the case of the disappearing and reappearing cash.
I wanted to disappear too—and sometimes I actually managed it. For five minutes at the archery range, or an hour of swimming in the lake, or a few hours at a time in my bunk—there were times when my mind went blank, and I didn’t think about anything.
But always the picture of who I really was returned to me, made clear by the other campers. They were kids who had friends, and real towels, and regular parents. Looking at everyone else, I realized I was different—different in a bad way. They were all normal, but I was the Tank Man’s son, and at the end of camp my Mom would drive me back to the eleven acres I couldn’t seem to escape. At camp I wanted to crawl under a rock and disappear. At home I knew I never could.
During one activity time, I found myself sitting next to one of the camp counselors.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
“A candle,” I managed. “We’re supposed to make candles.”
“Oh, candles! Lovely!”
Her voice was so full of genuine interest that I looked up at her. She was smiling.
“I’m trying to decide what color to make mine,” I ventured.
“Well, I’ll make a yellow one,” she said brightly. “I’ve always loved candles! I really wanted to make one of my own, but I’ve never done it before.”
“I know how to make them,” I said. “My mom made them with us when we were younger.”
“You do? Would you show me?”
“Of course!” Now I was smiling. I helped her gather everything she needed to make her candle, and we chatted the whole time. When we finished, she thanked me over and over again.
“I love it. It’s beautiful. I just love it, Mark. I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed doing this with you.”
She put her hand on my shoulder, and I found myself wanting her to stay beside me for the rest of camp. But that was silly—I didn’t need a counselor following me around like I was a baby. The craft session ended, and I moved on to the next activity.
Helping her turned out to be the only truly enjoyable thing I did at camp, and I never saw her again after that hour we spent making candles together.
Mom tried to make up for it when I got back home. She scrounged up the cash for me to play Little League baseball. Practices were after school, so I could hitch a ride with one of the other kids, but for games I had to bum a ride from Coach—Mom was always busy, either working in town or working at home, and I knew better than to ask Dad.
We made it all the way to the championship game, losing 4–7 against some rich kids from the next county over.
When we got to Coach’s truck after the game, he told me to hang on before climbing in the back, and then he leaned into the cab and dug something out of the glove box. “You earned this, son,” he said, handing me a small ribbon with a medal attached.
It was a cold ride home that night. Dad hadn’t come to a single game all season, even though I’d told him when we made the play-offs. In the bed of the pickup, small leaves swirled in the corners and my hair whipped across my eyes. I pictured displaying my medal on top of my dresser, or maybe I would pin it to one of my bedposts so I could see it when I was falling asleep. It probably wouldn’t be allowed in the living room—it was already cluttered with Dad’s LP cabinet, speakers, records, books, and guns—but my medal wouldn’t take up much space. Maybe there was a chance.
It was an even colder walk home. Coach dropped me off a mile up Blakely Drive, and I carried my glove and bat over my shoulder like a hobo walking the tracks. Up our long driveway at last, I opened the door, and Dad was reading on the couch. He didn’t look up. Bat and glove in one hand, medal in the other, I closed the door behind me with my foot and stood for a minute, waiting.
When I realized that nothing was going to happen and that no words were going to be said, I walked to my room. I dropped my equipment on the floor and climbed into bed with my uniform on, still holding my medal.
19
“MARK! STAND HERE, BOY.”
Dad speaks my name like it is poison—like he can’t wait to spit it out of his mouth.
He hurls my name at me like a curse, and after my name come questions I can’t answer. I understand there is no right answer, even as I long to know the answer that would halt the single motion with which he removes his belt and lets it hang loose from one hand. It is a strip of pure evil, and I hate it. I am a slave in my father’s world, controlled by the bitter sound of my own name.
I know the beating that is coming. I have joined Jerry in the brotherhood of the belt, old enough now to feel the full weight of Dad’s anger. Only my sister is still innocent. The terror that rears at the sound of his words feels like a living thing, like a spider I can feel crawling across my body. Not the belt again. Anything but the belt. The spiders are multiplying. Their legs make my skin shiver. My neck. My forehead. The backs of my thighs where the belt likes to bite.
No, please no—I’m going to soil myself. I’m supposed to be standing at attention in front of my father, but instead I’m leaning forward, bending my knees, shoving my hands sideways against my butt cheeks as hard as I can. Praying through clenched teeth that it will stay inside me. I look up and Dad is watching me, and he nods toward the bathroom. Unbearably grateful, I shuffle quickly down the hall. I’m not even seated all the way when a wave of it pours into the toilet. Then another and another. Then nothing’s left, and the only thing left to do is stand up. I don’t bother to pull up my pants.
When I finally force my fingers to pull the door handle, Dad is there, waiting. Ripples fall along the belt dangling from his left hand. His right hand floats at his side. “Didn’t I tell you to clean this place up after school today?”
“I . . . I thought that—”
“Who said you could think, Mark? That’s your problem right there. You thought. I don’t want you to think. You’re not allowed to think. Just do what I tell you. And that’s all.”
His hand explodes toward my face, and I hear the slap before I feel it. I’m already on the floor when the pain shrieks into my skull.
“Get up!” He’s screaming now. “Not very smart, are you, kid? Get up!”
I can hear the deadly silence that follows, even over the ringing in my ear. “Bend over. Put your hands on that chair.” Dad is breathing behind me, and I know the belt is alive. The plywood floor creaks, and I know he’s digging in. A loud intake, held, and then I hear the sound of my screaming, and it doesn’t stop. Dad is screaming too—that I need to shut up or he’ll really give me something to cry about—but I can’t stop. It doesn’t matter that he picks and chooses his targets, alternating between my butt and thighs and back. I bite my lip and squeeze my eyes and tense every muscle and still the screams escape.
After one minute or one hour comes a new sound that is impossible to ignore. It is the scream of a creature who knows it is dying but who wants to live, primal and desperate. The sound fascinates me because it’s coming from my own throat. It’s roaring from some deep place inside that I never knew existed. Carried by that howl of anguish, I turn and face my father. I raise one arm like a shield, my other arm covering my bare butt.
“I promise!” I scream. “I promise!” I don’t know what I’m promising, but I promise it anyway.
“You promise? What good is that, coming from you? You disgust me.” Dad is breathing hard, his words coming in short bursts. “Put your hands back down. Bend over.”
&nbs
p; I can’t. For the first time in my life I’m completely unable to do what my father wants. I can’t put down my arm. Holding it up is the one thing that is keeping me from disintegrating. I know it will cost me. I want to live, but I’m going to die at age eleven, facing my father with my arm still raised.
Dad’s belt finds my face. Then my wrist. Then stomach, ear, flank, and ear again. And the sound is one long scream.
Mom’s voice comes from a great distance. “Stop it! Stop it! You’re killing him!”
I open my eyes and see her wrestling with Dad, one of her hands around Dad’s left wrist and the other clinging to the belt. Dad looks at me over Mom’s shoulder.
“Someone needs to teach this kid a lesson! He never learns! He’s nothing!”
“Enough!” Mom screams, then pleads, “Enough enough enough enough!”
She’s still white-knuckling the belt. Dad turns away from us both and drops the end of the belt he’s holding. And then he’s gone.
“Wash your face and then go to your room, Mark.” Mom’s voice is a bare whisper.
I want to pull up my pants but the effort seems impossible. I shuffle down the hall and return to the bathroom. It still smells like my bowel movement. In the sink mirror I see my face and the shape of punishment painted in red on my skin. I pool cold water in my hands and splash it upward. I don’t dry because the towel will be too rough.
In my room, I collapse into my pillow, sobbing. Every part of me is burning. I will never learn what my father is teaching.
PART THREE
A SHIP
20
THE FACT THAT Dad could lash out at us, at any moment for any reason, didn’t stop life from happening. We still plodded through school. We still did chores and played board games and ate dinner. We even started roller-skating as a family down at the Bloomfield Hills roller rink. We’d spend Sunday afternoons grooving to the hits beneath the spinning disco ball. Dad would always take the spotlight, shirt flapping out of his khakis, skating backward and forward with equal ease, looping and twirling through the crowd, lost in a world of one. We were still a family, and sometimes we seemed happy.
With summer fast approaching and his three kids out of school for more than three solid months, Dad decided he needed to be even happier, so he pulled the trigger on his lifelong dream of boat ownership.
It started with a small, close-knit group of scuba divers who dove on shipwrecks in Lake Michigan, and between Dad’s mouth, his gun range, and the fact that he owned his own equipment and didn’t need to be babied, he had become part of their inner circle, diving on wrecks whenever the weather was good. Since it was free, Mom didn’t care when he left, and neither did we.
One of the divers told Dad the story of a state-owned patrol boat that had sunk at its dock and was just sitting there, waiting for someone to raise it.
Years before, the story went, a certain Captain Allers had suffered a tragic accident on the boat. While on the job inspecting fishing nets, the ship’s propeller had become tangled in a line. The captain’s son dived into the water with a knife to cut the line, and while he was in the water, the propeller slipped back into gear, decapitating the boy. Captain Allers, who witnessed the whole grisly accident, dived into the water and immediately suffered a heart attack and drowned. No one wanted anything to do with the boat after that, until a man bought it, moored it in a small harbor, took out a large maritime insurance policy, and then sank the boat and collected his windfall. At least that was the story Dad was told, and it sounded plausible enough that the next time he and his buddies motored down the Grand River, which fed into Lake Michigan, Dad suggested a detour.
The derelict, called Patrol One, was right where it was supposed to be, its pilothouse sticking out of the water like a tombstone. Dad claimed it weighed in at nearly one hundred tons and was at least seventy-five feet long. As he finned along its hull in the dark water, he could imagine himself inside the boat. Not as a diver, though—as a pilot. A captain. He needed the Patrol One to be his.
Two weeks later, Dad scraped together $3,500 and purchased the submerged wreck. His friends wondered why he’d spent so much money on a ship that was mostly underwater and half buried in mud, but that was because most people thought differently than Dad did. Including Mom.
“I can’t believe you bought that stupid boat!” It was dinnertime, and Mom had moved past anger into complete disbelief. “We don’t have enough money to fix up the house, and you bought a boat? What’s wrong with you? You’ve never even painted the house, and it has a bright orange door!”
Dad gave it back as good as he was getting it. “Don’t change the subject. I can use my boat to make money!”
“Oh please! That was your story with the guns, and you went to jail!”
“For one day! And this boat’ll be a cash cow! I can run dive trips, fish, use it to—”
“It’s sitting on the bottom—you don’t even know if it will float!”
“It’ll float, believe me. All I’ve gotta do is . . .”
But Mom had already been broken. She fled the kitchen, sobbing, and we heard her bedroom door slam. Dad shrugged and refocused his attention on his plate, tucking into his potatoes au gratin with gusto.
Dad reported his plans for raising the ship. He scrounged up some large sheets of canvas, donned his scuba gear, and with some well-executed underwater hammering, nailed the canvas sheets around the hull, a bit like one of the pigs in a blanket he loved to wolf down at breakfast smorgasbords. He figured he could then pump water out of the boat faster than the water could flow back in through the canvas. He figured right, and in less than twenty-four hours he had the ship floating again.
Talking to a couple of locals who came out to watch the operation, Dad filled in some missing details. The Patrol One had been built all the way back in 1901, and besides being used to inspect fishing nets on the Great Lakes, it had been used to transport moose to Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It was powered—or would have been powered if it hadn’t been a rotting, sludge-filled hulk—by a four-cylinder Kahlenberg diesel that weighed in at eighteen tons.
“Heavy as three bull elephants,” he told us, “and a propeller about as tall as Mark!”
Everything about the ship was oversize, which was a scale Dad loved to work in. Next came some critical hull repairs that let him pull off the canvas sheets and shut down his extra pumps: new lumber over the holes, waterproof paint, tar and caulking, and bilge pump repair. After that Dad tackled the engine, and despite needing to take apart, clean, and reassemble the entire thing, he got that beast running within a couple of weeks.
With the Patrol One floating—low in the water, but floating nevertheless—and the engine running, Dad was officially the captain of his own ship. It was nearly summertime. Mom was working full-time in a factory and trying to keep her household from falling apart or being swallowed by sand. Jerry was spending more and more time in our room, studying for his end-of-the-year exams, while Sheri was trying to spend as much time at her friends’ houses as she could. I was imagining a summer in which I left home every morning, striking out for the deserted woods.
As usual, our plans didn’t matter, because once the boat dried out, we would be saying good-bye to our house on Blakely Drive for the summer and moving on board the Patrol One.
“Here, Mark, take this suitcase to the car. We’re going to stay on the boat for a while,” Mom said when the time came.
“How long are we going to be gone?”
Mom sighed. “Not sure. Come back and get this one when you’re done—and don’t drop it. It’ll—”
“It’ll spill if I don’t hold it closed. I know.”
I stuffed the first suitcase in the trunk of the car. Dad had already claimed most of the space with boxes filled with greasy tools and other items from the shed. Once the last bit of luggage was loaded, the three of us kids crammed into the backseat, squeezed between bags of food Mom had packed. She was waiting in the passenger seat, fanning herself. It was
near a hundred degrees in the car. I could feel Sheri’s sweaty leg against mine, but there wasn’t enough space to move.
Dad eventually wandered over with another box. “Here, put this on your lap, Jerry,” Dad said, thrusting the dirty cardboard through the rear window. I looked over and saw a random mess of bolts, nuts, and pipe fittings, stuff that had been lying around the shed for years. Dad backed the Ford past the tank and then stopped, giving the house a quick scan before dropping the car into drive and pulling away.
“Hope it’s still here when we get back,” Dad said. With that he punched the gas and we sped down the hill. I heard the occasional pop from a car battery chip slapping the underside of the car, and then we pulled out onto the road.
21
WHAT I DIDN’T REALIZE was that moving on board meant, well, a boatload of backbreaking work. Dad had known, but he didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
The Patrol was a two-level ship with twelve rooms, including five bedrooms that Dad insisted on calling staterooms. At the bow, on the top floor, was a large open room called the fish house, which the Department of Natural Resources had used to check that commercial nets were regulation size. Moving back along the top floor, we’d reach the pilothouse, the kitchen—Dad made us call it the galley—and the dining room, which had a large table bolted to the floor, and at the back of the dining room was a narrow, nearly vertical stairway with metal pipes for handrails. Belowdecks came the parts room, the engine room, the five staterooms, and finally the claustrophobic chain locker at the tail. Beneath all of that ran the bilge, extending the length of the ship.
