The Tank Man's Son

by Mark Bouman

  Diving was starting to sound less fun already, but I couldn’t turn back.

  “This is the J-valve,” Dad continued, “and you just pull this lever if you ever run out of air.”

  The thought of running out of air terrified me. The tanks were so heavy it seemed unlikely I would have any control or be able to maneuver my hand behind me to reach the valve. If something went wrong, I would just die. And it would be a horrible death.

  “You’ve got plenty of air,” Dad explained, “but just in case something goes wrong, remember this, and never go below sixty feet. You’ll get the bends if you do, and your blood will boil when you come up. You do not want the bends.”

  I agreed! Now I didn’t want to die underwater if something went wrong, and I didn’t want to come back up if something went wrong. Diving was sounding worse and worse. I would have no way to know how deep I was anyway. Dad carried a depth gauge on his wrist, but I knew he’d never let me use it.

  “And remember to clear your mask like this,” he motioned, “and always follow your smallest bubbles to the surface.”

  That sounded impossible. Smallest bubbles? And didn’t every bubble race up as fast as it could? That’s what I planned on doing. I decided I’d rather die of the blood-bubble thing than the blacking-out-and-drowning thing.

  “Let the air out of your lungs slowly as you surface, and don’t hold your breath or your lungs will burst.”

  For Pete’s sake, I thought. Now I’ve got to worry about my lungs bursting?

  “Remember, kid,” Dad intoned, and he rapped his knuckles on my forehead. “Now let’s get to buddy breathing.”

  Dad tossed the air tank over the side and allowed it to sink. He nodded at me. “Dive down to the tank,” Dad instructed, then added, “Don’t worry. I’ll meet you there.”

  Dad jumped into the water and disappeared. I knew the water was close to twenty feet deep, so it would take all my effort to reach the tanks before running out of air. Dad was wearing flippers and a lead weight belt, so he could shoot to the bottom in seconds. I took the biggest breath I could, held my mask to my face, then jumped.

  The cold water shocked my whole body awake. Down, down I went, my ears aching and my lungs feeling fit to burst. I could see Dad, waiting in the murk, holding on to the air tank with one hand and waving me over with the other. Desperate for air now, I reached for the regulator that was in his mouth. Dad took the regulator out and pushed it toward my face. I snatched it with both hands, crammed it into my mouth, and pulled in air with huge gulps. The feeling of fresh oxygen flowing into my lungs made me hang on to the regulator with a white-knuckle grip. Great clouds of air bubbles exploded from the back of the tank as I exhaled the air almost as quickly as I took it in. All too quickly, though, Dad reached across and took the regulator back, but he only took one gulp of air before handing the mouthpiece back to me. And so it went, back and forth, Dad giving me an extra breath or two, and when I’d calmed down, we slowly finned back toward the surface, buddy breathing all the way, until at last my head broke the surface.

  “Okay,” Dad grunted as he climbed onto the boat, “now you know in case you need it. Buddy breathing has saved more men than you could count in a month.”

  From then on I was qualified to dive, and I always dived alone. Only Dad had a wet suit, whereas I had to trunk it. When the mood hit, I’d ask Dad to lower the heavy tank into the water on a rope. I’d tug on a set of flippers and a mask, then jump into the Lake, surfacing beside the tank and treading water while I slipped off the rope knot and worked my way into the tank’s stiff harness. Then I’d clear my mask, clamp the regulator between my teeth, and give Dad a thumbs-up.

  Then down I finned, alone, into a blue-green world of liquid light.

  The first few moments were always controlled panic: the icy water, the bizarre feeling of being able to breathe underwater, the sense that I was somewhere I didn’t belong. And there, directly above me, drawing nine feet of water, hung the bulk of the Patrol, a shimmering shadow when seen from below, its massive propeller hanging motionless, slowly adding layers of blood-red rust. Soon, though, and inevitably, the quiet of diving took over. Time seemed to slow, and in the long seconds I could hear myself pulling in air, the bubbles leaving the regulator with a soft rush, like scattering birds. I could feel the water slipping around my body as I finned downward, and then I would see that day’s wrecked ship below me. No matter the size of the wreck, I always felt small by comparison. Water swirled around the ship, shifting silt on the bottom, the current pulsing and pushing. I never dared approach too closely for fear of snagging my tank and becoming trapped, but each time I wondered what it would be like to enter the hull, to swim through nearly black staterooms filled with floating things best left to the imagination.

  The dive had to end less than forty minutes after it began. I knew it was time to head back when the air took on the taste of metal—we never dived deep enough to require decompression stops, like Dad sometimes did, so as long as I could see the silhouette of the Patrol, I could make it back. Dad would help me manage the heavy tank, and if one of his friends happened to be on deck, he’d brag about what I knew how to do underwater.

  “This kid has done more already than most men do their entire lives,” he’d say, and he didn’t need, in his words, “some government pencil pusher telling me what I can and can’t do.” He wasn’t just the captain of his own ship—he was master and commander.

  And he needed everyone to know it. Each time we pulled into a new harbor, Dad at the helm in his captain’s hat, it wouldn’t take long for him to befriend a curious onlooker at the dock. He was a natural storyteller, and he was an expert at projecting a kind of manly intrigue. Within minutes he would be inviting whoever it was to come aboard for a tour of the engine room. The allure started with the ship itself—what kind of man piloted a one-hundred-ton boat around the Great Lakes just for fun? That was an unasked question to which Dad’s whole person was constantly shouting an answer.

  Once we docked at Manistee to get in the lee of some bad weather that was heading our way. Mom and Sheri stayed on the boat while Dad told Jerry and me to follow him so we could carry some groceries back from the store.

  As we stepped onto the dock, the other boats looked tiny. Dad was taking his sweet time connecting our boat to the shore power, so Jerry and I amused ourselves by picking out what we’d like to try.

  “How about that one?”

  “The long sailboat? Nah, too much work to rig everything up. How about that one?”

  “It’s nice. But that one’s even nicer.”

  In fact, it was the nicest boat within sight. Significantly smaller than ours, of course, it still had every amenity. It was in cherry shape, and the man who stepped off it looked like he spent all his free time polishing and cleaning his beauty. Clearly retired, he wore a bright yellow jacket and matching hat.

  Dad was just finishing with the electrical hookup when the man wandered over. “Never seen a ship like this before,” he commented.

  “Like a tour?” Dad asked immediately.

  “Sure,” he said, surprised to be invited on so quickly. “I’d love one.”

  Jerry and I groaned. We knew the “tour” would last at least thirty minutes, after which we’d still be forced to follow Dad to the grocery store. But he wasn’t about to miss a chance to show off.

  “Come on board,” Dad said graciously, reaching out his hand to help the man up. “Let’s start at the pilothouse.”

  As they left, Jerry told me he was going to wait in the galley, but I decided to tag along on the tour, just in case the visitor said or did something interesting. I caught up to them just as Dad was giving him the vital statistics.

  “The four-cylinder Kahlenberg diesel weighs in at eighteen tons. Patrol One’s eighty feet long and weighs in at one hundred tons.” He paused for effect. “And she draws nine and a half feet of water and has a five-foot prop.”

  The man couldn’t respond with anything more artic
ulate than an astonished “Wow.” That was how most people reacted.

  Dad continued the tour throughout the ship, ending as he always did in the engine room. The sheer size of the engine towering over us shocked most people. Dad reeled in his tour guests like fish on hooks. By the time Dad was done, the stranger looked as impressed as if he’d just been given a tour of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

  “Thank you for the tour. Thank you so much! It’s mighty impressive!” As the man in yellow left the engine room with Dad, I noticed a large black oil smear on the back of his jacket. Dad saw it too but didn’t say a thing. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and both of us knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Come on, Mark,” Dad said once the man was gone. “Where’s your brother? What are you two lollygagging for, anyway? We’ve got food to get!”

  23

  IT WAS EXPENSIVE TO run the Patrol. Dad ran out of cash long before he grew tired of piloting his boat from harbor to harbor, so even though we took quite a few trips early on, soon we simply lived on the ship. We docked near the coal quay in the Grand River, generally carrying on as we would have at home, apart from the surrounding hills being replaced by polluted water. We still ate boring meals, played Monopoly, argued, listened to the radio, and wandered around, trying to do nothing much but just enough to keep Dad from giving us chores.

  Then, as the summer trudged on, my stars suddenly aligned. Both Mom and Dad had found nine-to-five jobs in Grand Rapids, and so weekday mornings, before seven, they’d walk down the gangway and along the shore to our Ford Custom for the long drive into town, leaving us kids alone on the ship.

  It was the happiest time of my life.

  Every morning I’d wake up before my brother and sister. First thing, I’d cram my head through the single porthole, which was barely wide enough, and survey the river. Nearly always it was covered by a morning mist that beckoned me to discover what it was hiding.

  The ship was quiet and peaceful, and no one ever told me to do anything, which was a state of affairs that blew my mind. After stretching and looking out the window, I’d pad down the hall from my stateroom to use the Patrol’s single bathroom—Dad taught us to call it “the head”—which was really more like a closet. There was a shower stall, which only worked when the ship’s engine was running, and a portable toilet that squirted dark blue chemicals when it flushed. Originally the shower had been designed to have a water heater hooked up to it, but Dad never replaced the broken one after raising the ship. He had a better idea. Since the ship was designed to pump the surrounding lake water through pipes in the engine room, thus cooling the engine, Dad replumbed one of the pipes so that some of the water, after flowing through the scorching engine, came into the shower instead of returning directly to the river. It was a good plan because it created hot water for free—assuming the engine was running—and cooled off the diesel at the same time. It wasn’t a great plan, however, because the hot water it created was just this side of boiling. It was impossible to stand directly under the spray without being scalded. That meant there was only one way to use the shower: if I stood with my back against the wall, as far from the spray as possible, I could splash bits of water out of the spray with only mild pain in my hand, and by the time the drips reached the tender skin of my stomach or face, the heat was bearable.

  Which led me to ask: Why bother to shower? By the end of most days, I’d spent hours and hours in the same river water, only outside the shower stall it was a good seventy degrees cooler. So each night, when it was time for bed, I’d simply pull off my wet clothes—shoes, socks, shorts, T-shirt—and throw them on the floor. The next morning, I’d shake the bits of green algae out of my damp socks and put the whole outfit back on.

  Once Mom said to me, “You know, Mark, when Dad’s friend Gary comes to stay on the boat, he washes his face, brushes his teeth, and combs his hair every morning before he goes anywhere. You should do the same.”

  What a clean freak! I thought. Good for Gary, but he was the first person I’d ever heard of who did such things. Dad certainly didn’t. He constantly reeked of body odor, and it could become overpowering if we needed to spend much time in close proximity. He was sour and almost acidic—the smell made me want to take a deep breath of fresh air, which wasn’t a helpful reflex if I was trapped beside him holding a wrench while he was tightening a bolt in the engine room. Dad treated his body almost as an afterthought. His teeth, which I rarely saw him brush, were yellow and usually caked with the remains of his last meal. He kept an electric razor in his car, and when we were driving, he’d grab it out of the glove box and flick it on, letting the dark trimmings drift onto his lap or even blow around the car if the windows were down. If we got somewhere before he was finished, he’d simply toss the razor back in the glove box and finish the job later. The razor couldn’t handle his plentiful nose or ear hair, so he would reach up with his index finger and thumb and rip out a few, and then flick them away—in the car or on the kitchen floor or at a store, wherever he happened to be. I didn’t necessarily want to turn out like that, but Gary seemed to be taking things too far in the other direction.

  With complete freedom to do anything I wanted, I usually chose to fish with Jerry and then explore along the shoreline by myself. We rarely played with Sheri. She didn’t care for fishing or exploring and always chose to stay on the boat by herself. We played Monopoly together sometimes, especially at night, but even then Jerry and I preferred to play chess against each other. Sheri hated chess. Without Mom nagging us to include our sister, Sheri spent hours and hours by herself. During those slow summer days, I suppose she played with her dolls or just waited around for time to pass—but whatever she did, she did it without us.

  Despite our choosing to fish, Dad never bought us any fishing tackle. “What a waste of my good money!” he’d fume. “No matter what I buy you kids, you lose it!”

  Catching anything became a challenge, but we figured out how to scavenge most things and beg what we couldn’t, from hooks and lures to line and weights. There were usually a few poles around the ship, left by one of Dad’s buddies for when they came to visit. The peninsula was a popular spot for local fishermen, and it didn’t take us long to learn which underwater logs and edge-of-the-shore bushes snagged the most gear. Other fishermen seemed to have an unlimited supply of tackle, and the minute a nice hook-and-lure combo got hung up, they’d cut it loose and tie in a new one. Jerry and I would watch, and the minute they closed up shop and headed back to their cars, we’d swoop in, drag a sunken branch to the surface, and harvest its hidden treasures.

  As we wandered from one fishing spot to the next, we interacted with quite a cast of characters. Rich and poor, black and white, young and old. The rich guys showed up on the weekends and left the best gear, but the black families—Dad called them coons, whatever that meant—were the nicest.

  “Let’s head out fishing,” I’d suggest to Jerry, and nearly always I was answered by the same lament.

  “We don’t have any worms.”

  We had plenty of lures, but they were tricky to use. Earlier in the summer, when it was cooler and damper, we could find worms under every rock. But with the August heat, the worms had all gone deep underground, and we’d be lucky to find a single one.

  “I know we don’t, but I’m going fishing anyway. Maybe we can find some along the way.”

  We grabbed our gear, and after a short walk we arrived at our favorite fishing spot, near the base of a bridge.

  “I’m going to check the rocks near the shore,” I said, and Jerry, who had already split up to look elsewhere, called back, “Okay, let me know what you find.”

  After a few minutes of unsuccessful searching, I realized we’d have to fish without worms. Making my way back toward Jerry, I nearly tripped over a man who was sitting near the shore. He was wearing a dirty coat, and his pole was propped up on a forked stick so that he didn’t need to hold it.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. His v
oice sounded thick, like he was talking with a peppermint candy in his mouth.

  “Looking for worms,” I answered.

  “There ain’t no worms around here—too hot!”

  As he spoke to me, I noticed he was missing one of his front teeth. A ragged beard covered much of his face, and the skin I could see was sunburned and crisscrossed with wrinkles. “You need to buy yourself some worms is what you need to do,” he continued. I noticed the neck of a bottle protruding from a brown paper bag beside him. “Don’t you know anything?”

  I moved past him as quickly as I could, and as I did, I heard friendly voices up ahead. I came around a bend to find a black family fishing together, all sitting in lawn chairs and holding poles.

  “Junior,” the mother was saying, “help your sister with her pole.” The pole the mom held was made from bamboo and was so long that she could reach the water without casting or leaving her chair. A small red-and-white float bobbed up and down at the end of her line.

  I flipped some rocks, still hoping to find a worm before rejoining my brother.

  “Honey,” called the woman, “are you looking for worms?”

  I glanced up, and the whole family was looking back at me.

  “Yes,” I admitted, hoping I wasn’t taking their spot.

  “You come right over here and get some from me,” she said immediately. She reached in her pail and pulled out a handful of worms. “Here—is that enough? Why don’t you take some more?”

  “Okay, ah, well . . . thanks!” I managed. I set my pole down and held out my cupped hands, and she dropped the mass of squirming worms right into them.

  “Do you have something to put them in?”

  I shook my head.

  “Junior, bring that cup over here.” She motioned. The young boy carried over a small white Styrofoam cup. I transferred the worms, picked up my pole, and smiled at the woman.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot!”

  “No problem, and you have a good day.”