by Mark Bouman
He released my wrist, and I snatched my burned hand back. The match was still resting in my palm, and I stepped to the sink and ran both my hand and the match under cold water. Dad, meanwhile, had sat down at the table. I tossed the wet match into the trash, but Dad didn’t even look up.
That was the kind of lesson Dad liked to teach. Practical, he said, and something we wouldn’t soon forget.
I was learning something different, though: that I could never trust my father. I took that lesson to heart and avoided him every chance I got. He was the source of our pain at home, so less Dad meant less pain. I wasn’t bright when it came to math, but even I could see the end of that equation. If less Dad meant less pain, then no Dad would mean no pain.
But could I actually kill him?
I knew how to use a gun well enough, and my shotgun could certainly kill a man. That wasn’t in doubt.
What I doubted was my courage. Perhaps if he was sleeping, or facing the other way. But what if he woke up, or turned around, and I had to look into his eyes as I pulled the trigger? Then there was the possibility of missing. If Dad was alive after the first shot, I knew I wouldn’t get a second. He would certainly murder me.
And what if I succeeded? Say I pulled the trigger: who would I become? I’d no longer be the Tank Man’s son. Instead, I’d be the kid who killed his father. The police would probably understand my plight, and perhaps even look the other way. But even with my poor record of church attendance, I was convinced that God would still hold me accountable. And if God was anything like Dad, I wouldn’t get off easy.
I spent every minute I could with Zeke. Sometimes I was too tired or too depressed to hunt, and he seemed to understand. We’d walk together until we found a patch of grass or a fallen log, and then I’d sit and pull him into my arms and cry. During the loneliest years of my life, my dog was my companion and friend.
But even Zeke couldn’t shield me from a growing awareness of my near-total isolation from other people and of the constant agony of living. I felt as if darkness were clinging to me, and everything I saw was shadowed. Pain seemed to take on an almost physical form.
Pain knew all my habits, all my haunts, and there was no place I could go where he wouldn’t find me. I spent most days apart from Zeke, stuck at school, but Pain followed me everywhere. I had tried for years to run from him, but he always found me. Pain covered me like a blanket, there for me after the beatings when I cried myself to sleep. He was waiting for me at school each day—in the locker room, in the lunchroom, in my classrooms—reminding me that he would never leave me. Pain greeted me when I walked the halls, when no one else would even acknowledge me.
Pain shared my silent world. He was a constant presence looking over my shoulder. Whenever my spirit groaned from not being free, he reminded me that being utterly alone would be even worse. His friendship deadened my emotions. Life began to pass at half speed. Living each day was like shouldering a heavy weight, but what choice did I have? Life was leaden, but at least it was predictable. Lift, suffer, sleep. Repeat.
Pain was rough around the edges—not the sort of friend to show off—and he didn’t want to share me with others. It was easier to bend to his will. To stare at the ground instead of other people’s eyes. Life became a series of wanderings through desolate places, and he went with me. I hated him, yet it seemed he was the only one who refused to leave my side. He would be my constant companion. There was nothing I could do to change that fact.
I felt altogether alone—so alone that I almost welcomed Pain’s company.
Another afternoon, and more hours spent exploring with Zeke—but this time something new happened.
As Zeke ran ahead of me, I’d been asking myself what would happen when I became a man. Before Dad was twenty-one, he was already married. He already had two kids. He had already been kicked out of the Navy. I wondered if I’d even make it to twenty-one.
My only goal in life was survival. I watched other kids in school gain confidence and chase dreams and learn to do things that were unavailable to me. The world was moving forward, and I was falling behind. From what I could tell, life happened fast once you grew up. And life could get bad fast, too, and then keep getting worse. What will I be doing in ten years? I wondered.
From out of nowhere, a sentence rose into my head, fully formed: You’ll be in Montana, in the military.
The voice was quiet and clear, and it surprised me—mostly because I knew it wasn’t my idea. I knew Montana was just a big wilderness of high mountains and old timber—how many times had I fantasized about running away there?—but why in the world would I move there as an adult? Was there even any military in Montana? And what did it mean that I was hearing voices?
Here came the questions again. That still, small voice had seemed like something helpful for a second, like a real answer, until the thought of it faded into the dusk. It was just me and Zeke, like always—and Pain, always Pain—and the future was still far enough away that I tried to put it out of mind. However scary it was to imagine life as an adult, the terror of being a kid had a way of demanding my focus.
The next day after school, I sprang Zeke from his kennel, grabbed my shotgun and a few shells, and headed out. I paused behind the house to load my gun, even though I was planning on just roaming that day, not hunting. I called my dog over and showed him the gun, and he instantly went on alert, ears up and tail straight back. I waggled my eyebrows at him. “Want to go hunting, boy?” I swung the gun slowly back and forth across the tree line, pretending to be looking for animals. Zeke’s head followed the barrels exactly. “Look—there!” I joked with Zeke. “There goes a rabbit!” With that I swept the gun quickly to my right where the imaginary target was, touching the trigger and saying “Boom!”
Unfortunately, when I said “Boom,” so did my shotgun.
I had forgotten to set the safety after loading my gun, and I’d just discharged a real shell at a pretend rabbit. Worse, my pretend rabbit had been hopping through the weeds in the direction of a mahogany motorboat sitting on a trailer in the yard. Dad had been restoring it for weeks.
It took me longer than it should have to cross the thirty yards to the boat, partly because I was praying so hard—Please, God, don’t let me have hit the boat, don’t let me have hit the boat—and partly because I was squinting my eyes. Through my narrowed lids the boat was a dark, flickering blur, still in a state of limbo between tenderly restored and totally ruined. When I could reach out and touch the boat, I could no longer put off the inevitable, and I opened my eyes all the way. To my horror, the boat had taken a direct hit. My gun had been loaded with pellets, and in thirty yards the hundreds of them had expanded to a cloud. It didn’t look like a single pellet had missed the boat.
My brain shut off. There was no way I could process the extent of my screwup. I hyperventilated, shotgun drooping from my right hand, left palm spread on the boat’s chewed-up side, head tipped forward to lean against the wood.
Then a single emotion powered me back up, jump-starting my brain. Panic. What in the world was I going to do? Maybe Dad wouldn’t notice. I stepped back a few paces. It was even more obvious. The side of the boat looked like a giant had sprinkled black pepper on it. Could I run away? It was already too late—Dad would be home in less than an hour, and that wasn’t enough of a head start. But maybe that was enough time to repair the damage! I safetied my gun, set it down, and whipped out my pocketknife. Choosing the thinnest blade, I inserted the tip beneath a pellet and tried to pry it out. It was wedged in tight, though, and I had to dig around it to loosen the wood’s grip. Finally the pellet popped free and I pulled the knife away. Instead of a tiny hole with a speck of metal at its center, now I was looking at a larger hole with rough edges, and the lighter colored wood beneath the exterior varnish shone like a beacon.
There would be no covering up what I’d done. I was dead. Not get-in-real-bad-trouble dead, but dead dead. Dad was going to murder me.
My body began to shake. Zeke
hopped around my legs, whining and throwing an occasional yelp my way. My panic folded in on itself and became a hard knot of terror that hung in my gut. Only a few weeks before, Dad had beaten me so bad that I had trouble sitting down even three days later, all because I’d left a half-eaten pot of oatmeal congealing on the stove. I had no illusions about how shooting his boat compared to that. I’d be killed in cold blood. I became physically sick to my stomach. My life is over.
Then a sudden wave of calm washed over me. Since I had less than an hour left to live, I might as well go out doing what I loved. Yes: I would go for a final hunt with Zeke. It was my dying wish. I picked up my gun, cleaned it off, and walked down the hill toward the trees.
Zeke was out ahead in an instant, scouting for scents. He had already put our strange detour to Dad’s boat out of his mind. When Zeke told me he’d found a rabbit, I thought about where the rabbit was probably hiding—in that shallow gully that ran crossways past the top of the pond—and how I might be able to get around the other side and be ready when he made a break for safety. I thought about which way the wind was blowing, about how many shells I had in my pocket, and about what it meant that Zeke’s barking was getting louder.
I lost myself in the hunt, or perhaps the thrill of the hunt swallowed me, but the events of that day were erased, like a miracle, from my mind. As Zeke and I disappeared into the wild, all thoughts of Dad’s boat disappeared as well.
A few days later I was in the shed, looking for some twine, when Dad called me from his workbench.
“Mark, come here for a minute.” His tone told me something was wrong, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of what. I’d kept a clean slate so far that day—or at least I thought I had.
Dad looked at me, still holding on to the part he was cleaning. I approached him but kept myself out of his reach, all the while scouring my brain for what I might have done wrong. Then he simply asked, “What did I ever do to you that would make you so mad that you’d shoot my boat?”
The boat! The memory came crashing back like an explosion. The shotgun, my final hunt before Dad was due to murder me, and then the strange oblivion that followed. I literally hadn’t thought about it since it had happened. But Dad knew. I’d managed to live a few extra days, somehow, but now I was going to die.
“Dad, it was an accident!” I blurted, sure I had just spoken my last words.
“Okay, son. That’s all I wanted to know.” Dad turned back to his bench and continued working in silence.
I stood rooted to the floor, mouth hanging open. I watched Dad’s shoulders rise and fall, saw his watch glint as he reached for a tool and brought it back into the circle of his work lamp. There was a round window in the shed, made from the lens of a searchlight, and for some reason, the light streaming through made me think of a bee’s eye.
In a daze I walked out the door. Outside the sun was shining like I’d never seen it shine. The sky was blue all the way to forever. I knew in my gut that I’d just come out the back side of a miracle. It was a small one, maybe, compared to what other people needed, but that day it meant life to me.
32
“THE PATROL’S GOTTA GO,” Dad told us at supper. As if any of us cared. His announcement simply created a blanket of silence that covered the table.
He went on and on about it. Fuel costs were rising, dock space was getting more expensive, and ship maintenance was becoming a nightmare. The hull was suffering from dry rot, which meant that the bilge pump was under constant strain as new leaks sprang. When the ship was docked, the pump could keep up, but the Patrol could no longer sail. Even if Dad could afford to put the ship in dry dock and overhaul the hull—which he couldn’t—he was probably fighting a losing battle. And if the ship sank at its mooring, the Department of Natural Resources would stick Dad with a huge fine.
That night we heard the sound of bedsheets ripping and tearing. “The DNR is gonna ride me like a cowboy!” Dad shouted in his sleep, waking all of us up. “She’s sinking, she’s sinking—I’ve gotta plug the hole with this sheet!”
By the time Mom woke him up, the bedding was in tatters and Dad was drenched with sweat. We all went back to sleep, and over the following weeks, Dad went to work on the ship, pulling everything off that was worth more than fifty cents, from the brass compass in the pilothouse down to the life jackets in the stern chain locker. Then he hired a demolition crane to knock down the superstructure and pull it off the ship, leaving the Patrol as nothing more than an empty, leaking hull. Dad then ordered two dozen tons of sand and spread it throughout the hull.
Then came the wait. Sinking a ship in Lake Michigan was illegal seven ways to Sunday. It wasn’t that Dad wouldn’t do something so illegal—just that he’d be plenty careful about how he did it. If he had been worried about the DNR’s reaction to the Patrol sinking at the dock, he was terrified of them finding out he’d scuttled his ship in deep water. That was the sort of stunt that went far beyond a hefty fine and a pile of paperwork. He’d be looking at jail time.
The perfect opportunity arrived when a cold front pushed down from Canada, bringing with it thick sheets of rain and miserable cold. Visibility on the Lake was under twenty-five yards, and the water was heaving. No sane person would be out on a boat unless his livelihood depended on it.
Dad convinced one of his buddies who owned a big boat to motor to the dock in the Grand Haven harbor, and together they attached lines to the Patrol’s deck. There was a harbor watchman on duty that night, but a quick scouting trip convinced Dad that he would be staying inside his shack for the rest of the night, trying to keep warm and dry.
Four hours later they were five miles out into the Lake. Five hundred feet of water would be plenty to hide the Patrol from prying eyes. With his friend’s boat idling nearby, Dad detached the lines. Then he climbed down to the first level, scooting around the piles of sand, and found the back steering gear by headlamp. The Patrol would sink on its own, given enough time, but time was one thing Dad couldn’t afford. He needed to ensure no one could see his boat, because no one would fail to recognize it—what he needed was for it to sink like a stone. So first he opened the ship’s seacocks, a series of valves that formerly connected the engine’s cooling system to the water. As more water poured into the hull, Dad picked up a tool he’d stashed when he first decided to scrap the ship: a heavy, four-foot crowbar. He knew which areas of the hull were weakest from dry rot, and he intended to help things along with a few well-placed holes.
He nearly lost the crowbar on his first attempt, so decayed was the hull. The metal punched through the wood like a needle through skin, and it was all Dad could do to keep it from continuing out the hole and into the Lake. A moment later Dad struggled to keep his footing as a great geyser of water shot into the boat. Dad could see the edges of the hole widening as the force of the water tore off bits of rotten wood. He hurried to the next few sections of weak hull and punched additional holes in them, finding the steep stairway again as water swirled around his knees. Moments later he emerged on deck and hollered for his friend to pick him up.
Dad wrapped himself in a wool army blanket, and they spent the next hour watching as the Patrol sank lower and lower in the water. “Fifteen minutes and she’ll be gone,” said Dad’s friend. Dad grunted and tried to stay warm.
Except that fifteen minutes later, just as the waterline reached the deck, the Patrol stopped sinking. No more water could flow into it since it was already resting level with the top of the Lake. The ship was staying afloat, barely, because of its wood hull and decks. It would get waterlogged eventually, and the ship would sink, but Dad needed it to sink right then, not later. His worst fear until that moment had been the DNR discovering he’d sunk the ship, but now he feared the DNR discovering he had almost sunk the ship, creating a partially submerged navigation hazard. He would be able to wallpaper the living room with the tickets he’d get for pulling a stunt like that, right after he got out of jail.
Fifteen minutes became an hour. Th
e Patrol was still stubbornly at the surface, clinging to its last bit of buoyancy as if it were treading water.
Dad couldn’t wait any longer. “Screw it—let’s ram her.”
His buddy maneuvered the boat into position perpendicular to the keel of the Patrol. “Hit it,” Dad said, and the moment the bow of the other boat edged up onto the hull, the Patrol rolled over and slipped below the surface.
They idled in the area for the next half hour, making sure the sunken ship didn’t resurface. A few boards and other bits of flotsam bobbed to the surface, but nothing of any real size. Then there was nothing for it but to motor back to the Grand Haven harbor. If the harbor watch saw the boat tie off at the dock, he must have wondered why two men had been out on the Lake on such a miserable night and why one of them was wrapped in an army blanket. It might also have occurred to him to wonder where the Patrol was. But the harbor watch remained safely inside all night, and Dad’s operation went off without a hitch.
Still, he was shaken and sad. We stayed out of his way even more than usual. He had loved being the captain of that boat—and what could replace it? Nothing. It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
In the following weeks, Dad heard through the grapevine that he was a prime suspect in the Patrol’s disappearance. “The DNR ain’t the sharpest tools in the shed,” Dad proclaimed. “They got nothing on me.”
He was right, though. The consequences of his actions that night never caught up with him.
33
THERE WERE OTHER CONSEQUENCES he couldn’t outrun, however.
One morning Mom woke up and realized she was done. Done with absolutely everything. Done living in a tiny shack that had a sunken tub. Done working overtime to pay for Dad’s toys. Done driving her car over crushed battery cases. Done forcing herself to stay in another room while Dad beat her kids. And most of all, done with Dad—and she told him so.
