The Tank Man's Son

by Mark Bouman

  Now his ship was chock-full of holes and resting on the bottom of the Lake, silent and stoic as every other wreck.

  How had things changed so much, so quickly? That life was all I’d ever known. I squinted in the too-bright sunlight. I tried to swallow, then wiped my cheek for no reason.

  A few weeks later, my SAT scores arrived in the mail, and they were higher than I had expected. A few months after that, a letter arrived from Michigan State University. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, and I ripped open the envelope and read aloud.

  “We at Michigan State University are pleased to offer you a financial-aid scholarship for the next school year . . .”

  I looked up at Mom and found her grinning. “Mark, this is your ticket. A scholarship! Isn’t it wonderful? I always said you were smart. I was worried that . . . but it doesn’t matter. Mark, first your brother and now you.”

  I wondered what I was supposed to say. I didn’t trust myself to speak, but I smiled at Mom before going to my room, chucking my backpack full of books on the floor, and heading outside to grab Zeke from where he was waiting in the yard.

  Now that I knew the direction my life was headed—seventy miles due east on Highway 96—the prospect excited me.

  But I also dreaded it. Most kids received scholarships because they were smart. I got mine because we were flat broke. Did I belong at college? Did I even want to go to college? What would I do there?

  As usual, the questions didn’t matter because they didn’t have answers. I didn’t really have a choice—I received a scholarship, and I had no other plans, so of course I would go to college.

  Zeke and I headed out. We would do what we always did when I wanted to avoid thinking: run our traplines. We’d disappear into whatever wilderness we could find in Grand Rapids, and we’d stay hidden as long as we possibly could. It was somewhere between our back gate and the back of the cemetery that it hit me: when I went to college, I’d have to say good-bye to Zeke.

  36

  ON MY FIRST DAY OF COLLEGE, Mom had to work at the phone company, so Dad drove me to Michigan State.

  “I’m supposed to be living in Akers Hall. That’s what the paperwork says,” I told Dad, looking down at the letter in my hands, then up at a bewildering complex of massive buildings. “I think it’s over . . . there?”

  Dad grunted. We’d already been over there, but maybe we’d missed it. It felt like every other car was driving directly to its destination, while we were stuck in a maze. At last we spotted a sign confirming that we’d found the correct dorm. Dad didn’t bother trying to find a real parking spot—he simply bumped the car up the nearest curb, sandwiching it between a legally parked car and a fire hydrant.

  It felt like we were at the center of a thousand-car tornado, and every door and trunk was flung open. Suitcases were piled three and four deep on the curb, waiting to be taken into the dorms. Students streamed every direction, carrying chairs and lamps and laundry baskets and record players. Everyone I saw seemed to have new shoes, new clothes, combed hair. They were relaxed and laughing. It was their first day of college, and every single student was glowing with anticipation.

  I felt minuscule.

  I climbed out as slowly as possible, trying to keep my head down. My frayed hand-me-downs and outdated shoes shouted, “Look over here!”

  I glanced back at Dad. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around the back of the car. Greasy fingerprints streaked the doors and the trunk lid from where his hands had marked them. The other dads lounged beside their sleek new cars, grinning as their sons and daughters prepared to conquer the world. The other dads wore sunglasses and slacks and polished black shoes. The other dads were trim and fit.

  My father shuffled. His shirt was partly untucked. His authority had simply leaked out of him. Dad was no longer the man I remembered when I was a boy.

  “Thanks for driving me, Dad. I’ll see you later.”

  He grabbed his wallet, fished out a ten-dollar bill, and held it out. I took it, then shook his stained and calloused hand.

  With that he got back into his car, reversed off the curb, and drove away, leaving behind a small cloud of foul-smelling smoke. I waved good-bye, keeping my arm low. When he was out of sight, I grabbed my things—it would only take one load—and began to search for my room.

  Dave had been the star running back on his high school football team, and his girlfriend, Jackie, had been a cheerleader. Tim immediately began making plans to join a fraternity and pretty much disappeared. John’s two loves were heavy metal and pot, and when he and his druggie pals really got cooking, you couldn’t see across the room or hear yourself think. The fourth guy, Ted, went home every weekend.

  I was the fifth roommate, and my glaring lack of social skills quickly became apparent, and I sensed that everyone had already labeled me as the weirdo. Mine wasn’t the endearing kind of weirdness either, the kind that could still secure me a spot in the pecking order. Plenty of guys were weird, but they had something that made them safe and easy to understand. You could be weird and also be a druggie, or a record collector, or a Ping-Pong expert, or a party crasher, but the one thing you couldn’t be was plain old weird. But that was me: a kid with no interests, no money, and absolutely no ability to make friends.

  Having been around engines and machines all my life, I decided to become a mechanical engineer. Within two weeks, however, I realized I was in way over my head, and by the end of the first semester I was drowning.

  I couldn’t keep up in class, I couldn’t keep up after class, and my sense of total isolation increased. I learned it was easier to simply avoid everyone I could. Between classes, especially when it was dark, I would step off the path when I saw someone, waiting until they had walked past to continue on my way. I arrived late to class and left early, or even skipped it entirely. I was afraid to ask for help because I didn’t want anyone to know I was failing. I ate alone in the cafeteria and sat alone in my room. I looked out my window at the other students, sitting on the grass talking with each other or tossing a Frisbee. Everyone else seemed so happy and so well connected while I felt completely abandoned.

  When I lay awake in my bed, I thought about Zeke, wishing I could smell his dog smell, wishing I could trail a hand down and come up against his warm fur. Mom was working for the phone company during the day and dating at night, while Sheri was busy with her friends and her homework, so Zeke was stuck in a fenced backyard with nothing to do, lonely as a sailor lost at sea. The worst part was I knew he was lonely all the time and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I remembered a time years earlier. We had returned from a weekend on the ship late one fall, and I raced to find Zeke, who was beside himself with happiness at my homecoming. I noticed his water bowl on the ground beside him, and when I stooped to check it, with Zeke romping around behind me and whining fit to burst, I saw that the water in the bowl was frozen solid. In his thirst he had licked a groove into the ice. How could I have done that to my friend? Now, sleepless late into the night, I would stand at the window and look out across the campus, the brick buildings winking between the tree branches. Every curved path seemed to have a group of kids hurrying along it, off to a study group or a party or a pizza joint. I could see everyone else, and no one could see me.

  One Friday, the need to be understood became too powerful to resist. I stuffed some clothes in a backpack, ripped a small square of cardboard off a pizza box lid, and scrawled the letters GR on it. Then I jogged out of my dorm and across campus until I was standing, breathing hard, at the edge of the highway, thumb in the air.

  Two hours later, I was sitting in the cemetery in Grand Rapids, tears wetting my cheeks and shirt, clinging to Zeke like a drowning man. I don’t know how long I held him. During that visit I must also have done the sorts of things one does on a visit from college, like eat potatoes with Mom and pretend to care about Sheri’s homecoming dance, but it felt like I held my dog forever, and when I blinked, I was back at college,
the same old weirdo imbecile, and no one even knew I’d been gone.

  John’s ability to score good-quality weed, as well as his prized record collection, endeared him to some guys across the hall who liked to party on Friday nights. One night, when I was sitting alone in my room thinking about Zeke, their door was open, and I could hear bits and pieces of their shouted conversation over the hi-fi that was blaring Fleetwood Mac. When they flipped to the B-side, I realized one of the voices was directed at me.

  “Hey! Bouman!” It was John. “You want a beer, man, or what?”

  I’d never heard that sentence before in my life. I knew as well as anyone that to be included in a party, you had to be willing to pony up for the beer every so often—and the other guys on my floor knew I didn’t have a cent to my name. I had arrived at college with ten dollars, spent it almost immediately, and hadn’t earned a penny since. Besides, I didn’t even like the taste of beer. My father never drank, and he absolutely despised anyone who did, calling them blathering idiots. Declining the rare party invitation was easy.

  But why not? I was miserable, willing to try anything.

  When I showed up at the door, John’s stoner buddy Keith motioned me in. “Grab a cold one from the fridge, man.” He nodded, once, and I knew that he knew I had no money and that he was covering me for the night. I walked to the fridge and leaned down to open it, hearing Keith holler, “The ones on the top shelf are mine.”

  The beer in my hand was the armor I needed to face the room and look for a safe place to sit. I knew Dave was an accounting major. His glasses and his hair were both thick and black.

  “You’re Bouman, right, from across the hall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Heard about you,” he said, taking a swig. “They said you’re strange and never talk to anyone.”

  I tried to play it cool. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, as if my question had been a real one. And maybe it had been. Then, “But you seem pretty normal to me.”

  I studied his face for signs of mockery, but he seemed genuine. He reminded me of my brother in a way—since I knew he would tell me the bad news, I could trust what sounded like good news. I chugged half my beer, hating the taste but longing to be like everyone else. Being different was death.

  Before I’d had too many beers, Tim sauntered into the room. His family owned a dry cleaning business that he was always bragging about, and he fancied himself a ladies’ man. He was the shortest guy in the room, and besides having a typical Napoleon complex, he was just an all-around jerk. At least to me he was, ever since we’d been introduced and I wandered off in the middle of his boring account of which fraternities he might grace with his presence. His eyes locked on mine almost instantly.

  “Where’d you get that beer?”

  So he’d been the one sharing the stash with Keith.

  “From the fridge,” I answered.

  His scream drowned out the music: “That’s my beer!”

  I understood two things at that moment: it wasn’t, in fact, his beer, and also that his sense of entitlement made me want him to suffer. Something inside me snapped. From where I sat, I screamed right back at him, “I ought to rip your f—ing head off!”

  Then I was on my feet and across the room, glaring down my nose at Tim. “I am going to kill you!”

  The voice coming out of my mouth sounded eerily familiar. Keith pushed between us, holding me back with one arm and saying to Tim, “That’s my beer, man. I gave it to him.”

  “It better not be my beer.” Tim was weaving back and forth like a snake, trying to see past Keith. I mad-dogged right back, fists at my side but ready. Then Tim was at the door, saying something and gesturing, and I was already sitting beside Dave again, somehow, feeling the blood banging out time in my ears.

  As the conversation picked up around us, Dave asked, “Man, Bouman, what happened to you?”

  I had no idea.

  “You scared me, man. It’s like you’ve got a volcano in your soul!”

  Without a word, I stood up and went back to my room, closing the door behind me. In bed, with my pillow over my head, I couldn’t drown out the sound of my thoughts. It wasn’t memories of Zeke that tormented me but the fact that I knew the sound and the name of the anger inside me. I was becoming my father.

  My anger at that—my anger inside that—felt bottomless, like something that would drown me the moment I dipped a toe into it. As my bed tilted and wobbled, I realized Dad had lied to me about life. What he’d told me was most important was not important at all. He taught me how to drive a tank and a ship, shoot every kind of gun, and kill a man. He taught me to obey without complaint or question. He taught me that power and the will to wield it were the only things that mattered.

  Yet such things were beyond useless. They only marked me an outcast. Dad had filled my head with propaganda. He had taught me to hate and to be violent. He had set me up to fail and to keep on failing. I wasn’t going to make it—not just at college but in life. As a man.

  I was the fool. Everything I had been taught was a lie, but I was the one who had believed it. I wanted to forget. I wanted more beer.

  “There’s no easy way to say it,” Mom told me on the phone. “You have to sell Zeke.”

  She was right. He deserved to be happy, and seeing me whenever I managed to hitchhike home didn’t qualify. He needed someone less useless than me, someone who could take him hunting and call him into the kitchen when it was extra cold outside and scratch him on his back leg, just in the spot that made his front leg shake with pleasure.

  Mom helped me place an ad in the local paper, and someone responded—a man with acreage who lived outside town. Zeke would love it there, back among the oaks and ponds and wide-open skies. And just like that, it was over. Zeke’s new owner picked him up from Mom’s, and part of me withered away.

  More bad news arrived. I’d been so busy bumming beer and weed from anyone and everyone, desperately trying to bury my sorrow, that I hadn’t been to class in weeks. The university notified me that my scholarship would be canceled. If I got kicked out of college, where would I go? What would I do? The spinning I felt was myself circling the drain, and the speed seemed to be picking up. I was screwed.

  That’s when I remembered seeing an Air Force recruiter on campus during the first week of school. What a joke, I’d thought. Only a moron would sign up for something like that. Now I wondered whether signing on to become Private Moron was still an option. The Air Force was more palatable than moving back to my mother’s house at age nineteen—why did that sound so familiar?—or waiting in my dorm room for campus police to evict me. Before I decided anything, though, I needed a drink.

  The walls of the small recruiting office were plastered with posters of jets and a promotional slogan encouraging me to Aim High! for A Great Way of Life! There was a single desk, and in front of it was a single chair. Behind the desk sat a man dressed in an immaculate uniform, and it appeared that each item on his desk—brochures, papers, pens, a framed photograph—had been arranged with a protractor and a T square. I cut right to the chase, and so did he.

  “I want to join the Air Force.”

  “Well, what are you interested in?”

  He gestured at the chair, and I sat down. “I’ll do anything, go anywhere,” I said. “Just get me out of here.”

  “We love your kind, son.” The man’s smile was wide, and he slid a paper across the desk toward me. “Look these over and decide what you’d like to do.”

  I looked down at the list of specializations, pretended to read, and looked up at the recruiter. Then I pointed at random, hopping my finger back and forth across the paper. “This, this . . . or this,” I said, “looks good to me.”

  The recruiter narrowed his eyes a fraction. “Are you sure you don’t want to read those first?”

  “These are good enough,” I answered.

  He took the paper back and returned it to its precisely aligned pile. “We’ll just need you
to take some tests and make sure you qualify for the jobs you . . . selected,” he said, “and when the testing is done, we’ll assign you a job and a station.”

  While he was talking, he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a packet of colored papers. By the time I’d signed my name a dozen times, I was officially “entering the system,” as my recruiter called it. A trip to Detroit a few weeks later, along with a raised right hand and a repeated vow, and I had officially joined the Air Force. The United States military would take care of me, which was good, because clearly I couldn’t take care of myself.

  37

  IT TOOK OUR BUS the longest day ever to reach Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio, Texas, smack in the middle of hot-and-dry as far as the eye could see. Gear bag over my shoulder, I shuffled down the aisle with the rest of my fellow recruits, then stumbled down the steps and onto the radiating asphalt.

  “Well, boys,” called down the voice of the driver from behind us, “this is the end of the line.” He was smiling, and he pronounced “end” like it tasted sweet.

  There were footprints painted on the pavement in four long lines. We knew enough to form a line, or at least to attempt to form a line, but that was where our initiative ended. Doing absolutely nothing on the bus had worn me out, and others apparently were feeling the same way, because one by one we dropped our heavy bags to the ground. I wondered when someone would arrive to show us to our barracks and the mess hall. Over the noise of the still-idling bus, I began to hear a strange sound, click click click, growing louder. Around the corner of the nearest building strode a tall man, his boots and aviator sunglasses shining, his uniform pressed to perfection. Cli-clack. He snapped to a stop in front of us, glaring out from beneath his Smokey Bear hat.