Chapter Five
I learned on my Whidbey trip that the Black Ravens’ cruise was going to be the last one with Prowlers. They would begin transitioning to the EA-18G Growler, an electronic warfare version of the Hornet, when they got home.
I’d thought of writing about Dad and his flying days through the prism of modern pilots, but I always passed, the pain of examination too great to bear. But now the Prowler was on its last cruise. It was now or never. I called Mom not long after Ware took command of the Black Ravens and told her I wanted to write about Dad and the squadron. She had a question.
“Hon, is it going to be fiction or nonfiction?”
I took a breath and counted to ten.
“Mom, it’s nonfiction. Have I ever written fiction in my life?”
“Okay, dear, I just was wondering.”
I hung up a few minutes later. The more I thought about it, the more relevant her question became. My vision of my father was incomplete, a sort of fiction. Framed images of a serious man in a black uniform with an American flag behind him hung on the walls of my childhood home. On the mantelpiece were models of his planes, and inside a glass case there was a folded American flag presented on behalf of a grateful nation. What it all meant I didn’t know.
This is what I remember.
A little boy knows some things. Mom and Dad come from different places. It’s not about class or money; those are things I don’t understand. It’s geography, a word I can’t quite pronounce but whose answers lie in a big blue book kept on a high shelf. He is from the North, she is from the South, and we live in the West.
I see it best on vacations. Dad is one of six kids, raised in Brockton, Massachusetts, home of somebody named Rocky Marciano. In December 1972, we drive there from somewhere in a storm arriving just in time for the wedding of Dad’s baby sister, Marie. We go straight to the church and I fall asleep in a pew.
Then we go to his home. We live in a suburban tract home with air-conditioning and two bathrooms. My grandparents’ home is old and smelly. The carpet is faded green, the ceilings are slanted, and an old cat slinks around the place. There is only one shower in the two-story home on Herrod Avenue, so we bathe in shifts that seem to last the whole day long.
Grandpa Rodrick is just sixty, but he seems to be the oldest man in the world. He just got laid off from his job in shipping at a shoe factory but still slicks his hair back with Brylcreem and eats franks and beans for breakfast every morning. The house has a family room just like ours, but there isn’t much family about it. Right at 7:00 p.m., Grandpa retires to his La-Z-Boy and scowls at the Boston Globe while the Bruins skate around on Channel 38.
The kids are all adults now, but they still tiptoe around the old man. He tolerates me as long as I stay quiet. I plow through Time magazine’s Year in Review from the 1930s and 1940s stacked on a bookshelf. Every once in a while, I asked a question. Who was Tojo? Where was Ethiopia and why did Italy invade? Sometimes, he answers, sometimes he just mutters.
“Jiminy Christmas, you knucklehead. Why do you need to know that?”
Grandma Rodrick is the exact opposite. On her wrist is a jangle of bracelets holding charms with pictures of her rapidly multiplying grandchildren. She still works for Kelly Girl, a temp agency, filling in at offices three or four days a week. I sit in the backseat with her and Mom on the way home from Mass. She sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and nuzzles my face with her whiskery chin, smelling of Avon. Sometimes, she talks about grown-up things when she thinks I’m asleep. I hear about a miscarriage and a day driving around Brockton when she thought of ditching Grandpa.
Where Dad fits in his family is clear. He is the hero. Dad’s family isn’t exactly poor, but they are far from rich. Their pilot son gives color to their black-and-white world. The neighborhood is equally invested; I run errands with his sister, Lyn, and the grocer and the baker ask after Pete.
His black Irish features make him seem fierce, but he has a crinkly smile that makes you know he doesn’t think he’s better than you. His brothers and sisters approach him with serious looks and grown-up questions.
Dad’s just about to turn thirty.
His family views Mom just as I do: she is the prettiest creature, with light in her eyes. There’s usually a touch of lipstick on gapped teeth inside a mouth that is always working a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. She’s from Virginia Beach, Virginia, less than 600 miles from Brockton, but she might as well be from Mars.
Her dad is the cartoon opposite of Dad’s dad. Bill Gentry is a joker; wisecracks slip from his mouth almost as quickly as marriage proposals. He’s on his fourth or fifth rodeo. It is hard to get my parents to cough up details, but I’m smart and nosy and get it from here and there.
Sometimes, he takes me on his rounds in his sky blue boat of a car plopping me on a stranger’s couch in front of a Leave It to Beaver rerun. A nice lady gives me a sandwich and pats my head. They disappear into another room, and Grandpa emerges precisely one Lumpy Rutherford episode later with a grin and sweat on his forehead.
He is cashless on the drive home. Grandpa Gentry pulls up to an automated tollbooth and fake-tosses coins into the collection box. He acts shocked and angry when the gate won’t open. I can’t stop laughing. The gate opens.
He golfs all the time and keeps soft-porn novels in easily accessible drawers. I read them behind paperback covers of Johnny Tremain. His humor is rough and crass, full of mugging and jiving, which seems strange since he calls blacks “the colored” and prides himself for no longer using the n-word. The older I get, the sadder he looks. Mom laughs at his jokes but worries behind his back. The message is clear: don’t be like him.
Mom has one sister and no brothers, so her father is her only male reference point. Well, except for Mel. Sarah, Mom’s mom, got sick of Grandpa Gentry’s silly ways and set her sights on a more grown-up guy. That would be Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Melvin Gunter. He fought in three wars, has two Purple Hearts, and drinks Budweiser like I drink cherry Kool-Aid. Mel and Sarah moved to his Alabama hills after he retired in 1973. We visit every spring. They raise pigs and peaches, tomatoes and cows, on sixty acres. Their home is near the end of a road that pitches and winds like crazy. Mel’s momma lives up the road and shucks corn and green beans barefoot. She smiles without teeth and tells me about a no-good welfare cheat collecting from two counties.
“He’s just trash.”
Northerners are not welcome around here. Not even us, really. A man in overalls stops by one morning and tells Mel that he saw our Massachusetts license plates and wants to make sure he was okay. He then jokes about slashing our tires. Or maybe he isn’t joking.
Every morning, Mel works in his peach orchards in a white T-shirt and army surplus pants. Down comes his ax; up goes a Budweiser tall boy. It is 7:30 a.m. After breakfast, we go fishing in his catfish pond. One afternoon, we catch a giant one, maybe three pounds, throw it in the now empty beer cooler, and drive his blue tractor back to the house. He gives me a wink and gets a hammer and nail. He pounds the catfish to the wall and skins it. I puke in the driveway.
He is asleep in his lounger by 2:00 p.m. I lift a Marlboro out of his hand and snuff it out in an ashtray. I sneak into his living room and stare at snapshots of dead Korean boys preserved behind cellophane in a dusty photo album. He wakes up and thumps me on the head.
“You’re not old enough to see these things.”
My glimpses into a man’s world vanish as quickly as they happen. Mostly, I’m around women all day and night long. Mom’s mom flies wherever we are and visits for weeks at a time. The good news is she makes me chicken and dumplings and a chocolate cake with golden filling for my birthday. The bad news is she’s the most scared grown-up I’ve ever met. She doesn’t drive and hasn’t been to the movies for twenty years. That seems like a long time. Grandma only likes to talk about two things: how dangerous Dad’s job is and how men are jerks. She seems o
nly to be happy when she’s talking about being unhappy. She wants everyone to be as scared as she is. Then, Grandma tells Mom that Dad is doing men’s work and there’s nothing she can do about it. She works Mom into a panic and then seals the exits.
How a boy and a girl from different sides of the Mason-Dixon line come together is a story I can’t hear enough. Here’s how it goes. Dad starts at the Naval Academy in 1960. The following year, he goes down to Virginia with the academy’s brigade to watch Navy play Duke in a football game called the Oyster Bowl. There is a dance after the game filled with crew-cut boys and nice girls from Norfolk and Virginia Beach. My parents meet toward the end of the night. When she gets ready to leave, Dad—pushed forward by his friends—asks for her number. She gives it with a sugary smile.
Then he doesn’t call for a month! I never find out why. He probably is just busy. He invites her to Annapolis for another dance. He is quiet. She is not. They like that about each other. They start going steady. Every weekend, she and a few girls carpool up to Annapolis. The girls stay in houses with housemothers who watch what goes on. Dad doesn’t like this, so he borrows a car so they can go watch the submarine races. One weekend, she sits under an oak tree and watches Dad march off demerits for eating a cookie in math class. That’s when Dad knows she is the one.
Dad proposes down on the Cape, not far from Kennedy’s Camelot in Hyannis, on a summer weekend in 1963. Mom’s ring is a little smaller than Jackie’s. There’s just one catch: Mom is a Baptist. She gets pamphlets in the mail from her almost father-in-law about mixed marriages. This confuses her. She thought mixed marriages were between black and white folks. Mom takes classes for six months and gets baptized just before Dad graduates from the Naval Academy in June 1964. It’s a hot day and Dad gets a watch for being good at math.
He has leadership classes to take, so they put off marriage until after Christmas. Then, it finally happens. Dad’s family flies down to Norfolk; it’s the first flight for his brothers and sisters. Our Lady of Victory Chapel at Norfolk Naval Base is filled with naval officers, nanas in white gloves and Southern girls with bird-nest hats. My mother wears a white bridal gown of Alençon lace styled with long sleeves and a floor-length bell skirt. (Or at least that’s what the Brockton Daily Enterprise says in a clip I dug out of Mom’s closet.) Dad is in his dress uniform. The priest pronounces them man and wife. They leave church under an arch of swords provided by Dad’s classmates. They jump into Dad’s Corvette after the reception. Dad fishtails the car in the Virginia slush and they head south. Flight school starts in Pensacola in eight days.
Mom spends her first year as a Navy wife in a shotgun shack with a puke bucket by the bed. She is pregnant with Terry six weeks after the wedding. Mom’s best friend, Brenda, married a Navy flier too, and she lives down the road. Every morning, Dad drops her off at Brenda’s on his way to work. She slips into Brenda’s bed, snuggles up until she has to puke again.
They move a few months later to Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, where Dad learns how to fly the E-2, a turboprop sub chaser. Terry arrives late on Halloween. There are no breaks. Mom becomes pregnant with me right after she recovers from childbirth. I arrive the following September, a month early and barely five pounds. Mom is twenty-four and has two children under the age of one.
It is September 30, 1966. We are an American family. Our story will never be this simple again.
Chapter Six
Tupper and Beth watched Kindergarten Cop with their girls on his last night home. He picked at a piece of German chocolate cake Beth had baked especially for him and watched his girls curl up with their poodle, Gretl. He blinked back tears and thought to himself, “I’ve taken command and it’s breaking my heart.”
He couldn’t show the girls; that would be too much for them. That’s what his journal would be for. Beth had given him some leatherbound books for his birthday because she knew that writing his thoughts down calmed him.
The girls were getting too old for Tupper to tuck them in, but they made an exception that night. After the girls went to sleep, he and Beth went over the bills a last time and talked dreamily of some land they owned a mile away high on a bluff overlooking Burrows Bay. Someday they hoped to build their dream house there, maybe even next year. He bottled up the last of his hard cider until midnight and then tried to get some sleep.
It didn’t take. Tupper woke the next morning long before the 5:00 a.m. alarm clock. He packed his bag in the dark, muscle memory taking over. He looked out the window at the evergreens swaying in the gloom. He thought of when he first moved here with Beth in 1996. They had to look up Whidbey Island on a map and they thought at first it was small and remote, but thrilled at the adventure. They now loved it as much as they loved the girls. He hated to leave.
Tupper headed downstairs and labeled all the wine bottles with green, yellow, and red stickers for Beth. Tupper had become a bit of a wine snob since the family did a tour of duty in Germany beginning in 2005 and he’d acquired about a hundred bottles. He’d returned from his last cruise to find that Beth and some friends had uncorked a $100 bottle of 1997 Castelgiocondo Brunello di Montalcino at the end of a girls’ night out. That wouldn’t happen again with his sticker system.
He then took a long, hot shower, slowly turning off the nozzle, knowing it would be the last one for months. Beth and the girls got up, and the family headed over to Penguins, a local coffee place. Tupper indulged himself with an orange-cranberry scone hot out of the oven. The family then piled into their SUV and made the ride up to NAS Whidbey Island under a blue sky.
On base, Beth and the girls held it together as Tupper spun through the gate that separated the parking lot and the Black Ravens’ hangar. But then he looked back a last time and saw Caitlin looking away, tears running down her cheeks. He wouldn’t be able to get the image out of his mind for weeks.
Tupper had plenty of work to make him forget how much he missed his family. Taking over from Doogie was proving even harder than Tupper knew it would be. Half the squadron kept their heads down, hoping their new master wouldn’t kick them as hard as the last guy, while the other half dropped their packs; a Navy term for fed-up sailors going through the motions, doing the minimum just to get by. Tupper spoke often to his sailors about this being a new day for the Black Ravens, but they were skeptical; Tupper had been Doogie’s second-in-command, and there was no evidence he’d do things any differently.
That was only half of the problem. Everyone knew this was the Black Ravens’ last cruise with the ancient Prowlers. With VAQ-135 beginning transition to the EA-18G in a little more than a year, Tupper was like a general manager of a baseball team relocating to an excited new city with one more lame-duck season to play in a decrepit stadium before a handful of pissed-off fans. He had to keep sailors motivated to repair and mother Prowlers that would be scrapped for parts and metal next year.
There was a personal preservation angle as well. There would be seven squadron skippers on the Nimitz and only two of them would be recommended for further command. The rest would see their once-promising careers shunted to middle-management posts. But it wasn’t a level playing field. He’d be competing against the COs of Hornet and Super Hornet squadrons. A head-to-head comparison of the Prowler and Hornet was not pretty. Hornets can fly at 1,200 miles per hour—nearly twice the speed of sound. Prowlers top out at 650 mph, slightly faster than a 737 flying between Indianapolis and Detroit. The Hornet carries Sidewinder missiles capable of obliterating enemy aircraft twenty miles away. The unarmed Prowler sends out electromagnetic waves to make enemy radars go snowy. The Hornet can drop three tons of bombs ranging from bunker busters to tactical nuclear weapons. The Prowler has the ability to absolutely wreck a terrorist’s cell phone network.
There were going to be three Hornet squadrons on board the Nimitz, so squadrons could swap parts easily if something broke. The Black Ravens were the Nimitz’s only Prowlers and most were built dur
ing the Reagan administration, before some of their pilots were born. Break something on a decaying Prowler and you’d be on the phone with a fat man at NAS Jacksonville’s parts depot who may or may not surrender the part. Then you’d wait days for the part to be flown out to the boat on the goddamned COD—Carrier Onboard Delivery, the carrier’s transport squadron whose reputation for efficiency was slightly lower than a cut-rate East European airline. Your best option was cannibalizing parts from the Hangar Queen, aka the Prowler that never flies except on to the boat at the beginning of cruise and off at the end.
That was the hand Tupper was dealt. No use crying over it. There were 145 sailors and 22 officers under his command. They ranged in age from seventeen to fifty, men and women, black, white, and Latino. Some of them were pimple-faced seaman apprentices from broken homes and some were middle-aged chiefs who knew more about the Prowler than Tupper ever would.
The chiefs made up the squadron’s middle management known in the Navy as the Goat Locker. If a skipper’s Goat Locker was top-notch, his planes launched on time and his sortie completion rate was near 98 percent. That made the skipper’s boss at Carrier Air Group happy. CAG was the captain who oversaw all the squadrons on a carrier, and if a skipper wanted to scramble up another rung on the Navy ladder he needed CAG’s blessing. A crappy Goat Locker meant downed jets, backed-up paperwork, and CAG screaming through the telephone. If that happened to Tupper, the only thing he’d be commanding next was Caitlin’s soccer team.
Tupper’s Goat Locker was a mess, a by-product of Doogie’s command and good people getting out because they couldn’t handle being deployed eight months out of the year, every year. Those who remained were calling in sick and dragging their feet on paperwork and generally setting a bad example for sailors.
The fact that Dan Whittle, VAQ-135’s master chief—the head of his Goat Locker—was missing in action did not help. Whittle had served nearly a quarter century in the Navy and was the veteran of multiple Prowler cruises. He was loved by his men, but he was never around. The Navy had given him limited duty to deal with family issues for the past six months, and he’d been a ghost around VAQ-135. He was back now—or so Tupper thought.
The Magical Stranger Page 5
