The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

Dad slips his tongue out of his mouth and bites it, a sign that he is trying not to lose it.

  “Now, Barbara.”

  Mom has a point. I crumple inside my red snowsuit. Something tells me I am on the cusp of a brand-new level of humiliation, so I stop crying. I tell Dad that I’ll keep working at it with Mom. She plays along with the charade. Relieved, he pats me on the head and skis away, searching for my sister and my cousins.

  Mom and I wait until he is out of sight. And then we take off our skis and hike to the lodge. I fish out a Judy Blume book that I’d stashed at a back table—I knew I’d end up here—while she sits a few rows away staring out the lodge’s big bay windows. She is a lousy skier too and quits for good that year after being run over by two Canadian hotdoggers. But we never talk about our shared misery. Instead, she starts staying back at the cabin leaving me alone in the lodge with my books.

  I don’t mind until the sun begins to fade. That’s when I get nervous. The mountain closes at four so I sit near the window and watch for Dad’s black jacket and powder blue ski hat with the word PROWLER written across the front.

  I wait a long time. Pete Rodrick always skis the last icy run, carving down the mountain with the ski patrol and the other toasted stragglers. I stare out into the dark, petrified he’s crashed. I relax only when I see the white ball of his ski hat. Life can go on.

  The shitty thing is that sports are all that matter to me. I let them torture me. I beg my parents for a subscription to Sports Illustrated, and there’s Archie Griffin on the September 9, 1974, cover of my very first issue. Every Thursday, I sprint from the school bus to the mailbox and then to my room. I read everything, even stuff on gymnastics. The thing is, I don’t need to be great at sports; I just need to be decent. But I am nowhere close. I need Dad to help or tell me that stuff doesn’t really matter. But he is always half a world away.

  Only in my room do things turn out okay. I come home, close my door, and correct the record. I lie on my bed tossing an orange Nerf off the ceiling, staring at my pennants, and reconstruct an entire season in my head. I always win, but there are hurdles to overcome. My team gets off to a great start, but then I’d break my arm or we’d get jobbed by the officials and have to claw our way back for the playoffs. I always play quarterback, a master of the short-passing game, working the sidelines and moving the chains. Soon, I branch off into other dream worlds. I run for president and lose the New Hampshire primary but slowly battle my way back, winning the Republican nomination at a deadlocked convention.

  I daydream for hours. This drives Mom crazy. Every hour or so, she throws my door open trying to catch me doing something bad.

  “What are you doing? Go outside.”

  “I’m just thinking. I’ll go outside later.”

  She slams the door shut. Our fights are getting longer and louder. I start thinking that my very presence puts a sour look on her pretty face. She signed up for the Navy life, the kids, and the moves, but she didn’t sign up for me. She doesn’t understand it. Terry is good as gold and she sees her girlfriends with their happy sons. Then she looks back at me and I can tell she feels that she got screwed. I am a problem she cannot solve.

  Everything I do confuses her. I dread playing sports, but then I watch the NFL for six hours without moving. It’s sunny outside and I am in my room reading about Iwo Jima or Earl Morrall. She won’t hold dinner for two minutes while I finish a Sports Illustrated story or try to catch the end of part 17 of The World at War on PBS.

  “Just one more minute, Mom.”

  “Stephen Thomas Rodrick, why must you always defy me?”

  Then again, her behavior confuses me, so we’re even. She has patience with everyone but me. We scream and holler at each other, my tears of rage only stoking her own. But then the doorbell rings—Navy folks are always dropping by—and she rubs her eyes hard and pushes her hair back into place. Mrs. Barbara Rodrick, Pete’s wife, magically reappears. She pinches her cheeks for color and answers the door with a smile. She is a different woman.

  There aren’t a lot of grown-up things to do in Oak Harbor, so my parents’ social life revolves around Dad’s squadron. The couples host progressive dinners in Crosswoods, with each house preparing a different dish. My mom bakes Cornish hens and piles her hair high on her head. I watch her get ready, always waiting for the grand finale: the ceremonial swirl spraying of Aqua Net. She slips into a red miniskirt with a white turtleneck and heads down the stairs.

  The other wives love her southern charm as she plays a sillier version of herself, making fun of herself for not being able to figure out the lawn mower when Dad isn’t around. Why does she do that? After dinner and drinks, the couples play bridge, sometimes at our house. I watch from the top of the stairs and marvel at the beautiful woman who has taken Mom’s place. She plays the wrong card and my parents do a Disney version of The Bickersons.

  “Son of a biscuit eater, Barbara, what are you doing to me?”

  “Judas Priest. Was that the wrong suit? Sugar Ray Robinson.”

  Everyone laughs and so do I. This is a blunder. She catches me watching from the stairs. It is past my bedtime. She freezes me with her death glare. Busted. I blink in surprise like I’ve just eaten a Larry Holmes jab. But then I look again, and she is back cracking wise and smiling at everyone around the table.

  I retreat back to my room and wonder what the hell I’m doing wrong. It would be easier if Mom were a crazy lady, not feeding me and screaming at the neighbors. I’d understand; I know there are not nice people in the world. But Mom isn’t that at all. She volunteers for the Red Cross and bakes cookies for the neighbors. Her friends long to spend time with her. She’s kind and warm and people love her.

  I am her one true mistake.

  Chapter Ten

  The morning before the Nimitz left North Island, Doc told Tupper that one of his sailors was going to kill himself if he had to stay on cruise. Tupper had twenty minutes to decide whether to send him off or keep him onboard. It was an unwinnable choice: leaving him behind rewarded malingering, but he didn’t need dead weight either. He sent the sailor off.

  The next morning, Tupper ended the career of a fifteen-year sailor. Back on Whidbey, one of Tupper’s petty officers had signed paperwork saying he had checked Prowler maintenance performed by a junior sailor. That was a lie discovered when a hubcap on the wheel of a Prowler’s landing gear popped off because it was installed wrong. If the hubcap had popped off during landing there could have been a catastrophe.

  It was just one incident, but indicative of a larger issue left behind by Doogie. Tupper’s maintenance crew were like teenagers screamed at one too many times by a jackass stepdad. They fought back in a passive-aggressive manner, cutting corners wherever they could. It was obvious the bosses didn’t care about them, they reasoned, so why should they give a shit?

  The petty officer’s faked paperwork was just the incident that was caught. Tupper had two options. He could give him an informal reprimand, put a nasty letter in his file, and leave it at that. Or he could take him to captain’s mast, one step below a court-martial: the guilty sailor is forced to stand at attention in front of the squadron while the commanding officer reads off the offense, berates the sailor, and then strips him of rank or pay.

  The petty officer was just five years short of retirement and took care of a special-needs son who desperately needed Navy insurance coverage. He begged Tupper to cut him a break. Tupper slept on it for a night. His approach to discipline had been shaped by his years at the academy. He’d arrived in Annapolis in 1988 with a chip on his shoulder, still pissed about his initial rejection. He decided he hated the place but would conquer it all the same. Like all the plebes, Tupper had someone screaming in his ear every day for that first year.

  “Midshipma
n, how many carriers does the Indian navy have?

  “I do not know, sir! No excuses. I will find out immediately.”

  “Goddamnit. Do it now!”

  Tupper hauled ass to the library and dug up the information. (The answer was zero.) By the time he reported back, the upperclassman had forgotten he’d even sent him. He knew it was all a game to see who would crack under pressure, cut a corner, or commit an honor violation.

  A fellow plebe committed suicide by jumping out of a window in his first year. Tupper’s mother wanted to pull him out. Tupper set her straight.

  “Mom, they’re not yelling at me personally. They are trying to see whether I can handle stress. I can.”

  He detested the upperclassmen who got their jollies out of terrorizing him for cheap pleasure. One upperclassman rode him his second year until he couldn’t take it anymore. Tupper challenged the smaller man to a fight. They wrestled in a hallway at Bancroft Hall, and the smaller man kicked Tupper’s ass. Turned out the guy was an all-state wrestler. He still didn’t regret it.

  But Tupper respected the less sadistic upperclassmen, the ones who were trying to teach him something. He thrived in a place he professed to hate. He rose to the rank of brigade adjutant his senior year, third in command of the entire brigade. A newspaper photographer snapped a picture of Tupper getting in the face of a scared-shitless plebe. His parents cringed, but Tupper loved it. He was teaching the kid something.

  And now he had to teach his sailors a hard lesson. Shitty maintenance and cutting corners was going to get someone killed. It wouldn’t be tolerated. At captain’s mast, he busted the man from petty officer first class to petty officer second class, a move that would cost the sailor $1,000 a month in pay. Tupper’s decision meant his sailor would be drummed out of the Navy long before he hit twenty years.

  Through the cruise, Tupper would see the demoted sailor mopping floors in the mess and wondered if he had done the right thing. His decision weighed heavily on him and he wasn’t great at hiding it. CAG pulled him aside after their daily staff meeting.

  “Are you okay?”

  Tupper blinked hard.

  “Absolutely.”

  It was not the kind of attention a skipper wanted. He went back to his room and started an email to Beth. He wrote, “I’ve never felt so alone” but deleted it before sending it. Beth had enough to worry about.

  There was less than a month before the Nimitz would be on station in the Gulf. Tupper had to sort out the maintenance issues fast. The air wing upped their tempo and there was a recurring refrain in the Nimitz’s launches and recoveries: Prowlers not getting airborne. One day the radios weren’t working; the next day it was the regulators pumping oxygen to the crew. Then the slats on one of the Prowlers wouldn’t come up after taking off. On and on it went. It was the cost of ancient planes, but CAG didn’t want excuses; he wanted Prowlers in the air.

  Tupper tried to tune out the white noise when he was flying. The cockpit was the one place where he felt at peace. He’d been flying Prowlers for twelve years, and there was a comfort that came with settling into the rickety pilot bucket of the EA-6B. It made all the other shit seem meaningless.

  But flying as a skipper had its drawbacks. The Black Ravens were filled with junior pilots and ECMOs making their first cruises, and they couldn’t all fly together for safety reasons. Well, they could, and some skippers insist on only flying with senior ECMOs, but Tupper thought that was asking for a mishap.

  At night, a Prowler pilot needed a trusty ECMO next to him feeding him information and communicating with the carrier. But there was no way to become a trusty ECMO without experiencing some hairy nights that made your pilot want to punch you through your mask. So it fell to Tupper to fly with the junior guys.

  A week out of San Diego, Tupper launched on a dark, mist-filled night with Lieutenant Steve “Buttons” Murphy in the seat next to him. Buttons was a California boy and a former enlisted guy who’d made the transition to officer and was making his first cruise as an ECMO. Buttons’ primary responsibility was assisting Tupper in his approach and “calling the ball,” letting the Nimitz’s landing crew know that they saw the lights of the meatball and were lined up to land. But the creaky Prowler was filled with built-in booby traps. The cockpit fogged up on humid nights. If you waited for the first wave of condensation on the window before you flipped on the defog you were already screwed; you’d spend the next few minutes rubbing at the window with your flight gloves.

  Buttons forgot to hit the defogger. The cockpit fogged up. Tupper cursed. Buttons tried to adjust the defogger while the landing signals officer on the Nimitz asked him to call the ball. Buttons didn’t respond, his head down over the instruments. The deck asked again.

  “Call the ball.”

  Buttons hesitated, confused. Tupper waited as long as he could, but then he aborted his landing and flew around the Nimitz for another approach. He slammed his fist against his seat and screamed at Buttons.

  “You are fucking behind the jet.”

  Next time around, Tupper called the ball himself. The Prowler’s tailhook dropped but skipped over the Nimitz’s four arresting wires. They had to circle again. They didn’t land until their fourth try, a humiliation to Tupper. Pilots are graded on their landings and ranked against each other; he’d take a ton of shit for tonight’s fiasco.

  He stormed away from the jet talking to no one as he walked back to the Black Ravens’ ready room, the squadron’s office. He glowered at Buttons during the debrief but said nothing.

  The silent treatment was one of Tupper’s less successful leadership skills. He’d forgotten he had been in Buttons’ flight boots many times. On his first cruise, his squadron was enforcing no-fly zones over southern Iraq. Their basic mission was flying circles over the country, daring Saddam Hussein’s air defense to fire a surface-to-air missile so that the Americans could use it as a pretext to crush his missile sites, radar stations, and munitions factories.

  Hussein wasn’t quite that dumb, and the Lancers flew circle after circle above the desert. That was okay with Tupper. The Prowler didn’t have a GPS navigational system like the Hornets and Tomcats, and its inertial navigational system was unreliable and often broken. Prowler crews were constantly on the radio trying to figure out exactly where the hell they were in the sky. Tupper would launch into the Gulf haze and try to find a Hornet to tag along with so he didn’t miss his tanker rendezvous.

  Landing on the USS Constellation was also a mind game. He couldn’t quite figure out the Prowler. You could line up the A-4 from flight school behind the boat and it would stay level. The Prowler was an out-of-alignment pickup truck, drifting up and down, left and right without provocation. He couldn’t keep it on speed. Tupper would give his Prowler power, but the jet wouldn’t immediately react, so he’d give it more power and the plane would lurch forward and down, then he’d pull back on the stick to try and slow it down. On and on it went, Tupper lurching the Prowler around while his ECMOs sighed into their masks.

  On final approach, he had the landing yips. His brain told him he had too much power and he was about to overshoot the carrier, so he’d throttle back too soon and the Prowler would land a second early, catching the number one wire and pissing off Tupper’s skipper.

  But that was long ago and Tupper didn’t feel like cutting Buttons a break. Soon, they would be flying six-hour missions up to Afghanistan and landing on a pitching carrier in the Arabian Sea. It was best to scare someon
e straight now, not in October.

  Besides, Tupper didn’t have time to babysit. He had a squadron to run. He spent the next few days meeting and talking with his senior petty officers in the Goat Locker. He met with them down in the hangar bay and took their questions for hours as he tried to get them to buy back into giving a damn about maintenance. Most of them were still bitter from Doogie’s reign, but he thought they were softening, nodding along when he spoke. He didn’t tell them there were rumors that the Nimitz’s deployment might be extended to ten months because of maintenance problems with the USS Enterprise. There was no reason to crush what was left of their fight.

  Tupper walked back to his room at night and tried to figure things out. He couldn’t let his guard down with anyone. The sailors could bitch to each other, JOPA had JOPA, and the department heads could commiserate, but he had no one. Sure, he talked with Vinnie, but even with the XO he only said so much. He knew squadrons that went to hell because the men saw fear and indecision in their skipper’s eyes. That wasn’t going to happen to him.

  So he called Beth and the girls. He knew he was waking them up, but he needed to hear their voices. Beth sounded like she was in her element, busy with her job and raising the girls. She didn’t have time to miss her husband. Not yet anyway. Tupper understood that. Her voice was enough.

  Chapter Eleven

  Things change when Dad’s around. His buddies come over on Sunday afternoon and rehash the night before. They drink Coors smuggled back on cross-country flights in their Prowlers. I play with my Hot Wheels and listen to them talk about a pilot who lost his wings after attempting a landing without his wheels down. It sounds dangerous, but they are all laughing, so maybe landing without wheels is no big thing.

  There are moments when we are like everyone else. Every other summer, Dad takes extended leave and we pile into our Buick station wagon for long road trips. We stay at Holiday Inns and giggle when he orders clam chowder and it arrives red and thin instead of white and creamy.