The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  “You realize that you have to do it every day, even when you don’t feel like it, right?”

  I tell him no problem. The next Monday, giant stacks of papers are sitting in our driveway when I get home from school. Sundays are the worst. I have sixty customers on my route, but I can carry only ten or twelve Sunday papers in my sack without falling over. Dad walks the route with me in the mist and rain one Sunday, just the two of us. He tells me about buying his mother her first dishwasher with his paper money. I laugh out loud.

  “I’m not going to buy Mom a dishwasher. No way.”

  Dad stares me down. He looks so disappointed. I try to backtrack.

  “She already has one. She doesn’t need one.”

  We walk in silence for a while. Then he tells me to save my money for something else. He’s leaving again in the spring. But this time when he comes back I can meet him in Hawaii and ride the carrier with him from Honolulu to San Diego. There is one condition: I have to buy half of my plane ticket. I tell him it’s a deal.

  But that’s so far away. My twelfth birthday is just six weeks away. Dad goes away for a month, but he makes it home just in time. There’s going to be a party with Billy and Eric and Timmy. Then something terrible happens. There is a boy down the street named David Bruce. He is a year younger than me and has the only buzz cut in the neighborhood. I know he wants to be my friend and we play one-on-one football in his front yard, one of the few games I can win since I outweigh him by thirty pounds. I meet his dad after one of our games, working in his garage. He doesn’t smile.

  But then David and I have a falling-out over something stupid, or maybe he just gets tired of me being mean to him. I see him on the school bus but we never really talk. Then, a few days before my birthday, David’s father is killed in an A-6 accident off the USS Ranger. I hear the news, but it doesn’t register. Dad comes into my room on the morning of my birthday.

  “I want you to invite David Bruce.”

  “C’mon, Dad, he’ll ruin it.”

  “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

  I call David’s house. His mother answers in a shaky voice. I ask her if David could come over later for my party. She starts crying on the phone, babbling thank yous through tears.

  David shows up a few hours later in a too-big blue windbreaker that belonged to his dad. He gives me a hastily wrapped stapler as a present. I begin to roll my eyes and Dad shoots me a death look. I say thank you. We have cake and then we play football in the backyard. Dad makes sure David scores a touchdown.

  Mom and Dad leave for a weekend in San Diego the next morning. We are left in the care of an elderly babysitter who smells of grape juice. The next day is Monday, October 2, 1978, momentous because that afternoon the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees are playing a one-game playoff. The only problem is the game starts at 11:30 a.m. Oak Harbor time. I’ll miss it if I go to school.

  So I hold my breath until my face goes red and tell the babysitter that I’m sick. She calls my parents down in San Diego. I sneak upstairs and pick up the other line. Dad listens for a minute, relays the information to Mom, and tells the sitter I can stay home. I can hear Mom in the background.

  “He’s faking, you know that, right?”

  How does she know?! I watch the game propped up on my parents’ bed on the $35 black-and-white television we bought at a garage sale. Carl Yastrzemski pops up to Graig Nettles to end the game and I run out of the house to do my paper route, miraculously healed. My parents come home a day later and Mom stares me down.

  “I hope you’re feeling better.”

  Mom keeps asking me what I’m doing with my paper route money, and I can’t honestly tell her. Poor accounting is swallowing up my profits. I can’t keep straight who I’ve collected from and who I haven’t. I ring a cranky neighbor’s doorbell one night and he barks at me that I’d just collected from him a week earlier. He threatens to call my boss. Now I collect just enough to pay for the papers and have some cash left over for movies and ice-cream sandwiches.

  But Mom is convinced I have a secret stash of fifties somewhere and I’m up to no good. Dad comes home exhausted one night, and before he can open a beer she starts in with the questions.

  “Pete, where is the money going?”

  Dad’s eyes glaze over. Sometimes, he spends a few minutes trying to help me figure out my bills, but once he becomes confident I’m not swindling anyone or hoarding big money, he lets me go back to doing it myself.

  He is more concerned with my paper route’s cleanliness. Dad hates litter. More than once, we’ll be driving somewhere and he’ll point out a pile of garbage and pull over and pick up the trash. He then turns to Terry and me.

  “That’s not acceptable. You will never do that.”

  Like most things, I agree with Dad in principle but not in action. I have giant plastic bags full of rubber bands for my papers and they start multiplying around our house. I’m watching television one night when my neck is hit with a fierce pain. I spin around, ready to punch Terry. But it’s Dad. He’s holding three rubber bands.

  “Every time I find one, you’re getting shot.”

  He shoots me another half-dozen times over the next week. For some reason, I don’t get angry like when Mom is on my ass. I learn my lesson.

  Some weekends, I get my friend Billy to deliver my papers so I can head up to the mountains with my parents. We just bought a condo up in the Cascades with Dad’s friend Laddie Coburn and his wife, Ulla. Laddie is everything my dad isn’t: a smart-ass who does what he wants. He’s got an opinion on everything, even things he knows nothing about. He’s cool. We show up with strollers and bags and Laddie waves from the couch and doesn’t offer to help. That seems awesome. He also has a stash of European porno magazines that I discover. I worship him.

  Terry and I head off to the condo’s clubhouse every day to swim in the pool while Dad retreats to a log cabin owned by the condo association with a black briefcase full of papers. He’s got fitness reports to churn out. Mom is left alone with Chrissie; she doesn’t even have a television or phone. By dinnertime, she is exhausted. She complains and Dad does the dishes quietly.

  Every night, he sends me to take the trash over to a dumpster about a hundred yards away from our property. One pitch black evening I make my way with a Hefty bag slung over my shoulder. I’m about to throw the bag in when a black shadow cuts me off.

  “BOOOO!!!”

  My heart explodes in my chest. I drop the bag and piss myself a little. Is it a murderer? Could be, Ted Bundy’s back on the loose. Nope, it’s Dad! He must have snuck out behind me and run ahead. His face is purple and a freaky smile is on his face.

  “Did I get you?”

  He did. But I don’t understand. I could see Laddie doing something like this but not my father. I’m scared. I start crying.

  “That’s just mean.”

  We walk home in silence. Dad puts his arm around me and says he’s sorry. I tell him it’s okay. He opens the door and whispers in my ear.

  “We don’t need to tell your mom about this.”

  And we don’t. It’s our secret.

  Then Dad leaves.

  I drift off at school. In science class, I write down all the bones of the human skeleton on seven Juicy Fruit wrappers, get an A on a test, and feel ashamed. Dad would kill me for that. But I can’t help myself. I keep doing stupid things. I bring rubber bands to school and try to shoot a buddy, but I miss and hit my crusty science teacher in the neck. He walks over slowly and smiles.

  “I think it’s time for a swat.”

  Out in the hall Mr. Renegar gets ready to bring his paddle down on my bony ass. But first he tells me he’s drilled holes in his paddle to make it more aerodynamic. Then he hits me twice. I scream and swear. That gets me another.

  Mom is less than sympathetic. Christine has constant earaches and she is exhausted. S
he reads the note sent home from school and then tosses it on the dinner table.

  “Good for them.”

  She immediately regrets it and tells me that came out wrong. I tell her I know. I go out into the rain and deliver my papers and on it goes.

  I do nothing to lighten her load. The deadline to raise $250 toward my Hawaii trip comes and goes. I have $43 in my pockets. In my spare time, I teach my baby sister to walk into a room slamming her hands on her head screaming “Dopey me” in honor of something Robin Williams did on Mork & Mindy. I go on a father-and-son Boy Scout camping trip with someone else’s dad. David Bruce moves away. Last I heard, his mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

  I taunt David Tapia in English class about how I’m heading to Hawaii and he’s not. I turn thirteen and get a note from Dad: “Happy 13th. Welcome to Being a Teenager. Yuck!” Mom forgets and then makes me a cake at the last minute.

  We barely speak. I stop constructing sports fantasies in my head and begin a new one: how great life would be if Mom were gone. I figure out what relatives would watch over us while Dad was at sea and how our life would be full of glamour and mystery. I’d be in charge of Christine; that part I could handle.

  And then the opposite happens.

  The helos are not looking anymore. Mom takes Terry and me into the kitchen away from the chain-smoking wives bearing deli trays.

  “It’s just us now. We’re used to that. Your dad’s watching us now. Let’s show him how strong we can be.”

  We’re sitting at the kitchen table where Dad served waffles on Sunday mornings. She gets up, straightens her blouse, and walks back toward the grown-ups. I can hear her gasping for air. I don’t know what to do so I do nothing.

  The next day, a priest stops by. I am upstairs in my parents’ bed staring at the ceiling. The priest is tiny and peculiar-looking with moppy hair. He sits down on the bed and puts his hand on my head and prays. He tells me to call him at any time; he’d be happy to have me over to the rectory or maybe we could go skiing. He says Dad was a great man and a good Catholic; he’d want me to be close with his priest.

  I nod blankly, promising that I’ll call him, but I know I never will. He gives me the creeps. (He’ll be busted for pedophilia twenty years later.) The priest asks me to remember something.

  “Remember all the good times you had with your dad. Those memories can last you your whole lifetime.”

  I try, but what do I have? I remember the drives to church and the lectures about littering. I remember a man who made others snap to attention. And I remember him gone. I remember a man who made Mom happy while I make her miserable. I know I do not carry one ounce of his decency in my bones. I wished Mom dead and God punished me by taking Dad. Simple as that. But I don’t say anything.

  The priest tells me one last thing before he puts on his hat and heads downstairs.

  “You’re the man of the house. Your mother is counting on you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tupper and his men settled into the routine of a naval aviator at sea, vast hours of tedium punctuated by seconds of terror. A few days out of Japan, Tupper had one of the terrible moments.

  The frightening contradiction of carrier flying is that a pilot has to reduce his plane to the slowest speed possible short of stalling for the last quarter mile of an approach to the carrier. Watching from the tower, it looks like the plane is suspended, barely floating, for the last few seconds before wheels and tailhook hit the deck.

  On a windy day north of Singapore, Tupper’s Prowler was at that tenuous instant when a gust whipped around the Nimitz’s tower. For a moment, the wind looked like it was going to push Tupper’s Prowler down into the Nimitz’s backside. But Tupper anticipated the gust—known in the Navy as the burble effect—by a half second and went to full power. His Prowler surged up fifty feet and caught the two wire.

  His legs quivered as the plane captain on the deck directed his Prowler to its parking space. He knew he would have been a goner if the same problem had arisen when he was a young pilot. But that night, he checked his email and found out Brenna had been cast as the lead in The Nutcracker. Tupper went back to the ready room and didn’t talk about cheating death; he talked about his daughter’s dancing skills.

  The Ravens’ ready room was an 800-square-foot windowless space just below the flight deck that served as the squadron’s workspace and clubhouse. There was a small cubbyhole of an office for maintenance and operations and a front desk where a duty officer fielded phone calls. The rest of the room was a series of leather chairs pointing toward a podium at the front of the room where Tupper spoke about squadron business. But the star attraction was the giant plasma-screen television. Each night, the men settled in and watched the television show Top Gear and the movie Beerfest on an endless loop.

  Tupper and most of the men were hanging around the ready room one afternoon when they were told that Captain Paul Monger, the Nimitz’s commanding officer, would be making an announcement over the ship’s closed-circuit television system. His round, bald head popped up a few minutes later and told them the news the men had been dreading: owing to problems with the USS Enterprise’s nuclear reactor, the Nimitz would be extending its cruise from six to eight months. As usual, the guys on board were the last to know. Tupper had received info from folks back in Whidbey that USA Today had already reported the Nimitz’s extension.

  Tupper and the men pulled into Singapore for a port visit a couple of days later, but there was a gloom about them. As usual, the officers rented an admin suite in a posh hotel, a sprawling 1,200-square-foot place that seemed more luxurious before twenty naval aviators moved in and filled one of the tubs with cheap beer and booze. Sure, there was the requisite binge drinking and Tupper ended up sleeping on the floor with just a bathrobe as a bed—the actual beds were first come, first served—but there was blackness to everyone’s mood. The Navy was screwing them again.

  Back on board, Tupper thought he had turned a corner on the maintenance issue. The sailors seemed to have warmed to him once they realized he wasn’t going to be Doogie redux. They invited him down to the fo’c’sle—an area in the front of the ship that houses the anchors—for a chief indoctrination where three seamen were being promoted to chief petty officer. The sailors were blindfolded, spun around, and given hypothetical situations, and then they had to shout their answers. The petty officers let Tupper slip in front of the sailors, and they were screaming instructions back and forth. Then they whipped off the blindfolds and the new petty officers saw they were trading spittle with the skipper. Everyone laughed and Tupper thought: “This is why I joined the Navy.”

  He went back to his room and checked his email. Caitlin had sent him an essay she’d written about learning to kayak. He was amazed by how grown-up she sounded. But then he read the line, “I wish my Dad was here to see me, I miss him.” His eyes clouded over. Tupper wanted to call her so badly. But it was the middle of the night back in Anacortes.

  A week later, the Nimitz arrived on station in the Arabian Sea, two hundred miles south of the Pakistan coast. Tupper and his men had their first flights in-country.

  The Prowler mission was both critical and absurd. To reach Afghanistan, the Black Ravens flew almost 1,000 miles north—up the boulevard, in Navyspeak—over Pakistan before entering Afghan air space. The Command and Air Operations Command at Bagram Air Base would dispatch them to different quadrants where American troops were moving. The Prowlers would fly the route and see if the pulses coming from their pods could explode radio-controlled mines and IEDs before they blew up Americans. Then they would try to jam the cell phone and radio communications of the Taliban fighters before they could tell their comrades that American troops were on the way.

  There was no way of knowing whether you’d jammed a Taliban warning call or blown up an IED before a Marine stepped on it, so the Black Ravens flew 2,000 miles daily not certain whether they had hel
ped or not. All they knew was that the guys on the ground didn’t want to move without the Prowlers’ protective blanket. For Tupper that was an easier burden than the one borne by the Hornet guys—a Prowler squadron would never go to sleep wondering whether they bombed a schoolhouse by mistake.

  The missions lasted six hours, but only two or three of them would be doing actual jamming. The rest of the time was spent on the commute and hitting Air Force tankers for more fuel. There was a solution to all the coming and going: place the Prowlers at Bagram in northern Afghanistan. (The Air Force had discontinued the EF-111 Raven, its radar-jamming plane, in the 1990s, leaving the entire mission to the Navy.) From there, it was just a forty-minute flight to the fight.

  But that contradicted the Navy mission. The modern Navy was all about carrier warfare: the ability to put five acres of sovereign American soil on an enemy’s doorstep. If you started taking parts of a carrier’s air wing and stashing them on Air Force bases, the next thing you knew Congress might start reassessing whether the billions spent annually to maintain the Navy’s eleven carriers was really necessary.

  So the Prowlers stayed on the Nimitz. The borderline lunacy of the situation struck Tupper on that first flight back from Paktia Province in northern Afghanistan. He was hitting the KC-135 tanker for the third time in six hours and turbulence pitched his Prowler up and down, hundreds of feet at a time. Five miles up, Tupper had to maneuver the refueling hook of the Prowler into a magnetic basket connected to the KC-135 refueling hose. It was a terrifying illusion as a pilot: it was hard not to think the basket was going to fly through your windshield.

  An hour later, Tupper landed back on the Nimitz. His back was killing him. He’d hurt it when he was a twenty-year-old Middie running from a rent-a-cop in the catacombs underneath the Naval Academy, slashing his spine against a heating duct. Now each long flight reminded him of his crazy days. He sat down in the squadron’s maintenance shack and signed in the jet. Twenty minutes later, he asked a petty officer to clear the room. Once the room emptied, Tupper whispered, “I can’t stand up.” His sailor nodded and gingerly lifted his skipper to his feet.