The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  For a moment, Gordie and I stared wide-eyed at each other. A faraway siren sounded and then seemed to draw closer. There was a moment of conscience mixed with fear. Should we take it down? “Nah,” we cackled simultaneously. We jumped back into Gordie’s car and peeled off into the darkness.

  The following Monday, Otten didn’t mention the shaved Moofla or the hanging. Actually, she never mentioned the Moofla again. This earned our grudging respect, if not our remorse.

  Why did we turn it up a notch? I can’t say for sure. Why do boys set fire to ants? Why do grown men start wars over barren pieces of land? Boys do things that are not explainable, especially boys without dads. The only thing I knew was Mom was right for once; it was good that Dad wasn’t around to see it.

  Somehow, both Gordie and I managed to graduate the next year. After the ceremony, Mom had tears in her eyes. This seemed normal. The beautiful woman I’d watched a decade ago from the top of the stairs was gone, replaced by someone I didn’t know. She held my little sister’s hand with one hand and wiped her eyes with the other. My grandmother tried to comfort her, but Mom couldn’t stop the tears. Finally, she spoke.

  “The vice principal told me you were the student who had the most potential but did the least with it.”

  She was trembling. Christine, now six, looked up at me with giant brown eyes. She was frightened and wrapped her tiny arms around Mom’s waist. In front of me was Dad’s Holy Trinity, his mother, his wife, and his little girl, the last, best thing he created. Classmates rushed by me, a blur of shouts and blue robes. I didn’t know what to say.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Life kept happening without the Black Ravens. The Nimitz was floating in the Arabian Sea when Vinnie’s wife, Marci, went into labor back in Whidbey. He woke up the next morning to a son named Henry. That evening, the whole squadron celebrated with cigars on the fantail.

  Tupper watched his men bullshit and joke and thought this was how it was supposed to be. But he missed his family. With the seventeen-hour time difference, he kept getting Beth’s voice mail. His parents had just finished a visit to Anacortes, but now they were gone. Caitlin was heartbroken wondering who would read her bedtime stories now that Grandpa Jim was gone. Tupper’s mom emailed him details of their visit, describing his daughters’ jokes and smiles in the vivid detail he could never get from his wife.

  He finally got Beth on the phone. They talked a bit, but he realized he didn’t have much to say, a common problem after they’d been apart for months. But he could hear the rain pounding on the roof of her car, 8,000 miles away. He just listened. Tupper had not heard rain in three months.

  All there was to do was work. Tupper could feel Crapper’s incompetence spreading like a pesticide-resistant fungus. All naval aviators had to stay current in their swim and survival qualifications: once every four years they had to demonstrate that they could still swim a hundred yards in their flight gear, just as they did back in flight school. It was up to the safety officer to make sure everyone was current before deploying. Crapper had missed Beav’s deadline and he was out of qualification. Beav was going to have to fly off on the COD to Bahrain and then make the twenty-four-hour trip back to Whidbey unless CAG called NAS Whidbey and asked for a waiver. He went to see his boss, hat in hand. CAG wasn’t sympathetic.

  “The policies are there for a reason. You have to send him home.”

  Tupper decided to chew some ass. He made Crapper produce a chart that showed where every officer was in his swim and safety qualifications. If there was any doubt, Tupper yanked the aviator off the flight schedule. The result was that Prowler sorties were canceled because of insufficient flight crews. It was a clever but efficient fuck-you to CAG. Suddenly, CAG was on the phone, frantic. He didn’t mean enforce all the policies.

  “CAG, I’m just trying to make sure everyone is current.”

  “Well, don’t go overboard.”

  All the pissing and moaning was enough to make him forget that it was Thanksgiving. General David Petraeus, the head of United States’ Central Command, flew out in the morning from Bahrain. He got a ride in a flashy new Hornet—typical, thought the Prowler guys—and then served turkey to the sailors.

  In a military filled with bullshitting middle managers Tupper thought Petraeus was a guy who did what he said without worrying about his image. (Then again, Tupper wasn’t shocked by Petraeus’s fall in 2012. He’d seen it all. The public face. The private lie. Nothing surprised him.) Like most officers, Tupper supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he was baffled by the lack of an end game. At least Petraeus had gone into Iraq and executed a troop surge that brought a sliver of stability. Maybe he could do the same in Afghanistan and Tupper wouldn’t have to spend more Christmases away from his girls.

  In the evening, Petraeus stopped by the Black Ravens’ ready room and spoke for a few minutes, joking that Tupper didn’t have enough gray hair to be a skipper. Tupper told him he didn’t know the half of it.

  Tupper went back to his stateroom and flipped through a book on Churchill that Vinnie had loaned him. He loved how Churchill never gave up whatever the odds. But then Tupper’s dark humor took over. Churchill never had to skipper a Prowler squadron.

  The next day, things got better. The squadron completed seven sorties out of seven. Their time in-country was becoming more productive. Some of Tupper’s officers had begun communicating directly with CAOC in Bagram about where the Prowlers should be flying and what troop movements needed protection. Before, CAOC called CAG’s staff and told them their needs, and then the information was relayed to the Black Ravens. The end result was high-tech telephone tag with something always getting lost in translation. Streamlining the process and speaking to the source directly was making the missions more effective.

  There was only one problem. CAG didn’t like being cut out of the loop. He called Tupper early one morning.

  “Are your guys talking directly to CAOC?”

  Tupper was still half asleep.

  “Yes sir.”

  CAG slammed the phone down. That was a first for Tupper, a superior hanging up on him. He thought he had just been streamlining the process, and his boss thought he’d disobeyed the chain of command. Now he didn’t know what to do. So he did nothing. Tupper knew he should apologize or explain, but screw it, if CAG didn’t want to listen he wasn’t going to show up outside his stateroom like a naughty schoolboy begging the Mother Superior for forgiveness.

  So the Black Ravens went back to doing things CAG’s way. That night, Tupper took his Prowler over Farah Province in northern Afghanistan. They arrived on station, but because of a communications foul-up, they just circled the sky for two hours doing nothing. It was six and half hours of burning dinosaurs, Navyspeak for wasting thousands of dollars in man-hours and jet fuel. Tupper watched shooting stars in the Afghan sky and thought of Brenna making her debut in The Nutcracker back in Anacortes. He lined his jet up behind the Nimitz on a pitch black night a few hours later and thought: what a waste.

  The next day, he saw CAG at the morning meeting. They exchanged maybe five words. It was the week before Christmas and there was a holiday dinner that night for the Nimitz’s senior staff in Captain Monger’s private dining room. There were assigned seats, and Tupper noticed he was at the far end of the table away from the CO and CAG. He would have needed a can and some string to join their conversation. He didn’t mind.

  Soon it was December 25. By chance, all of Tupper’s deployments as a junior officer had begun in the spring and brought him home for the ho
lidays. This was the first one away from Beth and the girls. Maybe it was the blues, maybe he’d just had enough, but he told CAG that the Prowlers were being wasted, too much of their time was spent circling, waiting for assignments that should have been worked out before they left the Nimitz. CAG listened and said he’d take it under advisement.

  Tupper went back to his stateroom and opened presents from the girls. He briefed that night and took off for Afghanistan. Again, the Prowlers didn’t have a specific mission. In-country, Tupper put his Prowler on autopilot and began composing a Christmas poem at 25,000 feet for Beth on the back of his preflight checklist. He was still working on the first stanza when he saw a sparkle of lights down below. It was a firefight going on in Nuristan. Across the radio came the crackly voice of a tactical controller down on the ground. “Can you jam them?”

  “Roger that.”

  Tupper’s crew flipped on the four jamming pods underneath the wings. An ECMO turned a knob and sent out a blizzard of electronic whiteout. A few minutes later, there was a coordinated series of explosions. Tupper guessed American troops had responded to a nighttime attack with a slew of artillery. Had the Prowler prevented Taliban lookouts from relaying information to their men about where the fire was coming from? Probably, but he would never know for sure.

  On the way home, the sun was coming up as the Prowler passed through the mountains. Tupper could see the small huts of villages located at about 10,000 feet. Someone had told him that the villages held blue-eyed blond Afghanis, the descendants of earlier invaders. Tupper thought that soon the United States would be gone too. Will we have done any good?

  The Nimitz pulled into Bahrain just before New Year’s Day and the squadron held a belated Christmas party at the Marriott. The afternoon before the party, Tupper wrestled with what to say to his sailors. He liked to prep his speeches days in advance, but this time he didn’t. Instead, he went out with his men and got hammered at the pool. That evening, Tupper took the microphone in front of his sailors and held it for a moment. He thought of quoting Churchill or some other leader. He went in another direction.

  “I only want you to remember one thing,” shouted Tupper. “You have one thing that the rest of the Navy will never have.” He paused for effect. “You are Black Fucking Ravens. Black Fucking Ravens. Never forget that.”

  He then did a rap about how other squadrons wished they were as awesome as VAQ-135. At the end, Jim and Cindy’s son tossed down the mic, MC-style. For a moment, there was just shocked silence. Then his sailors started whooping it up.

  “Allrrrigght, Skipper!”

  Tupper worked his way through his men, high-fiving officers and seamen alike. His face was flushed red. Then he stepped out of the pool area and puked into a garbage can. He’d violated his own promise not to get shit-faced while CO. But nobody blamed him for it. It just made him seem more like them.

  Tupper flew his last mission over Afghanistan at the end of January. Barring a series of unlikely circumstances, he would never fly in harm’s way again. He thought he would be emotional, but he was just too exhausted to think about it.

  On board, his management responsibilities were crushing him. He was working on the fit reps of his junior officers, and his choices would decide who made department head and who would be dumped into an unforgiving economy. After his performance in the seat next to Beav on the flight to Oman, Chicken was his future rock star; only an extraordinary act of buffoonery could stop his career.

  At the other end was Rodney “Socr8tes” Williams, a teddy bear of a man: everyone loved him in the ready room, but few wanted to fly with him because of his stammering on the radio. When things go bad, a pilot wants a navigator speaking crisply with the tower. That wasn’t Socr8tes, who had a hard time getting the plane’s radio calls right. Tupper had him into his stateroom earlier in the cruise and asked him if he had considered speech therapy. Socr8tes—he got the “8” in his call sign because of his mispronunciation of the Greek philosopher’s name on a port call—told him he’d been doing speech therapy since he was five. Tupper just nodded and patted him on the shoulder.

  Socr8tes was African American and Tupper guessed that was why his stutter was probably overlooked, but he wondered whom exactly the Navy was helping by passing him through flight school and putting him and others in harm’s way. Next up for Socr8tes was a stint instructing at VAQ-129, the training squadron. Tupper could only imagine the implications of a rookie pilot with Socr8tes next to him in shitty weather. Only Tupper had the power to stop the madness. He went back and forth over a sleepless night before ending Socr8tes’ flying career, thinking it might save his life.

  On it went. Tupper filled out form after form. He tried to remember all the stupid things he did as a JO and cut some breaks, but some things he couldn’t take. It filtered back to him that Crapper and an ECMO junior officer, Lieutenant Devon “the Wolf” Benbow, had publicly grumbled that Vinnie’s flying was unsatisfactory and they didn’t want to fly with him.

  They had a point. Vinnie’s landing grades on the Nimitz were not great, and Tupper had paired Chicken with him after CAG complained. He’d even gone with Vinnie to an eye doctor in Bahrain on a port call. But for the men to go public with their misgivings undermined Vinnie’s ability to lead the squadron in and out of the plane.

  Tupper called Wolf and Crapper into his stateroom separately. He asked them if they had voiced their concerns to Vinnie in the debrief that follows every flight. They both said they had not. Tupper then asked if Vinnie was unsafe to fly with and should be taken off the flight schedule. They both answered no.

  “Then shut the fuck up.”

  He had other things to worry about. Beth was coming to meet him in Hong Kong in two weeks. It had been seven months since he said good-bye to her back at NAS Whidbey. Their conversations had grown strained over the cruise as they lived separate lives connected only by their children. He looked himself in the mirror in his stateroom and worried. Was his face ruddier? Had his hair gone grayer? Would she still see in him what she saw when they were at Penn State?

  But when she opened the door for him at the Renaissance Hotel it all melted away. They kissed and fell into delirious conversation, happy and nervous all the same. Tupper tried too hard at first. He took Beth to a posh Hong Kong tailor and insisted she order $2,000 worth of suits and skirts, clothes that she would never wear.

  They went to the Stanley Market the next morning and walked hand-in-hand through the stalls. They Skyped that night with Brenna and Caitlin and Tup’s parents, who had flown to Anacortes to watch the kids. The next night was the twenty-second anniversary of their first date, so Tupper bought an expensive bottle of French wine and took Beth to an Indian restaurant she’d read about in a magazine.

  And just like that it was over. Tupper took his wife to the airport and watched her pass through security. He felt sadness sweep over him. But it was a happy sadness. It was comforting to know they could both miss each other after all these years. And he’d be home in a month. The hard days were almost finished.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I spent my twenties running from Mom and Dad.

  Gordie’s and my Georgetown fantasies were long dashed and we both ended up in ragged facsimiles of our actual dreams, Gordon at Catholic University in D.C. and me at Loyola in Chicago. Loyola fit my very loose criteria: it was Catholic, they accepted me, and it was in a big city. They didn’t seem to mind that I’d finished in the gooey middle of my class. I received my acceptance letter in Ap
ril of my senior year and didn’t give it another thought until August.

  I’d fallen in love for the first time. She was a preppy blonde who so entranced me I didn’t mind wearing a homemade “Je t’aime” sweatshirt with her name on it to school on Sadie Hawkins Day. I’d stolen her away from a friend, getting drunk and making out with her for the first time as the poor guy pounded on the front door, crying on the steps of the house.

  So I earned all the ensuing bad karma. On prom night, I drove across town to pick her up in Mom’s brand-new Buick Century. It had just started to rain, and I reached down to adjust my cummerbund and looked up too late to see a red light. I hit the brakes hard and slid the car up and over a concrete curb. The Buick’s alignment was never the same. Mom was not happy. We ended up driving to the dance in my Taco Bell–infested two-tone Chevette.

  On a July night, we drove her Chevy Nova to a back street of a new subdivision. That’s where I lost my virginity. I looked up at the moment of consummation and saw through the windshield a yellow sign that read “Dead End.” But that was before I did signs or metaphors. We were both consumed with Catholic guilt, and she spent the rest of the summer breaking up with me while I begged her to take me back.

  There was universal relief when it was time for me to leave for college. Aunt Nancy agreed to drive with Mom and me to Chicago for the move-in. This was a wise and magnanimous move; a road trip with Mom and me alone together in a car for five hours would have likely ended with state troopers and sirens.

  We reached downtown Chicago near twilight and forced our way north on Lake Shore Drive. We came around the curve near Oak Street and suddenly there were high-rises casting shadows onto green water. One of the buildings had balconies. I stretched myself around to get a final look before they disappeared behind us.