“Come, join the rest of the community.”
I moved closer by a single row and cursed the priest under my breath. I had not been to church in many years, but the words came back to me like a 1970s AM radio hit, the rituals, the verses, the refrains.
Dying you destroyed our death. Rising you restored our life.
This was a modern service, so when it came time to say the Lord’s Prayer, everyone held hands. Not my thing. Luckily, I was just out of reach. I recited “Forgive them their trespasses” while staring into space, not making eye contact with anyone. I shook a few hands when it was requested that we show each other the sign of peace, but I remained in my own orbit, separate.
At communion time, I went down and received the Body of Christ. I knew, technically, this was wrong. I was not in a state of grace, since I’d missed the last 1001 days of holy obligation. Then there was all the birth control I’d bankrolled through the years. These were all mortal sins, no-go signs for communion. But I remembered Mom’s outcast years in the back pews while the fake pious walked around her. I went up and got my sliver of bread.
The priest held my gaze for an extra second as he placed a wafer on my serrated tongue. I thought somehow he’d used his supernatural powers and was going to out me for being profoundly outside the state of grace. But he said nothing.
Mass came to a close and everyone started to file out. I decided I was leaving. There were some decent Southie bars where I could have a couple of Budweisers before heading home. No one would ever know. And I would be doing everyone a favor. I was a gate-crasher, pure and simple.
I was a step away from escaping when the wafer-dispensing priest cut me off.
“Don’t go. Who are you? I know there’s a reason why you’re here.”
I blushed.
“My name is Stephen Rodrick and I’m Pete Rodrick’s son. He was a member of the class and . . .”
He cut me off.
“I knew Peter. My name is Paul Kenney. He was in my homeroom. Someone told me you were coming. Come with me, I’ll introduce you to people who knew him.”
Kenney’s right hand attached itself to my forearm. He had the grip of a longshoreman. I was more than a little afraid of him. He told me he was a Jesuit. This put me slightly at ease. The Jesuits are barely even priests, I told myself, the UN peacekeeping soldiers of the cloth. When I was at Loyola, the liquor store delivery van seemed permanently parked in front of the Jesuit residence. That was admirable.
I let him lead me into a large, open hall where cocktails were being served. Everyone was getting soused, and fast. I grabbed a vodka tonic and Kenney handed me off to Bill Flynn, a local surgeon. He was the master of ceremonies for the reunion. You could still see in his face a lady killer with a quick smile and black Irish features. He gave me a handshake and a slap on the back.
“Your dad was a brilliant man. He got 800s on his SATs, perfect scores. Did you know that?”
That I did know—Dad’s great grades were part of the family mythology—but I started writing it down in my notebook anyway. Flynn grabbed my hand with delicate care. He spoke softly and it was hard to hear him above the babble of voices.
“You’re left-handed too? Pete was left-handed.”
“Yes, yes, he was.”
The old man’s observation left me stuttering to say simple words. His recollection of a small but intimate detail about Dad moved me more than I can say. Somehow, it made Dad seem more alive than any platitude I was told as a kid. I said to myself, “He actually existed.”
Flynn kept talking. He told me how Dad liked to sit in the back of the classroom and stare out the window.
“We were in sophomore mathematics class and Father Ruttle was prattling on about some complicated algebraic problem,” said Flynn. “Your dad was always half-asleep sitting by the window. Father Ruttle thought he caught him not paying attention and said, “Mr. Rodrick, what is the answer?” Your dad gave this complicated answer and just kept looking at the window. He was a mathematical genius, but the stuff he didn’t care about, he didn’t give a damn about.”
That sounded a lot like me as a child except for the mathematical part and the genius thing. The stuff I gave a shit about—the Raiders, Sports Illustrated, Paul Weller—I cared about with a passion bordering on insanity; the stuff I didn’t give a shit about, I really didn’t give a shit about. I’d always found this to be a fatal character flaw, a sign of laziness and shiftlessness, an assumption that Mom and my teachers were all too happy to confirm. To hear a stranger tell me that Dad shared the same attitude filled me with relief.
I tried to explain this to Flynn. I started to tell how I’d always felt like an alien in my family, with no understanding of where my personality came from. But the words wouldn’t come.
Another classmate came over to say hello. He was small with bushy eyebrows and a gentle smile. His name was Richard Ward and he’d just retired after a legal career at a prestigious Boston law firm. He was from Quincy, a town not far from Dad’s Brockton.
“Your dad was really good to me, and I’m not sure why,” Ward told me. “He had a car senior year and he’d wait after school for me. Not a lot of people had cars, and it made my life so much easier.”
Ward told me stories about horsing around with Dad at the Brockton Fair. There was a mildly risqué show that the boys weren’t old enough to attend. Dad and another buddy snuck in while Richard waited outside.
“He just had a real joy for life. I can see why men would follow him. He had something, a kindness about him.”
Giant tears trickled down his lined face and onto his suit jacket.
“He was my best friend. And he was so good to me. You should know that.”
I gave him a hug. Flynn circled back. He was giving the keynote speech after dinner and he wanted to mention Dad. He asked for some details about the accident. I gave him the basics: just made skipper, on his way home, then the Kitty Hawk is turned around after the hostages were taken, killed near Diego Garcia during a low-level training flight, nothing found but an oil slick.
He thanked me and walked away. It was dinnertime and I sat next to Father Kenney. He had a neatly trimmed white beard that blended perfectly into the closely cropped ring of hair that circled his bald head. We talked for a while about his various postings around the world and his current project recording the oral histories of elderly Jesuit priests in the United States. I asked him if he was going to record his own story.
“I’m sixty-eight. You have to be seventy. I’ll be there soon enough. Time goes by so quickly.”
We talked for a while about Dad. Father Kenney remarked that he always seemed so serious. I told him a little about Dad’s dad, his long black moods casting a shadow over the family and how Dad had to pick up the slack. Father Kenney nodded slowly.
“That explains a lot. I always got the sense your dad carried some kind of sadness inside him. I can see it in your face too.”
I gave a wince of a smile. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this observation from someone about myself, but to hear that Dad was the same tore up my insides. Maybe it was all predestined; maybe I didn’t have any say in the matter.
I had another drink. The alcohol lifted my spirits, and I decided to dwell on the good things I’d heard about Dad. I felt understood in a way, surrounded by his fellow travelers from long ago. After the lobster bisque was served, Dr. Flynn stood up and walked to a podium at the front of the room.
He paused for a moment and looked down at some notes.
“It was during the first Persian Gulf War over Iraq. It was a night flight over the desert and Pete just never returned.”
I nearly passed out. Somehow, in the thirty minutes from when I’d told him about Dad’s accident Flynn had tarted up the story, moved it up over a decade, shifted from sea to land, and from peacetime to combat. He had totally botched it. I had to set the record straight. I started to stand up, but Father Kenney gave me the death grip again. I told him that wasn’t how it had happened.
“I know. I heard what you told him. But some things you just have to let go. Let go.”
I slumped back into my chair. After the speech was over, there was more mingling. A line formed of three or four classmates who wanted to meet me. A short, bald man shook my hand, his eyes bugged wide with amazement.
“Your dad must have been almost fifty by the time of the Gulf War! That’s really remarkable he was still flying!”
I started telling him it was more complicated than that, but I stopped. Instead, I just smiled and thanked him for his kind words. Maybe Father Kenney was right. Some of it you just had to let go.
I slipped out of the high school a little later. It was dark now, and the glass façade of the Boston Globe building was lit up. Green trucks loaded up early editions of the Sunday paper. I thought of childhood days reading the Globe with my grandparents on the Cape. The place no longer looked like the Temple of Doom. I turned on the radio and Dad’s beloved Celtics were beating the tar out of the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference semifinals. For once, I didn’t root against a Boston team.
Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the events of the evening, but I decided to drive the thirty minutes south to Brockton, a place I’d ventured to only once in the seven years I’d lived in Boston. I got off on an exit I faintly remembered from decades ago. I tried to will my car to his old neighborhood in the dark.
But I didn’t have a GPS and was blind with exhaustion. I drove around bad neighborhoods for an hour or so until the chances of getting carjacked seemed higher than the chances of finding the house on Herrod Avenue.
I gave up. Usually, this would have meant a drive home full of swearing at myself for not bringing directions, berating myself for not being better organized, for not being more like Dad. But not that night.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Tupper did the math right after his fly-in. He’d been gone for 377 of the previous 500 days. The Navy tried to prepare you for reentry with seminars and brochures, but he was still going from a boat of macho to a house of estrogen. It wasn’t easy. His change of command speech about leaving two girls and returning home to young women had been just words, but now the words were true. Some of it would take some getting used to. He looked at Brenna with amazement one morning shortly after returning.
“You’ve got boobs!”
Brenna turned red, ran to her room, and slammed the door. Beth told him it wasn’t his finest moment as a father. He apologized, but he was genuinely dumbstruck. He’d blinked and it had all gone by; one day he was reading Brenna stories before his first cruise, and now she was a young woman, finishing eighth grade and talking about colleges. She wanted to go to law school. Or dance. Or write.
Caitlin’s changes were subtler. She was still his tomboy, pestering him to buy her more bottle rockets from the Indian reservation down the road. But she worried too much about life and school—all they seemed to do in school these days was test, test, test. At night, she wondered about death. She believed in God most of the time, but then her hamster would get sick or she’d see a fallen bird and wonder at bedtime whether God had forgotten her. Tupper thought she was just like her old man.
He and Beth tried to get back into a routine. It was harder than he remembered. He started playing guitar in the band at church because he knew it was important to Beth and the girls. They talked about finally building their house on Burrows Bay. Not that he saw Beth a lot—she had gone back to work part-time and he had his job. Between their joint responsibilities and the girls, they hardly had time to talk. It was go, go, go from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. and then get up and do it again.
Their time together was largely spent figuring out what they were going to do next. None of the choices were promising. Beth and the girls quickly shot down the idea of Afghanistan, and no one was enthused about a return to Pax River—too many ghosts. The other option was serving as air boss on the USS Lincoln. Air boss wouldn’t be flying, but it would be close, working up in the carrier’s tower supervising the launch and recovery of aircraft. The Lincoln was based in Everett, a tolerable one-hour commute away. The girls could stay in Anacortes and in the schools they loved. Of course, the Lincoln meant more sea duty, but he wouldn’t have to ship out until the following February, an eternity away.
He still had his day job. Every day, there were speeches to give, promotions to sort out, and bullshit to wade through. In May, he flew a Prowler down to NAS Lemoore for his formal fit rep. He listened to CAG list his failings and said less than fifty words. He walked back to the hangar for his flight back in time to notice Socr8tes on the wing checking out a malfunction. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, a major violation in the fly-safe Navy. Vinnie reported that Dizzo, another junior officer, had done the same thing on a recent flight.
Back in Whidbey, Tupper called the squadron into their ready room on a Friday afternoon. He waited for silence and then mentioned the helmet violations.
“Socr8tes, Dizzo, your weekend starts right now. Get the fuck out of my command.”
There was silence. The two fliers gathered their gear and trudged out. Dizzo sat in his truck, tears in his eyes. The JOs were stunned. They had been taught, “Praise in public, rebuke in private,” at the Naval Academy and Officer Candidate School, but they’d just watched two of their colleagues get dressed down before their eyes. Sure, everyone was supposed to wear their helmet up top, but did the violation warrant banishing grown men? After the meeting ended, Wolf asked Tupper for a minute.
“Sir, I think that was wrong.”
Tupper thanked him for his opinion, but then told him to shove it up his ass. This was basic safety shit. What if Dizzo had slipped and landed on his head? Didn’t the squadron already lose an eye on cruise? He waved Wolf away and went to his office and slammed the door.
Two weeks later, Tupper flew back down to Lemoore with Ralph and Wolf. CAG was moving on to a fleet job, and all the wing COs were mandated to attend the change of command.
He liked the new CAG, a tiny man whose call sign was Satan. He listened as Satan thanked all the other squadron commanders by name and praised their service. He moved on without mentioning Tupper. Tupper did a slow burn. He flew back in silence with neither Ralph nor Wolf mentioning the slight. But the next morning, he was walking down the hangar steps when Linda piped up.
“Skipper, I heard CAG didn’t mention you. That must have sucked.”
Tupper seethed, but he didn’t say anything. He called Satan and told him the snub had undermined his ability to lead. Satan was mortified and told him it was merely an oversight. He promised to call Wolf and Ralph and tell them it was just a mistake. Still, the damage had been done.
The summer was nearly gone. Tupper’s change of command was just three months away. Where had the time gone? Had he done any good? Tupper had a new feeling, one he hadn’t felt in twenty years. He was done with the Navy.
But the Navy wasn’t done with him. Tupper officially passed on the Pax River j
ob and took orders for the air boss job on the Lincoln. He would go back to sea and everyone else could stay home. But the decision quickly bit him in the ass. Shortly after he accepted the job, the Navy announced that the Lincoln was moving from Everett to Norfolk, Virginia, in the spring of 2012 for repairs. That meant Tupper would have to live in Virginia by himself for the last six months of his tour. There had been rumors of the Lincoln relocating that even I’d heard, but Tupper, consumed by command, didn’t hear them. Beth was livid.
“How could you not have known? Everyone else knew!”
Tupper didn’t know what to say. He was heartbroken. He’d done his best to keep his family in one place, and even that had failed. The head-down laser focus that served him so well as a pilot was screwing him in the real world.
The Black Ravens headed out to sea in August for some pointless exercises off the California coast. The squadron was transitioning to the Growler starting in October, but the Navy insisted the squadron keep current on their carrier qualifications. So Tupper and his men headed out to spin some circles off the coast of San Diego.
That’s when his Prowler nearly killed him. He was bringing his jet in for a routine daytime landing, but just as the Prowler was approaching the deck its nose bucked up violently to the left. For a second, Tupper lost sight of the deck. But he yanked the stick forward and kicked the rudder hard to the right. The Prowler corrected and somehow he grabbed the three wire. Even at the end you had to pay attention.
Two days later, Tupper caught his last trap. He jumped down from the plane, and Beav told him that he was needed in the ready room. CAG was waiting for him along with his men. He wondered what the hell had gone wrong this time. But CAG started talking about the special qualities needed to lead a squadron into combat. Tupper didn’t immediately understand. Then, CAG pulled something out of his pocket.
The Magical Stranger Page 20
