The Magical Stranger (2 page)

“C'mon, Barb, you can start a whole new life.”

Her response is a whisper.

“No.”

Chapter Two

M
om kept her word. It's 2009 and she makes coffee for one, pouring Folgers into a thirty-year-old coffee mug. The cup is chipped and discolored with long-ago lipstick traces. The Black Ravens squadron logo is faint and the name “Pete” fades a little more with every wash. She is sixty-seven now and lives outside Flint, Michigan, where she moved our family after Dad's accident. An arthritic knee slows her down, but she still possesses the quick laugh and wide brown eyes that made my father fall in love with her fifty years ago. There's the toothy smile and the southern fake swear words. “Judas Priest” swapped for Jesus Christ.

I'm not the greatest son, but I know what matters to her. Earlier that year, I sent an email to the general mailbox of VAQ-135, my dad's old squadron. I was looking for new coffee mugs. The squadron's commanding officer, Commander Brent “Doogie” Breining, wrote me back. He thanked my family for our sacrifice—this happens a lot—and noted that his change-of-command ceremony would occur on July 2, 2009, two days short of the thirtieth anniversary of my father taking command of the Black Ravens. Would I like to come out to Whidbey Island for the ceremony? There would be a formal dinner—a dining-out—the night before where I could meet the guys in the squadron, fliers like my father. And who knows? They'd invite some Black Raven alumni; maybe one of them might even have known Dad. The next day, there'd be a formal ceremony where Commander James Hunter “Tupper” Ware would formally relieve Doogie. Afterward, I could get a tour of the base and even sit in the cockpit of an EA-6B Prowler, Dad's old plane still in service thirty years later.

I'm a writer; I inhabit other people's lives for a living. The Navy left me without a father but with some useful skills. I am adept at playing the new kid, making my way in strange worlds, never knowing where the bathrooms are located. This is what I do. Still, Breining's invitation frightened me. Some historians trace the start of the war on terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran. That would make Dad's crash the first American collateral damage. Thirty years later, fathers still fly EA-6B Prowlers off carriers. Their sons still skate at the Roller Barn. The war goes on and on. All that changes are the “Welcome Home” signs. But my family surrendered long ago. We fled that world, refugees never speaking of our destroyed homeland.

A colleague nicknamed me—half mocking—the magical stranger because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant and unknowable, holy but absent, a born leader who gave me little direction. Peter Rodrick was one of only 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark. And he was an apparition, gone two hundred days of the year from when I was six until he died. Even when he was home, he was away, working sixteen-hour days, writing up flight plans, and diagramming aerial tactics. He was such a ghost that I didn't fully accept he was gone for years. It just felt like he was on an extended cruise.

Evidence of the actual man was harder to come by. Most of it was locked away in cruise boxes and crates in Mom's basement: a framed picture from the
Brockton Enterprise
of a boy with a pole on the first day of fishing season; a long black leather sleeve holding a sword, and a small metal box containing envelopes with single dollar bills sent to him on his birthday by his father, the envelopes still coming for years after he died.

I had made some tentative steps at connecting with Dad, but they always ended in sadness. I visited his marker at Arlington National Cemetery twice when I was in Washington as a college kid. I would climb the hill up to his section and sit down on the hard ground. I'd pick out the dirt that lodged between letters reading
IN MEMORY OF PETER THOMAS RODRICK CDR US NAVY JAN 6 1943–NOV 28 1979
. I'd cry and flip a middle finger at tour guides droning on about Audie Murphy to tourists in passing trolleys. I never told my family.

An early attempt to write about the past burned me. In 2002, I turned thirty-six, Dad's age when he died. My wife and I lived in suburban Boston, an hour from Dad's hometown of Brockton. We were talking about starting a family, and she wanted to raise our children in a blissful suburban security neither one of us had as kids. I wanted to live in LA or New York. But there were larger issues. She was convinced that I wouldn't be a proper father until I had made peace with my own dad.

I readily agreed. I pitched a magazine story on Navy pilots and eventually spent three weeks on the USS
Kitty Hawk
, Dad's last ship. I sat in the chapel where Dad prayed every morning. I left on a transport plane from the same catapult he used on his final flight. I finally understood a flake of his life. But the end result was the opposite of what I had hoped. My wife asked for a divorce a few weeks after I returned, believing Dad's transient life and early death had ingrained in me a restlessness and sadness that would not be eased by babies and backyard cookouts. I assumed she was right, shouldering the blame for our joint failure.

The story didn't exactly open up a dialogue within my immediate family. We went to an Outback Steakhouse shortly after its publication, but the conversation was slow. Finally, Mom spoke.

“I liked the story very much.”

My older sister scowled.

“I can't believe you described me as stoic.”

We then ordered a Bloomin' Onion. That was the end of the conversation.

S
o I put Dad back into a cardboard box full of photos I kept in a room I rarely used. Newly single, I split my time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, moving back and forth between LAX and JFK eight to ten times a year as if someone or something was chasing me. Dad was dropped from my itinerary until Commander Breining's invitation. I vacillated for weeks, staring at the ornate lettering of the official invitation. In the end, my new girlfriend Alix's curiosity about my past pushed me to buy two airline tickets just a week prior to the ceremony.

I immediately began to regret it. We flew from New York to Seattle on a July afternoon. An hour after landing, we pulled onto the Mukilteo ferry, an idyllic twenty-minute voyage from suburban Seattle to the southern tip of Whidbey Island. It was a trip I'd made dozens of times as a child. The afternoon was a “blue-sky day,” a Navy term for endless visibility, just like the day of Dad's accident. Alix dozed while I squinted through the glare and thought of Dad losing perspective between sea and sky—one of the many theories for his crash.

I spotted a woman struggling with two small children in the car ahead of us. Her Subaru station wagon had a Fly Navy bumper sticker and was packed with toys and luggage. I guessed she was returning home after visiting relatives while the children's father floated on a different ocean.

The woman looked to be about Mom's age when she became a widow. Barbara Rodrick was thirty-seven and still beautiful when Dad's plane crashed sixty-three miles southeast of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. She has been on zero dates since the mishap, as the Navy likes to call plane crashes. I felt this was heroic when I was younger, her terminal fidelity a fitting coda to my father's own bravery. As an adult, I began to think it was beyond sad.

We approached the island. The ferry's loudspeakers instructed drivers to return to their cars. Up ahead, the woman expertly wrangled her hyperactive son into his car seat as he kicked and thrashed.

The boy jarred something in my memory. When I was five, Dad was studying for a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. One day, my sister and I were riding in the back of our blue Chevrolet station wagon as Mom ran errands. This was in the time before mandatory seat belts, much less car seats. I tried to crank down the window with my tiny fingers but pulled the wrong handle. The door opened and I tumbled onto the asphalt.

Somehow, Mom didn't notice. My sister and I were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. We fought constantly. Now, watching her tormenter tumble out the door, Terry saw her opportunity. She kept quiet.

Luckily, I landed on the curb side of the road. The passing cars looked like motorized dinosaurs from the ground. A block or two away, Mom looked in the rear window and screamed at Terry.

“Where's your brother?”

“He fell out back at the light.”

Mom turned the station wagon around, squealing rubber. She pulled up in front of me and jumped out of the car. Her hands were shaking but her bouffant hairdo was still perfect. She dusted me off, looked around to see if anyone she knew was watching, and whispered in my ear.

“Do not mention this to your father.”

Back on the ferry, I watched the woman double-check her kids' restraints. She gave her little boy a sippy cup, combed his hair, and smoothly moved into the driver's seat. She was completely in command. I couldn't look away. It was a scene from a play I had never seen.

Chapter Three

A
few miles away, a man I had not yet met prepared to take Dad's last job.

Commander James Hunter Ware III carefully laid out a white uniform on the bed in his Anacortes, Washington, home. He took out a ruler and made sure his medals were perfectly aligned, a trick he learned at the Naval Academy. On paper, he was the American man as hero. There was the buzz cut, the flight jacket, and a cowboy's squint. His garage housed his Harley, a beat-up Ford pickup truck, a still for his nasty homemade hard cider, and license plates from five states. He was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis grad, and a former test pilot. For a decade, he had flown in harm's way—most recently jamming Taliban communications in the skies above Afghanistan—and then landed his EA-6B Prowler in the dark on the deck of a carrier. There were ribbons on his uniform to prove it.

Tonight, Ware dressed for VAQ-135's dining-out, a formal dinner marking the squadron's change of command. Tomorrow, he would become skipper of a squadron heading to sea, the Navy's glamour job.

There was so much he wanted to do. He'd been in enough squadrons where number chasing was the only goal: percentage of sorties completed, percentage of sailors promoted, percentage of wives participating in Toys for Tots, blah, blah, blah. The Navy was no longer about sailors, thought Hunter; it was about stats and checking boxes. As far as he knew, a stat wasn't what would get a Prowler aboard a carrier in a driving rainstorm. It was the 167 men and women of VAQ-135, and they'd have to do it with the four oldest EA-6B Prowlers in the fleet.

Ware knew it sounded new agey, but his command was going to stress “sailors taking care of sailors.” That didn't mean screwups and misconduct would be ignored—Ware had no tolerance for shitty sailors and excuses—but it did mean looking out for one another, taking personal responsibility, and not passing the buck—long a VAQ-135 staple. Ware guessed if he could pull that off, not nearly as easy as it sounded, getting jets in the air and getting jets home safe wouldn't be a problem. Promotions and sortie completion quotas would follow, and pretty soon he'd have his dream: the top electronic attack squadron in the U.S. Navy. If all that happened, his own future—he had dreams of commanding his own ship—would be his to write.

Ware could change lives with a signature, but at home he was still a figurehead king. Downstairs, he could hear his daughters—twelve-year-old Brenna and ten-year-old Caitlin—chattering with his wife, Beth, and his mother, Cindy, about dance classes, Harry Potter, and sleepovers. He caught snippets of dialogue as he drifted in and out of earshot. He knew his daughters better than most Navy dads, but sometimes he felt like a stranger in his own home, trying to understand a language not his own.

Ware spent a lot of time laughing about how little power he held over his own life. (It beat crying.) A Pentagon fleet monkey decided when he came and went. Another fleet monkey ruled on his screwups. Entire days were spent trying to protect himself and his sailors from the flying bullshit being pushed by men living in the D.C. echo chamber—men who hadn't been to sea for years, men who had forgotten what it was like to spend eight months away, missing babies being born.

In reality, Ware didn't even hold the deed to his own name. He was named James after his father and grandfather, but raised as Hunter, shortened to Hunt by his mom and Beth. But that was only within the confines of his Anacortes home, a twenty-minute drive from the back gate of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. In the Navy, Ware was known by his call sign, “Tupper,” a not-clever play on his last name. Ware grew up dreaming of Maverick and Ice, so he didn't much like being known by the trademarked name of a brand of plastic containers. Still, he knew it could be much worse: The Black Ravens' ready room featured a Crapper and a Turd. In the real Navy, call signs were ego-killing nicknames designed to strip away rank and privilege, making everyone equal in the cockpit—a good thing when skies turned black. Tupper knew call signs would be gone soon, or at least the R-rated ones—victims of a politically correct Navy hell-bent on not offending anyone. Sure, it would suck to tell your son that your call sign was slang for shit, but where was the line? He didn't know. He was serving in a Navy that was waging two wars while afraid of its own shadow.

Sometimes, he had to remind himself why he got into the flying business. It was simple: he had no choice. He knew it sounded corny, but when he saw
Top Gun
at sixteen, that was it. Suddenly, every conversation was about Annapolis, flying jets off carriers, and the need for speed. (He wrecked three cars in high school.) Spare quarters were spent down at the arcade playing After Burner, a Navy pilot video game. There was no Plan B. The Air Force Academy sent a representative to his house and promised Tupper a slot if he wanted it. Tupper shook his hand and looked him in the eye.

“Thanks, but I'm not interested. I want to fly jets off carriers.”

But now even flying jets off carriers had lost some of its allure: too many rules and regs to follow. Couldn't fly the Prowler below 500 feet, couldn't make a hard break toward the carrier at more than 350 knots. Sometimes, Tupper muttered to himself: “What the hell is this? The goddamned Air Force?”

And the paperwork! Forms for this, forms for that. Fit reps to write, everyone gets an award come end of cruise. Jesus Christ! Sometimes he felt like Dilbert with gold wings.

But he pushed all of that out of his mind. Tomorrow was what mattered. “Concentrate on the important things,” he told himself. “This is what you've been waiting for.”

Beth came into the room.

“Hunt, we've got to go in ten minutes.”

B
eth was the one who had sacrificed the most.

They met at Penn State after he had been rejected by Annapolis—his first Navy kick in the crotch—and she stuck with him when he got into the Naval Academy on his second try. Their relationship was ruled by absence from the start. At the academy, Tupper would go over the wall and jump into Beth's car and they'd head off to D.C. for a day. But then there was flight school in Pensacola, Florida, and Meridian, Mississippi. On the rare free weekend, he'd call Beth in Pennsylvania and they'd find a spot on the map halfway between them.

Tupper hemmed and hawed about whether to end it. Navy life wasn't easy for a young wife. Beth was the first college graduate from a working-class Pittsburgh family; there were things she wanted to do. Tupper thought maybe it would be better if he went at it alone for a while.

He turned it over in his head for months. But he was miserable without her. He called her one day and told her he was going to fly his A-4 Skyhawk into State College and visit Penn State for a ROTC event. Could she meet him there?

She agreed. His plan was a complete lie. He made the 1,000-mile drive from Meridian to State College in his Mitsubishi Eclipse and arrived a day before her. He bluffed his way into Snyder Hall, his old dorm, and went up to room 406. He knocked on the door. Two guys answered and stared at the buzz-cut Hunter in his green flight jacket. He asked them if he could buy a few hours in his old room in exchange for some Fly Navy coffee mugs, a case of beer, and some squadron patches. The boys agreed.

Beth arrived the next day. Hunter took her up to see his old room. He pushed open the door and she lost her breath. The kids had blown up one hundred balloons and tied them to the ceiling. They fell on Tupper and Beth when they opened the door. Hunter pulled out an engagement ring. Beth said yes. They both wept.

They picked a wedding date six months down the road and reserved a mansion in Coraopolis, just outside of Pittsburgh. Tupper plugged through the rest of flight school. He passed his final flight tests. He was scheduled to receive his wings of gold on May 28, 1995, at NAS Meridian, not far from where my father's T-2 crashed. There was just one problem: May 28 was his wedding day.

Tupper told his commanding officer that he wouldn't be there. He was told that wasn't acceptable. Ensign Ware and a Navy captain played chicken for a day. Eventually, the Navy conceded. Tupper and Beth were married as scheduled. The following week, Beth pinned on his wings in the CO's office back in Meridian.

Tupper had put Beth before the Navy. That wouldn't happen again for a very long time.

T
upper watched as Beth brushed out her brunette hair. He would take command in less than eighteen hours, but he didn't feel triumphant. Instead he felt sorrow—sorrow for what he was about to put Beth and the kids through. Sorrow for what he had missed. He'd already been gone most of the spring and summer on workups, getting ready for a six-month deployment that began in three weeks. It would fall on Beth to take care of the girls and, as skipper's wife, watch over the families left behind, just like it had fallen on my mother thirty years ago. She had cut back her hours as a dietitian working with disadvantaged young mothers because someone had to be there for the girls, someone had to give them a sense of stability, and it certainly wasn't going to be their father.

It was just another in a long list of sacrifices she had made for her husband. They had been together for over twenty years and between workups, cruises, and overseas detachments, Tupper calculated he had been gone for five of them. The girls had grown used to it in their own way. Beth found Caitlin the perfect pet: a dwarf hamster with the life expectancy of two years, exactly the length of a Navy tour of duty. But that was when they were younger. Now Beth was worn out and the girls were old enough to know what they were missing. So was Tupper. Recently, Beth started asking tough questions.

“How much more? Hunt, I can't do this forever. I'm tired. The girls are tired.”

“Just a little bit longer.”

He thought of everything he had put her through. Back in 2000, he'd been tapped for test pilot school in Patuxent River, Maryland, a sign his career was on the fast track. Tupper told Beth he'd be home for dinner most nights, a welcome relief for her after he'd been at sea for most of their babies' lives. But there was always a new jet to master, a new manual to plow through, a flight plan that needed revising. He made it home for dinner once a week at best.

Beth didn't take it well. He'd come home in the evening, and she'd be splayed on the couch, the kids screaming in their playpens still needing to be fed. He thought she was depressed. It went on for six months, his vibrant bride reduced to a crumpled wreck on the sofa.

Finally, a Pax River flight surgeon suggested Beth have her thyroid checked out. Tests were run and the diagnosis was a hyperactive thyroid. Meds were prescribed, but it was a slow climb out of her hole and Tupper wasn't there for her. Then came 9/11, and he was stuck at test pilot school for another year. Troops and jets poured into Afghanistan and Iraq and he wasn't part of it. To fill the time, he decided to get a master's degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins at night. He saw his family even less. There is a saying in the Navy: “There are horses that ride and horses that don't, and if you ride, be prepared to get ridden to death.” Tupper galloped into his future, and no one warned him about the cost.

Tupper and Beth worked out a way to make parting less painful. A few months before each cruise, they began a home project that they had no chance of completing before his deployment. (This year it was redoing the backyard.) They would inevitably come up short and snipe at each other just before he left. Somehow, bruising their love made things easier. Tupper knew that civilians found their elaborate routine beyond crazy, but inside the Navy, their friends just nodded. Whatever it takes.

It was time to go. Tupper went down the stairs and talked to his girls: Brenna, the prim ballerina, and Caitlin, who loved to wrestle weeds out in the yard with her dad. Recently, Tupper had watched a video of a younger version of himself recording Brenna's favorite bedtime stories so she wouldn't forget him while he was away on his first cruise. There were tears in his eyes as he read, just as there were tears as he watched it a decade later. Still, he went away. And not just that once, but over and over again. He had just turned forty. He was starting to add up all the damage that had been done. Had it been worth it? He didn't know.

Beth came down the stairs, still as beautiful to him as the day they met. She gave the girls some final instructions, and then the couple jumped into Beth's BMW SUV. Tupper carefully backed the car out of their cul-de-sac and asked his wife one question.

“Ready?”

T
he Wares skirted the quaint hotels and art galleries of seaside Anacortes and then drove past the less-photogenic Shell refineries on Washington State Route 20. For a while, they rode in silence. Tupper didn't like to admit it, but he was a brooder, prone to dark silences that could keep him quiet except for mandatory radio calls on a six-hour combat flight. The melancholia had been there since he was a kid. He cried when his parents put an old chair out by the curb, convinced the chair had feelings. He told his mother that it wasn't right to abandon it. Cindy Ware had to lie and tell him another family of chairs needed the chair even more. Around the same time, Jim took him fishing for the first time. His boy had just reeled in his first catch when his dad noticed he had tears in his eyes.

“Dad, can a fish scream?”

But as they turned off toward the Hope Island Inn by the Sea, Tupper's default melancholy vanished, replaced by something else: unfettered relief. He knew the emotion well. It was the feeling that you've cheated death, whether a real one or just a career killer. He'd known the feeling as a pilot a handful of times around the carrier, mostly back when he was a rookie pilot, a nugget, having trouble getting aboard. You name it—almost ramp strikes, coming in too fast, overshooting the carrier's four arresting wires—Tupper had problems with it early in his career.

The United States is the only country in the world that has pilots land on carriers in the dark—other countries having decided it is far too dangerous—and it is an ass-tightening experience under the best of circumstances. Most of the Navy now flew variations of the F/A-18 Hornet, a modern jet that projected all your information—airspeed, altitude, rate of descent—right in front of you with a head-up display. The HUD meant you could keep looking straight ahead, searching out the speck that is a carrier on a dark night, without having to scan back inside the cockpit to look at your instruments. The plane even had an autopilot setting where if you lined the Hornet up behind the carrier it would land itself like a Mercedes parking itself on a Manhattan street.