The Tank Man's Son (22 page)

Dad answered without turning. “Yeah, boy, you’ll pay all right.”

I knew the footsteps behind me were Mom’s, since Jerry and Sheri would never risk getting involved. We all knew that a Bouman kid suffering alone was a kid best left alone. Dad wouldn’t ration his wrath. He was prodigal with pain.

“Hey!” she snapped.

Dad didn’t turn around, but he did stop walking. Zeke and I froze.

“That wasn’t the dog’s fault, and you know it! If you don’t want your stuff to get wrecked, then stop putting it where the dog can reach it! Just like that lousy life raft. Go on, Mark
 
—get Zeke back in his kennel.”

Mom’s logic was a lot less sound this time than when Zeke had chewed the raft. Dad had put the fuel drum
outside
the kennel to keep it safe, and while Zeke hadn’t opened the valve on purpose, it was his fault. Still
 
—any port in a storm. I rushed forward and grabbed Zeke by the collar and led him back. We passed Dad on the way. He was standing
stock-still, except for his fists. They were opening and closing. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular.

Mom watched us, arms folded across her chest. “Come on now,” she said when I’d lugged Zeke back into his kennel and chained him up. “Get ready or you’ll miss the bus.”

When I walked down the driveway fifteen minutes later, Dad was still standing outside, looking for all the world like a man enjoying a quiet morning. Sometimes Mom took the fight right out of him. Thing was, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes Dad hung on to the fight and then gave it back later.

But I was glad Dad wasn’t going to kill my dog
 
—that was all I knew for that day, and it was enough.

S
CHOOL HAD ALWAYS
been a chore. Even in elementary school I’d really only enjoyed the fact that a guy could get a free lunch. Since I was always hungry, I always cleaned my tray, and I marveled when other kids would toss away half their food. Recess was fine when I was smaller, since I could hit a baseball and tackle hard. But recess wasn’t part of the equation anymore. Break time was just other kids standing around in groups, chatting and laughing, and me realizing there wasn’t a single group I could join.

From what Jerry told me, high school was going to be even worse. Still, while he wasn’t the coolest kid in school
 
—his high-water pants and stained T-shirts guaranteed that, not to mention his thick, black glasses
 
—his teachers seemed to respect him and so did certain kids. And the ones who didn’t
 
—well, he never let them bother him.

Once a blimp of a guy from the baseball team confronted Jerry in the parking lot after school. The kid had two or three chins and brand-new Chuck Taylors.

“Whaddaya think, four eyes
 
—that I’m just gonna let you walk past?”

Jerry’s answer was simple. “Yes.”

“Well, I ain’t.”

Jerry pushed his glasses farther up on his nose, and then said, “I’m going home to study. I don’t want to fight.” He made a move to go around, but the other boy shoved Jerry’s shoulder.

“You’re gonna have to,
Fairy
Bouman.”

Jerry sighed and set his books down on the asphalt in a neat stack, then straightened. He was a good six inches taller than the other kid, and probably forty pounds lighter. An impromptu boxing ring formed, a row of parked cars on one side and spectators on the other three. Jerry raised his arms to his chest, loose and easy, then tucked his chin down and waited.

“Get him!” someone yelled.

The baseball kid charged, and Jerry just stood there. The other kid threw a flurry of punches, all aimed at Jerry’s face, but Jerry tried to duck and dodge, all the while backing away from his attacker. It looked like the fight was going to be over soon enough, as Jerry didn’t seem to be able to defend himself.

And it was, but not in the way that everyone watching expected. Jerry’d had the stuffing beaten out of him too many times to count, and he had an incredible tolerance for pain
 
—Dad saw to that. Jerry hadn’t been retreating
 
—he’d been luring the other guy closer, like a patient fisherman. With a sudden move, Jerry stepped inside the other guy’s reach and slugged him smack on the jaw. Matching the rest of his angular body, Jerry had sharp, pointy knuckles that protruded from his clenched fists, almost like a set of brass knuckles. Without slowing, Jerry spun his opponent around, doubled him over with two shots to the kidney, then grabbed him and, using all of his considerable leverage, rammed the kid headfirst into the nearest car door with a nauseating crunch.

His huge body slid down the door, collapsing in a heap and leaving a head-shaped dent in the metal. In the sudden silence, Jerry said to
no one in particular, “I don’t want to fight,” and then he picked up his textbooks and walked away.

Kids at school just couldn’t believe that a dork as skinny and quiet as Jerry could really fight, so that wasn’t the only time Jerry was forced into violence. The result was always the same, though: Jerry would absolutely destroy his opponent. One thing he’d learned from Dad, whether he liked it or not, was that the quickest way to end a fight was to make sure the other guy couldn’t get up off the ground.

Jerry had confidence, and he could defend himself. I had a report card full of Ds and a single purpose in life: spending time alone with my dog.

Every minute spent at school was a minute spent away from Zeke, and that wasn’t good for either of us. Before the bus was even stopped at my driveway, I would stand up and begin stumbling down the aisle toward the front, and the minute the door hinged open, I was through it like a shot, bolting up the driveway. Zeke always knew I was coming, and as I ran, I could hear his barking growing closer and closer. Then Dad’s shed would come into view around the side of our house, and I’d run even harder toward the frantic barking. As I rounded the front corner of the shed, Zeke’s doghouse would come into view, and we’d see each other for the first time.

“Hey, boy! Hey! How ya doin’? Ready to go?”

I had learned that Zeke was a German shorthaired pointer, but unlike most of his breed, he never had his tail clipped. His long, slender tail only added to his ability to seem entirely wild, like a small brown-and-white tornado. He was totally unable to control himself when I sprang him from the shed, sometimes leaping into midair and then, with all four legs off the ground, twisting in the opposite direction and landing in a heap. Barks, yips, licks, wags, sniffs, and all the while switching between four legs, two legs, and no legs with the speed of a bullet. To me he looked like living joy.

I don’t know what I looked like to Zeke. All I know is that somehow, for some reason, he loved what he saw. Of that I was certain.

I would jam my hand into the latch to open his gate, and out he’d fly, blowing past me and rounding the corner on his way to the house. We both knew exactly what came next. Zeke would wait outside the door while I’d race to my room, toss my books onto my bed, and in one fluid pivot grab my shotgun from where it always leaned against the wall. Dad had given me the shotgun
 
—a double-barrel Ithaca hammerless
 
—and it was so heavy and long that without my pride I could scarcely have carried it. I kept it clean and oiled, and Zeke and I never went into the woods without it. Next came a handful of shells stuffed into my coat pocket, and I’d make it back to the door where Zeke was whining with happiness.

And that’s when things slowed down. Our rush to reunite and get ready was over, and now we could relax. We had escaped
 
—Zeke from his cage, me from school and home
 
—and now it was time to savor our freedom. Usually we walked behind the house together, away from the road. Our house, squatting at the top of one of the tallest hills around, gave me a view that stretched for miles. While Zeke sat beside my leg, letting me know with the occasional pressure of his head that he was ready to go whenever I was, I would scan the surrounding land. Sometimes sharp in the sunlight, sometimes dark in the mist, and other times painted with the colors of fall, our land
 
—and our neighbor’s land, since we never paid attention to property lines
 
—hid what seemed like endless places for a boy and his dog to explore.

The man who gave me Zeke had been right: my dog was a born hunter. He could sniff out any critter, anywhere, and nothing pleased him more than chasing down a scent and then making sure I kept up with him. Turned out I was a born hunter too. Running with my dog was the only thing I cared about
 
—the only thing I let myself care about. The amount of game hidden in the surrounding creeks and hollows and stumps and burrows was astounding: raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and even foxes.

We loved those woods. What we found there couldn’t be taken from
us. I was free from the constant, nagging fear of humiliation that followed me around school. Free from the stabbing fear of punishment at home, from the sense that every move I made was being scrutinized by an unfair judge, who on the strength of a single careless word could call down a slap powerful enough to knock me off my feet and into the nearest wall. And Zeke was free to be himself and to be with me, which was all he ever asked.

Jerry and Sheri and I would always be connected. No one understood our life, which meant that no one would ever understand us.

Thing was,
we
didn’t understand our life either. We lived in the same house, but we almost never talked about life. The things that mattered most remained unspoken between us. We never told one another that everything would be all right. We didn’t hug or hold one another. We rarely touched.

But touch is a language a boy needs to speak and to hear spoken to him. Trapped in my own silent suffering, I pined for touch. That was a constant wound, an ache that had no remedy. All I could do was cope, alone, and the only way I knew how was in the company of Zeke. Because it just so happened that touch was my dog’s native language.

We would explore miles and miles of woods and streams, uphill and down, always side by side. Zeke loved to swim in one of the nearby ponds, and I would sit on the bank while he frolicked in the water before running to shore, shaking himself, and racing back into the woods. He had a funny habit of sniffing out and collecting every box turtle he could find, one by one, and then dropping them in the pond. Maybe he was bringing them back for me, as presents, wanting to fill my pond with something he knew I liked. And I would always thank him with a kind word and a thump on his flank. Then Zeke would thank me for thanking him, giving my hand a lick and turning in eager half circles, then pushing his bony head into my flank. In the silent shadows beneath the trees, alone with Zeke, I was never belittled. Never criticized. Never attacked. No one talked at me about failed tests or water-stained clothes. No one reminded me of all the chores
I had done wrong. I was never made to feel like a waste of space on God’s green earth.

The end of every hunting trip was a little death. Zeke and I would straggle back to the house at the latest possible hour, and I would take my sweet time settling my dog down in his kennel. The longer I stayed outside, the greater the chance that inside Dad was watching television or reading on the couch. I could go from the kennel to my bedroom if I was lucky, wolfing down some leftover food on the way. Zeke’s face
 
—bright eyed, smiling up at me, painted with mud over the top of his brown-and-white spots
 
—might be the last face I’d see at night.

It was the first one I thought of every morning.

Z
EKE BECAME MY ESCAPE,
but it was an escape that could never be complete. I still saw Dad nearly every day, of course
 
—there wasn’t another option in an 800-square-foot home. It was true that I avoided him whenever possible, but Dad had a knack for finding me, whether I wanted him to or not.

What didn’t make sense was that sometimes I still
wanted
him to find me.

The Dietzes had a large barrel that they used to store their garbage. We never understood the need for a barrel, since they had plenty of land behind the house where they could dump trash, but it seemed to work for them. We would burn our trash heap, and they would burn whatever was in their barrel.

One afternoon, when I was hanging out with Zeke near the house, I smelled the smoke from the Dietzes’ burn barrel and glanced up. The smoke wafting our way didn’t look normal. “Hey, Jerry.” I pointed. “Look!”

“Burn barrel smoke, right? So what?”

“I don’t know
 
—doesn’t the smoke seem more spread out? I’ve never seen it like this before.”

“I think you’re right. Let’s go check it out!”

We ran down the hill toward the tree line that separated the Dietzes’ property from ours. And then we saw Mike Dietz near the burn barrel, racing around in a panic because the low grass all around him was on fire. He was trying his best to stomp out the flames, but it was impossible. For every patch he put out, three more sprang up.

“Jerry! Mark! This is growing too fast!”

“Where are your parents?” Jerry asked, starting to panic. The grass fires were edging toward the trees.

“Not home. No one’s home. Help!”

We all started to chase the flames, but it was no use. The dry grass continued to ignite and sometimes reignite even after we stomped it out.

“This isn’t working!” Jerry shouted. “Mark, go get Dad!”

I headed up the hill as fast as I could. I glanced back over my shoulder once, and the smoke was thickening and filling the sky. As I neared the shed, where I had last seen Dad, my stomach dropped. What if he blamed
m
e
? Then I flung open the door.

“Dad! Dad! There’s a fire in the field from the Dietzes’ burn barrel!”

Dad looked up and read my face.

“Where?”

“Near the tree line.”

He dropped the tools he had been holding and followed me out the door. I was still puffing and breathing hard from running up the hill as I stood next to Dad. He looked across the burning field.

“Go get a shovel. I’ll meet you down there.”

I ran toward the shed to grab a shovel, noticing as I did that Dad wasn’t running to the house to call the fire department like I expected. Shovel in hand, I raced back to where Mike and Jerry were fighting the flames. “I told Dad,” I panted, attacking the nearest set of flames with the shovel.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he call the fire department?”

“I don’t
know
.”

Seconds later, Dad crested the hill in the tank. We could see him motioning us out of the way from the driver’s hatch, and we scattered like bowling pins. Dad jammed the tank right up to the trees, lined one of his treads up, and plowed forward. The burning grass was disintegrated beneath the weight of the tank, leaving nothing more than smoking soil in its wake. He reached the end of the line a few seconds later, and he put the tank into a tight turn and came back for one more pass.

A minute later, the fire was almost completely out, and a wide swath of charred, fuel-free ground stood like a barrier at the edge of the trees.

He halted the tank and shouted, “Finish up what I missed!”

Then he drove back up the hill and disappeared.

It was a while before any of us moved. Mike summed up the general opinion when he said, “Whoa . . . I can’t believe it. That was amazing!”

We began to scan back and forth along the ground, stomping out any embers we discovered. Our little brains, which had been on overload, finally caught up with what Dad knew: with a tank, you could crush nearly anything.

Other people knew that Dad was willing to use his tank to do almost anything, provided the “anything” in question was something he could brag about or do while showing off.

One day Dad got a call from a farmer a few miles down the road. The farmer had sold his land to a developer, but before the sale could go through, the farmer needed to demolish the farmhouse and the barn. “I asked myself why I should pay some demo crew when the Tank Man lives nearby,” the farmer told Dad.

Several days later, Mom drove us kids to the farmer’s property while
Dad followed slowly in the tank. We noticed cars parked all along the man’s long driveway. After we found a spot and walked up to the house, we joined the hundreds of people who had shown up to watch the demolition, as well as a crew from the local television station. It wasn’t too many minutes later that Dad rumbled up the driveway to great applause.

He took his time climbing out of the hatch, and then he and the farmer walked around the house and the barn for several minutes discussing the best way to bring everything down. The brick farmhouse had a basement, so Dad couldn’t simply plow through the walls or the tank would become stuck below ground level. The barn wasn’t small, either
 
—I wondered if Dad would be able to drive out of it if the barn happened to collapse on top of the tank. Eventually, Dad and the farmer shook hands, and then it was time for an interview with the television folks.

“Mr. Bouman,” the reporter asked a bit breathlessly, “are you ready?”

Dad simply nodded.

“What gave you the idea to buy an army tank?”

Dad knew everyone was watching him. The bright lights of the camera lit up his face, and he seemed to grow a few inches as he stood next to his tank. “Most people stand around and just watch the world, wishing they had the courage to act,” he declared to the camera. “But I’m not most people.”

The reporter took a step back, extending the microphone she held a bit farther. “You seem very sure your tank will take down this house
 
—do you have any concerns?”

“Nope.” Dad jumped up on his tank with one fluid motion, gave a jaunty wave to the crowd, and brought the tank to life.

We watched as Dad made slow but steady progress with the farmhouse, nosing the first third of the tank through the brick walls and then backing out before the tank could overbalance and tip forward. Every five minutes or so he’d gesture toward the crowd, and several men would
scramble over the tank, removing the hundreds of accumulated bricks with the speed of a pit crew.

The house probably took forty minutes to knock down completely, but most people stuck around because the barn was next. It was at least fifty feet high, and it had a massive main beam holding up the roof. I knew if the beam didn’t go over, the barn wouldn’t either
 
—but I also knew it was in the center of the barn. Dad couldn’t just poke in the edges like he was doing with the house.

At last he positioned the tank directly outside the door of the barn, and all the folks who had stayed to watch grew quiet. Dad drove through the main door and stopped the tank a few feet shy of the main beam. Then he gunned the tank forward and the beam
 
—an incredibly heavy piece of wood, two feet square if it was an inch
 
—simply snapped in half like a twig.

Two things then happened simultaneously: Dad rammed the drive levers into full reverse, and the barn began to collapse like it was made of wet cardboard. The roof buckled, walls leaned and snapped, and all the while Dad’s tank was powering backward. Just as the central peak of the roof hit the floor and the four walls fell inward with a mighty crash, Dad exploded out the door in reverse, seemingly spit out by the massive cloud of dust and splinters.

The crowd roared with one voice.

I found myself roaring with them, clapping and jumping up and down. How could I not? The Tank Man had triumphed again.