The Tank Man's Son (4 page)

Dad looked at his honey-do list, looked at the condition of the house, and decided the next logical step would be to obtain a luxurious bathtub. One day he marched into the bathroom with a saw and cut a rectangular hole in the floor. He sawed right through the floor joists as well, and soon we could see clear down to the sand beneath the house, several feet below.

“I got a deal” was all he’d tell us.

When Mom got wind, she crossed her arms and declared, “This is going to look absolutely ridiculous
 
—a
sunken
tub, in
this
house?”

Dad grinned like she’d walked into a trap. “You know, lots of the finest homes have sunken tubs.”

The following day a man drove up in a truck and helped Dad unload the tub and muscle it into the bathroom. Dad took over from there, sliding it into place with pry bars and lowering it into the hole he’d cut. The top of the tub stuck up about six inches above the floor, creating a serious tripping hazard. The length, however, was an even bigger problem. The hole Dad had cut was about a foot too long.

“Not my fault,” Dad grumbled. “They gave me the wrong dimensions!
Jumbo
tub, my ass.”

There really wasn’t a good way to cover the hole back up, given that Dad had removed all the joists, so he simply gave up on the entire project, leaving us with a semisunken tub and a one-foot gap.

The hole in the bathroom floor wasn’t a problem for us kids. We loved it. One of our never-ending chores was to sweep up the sand that seemed to multiply in the house, and the hole made a perfect place to dump it without going outside.

The sand bothered Mom the most, and she got it in her head that
a cement front porch would make a good place to kick off our sandy shoes, thus keeping the floors clean. Dad refused to pour one.

“Why don’t you do it yourself if you’re so fired up about it?” he griped.

The next day Mom called a cement truck. She scrounged some old pieces of wood from the yard and nailed them into rough forms around the front door. When the driver arrived, he took one look at the forms and refused to pour. He knew Mom’s handiwork would simply buckle and allow the wet cement to ooze across the sand. After he and Mom just stood there for a minute, the driver asked Mom for Dad’s toolbox and rebuilt the forms himself so that he could pour the cement. Since Mom didn’t have any cash, she raided Dad’s stash of ammunition and gave the man a few boxes of shotgun shells.

Two days later, when it dried, we had a real porch sure enough
 
—although if it made any difference in the amount of sand inside, I couldn’t tell.

The constant sand invasion was the reason for our excitement when a traveling salesman stopped by to demonstrate a Kirby vacuum. We actually dared to dream that our sweeping days would be over, since the vacuum, we were all assured, could run on both carpet and hard floors. We gathered in the living room, Dad in his armchair and Mom on the couch with the three of us. The salesman stood in the center of the room, talking about its wind-tunnel design and lifting capacity and precise manufacturing tolerances, after which he made eye contact with Mom and asked, “Ma’am, would you like to see a demonstration?”

He unwound the power cord with a practiced flourish and plugged it into the wall. On the way back to his machine, he made a show of walking slowly over our carpet, studying its gold, scarlet, and green designs. Then he clicked on the vacuum and ran it over a particular spot, back and forth, back and forth. By the third pass, the vacuum was leaving a thin but clearly visible line of sand in its wake. When the salesman ran the vacuum back across the trail of sand, the vacuum sucked it right up
 
—and then deposited a fresh line of sand in a slightly different spot.

Jerry and I elbowed each other and counted our lucky stars
 
—this was one time someone
else
would get the blame for not cleaning up all that sand! The salesman was visibly withering. With each pass of the vacuum across the carpet, his shoulders slumped a bit lower. His forehead wrinkled. He pushed and pulled the vacuum more and more frantically, and I could see his lips moving silently.

Suddenly, he turned off the vacuum. For several seconds he stared at it, and we stared at him. Then he crouched down and plucked some sand from one of the long lines marking the carpet. He rubbed his fingers and the sand fell back to the carpet.

“Well,” he said, “what in the
heck
?”

“I’m sure
 
—” began Mom, but the salesman interrupted her with a quickly raised hand.

Without speaking, he flipped the vacuum upside down on the carpet, unplugged it, and began taking it apart, all the while muttering about what might be ailing his incredible machine. As soon as he had it all put back together, he turned it back on and tried again. The vacuum traced the same lines of sand across the carpet with each pass. In desperation, the salesman pulled the collection bag off the back of his machine. He unfastened the clasp, unrolled the top of the bag, and reached his hand in. When his hand came back out, it was full of white sand, which ran through his fingers and down onto the carpet. The bag looked like it was already more than half full.

Mom started to laugh, her hands floating up to the sides of her mouth, and her laugh was like the first rock in an avalanche. Soon all of us were laughing, even Dad and the vacuum salesman
 
—laughing so hard our sides hurt.

“You know,” chortled Dad, “that fancy vacuum of yours actually works pretty good. Just
look
at all the sand it picked up!”

And so as the laughter died away, we resigned ourselves to ongoing sand duty
 
—part of what Dad called “policing the place,” though we
had no clear idea of what that meant
 
—each time carefully pouring the collected sand into the hole beside our sunken bathtub.

Our house was too far out in the country to have garbage pickup. There was a municipal dump, of course, but Dad decided that driving our trash to the dump would be a waste of effort when we had a perfectly empty valley right behind the house. Each time a trash can in the house filled up, one of us would dump it outside
 
—which meant that every so often Dad would notice the trash pile was getting out of control.

“You boys go out back and get some burning done.”

We always tried not to smile when Dad handed down that particular task, fearing he’d decide to do it himself or even give the job to Sheri. Compared to sweeping the never-ending sand in the house and our newest chore
 
—filling the ruts in the driveway
 
—burning the trash pile was nearly a treat.

We had a routine. On the way to the garbage pile, Jerry and I would each grab a long, sturdy stick. Then as soon as we reached the pile, we’d look for something like a frayed tarp or a garbage bag, which we’d divvy up and wrap tightly around the ends of our sticks. A flick from one of the Zippos we both carried and
 
—
fwoosh
 
—we were explorers, holding aloft our torches. Flames ready, we’d clamber to the center of the pile, holding the torches well away from our bodies, since more than once a blob of molten plastic had dripped onto our exposed skin, searing us for an instant before sputtering out. Once we were in the center, we worked our way outward, touching our torches to anything that looked flammable: phone books, shredded shirts, the odd scrap of lumber. All the while, our plastic-fueled torches burned a bright, nearly neon blue, even in the sunlight, and the sound of their flames
 
—
ship ship shiiiip
 
—became a private language, telling where to step and what to burn.

After we set fire to everything that wasn’t wet, metallic, or made of glass, we would retreat to the edge of the pile. Still holding our torches,
we’d stand and watch the flames spread in fits and starts across the discarded landscape, sometimes stepping back into the pile to prod or relight some object. I could imagine I was a giant, watching an entire countryside burning, from the rotting valleys all the way to the peaks of rusty iron.

Dad’s chore was pointless. The flames never consumed the pile
 
—there was far too much that couldn’t burn
 
—and over time it grew and grew. The valley was glutted with garbage, trash so damp and compacted that no burning short of an explosion could have altered its shape. Dad must have understood that. He knew the trash pile as well as anyone in the family, and he knew the shape of fire even better. Yet every few weeks he sent Jerry and me back to burn. And so my brother and I would stand, shoulder to shoulder, and watch flames become embers become smoke and ashes, and then we’d walk back up the sandy hill to the house, content for a moment that we’d done exactly what our father required.

Once, when Jerry and I were trudging back from the trash pile at dusk, Dad barked at us to get some two-by-fours from behind the shed because he had something to unload from his truck. We knew the drill. Dad came home with strange objects all the time, and more often than not we had to help him transfer whatever it was
 
—nearly always something mechanical and too heavy for one man and two boys to move safely
 
—from the truck to the yard. We had no idea what this particular item was, but we could tell Dad was excited about it.

“This baby was on a destroyer in dubya-dubya-two, boys,” he said. “Got ’er off a guy near Detroit for a song, and I’m about to get ’er working.”

“But . . . what
is
it?” I asked.

“A searchlight, Mark,” he answered, motioning us to come closer. He unbolted something on the back of the thing and pulled off a hatch, pointing to a deeply concave mirror.

“This reflects the light and concentrates it.” He stopped to look at
us, savoring the moment before adding, “Concentrates it enough to see things
two miles
away.”

He nodded happily as we gaped at the mirror. “Yep, two miles. Don’t look into it or it’ll blind you. It gives out as much light as one hundred twenty
thousand
candles.”

Jerry and I both blurted the obvious. “When are you gonna turn it on?”

“I’ll hook it up and we can try it out,” he answered. I’d never heard him happier. As he began to fiddle with the searchlight, Sheri wandered out to watch.

“What is that?”

“It’s a searchlight from a destroyer!” I bragged.

“What’s a destroyer?”

“A
ship
,” I said impatiently. “Now let Dad work.”

It took Dad a while to get everything ready. He never seemed in doubt about what to do but moved around the searchlight quickly and purposefully, adjusting and tightening and lubricating, ignoring our questions until we stopped asking.

Finally it was time. Dad had run a thick cable from the searchlight to a nearby generator.

“This’d be useful on a ship
 
—it’s what it was made for, after all.”

He looked at his audience, winked at Mom, and flicked a switch on the back of the searchlight.

“And . . . There. It. Goes.”