The Tank Man's Son (10 page)

“Mark, what
happene
d
?” Jerry yelled from behind me. He’d heard the noise and sprinted out of the house.

“Dad hit Dale’s car! Come on!”

Dad was still sitting at the controls, and Dale motioned frantically with his arms. “Back it up! Back it up!”

We stared in awe as Dad reversed the tank, ever so slowly, and Dale’s car began to move backward with it. Part of the tank was embedded in the softer metal of the car, and for a moment it looked like they couldn’t be separated. Then, with a sickening noise of metal ripping metal, the tank broke free, leaving Dale’s car rocking softly on its shocks.

Dad killed the tank’s engine as Dale raced to inspect the damage. The front of the tank had slammed squarely into the trunk, flattening it onto the chassis with the power of a hydraulic press. Amazingly, the rear window of the car was intact, but from there the trunk sloped steeply until it was only several inches thick at the rear bumper.

Dale threw himself onto the ground, face first, and pounded his fists into the dirt. “My car, my car!” he sobbed over and over.

“It’s not too bad, actually,” Jerry remarked, trying to be helpful. We’d seen Dad do some serious damage with the tank. Considering what could have happened, the small white car had gotten off easy.

Dale disagreed, and wailed all the louder. Mom, Vera, and Sheri arrived then, discovering a damaged car and a grown man who was groveling in the dirt, tears streaking his face.

“What hap
 
—” Sheri started to ask.

“Shush,” Mom interrupted, putting her finger to her lips and frowning.

For a minute the only sounds came from Dale, who was curled into a whimpering heap, and the only action was the six of us watching him. It was strange to see a grown man flopped like that, his black hair waving back and forth as he shook his head like a dog.

Finally Vera broke the silence, embarrassment fighting anger in her voice.

“Dale. Get up. Get
up
.”

He reluctantly climbed to his feet and stood with his head down. His pants and hands and even his face were streaked with dirt. Then he spun and kicked the tank as hard as he could, producing a dull clang.

Then Dale just stood there, the mirror of a little kid who has just had his favorite toy taken away, from the pouting lower lip to the heaves that still shook his shoulders. Mom had made it clear that we kids weren’t to speak, but she hadn’t told us we had to leave, so we hung around to see what would happen.

Dad spoke up at last. “Sorry, Dale. I didn’t know your car was there.” Then he added, “And . . . I
have
told you not to park there. So . . .”

With that parting shot, Dad climbed back into the tank, fired it up, and backed away from Dale’s car. Then he parked in his usual spot nearby, climbed out, and strolled down the hill. Dale got into his car and slammed the door.

Mom glared at us to ensure we wouldn’t blurt anything in front of Vera, and then Mom, Vera, and we kids walked back toward the house.

Probably no one was more surprised than Vera when, partway to the house, Dale drove up next to us. From the rear doors forward his car still looked brand new, and the engine was humming along quietly. Without saying good-bye to Mom, Vera opened the passenger door and climbed in.

Mom, Jerry, Sheri, and I watched the car bounce down our driveway, turn onto the road, and disappear.

Dale was never able to convince the repair shop that the damage had been caused by a tank, but his insurance company eventually believed him, and that was all that mattered. His car soon looked like new again, and he didn’t hold a grudge against Dad. After all, Dad still had the best private gun range in a hundred miles
 
—plus a tank that Dale still wanted to ride in.

And Dale’s car wasn’t the only victim of Dad’s tank. A few weeks later, a rainstorm turned the ground into a morass. The next night, plummeting temperatures turned the wet ground rock solid. In the morning, Dad climbed into his tank and fired it up, planning to take a short drive around the property. He threw the tank into reverse, not realizing that one of the treads was trapped tight by the frozen mud. One tread immediately began to roll while the other held fast, and rather than backing up in a straight line, the tank pivoted. He hadn’t expected that but figured the best way to break the tank free was to keep going.

By the time he saw the hood of his pickup protruding from under one side of the tank, it was already far too late. The truck was a complete loss. As was our septic tank, which Dad accidentally ran over a week later.

A
FTER THE INCIDENT WITH
D
ALE
 
—a guy Dad would have said was one of his best friends
 
—Mom said something that caught my attention.

“Your father values things and uses people.”

Mom was right, once I thought about it. Dad
did
value things. His guns and tank and books and knives and records meant a lot to him. And it wasn’t only the valuable stuff he cared about either. He cared about everything that was his,
because
it was his. It didn’t matter if it was his drugstore watch or his Sears catalog shoes: ownership meant worth.

He was forever telling us to be careful with his stuff, despite his lack of concern for anyone else’s stuff. He might decide to use one of Mom’s baking pans to catch oil during an engine rebuild and shrug off her anger, yet woe to the one who broke anything of his. He ruined countless things that belonged to others
 
—Mom’s towels and sheets and pots and pans, a sled that belonged to us kids
 
—yet demanded that nothing of his be damaged.

These demands began to be enforced with violence.

“Did you break this hinge off the shed door?”

“Dad, it was an accident. I
 
—”

Smack.

“Did you bend the antenna on my truck?”

“Dad, we were playing, and
 
—”

Smack
. He was unstoppable. One blow from his hand
 
—nearly always openhanded and directed at our left cheeks and ears
 
—could knock any of us down. The explosion of pain and heat and noise often caused me to drop like a sack of potatoes. Even Jerry, who was taller and stronger than me, usually crumbled. Even Mom. And the slaps and smacks were landing with greater frequency.

Not on Sheri, though. It seemed like Dad never hit her, for reasons we couldn’t fathom.

So it didn’t take long for the tank to lose its appeal
 
—to become just another thing Dad did at home, like shooting his guns and learning German and always keeping ice cream in the freezer. Cool at first, then something he cared about and we had to be careful with. Luckily for us, the chances of hurting his tank were next to nil.

The ice cream was another story. Dad began keeping the freezer stocked with it, and he forced Jerry and me to fetch him bowls when he was reading on the couch.

“Go get me some ice cream,” he’d growl without looking up. The trouble was that our freezer kept the ice cream rock hard, and we couldn’t scoop it out without letting it thaw. The first time I was sent to get him some, he cursed me from the other room.

“What the hell is taking so long?”

Jerry had to fetch it the next night, and like me, he found the ice cream nearly impossible to scoop. Dad stood and waited for him to deliver the bowl to the couch. Once the dessert was safe in Dad’s left hand, he lashed out with his right, slapping Jerry on the side of the head so hard that Jerry’s glasses flew across the room and clattered off the wall.
While Jerry crawled over to recover them, Dad sat back down and calmly ate the ice cream. Jerry and I learned to use a thick kitchen knife to hack out the ice cream faster.

All of which proved Mom’s point: Dad was using Jerry and me to get his ice cream, and it seemed like he cared more about his dessert than us.

It wasn’t like Dad was a monster, though. There were bad moments, but there were good moments as well. For instance, the more weapons I fired, the happier Dad seemed.

Dad and I would climb the gun tower and blast away at targets on the hill, and he’d keep feeding me more ammunition or a different gun. Sometimes we’d just go out back and wander around, blasting things.

“Here, Mark. Try the Luger.”

The pistol pulled my hand down as I took it. “Wow, it’s heavy!”

“It’s a German officer’s gun. Now try hitting that old milk can.”

I held the gun up and fired off a round. It felt like someone had punched my wrist and shoulder.

“It’s got some kick. Now keep going at that can
 
—I filled it with water.”

I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself for the recoil.
Boom. Boom boom boom.
I kicked up dirt behind and beside the can. Dad watched, his arms folded.

Boom
. The can exploded, spraying water in all directions.

“Great, Mark! You got it!” Dad gushed, giving me a wide smile. “Now this gun is a little harder to shoot.”

He handed me a pistol that was even heavier than the Luger, its shape thicker and more rectangular.

“What’s
this
one?”

“A forty-five auto. Issued by the US Army as a sidearm in World War II. See this bullet?” he asked me, sliding out the clip and letting me study it.

“Bigger than the Luger bullet, right?”

“Right. This’ll punch a hole in a Jap, for sure.” He slapped the clip back into the pistol and handed it back to me.

“Now lean into it. This has even more kick.”

Boom.

“It’s really hard to hold steady, Dad!”

“Take your time. Try to hit that second can.”

I tried to slow my movements and breathing.
Boom.

“High and left, Mark.”

Boom.

“Closer. Aim a bit lower.”

Boom
.

A cloud of water bloomed in the air, and Dad let out a whoop beside me. “Good job, Mark!” he smiled. He extended his hand. I engaged the safety, rotated the pistol in my hand, and placed the grip in my father’s palm.

We were the Bouman men, brothers in arms.

Until we weren’t. That kind of camaraderie didn’t last when Dad’s friends came around.

Once, Dad called me over to the base of the gun tower. He was standing in a loose circle with about six guys, and when I got close enough, I could see he was holding some kind of rifle I’d never seen before. It was almost as tall as I was, and when Dad handed it to me I nearly dropped it. I knew he expected me to fire it, so I aimed it as best I could at one of the metal targets out across the field. I could barely hold the barrel steady because of the gun’s weight, so I knew my chances of an accurate shot were close to zero.

As soon as I pulled the trigger, I understood that Dad hadn’t been interested in my accuracy. The gun’s recoil was so powerful against my right shoulder that it shoved me backward. I lost my footing and my
hold on the heavy gun at the same time. Dad stepped forward and grabbed the rifle right out of the air, allowing me to collapse on my keister. Dad and his friends roared with laughter. From the wooden floor, I could see one of them bent over, his hands on his knees, guffawing like he’d never seen anything funnier in his life. Another mimed my shot, his invisible gun punching him in the shoulder and causing him to windmill his arms like a cartoon character.

I picked myself up, wondering if I was expected to say something, but by then the men had forgotten me and moved on to the next weapon, so I climbed down the ladder slowly, favoring my sore shoulder, while the men above me continued to blast away.

Another time, when one of his buddies was over, Dad went a step further. His friend, a burly construction worker who turned his T-shirt inside out whenever the outside got dirty, picked me up by the ankles. I’d been on the floor in the living room playing chess with Jerry, and Dad had been sitting on the couch talking about some battle with his friend, when suddenly I found myself upside down, suspended, my arms waving uselessly below my head.

Bam
, my head pounded the floor, then
bam bam bam
, and all the while I could hear my attacker cackling.

“Dad, save me!” I screamed between slams, but the slams continued until Dad’s friend became bored and released my ankles. I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I rolled over and tried to sit up, my head swimming with pain, and when I could finally see straight, I could see my father still on the couch, talking with his friend as if nothing had happened.

Dad’s friends weren’t always around, of course. One afternoon he was taking the tank for a joyride around the property, and since I didn’t have anything better to do, I was outside watching. He’d just crushed a tree with the tank when he throttled back and yelled down to me, “Hey! Mark! Want to drive?”

Did I ever! Jerry and I played on the tank whenever we felt like it, treating it like our own personal jungle gym. I scrambled up and dropped into the driver’s seat. I knew from playing in the tank with Jerry that I could reach all the levers and pedals, but now that we were out in a field, with the engine running, there was one problem.

“I can’t see!”

“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “I’ll watch where you’re going.”

Dad crouched, balancing himself on the lip of the hatch, looming behind where I sat in the driver’s seat. He could look forward and still keep an eye on which levers I was supposed to be operating.

“Push those two together,” he ordered, leaning down and waving his hand to direct me, “and give ’er some gas.”

Turning left or right was as simple as pulling one of the levers on either side of my seat. If I pulled the left stick back, the left tread stopped while the right tread continued to churn, turning the tank left, and the same principle applied to the right track. Whenever Dad shouted, “Hard left! Right! All ahead!” I followed along. The sense of power made me dizzy. Twenty tons of steel responding to my direction. I was used to being the Tank Man’s son, but still I couldn’t stop thinking,
I’m driving a tank!

Before too long, though, the incredible noise and vibration overpowered me. I yanked both levers to a stop and clambered onto the seat, gulping fresh air. I turned to look behind us. In my mind I could picture the sharp ruts the tank treads must have pressed into the soft earth. Like looking back along a ship’s wake, I would be able to see exactly where we’d come from, even though I couldn’t see where we were going. Peering past Dad, I discovered that the ground we had just crossed looked exactly like every other scrap of ground on our land. Like a war zone. Nearly every plant had been flattened or upturned, and I couldn’t tell one rut from another.

“Quit rubbernecking,” Dad growled. “I thought you wanted to drive!”

I climbed back into the driver’s seat, engaged the levers, and shot forward. When my father told me to turn, I turned, and when he told
me to give it more gas, I did. All I could see was the dark, scuffed metal of the tank’s interior, and the heated odor of machine oil forced its way into my nose.

Driving the tank turned out to be more like being driven. Even as the tank powered its way across our sand, stopping for nothing, I felt like a puppet, with Dad pulling the strings.