The Magical Stranger (11 page)

“Here are your cigarettes.”

Winchester's face went white. He marched me to the nurse's office where a Band-Aid was placed on my very minor wounds. The principal called Mom. She immediately threatened a lawsuit. We were a united front, if only for a moment.

The school offered to drive me home, an out that I would have jumped at on any other day. But today was tryouts for Quiz Bowl, an academic extracurricular activity that required no study but merely a reservoir of useless information and a twitchy trigger finger. A moderator asked semi-intellectual questions, and you could buzz in as soon as you had an answer even if he was still talking. I rolled up the sleeves of my ripped shirt and bashed through questions about Roger Maris and William Henry Harrison. In the end, I was the only underclassman to make the four-man team.

Finally, something I was good at! Every Saturday, four eggheads and a chaperone headed off in a van to nearby Alma College for the state tournament. By the time the host read “It is held every April in Augusta, . . .” I was ringing in “The Masters.” This was not really a marketable skill, but it did bring our school glory and provide me with a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was close to being drummed out of school before Quiz Bowl, but now I was essential to Powers' delusions as the Notre Dame of Flint.

We won the state championship and earned Powers $8,000 in scholarship money that, inexplicably, wound up completely in the hands of a tobacco-chewing quarterback who tortured me in trigonometry. The Quiz Bowl team was introduced at a pep rally, and everyone went nuts when one of my tall teammates dunked a dictionary. Sure, they were laughing at us, not with us, but I didn't care.

It's not an exaggeration to say Quiz Bowl changed my life. Mom put the military school brochures away. She now viewed me on sporadic occasions as not being without some merit. At school, teachers rolled their eyes a little less. I could have taken the change and built on it a more mature version of myself. That didn't happen. Instead, I analyzed the situation and saw myself now as untouchable by Powers' management. I decided to press my luck.

I
n my senior year, Gordie and I were trapped in the English class of Ms. Otten. English was a dangerous place for us. We fancied ourselves young men of a literary bent, largely based on our consumption of back issues of
Harper's
stolen from the library. In European history class, our knowledge of the Black Prince would never match that of Mr. Richardson, so he had our respect. But this was not the case with Otten. We already believed ourselves more learned.

She quickly sensed our condescension but did not concede the premise. Possibly born in plaid slacks, Otten had black Spock bangs and reading glasses that swung back and forth across a rotating flat-chested foreground of unisex turtlenecks. She was on to our game early and placed us at opposite ends of the classroom. She also made regular sly remarks about the crummy colleges we would be attending, that is, if we managed to avoid the state pen in Jackson.

Otten was an odd duck. In addition to her classes, she was adviser to the
Powerline
, the school's newspaper. We didn't write for the paper—that would have been too constructive—we just made a series of cracks about its suckiness. The school's colors were blue and orange, and Otten had a similarly colored, shaggy-headed stuffed animal perched on a shelf above her desk. For reasons lost to history, it was named the Moofla.

Moofla was the paper's mascot and Otten's closest confidant. During class, she would address her fuzzy friend with asides like “The Moofla doesn't like dangling prepositions.” As the semester wore on, the conversations became more frequent. Once, when a hapless student suggested an unsuitable essay topic, Otten turned to the creature and asked, “What do you think, Moofla?” She paused, apparently considering his reply, and then declared, “We don't think that will work.”

This was disturbing. Most of our teachers tuned out our bratty prattle and counted the days until we were out of their domain. Otten engaged us in a long-running low-intensity conflict. She reveled in mocking Gordon's writing in front of the young women he was trying to woo. One day, I turned in an essay extolling the virtues of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. It was quite late. This I blamed on a confluence of mononucleosis and an implausible automobile accident. Otten went into investigative reporter mode. She ferreted out my lies and called my mother.

“Your son is the most manipulative student I have had in all my years of teaching.”

Mom's response was succinct.

“Tell me something I don't know.”

Gordie and I were pissed but powerless. Then Otten made a crucial mistake: she called in sick. On an early winter afternoon, her class descended into anarchy. A substitute sat at Otten's desk with her face in her hands.
Crime and Punishment
paperbacks whizzed through the air. Gordon went on an extended walkabout with a bathroom pass. I plotted how I could interest the impossibly tall Sarah Torri in any of my romantic scenarios.

This depressed me so thoroughly that I put my head on my desk and began to doze. Then Gordon returned. I awoke to see him frantically snapping his fingers in the doorway. He mouthed one word.

“Moofla.”

I immediately understood. Casually, I rose from my seat and made my way to the shelf holding our raggedy nemesis. A couple of hockey players wrestling on the floor in a homoerotic way provided a diversion. I grabbed the Moofla from behind the near-tears sub and pivoted toward the door. I then tossed the blue-orange fur ball sidearm to Gordon. He tucked the creature under his sweater and stashed him in the safe house of his locker. That night, the Moofla was smuggled to Gordon's home in an L.L. Bean book bag.

The next day, Otten returned. She eyed us coldly as we smirked into her classroom. She had an announcement.

“The stealing of a teacher's property is grounds for expulsion. Those of you who know what I am talking about should act accordingly before it's too late.”

We chose a different path. Gordon had an unhealthy interest in the Red Brigades' 1978 kidnapping of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. He had an idea: ransom the Moofla back in exchange for a public apology from Otten for not acknowledging our literary greatness. Like most radical kidnappings, this was bound to fail. Still, we hatched a plan: we would photograph the Moofla at various Flint locations and mail the Polaroids to Otten, whose home address was unwisely published in the White Pages.

It was now mid-December. We set upon our mission with a zeal that could have perhaps been better utilized conjugating the verb
être.
On a succession of Fridays, Gordie and I bought a bottle of Riunite at a Flint bodega, put the Smiths on the boom box, and set out in the most unsubtle of vehicles: Gordie's 1963 Buick LeSabre.

We logged many miles. There was Moofla on a chairlift at the local ski hill. There was Moofla being ravaged by other stuffed vixens on Gordon's bed. There was Moofla reading
Playboy.
There was Moofla holding a current edition of the
National Enquirer
to prove he was still alive. And our favorite: Moofla spooning the baby Jesus in St. Paul Lutheran's nativity scene.

We mailed the photos. Soon after, Otten began a class with another announcement.

“It is a federal offense to send threatening items through the mail. These are serious crimes.”

This seemed particularly unrealistic in a place like Flint; the FBI was going to pursue the kidnapping of a Muppetesque animal while the entire city was a Beirut-style war zone and drunk driving was considered a civic right? Not likely.

Still, things were getting too “hot,” as they said on
Starsky & Hutch
. It was time to unload the Moofla. We would return him to his mama—with one significant alteration. The Moofla would be hairless.

Why? Who can say? It seemed right at the time. One snowy evening, Gordon brought the Moofla into his living room, lovingly placed him on a towel, and broke out his brother's electric razor. Then he proceeded to mow off his synthetic blue-and-orange hair with the sideburn trimmer. Gordie's mom walked by, prepared to speak, gave a sigh, and went upstairs to bed. His older brother then made a cameo. Matt asked if that was his electric razor. Gordon said yes. His brother shook his head and whispered, “You'll be sorry, chump.”

These were more words than I had heard Matt utter in three years. Our original idea was to stick the shorn Moofla in Ms. Otten's mailbox. But then Heineken intervened. We stopped at a hardware store. We bought some rope. We drove over to Otten's apartment complex. We drank more beer. We stepped out of the car into the cold, hard Michigan night.

I put the rope around Moofla's neck and tied a sailor knot I almost learned in Webelos. Gordon finally put his athleticism to proper use. He lassoed the excess rope like a rodeo cowboy. He then skillfully hurled the Moofla high onto an upper branch of an oak tree by the building's doorway. Moofla swayed gracefully back and forth under the starlit sky. He didn't look like he was in pain.

For a moment, Gordie and I stared wide-eyed at each other. A faraway siren sounded and then seemed to draw closer. There was a moment of conscience mixed with fear. Should we take it down? “Nah,” we cackled simultaneously. We jumped back into Gordie's car and peeled off into the darkness.

The following Monday, Otten didn't mention the shaved Moofla or the hanging. Actually, she never mentioned the Moofla again. This earned our grudging respect, if not our remorse.

Why did we turn it up a notch? I can't say for sure. Why do boys set fire to ants? Why do grown men start wars over barren pieces of land? Boys do things that are not explainable, especially boys without dads. The only thing I knew was Mom was right for once; it was good that Dad wasn't around to see it.

Somehow, both Gordie and I managed to graduate the next year. After the ceremony, Mom had tears in her eyes. This seemed normal. The beautiful woman I'd watched a decade ago from the top of the stairs was gone, replaced by someone I didn't know. She held my little sister's hand with one hand and wiped her eyes with the other. My grandmother tried to comfort her, but Mom couldn't stop the tears. Finally, she spoke.

“The vice principal told me you were the student who had the most potential but did the least with it.”

She was trembling. Christine, now six, looked up at me with giant brown eyes. She was frightened and wrapped her tiny arms around Mom's waist. In front of me was Dad's Holy Trinity, his mother, his wife, and his little girl, the last, best thing he created. Classmates rushed by me, a blur of shouts and blue robes. I didn't know what to say.

Chapter
Eighteen

L
ife kept
happening without the Black Ravens. The
Nimitz
was floating in the Arabian Sea
when Vinnie's wife, Marci, went into labor back in Whidbey. He woke up the next
morning to a son named Henry. That evening, the whole squadron celebrated with
cigars on the fantail.

Tupper watched his men bullshit and joke and
thought this was how it was supposed to be. But he missed his family. With the
seventeen-hour time difference, he kept getting Beth's voice mail. His parents
had just finished a visit to Anacortes, but now they were gone. Caitlin was
heartbroken wondering who would read her bedtime stories now that Grandpa Jim
was gone. Tupper's mom emailed him details of their visit, describing his
daughters' jokes and smiles in the vivid detail he could never get from his
wife.

He finally got Beth on the phone. They talked a
bit, but he realized he didn't have much to say, a common problem after they'd
been apart for months. But he could hear the rain pounding on the roof of her
car, 8,000 miles away. He just listened. Tupper had not heard rain in three
months.

All there was to do was work. Tupper could feel
Crapper's incompetence spreading like a pesticide-resistant fungus. All naval
aviators had to stay current in their swim and survival qualifications: once
every four years they had to demonstrate that they could still swim a hundred
yards in their flight gear, just as they did back in flight school. It was up to
the safety officer to make sure everyone was current before deploying. Crapper
had missed Beav's deadline and he was out of qualification. Beav was going to
have to fly off on the COD to Bahrain and then make the twenty-four-hour trip
back to Whidbey unless CAG called NAS Whidbey and asked for a waiver. He went to
see his boss, hat in hand. CAG wasn't sympathetic.

“The policies are there for a reason. You have to
send him home.”

Tupper decided to chew some ass. He made Crapper
produce a chart that showed where every officer was in his swim and safety
qualifications. If there was any doubt, Tupper yanked the aviator off the flight
schedule. The result was that Prowler sorties were canceled because of
insufficient flight crews. It was a clever but efficient fuck-you to CAG.
Suddenly, CAG was on the phone, frantic. He didn't mean enforce
all
the policies.

“CAG, I'm just trying to make sure everyone is
current.”

“Well, don't go overboard.”

All the pissing and moaning was enough to make him
forget that it was Thanksgiving. General David Petraeus, the head of United
States' Central Command, flew out in the morning from Bahrain. He got a ride in
a flashy new Hornet—typical, thought the Prowler guys—and then served turkey to
the sailors.

In a military filled with bullshitting middle
managers Tupper thought Petraeus was a guy who did what he said without worrying
about his image. (Then again, Tupper wasn't shocked by Petraeus's fall in 2012.
He'd seen it all. The public face. The private lie. Nothing surprised him.) Like
most officers, Tupper supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he was
baffled by the lack of an end game. At least Petraeus had gone into Iraq and
executed a troop surge that brought a sliver of stability. Maybe he could do the
same in Afghanistan and Tupper wouldn't have to spend more Christmases away from
his girls.

In the evening, Petraeus stopped by the Black
Ravens' ready room and spoke for a few minutes, joking that Tupper didn't have
enough gray hair to be a skipper. Tupper told him he didn't know the half of
it.

Tupper went back to his stateroom and flipped
through a book on Churchill that Vinnie had loaned him. He loved how Churchill
never gave up whatever the odds. But then Tupper's dark humor took over.
Churchill never had to skipper a Prowler squadron.

T
he
next day, things got better. The squadron completed seven sorties out of seven.
Their time in-country was becoming more productive. Some of Tupper's officers
had begun communicating directly with CAOC in Bagram about where the Prowlers
should be flying and what troop movements needed protection. Before, CAOC called
CAG's staff and told them their needs, and then the information was relayed to
the Black Ravens. The end result was high-tech telephone tag with something
always getting lost in translation. Streamlining the process and speaking to the
source directly was making the missions more effective.

There was only one problem. CAG didn't like being
cut out of the loop. He called Tupper early one morning.

“Are your guys talking directly to CAOC?”

Tupper was still half asleep.

“Yes sir.”

CAG slammed the phone down. That was a first for
Tupper, a superior hanging up on him. He thought he had just been streamlining
the process, and his boss thought he'd disobeyed the chain of command. Now he
didn't know what to do. So he did nothing. Tupper knew he should apologize or
explain, but screw it, if CAG didn't want to listen he wasn't going to show up
outside his stateroom like a naughty schoolboy begging the Mother Superior for
forgiveness.

So the Black Ravens went back to doing things CAG's
way. That night, Tupper took his Prowler over Farah Province in northern
Afghanistan. They arrived on station, but because of a communications foul-up,
they just circled the sky for two hours doing nothing. It was six and half hours
of burning dinosaurs, Navyspeak for wasting thousands of dollars in man-hours
and jet fuel. Tupper watched shooting stars in the Afghan sky and thought of
Brenna making her debut in
The
Nutcracker
back in Anacortes. He lined his jet up
behind the
Nimitz
on a pitch black night a few hours
later and thought: what a waste.

The next day, he saw CAG at the morning meeting.
They exchanged maybe five words. It was the week before Christmas and there was
a holiday dinner that night for the
Nimitz
's senior
staff in Captain Monger's private dining room. There were assigned seats, and
Tupper noticed he was at the far end of the table away from the CO and CAG. He
would have needed a can and some string to join their conversation. He didn't
mind.

Soon it was December 25. By chance, all of Tupper's
deployments as a junior officer had begun in the spring and brought him home for
the holidays. This was the first one away from Beth and the girls. Maybe it was
the blues, maybe he'd just had enough, but he told CAG that the Prowlers were
being wasted, too much of their time was spent circling, waiting for assignments
that should have been worked out before they left the
Nimitz
. CAG listened and said he'd take it under advisement.

Tupper went back to his stateroom and opened
presents from the girls. He briefed that night and took off for Afghanistan.
Again, the Prowlers didn't have a specific mission. In-country, Tupper put his
Prowler on autopilot and began composing a Christmas poem at 25,000 feet for
Beth on the back of his preflight checklist. He was still working on the first
stanza when he saw a sparkle of lights down below. It was a firefight going on
in Nuristan. Across the radio came the crackly voice of a tactical controller
down on the ground. “Can you jam them?”

“Roger that.”

Tupper's crew flipped on the four jamming pods
underneath the wings. An ECMO turned a knob and sent out a blizzard of
electronic whiteout. A few minutes later, there was a coordinated series of
explosions. Tupper guessed American troops had responded to a nighttime attack
with a slew of artillery. Had the Prowler prevented Taliban lookouts from
relaying information to their men about where the fire was coming from?
Probably, but he would never know for sure.

On the way home, the sun was coming up as the
Prowler passed through the mountains. Tupper could see the small huts of
villages located at about 10,000 feet. Someone had told him that the villages
held blue-eyed blond Afghanis, the descendants of earlier invaders. Tupper
thought that soon the United States would be gone too. Will we have done any
good?

T
he
Nimitz
pulled into Bahrain just before New
Year's Day and the squadron held a belated Christmas party at the Marriott. The
afternoon before the party, Tupper wrestled with what to say to his sailors. He
liked to prep his speeches days in advance, but this time he didn't. Instead, he
went out with his men and got hammered at the pool. That evening, Tupper took
the microphone in front of his sailors and held it for a moment. He thought of
quoting Churchill or some other leader. He went in another direction.

“I only want you to remember one thing,” shouted
Tupper. “You have one thing that the rest of the Navy will never have.” He
paused for effect. “You are Black Fucking Ravens. Black Fucking Ravens. Never
forget that.”

He then did a rap about how other squadrons wished
they were as awesome as VAQ-135. At the end, Jim and Cindy's son tossed down the
mic, MC-style. For a moment, there was just shocked silence. Then his sailors
started whooping it up.

“Allrrrigght, Skipper!”

Tupper worked his way through his men, high-fiving
officers and seamen alike. His face was flushed red. Then he stepped out of the
pool area and puked into a garbage can. He'd violated his own promise not to get
shit-faced while CO. But nobody blamed him for it. It just made him seem more
like them.

T
upper
flew his last mission over Afghanistan at the end of January. Barring a series
of unlikely circumstances, he would never fly in harm's way again. He thought he
would be emotional, but he was just too exhausted to think about it.

On board, his management responsibilities were
crushing him. He was working on the fit reps of his junior officers, and his
choices would decide who made department head and who would be dumped into an
unforgiving economy. After his performance in the seat next to Beav on the
flight to Oman, Chicken was his future rock star; only an extraordinary act of
buffoonery could stop his career.

At the other end was Rodney “Socr8tes” Williams, a
teddy bear of a man: everyone loved him in the ready room, but few wanted to fly
with him because of his stammering on the radio. When things go bad, a pilot
wants a navigator speaking crisply with the tower. That wasn't Socr8tes, who had
a hard time getting the plane's radio calls right. Tupper had him into his
stateroom earlier in the cruise and asked him if he had considered speech
therapy. Socr8tes—he got the “8” in his call sign because of his
mispronunciation of the Greek philosopher's name on a port call—told him he'd
been doing speech therapy since he was five. Tupper just nodded and patted him
on the shoulder.

Socr8tes was African American and Tupper guessed
that was why his stutter was probably overlooked, but he wondered whom exactly
the Navy was helping by passing him through flight school and putting him and
others in harm's way. Next up for Socr8tes was a stint instructing at VAQ-129,
the training squadron. Tupper could only imagine the implications of a rookie
pilot with Socr8tes next to him in shitty weather. Only Tupper had the power to
stop the madness. He went back and forth over a sleepless night before ending
Socr8tes' flying career, thinking it might save his life.

On it went. Tupper filled out form after form. He
tried to remember all the stupid things he did as a JO and cut some breaks, but
some things he couldn't take. It filtered back to him that Crapper and an ECMO
junior officer, Lieutenant Devon “the Wolf” Benbow, had publicly grumbled that
Vinnie's flying was unsatisfactory and they didn't want to fly with him.

They had a point. Vinnie's landing grades on the
Nimitz
were not great, and Tupper had paired
Chicken with him after CAG complained. He'd even gone with Vinnie to an eye
doctor in Bahrain on a port call. But for the men to go public with their
misgivings undermined Vinnie's ability to lead the squadron in and out of the
plane.

Tupper called Wolf and Crapper into his stateroom
separately. He asked them if they had voiced their concerns to Vinnie in the
debrief that follows every flight. They both said they had not. Tupper then
asked if Vinnie was unsafe to fly with and should be taken off the flight
schedule. They both answered no.

“Then shut the fuck up.”

He had other things to worry about. Beth was coming
to meet him in Hong Kong in two weeks. It had been seven months since he said
good-bye to her back at NAS Whidbey. Their conversations had grown strained over
the cruise as they lived separate lives connected only by their children. He
looked himself in the mirror in his stateroom and worried. Was his face ruddier?
Had his hair gone grayer? Would she still see in him what she saw when they were
at Penn State?

But when she opened the door for him at the
Renaissance Hotel it all melted away. They kissed and fell into delirious
conversation, happy and nervous all the same. Tupper tried too hard at first. He
took Beth to a posh Hong Kong tailor and insisted she order $2,000 worth of
suits and skirts, clothes that she would never wear.

They went to the Stanley Market the next morning
and walked hand-in-hand through the stalls. They Skyped that night with Brenna
and Caitlin and Tup's parents, who had flown to Anacortes to watch the kids. The
next night was the twenty-second anniversary of their first date, so Tupper
bought an expensive bottle of French wine and took Beth to an Indian restaurant
she'd read about in a magazine.

And just like that it was over. Tupper took his
wife to the airport and watched her pass through security. He felt sadness sweep
over him. But it was a happy sadness. It was comforting to know they could both
miss each other after all these years. And he'd be home in a month. The hard
days were almost finished.