The Magical Stranger (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

T
upper was back at sea fifty days after his change of command. It wasn't supposed to go down like that, but the guy he was replacing on the
Lincoln
was busted for alcohol in his stateroom and bounced off the boat three months early. Tupper was told he'd have to report to the
Lincoln
before Christmas, obliterating the promise the Navy gave him that he could spend the holidays with his family.

One morning, Tupper ran into the guy he was replacing while filling out paperwork at Naval Station Everett. The man didn't seem to care that he had lost his job, and why should he? He was back home and still on track to retire with the same pay and benefits as Tupper, his sober replacement. Only Tupper's family would suffer for his fuckup.

Tupper spent his last month at home traversing the country for air boss training. He'd join the
Lincoln
as the mini boss, the number two man controlling air traffic on and off the carrier, and there was a lot to learn in a compressed time. On his flights back and forth he'd dwell on what he'd miss in the girls' lives, and it filled him with darkness. He'd become familiar with the rising tide of depression—by now it was an old adversary—and tried to push it out of his head. He repeated an old Sufi saying he'd once read: “Too much internal reflection when not bounded by limits and direction leads to despair.” He was there.

He dreaded leaving, but he and Beth needed a break. The pre-Christmas departure had frayed her last threads of patience. All they seemed to do was fight. It was different from their usual pulling apart before parting. Something seemed permanently broken.

This time, the family rose at 6:00 a.m. and drove him to Sea-Tac for the twenty-hour flight to Bahrain where he'd catch a COD out to the
Lincoln
. He couldn't hold back the tears. His girls told him it was going to be okay, but he wasn't sure if he believed them. He changed planes in Amsterdam, rolling his eyes at the Euro men in their pointed leather shoes and skinny jeans. He wondered why it was Americans who had to keep the peace while these guys got to sashay around with their man purses. But then he laughed to himself. Clearly, the Euros were the smart ones and he was the dumb ass.

There was six hours in Bahrain and then a three-hour COD flight out to the boat. That first night, he wandered into the wardroom, jet-lagged and disoriented. He filled his plate and stabbed at wilted lettuce and fruit cocktail. It felt like home. The thought depressed him beyond words.

Every morning he climbed six flights of stairs from his stateroom to the
Lincoln
's tower where he stood for twelve hours at a time helping Commander Brad “Flats” Jensen supervise the launching and recovery of airplanes. He wrote me an email one day describing his life: “I am now literally in a tower of isolation filled with loneliness.”

Tupper was grateful that the job was challenging and exhausting because he knew he was slipping into depression. He could joke about it to himself—he knew he was listening to Cat Stevens' “Sad Lisa” far too many times on his iPod. All he could tell himself was it was not forever. But it seemed that way at times. The ship pulled into Dubai for Christmas, and between the calls for prayer and the wind and the heat, it didn't seem like Christmas at all. He had built his life around making the Navy think he was a great man who could lead men and fly jets into harm's way. The Navy had responded by telling him they thought he was a slightly above average man perfect for middle management on a ship at sea.

He spent Christmas Eve in a hotel bar and marveled that so many people of so many races and backgrounds could be so vacuous, burning away the hours of their lives. And he knew he was part of that world. He went to the movies on Christmas and had a club sandwich from room service for dinner. He counted the hours until it was 7:00 a.m. back in Anacortes. He Skyped the girls, but they were still too sleepy to really talk. He wanted to tell them he needed them, but he didn't want to ruin their day. They talked awkwardly for a few minutes and then he was alone again.

U
p in the tower, he thrived on the chaos. One moment, jets were launching and recovering with no problems and then a Hornet was in distress and Tupper was supervising the flight deck for a possible emergency landing. Or some knucklehead kid would dart in front of a catapult about to launch a jet and Tupper would scream, “Suspend!”

Almost every day there was some VIP or admiral visiting the
Lincoln
who wanted to watch flight ops from the tower. Tupper smiled at the sultan of Brunei's entourage while privately wondering why the whole crew was doing somersaults for a dictator no better than the guys in Tunisia and Egypt. He wondered how he and the rest of the Navy had become yes men to autocrats who would desert America at the first sign of trouble.

Finally, in February, the
Lincoln
began to make its way home. Beth was supposed to meet him in Singapore, but she canceled at the last minute, citing the girls' schedule. It was just as well; Tupper caught a virus and spent three days in a hotel, hallucinating and delirious, his weight dropping from 180 to 165. As he recovered, he surfed the Internet and came across a marital survey where couples ranked their spouses in a number of areas, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being perfect. He sent it to Beth, saying she didn't need to respond but maybe it was something they could talk about when he got home. The next morning, he woke up to an email from Beth entitled “You Asked for It.” He didn't know if he was more hurt that she gave him a 2 for family contributions or a 9 on the physical attraction scale. He wondered who her 10 was.

A
couple of weeks later, I flew to the
Lincoln
out of Hawaii. I was there to watch Tupper orchestrate flight operations for the Tiger Cruise kids who were boarding at Pearl Harbor and riding the carrier back to San Diego with their dads. But in classic Navy fashion, the
Lincoln
ordered Tupper to attend all-day seminars on the Pentagon's recently updated don't ask, don't tell policy, and had to pass his duty on to a subordinate. Tupper tried to explain that I'd flown 6,000 miles to watch him work and maybe, just maybe, he could do the DADT seminar on a different day. The boss said no.

So we were both in a foul mood as the
Lincoln
made its way into Pearl Harbor a couple of days later. I watched the boat being prepared for Tigers and I obsessed about the Tiger Cruise I never spent with Dad. The
Lincoln
's deck was lined the next morning with sailors in dress whites as the carrier silently slipped into the harbor, gliding past the USS
Arizona
Memorial with the
Lincoln
's sailors saluting the watery grave of 1,500 men. It moved me more than I could say, but it also made me angry. It was just one more thing I almost shared with my father.

We disembarked a few hours later and took a cab to a Waikiki hotel, checking into a room on the second floor. We went out for steak sandwiches, and Tupper hungrily downed his first decent meal in a month. We tried to make each other laugh, topping each other's dark thoughts. That night, we ate more red meat at the hotel restaurant before retiring to the bar. Tupper got the first round.

“Well, my career sucks and my family's going on without me. Might as well get drunk.”

I completely agreed. But just as the night threatened to become irrevocably maudlin, Jitters, a tall, lanky
Lincoln
operations officer, walked into the bar with a beautiful blonde on his arm. He shook Tupper's hand and then pronounced in a loud voice that he and his girl had decided to get married the next day. They had been a couple for two years, but Jitters had been at sea for over half of their time together. I bought a bottle of champagne and toasted to hope triumphing over experience.

Jitters told us that he was getting out of the Navy and moving to Florida so he could be with his wife. We raised our glasses to his sacrifice, a sacrifice that neither Tupper, my father, nor I had made in our marriages. Past midnight, we stumbled back to our room. I flipped on the television and there was some newsflash about a tsunami or something, but we didn't really pay much attention.

Someone pounding on our door awakened us about ninety minutes later.

“Anyone in there? You must evacuate to a higher floor.”

Tupper said he wasn't moving.

“This is my first night in a real bed in a month. I'm not leaving.”

I agreed and we fell back asleep. Wind and waves lashed the beach about a hundred feet away. An hour later, there was more pounding, and, finally, the door was forced open. A large Hawaiian man shone a flashlight in our eyes.

“There's a tsunami warning. I could have you arrested for not complying with the evacuation.”

One or both of us mumbled “Go ahead.” The Hawaiian ignored us and asked a question.

“Is there anyone else in here?”

I swore and muttered louder than I meant.

“Yeah, there are six little people in the bathroom.”

The Hawaiian opened the door and shone a flashlight.

“There's no one in there.”

We couldn't stop laughing. The Hawaiian was not amused.

“You think this is the time for sarcasm?”

Tupper beat me to the punch.

“Yes, considering everything we've been through, this is the perfect time for sarcasm.”

The Hawaiian stared at us, contemplating calling the police. But his walkie-talkie crackled something about winds picking up and he just waved us out of the room.

We took the back stairs up three flights and entered a hallway filled with sunburned yuppie refugees and their spawn. Tupper utilized his decades of sleeping on a carrier experience and propped himself up with his backpack. He pulled his USS
Lincoln
cap down over his eyes.

“If it wasn't for the Navy screwing up our lives we never would have survived a tsunami together.”

He giggled and fell asleep. I was wide awake, staring at tiles on the hotel ceiling trying to not let my mind go to a dark place, a place where a boy meets his father returning from the sea and goes for a swim on the very same beach with his daddy.

Chapter
Thirty-Four

N
ot long
after my trip to Michigan, my uncle Danny invited me to his Virginia Beach home
for a reunion of the remaining sons and daughters of Dorothy and Tom Rodrick.
(Dad's older sister Lyn died in a car accident fifteen years after Dad's crash.)
I wasn't particularly close to Dad's sisters and brothers; geography and our
joint loss kept us at a distance. I'd blown off reunions in the past, but my
recent trips into Dad's life made me curious. I drove down from New York and met
Mom there.

Danny was the middle of the three Rodrick boys, the
quiet one. He had morphed into a Fox News enthusiast who talked about the right
to bear arms as if he had been raised shooting bison in Wyoming and not on the
streets of Brockton. But he had a good heart, never pushing his beliefs on the
rest of us. His wife, Toom, cooked all weekend long and said very little, her
sweetness hidden behind Thai shyness. Dad's sisters, Dorothy and Marie, were
there too, with their husbands, Mark and Sonny, but I latched on to my uncle
Paul, my dad's youngest brother.

Paul was only thirteen years older than me and I
used to watch with awe as he snuck in and out of the Herrod Avenue house, his
curly hair piled high in a white man's 'fro. He spent much of his twenties
hitchhiking across the country, showing up on our doorstep every once in a
while, his T-shirt and jeans covered in dust. He moved to Whidbey with his wife
shortly after we did, doing odd jobs and some painting. His house was full of
comic books and science fiction paperbacks. It was Paul, not my parents, who
took Terry and me to see
Star Wars
for the first
time.

Mom always eyed him suspiciously, worried that his
long hair and weird clothes would reflect badly on Dad. I remember all of us
going out for dinner at the officers' club one night and Mom suggesting to Dad
that Paul wasn't dressed appropriately. Dad exploded.

“I don't give a damn. He's my brother.”

Paul had always been a lost soul, drifting from job
to job, surviving minor scrapes with the law. When I was a teenager, he sent me
a copy of the lyrics to the Police's “Synchronicity,” suggesting we were the
same man, just a generation apart. (“If we share this nightmare / Then we can
dream / Spiritus mundi.”) He now lived in Hawaii in a house without electricity
near his two boys whose mother disappeared on them when they were young. From
time to time, I thought of how easy it would have been to follow Paul's wayward
path after Dad died, just drifting along.

We were at the liquor store when he said how much
he still missed Dad. He used to listen to Buddy Holly on the radio and watch my
dad do his homework until he fell asleep. But it wasn't all good memories. Paul
told me that the Rodrick kids had a slightly sadistic streak. They liked to pile
on top of the youngest, Paul or Marie, and tickle them until they screamed. Paul
hated it.

“They'd do it until I peed my pants. But your
father would come in and start pulling off everybody. He was my protector. But
then he left for the academy and I was just lost.”

We brought the booze back to Danny's, and those who
still drank started pounding beers and downing burgers. We talked about the old
house on Herrod Avenue; some of their memories broke my heart. The inkling I had
that my grandfather had been a difficult man was largely confirmed. Dinners were
eaten in silence. All the kids knew they'd catch hell if they disturbed their
dad in his den. So they went over to other friends' houses to play, trying to be
ghosts in their own home. Dessert was served and Uncle Danny started telling a
story by prefacing it with “This was right after Pete got arrested.”

“Whaat?”

Danny looked at me over his glasses.

“You don't know the story?”

I looked at Mom. She just shrugged.

Danny explained. Like Tupper, Dad had a weakness
for fast cars behind his perfect son persona. He spent his weekends tuning up
jalopies that his friends raced in demolition derbies. Back then, everyone left
their keys in their cars. Dad wasn't above “borrowing” one for a few hours and
returning it to its original resting place.

Dad snuck out of the house one night shortly after
receiving his academy appointment and slowly backed his mother's Chevy out of
the driveway. He pushed the car half a block down the street before starting it.
A few hours later, Dad's parents were awakened by a call from the police. Dad
had wrapped the family car around a pole and there was a case of beer in the
backseat. He was booked for drunk driving. His father was livid.

“Let him rot. I'm not bailing him out.”

Luckily, his mother played the long game. She knew
all of Dad's plans could come crashing down with a conviction. She scraped
together the bail, rushed down to the station, and dragged him home. She then
called her father, a onetime Massachusetts state representative. He made a few
calls. Dad went to court the next day in a jacket and tie. The charges were
dropped and Dad headed off to the academy a few months later. The Navy never
knew.

I laughed along, but I wondered to myself what else
I didn't know. Is this what happens when a man dies? Are all the things about a
man that do not burnish the myth swept away? Or was the information always
there, waiting for me? Maybe all I needed to do was ask.

I
started digging when I got home. Among the
papers in Dad's belongings I found a letter written on Naval Academy stationery
dated April 22, 1963, sent by my father to his mother. (How it ended back with
him I don't know.) The letter talked about minor matters and the upcoming June
Week at the academy. But at the bottom of the page there was a line that read,
“You will probably be getting a letter from the Commandant's office about my
conduct. It's sort of a long story. It's not a big deal but I will have to do
some marching.”

I asked Mom what that was about.

“Oh, that was a shoeshine business he'd started
with his roommate, Art.”

That rang a bell. Mom had put condolence notes in
Dad's box at her house, and I'd come across a letter from Art Holz, one of his
Annapolis roommates. I dug it out after the reunion. The letter was a Byronic
ode to Dad:

Dear Barbara and
children,

I knew, just the instant
before you told me this morning that Pete was gone. . . . My heart
sank, a part of me gone and I'm now realizing that empty space can't be
filled again.  . . .

Pete knew more than I did
then about some things. I don't know how. When he set a goal, he was
disciplined and determined. I remember his unorthodox study habits, rising
at 2:00 a.m. His determination is still a model for me, an ideal to strive
for. But more, he taught me about friendship and love, just by being my
friend and loving me a love I could not comprehend but only wonder at and
return as best I could. He never asked, only gave, and even sacrificed for
me.

He took the rap for me
with a stiff upper lip when he got caught selling Shoe-Glo at the Naval
Academy. All the evidence was in his room and he protected me from the
demerits that might have sunk me. I felt guilty and he grumbled about it,
but he laughed too, and told me not to worry. I wanted to write to him just
last week; an Amway salesman tried to sell me some Shoe-Glo and he would
have laughed again about that. . . .

Some lessons Pete gave me
that never dawned on me until years later. We would talk for hours about
work and play, life and God, and the things in store for us. Looking back
more in what Pete did than what he said; that his faith in God was something
he carried into every part of his life. He didn't keep it in a box as I was
inclined to do, or judge his daily actions by any lesser standard. He lived
what he believed and what he believed was love. I remember that he loved and
was loved.

There were times when I
felt spiritually as close to Pete as two men can be, two boys who became men
together. I feel close to him now, realizing how much I owe for his gifts to
me. All that I owed to Pete, I owe you now and I hope that in some way you
will let me make some payment on that debt.

Art

There was so much in his words that I fantasized
Art Holz might be Dad's Rosebud, someone who could explain it all to me. Art was
practicing law in San Diego when he wrote the letter and Mom said she never
heard from him again. I made a couple of calls. An academy classmate told me
that Holz had died of a heart attack in Mexico a decade ago. Another window
slammed shut.

There was a third roommate, but I was told he was a
long shot. John Frazier was one of the lost boys of the class of 1964. He never
returned for reunions and kept in touch with almost no one. But one of Dad's
classmates had an old email address. I gave it a shot. Frazier emailed back from
Kauai. He confirmed the shoe polish episode and had some other stories.

Dad and John had been academic stars, and their
room was filled with grinders looking for an edge, including, according to
Frazier, Roger Staubach, a member of the class of 1965. They explained calculus
problems until lights out.

After graduating, Dad headed off to flight school,
and Frazier went to submarine school in New London, Connecticut. By 1966, Dad
wasn't too far away, flying the P-2 Neptune, a bulky prop sub chaser out of
Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I was born. On February 27, Dad checked out a
Neptune and took Frazier down to Florida for the Daytona 500. They landed at
Sanford Air Force Base, about thirty miles from the raceway, and parked the
plane on a grass airfield. They hitched a ride to the track and watched Richard
Petty take the lead late in the race. A heavy rain began to fall. The race was
ended two laps short of completion with Petty declared the winner.

By the time Dad and Frazier made it back to Sanford
it was almost dark and there was a big problem: the Neptune had sunk a foot into
the Florida mud.

They were screwed. If they didn't get back to Rhode
Island in twelve hours, they'd both be AWOL. Dad thought quickly. He called the
local fire department and paid them fifty bucks to pull the plane out of the
mud. It took a half hour, but they got the plane onto the runway.

Dad finally took off, but the weather was still
shitty, so they had to head south and then west before they could loop back
north. It took them nearly ten hours to make it home.

Or at least that's how Frazier told me the story
via email. By chance, I found myself vacationing on Kauai a few months later,
and we met for lunch at Dukes, a beachside bar. Frazier was a rail-thin
sixty-eight-year-old man who still surfed, built low-income housing, and made
occasional trips to Brazil to see faith healers. He talked about Dad and his
Navy days with an incredulous chuckle, hardly believing that was him in the
stories that he told. The duality of my father, the churchgoer and the
adrenaline junkie, fascinated John.

After their second year at the academy, they'd
driven cross-country so they could visit the Seattle World's Fair and then head
down to Los Angeles to see a girl that Frazier was sweet on. They made the drive
in two and a half days, pulling over to sleep under their car when they were
exhausted. They had a nerdy contest to see who could get the best gas mileage,
and Frazier could still see Dad's calculations in his memory.

“He beat me. His mind was so precise he figured
exactly fifty-seven miles per hour would give him the best mileage and he
wouldn't go faster.”

The conversation swung back to the Daytona flight
and Frazier gave a little shiver at the memory. He told me that when they
approached Quonset Point on the return trip, visibility was so bad that the
tower suggested they divert to a different airfield. But Dad didn't want to be
late for duty. Frazier looked out the window and saw nothing but thick, angry
clouds.

“Pete, maybe we should land somewhere else.”

“No, we're fine.”

“You sure?”

“I've got this.”

A few seconds later, there was a deafening noise.
It took Frazier a second to place it: the Neptune had hit the runway hard and
fast.

“I thought for sure the plane was breaking in half.
But it didn't.”

Frazier told the story with a smile on his face,
clearly hoping to amuse me with a tale of madcap Dad and how he wasn't the
straight arrow everyone made him out to be. All that was true, but that wasn't
what popped into my head. Instead, I heard Tim Radel saying, “Your dad was an
accident waiting to happen.”

I
headed to Annapolis to see what else I could find. I made arrangements to have
lunch with the journalist Robert Timberg, a fellow class of 1964 graduate.
Timberg had chosen the Marine Corps as his vocation. In 1967, his face and body
were badly burned by a land mine while he was leading troops in Vietnam. He
spent two years in the hospital enduring dozens of skin grafts, his face barely
recognizable to the one I saw in Dad's 1964
Lucky
Bag
, the Naval Academy yearbook.

Timberg became a journalist and through pure chance
found himself at the
Annapolis Capital
and then the
nearby
Baltimore Sun
. His Annapolis years were never
far away, and he eventually spent more than five years writing
The Nightingale's Song
, a brilliant account of the
academy's five most famous, or notorious, 1950s and 1960s graduates—John McCain,
Oliver North, James Webb, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter—following their
lives from Annapolis to Vietnam and then on to Washington. The book helped me
understand my father's time, and it was a privilege to get a tour of Bancroft
Hall by a man who'd sacrificed so much. But there was one omission in Timberg's
book that I didn't quite understand. He never described the horrors he
personally survived.