The Tank Man's Son (11 page)

Dad controlled Jerry, too. Since Jerry was older and stronger, Dad had been using him as a gofer for longer
 
—long enough that it had become habit. When Jerry and I were flipping through one of Dad’s military books once, Dad stuck his head into the room.

“Jerry, come on. I need you.”

I heard my brother sigh, even if Dad didn’t. It was probably the hundredth time Jerry had been forced to help, alone. And probably ninety-nine of those times, Dad had yelled at Jerry during the chore and called him an imbecile.

I followed them out to the shed to see what they were working on. Dad was building some kind of metal frame, and he needed Jerry’s long arms to hold it while Dad sliced through sections of metal with his acetylene torch.

“Higher, and hold it there!” Dad barked. Then he flipped down his welding hood and lit the torch. It ignited with a loud pop, illuminating the inside of the shed and casting crazy shadows on the walls. As he began cutting, molten steel dripped onto the floor, and sparks leaped in all directions.

One landed on Jerry’s pant leg, just below the knee, and instead of fading out, it burned a hole right through the fabric.

“Ouch!” Jerry yelled, jumping back. There was still a spot of flame on his leg.

Dad flipped up his mask and screamed at Jerry. “What the f
 
— are you doing? Hold the damn thing where I told you!”

“But my
 
—”

“No buts, imbecile! Just do what I tell you, g
 
—d
 
— it!”

Jerry quickly swatted the small fire out and tried to regain his hold on the metal. Again the torch melted the steel, spraying sparks in all directions. Jerry kept glancing down nervously, and sure enough, another dot of fire bloomed on his pants. This time he balanced the metal in one hand and swatted out the fire with his other. The same thing happened five or six more times, and Dad’s cutting never missed a beat.

Dad flipped up his mask slowly, looked at his project, and simply stated, “Okay.”

“Does that mean I can go?” Jerry asked nervously.

“Just a minute,” Dad answered, looking back and forth between his project and some other pieces of steel scattered around the shed. “Now hold this piece.”

Much later, long after I’d given up and left the shed, Jerry and Dad emerged, damp with sweat. Jerry’s hands were black from handling the steel, and his pants were spotted from crotch to ankle with holes.

“It’s time for dinner,” I told them.

“Good,” grunted Dad.

Mom nearly dropped the plate she was holding when they walked into the kitchen.

“What happened to your pants?”

“Helping Dad.”

“Go wash your hands,” she said, frowning at Dad, who didn’t seem to notice.

Once we were all eating, she circled back to the problem. “Why didn’t you make sure Jerry didn’t burn his pants while he was helping you? Now you’ve ruined them. He can hardly use them for
anything
.”

“You can’t expect to not get dirty if you’re working,” Dad replied calmly.

“
Dirty
? Those are holes! If he’s going to help you, send him back
to the house to change his clothes first! Where are we going to get the money for another pair of school pants?”

Dad didn’t bother to answer. He just shrugged and kept on eating.

“Jerry,” I asked him later when we were alone, “is that why you sort of disappear sometimes?”

“Yep.”

I waited to see if he was going to add anything. After a minute he did. “I’ve helped Dad so many times. I’m tired of it. Even when it’s kind of fun or interesting
 
—it might not stay that way.”

“W
HAT ARE YOU WORKING ON,
D
AD
?
”
I asked as I crouched down beside him.

Dad was stretched out under a VW Beetle. It had been wrecked and the engine had been removed long before. More recently, Dad had used a torch to remove everything forward of the windshield. It looked like a piece of a car, like it belonged in a giant plastic model kit.

“It’s a project I’ve had in my mind for a while now. I thought I’d put that old plane engine on top of this to see how it goes.”

“A
plane
engine?”

“Yep. It’s on that pile right over there.” He motioned with his hand. Stacks of junk stretched in all directions, so I faked it.

“Oh, right. That one.” I couldn’t begin to imagine what he had in mind, so I let him keep working while I wandered toward the house.

At dinner that night, Mom asked Dad what he’d been working on all day.

“You know what an airboat is, right? Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I think I can use an old airplane engine to power the wrecked VW.”

“That sounds like fun,” Jerry said. “And it’ll go fast, right?”

What sounds like fun?
I wondered. I still had no idea what Dad had in mind.

“I think so,” he said to Jerry. “I should have it finished before Monday, and we can take it for a spin.”

Mom gave a skeptical snort and passed a dish of potatoes around for a second time. Jerry used the lull to ask something.

“Can I join the basketball team at school?”

Dad set his glass of milk down on the table with a bang. “Basketball? How are you going to get to practice or games?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well neither do I. You’ll have to find your own ride.”

Jerry sighed and moved some food around his plate.

“Why don’t
you
take him?” Mom asked.

“I’ve got other things to do,” Dad shot back. “Why don’t you take him if you think it’s such a good idea?”

Mom didn’t back down from Dad’s snarl. “
I
work full-time. I make dinner every night, do the laundry, and clean up your messes. Why don’t you think of someone else for once?”

“I work hard too, you know. I just want to get some things done after working all day. Can’t a man have a life?”

Mom didn’t know what to say to that, so no one said anything. Dad wolfed down the rest of his dinner and went into the living room. Mom left soon after, heading for the bedroom.

We kids began to clear the table and do the dishes. “Are you gonna play basketball?” I asked Jerry.

He shrugged and kept washing. I wondered what would happen if Jerry drove to school in the contraption Dad was making out of the VW and the airplane engine.

Dad spent much of the next few days on his newest
something
, as Mom labeled his projects. He stripped the airplane engine down and rebuilt it. He removed the VW’s backseats. He fabricated a steel mount for the engine and welded it to the top of the car’s frame. He called a buddy to help him hoist the plane engine onto the mount, and then Dad welded it into place over the rear of the car and reattached the four-foot propeller blades, encased inside a cage he had constructed to provide at least a hint of safety. By the end of the weekend, he had built a carplane.

Just one problem remained: how to actually
drive
it. After staring at his contraption for what seemed like an hour, his hands fixed on his hips, Dad stalked off toward the junk piles. Before long he shouted for Jerry and me to come help him, and we found ourselves lugging lengths of iron pipe back toward the carplane. When Dad was satisfied with his raw materials, he pulled on his welder’s mask and fired up the torch. Jerry managed to wander off
 
—who could blame him?
 
—while I hung around to watch. A tripod of pipes took shape, the wide end attached to the VW frame just in front of the driver’s seat and the narrow end reaching out past where the bumper would have been. Dad welded one of the old airplane wheels onto a pivot where the pipes met, and after testing his creation by jumping up and down on the carplane’s new front end, he put his welding gear away in the shed.

He returned with an armful of cables and wheels and bolts. He grinned at me, walked back to the VW, and then crouched down at the front end. Soon he had the front tire connected, via a system of pulleys, to the VW’s steering wheel. He stood up and evaluated his creation from top to bottom, front to back, the look on his face somewhere between pride and lust.

“Well, Mark,” he said, eyes still on the vehicle, “want to try it out?”

Dad had seen fit to reward my patience with the opportunity to be the first kid to ride in the carplane. I jumped into the passenger seat,
sitting forward and gripping the dashboard so I could see through the windshield. Behind me, the propeller blades were only about a foot past the glass. I felt like I was perched in a cockpit, ready for takeoff.

“Let’s go!” Dad shouted, and with that he turned the key in the ignition. The airplane engine roared to life instantly. With the propeller a blur directly behind me, and the powerful thrum of the engine about two feet above my head, I suddenly felt an urgent question in my gut:
How in the world does this thing actually work?

Dad must have seen my confusion. “Watch this!” he yelled, and then he reached down and grabbed a wire near the emergency brake lever. My eyes followed his hand, and I noticed for the first time that the wire ran through the back of the car via a series of eyelets before connecting to the engine mount above us. Dad gave the wire a few tugs that coincided with him waggling his eyebrows
 
—as if his facial expressions were causing the engine to rev. Dad gave the wire a yank, and the engine became deafening. We shot forward down the driveway, Dad flinging the steering wheel every which way as the carplane slalomed its way toward the road. I held on with both hands.

As soon as we hit the bottom of the driveway, Dad tugged the engine wire the opposite way and smashed the brake pedal, and he leaped out and ran up to crouch at the front of the vehicle where the cables connected to the pivoting wheel. Then his head was at the driver’s window.

“I got the cable directions reversed,” he shouted with a smirk, “so when I turned right, it went left!”

He did something that seemed to solve the problem, then flopped back into the driver’s seat and pulled the wire, ratcheting up the engine power, and we turned smoothly onto the road.

Dad lined up with a few small corrections to the steering wheel, and then he reached down and pulled the wire as far as it could go. The car was loud before, but now it was earsplitting and overwhelming. We surged forward, charging faster and faster down the road. And the one thought I had, spinning past again and again like the propeller, was
I’m
riding in a carplane!
It felt like I was perched on a missile. I risked a glance over my shoulder and was shocked to see that the road had completely disappeared, hidden behind a cyclone of dirt, leaves, and flying rocks. I looked at Dad. He was giddy. Joyful even, in his eyes.

It wasn’t a time for words. It was all about the wind in our faces and the scream of the engine as we flew down the road side by side. Dad had introduced another
thing
to our family. I was sharing it, and it was glorious.

Not too many weeks later, a storm had covered everything with a few inches of fresh snow, and Jerry and Sheri and I were deep into another game of Monopoly when Dad announced, “You kids come with me.” He stood up from the couch and grabbed his winter coat. When we got outside, we were puzzled to see him knotting a rope to the back of the carplane.

“This’ll be fun. You’re up first, Jerry.” With that he handed a snow saucer to Jerry. “Now run down to the road and show us how it’s done.”

Still a bit hazy on what
it
was, I had no time to ask Dad because he had already climbed into the driver’s seat of the VW. As he fired up the engine, I jumped into the passenger seat and slid toward Dad, but Sheri didn’t follow. I looked back at her through the rear window, her body blurred through the whirling propeller, and I saw her shake her head and walk back inside. Without waiting for me to shut the door, Dad pulled the wire for the gas and raced down to Blakely Drive, where Jerry was waiting. Dad pulled onto the road and stopped, giving Jerry, who had figured
it
out before I did, a chance to sit cross-legged on the saucer and get a firm grip on the rope. When he was ready, Jerry nodded at Dad. Dad nodded at me, then gunned it.

Even on the snow, the carplane could really move. Jerry held on
 
—but I could only tell because the rope was still taut. I could see it stretching out behind the VW for about ten feet, and then it disappeared in
the blizzard of snow the propeller was kicking up. Jerry was back there somewhere, and I just hoped he was on the saucer and not being dragged by one leg.

“I can’t see Jerry!” I yelled to Dad.

“So?”

“So I can’t
see
him!”

Dad let the cable go slack so the engine could idle. As soon as the speed of the propeller dropped, the blizzard behind us died down
 
—and there was Jerry, completely covered in snow and still clinging to the rope. We were towing a living snowman. Dad let the VW slow to a crawl, and Jerry climbed off. I thought he’d head for home after what he’d just been through, but instead he jogged to the driver’s window, wiping the snow off his face as he came.

“Dad, Dad!” he shouted. “We just need some skis! That way I’ll be above the worst of the snow and can see where I’m going!”

Dad nodded, looking pleased that his eldest son was taking after him, and he told Jerry to hop in. The three of us screamed back down the road, fishtailed into the driveway, and turned around. Jerry hopped out and raced into the shed, returning with a pair of old skis that Dad had found at a yard sale a few years before. They weren’t real skis
 
—like most of the stuff Dad found, they could have been cobbled together by Dr. Frankenstein. A pair of spring bindings were nailed to a pair of small boards, and the boards were then nailed to a pair of cheapo children’s skis. The result was something that nearly anyone could wear, although calling them skis was a stretch. Jerry ran past us toward the road, and we followed.

Jerry strapped on the skis, pulling the springs up and over his boots. Then he grabbed the rope and nodded to Dad. “Ready
 
—but start out slow this time?”

Dad gave the engine just enough gas to get the carplane going, while I turned around to watch my brother. He was hanging on like a champ, his skis tracking in straight lines through the snow. Dad looked back,
too, and when he saw how well Jerry was doing, he goosed the throttle. Faster and faster we went, racing down the road, the propeller kicking up the same amount of snow as before. This time the cloud only covered Jerry up to his chest, so I could still see his straight-out arms gripping the rope, his blown-back hair, and a grin that looked like it would split his face in two.

Dad wanted to try out carplane skiing for himself, so he ordered one of his buddies to drive over. An hour after Jerry’s run, he and I were standing on the side of the road to watch. Dad’s buddy was in the driver’s seat, while Dad, wearing size-12 snow boots, was having a terrible time trying to pull the frozen binding springs up and over his toes. Next came goggles, a heavy pair of work gloves, a black beanie, and a complicated way of wrapping the tow rope around his forearm that, he told us, professional bull riders used. The children’s skis looked ridiculous compared to Dad’s large body.