The Tank Man's Son (16 page)

T
HE FACT THAT
Dad could lash out at us, at any moment for any reason, didn’t stop life from happening. We still plodded through school. We still did chores and played board games and ate dinner. We even started roller-skating as a family down at the Bloomfield Hills roller rink. We’d spend Sunday afternoons grooving to the hits beneath the spinning disco ball. Dad would always take the spotlight, shirt flapping out of his khakis, skating backward and forward with equal ease, looping and twirling through the crowd, lost in a world of one. We were still a family, and sometimes we seemed happy.

With summer fast approaching and his three kids out of school for more than three solid months, Dad decided he needed to be even happier, so he pulled the trigger on his lifelong dream of boat ownership.

It started with a small, close-knit group of scuba divers who dove on shipwrecks in Lake Michigan, and between Dad’s mouth, his gun range, and the fact that he owned his own equipment and didn’t need
to be babied, he had become part of their inner circle, diving on wrecks whenever the weather was good. Since it was free, Mom didn’t care when he left, and neither did we.

One of the divers told Dad the story of a state-owned patrol boat that had sunk at its dock and was just sitting there, waiting for someone to raise it.

Years before, the story went, a certain Captain Allers had suffered a tragic accident on the boat. While on the job inspecting fishing nets, the ship’s propeller had become tangled in a line. The captain’s son dived into the water with a knife to cut the line, and while he was in the water, the propeller slipped back into gear, decapitating the boy. Captain Allers, who witnessed the whole grisly accident, dived into the water and immediately suffered a heart attack and drowned. No one wanted anything to do with the boat after that, until a man bought it, moored it in a small harbor, took out a large maritime insurance policy, and then sank the boat and collected his windfall. At least that was the story Dad was told, and it sounded plausible enough that the next time he and his buddies motored down the Grand River, which fed into Lake Michigan, Dad suggested a detour.

The derelict, called
Patrol One
, was right where it was supposed to be, its pilothouse sticking out of the water like a tombstone. Dad claimed it weighed in at nearly one hundred tons and was at least seventy-five feet long. As he finned along its hull in the dark water, he could imagine himself inside the boat. Not as a diver, though
 
—as a pilot. A captain. He needed the
Patrol One
to be his.

Two weeks later, Dad scraped together $3,500 and purchased the submerged wreck. His friends wondered why he’d spent so much money on a ship that was mostly underwater and half buried in mud, but that was because most people thought differently than Dad did. Including Mom.

“I can’t
believe
you bought that stupid boat!” It was dinnertime, and Mom had moved past anger into complete disbelief. “We don’t have enough money to fix up the
house
, and you bought a boat? What’s
wrong
with you? You’ve never even painted the house, and it has a bright orange
doo
r
!”

Dad gave it back as good as he was getting it. “Don’t change the subject. I can
use
my boat to make
mone
y
!”

“Oh please! That was your story with the guns, and you went to jail!”

“For one day! And this boat’ll be a cash cow! I can run dive trips, fish, use it to
 
—”

“It’s sitting on the bottom
 
—you don’t even know if it will float!”

“It’ll float, believe me. All I’ve gotta do is . . .”

But Mom had already been broken. She fled the kitchen, sobbing, and we heard her bedroom door slam. Dad shrugged and refocused his attention on his plate, tucking into his potatoes au gratin with gusto.

Dad reported his plans for raising the ship. He scrounged up some large sheets of canvas, donned his scuba gear, and with some well-executed underwater hammering, nailed the canvas sheets around the hull, a bit like one of the pigs in a blanket he loved to wolf down at breakfast smorgasbords. He figured he could then pump water out of the boat faster than the water could flow back in through the canvas. He figured right, and in less than twenty-four hours he had the ship floating again.

Talking to a couple of locals who came out to watch the operation, Dad filled in some missing details. The
Patrol One
had been built all the way back in 1901, and besides being used to inspect fishing nets on the Great Lakes, it had been used to transport moose to Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It was powered
 
—or would have been powered if it hadn’t been a rotting, sludge-filled hulk
 
—by a four-cylinder Kahlenberg diesel that weighed in at eighteen tons.

“Heavy as three bull elephants,” he told us, “and a propeller about as tall as Mark!”

Everything about the ship was oversize, which was a scale Dad loved to work in. Next came some critical hull repairs that let him pull off
the canvas sheets and shut down his extra pumps: new lumber over the holes, waterproof paint, tar and caulking, and bilge pump repair. After that Dad tackled the engine, and despite needing to take apart, clean, and reassemble the entire thing, he got that beast running within a couple of weeks.

With the
Patrol One
floating
 
—low in the water, but floating nevertheless
 
—and the engine running, Dad was officially the captain of his own ship. It was nearly summertime. Mom was working full-time in a factory and trying to keep her household from falling apart or being swallowed by sand. Jerry was spending more and more time in our room, studying for his end-of-the-year exams, while Sheri was trying to spend as much time at her friends’ houses as she could. I was imagining a summer in which I left home every morning, striking out for the deserted woods.

As usual, our plans didn’t matter, because once the boat dried out, we would be saying good-bye to our house on Blakely Drive for the summer and moving on board the
Patrol One
.

“Here, Mark, take this suitcase to the car. We’re going to stay on the boat for a while,” Mom said when the time came.

“How long are we going to be gone?”

Mom sighed. “Not sure. Come back and get this one when you’re done
 
—and don’t drop it. It’ll
 
—”

“It’ll spill if I don’t hold it closed. I know.”

I stuffed the first suitcase in the trunk of the car. Dad had already claimed most of the space with boxes filled with greasy tools and other items from the shed. Once the last bit of luggage was loaded, the three of us kids crammed into the backseat, squeezed between bags of food Mom had packed. She was waiting in the passenger seat, fanning herself. It was near a hundred degrees in the car. I could feel Sheri’s sweaty leg against mine, but there wasn’t enough space to move.

Dad eventually wandered over with another box. “Here, put this on your lap, Jerry,” Dad said, thrusting the dirty cardboard through the rear
window. I looked over and saw a random mess of bolts, nuts, and pipe fittings, stuff that had been lying around the shed for years. Dad backed the Ford past the tank and then stopped, giving the house a quick scan before dropping the car into drive and pulling away.

“Hope it’s still here when we get back,” Dad said. With that he punched the gas and we sped down the hill. I heard the occasional pop from a car battery chip slapping the underside of the car, and then we pulled out onto the road.

W
HAT
I
DIDN’T REALIZE
was that moving on board meant, well, a boatload of backbreaking work. Dad had known, but he didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

The
Patrol
was a two-level ship with twelve rooms, including five bedrooms that Dad insisted on calling staterooms. At the bow, on the top floor, was a large open room called the fish house, which the Department of Natural Resources had used to check that commercial nets were regulation size. Moving back along the top floor, we’d reach the pilothouse, the kitchen
 
—Dad made us call it the galley
 
—and the dining room, which had a large table bolted to the floor, and at the back of the dining room was a narrow, nearly vertical stairway with metal pipes for handrails. Belowdecks came the parts room, the engine room, the five staterooms, and finally the claustrophobic chain locker at the tail. Beneath all of that ran the bilge, extending the length of the ship.

And
all
of that space needed to be fixed.

The ship had been underwater for years, so every room was a maritime disaster area: thick, sticky mud caked the ceiling, dried on the walls, and covered the floor; the wood was so waterlogged you could press your thumb into it; and dead fish in various states of decomposition were wedged into countless nooks and crannies. And added to all that was the feeling that you were inhaling tiny, damp bits of the ship whenever you took a breath. Dad left a portable heater running inside the ship day and night.

Mom had taken one look at the ship and shaken her head. “I’m not living on that thing. No one can live on that thing. It’s disgusting.”

“It’ll be fine,” crowed Dad.

“No, it won’t.”

“The ship’ll be fine.”

“No, it
won’t
. Look at it!”

Dad looked, and it looked fine to him. “I need the kids every day to help me fix it up. It’ll be great. You’ll see.”

Mom didn’t wait around to see and declared that she would be living at home and doing
actual
work. And thus began our summer vacation. At first Jerry, Sheri, and I made day trips with Dad to the
Patrol
. We spent weeks using individual buckets to carry everything small to the rail of the ship
 
—scraped mud, garbage, fish carcasses
 
—and tossing it overboard. Dad told us to make sure we didn’t let people see what we were doing, though the polluted Grand River wasn’t a sparkling gem to begin with. Little by little, the ship became less like the water it had been stewing in and more like a place people
might
actually be able to live.

When the ship started to dry out, however, that presented its own set of problems
 
—problems which Dad chose to view as opportunities to put us to work. Without the mud and sludge coating every surface and with the heater running, the wood finally began to dry in the warm summer air. As the wood hardened, however, things shifted. Doors shrank out of alignment with their jambs. Closed windows couldn’t be opened, and open windows couldn’t be closed, and everywhere we looked there
was paint peeling and bubbling off, sometimes in tiny patches and sometimes in great wide swaths.

One afternoon Dad took a deep breath and declared, “Smell that dry air? Time to move in.”

My stateroom had a single bunk, a single porthole, and a tiny lightbulb hanging from the ceiling with a small pull chain attached to it. Jerry and Sheri got the same setup, while Mom and Dad got the largest stateroom.

The next day we helped Dad carry what seemed like hundreds of gallons of white paint up the gangway and onto the aft deck. After lunch, Dad found us in the galley.

“Bought you something,” he stated, tossing a paper bag our way.

Jerry reached inside and pulled out three new paint scrapers. Without a word he handed one to me and one to Sheri. Dad pulled his own well-used paint scraper out of his back pocket and walked to the nearest section of rough, bubbling wood. “Like this,” he said, and scraped a patch of paint down to the bare wood. Paint flecks floated down like snow.

Then Dad walked off to another part of the ship, leaving us in no doubt about what was supposed to happen next.

“I can only reach halfway up the walls,” complained Sheri. “This is the worst summer ever.”

“Just scrape the low stuff,” Jerry said, “and I’ll get the parts you miss. Mark’ll help too, right, Mark?”

“Right,” I grudgingly agreed.

“Look, if we finish fixing the boat, we can play. Like at home. Dad will eventually run out of chores for us.”

And so scraping decades of paint from a foul-smelling ship became our life for the following weeks. Sometimes the wood was so rotten that it scraped right off with the paint. Every morning Dad would tell us which part of the ship to work on, and we’d trudge in and begin scraping. The walls all had multiple layers of paint, some so thick that I could see down through the years like I was a geologist looking at a canyon. White, gray, red, gray, dark gray, black, green, more gray.

“Who would paint a door so many times?” I asked Jerry. “And why would they switch colors each time?”

He answered with a question of his own. “And what was so gosh-darn great about gray?”

We scraped until our arms ached. We breathed in time with the back-and-forth motion, and paint flakes slowly covered us from head to toe. We inhaled some of the smallest flecks and tried to blink others out of our eyes. Our shoes were constantly transformed with new colors, and a fine grime of paint chips gummed up the knots and twists of our shoelaces just as thoroughly as the sandburs back home.

Occasionally Dad poked his head into the room to check on us, and that was our signal to sweep everything into a bucket and throw it overboard. The current in the Grand River was minimal where Dad was docked, but the sluggish water was so dirty that our paint chips hardly seemed to make a difference. No matter how much paint we dumped overboard, there was always more scraping to do
 
—until one day we finished. We had scraped every surface that could be scraped, from the crow’s nest down to the bilge.

The next morning Dad brought us something new: a paper bag with three paintbrushes in it.

“Doors, doorjambs, ceilings, window frames, chairs, stairs, railings, chain lockers, hatches, porthole frames, decking,” Dad listed. “If it isn’t brass or glass, paint it!”

At first we tried to paint the right way, but we quickly discovered that slopping on paint as thick and fast as possible was the best technique. When the paint was thick enough, it filled in the cracks and gaps in the old wood, and we only had to apply a single coat. Sheri painted low while Jerry and I painted high. All Dad’s paint was oil based, so by the end of each day we stank of thinner
 
—which we used to wash the brushes
 
—and gasoline, which we rubbed on our skin to remove the paint.

Hour after hour, day after day
 
—until one day Dad declared the painting finished.

Once the
Patrol
had been bathed in white and Dad was starting to think about taking it out onto the Lake, I was given my first taste of bilge duty. Sheri was exempted because Dad declared it a “man’s job,” and Jerry was exempted because he was terrified of the dark, confined space, forcing me to do it alone. After putting on my swimsuit, I climbed down to the lower deck, lifted the access hatch, and lowered myself through, splashing into a dark and claustrophobic canyon. Dad lowered a five-gallon bucket after me on a rope, inside of which were two Folgers coffee cans.

“Get whatever might foul the pump,” he instructed.

In the light of a single bulb, I sloshed around in search of something solid to fill my cans. I discovered gummy sludge that was stuck to the hull, along with fish, oversize snails, and frogs, all of which were in various states of decomposition and mummification. Whenever I filled the five-gallon bucket with my Folgers cans, I called up to Dad, and he disappeared for as long as it took him to dump it over the deck rail. I waited for him in the bilge, hearing the slow slap of water on the sides of the ship, listening for Dad’s returning footsteps. Several bucketfuls of gunk satisfied Dad that the pump would run again, and I was granted permission to climb back out.

“Now, into the river!”

Covered head to toe in filth and slime, I leaped over the rail and into the water. Some of the stuff I’d just scraped out of the bilge was floating there, waiting for me, but Dad tossed me a bar of Ivory soap before striding away.

The repairs were mostly finished, but they were a means to an end. Dad didn’t want to anchor in a harbor somewhere and set up a lounge chair on deck. He had arranged to dock the ship near the coal quays on the Grand River
 
—actually a small peninsula. Great piles of coal surrounded the city’s main power plant, but not much else besides a few marshes, a scattering of small ponds and meandering waterways, and the water
discharge channel from the plant. But it was a short sail down the river to Lake Michigan, and Dad wanted everyone to marvel at the
Patrol
, which meant taking it out on the open water.

“You ready to go out to sea?” Dad asked Mom when she came to see the progress.

“I suppose. Once or twice, anyway.”

“You’ll change your tune,” Dad said, but Mom frowned in reply. I suspect the only thing worse than being cooped up with Dad at home was being cooped up with him on the boat.

Out on the water, Dad was king, and he played his role to the hilt. Squinting from beneath the brim of his captain’s hat, which he donned whenever he took the helm, he would man the ship’s wheel like he was a born mariner. Compass, throttle lever, gauges for fuel and oil pressure, running lights, air horn, UHF radio console
 
—he loved everything about running that mighty machine. The
Patrol
gave him the chance to be 100 percent in charge. While he was driving the tank or shooting guns, life might suddenly inconvenience him. Mom might yell at him about money or a neighbor might come over to complain about something or he might have to go to his job. On the water, though, Dad was truly the captain of his own ship.

When it came time to sail, Dad would start up the Kahlenberg, and the noise and heat it generated were almost unbelievable. Each of the four pistons was as tall as Dad and thicker than my body. The engine shook the entire ship, and we could feel the vibrations through our shoes until it seemed even our teeth were in motion. Then we’d pull in the gangway, release the mooring lines, and off we’d go, plowing down the river toward the Lake.

When we were under way, Dad would often ignore us. Once, when I got tired of watching Dad steer, I went looking for Jerry. I checked the main cabin first and found Sheri. She was playing with her dolls and had them scattered, along with their various accessories, across the carpet Dad had hastily laid down to cover the floor.

“Where’s Jer?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, not looking up. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

I searched the rest of the ship before I thought of one place I hadn’t checked: up. Standing on deck and craning my neck, I could see him far above in the crow’s nest. It was the tallest point on the ship, but a quick hand-over-hand climb took me the thirty feet to the top.

“Move over a bit,” I said, squeezing onto the small platform next to him. It was really only made for one person, but we figured out how to place our feet so we could both fit.

“Seen anything?” I asked.

“No, it’s pretty quiet.” He had Dad’s binoculars with him. A large strap around his neck kept him from dropping them onto the deck below
 
—the crow’s nest could sway more than ten feet from side to side.

“No ore carriers?” At many hundreds of feet in length, they were the largest ships on the Great Lakes, and Dad’s boat looked like a toy next to one of them. The land was a distant glimmer on the horizon, but when I took a turn with the binoculars, the high bluffs that lined Lake Michigan were clearly visible.

“I’m going down, move over,” Jerry said, and he scampered down the ladder. I stayed for a time, enjoying the view. Everything was blue to the horizon, save for the white propeller wash trailing behind the ship.

Being at sea started out as an adventure
 
—the lure of wide-open water and endless possibilities. The
Patrol
was a world away from the sandy hills at home, and the water never infested our socks and shoelaces with sandburs. Most of our chores at sea involved operating the boat, and that tended to be more pleasant than what Dad came up with at the house. The galley usually had a supply of Wonder Bread, jars of peanut butter, and a sack of apples, which was plenty to get by on.

It wasn’t paradise, though, and the ship quickly got small after a few days at sea. We played card games and board games, but we were still antsy kids. The great part about living on eleven acres was that at least you always
had eleven acres. There was really only one way to exercise when we weren’t docked, and that was to play hide-and-seek. The ship was filled with hidden places, and Dad had given us so many chores that we knew them all. Some of them were so small that our little bodies would barely fit.