The Tank Man's Son (17 page)

Jerry instigated. “Hey, let’s play hide-and-seek.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “Sheri, me and Jerry will hide, and you find us.”

She covered her face and began to count, while Jerry and I ran back to the galley and down the stairs.

We wedged into a dark, narrow crack, silently congratulating ourselves. Soon we heard the sounds of Sheri’s search, and it was all we could do not to laugh or call out to her.

The minutes stretched. We couldn’t hear Sheri anymore. And I didn’t know about Jerry, but I was starting to lose feeling in my legs.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s give up.”

We wandered upstairs, only to discover Sheri back in the main cabin, playing with her dolls.

“Hey, why’d you give up?” I reprimanded her.

“I couldn’t find you, and it’s
dark
down there. I got bored.”

I got ready to retort, but then I heard Mom’s voice in my head.
You boys need to play with your sister. You have each other, but she has no one.

Living on the ship was getting worse and worse.

Dad had expectations for us too. I loved to stand at the rear rail when we were under way, watching the propeller churn the water into foam. The
Patro
l
’s wake would unwind itself behind us like a forever snake, and I could stare at it for hours. Dad, however, had a radar for boys who were doing nothing
 
—and the ship was too large for him to operate entirely on his own. Dad taught us to navigate so we could share the workload.

“Take the helm, boys,” he’d say, and Jerry and I would jog off toward the wheelhouse.

I felt a sense of pride: Dad was putting me in charge of steering the entire ship. He’d told me that the Kahlenberg cranked out more than 250 horsepower, and I imagined I could feel every bit of that power
vibrating up through the throttle lever and the brass wheel. He never let us steer the ship into port, of course. He wanted to be seen at the wheel. But in open water, he was content to trade our lack of expertise for his comfort. Dad might be gone for a minute or an hour, but either way, steering the ship would be up to one of us kids. We had a hard time giving navigation the attention it needed, and more than once we got up close and personal with navigation buoys and fishing nets, but that sort of marginal navigation seemed to be good enough for Dad.

In fact, once we’d taken a few turns at the wheel without causing a serious accident, Dad realized that we were an untapped source of nighttime labor. Why should he, or his diving buddies who tagged along for the ride, steer the ship when there were perfectly capable children on board? Dad began giving us overnight shifts, allowing us to use the bunk in the pilothouse.

“Share the shift with your brother if you need to,” he told me one night, “but just don’t leave this heading.” He tapped the wide face of the compass for emphasis. “South by southwest at one-nine-five, got it? Do
not
leave that course. I’ll relieve you at oh-seven-hundred.”

That was a long nine hours. The dim light on the chart table reflected from the inside of the darkened pilothouse windows, making it impossible to see anything beyond the ship. The time passed like this: look at the compass and make sure it was pointed at 195; adjust the wheel if needed; grab the brass handle that controls engine speed, then release it since I wasn’t allowed to change speed anyway; look at the compass again. When it was my shift, I longed to sleep but didn’t dare. Although I grew more and more groggy and I allowed the ship to wander off course several times, I never actually fell asleep, and by the time the sun crept up over the edge of the Lake, I made sure we were smack-dab on course.

Jerry and I learned later that our overnight course corrections had cost the trip more than an hour of sailing time, but that was how things tended to go on the
Patrol
. You had to be ready for the unexpected
 
—and you had to make it seem like the unexpected wasn’t your fault.

T
HE SHIP WAS A PERFECT
platform for Dad’s scuba diving. The Lake was littered with wrecks
 
—everything from modern fishing boats that had gone down in storms to massive, three-masted vessels that had been resting beneath the cold water for more than 150 years. Since Dad had a huge boat and an unlimited amount of free time, he had no trouble getting in touch with the right people who knew things or who knew a guy who knew things. Dad’s posse knew things even the Coast Guard was in the dark about.

Finding the wrecks was like following a spoken treasure map. Once Dad heard that if he lined up with a particular pair of smokestacks at the power plant, then eased along until a certain tall tree on the shoreline was exactly opposite the starboard beam, and finally turned perpendicular to shore and motored out to a depth of exactly eighty feet, he’d find a wreck. Sure enough, the depth finder pinged a moment after we first hit the target depth, showing that the bottom jumped up where the bulk
of the sunken ship rested. We’d hit it dead on
 
—and that kind of thing happened all the time. There was
Walter L. Frost
, a lumber hauler that had gone down in a storm, and
Westmoreland
, nicknamed the “Treasure Ship” for the old coins scattered around its hull.
Montauk
,
Flying Cloud
,
Rising Sun
,
Three Brothers
,
Francisco Morazan
 
—we heard all the names over and over, like they were the names of distant relatives we were going to visit that summer.

Sheri and Mom didn’t want anything to do with Dad’s diving, but Jerry and I would come out on deck to watch him don his gear. He wriggled his way into his black wet suit first; then came twin tanks
 
—the color of a canary
 
—hooked to a single-stage breathing regulator, face mask, waterproof flashlight, dive watch, and a nine-inch survival knife strapped to the underside of his left forearm. Once he was ready, he’d walk to the rear of the
Patrol
to a gate, through which he would leap into the water feetfirst while pressing his mask to his face. We’d watch his bubble trail until we got bored and then wander around the ship until we heard him clamber back on board.

One day when Jerry was off somewhere by himself, Dad asked me if I wanted to learn to dive, and I jumped at the chance.

“First thing you need to learn is buddy breathing,” he said, “in case you run out of air and need to come up with the help of another diver.”

Diving was starting to sound less fun already, but I couldn’t turn back.

“This is the J-valve,” Dad continued, “and you just pull this lever if you ever run out of air.”

The thought of running out of air terrified me. The tanks were so heavy it seemed unlikely I would have any control or be able to maneuver my hand behind me to reach the valve. If something went wrong, I would just die. And it would be a horrible death.

“You’ve got plenty of air,” Dad explained, “but just in case something goes wrong, remember this, and never go below sixty feet. You’ll get the bends if you do, and your blood will boil when you come up. You do
not
want the bends.”

I agreed! Now I didn’t want to die underwater if something went wrong, and I didn’t want to come back up if something went wrong. Diving was sounding worse and worse. I would have no way to know how deep I was anyway. Dad carried a depth gauge on his wrist, but I knew he’d never let me use it.

“And remember to clear your mask like this,” he motioned, “and always follow your smallest bubbles to the surface.”

That sounded impossible. Smallest bubbles? And didn’t every bubble race up as fast as it could? That’s what I planned on doing. I decided I’d rather die of the blood-bubble thing than the blacking-out-and-drowning thing.

“Let the air out of your lungs slowly as you surface, and don’t hold your breath or your lungs will burst.”

For Pete’s sake
, I thought.
Now I’ve got to worry about my
lungs
bursting?

“Remember, kid,” Dad intoned, and he rapped his knuckles on my forehead. “Now let’s get to buddy breathing.”

Dad tossed the air tank over the side and allowed it to sink. He nodded at me. “Dive down to the tank,” Dad instructed, then added, “Don’t worry. I’ll meet you there.”

Dad jumped into the water and disappeared. I knew the water was close to twenty feet deep, so it would take all my effort to reach the tanks before running out of air. Dad was wearing flippers and a lead weight belt, so he could shoot to the bottom in seconds. I took the biggest breath I could, held my mask to my face, then jumped.

The cold water shocked my whole body awake. Down, down I went, my ears aching and my lungs feeling fit to burst. I could see Dad, waiting in the murk, holding on to the air tank with one hand and waving me over with the other. Desperate for air now, I reached for the regulator that was in his mouth. Dad took the regulator out and pushed it toward my face. I snatched it with both hands, crammed it into my mouth, and pulled in air with huge gulps. The feeling of fresh oxygen flowing
into my lungs made me hang on to the regulator with a white-knuckle grip. Great clouds of air bubbles exploded from the back of the tank as I exhaled the air almost as quickly as I took it in. All too quickly, though, Dad reached across and took the regulator back, but he only took one gulp of air before handing the mouthpiece back to me. And so it went, back and forth, Dad giving me an extra breath or two, and when I’d calmed down, we slowly finned back toward the surface, buddy breathing all the way, until at last my head broke the surface.

“Okay,” Dad grunted as he climbed onto the boat, “now you know in case you need it. Buddy breathing has saved more men than you could count in a month.”

From then on I was qualified to dive, and I always dived alone. Only Dad had a wet suit, whereas I had to trunk it. When the mood hit, I’d ask Dad to lower the heavy tank into the water on a rope. I’d tug on a set of flippers and a mask, then jump into the Lake, surfacing beside the tank and treading water while I slipped off the rope knot and worked my way into the tank’s stiff harness. Then I’d clear my mask, clamp the regulator between my teeth, and give Dad a thumbs-up.

Then down I finned, alone, into a blue-green world of liquid light.

The first few moments were always controlled panic: the icy water, the bizarre feeling of being able to breathe underwater, the sense that I was somewhere I didn’t belong. And there, directly above me, drawing nine feet of water, hung the bulk of the
Patrol
, a shimmering shadow when seen from below, its massive propeller hanging motionless, slowly adding layers of blood-red rust. Soon, though, and inevitably, the quiet of diving took over. Time seemed to slow, and in the long seconds I could hear myself pulling in air, the bubbles leaving the regulator with a soft rush, like scattering birds. I could feel the water slipping around my body as I finned downward, and then I would see that day’s wrecked ship below me. No matter the size of the wreck, I always felt small by comparison. Water swirled around the ship, shifting silt on the bottom, the current pulsing and pushing. I never dared approach too closely for
fear of snagging my tank and becoming trapped, but each time I wondered what it would be like to enter the hull, to swim through nearly black staterooms filled with floating things best left to the imagination.

The dive had to end less than forty minutes after it began. I knew it was time to head back when the air took on the taste of metal
 
—we never dived deep enough to require decompression stops, like Dad sometimes did, so as long as I could see the silhouette of the
Patrol
, I could make it back. Dad would help me manage the heavy tank, and if one of his friends happened to be on deck, he’d brag about what I knew how to do underwater.

“This kid has done more already than most men do their entire lives,” he’d say, and he didn’t need, in his words, “some government pencil pusher telling me what I can and can’t do.” He wasn’t just the captain of his own ship
 
—he was master and commander.

And he needed everyone to know it. Each time we pulled into a new harbor, Dad at the helm in his captain’s hat, it wouldn’t take long for him to befriend a curious onlooker at the dock. He was a natural storyteller, and he was an expert at projecting a kind of manly intrigue. Within minutes he would be inviting whoever it was to come aboard for a tour of the engine room. The allure started with the ship itself
 
—what kind of man piloted a one-hundred-ton boat around the Great Lakes just for fun? That was an unasked question to which Dad’s whole person was constantly shouting an answer.

Once we docked at Manistee to get in the lee of some bad weather that was heading our way. Mom and Sheri stayed on the boat while Dad told Jerry and me to follow him so we could carry some groceries back from the store.

As we stepped onto the dock, the other boats looked tiny. Dad was taking his sweet time connecting our boat to the shore power, so Jerry and I amused ourselves by picking out what we’d like to try.

“How about that one?”

“The long sailboat? Nah, too much work to rig everything up. How about that one?”

“It’s nice. But
that
one’s even nicer.”

In fact, it was the nicest boat within sight. Significantly smaller than ours, of course, it still had every amenity. It was in cherry shape, and the man who stepped off it looked like he spent all his free time polishing and cleaning his beauty. Clearly retired, he wore a bright yellow jacket and matching hat.

Dad was just finishing with the electrical hookup when the man wandered over. “Never seen a ship like
this
before,” he commented.

“Like a tour?” Dad asked immediately.

“Sure,” he said, surprised to be invited on so quickly. “I’d love one.”

Jerry and I groaned. We knew the “tour” would last at least thirty minutes, after which we’d still be forced to follow Dad to the grocery store. But he wasn’t about to miss a chance to show off.

“Come on board,” Dad said graciously, reaching out his hand to help the man up. “Let’s start at the pilothouse.”

As they left, Jerry told me he was going to wait in the galley, but I decided to tag along on the tour, just in case the visitor said or did something interesting. I caught up to them just as Dad was giving him the vital statistics.

“The four-cylinder Kahlenberg diesel weighs in at eighteen tons.
Patrol One
’s eighty feet long and weighs in at one hundred tons.” He paused for effect. “And she draws nine and a half feet of water and has a five-foot prop.”

The man couldn’t respond with anything more articulate than an astonished “Wow.” That was how most people reacted.

Dad continued the tour throughout the ship, ending as he always did in the engine room. The sheer size of the engine towering over us shocked most people. Dad reeled in his tour guests like fish on hooks. By the time Dad was done, the stranger looked as impressed as if he’d just been given a tour of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

“Thank you for the tour. Thank you so much! It’s
mighty
impressive!” As the man in yellow left the engine room with Dad, I noticed a large black oil smear on the back of his jacket. Dad saw it too but didn’t say a thing. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and both of us knew it wouldn’t be the last.

“Come on, Mark,” Dad said once the man was gone. “Where’s your brother? What are you two lollygagging for, anyway? We’ve got food to get!”