The Tank Man's Son (19 page)

Sometimes, when I managed to catch one, I would hold it up close to my face and study it. They tended to pull their heads back into their shells, and I’d speak to them.

“It’s okay, little guy. You’re okay. You don’t have to be afraid. Look, I’ll find you some food. You’re safe.”

I could usually find a dead or dying bug floating nearby on the surface of the water, and I’d place it in the palm of one hand and wait for the turtle to poke its head out. When it did, I’d say good-bye and release it back into the water, setting my palm level with the surface and letting the creature climb off and stroke away. Each painted turtle was pure and wild and innocent.

Most times I explored, I chose to stay out until after Dad and Mom returned from work. Dad would blow the ship’s horn
 
—a mighty blast of air that echoed across the marshes
 
—to let me know it was time to come back. After chow, Dad would usually wander off toward the engine room while Mom would wash dishes in the galley.

Every so often Dad would warn Jerry and me, “Stay close; I might need you.” That meant we needed to be within shouting distance of the dock in case he called. Otherwise I was free to roam the shoreline until it was too dark to see, and then I would slip back onto the ship, slide into bed, and wait for the sun to rise on my next day of freedom.

I didn’t
always
stay in at night. Once, after a long day of exploring, I lay awake on my bed, listening to the heat and the hush of the river. Restless, I stood to look out the porthole and saw across the water the sparkling lights of a carnival. I stuffed my feet into my socks and wet shoes and tugged on my damp T-shirt. Mom and Dad were in their room. The boat was dark, but I knew my way around by feel. I found the door to the deck and stepped out into the relative brightness of the night. There was the inky water, the black shoreline, and the lights across the river, which drew me like a moth to a flame.

I walked almost a mile upriver to the nearest bridge, following the outlined strip of stars above my head since the path was pitch black, and then traveled another mile downstream on the other side. I stood at the entrance an hour later, and the full panoply of the carnival exploded before me: countless game booths, illuminated food stands, the Tilt-A-Whirl, hawkers and barkers and wandering clowns, and spinning over everything, the Ferris wheel, winking like a neon eyeball. I’d been to a carnival back home during daylight hours, but at night it was a different animal.

The smell of caramel corn and hot dogs and cotton candy thickened the air, and grizzled carnies shouted at one and all. Frantic music blasted from each ride and booth, combining and echoing, overloading my senses. I rooted for this man to prove his strength with a mallet and for that woman to make three shots in a row with a basketball. My eyes and head followed the roller coaster, round and up and down, leaving me dizzy and gasping. And everywhere, people and always more people.
Couples that looked like Grandma and Grandpa Russell, holding hands and strolling. Teenage boys punching each other in the shoulders and then checking that their hair was still slicked back and solid. Between two tents a boy and a girl, kissing, both of his hands locked around her waist. It was a carnival devoid of children, save me, and I felt myself to be a man.

I wandered for hours before I turned back toward the darkness and walked home. When I climbed the ramp back onto the boat, I could see a dim light glowing behind the windows of the main cabin, and when I opened the door, a yellow rectangle fell across my body.

Mom was waiting in the main cabin. She was sitting in a chair, an open book face down on the table to her left, and her hands were folded in her lap.

“Where were you, Mark?”

I was surprised by her question. Mom rarely knew where I was.

“I was across the river at the carnival.” I motioned back through the open door with my whole body. “Why?”

“You need to be more careful from now on.” She fixed me with her look of serious concern. “I heard about a man who dresses up as a clown and kidnaps boys, Mark. He kills them. It’s not safe for you to be out alone like that.”

I stared. Her words hardly made sense.

“Mark, promise me you’ll stay on the boat at night. With us, where you’ll be safe.”

I promised. Then I walked to my stateroom knowing that we’d only be on the boat a few more weeks. Then it would be time to go back home, where life would return to normal. School, chores, and eleven acres. And Dad. I sailed off to sleep, the music of the carnival sailing back toward me across the black water.

D
AD HAD WORKED FOR
Otto Freicky’s marine salvage company, running equipment on the barge and diving. Otto, who practically lived on his barge, was a seaman from the old school, and Dad always spoke respectfully of him. Otto seemed like he was a foot shorter than Dad, and his skin looked like it was made out of old leather. As our summer wrapped up, Otto bragged to Dad about his luck: he’d purchased a red Chevy Corvette for only five hundred bucks. There was one small catch, he admitted
 
—his new muscle car was underwater
 
—but it would be a cinch to pull up with his heavy crane. When Dad pressed him for details, Otto said that the previous winter, two teenagers had stolen the car, raced it around town until it was nearly out of gas, and then, for some reason, driven it out on the ice, at which point they abandoned it. The next day, before the car could be recovered, the ice started to crack and shift, and a small group of locals watched the Corvette tip into the water and sink. The insurance company had already compensated the
car’s owner, but Otto knew a guy at the insurance company, which is how he was able to buy the title.

Finding the car was easy
 
—just a matter of reading the insurance file and then looking for something red beneath the water
 
—and so was hoisting it. Dad was the one who dived onto it and hooked the crane’s cable to the car’s chassis. Otto was grinning until his car broke the surface and began to drain, revealing not the bold curves of his Corvette but the blocky lines of a Ford Falcon.

“What the
 
—I thought he told me it was a
Corvette
, and that’s
not
a Corvette! I guess I shoulda looked at that title closer.”

As his crew stood on the barge and watched muddy water continue to pour from the car, Otto kicked a deck cleat and asked heaven and anyone else who was listening, “What in the world am I gonna do with this thing?”

Dad had an answer. “What do ya gotta have for it?”

He bought the Falcon off Otto at a 70 percent discount, then had it towed to the parking lot near the
Patrol
. Once it dried out, we saw that the Falcon had a two-tone paint job, but not the good kind. The mud had eaten the paint from the half of the car that had been buried, so the front was a different color from the back. It only took Dad until the end of the day to get the Falcon running again, and despite the discovery that there were more than a few dead fish trapped in the heating system, Dad had come out ahead. Otto’s brag-worthy story had been reduced to a chapter in Dad’s.

Raising the Falcon was our last adventure of the summer. After months of boating, scuba diving, and learning for myself the ins and outs of every bay and backwater within a half-day’s walk of the
Patrol
, it was time to head back to Belmont. The school year was barreling toward us, along with colder weather, and even Dad was ready to hang up the captain’s hat and winterize the ship. For me, moving out meant nothing more than walking down the gangway, carrying a few clothes crammed into a grocery bag in one hand and some board games tucked under my other arm.

I was carrying a secret in my pocket, though
 
—I was taking home a turtle.

On our last day at the river, I’d felt a pit open in my stomach when I thought about waking up at home without the prospect of seeing one of my little friends, and it hadn’t taken much thought to figure out a solution. One last trip up the riverbank, one last wade into chest-deep water, one last patient wait, and I walked back to the ship carrying a hard-shelled emblem of the peace and solitude I’d discovered that summer.

I drove back with Dad in the Falcon. When we hit the highway and Dad got the car up to speed, it began to weave back and forth across the lane.

“Otto must’ve warped the chassis when he yanked her out of the mud,” Dad growled. He battled the swerving for a mile or two, then swore and slowed down. The swerving wasn’t noticeable as long as Dad kept the car below forty. Other cars raced past us, some honking, but Dad chugged on, headed home at
his
speed.

“It’s not just the coons
 
—it’s the unions and spics, too,” Dad said as we drove through the city. “Taking all our g
 
—d
 
— jobs. Gotta be a change in this country, and it’s gotta be soon.”

I hadn’t heard my name, and nothing he’d said had been a question, so I went on staring out the window. Dad said stuff like that all the time, and it rarely required more of a response than a noncommittal grunt. I reached down with my right hand, slowly, and patted my pocket to make sure my turtle was still there. I could picture it, legs and head retracted into its shell, waiting for my signal that it was safe to come out again.

Soon we were crunching down our gravel road, then crunching up our driveway made from car battery cases, and then I was looking at our house. Something was different, and it took me a minute to realize I was seeing new colors. When I’d left for the ship, the house had been cinder-block white with only the sunny-orange front door providing variety. Now one entire side of the house was orange as well. I walked around
to get a better view and discovered a sprinkler hooked to the end of a garden hose and rotating back and forth, back and forth
 
—
chick chick chick chick chukkachukkachukkachukka
. It was watering a shrub as well as the side of the house, and both the plant and the wall had been stained the unmistakable rusty orange of our hard water, as if the sprinkler were really a spray-paint nozzle.

I could tell Dad was standing behind me, so I froze. “Someone left the damn water running while we were away,” he said, and then I heard him walk off.

I knew it hadn’t been me
 
—I’d been at the ship! Dad must have known he was the only one who had returned to the house recently, so nothing more was said about it. A minute later the sprinkler shut off, and I saw Dad go into the house.

I stayed outside, surveying. Water continued to drip from the shrub and run down the side of the house. I noticed that even the sand had been tinted orange. I pictured what would happen if we put the sprinkler in the middle of the roof and let it run for a few days, and the thought made me smile. I looked down at my shoes, and the laces already had several sandburs tangled in them.

“Well, turtle,” I said, patting my pocket again, “here we are.”

Every boy imagines worlds in which he is the hero. The previous years at my elementary school, when my teacher pulled down the world map over the blackboard, I became an Antarctic explorer making the final push toward the South Pole. I daydreamed during gym class, a sniper poised to bring down the commander of the enemy convoy. I doodled baseballs and bats in the margins of my history quizzes, the record-setting slugger who was never at a loss for friends.

One glance at my new junior high school shattered those brittle hopes. My old school, which had been out in the countryside, had a playground surrounded by acres and acres of grass and was guarded by large, twisted
trees. I could smell hay and cows when I played football and baseball at recess, which was my favorite time of every day
 
—the only time when I didn’t need to pay attention to the teacher or to Dad. When I was playing sports, I felt free and easy, and the other kids liked me and picked me for their teams. My new school hulked at the center of a recently built subdivision, and everything was brand-new, from the saplings to the sidewalks to the students. As I stumbled off the bus on the first day of school, I realized that everything had changed, except for me. New kids, new classes, new teachers, new expectations, and countless new ways to mess up . . . and at the center of it all was the same old Mark Bouman.

The hallway was a fast-moving river filled with what seemed like five hundred unfamiliar fish, and I was just a small fry trying not to bump into anyone my size or get eaten by anyone bigger. I made it through the day by keeping my head down and speaking only when spoken to, and instead of drawing baseballs, I outlined the humped shapes of turtles.

When the final bell rang, I trudged to the parking lot. There were buses lined up as far as I could see, and I froze, overwhelmed by the number of choices. All around me the other kids chatted and laughed as they found their rides home. Then one of the buses started its engine, and another followed, and soon they were all idling while I was the only kid left standing on the curb. I jogged up and down the sidewalk, searching for my ride, but every bus looked identical. One by one they dropped into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, driving off in all directions like bees from a hive.

I was alone. The smell of diesel hung over the empty lot as I hitched my backpack a bit tighter to my shoulders and tugged up my hand-me-down jeans. I didn’t know my bus, but I knew which streets would take me home, and I guessed it was an hour’s walk, so I needed to get started.

As soon as I got home and figured out that Dad wasn’t home yet, I raced to my room to find my turtle. Jerry was already back, sitting at the tiny
folding table he called his desk, his textbook open beneath the tiny lamp, biting his pencil as he stared at a notebook. The turtle was where I’d left him that morning, half submerged in the shallow water at the bottom of a cast-iron pot on the dresser. It was time to make him a home
 
—he didn’t deserve to be trapped in my house all the time
 
—and on my walk I’d thought of just how to do it.

At some point Dad had brought home an ornamental cement fountain, and now it sat beneath a good-sized poplar tree. We’d never used it for anything, apart from the times Jerry and I hid behind it while playing army, and Dad had never shown any interest in it, so I figured it was fair game for me to use. I knew it wouldn’t hold water because there was a hole in the bottom, probably where a pipe was supposed to run, so I rummaged around in Dad’s shed until I found a container filled with sticky white goop that seemed like it would seal the gap. After slathering the goop in the hole, I spent the next ten minutes searching for some large rocks to place at the center of the fountain. Then I connected two garden hoses together, set the open end beneath one of the rocks, and raced to turn on the tap. While water poured into the enclosure, I grabbed the turtle from my room. Back at the fountain, I carefully set the turtle down on the rock pile in the center, stepping back to survey his new home as it filled with water.

“Okay, little turtle, this is your home now,” I said.

He extended his neck toward the splashing hose, as if to get even closer to the water. My gaze traced the thin, red lines arcing above his eyes and back onto his neck, continuing up the curve of his shell. His shell was only about an inch across, though his neck seemed nearly as long as my thumb. Over the sound of the running water, I heard a sort of click. It took me a moment to find the source: a beetle had fallen out of the poplar above, landing shell down on one of the rocks. The beetle struggled for a few seconds, legs waving in the air, and then it rolled down the side of the rock and disappeared into a crack. My turtle had
been watching as well, and it followed the beetle down into the damp darkness, vanishing from my view.

“Enjoy.” I grinned. “I’ll see you soon.”