The Tank Man's Son (23 page)

A
NOTHER YEAR OF
school slouched past; another summer vacation arrived. We knew from past experience that Dad and Mom would be too busy working or fighting to pay much attention to us. I knew I should be spending more time with Jerry, since he’d be heading off to Michigan State soon, but in truth what I was looking forward to were uninterrupted months of tramping through the woods with Zeke, seeing as few other humans as possible.

And then Dad surprised us.

I could tell what the pile of blue plastic and white aluminum poles was, even from across the yard, and there was no
way
Dad had gotten it for us. But there it was, sitting right up the hill from the shed: an above-ground swimming pool.

“Jerry! Jerry!”

He came tearing out of the house. “What?”

I pointed. He shrugged at the blue-and-white pile, uncomprehending. I pointed again for emphasis. “Jerry
 
—it’s a
swimming poo
l
!”

He grinned and punched me in the shoulder.

Dad assembled it that same afternoon. Sheri joined us, and we hopped around and asked questions, tossing ideas back and forth about what we’d do with the pool. It stood as high as my shoulder and formed a circle almost as wide across as our living room. Once it was up, Dad looked at us. “Well, guess you’d better fill it,” he said, and with that he walked away.

“What made Dad decide to find a pool for us?” I asked.

“Who cares!” Jerry answered.

We connected three different hoses together, and before long we had a steady stream of water trickling in. And then . . . we waited. And kept on waiting. It seemed to take forever for the hose to fill the pool, and we were determined to wait until the water was high enough that we could take a real swim
 
—no cheating! We tried to do our usual things to stay busy, but more often than not we found ourselves back at the side of the pool, peering in, trying to determine how many inches the water had risen since the last time we checked. Not even hunting with Zeke could take my mind off the pool and all its possibilities.

Finally the pool was ready. While Sheri watched, Jerry and I dragged a few old boxes over to the edge so we could get in
 
—Dad hadn’t bothered to bring home a ladder or steps
 
—and then the three of us took our first laps around our new pool. It was glorious. Sure, the water had already started turning the blue liner a shade of orange, and it was ice cold, but the pool was ours. We could hardly believe it: as if running water and a sunken bathtub weren’t luxury enough!

We soon discovered two reliable pool toys: Zeke and a plastic baseball bat. The bat, which had a hole at one end, filled with water and could maintain neutral buoyancy, like a submarine, and since it was
streamlined, it made a perfect torpedo. We played a game in which one of us
 
—two, if Sheri wasn’t off at one of her friends’ houses or tired of playing what she disdainfully called our “boy games”
 
—would try to swim underwater from one side of the pool to the other, while the gunner would aim the bat and then accelerate it underwater, trying to anticipate the swimmer’s movement and score a hit.

“Ping, ping, ping,” came Jerry’s uncanny imitation of a submarine’s sonar, and that called for my response. “Flood all chambers! Dive, dive, dive!”

Once, Jerry hit me with the water-filled bat
above
water, when I came up for air, and it shoved one of my front teeth back against the roof of my mouth. Dad decided the dentist would be a waste of money, and he turned out to be right: over the course of the summer, my tongue slowly pushed my tooth back into place.

Zeke, though, was an even better toy. The easiest way to get him into the pool was to stand outside on the sand, lift him up, and then heave him up and over the edge. Getting out was, for both him and us, a matter of scrambling up the side and dropping to the ground. He loved to swim, and we loved it when he was in the pool with us. He was a yipping, tail-bashing game all by himself, and though we never knew what we’d do with him (Try to ride him? Teach him underwater fetch? Play Marco Polo?), it was always fun. We got him to understand the torpedo game well enough, though he tended to bite any incoming munitions and swim away with them. It was a summer of unexpected fun at the Bouman house, and between the pool and hunting with Zeke, I had rarely been as happy.

Like all things on our property, however, the pool slowly decayed. The inside liner, which had been the blue of a summer morning, turned a deep rust color, and since we weren’t putting any chemicals into the water and had no filtration system, bugs began to multiply. When we
were underwater, wearing our diving masks, we’d come face-to-face with bugs as big as our thumbs, spiraling their lazy way through what must have seemed an ocean. We didn’t stop swimming, but we did become more careful about keeping our mouths closed underwater.

The bugs weren’t the biggest problem, though. The water level had started to drop faster and faster, to the point where we had to leave the hose running in the pool for most of the day. After some sleuthing, we discovered that whenever Zeke scrambled his way out of the pool, his toenails punched small holes in the liner. Mom bought us a patch kit in town, and we walked around the inside rim of the pool, covering the worst of Zeke’s tracks. From then on we gave him a boost over the side when he wanted to get out, hoping not to create any more leaks, since Mom hadn’t given the impression that she’d keep supplying us with patch kits.

A few weeks later, however, as the water level continued to drop, it became clear that Zeke’s toenails weren’t the real culprit. Jerry, donning a diving mask and spending so much time underwater that his skin wrinkled up like Grandpa Russell’s, eventually discovered a leak at the bottom of the pool, right in the corner where it met the wall. While I supplied moral support in the water, Jerry took one of our last patches and swam back to the bottom, but he found himself floating up to the surface before he could apply enough force to do the job. After several failed attempts, he spotted something that looked like a blue string right near the leak. It seemed to be waving at him, and thinking he could hold on to the string and stay underwater while he finished the patch, Jerry grabbed it.

He instantly discovered that the string was part of the stitching that held one of the pool’s main seams together. Jerry’s tug ripped the seam open a few inches, and that was all it took. The rip became a hole, the hole grew into a tear, and three seconds later the pool was split from top to bottom. Five thousand gallons of water exploded out of that side of the pool, leaving Jerry and me gaping like landed fish inside the
suddenly empty pool. One instant we were swimming, and the next we were standing in a few inches of water on a heap of wet, blue plastic, watching our lives drain away.

Because it just so happened that the leak had been perfectly aligned with the doorway to Dad’s shed.

The sound of a mini tsunami caught Dad’s attention. He had been just behind the shed, and he raced around the corner in time to see Jerry and me standing atop the ruined pool in our swimsuits while a wall of water pushed hundreds of pounds of sand, dirt, and small rocks directly down the hillside toward him.

Without missing a beat, he charged for the front of the shed, yelling, “Don’t just stand there
 
—close the door!”

Too late. By the time the flood hit the shed and redirected around it, the water had deposited more than a foot of sediment inside the shed. Luckily for Dad, he’d built the shed with a raised floor and separated floorboards, so all the water drained out. Unluckily for me and Jerry, though, the mud showed no inclination to follow the water. It took Jerry and me about thirty seconds to slosh our way out of the remains of the pool and scramble down the hillside to the shed, and that was how long it took Dad to grab two shovels and plunge them into the wet sand outside, blades first. There they stood, like drill sergeants, waiting to give us our marching orders. Dad didn’t even bother with words.

Jerry and I shoveled damp sand for three days, and on the first day Dad tore the pool down the rest of the way. He never moved it, and the ruined pile of plastic simply stayed there to rot.

Sometimes I’d picture that day in my mind: Dad appearing from behind the shed just as the waist-deep wall of water arrived, his face expressing something I’d never seen, and only for an instant. It was shock mostly, but mixed with a bit of fear and a dash of awe. It was the look of someone who is always in control realizing, if only for the briefest moment, that control is elusive. Those three days of shoveling blistered my hands, but it wasn’t an entirely unhappy memory.

Our house continued to decay as well. One of the floorboards in the living room eventually rotted all the way out. Dad yanked out the pieces of spongy wood with the claw of his hammer, but he never got around to replacing the board. That meant there was a hole in the floor about the size of a loaf of bread. We all knew where it was
 
—just in front of where you’d stand if you were answering the phone
 
—so it was easy to avoid
 
—much easier than the water pipes and cooling fins we had to step over to get through the new doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sheri found a small rug somewhere that she placed across the hole in the floor, and that became the new normal.

One day a saleswoman rapped on our door. Dad was gone, but Jerry and Sheri and I were in the house, so we all came into the living room and lurked behind Mom to see what would happen. The woman, dressed smartly in a white blouse and blue skirt, wanted to sell Mom beauty supplies, and she just knew she had something that would be perfect for Mom’s complexion and hair color. Her white high-heeled shoes clicked as she walked into the house and sat down.

“Let me open this up,” she cooed. “Now let’s start with some foundation. We have various skin tones and shades.”

Mom might have liked to buy some, but we knew she wouldn’t. Not with Dad using all the spare cash for his toys. So Mom made a kind of politely noncommittal noise
 
—“Mm?”
 
—and kept listening.

“Next I’d like to show you blush . . .”

We three kids sat and watched her dig through her leather makeup case, fascinated by the exotic wares. Having salespeople come to the house was a rare event. One by one she placed little bottles on the table next to Mom.

“Oh, this
is
nice,” Mom said approvingly, unscrewing a cap on a vial of lotion and rubbing some of it on her skin. Sheri scooted closer so she could watch up close.

While Mom tried something else and Sheri tried the lotion, the woman asked if she could use our phone. “I just need to make a quick little call to my daughter.”

“Of course,” agreed Mom, still looking at the samples. “It’s right over there.”

As the woman rose from her seat and made for the phone, we kids became aware of a potential problem: she was headed directly for Sheri’s rug.

None of us said a thing, most likely because we were too shocked to speak. What happened next unfolded in slow motion.