The Tank Man's Son (28 page)

“There’s no easy way to say it,” Mom told me on the phone. “You have to sell Zeke.”

She was right. He deserved to be happy, and seeing me whenever I managed to hitchhike home didn’t qualify. He needed someone less useless than me, someone who could take him hunting and call him into the kitchen when it was extra cold outside and scratch him on his back leg, just in the spot that made his front leg shake with pleasure.

Mom helped me place an ad in the local paper, and someone responded
 
—a man with acreage who lived outside town. Zeke would love it there, back among the oaks and ponds and wide-open skies. And just like that, it was over. Zeke’s new owner picked him up from Mom’s, and part of me withered away.

More bad news arrived. I’d been so busy bumming beer and weed from anyone and everyone, desperately trying to bury my sorrow, that I hadn’t been to class in weeks. The university notified me that my scholarship would be canceled. If I got kicked out of college, where would I go? What would I do? The spinning I felt was myself circling the drain, and the speed seemed to be picking up. I was screwed.

That’s when I remembered seeing an Air Force recruiter on campus during the first week of school.
What a joke
, I’d thought.
Only a moron
would sign up for something like that.
Now I wondered whether signing on to become Private Moron was still an option. The Air Force was more palatable than moving back to my mother’s house at age nineteen
 
—why did
that
sound so familiar?
 
—or waiting in my dorm room for campus police to evict me. Before I decided anything, though, I needed a drink.

The walls of the small recruiting office were plastered with posters of jets and a promotional slogan encouraging me to
Aim High!
for
A Great Way of Life
!
There was a single desk, and in front of it was a single chair. Behind the desk sat a man dressed in an immaculate uniform, and it appeared that each item on his desk
 
—brochures, papers, pens, a framed photograph
 
—had been arranged with a protractor and a T square. I cut right to the chase, and so did he.

“I want to join the Air Force.”

“Well, what are you interested in?”

He gestured at the chair, and I sat down. “I’ll do anything, go anywhere,” I said. “Just get me out of here.”

“We
love
your kind, son.” The man’s smile was wide, and he slid a paper across the desk toward me. “Look these over and decide what you’d like to do.”

I looked down at the list of specializations, pretended to read, and looked up at the recruiter. Then I pointed at random, hopping my finger back and forth across the paper. “This, this . . . or this,” I said, “looks good to me.”

The recruiter narrowed his eyes a fraction. “Are you sure you don’t want to
read
those first?”

“These are good enough,” I answered.

He took the paper back and returned it to its precisely aligned pile. “We’ll just need you to take some tests and make sure you qualify for the jobs you . . . selected,” he said, “and when the testing is done, we’ll assign you a job and a station.”

While he was talking, he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a packet of colored papers. By the time I’d signed my name a dozen times, I was officially “entering the system,” as my recruiter called it. A trip to Detroit a few weeks later, along with a raised right hand and a repeated vow, and I had officially joined the Air Force. The United States military would take care of me, which was good, because clearly I couldn’t take care of myself.

I
T TOOK OUR BUS
the longest day ever to reach Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio, Texas, smack in the middle of hot-and-dry as far as the eye could see. Gear bag over my shoulder, I shuffled down the aisle with the rest of my fellow recruits, then stumbled down the steps and onto the radiating asphalt.

“Well, boys,” called down the voice of the driver from behind us, “this is the end of the line.” He was smiling, and he pronounced “end” like it tasted sweet.

There were footprints painted on the pavement in four long lines. We knew enough to form a line, or at least to attempt to form a line, but that was where our initiative ended. Doing absolutely nothing on the bus had worn me out, and others apparently were feeling the same way, because one by one we dropped our heavy bags to the ground. I wondered when someone would arrive to show us to our barracks and the mess hall. Over the noise of the still-idling bus, I began to hear a strange
sound,
click click click
, growing louder. Around the corner of the nearest building strode a tall man, his boots and aviator sunglasses shining, his uniform pressed to perfection.
Cli
-
clack
. He snapped to a stop in front of us, glaring out from beneath his Smokey Bear hat.

“My name is Sergeant Christian, and I want you to turn around and face the bus.”

With varying degrees of speed and military panache, we did.

“Now I want you to wave good-bye to that bus, boys, because it’s your last chance out of here.”

A few guys snickered, and one standing near me drawled, “Bye-bye, bus,” as the diesel huffed away in a cloud of smoke. I smirked.

“Wipe that smile off your face, a
 
—hole!”

The last syllable was our call to attention. All around I could hear my fellow recruits straightening into a semblance of order. As I stood there with the others, listening to Sergeant Christian scream what seemed an unending stream of profanities at us, it occurred to me:
This is just like home
. I could tell some of the guys were taking it hard
 
—slumped shoulders, bug eyes
 
—but it was all very normal for me. Maybe the ones who had joined the Air Force because it was a lifelong dream were beginning to doubt that decision. Not me. I was here because it had seemed like my least-bad choice. Sergeant Christian could bark and cuss at me all he wanted
 
—I knew he wouldn’t lay a finger on me, and I’d be getting three square meals plus a paycheck, just for keeping my mouth shut and doing whatever I was told.

“. . . we clear on that, recruit?”

“Sir-yes-
si
r
!”

Back in the recruiting office, I must have pointed at something to do with computers, because after basic training I was shipped to Illinois for eight months of school and then to Montana to work on our nation’s nuclear weapons systems. I had a regular job about a million miles away
from anything dangerous, a regular paycheck, and as the months turned into years, it seemed I had a pretty good chance of surviving.

Unfortunately, I also had a regular drug habit that had followed me from college, as well as an irregular aversion to authority.

Especially to Sergeant Simpkins. “Sarge is such a jerk,” I would complain to whoever would listen, making no attempt to hide my disdain. “He’s out to get me, for no reason.”

It was true that he was out to get me, but everyone, including myself, knew there actually were good reasons. I failed dorm room inspections regularly. My uniform was never pressed and often dirty. Whenever I had a job assigned to me, I made sure to quit as soon as I’d done the bare minimum. I drank beer and smoked weed. I was surly to my superiors. All of which meant that I’d accumulated a ridiculous number of demerits and extra work shifts, not to mention an official personnel file filled with Letters of Admonishment and Letters of Reprimand.

Still, it wasn’t all my fault. My roommate knew the right people, and when he got so drunk that he couldn’t crawl out of bed in the morning, Sergeant Simpkins would cover for him. I, on the other hand, had been written up for being an hour late the morning after we switched to daylight saving time.

I hated how unfair it was, and I hated that there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it, but I’d developed an ongoing
 
—and, to that point, successful
 
—policy: ignore everything. One day, however, that option was snatched away.

“I’m gonna need you to come into the office, Airman Bouman.”

I could hear the air quotes around my rank when Sergeant Simpkins spoke. I rolled my eyes and made sure he saw me. He grinned right back.

“I’m writing you up, Bouman,” he gloated as he pushed the paperwork across the desk. I didn’t even read it
 
—what would be the point? I signed it, scarcely looking at the paper, and shoved it back across the desk. We’d been through the same drill before.

Usually I got up and wandered away at that point in the proceedings, but my sergeant wasn’t finished.

“I don’t like you, Bouman. And guess what? I don’t have to like you.” He let that sink in. I shrugged. “And do you know what else?” he continued. “I’m not gonna need to put up with you for much longer.”

My expression must have given me away.

“I see what you’re thinking, Bouman, but you’ve got it backwards. See, I’m not going anywhere. In fact, I’m getting promoted. Nope. It’s you, Bouman
 
—you’re the one who’s going somewhere. And do you know where you’re going? O-U-T. As in out of the Air Force. I’m getting you kicked out, Bouman. Your very next step is an Article 15.”

I knew what an Article 15 would mean: I could never be promoted, and if I quit, I could never reenlist. If he filed the paperwork, it would be a rubber-stamp case for the higher-ups. My file was thick enough to need a forklift. I was trapped, and he knew it.

He left, chuckling on his way out the office door. I stayed in my seat, seething, clenching and unclenching my jaw until it ached. He had me cornered with no way out. Unless something happened to him first.

I left to find a drink.

“If I can’t make it in the Air Force, what’ll I do? I’m gonna end up in prison or dead, you know?”

After four beers and half a joint, my words were slurred, but the wall I was talking to didn’t seem to mind. It just kept listening. I had no other friends, so the wall would have to do. It wasn’t hypothetical, however
 
—I 
couldn’t
make it in the Air Force. I’d proved that. And the thought of my family helping me was laughable. If I was kicked out, I wouldn’t make it. I’d die, sooner or later, probably in a ditch or a motel room, probably wasted.

Another few tokes and I asked the wall, “Then maybe
God
will help me?”

I laughed as soon as I said it. I knew God wasn’t going to listen to
an imbecile like me, especially since I happened to be higher than a mortar round.

Then a strange thing happened. I heard a different voice
 
—not my own, and not the wall’s
 
—and it said, “Yes, he will.”

I considered that. What the hell did I have to lose? I spoke two sentences that summed up the first twenty-two years of my existence.

“Help me, God. I hate my life.”

And then I stumbled to my bed.

That was late on a Friday night. Monday, before Sergeant Simpkins had filed any paperwork, and before I’d hatched any real plans for revenge, Brian, one of the airmen I worked with, cornered me.

“Hey, Mark,” he said, an earnest expression on his face, “I can see you’re not doing so well. So . . . why don’t you come to church on Wednesday? We’re going to show a movie.” That was one of the weirdest things I had ever heard
 
—who would go to church for a movie? I knew Brian was a bit different from most of the other guys, but our bosses seemed to like him. I was more worried about church than about him. Church was for good people, and I was clearly not one of them.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, as surprised as he was by my answer.

I was even more surprised when, two days later, I actually opened the front door of the small church. The pews were half full already, and I slipped into a seat at the back just as the lights went out and the movie started. It turned out to be one of those movies about the end of the world, and when the last frame of the film passed the bulb and someone flipped the lights on, I saw Brian sitting close to the front of the church along with some other airmen. The pastor then talked about how to be sure you were saved. Being saved definitely sounded like something I needed, but there was no way I was getting out of my pew in front of the other guys from work. I left before I was forced to talk to anyone.

Nothing improved over the next few days
 
—not with my sergeant,
who was still watching me like a hawk and counting down the days until he could write me up again, and certainly not with me. I went right back to slacking at work and drinking and doing drugs the moment I went off duty.

The following Sunday, though, I found myself back at church, opening the front door and sliding into the same seat, farthest pew back. I don’t remember anything from the service until the part when the pastor asked if anyone wanted to come forward to accept Jesus.

I was the only one who stood up. I left my seat and began to walk the center aisle toward the front. Every eye was fixed on me
 
—weirdo Bouman, failure Bouman
 
—but I didn’t care. I was desperate. My life was like our old house back in Belmont. Everything I was trying
 
—pretending my past hadn’t happened, relying on the military to take care of me, searching for oblivion with beer and weed
 
—wasn’t any better than slapping some paint on the chipped cinder-block walls. Paint or no paint, I’d still be the same falling-apart shack underneath.

With each step down the aisle, the heaviness of everything I was carrying seemed to increase.
Why would God ever want
me
?
I wondered. I had failed at everything I ever tried. I had nothing to offer.
Nothing.