The Tank Man's Son (29 page)

Next thing I knew I was kneeling on the carpeted steps that led up to the low stage, as if the weight of my life had pushed me to my knees.

I prayed. “Help me, God. My life is a mess.”

With that, my life
 
—that broken house built on sand
 
—was leveled in a single shuddering instant. Something changed in me. I felt cleaner than I’d ever been. Eventually I stood and walked back to my pew. As I did, a voice I’d heard years before, back when I was a boy running the woods with Zeke, spoke to me.

I’m going to start over with you, Mark. You’re going to start over.

A
FTER THAT FATEFUL
S
UNDAY,
the little church became my life. If the front door was open, I was inside. Sunday morning services, Sunday evening prayer meetings, potlucks, Wednesday movie nights, Saturday yard work. I didn’t talk much about it to anyone else, and I couldn’t describe it well to myself, either, but I knew that something had changed for the better in my life, and I wanted more of it. As much as I could get.

I started reading the Bible, and there was one verse that seemed to keep echoing inside my mind nearly every hour I was awake. “When a man’s ways are pleasing to the
L
ORD
,” it read, “he makes even his enemies live at peace with him.”

Despite having invited me to church, Brian was just as shocked as everyone else at work that I had become a Christian. Most of the other guys pounced on the chance to tease me, and Sergeant Simpkins egged them on. “Praise the Lord,” someone would drawl when I walked past, and the group would roar with laughter.

Brian pulled me aside one day. “Mark, they’re just waiting for you to fail, watching you like a hawk. You’re doing the right thing
 
—keep it up!”

I didn’t hate Sergeant Simpkins anymore, but I still had a serious problem on my hands because of him. I didn’t even think about him much, being so busy with my new life, but he was still riding me harder than the other airmen, and I figured it was only a matter of time before something final happened. If I messed up once more, I was finished.

The trouble for Sergeant Simpkins was that I really
had
cleaned up my act. Before, I’d been giving him an embarrassment of material he could use to get me into trouble, but now his opportunities had dried up. Without even thinking about it, I quit beer and weed. And all the time I was doing my job, keeping my head down, I was turning that verse over and over in my mind, like a river rock tumbling down a stream.

A few months later, I heard that Sergeant Simpkins was being transferred, and I didn’t know what that meant until my new boss, Sergeant Barns, called me into the office to discuss my personnel file. He was smiling in a genuinely friendly way. “Mark, I sense there was some bad blood between you and your former sergeant. We don’t need to go into all that. What we do need is for you to keep this file from getting any thicker
 
—and something tells me you’re already on the right track.”

I looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, sir, I am.”

“Well then, Mark, I’ll see what I can do to keep you on Uncle Sam’s side, okay?”

I left the office, then stopped midstride in the hallway. My boss had always been my enemy
 
—but now I was at peace with my boss. Stranger still, my problem had required no violence or anger to solve. I smiled and kept walking. And Sergeant Barns made good on his word: with his help, I was able to stay in the service and even earn promotions.

I didn’t need to look far to discover another place I could pitch in at church. The youth group was always in need of volunteers to help at
meetings and to chaperone trips, and I was a natural fit. The kids seemed to like me, regardless of my character flaws
 
—or perhaps because of them. The more I hung out with the youth, watching all the fun things they did together
 
—pizza parties and football games and campfires
 
—a realization punched me in the gut. I had never done any of those things.

I had done
interesting
things, sure. Crazy things even. Things other kids had envied. None of them had ridden in a carplane or scuba dived. None of them had lived on a formerly derelict ship or seen their father’s tank run over a car. None of them had fired machine guns. But their simple activities were infused with a goodness and innocence that the atmosphere of my childhood had choked away.

I had been robbed of my childhood.

I’d been learning to pray, but the realization kicked my prayer into high gear
 
—and it wasn’t always pretty. My heart ached, thinking of everything I had missed and everything I had endured instead. My list of complaints to God seemed endless. The gap between what my childhood
had
been and what it
might
have been felt like a widening chasm inside my heart, and in my prayers I pleaded with God for a way to close it.

Then one day I was reading the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis, and I found that after he had been sold into slavery by his brothers, he eventually rose up to become the second most powerful man in all of Egypt. He married and had two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. The version of the Bible I was reading told me what the two names meant, and the instant I read the meaning of Manasseh’s name, I knew that God was talking to me.

“Manasseh, meaning, ‘God made up to him all the evil of his youth.’”

In that moment, I felt God was making me a promise, and I clung to that promise with everything I had. When I was a boy, I had tasted only fleeting moments of joy
 
—in the outdoors, first alone in the hills at home and on the shoreline waters of the Grand River, and later accompanied by Zeke. As if opening my eyes for the first time to my surroundings, I found
that I was living in Montana’s unspoiled wilderness. All around me were lakes and forests and mountains and skies that stretched forever, but I’d been too busy screwing up to notice. I’d been too busy regretting my past to remember an important part of it:
You’ll be in Montana, in the militar
y
.

Now I noticed. Life on the base was going well. I was staying on the right side of military law. Life at church was flourishing, and I wasn’t just learning about my faith
 
—I was starting to make the first true and deep human friendships of my life. I could look other men in the eye, and I talked with them about work and God and life. And so, with the foundation of a
normal
life holding me up, I began to spend every minute of free time outdoors, often with new friends from church who also loved the outdoors. But unlike my childhood, I wasn’t escaping. I was celebrating.

One of the guys I’d met at church was named Jerry, and something surprised me about him: he loved the outdoors even more than I did. Between us we had enough gear to do everything we loved
 
—hunt, trap, fish, canoe, and just disappear into the wilderness for days at a time. We decided to share a small apartment that had a basement, which we converted into what must have seemed like an entire sporting goods store. Our motto became that if it had fins, fur, or feathers, we’d go after it.

Someone asked if I wanted a dog who needed a new owner. Of
course
I did! On Sundays, Jerry and I would load my beater truck with gear before the morning church service, then race out the door to hunt the moment the service ended. Once, we pulled back into the parking lot for evening service with two dead deer in the bed of the truck, and our mud-splattered hunting clothes didn’t merit even a second glance from anyone else at church.

It was precisely what I needed.

The older ladies at church started to joke that I’d never marry since I was spending all my time hunting. At least I hoped they were joking. They did have a point, though: I had no idea how to have a conversation with a woman my age.

But God hadn’t finished promising.

I noticed Joan the first Sunday she came to church. She was a park ranger in Yellowstone during the summertime, but during the rest of the year, she worked as an audiologist in the local schools. And since my friends at church noticed me noticing her, they urged me to ask her out on a date.

“Mark, think about it: she’s a ranger, and you love the outdoors!”

That logic, which I had heard variations of for week after week, was sound. What wasn’t logically obvious was why someone like Joan, whose beauty was only equaled by her gracious sophistication, would be attracted to someone like me, an obsessed outdoorsman with the social skills of a rock. But I thought about Joan all the time, and I prayed that God would have mercy on me.

It took me months to gather enough courage to ask her out, and I have no idea what she saw in me that made her say yes. My truck was beat up and in constant need of repair. My apartment was so dirty that we joked you could grow mushrooms in the carpet. Jerry and I had so much wild game stuffed in the refrigerator that there was barely room for store-bought food.

“So,” I ventured one Sunday morning after church, “would you go out with me? If you want?”

“Sure.” She smiled. “What’s the plan?”

My brain was already completely overloaded. No one had prepared me for this. I had to have a
plan
as well?

“You can drive over to me and Jerry’s apartment?” I tried.

She paused like she was waiting for more. But I was fresh out of ideas.

“Okay, great, then.” She was still smiling. “I’ll come over tomorrow night at seven.”

When Joan agreed, I felt I had won the lottery. She seemed too perfect. By the time she arrived the next night in her immaculate Honda Accord, I’d managed to clear the dirty plates and ammo boxes and hunting catalogs and trays of elk jerky off our dining room table.

“Come on in,” I invited. I’d practiced that line.

“Thank you.”

She didn’t run back out the door screaming, which was a good sign.

“Shall I . . . ?” she asked leadingly.

“Oh! Yeah, of course. Come over to the table. Here, let me get your chair.”

She sat down, and I went into the kitchen. I returned with my dinner
 
—a Banquet frozen chicken dinner I’d microwaved, along with a container of cottage cheese.

“Are you eating?” she asked.

“Yep. I’m pretty hungry. Don’t worry, there’s enough for you.”

“You didn’t tell me we’d be having dinner, Mark. I already ate.”

“Oh. Well, is it okay if I eat still?”

“Go right ahead.” She grinned.

I dug in with gusto, eating the chicken with my fingers and spooning the cottage cheese right out of the tub. Between mouthfuls I asked, “So . . . Joan . . . what do you want to do with your life?”

Eight months later, Joan agreed to marry me.

Except the next day she told me she had changed her mind
 
—not to a refusal, but to a maybe. “I just need a little time to think about it and make sure, Mark.”

I could certainly understand that.

But when I asked her again several weeks later, she said yes. “Yes!” with an exclamation point and laughter and the tightest hug I had ever felt. Absolutely, completely yes.

Joan kept working in the schools, I kept up my duties on the base, and the wedding date rushed toward us. Joan rented a house where we would live together after the wedding, and in mid-December the guests began to arrive. Her parents, along with all five siblings and their spouses, flew in from Wisconsin. My side would be next, with Dad and Ann flying in from Michigan, as well as Mom and Sheri, and Jerry would arrive from
Greece, where he was stationed in the Air Force. For the first time since the divorce, all of us Boumans would be together in the same room.