The Tank Man's Son (8 page)

Suddenly terrified of being caught in a battle
 
—even a battle I knew was a game
 
—I dropped to the ground and rolled onto my back. In panic
I looked for something familiar. And there it was: a familiar shape outlined against the sky, black on nearly black. It was one of the few tall oaks that dotted the area, and I’d climbed into its highest branches many times. Trying to stay low to the ground, leaning forward but keeping my head up like Dad had showed us, I raced across the empty sand toward the tree. As soon as I reached it, I stood with my back against its rough bark, safe in the knowledge that I blended perfectly into its dark silhouette. I tried to control my breathing, but my heart was pounding hard enough that I expected a sniper to hear it and pick me off at any second.

As soon as the next round of gunfire opened up, I began to climb. Branch by branch, trying to time my ascent with the bursts of noise, I made my way to a familiar perch, nearly thirty feet from the ground.

It was only then, as my breathing slowed, that I began to take in the scene below me. Lit by a fingernail moon and a thousand bright stars, all reflecting off the white sand, the battlefield lay before me like a school diorama. Dark shapes darted back and forth across it, the flashes of muzzle fire showing the outlines of heads and shoulders for fractions of a second. The shots came from one direction, then shifted the opposite way, back and forth and then back and forth again. The gunfire was punctuated by shouts, by the occasional scream, and twice by what sounded like real explosions. It was a marvel of terror, spread below my dangling legs.

Eventually
 
—minutes? hours?
 
—the fighting moved past my perch. Rapid staccato slowed to an occasional pop, and after a time I realized the battle was finished. Dazed and exhilarated, I climbed down the oak and walked toward the house. Halfway home, I heard laughter from the direction of Dad’s gun shed, and I followed my ears. Light leaked through the cracks and out onto the sand, along with the sound of men being men. Without thinking, I walked straight to the door and pulled it open.

In the sudden shine I saw my father, standing among his troops, except that he was not my father. His face was striped, green and brown,
and from the jungle backdrop of his skin, his eyes and teeth gleamed like white fire.

“Come in, Mark!” he said, motioning.

It seemed the whole room stopped to look at me. Needing to break the silence before it overwhelmed me, I blurted out, “Is it over? Who won?”

“Your dad got his ass shot off!” one of them yelled, and the whole room erupted in laughter.

“Well, I got a few of them first,” he countered. “And I
 
—”

Suddenly the sound of gunfire filled the room. I screamed in pain and leaped into the air. Beneath me loomed the dark shape of a gun barrel, firing, firing, sending gouts of orange flame into my shoes and pants as I landed. The shooting stopped as I fell to the floor
 
—just as one of the men yanked open the shed door to reveal the shooter, who had shoved his weapon beneath the door and unloaded a full clip of blanks.

I clutched my legs. The blasts had burned holes in my pants below my knees and burned my skin besides. I was the only one in the room without a weapon, and I’d just been shot, even if only by blanks.

Raucous laughter drowned out my cries of pain. The shooter stood to backslaps and congratulations for his bravery. I tried to laugh along but gave up when it became clear I’d been forgotten. I was, once again, a nonperson
 
—a boy whimpering unheard at the feet of men.

In a triumphal crown to the war games, Dad raised his pistol over his head, and any thoughts I might have had were blown away by the tumult of shouts and cheers that poured from the throats of his men.

M
OM REFUSED TO SURRENDER.
She was saddled with a husband who spent most of his time shooting guns and reading up on the Third Reich. She owned a house that was barely a house and each day seemed one step closer to being reclaimed by the shifting sands that surrounded it. Her children were a wild, ragtag bunch. But she hadn’t survived as long as she had by giving up when things got tough. Middle-class respectability
 
—okay,
lower
middle-class
 
—remained within her reach. That was one of the reasons she married Dad in the first place, at an age when she should have been in high school, rather than trying to raise us on her own.

Mom was waging guerrilla warfare against our family becoming white trash, and one of her preferred tactics was to make sure her kids went to church. One Sunday each month
 
—two, if she was lucky
 
—Mom would marshal us kids out of bed and spiff us up, checking our hair, teeth, faces, and fingernails.

“We’re going to church,” she’d bark like a drill sergeant. “Get
up
!”

Jerry and I slept in every chance we got. “Mom, do we
have
to? I 
hate
going to church.”

“Get up and into your Sunday clothes, now!”

“But Mom, my pants don’t even fit!” Jerry tried.

“Wear them anyway,” Mom retorted, bustling down the hall to check on Sheri. We moaned and dragged ourselves out of bed.

“I hate church,” I groused to Jerry. “We don’t know anybody, and we have to wear weird clothes.”

“At least your weird clothes fit
 
—my pants are up to my ankles.”

“At least I don’t have big dorky glasses,” I shot back. Jerry shrugged. He knew I was mad at my dress clothes, not him.

Sheri met us in the kitchen, and we started eating our cereal. She always wore a black dress and black shoes to church, and not only did her outfit seem far more comfortable than our too-tight wool pants, stiff leather shoes, and button-up shirts, but she actually
enjoyed
dressing up. It was incomprehensible.

Mom came into the kitchen to check up on us while we ate.

“Change your shirt
 
—that one’s dirty,” she snapped at me.

“Dirty?” I asked innocently, looking down at my shirt.

“You haven’t washed it since the last time you wore it, Mark. Look at how dirty the collar is!”

That wasn’t a news flash. Everything I owned was dirty. Heck, everything I owned looked dirty even directly after being washed
 
—that’s what happened when you bought the cheapest possible clothes and washed them in the worst possible water. And when you lived in the middle of acres of dirt.

I didn’t say any of that to Mom, of course, but left my cereal to sog and slithered off to change my shirt. When I returned, Mom had turned her attention to Dad, who had wandered past on his way to the living room.

“Aren’t you ready yet?”

“
I’m
not going,” he stated proudly.

“What? Why not?”

“All those people want is your money.”

“We need to go as a family!” Her voice had taken on a pleading tone. “It’s important.”

“They’re just a bunch of hypocrites,” Dad said. “They dress up and act holier-than-thou, then live like hell the rest of the week. Crooks and criminals, that’s what they are.”

Mom crossed her arms. “Don’t you think it’s important for our
kids
that we go as a family?”

His answer was brutally efficient. “No.”

Mom stood there, staring venom, but he flopped onto the couch and cracked open a manual on the inner workings of an assault rifle. Mom caught us looking longingly at Dad.

“Let’s
go
,” she said in disgust. There was nothing for it, so we headed out the door, limping in our stiff shoes and itchy pants.

The church was a large, white building, set back from the road on a swath of neatly mowed grass. Its steeple came to a precise point, high above the largest trees on the church grounds, and wide steps led up to the double front doors. In the sanctuary, dim light from the yellow windows drifted down over brown carpet and row after row of long, wooden pews that had been polished to a gleam by generations of sliding dresses and slacks.

Since Mom always made sure we arrived in time for Sunday school, however, we entered the building through the parking lot and headed down the stairs to what was called “the education level,” which in reality was a cold basement that smelled like damp paint. Jerry and Sheri and I would find our separate classrooms, and then I would be alone. I always chose one of the metal folding chairs close to the back of the room. I came to church just often enough that no one had to treat me like a visitor, but no one was my friend, either. Mostly I stared at the floor and waited for time to pass.

“Who wants to play a game?” the teacher liked to ask. His chipper voice was too loud for the small classroom. “Are you ready? Where is John 3:16? Whoever can find it in their Bible first will win a prize!”

We were all made to hold our Bibles over our heads with two hands until the teacher was satisfied that everyone was ready. He would look around dramatically, playing up the moment, and then punch his fist into the air and shout, “Go!”

All around me I could hear the sounds of Bibles hitting laps, covers being tossed open, and impossibly thin pages turning and turning like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. I no sooner opened my Bible at random and began saying to myself
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
than a small blonde girl jumped out of her seat, yelling, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” She read the verse aloud to verify her claim, but to me it sounded like she had already known the words before looking it up. “ForGodsolovedtheworld, thathegavehisonlybegottenSon, thatwhosoeverbelievethinhim, shouldnotperishbuthaveeverlastinglife.”

“Correct!” announced the teacher, and he reached across several children to hand the girl a piece of candy.

I closed my Bible and returned to thinking about how uncomfortable my pants were and how my leather shoes were starting to rub a raw spot on my left ankle. It was obvious I wasn’t one of the good kids. While the teacher walked back to the front and the rest of the kids bantered about who would win the prize during the next “sword drill,” I wondered for the hundredth time why Mom dragged us to church at all.

Even before I opened the door at home after church, I could hear one of Dad’s German marching songs blaring from the record player. I’d barely entered the living room when he looked up from his book and barked, “Why’d you leave your breakfast dish on the table?”

I stood there, uncomfortable as ever in my church clothes, wondering what to do. Many times when Dad upbraided me for something, I felt I deserved it
 
—even if I was innocent in that particular instance, I’d probably been guilty some other time.

That day, however, I was feeling just a pinch of self-righteousness.
I had just endured three hours of church on a sunny Sunday, after all, while Dad had lounged on the couch with his shirt off.

I piped into his expectant silence, “I
didn’t
leave it, Dad, honest to
Go
d
!”

He crossed the space between the couch and me in the blink of an eye. His slap to the side of my head stunned me, but I didn’t move. I was rooted to the floor. “What did I tell you about using the Lord’s name like that?” he shouted at me. “Who the f
 
— do you think you are? You’re
nothin
g
!”

He marched into the kitchen and returned with a bar of Zest soap. I opened wide
 
—what was the point of resisting?
 
—and watched down my nose as Dad’s brawny fingers forced the soap into my mouth.

“Now bite down, dammit!”

My teeth sank into the waxy bar. The gag reflex was hard to suppress, but spitting the bar out would only reset my punishment. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to flare my nostrils, desperate to pull air into my lungs that wasn’t soap flavored. My cheek and ear were still ringing from Dad’s slap. I knew Jerry and Sheri had already fled to their rooms. We hated watching one another get punished, partly because Dad had a way of spreading punishment around, but mostly because watching one another suffer was its own kind of suffering. Why suffer when you didn’t have to?

“Now get out.”

Dad’s pronouncement came minutes later, and I ran for the bathroom. I vomited the bar of soap into the sink, my stomach heaving as the soap bounced around and settled near the drain. When I calmed down, I set it on the counter so I could carry it back to the kitchen later.

I grimaced at myself in the mirror. Some of the chunks of soap stuck between my teeth were obvious, and I picked them out with my finger and flicked them into the sink. Other bits, however, hid between my molars, and no amount of picking could dislodge them. I cupped my hands and slurped water into my mouth, swishing until I couldn’t stand the soapy flavor any longer, then spit. I knew it would take quite a few rinses to clear my mouth out, which meant I had plenty of time to think.

About how it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been forced to go to church. About my punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain. And about what Dad had muttered as he shoved the bar of soap past my lips: “Just a g
 
—d
 
— good-for-nothing kid.”