The Tank Man's Son (9 page)

I
T WAS SOMETIME AFTER
the soap incident that heaven smiled down on my father and blessed him with an unexpectedly awesome weapon.

He saw a report on television about a World War II tank soon to be auctioned. The Military Inn, a fixture of the Dearborn veterans’ community, needed to get the M19 off its property. The proprietor owned one of the largest private collections of weapons in the world, but the tank had to go. Dad dialed the number on the screen.

“What’s the story on the tank?” he asked the manager at the television station.

“It’ll be auctioned off to the highest bidder. If you’re interested, you need to place your bid before the weekend.”

“It might be worth six hundred bucks to me,” Dad replied. He gave the manager his name and phone number and then hung up.

On Monday morning the phone rang. “Mr. Bouman, how are you going to move your tank?” Turned out Dad wasn’t just the
highest
bidder, he was the
only
bidder.

Dad drove over to Dearborn to see his new acquisition. The M19 was twenty tons of steel with twin 40mm guns in an open turret. The barrels and breaches were torched so they couldn’t be fired, and the engine hadn’t been run in years, but that didn’t bother Dad. The Navy had taught him how to repair just about anything that burned gas or diesel. He contacted a heavy moving company, then contacted Mom.

“A
tank
?” Mom thought she’d misheard. “You haven’t even finished your
house
yet, and you bought a tank?”

“I got a good deal.”

“The last thing this family needs is you spending money on a
tank
!”

“Money, money, money
 
—is that all you think about?”

“It wouldn’t be if you’d quit spending it like we have lots of it. And spending it on
toys
.”

She couldn’t do more than complain, though. Dad was the owner of a tank, and there was no going back.

Blakely Drive wasn’t much wider than a single lane, and since it was unimproved gravel, it didn’t have shoulders. When the moving equipment arrived, with the M19 on top, it was almost as wide as the road, so none of our neighbors could get past until the tank was delivered. Dad had the moving crew drop the tank on our property within spitting distance of the road.

Jerry and I didn’t say much
 
—we didn’t have to. We just kept play-punching each other on the arm and nodding our heads and grinning. Even Sheri was excited. Having a tank was definitely at the top of the list of good surprises we’d enjoyed.

It didn’t take long for the Dietz clan to come over. “I was wondering why the road was blocked,” called Mr. Dietz, “and now I know. You bought a tank!”

“Yeah,” Dad said, practically bursting with pride. “Thought I’d build my own army.”

The Dietz boys ran up behind their father.

“Is that a real tank?”

“What are you gonna do with
tha
t
?”

“How big’s the engine?”

“Geez, those guns look like they could take out a
house
!”

Dad laughed, patting the air with his palms as if to slow the flow of questions.

“It’s got two 125-horsepower Cadillacs, and they run, but I gotta do some work on ’em,” Dad said, as if repairing tanks were something he did every day.

Now Mrs. Dietz had arrived as well, and she marched right up to Dad. “Bouman, what have you gone and done
 
—are you going to get into trouble with that thing?” Then she laughed and stepped closer to the tank so she could pat it.

Jerry and Sheri and I had already climbed onto it, and the Dietz kids were right behind us.

“What are these for?” Mike Dietz wondered, opening and closing some boxes beside the guns.

“I think they hold the ammo,” I answered, running my hands along the barrels.

“But why are there holes in the guns?” asked Sheri.

“Looks like the holes were cut out with welding torches, see?” I stuck my finger into one. “Maybe to make sure you can’t start a shooting war?”

We all grinned, and Jerry jumped down into the gunner’s seat, pretending to blast a passing car.

“Don’t, Jerry!” I warned. “We might get in trouble for something like that!”

“Aw, they can’t really shoot,” he said, pretending to attack a nearby building.

We crawled from one end of the tank to the other, and from top to bottom, searching out every compartment and hatch and cranny. Inside the tank, where the driver sat, was easily the coolest. Mrs. Dietz agreed.

“I gotta try this, Bouman
 
—how many housewives around here can say they’ve sat in a tank?”

Dad climbed up and helped Mrs. Dietz, who completely disappeared down the hatch.

The Dietz boys couldn’t contain their glee.

“Mom’s gone!”

“She’s so short she can’t even see out!”

“Watch out, Mom! Turn left!”

Her happy voice shouted back from the driver’s seat, “At least I can reach the pedals! All right, Bouman, help me outta here!”

As Dad helped pull her out, he looked at Mr. Dietz. “Want to give it a try, Les?”

“Nope, I’d probably end up crushing something,” he joked.

“Lemme have a turn then!” one of the boys chortled. “I’ll run over Mom!”

“You just watch yourself!” she threatened with a smile, sliding back to the ground and dusting herself off. That made me think of our mom, and I looked all around, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Once the excitement faded and our neighbors got tired of staring, they headed home, and Dad got to work, disappearing inside the engine with his tools. After a few days of banging and clanking, and a few hundred curses, Dad declared the engine was ready to run for real. The three of us
 
—Mom was still avoiding the tank
 
—gathered in a knot to watch as Dad lowered himself into the hatch. The engine choked, sputtered, and belched thick clouds of blue smoke. The noise was incredible
 
—like a hundred cars stacked together
 
—and I guessed the whole neighborhood knew that my father had finally gotten his new tank working.

The tank made my father a local celebrity, and not just when neighbors came by to drive it over anything crushable. Most places he went, people knew who he was. Sometimes it was just whispers he overheard
 
—
there goes the guy who got himself an honest-to-goodness tank
 
—and other times it was a free bottle of Coke or game of bowling. So it wasn’t long before he got it
in his head to upgrade, and he put word out that he was looking for a new engine. A man called him soon after, a man who had the 450-horsepower Ford engine from a World War II M36 tank retriever. “It’s still in the crate,” he told my father. He’d purchased it to install in one of the construction cranes he owned, but it had been too large to fit in the casing.

“What do ya gotta have for it?”

“Oh, how about two hundred bucks?”

“I’ll give ya one fifty.”

Dad borrowed a truck and lugged home the new engine, then promptly set about removing the old Cadillac engines from the tank. Of course, he hadn’t bothered to check whether
his
casing was big enough to fit the Ford engine
 
—it wasn’t
 
—but he didn’t waste time moaning about it. He simply rotated the new engine and dropped it in backward, and it fit just fine. He didn’t bother to dig up a manual for the new engine either, so he took his best guess at how to hook up the transmission linkage. Once he got everything installed, he took his tank out for a test run. The new Ford workhorse ran like a champ and gave Dad a hair over ten miles an hour driving forward, but in reverse it went over thirty. “Too much work to fix it now!” he declared, and that’s the way his tank remained, faster backward than forward.

That summer, Dad got a call from a few towns over, asking if he would drive his tank in the annual Fourth of July parade and if he’d be willing to park it at the police station a few nights early, to set the mood for the festivities. Dad was thrilled
 
—until two nights before the parade, when someone broke into his tank and tried, unsuccessfully, to take it for a joyride. Dad didn’t like that idea one bit, but the hatch didn’t have a lock. Figuring the thief might strike again, Dad carefully affixed a military smoke grenade, the kind meant to mark a landing site for helicopters, to the underside of the driver’s seat, setting it to go off if a person sat down.

The police called Dad the next morning to tell him that the tank was still in the parking lot, but the driver’s compartment and the hatch were bright red. Dad must have told that story a dozen times that morning
alone, and when it came time for the parade, and we all drove over to watch, Dad kept his head on a swivel for anyone with a guilty look who happened to be the color of a tomato. He never discovered the would-be tankjacker, but he did discover that the attention his tank brought was like a drug.

We could see it just by looking at him when he was with his tank: the way he held his head higher, the frequency with which he puffed out his chest, how he would look off into the distance as if he possessed vision that others did not. The greater the attention Dad received, the more he ignored us. Driving his tank down a boulevard filled with cheering spectators came naturally to him.

Once at a gun show, when he went to pick up a special order, Dad told me that most people are sheep. I knew that Dad wasn’t most people, though, so I guessed that made him the shepherd. Seeing Dad in his tank, I felt certain that what he said was true. Some people really were born to lead, which meant the rest were born to follow.

One of the men who liked to hang around Dad helped him paint the tank with authentic World War II camouflage, and when the project was finished, they selected a prominent place on the side, just above the treads, and added an iron cross, one of the military symbols of Nazi Germany.

It was official. In the eyes of everyone in town, as well as within a fifty-mile radius, Dad had become the Tank Man, and that meant I had become the Tank Man’s son.

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
for my new identity
 
—the Tank Man’s son
 
—to spread past Blakely Drive. One of my classmates learned about the tank, and he stopped me outside the door to our classroom. “My dad saw your dad parking it on a hill,” he said, nodding to himself, “so
that’s
how I know it’s true!”

The news spread like spilled milk across a cafeteria table. A knot of kids formed around me.

“Your dad really has a tank? A
real
army tank?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“And he gives you rides in it?”

“Yeah, all the time.”

“No way! Do you get to shoot the gun?”

That question was answered for me by another kid. “The guns don’t work, dummy!”

“But why did your dad buy an army tank anyway?”

That question was trickier. Why
had
he bought the tank? Probably for the same reasons he bought all his toys. Because he liked it, and because he could.

I shrugged. “Just to have one, I guess.”

My classmates’ opinion of Dad soared. To them my father was a legendary figure: a bold, fun-loving man who bought and drove an army tank for no other reason than the thrill of it. I knew a more complicated reality, but I saw no reason to change their minds.

And part of me had to admit they were right. It
was
cool, sometimes, to be my father’s son. One ordinary school day, when Mom was picking up Jerry and Sheri for some reason, I rode the bus home alone. Emma, our driver, was so short that she’d asked the guys down at the maintenance yard to add wooden blocks to the clutch, brake, and gas pedals. She was shaped like an apple and had a tongue like a whip, and we kids rarely dared to test her.

As the school bus slowed down near my stop, I could hear
 
—even over the pounding of the bus’s compression braking
 
—another roar that could only be Dad’s tank. I strained my eyes to see through the trees. Sure enough, Dad was chugging down the hillside, cutting toward the bus at an angle. He had the tank pushed to its limits, and smoke belched behind him as fans of dirt churned up from the treads. Dad beat the bus to the head of our driveway by a few seconds. When the bus stopped with a jerk, Dad was waiting, revving the tank’s engine and watching from the driver’s hatch, his mouth a half grin. All the kids jumped from their seats and ran over to gawk, and Emma didn’t say boo. Even if they’d heard of the Tank Man, few had actually seen him driving. I walked the aisle toward the front, while every kid stayed glued to the right side of the bus, staring at my dad, with him staring right back.

I climbed down the steps and hopped to the ground. Dad motioned for me to get in the other hatch. By then I’d had enough experience with the tank that clambering up the tread, across the deck, and into the gunner’s hatch was second nature. Once I was inside, Dad punched
it. The sight of a bus full of astounded kids, their faces plastered to the windows, was the last thing I saw as we drove up the hill toward home.

Later that same school year, there was an overnight ice storm that coated absolutely everything in crystal. Each tree looked like it was made from glass, and even the sandburs had a certain kind of beauty. As we waited for the bus at the end of our driveway, the few cars that passed by sounded different
 
—quieter and more hesitant. I plunged my hands to the bottom of my pockets. My breath came in regular puffs of white that hung in the air before drifting away. When the bus finally arrived at my stop, it didn’t actually stop. Instead, wheels locked, it
tried
to stop but slid right off the road and into the ditch, the whole thing happening in slow motion.

I knew there was no way that bus was getting out of the icy ditch. I heard Emma give it gas, and the tires spun like the dickens, but she knew as well as I did that her vehicle wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I saw her pick up her radio handset, probably to call for help, and when she did, my brother and sister and I shrugged at each other and started back up the driveway.

The ice made it hard to get back up the hill. I had to keep my hands out of my pockets, and by the time I reached the front door, I couldn’t feel the knob when I opened it. For some reason, I yelled for my father
 
—probably because the situation involved a large vehicle. Dad threw on his jacket and went outside, and I followed him. Looking down the hill toward the road, we could see the bus still resting at an odd angle.

“Huh,” Dad said.

He stepped off the porch and climbed into the tank. The engine fired right up, belching clouds of exhaust into the frigid air, and before he drove off, I scrambled up beside him. We rode down the driveway together, the tank paying about as much attention to the ice as a windshield to a fly.

Dad pulled the tank in front of the bus, hopped out, and walked to the bus door, which Emma levered open.

“Want me to pull you out?”

Emma paused before answering. Normally nothing rattled her, but maybe the prospect of hooking her bus up to a tank was simply too much. At last she shrugged and stammered an answer.

“I . . . ah . . . well
 
—I guess so?”

“Then stay behind the wheel,” ordered Dad, “and steer the bus so it comes out of the ditch gradually. I don’t want to pull it out at too much of an angle, or it might tip over.”

“Okay, but
 
—” Emma still sounded worried.

“It’ll be fine.”

I climbed out to watch the proceedings. From the road, I could tell Emma wasn’t at all convinced that adding a tank to the equation was going to help. She was wearing her believe-it-when-I-see-it expression: one eyebrow raised, lips tight. My father’s tank was big, sure, but nothing close to the size of a school bus. But Emma must have figured she didn’t have anything to lose. If it didn’t work, she’d still be stuck in the same ditch, no worse off than before
 
—and able to blame that crazy Tank Man if anything went south.

“Get the chain from the bin!” Dad yelled over to me, and with numb hands I pulled several dozen feet of chain out of a locker on the tank. Dad maneuvered the tank so it was on the road directly in front of the bus, pointing the same direction, then positioned the chain onto the road between the two vehicles. Working quickly, Dad attached the ends of the chain to the bus’s axle hooks and lifted the middle of the chain up and over a steel clamp on the body of the tank, directly between the treads. Then he climbed back into the driver’s hatch and gave Emma a thumbs-up. She just stared. From where I stood, only her gray, permed hair was visible above the wide steering wheel.

Dad gunned his engine, then put the tank in gear and shoved the drive sticks forward. The bus jerked, and Emma disappeared for a
second before sitting back up and adjusting her glasses. The bus shuddered, and Emma spun the wheel to keep the bus from sliding farther into the ditch. The tank was powerful, but the bus was huge, and nothing further happened beyond the morning quiet
 
—and the icy surface of the road
 
—being torn to shreds by the increasing roar of the tank’s treads. Dad was kicking up a miniblizzard of ice crystals and frozen gravel, his tank actually sliding a bit from side to side as it grappled with the mass of County Bus No. 32.

Then, just when I thought the whole operation would be a bust, the tank’s treads dug into the gravel beneath the ice. Once they did, Dad had plenty of traction, and the bus began to move, at first by inches and then by feet. All at once it came sliding out of the ditch, its wheels still locked and skidding across the ice. Dad continued to pull forward until the bus was squarely in the middle of the road. And there it sat, looking like a school bus was supposed to look, like it had never been in the ditch.

Yes!
I thought.
We did it!
Dad motioned to me to unhook the length of chain, and Emma leaned out her window.

“I was worried for a minute,” she yelled, “but thanks, Mr. Bouman! Now I don’t need the tow truck.”

Dad nodded, then spun the tank and drove it back up the hill toward the house. Suddenly it occurred to me: I still had to go to school! Not that I would have anything particularly fun to do at home. With everything outside iced over, I would probably spend the day inside, watching television if Dad wasn’t and doing nothing in my room if he was. I sighed, fogging the air in front of me with a larger-than-normal cloud.

Just then Emma popped open her window and hollered down at me. “School’s closed on account of the ice. Just heard it.”

With that she revved the engine and began to ease cautiously down the road. I watched the bus disappear around the bend until I was alone on the road. I looked toward the house and picked out the shape of Dad’s tank crunching its way up the driveway. He’d left without me. With both vehicles gone, I could hear my breathing. I could hear the
occasional crack of a branch breaking under the weight of ice. I started up the driveway, hands out, carefully picking my way up the slick slope. The easiest route was to follow the tracks of my father’s tank.

Dad’s buddy Dale, the ammo man, was a big fan of the tank, and he was the fastest and most accurate reloader, which made him valuable to Dad. One crisp, sunny afternoon, Dale decided to be a good boy and ignore his guns, instead taking his mother for a drive. He’d just purchased a new Toyota sedan, and there wasn’t a single blemish on its pearly white surface. After the drive he came over to our place so his mother, Vera, could chat with Mom
 
—and, of course, he knew there was a good chance he could sneak in some time on the gun range.

Jerry and I were playing outside, and I watched Dale drive past the house, parking his car in an open, sandy area away from anything else. As he and his mother walked toward the house, I heard her asking him why he had parked so far away. Dale said something about keeping it cherry, but Vera was having none of it.

“You’ve been warned not to park away from the house, Dale,” she chided. “I mean, at the Bouman place you never know
 
—”

“It’s fine, Mom,” Dale interrupted. “Just head inside. I’m going to see if we can take the tank for a spin.”

Dad was way ahead of Dale. He already had the tank warmed up and was motoring across the field toward the house. “Ready to go for a ride? Hop in!” he shouted. Dale jogged down the driveway, jumped onto the tank, and lowered himself into the other hatch.

“I’m going inside, Mark,” Jerry said.

“I guess I’ll just stay and watch the tank,” I told my brother. I knew I couldn’t ride in it, but I didn’t want to go inside with the ladies, either. I knew Dad had the throttle levers jammed all the way forward by the pitch of the engine. Whenever he turned, the treads tossed dirt into the air. The ground they drove across looked a lot like a war zone: every scrap
of vegetation, from the tallest tree to the smallest blade of grass, had been torn down, twisted up, or otherwise mangled into oblivion. The ruts in the ground were deep enough to lie down inside.

Before long, the tank began to head straight up the hill toward the spot where Dad usually parked it, behind the house. He always positioned the tank there so it could be seen in silhouette from the road, with the tank’s twin 40mm guns pointed outward to intimidate anyone driving by. It was cold enough outside that the men had probably decided to head inside and take over the couch, sending the women into the kitchen.

Dad powered up the hill and across the crown, then swung around in a smooth, tight spin. He had done it so many times that the top of the hill, as well as the back slope of it, had a sort of natural road embedded in it, free of all trees and bushes.

Which is why Dale had chosen that spot to park his brand-new, scratch-free car half an hour earlier. Dale must have realized the path Dad was taking, because I heard the growl of the engines drop suddenly, as if Dale had shouted a warning. But twenty tons of moving steel can’t stop on a dime. Dale’s car was a trapped lamb with a wolf bearing down on it.

I heard the impact even over the noise of the tank. When Dad killed the engine, everything was silent for a moment. The next noise was Dale’s voice screaming, “No, no, no! Not my car!” as he clambered out of the hatch and jumped down onto the ground.