The Magical Stranger (18 page)

I slumped back into my chair. After the speech was
over, there was more mingling. A line formed of three or four classmates who
wanted to meet me. A short, bald man shook my hand, his eyes bugged wide with
amazement.

“Your dad must have been almost fifty by the time
of the Gulf War! That's really remarkable he was still flying!”

I started telling him it was more complicated than
that, but I stopped. Instead, I just smiled and thanked him for his kind words.
Maybe Father Kenney was right. Some of it you just had to let go.

I slipped out of the high school a little later. It
was dark now, and the glass façade of the
Boston
Globe
building was lit up. Green trucks loaded up early editions of
the Sunday paper. I thought of childhood days reading the
Globe
with my grandparents on the Cape. The place no longer looked
like the Temple of Doom. I turned on the radio and Dad's beloved Celtics were
beating the tar out of the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
For once, I didn't root against a Boston team.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the events of
the evening, but I decided to drive the thirty minutes south to Brockton, a
place I'd ventured to only once in the seven years I'd lived in Boston. I got
off on an exit I faintly remembered from decades ago. I tried to will my car to
his old neighborhood in the dark.

But I didn't have a GPS and was blind with
exhaustion. I drove around bad neighborhoods for an hour or so until the chances
of getting carjacked seemed higher than the chances of finding the house on
Herrod Avenue.

I gave up. Usually, this would have meant a drive
home full of swearing at myself for not bringing directions, berating myself for
not being better organized, for not being more like Dad. But not that night.

Chapter Twenty-Six

T
upper did the math right after his fly-in. He'd been gone for 377 of the previous 500 days. The Navy tried to prepare you for reentry with seminars and brochures, but he was still going from a boat of macho to a house of estrogen. It wasn't easy. His change of command speech about leaving two girls and returning home to young women had been just words, but now the words were true. Some of it would take some getting used to. He looked at Brenna with amazement one morning shortly after returning.

“You've got boobs!”

Brenna turned red, ran to her room, and slammed the door. Beth told him it wasn't his finest moment as a father. He apologized, but he was genuinely dumbstruck. He'd blinked and it had all gone by; one day he was reading Brenna stories before his first cruise, and now she was a young woman, finishing eighth grade and talking about colleges. She wanted to go to law school. Or dance. Or write.

Caitlin's changes were subtler. She was still his tomboy, pestering him to buy her more bottle rockets from the Indian reservation down the road. But she worried too much about life and school—all they seemed to do in school these days was test, test, test. At night, she wondered about death. She believed in God most of the time, but then her hamster would get sick or she'd see a fallen bird and wonder at bedtime whether God had forgotten her. Tupper thought she was just like her old man.

He and Beth tried to get back into a routine. It was harder than he remembered. He started playing guitar in the band at church because he knew it was important to Beth and the girls. They talked about finally building their house on Burrows Bay. Not that he saw Beth a lot—she had gone back to work part-time and he had his job. Between their joint responsibilities and the girls, they hardly had time to talk. It was go, go, go from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. and then get up and do it again.

Their time together was largely spent figuring out what they were going to do next. None of the choices were promising. Beth and the girls quickly shot down the idea of Afghanistan, and no one was enthused about a return to Pax River—too many ghosts. The other option was serving as air boss on the USS
Lincoln
. Air boss wouldn't be flying, but it would be close, working up in the carrier's tower supervising the launch and recovery of aircraft. The
Lincoln
was based in Everett, a tolerable one-hour commute away. The girls could stay in Anacortes and in the schools they loved. Of course, the
Lincoln
meant more sea duty, but he wouldn't have to ship out until the following February, an eternity away.

He still had his day job. Every day, there were speeches to give, promotions to sort out, and bullshit to wade through. In May, he flew a Prowler down to NAS Lemoore for his formal fit rep. He listened to CAG list his failings and said less than fifty words. He walked back to the hangar for his flight back in time to notice Socr8tes on the wing checking out a malfunction. He wasn't wearing his helmet, a major violation in the fly-safe Navy. Vinnie reported that Dizzo, another junior officer, had done the same thing on a recent flight.

Back in Whidbey, Tupper called the squadron into their ready room on a Friday afternoon. He waited for silence and then mentioned the helmet violations.

“Socr8tes, Dizzo, your weekend starts right now. Get the fuck out of my command.”

There was silence. The two fliers gathered their gear and trudged out. Dizzo sat in his truck, tears in his eyes. The JOs were stunned. They had been taught, “Praise in public, rebuke in private,” at the Naval Academy and Officer Candidate School, but they'd just watched two of their colleagues get dressed down before their eyes. Sure, everyone was supposed to wear their helmet up top, but did the violation warrant banishing grown men? After the meeting ended, Wolf asked Tupper for a minute.

“Sir, I think that was wrong.”

Tupper thanked him for his opinion, but then told him to shove it up his ass. This was basic safety shit. What if Dizzo had slipped and landed on his head? Didn't the squadron already lose an eye on cruise? He waved Wolf away and went to his office and slammed the door.

Two weeks later, Tupper flew back down to Lemoore with Ralph and Wolf. CAG was moving on to a fleet job, and all the wing COs were mandated to attend the change of command.

He liked the new CAG, a tiny man whose call sign was Satan. He listened as Satan thanked all the other squadron commanders by name and praised their service. He moved on without mentioning Tupper. Tupper did a slow burn. He flew back in silence with neither Ralph nor Wolf mentioning the slight. But the next morning, he was walking down the hangar steps when Linda piped up.

“Skipper, I heard CAG didn't mention you. That must have sucked.”

Tupper seethed, but he didn't say anything. He called Satan and told him the snub had undermined his ability to lead. Satan was mortified and told him it was merely an oversight. He promised to call Wolf and Ralph and tell them it was just a mistake. Still, the damage had been done.

The summer was nearly gone. Tupper's change of command was just three months away. Where had the time gone? Had he done any good? Tupper had a new feeling, one he hadn't felt in twenty years. He was done with the Navy.

But the Navy wasn't done with him. Tupper officially passed on the Pax River job and took orders for the air boss job on the
Lincoln
. He would go back to sea and everyone else could stay home. But the decision quickly bit him in the ass. Shortly after he accepted the job, the Navy announced that the
Lincoln
was moving from Everett to Norfolk, Virginia, in the spring of 2012 for repairs. That meant Tupper would have to live in Virginia by himself for the last six months of his tour. There had been rumors of the
Lincoln
relocating that even I'd heard, but Tupper, consumed by command, didn't hear them. Beth was livid.

“How could you not have known? Everyone else knew!”

Tupper didn't know what to say. He was heartbroken. He'd done his best to keep his family in one place, and even that had failed. The head-down laser focus that served him so well as a pilot was screwing him in the real world.

T
he Black Ravens headed out to sea in August for some pointless exercises off the California coast. The squadron was transitioning to the Growler starting in October, but the Navy insisted the squadron keep current on their carrier qualifications. So Tupper and his men headed out to spin some circles off the coast of San Diego.

That's when his Prowler nearly killed him. He was bringing his jet in for a routine daytime landing, but just as the Prowler was approaching the deck its nose bucked up violently to the left. For a second, Tupper lost sight of the deck. But he yanked the stick forward and kicked the rudder hard to the right. The Prowler corrected and somehow he grabbed the three wire. Even at the end you had to pay attention.

Two days later, Tupper caught his last trap. He jumped down from the plane, and Beav told him that he was needed in the ready room. CAG was waiting for him along with his men. He wondered what the hell had gone wrong this time. But CAG started talking about the special qualities needed to lead a squadron into combat. Tupper didn't immediately understand. Then, CAG pulled something out of his pocket.

“It is with great honor, Commander Ware, that I award you the Bronze Star.”

CAG shook his hand and left the room. Tupper's men moved in to shake his hand and give him man-hugs. He looked into the eyes of men he'd yelled at, drunk with, and flown with. He felt love for them. He tried to tell them that it was they who deserved the Bronze Star, not him, and the practice of giving only the skipper a Bronze Star was wrong. But then his eyes welled with tears. He mumbled an excuse and left the room.

He went back to his stateroom and sat down on his bed. He felt hollow. He knew he'd never have to screw up the kind of courage it took to land a Prowler on a carrier. He knew he was losing something at the very core of himself. And he wondered if the rest of his life would be just an epilogue.

B
ack home, Tupper and Beth battled almost daily. It might be about the alarm going off at 4:30 a.m.; it might be over the color of the eaves on the new house they were planning. She had hit the wall on what she was willing to sacrifice for the Navy. Tupper's promises that it wouldn't always be like that rang hollow. Beth had eighteen years of hard time on her side.

“You always say that.”

Beth now thought taking orders for the
Lincoln
was a mistake. This kicked Tupper in the gut. He had thought they had made the decision together. Now it was all his fault.

Tupper flew back east to Philadelphia for a friend's wedding. He had a lot of time to think about the decisions he had made, what he might have done differently. For a moment, he rooted for Beth to leave. Things had gotten too hard. It wasn't supposed to be like this. But as he watched his buddy—a confirmed bachelor—make the leap, Tupper's heart melted. He'd fight for Beth. They would make it work. He couldn't lose flying and his true love in the same year.

On his way back through Sea-Tac, Tupper ran into his wife at the airport heading to San Diego for a work conference. He snuck up behind her in the ticket line. She seemed happy to see him. They talked for a few minutes before Tupper had to go. There were no cross words or sarcastic remarks. That was a start. He then made the long drive back to the girls.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

O
ver time, Sherm became a spirit guide of sorts for me around Whidbey. Without his family, he had plenty of room in his house, and I rented a room for my trips up to see the Black Ravens. Sherm had a falling-out with his parents that he really wouldn't talk about, and the squadron was his life and his family. I became part of his family too. We spent many nights bullshitting about the Navy while drinking down at the Brown Lantern in Anacortes. He was easily the most gung-ho Black Raven and, consequently, also the most easily discouraged.

Like Tupper before him, Sherm was having a hard time making the transition from hell-raising junior officer to his new position as lieutenant commander, the Navy's entry point into middle management. One night, he called me back in New York with a problem.

Before the Navy brass settled on the Growler as the name for the Prowler's successor, it had been known informally in the Whidbey community as the EA-18 Shocker. Someone in the community even informally designed a three-prong lightning bolt with the tag line, “They'll never see it coming.” Everyone loved it, including the brass. But then a wise man pointed out to the admirals that the design mirrored a common hand gesture for the simultaneous digital penetration of a woman's vagina and anus.

That wouldn't do. The name “Shocker” was banned, but the decals lived on and popped up on walls and stop signs at NAS Whidbey. Sherm was outraged by the Shocker shutdown and sometimes wore a nonstandard Shocker patch on his flight jacket that led Vinnie to dress him down on one occasion.

Still, Sherm pushed the issue when he leased a new BMW sports car. He called and told me he wanted to get a vanity plate that read SHOKR. I tried to discourage him.

“Are you sure you want to drive through the gate with that on your car every morning?”

“I think it would be awesome.”

“I agree, but less awesome if you want to make command.”

Sherm went silent for a second.

“I don't understand. I bust my ass for the Navy. Why do they have to kill all the fun parts?”

I didn't have an answer. In the end, Sherm didn't get the plate. Eventually, he turned his energies to another side project: getting me up on a flight. After my disappointment on the
Nimitz
, I tried not to get my hopes up. But Sherm and Tupper worked the paper and the phones. On a summer afternoon, Sherm called me on my cell phone.

“We did it. You're approved to fly. This is going to be awesome.”

I
wasn't afraid. There was no anxiety about climbing into the same type of plane that killed my father. The songwriter Freedy Johnston has a beautiful song called “Western Sky” about a pilot's son who won't fly after his father is killed in a plane crash. That's not me.

Why? Some of it is a matter of scale. Dad was flying a twenty-ton coffin at one hundred feet over a glass sea. That can get complicated. A twitch of the stick and the abyss calls. I'm usually a passenger on something called an Airbus. They're called Airbuses for a reason. Plane goes up, plane comes down.

Besides, I was playing the percentages. What were the odds of another Rodrick dying in an aviation disaster? I'm not Job, surviving a tsunami only to get kidnapped by guerrillas or gorillas. I'm a middle-class American with a graduate degree, all of my teeth, and most of my hair. Dad's crash was my one allotted megasad tragedy.

I
arrived at Sea-Tac on a July Sunday, one of the precious few blue-sky days that trick folks into moving to the Pacific Northwest. Mount Baker was still visible through the gloaming when I reached Sherm's house. We talked about the week ahead. Sherm told me there would be a cursory two-day VIP flight orientation, no big deal—basically telling me what knobs not to pull. My understanding was that the classes were more for my amusement and education than an actual requirement.

This proved incorrect. The next morning, I settled into a conference room with four naval aviators at NAS Whidbey Island. Here's the thing: all of them had passed their swim and survival qualifications back in Pensacola during their flight training. All were under thirty-five and in pretty good shape. They were merely here for their quadrennial requalification. With any luck, they would be drinking beer at the officers' club by 3:00 p.m.

A lieutenant with frizzy hair walked into the room and turned on an overhead projector. The aviators guzzled the last of their coffee and slapped their necks in hopes of staying awake. She spoke about the psychological issues that can screw a pilot up in the cockpit: fights with the wife, mortgage-refinancing issues, a cold Egg McMuffin. It could be anything. There was a discussion of cockpit distractions, with case studies of planes flown straight into mountains because the crew was discussing baseball or checking out a minor cockpit glitch that should have been ignored until they were back on the ground.

The subject rankled me; it got back to the old song and dance: any plane crash was probably the pilot's fault. I thought of my dad managing 150 men, worrying about Mom, plowing through hundreds of pages of fitness reports, and then having to fly 450 knots a hundred feet off the ocean. The instructor focused on a 2006 T-39 Sabreliner crash that killed a Navy instructor, two students, and a civilian pilot in the hills of southern Georgia. The lieutenant theorized that the pilots had been confused by the students' change of seats late in the mission. The pilot had been a friend of Sherm's, and he later told me this was bullshit.

“They just flew straight into the side of mountain. Sometimes, you lock in and it happens.”

The lieutenant finished her presentation and it was lunchtime. The Black Ravens' FNG—Fucking New Guy—had been strong-armed into bringing me a Subway sandwich and some chips. Attempts at assigning him a call sign would eventually land on Sling Blade, a reference to his shifty black eyes, buzz cut, and cryptic, guttural utterings. I tried to give him a few bucks for the sandwich. FNG grimaced.

“No, mmm hhh, gotta go.”

I unspooled the intricately wrapped sandwich. This took me more than a minute, a reminder that my motor skills hadn't developed much since third grade. I was about to take my first bite when the lieutenant tapped me on my shoulder. Did I want to knock out my basic swimming qualifications next door in the pool?

Sure.

Maybe it's the memory of Dad tossing me into the waves headfirst on Cape Cod, but entering water has always been like hooking up to a Demerol drip for me—the weightlessness, slipping away from terra firma, my mind switched off. For years, I drove great distances so I could get in one good ocean swim every month. All you have to do is time your duck before the next wave arrives. I started swimming for exercise a decade ago, enjoying the long, languorous turns of my body as I counted down the laps to a mile. (Of course, I skipped the flip turns after a period of experimentation left me with a chipped tooth and a bruised cheek.)

I changed into my trunks and met a civilian instructor in a blue windbreaker. He had grave, sad eyes. We shook hands. I would grow to despise this superficially harmless-looking fellow. He told me to swim 200 meters alternating between the breaststroke, the sidestroke, the backstroke, and the crawl. This would be easy. I climbed to the top of a twenty-five-foot tower, crossed my hands across my chest, and stepped over the edge. The water felt good against my skin. I moved easily through the water, taking about six or seven minutes to swim the distance. I was barely winded as I lifted myself out of the pool.

Mr. Instructor shook his head sorrowfully. He wore an expression frozen between contempt and pity.

“Your crawl was decent, but the rest of the strokes aren't cutting it. You're doing the breaststroke completely wrong. You're giving a frog kick when I want a scissors kick. You'd drown in five minutes trying to do that stroke in full flight gear.”

Dread began coursing through my body. Mr. Instructor requisitioned a squat Navy seaman named Nate. For a few minutes, Nate showed me the strokes. The Navy breaststroke was particularly vexing. The leg movement seemed the exact opposite of the breaststroke I'd been apparently doing wrong for my entire life.

“Okay, now give it another try,” said Mr. Instructor. He glanced at his watch, pining for a long-past appointment with a cup of noodles.

I jumped in. I started swimming. Mr. Instructor commenced screaming.

“No, no, the stroke is up, in, out, and glide. Up, in, out, and glide.”

I sputtered through the water, not drowning. I grabbed the side. Nate swam up next to me.

“Are you nervous?”

“No, why?”

“Both your arms are twitching.”

He was right. My forearms were quivering. Sometimes this happens. I do well under pressure until I start thinking about the pressure. It was baseball all over again.

Mr. Instructor sighed dramatically.

“Well, take a break. We can try this again tomorrow at 6:00 a.m., but if you don't pass it, you can't do the rest of the quals.”

I slinked out of the pool. What did he mean, the rest of the quals?

I soon found out. I got dressed and headed across the street back to the classroom. The lieutenant took me into a room and showed me a video of how to keep breathing while experiencing five or six Gs, an extreme force that, truth be told, I wasn't likely to encounter unless I was reborn as a Blue Angels pilot. The HICC maneuver involves keeping your core centered and doing a series of short gasping breaths in, followed by short, strangulated breaths out making a HICC, HICC, HICC sound. I kept flashing back to a first-aid film I had seen as a boy where an epileptic made the same exact noises while having a seizure. I tried to get the breathing right, but the instructor told me I was doing it wrong.

“Try and make it sound less like you're choking to death.”

I tried it again. This time she stared at my hands. They were still shaking.

“Maybe you should eat your sandwich and go back to the classroom.”

I started having the sick feeling that I was not going to get up in a Prowler. I stumbled back into the lecture room. An instructor was already giving tips about ejecting from a plane near the carrier. He chattered on about releasing from your parachute harness and steering your chute away from the carrier deck and the carrier's backwash.

This was, theoretically, good information; Commander Butch Williams suffered a weak catapult launch on the
Kitty Hawk
a month after my father's crash. His A-6 Intruder plunged into the sea. He ejected, floated down, and, legend has it, was seen giving deckhands the finger as the
Kitty Hawk
's wash pushed him out to sea. But his kneeboard—a small plastic pad strapped to a pilot's leg with maps and other flight information—had slipped down around his ankle and his parachute string became hopelessly entangled around it. The carrier's propeller sucked him under. Divers could see his body but couldn't reach him through the churn. Williams was dead by the time they brought him to the surface twenty minutes later. When the
Kitty Hawk
returned home in April 1980, it did so without the skippers of its two Whidbey squadrons.

But I was too tired to really listen. After yesterday's ten-hour travel day, the current swim disaster, and lack of lunch I was paying attention with perhaps a twelfth of my brain. This was another error. The brief ended. Navy technicians entered the room, and began rigging a parachute to a previously unnoticed contraption hanging from a high ceiling.

A few minutes later, I was told to change into a flight suit. A heavy pack was hoisted onto my back. A too-large helmet was dropped on my head. I was hooked into a harness, and virtual reality goggles were placed over my head. Before I could say “What the hell,” I was hoisted up a few feet and then dropped. Through the goggles, I saw my boots and body heading toward a cartoon carrier. Someone started shouting.

“1500 FEET FROM THE DECK, WHAT DO YOU DO. ARE YOU TANGLED? 500 FEET FROM THE DECK. STEER AWAY!”

I did neither. I smashed into the deck. Someone laughed.

“That would have hurt.”

Apparently, I missed the part of the lecture about IROC, a helpful acronym for idiots like me:

Inspect your chute.

Release your raft.

Observe your situation.

Control your chute.

By now, I was observing my situation and it sucked. I was given two more tries. I died the second time and was a probable quadriplegic the third. The helmet came off. I noticed sweat pouring from my earlobes, a malady I previously associated with a coke-addled friend.

I was led into another room. I climbed a ladder and was strapped into a mock cockpit. An instructor strapped me in with a canvas seat belt.

“This is going to test your ejection skills.”

“What ejection skills?”

My heart thumped through the apparatus. The instructor let out a shout.

“OKAY, RELEASE!”

I tensed. I tensed so hard my back went into spasms typically reserved for bad breakups and IRS audits. Nothing happened.

“Oh, sorry. I was getting a call. My bad.”

A few seconds passed.

“OKAY, RELEASE.”

This time, my body was thrown backward at 150 mph. The cockpit shuddered before settling.

At this precise moment, I had a thought: the dudes in the squadron are punking me! It wasn't impossible. These are grown men who had been known to wait for hours so they could pour a garbage can of ice water on a friend while he sits on the toilet on the carrier. It was quite possible they had arranged an elaborate practical joke and everyone here was in on it.

I staggered out of the torture chamber. The lieutenant in charge took me aside.

“I understand you had problems with the swim qual, so you're going to have a long day tomorrow. You'll have to do swim quals at 6:00 a.m., have a little rest, and then do the rest of your qualifications around 11:00 a.m.”

Crap, this was real, not a prank. I didn't have the energy or the balls to ask what the rest of the qualifications were. I called Sherm over at the squadron.