The Magical Stranger (6 page)

Mom announces after Christmas that she's going to Hong Kong to visit Dad. Mrs. Borris, my second-grade teacher, offers to look after me. (Terry goes to a neighbor.) Every day after she finishes grading papers, we head off to a park with her soon-to-be-husband. We fly kites and eat ice cream. In the morning, I stand outside her bathroom and listen to her taking a shower wondering what could be going on behind all that steam. Mrs. Borris actually seems to enjoy talking to me. I don't want it to end. But Mom comes back. All Mrs. Borris gets is a cheap Chinese abacus as a thank-you. I don't want to go home.

Months later, Dad comes back. We drive to meet him at the base. We wait in a hangar full of balloons and moms talking about being horny, a word I don't understand. The sun begins to set and then Dad's plane touches down. He steps down from the jet—there he is!—and takes his helmet off. Terry and I run toward him, but Mom gets there first. She jumps into his arms just like Gene Tenace did with Rollie Fingers when they won the World Series. Finally, Dad scoops me up in his arms. He smells the same, Aqua Velva and sweat.

We go home and my parents stay in their bedroom for two days, emerging only to pour us more cereal and settle TV disputes. We head off to Mass that Sunday. Mom has a big smile on her face. There are guitars and the recessional is Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land,” a choice that Dad complains about the whole ride home. I don't care. He is home and making me waffles for lunch.

And that's when my parents tell me we are moving next month. They mention a place called Whidbey Island and a new plane called a Prowler. I've never heard of them but I don't care. I'm seven and ready to move on.

Chapter Eight

T
upper and the Black Ravens flew their Prowlers on board the
Nimitz
on July 19, 2009. Or at least that was the plan. This being the Prowler, they flew two down and had to wait another day for the other two because of mechanical problems.

Tupper and Vinnie Johnson were getting along well. Vinnie loved Churchill and the Greek stoic Epictetus, while Tupper was working his way through Malcolm Gladwell and a Horatio Nelson biography. They both could babble endlessly about leadership and organization building well past the saturation point of their men, so it was good that they had each other.

Vinnie had started as a helo pilot, transitioning to Prowlers after he turned thirty. Switching platforms in midcareer wasn't easy, and Vinnie was known as a hard worker and a blue-collar pilot, the last part a backhanded compliment. As a junior Prowler pilot, Vinnie had been flying the second jet in a four-Prowler formation approaching NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach. The lead jet slipped out of the pattern and dropped down on Vinnie. The jet wash forced his plane down onto the runway. His Prowler landed hard on its nose gear and then bashed both wings into the runway before sliding another 2,000 feet. Somehow the entire crew escaped, but the Prowler was totaled. Vinnie was absolved of blame—his CO was relieved for approving a dangerous flight pattern—but questions remained about his flying skills under duress. Tupper would have to keep an eye on him.

But the XO and the CO didn't spend a lot of time talking about flying tactics in the first days of cruise. Instead, they worked on motivating an officer corps beaten down by Doogie. Depending on who was coming and going, the Black Ravens had about twenty naval aviators in the squadron. Only five of them were actual pilots; the rest were electronic countermeasures officers (ECMOs) handling navigating and jamming from the Prowler's other three seats. The pilot-to-ECMO ratio wasn't a bad thing from a civility point of view. Most carrier pilots are megalomaniacs with adrenaline addiction issues. The ECMOs cut the machismo and delusions of grandeur to a more manageable level. Prowler squadrons had more decent folk and fewer assholes than the Hornet community simply because they had fewer pilots.

But there was a downside to four-man crews. Prowler inertia was a well-known joke throughout the Navy. Prowler guys were world-famous for not reaching consensus on anything, whether it be the best way to approach the carrier or which Taco Bell combo meal to buy while drunk in Anacortes.

Tupper and his men had heard all the jokes. They were accustomed to shitty planes, the Northwest rain, and being forgotten up in the far corner of Washington state. But Doogie's reign had been different. The men hated coming to work.

The first step was making things right with his department heads, the lieutenant commanders just below Vinnie and him. The cliché of naval aviators relentlessly cruising the skies looking for bad guys was mostly myth. Now all the lieutenant commanders had day jobs running departments within the squadron. Some of them were crucial—operations (ops) wrote the flight schedule, safety made sure no one got killed, and maintenance (mo) made sure planes were flyable. Some were bullshit—administration (admin) seemingly existed purely to plan parties and write up awards for the sailors, while legal was a clueless officer counseling a clueless in-trouble sailor on his constitutional rights.

All the departments had one thing in common; they were time-consuming pains in everyone's ass. A Black Raven might spend thirty hours a week briefing flights, flying missions, and then debriefing. The rest of his time was spent doing a ground job that made him want to blow his brains out. (The Air Force has ground officers handle their paperwork. Of course, Navy guys thought the Air Force was full of pussies, but, secretly, they were jealous.)

The
Nimitz
was spending a week in San Diego working out final kinks before heading west. Tupper wanted the squadron to hang out together on one of their last nights, but the younger officers succumbed to Prowler inertia and couldn't get their shit together. They splintered into smaller groups and wandered off. This was merely a gang of twenty-six-year-olds not agreeing on a bar, but Tupper took it personally. He was now forty and “back in my day” crankiness was settling in. He grumbled that it never would have happened when he was a junior officer.

So Tupper and Vinnie took the department heads out to the South Beach Bar and Grille for beers and fish tacos. Tupper knew his department heads from his XO tour. They were like his children: smart, ambitious, and complete mysteries all at the same time. There was Todd “Beav” Zenter, the hard-charging Jerry Mathers lookalike, a small man who drove a big truck with “USNA 99” license plates. Beav was the squadron's top pilot and hardest worker—a fact Beav was not shy about repeating. Sitting next to him was the admin officer, Silas “Shibaz” Bouyer, a regal African American with a sharp mind and a droll sense of humor. Tupper knew Shibaz was going places. The Navy lagged far behind the Army and Air Force in senior African American officers and the Navy brass was trying to catch up fifty years in a single decade. Shibaz just needed to fly straight to possibly make admiral.

Nursing a beer and looking glum was Blake “Stonz” Tornga, a red-haired, freckled-faced father of five. His call sign came because his hairiness gave him a slight resemblance to a caveman. Stonz's oldest boy was a nineteen-year-old Marine who would be boots on the ground in Afghanistan while his dad was flying in the skies overhead.

Tupper liked Stonz personally because they shared a dark view of the world: something bad was always about to happen, might as well prepare for it. Stonz had done everything the hard way, working his way up from sailor to an NROTC scholarship at the University of Nebraska. Now he was taking over maintenance, a thankless job made nearly impossible with ancient Prowlers making their last cruise before hitting the bone yard. If it went well, Stonz would make commander; if not, his career would be done.

Then there were two middle-of-the-packers, Robert “Turd” Peterson and Chris “Linda” Lovelace. Rumor was Turd earned his nickname simply because a chair he sat in back in flight school had the word “turd” scrawled on the back. He was a good man with a charisma deficit and wouldn't make command. He deserved better, and Tupper made a note to look out for him. Linda was a Citadel grad who had the misfortune of getting airsick on a third of his flights. Tupper had no idea why he hadn't been detoured to a desk job. Tupper already knew Linda and Turd would be disappointed with their end-of-cruise fitness reports, but he needed to keep them from dropping their packs. That kind of attitude could be contagious.

That left Lieutenant Commander Doug “Crapper” Crane, the Black Ravens' safety officer. The Ohio-born Crapper never told anyone where his call sign came from, which fit his image as the squadron's enigma. He had soft blue eyes and a dim view of the Prowler's mission. He was an electronics wiz who knew the Prowler's jammers better than anyone, and he was building his own light plane in his spare time. But Crapper was an odd egg, never quite meshing with the rest of the men, irritating everyone by turning paperwork in perfectly—an art form, really—but weeks late.

The dynamics of every Navy squadron are generally the same. The department heads always think the junior officers are slackers and work half as hard as they did when they were junior officers. The JOs bond together as the Junior Officers Protection Association and think the front office are ass-kissing dipshits. To VAQ-135's JOPA, Doogie's reign just confirmed their ideology. Now it was up to Tupper to change all of that in the sixteen months he had as skipper.

He ordered a round of beers for his department heads and proclaimed it was a new day. Contrary to the previous regime, he wanted their input on how to make the squadron better. He told them his door would always be open. In his early speeches to his sailors, Tupper stressed a simple three-point goal: always do your best; always do the right thing; and take care of your fellow sailors. Tupper told his department heads that this applied to them as well. If they found themselves in a situation where the choice was between protecting their sailors and an arbitrary Navy quota for mission completion rates or some other bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, they should always put their sailors first. He said the Black Ravens should be more than a squadron to the sailors; it should be their second family.

This was all sunshine and rainbows in theory, but the department heads each had ten to fifteen years in the Navy. They'd heard happy talk before. Besides, some of them had seen Tupper's dark side when he was XO, a temper and impatience that ran counter to the soothing words now coming out of his mouth. They'd watched Tupper enforce Doogie's draconian orders without a word of protest. That might have been the XO's job, but it didn't fill his senior officers with confidence that things would really change. Tupper would have to prove it to them.

Their skipper tried to steer the conversation toward how to remotivate the junior officers in VAQ-135, but the department heads didn't have any quick answers; they were just as shell-shocked from Breining's command as the young guys. They all agreed that the Doogie scar would have to heal naturally with time.

A few days later, the
Nimitz
pulled into NAS North Island across the bay from San Diego for one last day of R & R. This time, the squadron hung together as a unit, drinking beer and playing volleyball at cabanas on the beach. Tupper walked around slapping backs and joking with the men. This is more like it, he thought; we're coming together.

Then he went back to his room. He called Beth and the girls and then his parents. One of the perks of being skipper was having a phone in his stateroom and he could call home whenever he liked. But this was the last chance on a clear landline. Saying good night to his girls filled him with an unspeakable sadness. The
Nimitz
pulled out of North Island the next morning, the California coast fading in its wake. Tupper and the Black Ravens wouldn't touch American soil again for 237 days.

Chapter Nine

W
e leave California the same day Richard Nixon leaves Washington. Dad just shakes his head and turns off the television in our hotel room, and we start the nine-hundred-mile drive north. We arrive on Whidbey Island two days later, crossing Deception Pass Bridge in the fog.

I can't figure it out. Fog in August? Where are we, the moon? But then the skies clear. We drive through roads carved into lonely forests. I wonder if there are any people at all.

Then we hit town. “Welcome to Oak Harbor, population 10,445” reads the sign at the city limits. There is a five-and-dime, a furniture store, a broken cinema, some ball fields, and a burger joint called the Arctic Circle. We pull into the parking lot and order dinner. Dad heads off our doubts.

“Arctic Circle is as good as McDonald's.”

Of course we don't believe him. But the burgers are good. We finish them and then head south out of town, a mile or so. We take a left onto a dirt road and there's a circle of almost-homes. Dad stops the car in front of our property, just a cement foundation and bundles of wood. Terry and I scramble out of the car and chase each other through the sawdust and nails. Dad flew up a month ago and bought the place without Mom. I've never seen him look this nervous.

“Barb, what do you think? They're going to call it Crosswoods.”

Mom smiles and hugs Dad. There is light in her eyes.

“If you're here, then I want to be here. But I get to pick out the next one.”

Dad smiles. He says that sounds like a good plan.

I
t is just a neighborhood, but it is my neighborhood. It is just a house, but it finally feels like a home. There are four bedrooms; mine and Terry's on the left of the stairs, Dad's study and master bedroom are to the right. Mom makes a never-ending rotation of pork chops, spaghetti, fried chicken, and marinated flank steak. There is a living room we never use and a family room with a twenty-six-inch Zenith color television that gets four channels and a stereo console that holds Johnny Mathis, John Denver, and Simon and Garfunkel.

It isn't base housing, but it's close. There are fifty houses in Crosswoods and probably forty of them are Navy families. Some fly the A-6 Intruder, but most are new guys here to fly the EA-6B Prowler. What the Prowler does is a mystery to me. I read enough war books to know that bombers like the Intruder drop bombs and fighters like the Tomcat fight other fighters. But the Prowler is a radar jammer, whatever that means. All I know is it seems crowded; two guys up front, two guys in the back.

Every morning Dad rises at six, showers, shaves, jumps into his white MG, and makes the five-mile drive to NAS Whidbey Island. He's gone when I wake up and sometimes gone when I go to sleep.

It really isn't that bad. Behind our home are endless trees stretching for miles. My parents let me roam. I head out in the morning and wander the days away. I find a moss-covered log and make it my second home. Every day, I lie on my belly, peer inside, and watch the ants and worms go about their business. What are they thinking? Where are their daddies?

I'm not lonely. There are kids everywhere. I join Cub Scouts and play tag and kickball with Billy and Eric for hours. The sun stays up well past nine in the summers and we ride our bikes until then, collapsing in dusty clothes on unmade beds. And then we do it again.

But then there's school. Now I'm eight and everybody but me can write cursive. I try but produce chicken scratch. My teacher laughs and says I'll make a good doctor. What is she talking about? I don't want to be a doctor. I want to be president. The same teacher brings out a typewriter and suggests I type all my papers. She gives up after two lessons.

In the spring, I join Little League. Dad drops me off at the sign-up meeting where all the kids are assigned to a team. He says he'll be back in an hour. I make him promise. The hour passes. Then another. I sit down, my legs trembling. Somebody's mom comes over and puts her arm around me.

“You're an Apache now, but where's your chief?”

Dad finally returns, screeching his tires like in the movies. He says he's real sorry and blames it on airplane joint parts.

Then it is opening day. Mom and Dad come to my first game. I wave to him from the on-deck circle. Somehow, I get hits in my first two at-bats and then line out hard to the pitcher on my third. I can do this! But it was a mirage: I don't get another hit for the rest of the season. Matter of fact, I don't get another hit in my three years of Little League. I am a left-handed batter, a strange and weird thing for third-grade pitchers. An outside pitch to righties is a ball in the ear hole of my helmet. Balls plunk me in the shoulder and in the leg, game after game. My on-base percentage soars, but I am so scared. I start having nightmares where I get hit in the face by the ball repeatedly. Dad works with me once or twice after school, but I can see him looking at the gold Timex on his wrist. He has other things to do. I tell him to go do them. I'm not even that mad.

He's gone more and more. Our house becomes two different homes: Dad is here home and Dad is away home. The Dad is here means supper at six thirty sharp when he's not night flying. Elbows are off the table and there's a smack if we sass Mom. My bed is always made—and made again if Dad doesn't approve—and bedtime is always eight thirty even when twilight still fills the perfect summer sky.

Dad is gone features a breakdown of civilization. There might be bacon and eggs for dinner. Maybe even Frosted Flakes! Laundry piles up and Mass is missed. We fall into the rhythms of his coming and going, slacking off and snapping back when he reappears. This pisses Mom off. She thinks she looks like a fool with Dad because she complains about us in letter after letter, but then Dad sees two scrubbed and behaved kids and wonders who is telling the truth.

We rent cabins near Mount Baker in the Cascades when he's home. Dad loves to ski and so does Terry. One day she'll race in high school. For me, it's baseball all over again. I snowplow five or ten feet, list to my left, and face-plant into a snow bank. Then I can't figure which way to swing my legs so they'll be parallel to the hill so I can stand up again. I usually just leave my legs and poles in the yard sale position until a grown-up takes pity and hoists me up.

Mom and Dad are desperate. They buy me plastic skis not much longer than snowshoes. You don't even wear ski boots with them, just regular boots. The day after they arrive, I fish the box out of the trash and see that the skis are recommended for children ages four to six. I'm ten. My cousins visit from Michigan; all three of them are great on the slopes. They stare at my red plastic skis and then look away. I ask them if they will ski with me on Heather, the bunny hill, in the morning. They all make excuses and change the subject.

The next morning arrives too soon with fresh powder and blue skies. We drive up the winding road to the lodge, everyone chattering excitedly about moguls and jumps while I pray for a serious but survivable car wreck. Dad is driving fast without chains. It could happen.

No luck. I slip on my plastic torture sticks and head over to the beginner's towrope with both Mom and Dad. The problem is the skis are so short I can't pick up any speed. I go twenty feet and then come to a complete stop before toppling over onto the packed snow. I pick up the skis after the fourth or fifth fall and chuck them, almost beaning a toddler schussing by me. I scream at my parents.

“These are for babies! I'm not a baby.”

Mom's jaw juts out of her fake-fur hood. She cracks her gum loudly.

“You certainly are acting like a baby.”

Dad slips his tongue out of his mouth and bites it, a sign that he is trying not to lose it.

“Now, Barbara.”

Mom has a point. I crumple inside my red snowsuit. Something tells me I am on the cusp of a brand-new level of humiliation, so I stop crying. I tell Dad that I'll keep working at it with Mom. She plays along with the charade. Relieved, he pats me on the head and skis away, searching for my sister and my cousins.

Mom and I wait until he is out of sight. And then we take off our skis and hike to the lodge. I fish out a Judy Blume book that I'd stashed at a back table—I knew I'd end up here—while she sits a few rows away staring out the lodge's big bay windows. She is a lousy skier too and quits for good that year after being run over by two Canadian hotdoggers. But we never talk about our shared misery. Instead, she starts staying back at the cabin leaving me alone in the lodge with my books.

I don't mind until the sun begins to fade. That's when I get nervous. The mountain closes at four so I sit near the window and watch for Dad's black jacket and powder blue ski hat with the word
PROWLER
written across the front.

I wait a long time. Pete Rodrick always skis the last icy run, carving down the mountain with the ski patrol and the other toasted stragglers. I stare out into the dark, petrified he's crashed. I relax only when I see the white ball of his ski hat. Life can go on.

The shitty thing is that sports are all that matter to me. I let them torture me. I beg my parents for a subscription to
Sports Illustrated
, and there's Archie Griffin on the September 9, 1974, cover of my very first issue. Every Thursday, I sprint from the school bus to the mailbox and then to my room. I read everything, even stuff on gymnastics. The thing is, I don't need to be great at sports; I just need to be decent. But I am nowhere close. I need Dad to help or tell me that stuff doesn't really matter. But he is always half a world away.

Only in my room do things turn out okay. I come home, close my door, and correct the record. I lie on my bed tossing an orange Nerf off the ceiling, staring at my pennants, and reconstruct an entire season in my head. I always win, but there are hurdles to overcome. My team gets off to a great start, but then I'd break my arm or we'd get jobbed by the officials and have to claw our way back for the playoffs. I always play quarterback, a master of the short-passing game, working the sidelines and moving the chains. Soon, I branch off into other dream worlds. I run for president and lose the New Hampshire primary but slowly battle my way back, winning the Republican nomination at a deadlocked convention.

I daydream for hours. This drives Mom crazy. Every hour or so, she throws my door open trying to catch me doing something bad.

“What are you doing? Go outside.”

“I'm just thinking. I'll go outside later.”

She slams the door shut. Our fights are getting longer and louder. I start thinking that my very presence puts a sour look on her pretty face. She signed up for the Navy life, the kids, and the moves, but she didn't sign up for me. She doesn't understand it. Terry is good as gold and she sees her girlfriends with their happy sons. Then she looks back at me and I can tell she feels that she got screwed. I am a problem she cannot solve.

Everything I do confuses her. I dread playing sports, but then I watch the NFL for six hours without moving. It's sunny outside and I am in my room reading about Iwo Jima or Earl Morrall. She won't hold dinner for two minutes while I finish a
Sports Illustrated
story or try to catch the end of part 17 of
The World at War
on PBS.

“Just one more minute, Mom.”

“Stephen Thomas Rodrick, why must you always defy me?”

Then again, her behavior confuses me, so we're even. She has patience with everyone but me. We scream and holler at each other, my tears of rage only stoking her own. But then the doorbell rings—Navy folks are always dropping by—and she rubs her eyes hard and pushes her hair back into place. Mrs. Barbara Rodrick, Pete's wife, magically reappears. She pinches her cheeks for color and answers the door with a smile. She is a different woman.

There aren't a lot of grown-up things to do in Oak Harbor, so my parents' social life revolves around Dad's squadron. The couples host progressive dinners in Crosswoods, with each house preparing a different dish. My mom bakes Cornish hens and piles her hair high on her head. I watch her get ready, always waiting for the grand finale: the ceremonial swirl spraying of Aqua Net. She slips into a red miniskirt with a white turtleneck and heads down the stairs.

The other wives love her southern charm as she plays a sillier version of herself, making fun of herself for not being able to figure out the lawn mower when Dad isn't around. Why does she do that? After dinner and drinks, the couples play bridge, sometimes at our house. I watch from the top of the stairs and marvel at the beautiful woman who has taken Mom's place. She plays the wrong card and my parents do a Disney version of
The Bickersons
.

“Son of a biscuit eater, Barbara, what are you doing to me?”

“Judas Priest. Was that the wrong suit? Sugar Ray Robinson.”

Everyone laughs and so do I. This is a blunder. She catches me watching from the stairs. It is past my bedtime. She freezes me with her death glare. Busted. I blink in surprise like I've just eaten a Larry Holmes jab. But then I look again, and she is back cracking wise and smiling at everyone around the table.

I retreat back to my room and wonder what the hell I'm doing wrong. It would be easier if Mom were a crazy lady, not feeding me and screaming at the neighbors. I'd understand; I know there are not nice people in the world. But Mom isn't that at all. She volunteers for the Red Cross and bakes cookies for the neighbors. Her friends long to spend time with her. She's kind and warm and people love her.

I am her one true mistake.