The Magical Stranger (7 page)

Chapter
Ten

T
he morning
before the
Nimitz
left North Island, Doc told Tupper
that one of his sailors was going to kill himself if he had to stay on cruise.
Tupper had twenty minutes to decide whether to send him off or keep him onboard.
It was an unwinnable choice: leaving him behind rewarded malingering, but he
didn't need dead weight either. He sent the sailor off.

The next morning, Tupper ended the career of a
fifteen-year sailor. Back on Whidbey, one of Tupper's petty officers had signed
paperwork saying he had checked Prowler maintenance performed by a junior
sailor. That was a lie discovered when a hubcap on the wheel of a Prowler's
landing gear popped off because it was installed wrong. If the hubcap had popped
off during landing there could have been a catastrophe.

It was just one incident, but indicative of a
larger issue left behind by Doogie. Tupper's maintenance crew were like
teenagers screamed at one too many times by a jackass stepdad. They fought back
in a passive-aggressive manner, cutting corners wherever they could. It was
obvious the bosses didn't care about them, they reasoned, so why should they
give a shit?

The petty officer's faked paperwork was just the
incident that was caught. Tupper had two options. He could give him an informal
reprimand, put a nasty letter in his file, and leave it at that. Or he could
take him to captain's mast, one step below a court-martial: the guilty sailor is
forced to stand at attention in front of the squadron while the commanding
officer reads off the offense, berates the sailor, and then strips him of rank
or pay.

The petty officer was just five years short of
retirement and took care of a special-needs son who desperately needed Navy
insurance coverage. He begged Tupper to cut him a break. Tupper slept on it for
a night. His approach to discipline had been shaped by his years at the academy.
He'd arrived in Annapolis in 1988 with a chip on his shoulder, still pissed
about his initial rejection. He decided he hated the place but would conquer it
all the same. Like all the plebes, Tupper had someone screaming in his ear every
day for that first year.

“Midshipman, how many carriers does the Indian navy
have?

“I do not know, sir! No excuses. I will find out
immediately.”

“Goddamnit. Do it now!”

Tupper hauled ass to the library and dug up the
information. (The answer was zero.) By the time he reported back, the
upperclassman had forgotten he'd even sent him. He knew it was all a game to see
who would crack under pressure, cut a corner, or commit an honor violation.

A fellow plebe committed suicide by jumping out of
a window in his first year. Tupper's mother wanted to pull him out. Tupper set
her straight.

“Mom, they're not yelling at me personally. They
are trying to see whether I can handle stress. I can.”

He detested the upperclassmen who got their jollies
out of terrorizing him for cheap pleasure. One upperclassman rode him his second
year until he couldn't take it anymore. Tupper challenged the smaller man to a
fight. They wrestled in a hallway at Bancroft Hall, and the smaller man kicked
Tupper's ass. Turned out the guy was an all-state wrestler. He still didn't
regret it.

But Tupper respected the less sadistic
upperclassmen, the ones who were trying to teach him something. He thrived in a
place he professed to hate. He rose to the rank of brigade adjutant his senior
year, third in command of the entire brigade. A newspaper photographer snapped a
picture of Tupper getting in the face of a scared-shitless plebe. His parents
cringed, but Tupper loved it. He was teaching the kid something.

And now he had to teach his sailors a hard lesson.
Shitty maintenance and cutting corners was going to get someone killed. It
wouldn't be tolerated. At captain's mast, he busted the man from petty officer
first class to petty officer second class, a move that would cost the sailor
$1,000 a month in pay. Tupper's decision meant his sailor would be drummed out
of the Navy long before he hit twenty years.

Through the cruise, Tupper would see the demoted
sailor mopping floors in the mess and wondered if he had done the right thing.
His decision weighed heavily on him and he wasn't great at hiding it. CAG pulled
him aside after their daily staff meeting.

“Are you okay?”

Tupper blinked hard.

“Absolutely.”

It was not the kind of attention a skipper wanted.
He went back to his room and started an email to Beth. He wrote, “I've never
felt so alone” but deleted it before sending it. Beth had enough to worry
about.

T
here
was less than a month before the
Nimitz
would be on
station in the Gulf. Tupper had to sort out the maintenance issues fast. The air
wing upped their tempo and there was a recurring refrain in the
Nimitz
's launches and recoveries: Prowlers not getting
airborne. One day the radios weren't working; the next day it was the regulators
pumping oxygen to the crew. Then the slats on one of the Prowlers wouldn't come
up after taking off. On and on it went. It was the cost of ancient planes, but
CAG didn't want excuses; he wanted Prowlers in the air.

Tupper tried to tune out the white noise when he
was flying. The cockpit was the one place where he felt at peace. He'd been
flying Prowlers for twelve years, and there was a comfort that came with
settling into the rickety pilot bucket of the EA-6B. It made all the other shit
seem meaningless.

But flying as a skipper had its drawbacks. The
Black Ravens were filled with junior pilots and ECMOs making their first
cruises, and they couldn't all fly together for safety reasons. Well, they
could, and some skippers insist on only flying with senior ECMOs, but Tupper
thought that was asking for a mishap.

At night, a Prowler pilot needed a trusty ECMO next
to him feeding him information and communicating with the carrier. But there was
no way to become a trusty ECMO without experiencing some hairy nights that made
your pilot want to punch you through your mask. So it fell to Tupper to fly with
the junior guys.

A week out of San Diego, Tupper launched on a dark,
mist-filled night with Lieutenant Steve “Buttons” Murphy in the seat next to
him. Buttons was a California boy and a former enlisted guy who'd made the
transition to officer and was making his first cruise as an ECMO. Buttons'
primary responsibility was assisting Tupper in his approach and “calling the
ball,” letting the
Nimitz
's landing crew know that
they saw the lights of the meatball and were lined up to land. But the creaky
Prowler was filled with built-in booby traps. The cockpit fogged up on humid
nights. If you waited for the first wave of condensation on the window before
you flipped on the defog you were already screwed; you'd spend the next few
minutes rubbing at the window with your flight gloves.

Buttons forgot to hit the defogger. The cockpit
fogged up. Tupper cursed. Buttons tried to adjust the defogger while the landing
signals officer on the
Nimitz
asked him to call the
ball. Buttons didn't respond, his head down over the instruments. The deck asked
again.

“Call the ball.”

Buttons hesitated, confused. Tupper waited as long
as he could, but then he aborted his landing and flew around the
Nimitz
for another approach. He slammed his fist
against his seat and screamed at Buttons.

“You are fucking behind the jet.”

Next time around, Tupper called the ball himself.
The Prowler's tailhook dropped but skipped over the
Nimitz
's four arresting wires. They had to circle again. They didn't
land until their fourth try, a humiliation to Tupper. Pilots are graded on their
landings and ranked against each other; he'd take a ton of shit for tonight's
fiasco.

He stormed away from the jet talking to no one as
he walked back to the Black Ravens' ready room, the squadron's office. He
glowered at Buttons during the debrief but said nothing.

The silent treatment was one of Tupper's less
successful leadership skills. He'd forgotten he had been in Buttons' flight
boots many times. On his first cruise, his squadron was enforcing no-fly zones
over southern Iraq. Their basic mission was flying circles over the country,
daring Saddam Hussein's air defense to fire a surface-to-air missile so that the
Americans could use it as a pretext to crush his missile sites, radar stations,
and munitions factories.

Hussein wasn't quite that dumb, and the Lancers
flew circle after circle above the desert. That was okay with Tupper. The
Prowler didn't have a GPS navigational system like the Hornets and Tomcats, and
its inertial navigational system was unreliable and often broken. Prowler crews
were constantly on the radio trying to figure out exactly where the hell they
were in the sky. Tupper would launch into the Gulf haze and try to find a Hornet
to tag along with so he didn't miss his tanker rendezvous.

Landing on the USS
Constellation
was also a mind game. He couldn't quite figure out the
Prowler. You could line up the A-4 from flight school behind the boat and it
would stay level. The Prowler was an out-of-alignment pickup truck, drifting up
and down, left and right without provocation. He couldn't keep it on speed.
Tupper would give his Prowler power, but the jet wouldn't immediately react, so
he'd give it more power and the plane would lurch forward and down, then he'd
pull back on the stick to try and slow it down. On and on it went, Tupper
lurching the Prowler around while his ECMOs sighed into their masks.

On final approach, he had the landing yips. His
brain told him he had too much power and he was about to overshoot the carrier,
so he'd throttle back too soon and the Prowler would land a second early,
catching the number one wire and pissing off Tupper's skipper.

But that was long ago and Tupper didn't feel like
cutting Buttons a break. Soon, they would be flying six-hour missions up to
Afghanistan and landing on a pitching carrier in the Arabian Sea. It was best to
scare someone straight now, not in October.

Besides, Tupper didn't have time to babysit. He had
a squadron to run. He spent the next few days meeting and talking with his
senior petty officers in the Goat Locker. He met with them down in the hangar
bay and took their questions for hours as he tried to get them to buy back into
giving a damn about maintenance. Most of them were still bitter from Doogie's
reign, but he thought they were softening, nodding along when he spoke. He
didn't tell them there were rumors that the
Nimitz
's
deployment might be extended to ten months because of maintenance problems with
the USS
Enterprise.
There was no reason to crush
what was left of their fight.

Tupper walked back to his room at night and tried
to figure things out. He couldn't let his guard down with anyone. The sailors
could bitch to each other, JOPA had JOPA, and the department heads could
commiserate, but he had no one. Sure, he talked with Vinnie, but even with the
XO he only said so much. He knew squadrons that went to hell because the men saw
fear and indecision in their skipper's eyes. That wasn't going to happen to
him.

So he called Beth and the girls. He knew he was
waking them up, but he needed to hear their voices. Beth sounded like she was in
her element, busy with her job and raising the girls. She didn't have time to
miss her husband. Not yet anyway. Tupper understood that. Her voice was
enough.

Chapter Eleven

T
hings change when Dad's around. His buddies come over on Sunday afternoon and rehash the night before. They drink Coors smuggled back on cross-country flights in their Prowlers. I play with my Hot Wheels and listen to them talk about a pilot who lost his wings after attempting a landing without his wheels down. It sounds dangerous, but they are all laughing, so maybe landing without wheels is no big thing.

There are moments when we are like everyone else. Every other summer, Dad takes extended leave and we pile into our Buick station wagon for long road trips. We stay at Holiday Inns and giggle when he orders clam chowder and it arrives red and thin instead of white and creamy.

He turns highway drives into scary trips. He thrills at pushing another forty miles after the gas gauge reads empty, particularly in thunderstorms that force cop cars and eighteen-wheelers to the side of the road. Mom and I watch in white-knuckle horror. She whispers to him as she glances at the driving rain, “Peter, please,” but Dad drives on.

Mom might let us skip Mass from time to time, but it never happens on Dad's watch. When we visit my grandparents in Alabama, we drive sixty miles through the Deep South to find a Catholic church. At home, there is a weekly battle. Dad is a devout Catholic but an equally devout sleeper. Every Sunday, Terry and I move stealthily around the house, hoping he will sleep through 10:30 Mass, the last one of the day. But then he arises at 10:07 and has everyone out the door in twenty minutes.

Even at church, Mom is the center of attention. She sits out communion because she is on the Pill, a mortal sin. My parents only argue about one thing when I am little: Mom's insistence that two kids are enough. Dad protests, but she won't give in. She tells him she can't take on more if he's going to be gone so much. But I know it's something else. It's me. I've scared Mom off.

At home, we have a picture Bible, but that isn't good enough for me. I find an old Bible of Dad's and start reading it cover to cover. My classmates read
The Hobbit
. I'm reading the book of Revelation. Dad always said the Bible is the word of God, so I take what I read literally. That means things aren't looking good for me. Stealing is a violation of the commandments and a mortal sin. Those who steal are going to burn in hell. This frightens me because I steal almost every night.

I wake up around 3:00 a.m., starved, and sneak downstairs. I grab a handful of Chips Ahoy!, sneak back upstairs, and eat them in my bed while listening to Larry King on the radio. If I die before I confess my sin I'll burn forever. Fortunately, I am a bumbling altar boy known throughout the parish for ringing the bells at the wrong time. One Christmas Eve before midnight Mass, the priest offers to hear the altar boys' confessions. He says we can talk to him face-to-face rather than behind the screen since we all know each other. This seems like a really bad idea. My turn comes and I sit in a chair facing Father Massie and begin crying hard.

“What is wrong, young man?”

“I'm a thief, I'm going to hell. Every night I steal.”

“What do you steal? Money from your mom's purse?”

“No, I steal cookies. Chips Ahoy! cookies. Every night.”

The priest sighs and hands me a tissue.

“God will not send you to hell for eating cookies in the middle of the night. If he does, you'll see me right beside you. God knows you're a growing boy. Tell your mother you get hungry at night. Go say two Hail Marys.”

I say my prayers but I don't tell Mom. I'm not crazy.

She's already pissed about my grades. Every quarter, there's a mishmash of checks and check minuses. Mom stores them in a drawer and then throws them on Dad's lap when he comes home.

“See what's your son's doing? Absolutely nothing.”

Dad doesn't say much. He looks at Mom and me like we're both retarded.

“Barb. It'll work out.”

I don't quite believe him. I already know from books how hard it is to get into the Naval Academy. Dad must have already had his act together when he was my age. He is always in control. Was he born that way?

One day, he comes home early with a big smile on his face and a bottle of champagne.

“I screened for command.”

Even I know what that means. He's going to be skipper of a Prowler squadron in a year or two. He is thirty-three. This is a big deal. But there's bad news. Before he can take command, he tells me, he needs to learn how to be a leader, so we have to move to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, for six months.

We take a train across the country. My beloved Oakland Raiders finally win the Super Bowl but I miss it, hearing the score at a Montana train station. In Norfolk, we live on base for half a year and the strangest thing happens: Dad is home every night for dinnertime. He plays in a softball league, does the dishes, and helps with homework. It's like we are on a long, glorious vacation.

But something is wrong. Mom has tears in her eyes every day. This never happens when Dad is around. At dinner one night, Dad says he has an announcement. Terry and I look at each other, wondering who died. But then he breaks into the widest smile.

“Your mother is pregnant. You're going to have a baby brother or sister.”

My reaction is swift.

“I'm going to be sick.”

I run into the bathroom and dry-heave for five minutes. I get that from Mom. We both panic at good or bad news. I come out and Terry and my parents are still sitting on our couch. In Dad's eyes, I can see the light: he looks so happy. But Mom looks like me. Dad puts his arm around her and smiles, but she says nothing. Late at night, I hear them talking. Mom sounds like she's crying.

“Barb, this is going to be different. In two years, I'm done with sea duty. I'll be there this time.”

My reaction to the news continues to be less than ideal. Mom's belly grows and I get squirrelly. In my twisted head, the presence of new life makes me realize I'm going to die. I don't like that. I do the math; under the best of circumstances I might make it to 2050. That doesn't seem that far away. At night, I think of my grandparents: they must have been young once, right? Now they smell of mothballs and Avon and Budweiser. Soon, they'll be gone, and then my parents, and then me.

It's one of the first days of Lent. I've given up sweets, and one afternoon I pace the rooms in our house alone battling sugar withdrawal. Mom comes home from the grocery store and I'm crying in the kitchen.

“What's wrong with you? Did you hurt yourself? You weren't whittling, were you?”

“I don't want to die. Mom, I really don't want to die.”

She drops herself into a chair and exhales loudly.

“Christ almighty, I can't deal with this. Wait until I talk to your father.”

That can't happen.

“Please, don't tell him. I'll be good. I promise.”

She nods and starts putting the groceries away, her left hand supporting her belly.

“I won't say anything, but grow up. I'm having a baby. I don't need you acting like a baby.”

I can see her point. We move back to Whidbey in June. Two months later, Dad wakes me up in the middle of the night.

“You have a sister. We named her Christine Marie.”

I'm groggy and don't quite understand.

“Who delivered her?”

Dad laughs and digs his two-day beard into my neck, equally ticklish and painful.

“Who do you think, knucklehead, the paperboy?”

But then Dad turns serious.

“You have to look out for her, okay? No matter what.”

I tell him I will. I am nearly eleven and feel grown up.

“I promise.”