How to Train Your Dad

by Gary Paulsen

  The boat virtually leaped forward, the bow jerking violently up and then back down, as we started to scream across the water. I had a split second to see that Pooder had managed to hang on, but the skis seemed almost to be airborne like one of those old-time hovercrafts, and I thought that he must have known how to ski expertly after all, when the boat suddenly roared even louder, changed direction, knocking my dad away from the wheel, and began an out-of-control, completely mad, looping curve to the left in the center of the river.

  Again, later—much later—we discovered that the sudden lunging of the propeller when the extra power hit it caused the prop to jam to the side, forcing the boat to careen wildly in a circle.

  I felt as if we had climbed onto some bucking-water-bronco-amusement-park ride.

  My father, who had been literally pitched away from the controls with the sudden sideways slamming motion, was neatly tucked by centrifugal force along the inside of the boat like he was part of the hull. I was holding on with a death grip to the seat with one hand and Carol’s collar with the other as we were being whipped up and down like a flag in the wind. But there was plenty of room in the river, and for that half a moment, I thought we had lots of space and enough time to get control of things.

  I had forgotten about Pooder.

  Who had violently entered the Newtonian realm of physics and was now the living embodiment of the effect of forces on a moving body. While the boat was flying rapidly around in a tight left circle, Pooder, out on the very end of the towrope, was exhibiting the concept of centripetal force, the taut rope pulling inward and preventing Pooder from soaring out over the water with each rotation around the boat.

  “At first I thought you were doing it on purpose, you know,” he said when we got the mud cleaned out of his mouth. “Just to give me a good ride. Then we spun around the second time but everything went faster and faster. The banks of the river were a blur. And by the third or fifth or hundredth time around, I think I approached terminal velocity. I started to have tunnel vision, with a bright light at the end of the tunnel. When I saw my dead grandfather waving at me from the light, beckoning me toward another dimension of existence, that’s when I realized it wasn’t all for fun, so I decided to let go. I mean, why would he wave? He didn’t even like me.”

  Long breath, spitting mud, and then: “I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “You skipped,” I told him, “like a flat rock.”

  Even though I had been upside down with Carol biting me and Dad kicking me in the gut trying to break free from the force that pinned him to the side of the boat, I still had the wherewithal to watch my best friend skip across the water, the sun still shining on his light hair, his limbs flailing, a fading scream across the water …

  “You were moving so fast you skipped. I think four times.” I had to fight not to smile, remembering. “It was hard to count. Everything was moving so fast.”

  “I skipped?”

  I nodded. “On the first skip, your trunks and life vest were torn off and you were stone naked the rest of the way.”

  He was lying on the shore and tried to raise to look at his body, but his eyes were still packed with mud so he couldn’t see much of anything, and he fell back.

  “I skipped naked?”

  “Totally.” I nodded again. “You left the skis like an arrow and they beat you to shore. The life jacket was just tatters and we couldn’t find your trunks at all. It was incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not even on film.”

  “I’m naked now?”

  “Well, not really,” I said in a comforting voice. “You’re more or less caked in mud. On the final skip, you plowed into the muddy riverbank so hard Dad thought you might be buried alive. We had to dig you out when we got ashore.”

  “Naked?” He wasn’t following well. “I’m on the shore naked?”

  “Dad says it’s almost biblical, like you are a newborn babe plucked naked from the river. Don’t worry—I’ve got a swell pair of pink bibs I can loan you to get home.”

  A long silence then, the only sound was Carol trying to lick the mud off Pooder and, far off, some water birds chattering away.

  Then Pooder sighed and tried to say something but it came out in almost a whisper:

  “What? I couldn’t hear you.”

  A little louder:

  “If it’s okay with you guys, I don’t believe I want to water-ski anymore today.”

  Classic Pooder.

  LOSE, WIN, LOSE

  After the water-ski incident—which Pooder called Death by Water Ski, hence the name of the previous chapter—things returned to a kind of normal.

  As if, Pooder says, anything about this summer could possibly be called normal.

  “That water was hard,” he told me days after the skiing adventure as his memory of that afternoon slowly returned. “I have bruises in places you’re never supposed to get bruises. They started out black and blue and then they were purple and now they’re turning yellow, and I think there’s a good chance I will never have children, which is a shame because I think you will agree that I would make an excellent father.”

  We were sitting on a grassy part of the riverbank with Carol, who now regarded the river as an enemy and periodically growled and showed her teeth at the water.

  At the moment, she was dozing in the sun and seemed to be trying to run in her sleep while letting out muffled growls and twitching.

  “I wonder what she’s dreaming about,” I said.

  Pooder shrugged. “Probably a skunk or some small animal that shows fear and is trying to run away. She’s a pit bull. They like small things that flee and scurry away in tall grass. It’s a call to her more primitive instincts.”

  I wondered how he could possibly know that and when did he learn the word scurry? And why did he know so much about the predator-prey structure? Pooder was always full of these small—and sometimes not-so-small—surprises.

  “Speaking of scurrying things—which means a furtive movement, by the way—how’s it going with your dad?” Although Pooder adored my dad as is, he was deeply curious about anything experimental (see previous chapter, pages 138–158, for examples).

  “I’m back to my regular routine. The squirt bottle seems to be working, which is good. The next thing on the pamphlet is something they call ‘pleasant confinement,’ where you keep the subject in a tight area and only let him out to do the whole bathroom business. I don’t know how I could pull that off. I mean, there’s no way I slap a collar and leash on him without facing the fact that the train has gone off the tracks…”

  He thought a few moments. “It’s the truck. You could sabotage the truck so it didn’t run. That would more or less confine him to home—keep him away from sales or the used-clothing store.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe once in a while, but we need the truck to get feed for the pigs and chickens. And besides, he’s too good a mechanic for me to fool him for long.” I sighed. “I think I’m stuck with the way things are for the time being.”

  “And Carol doesn’t mind the squirt bottle? The way she did the squirt guns?”

  I thought back, reflecting on how the squirt bottle part of the training process had gone, and the first time I had used it as a deterrent.

  Which reminded me of the new wrinkle in my ongoing fashion nightmare that would prevent me from becoming lookatable material by the time school started and I was running into Peggy in the hallways.

  Shoes.

  Somehow, but not surprisingly because the shoe store and the grocery store both backed out to the same alley and my father never met a dumpster he wasn’t willing to dive in, my dad had discovered that the chain shoe stores dumped shoes—threw them away in the garbage—when they went out of style or demand.

  However.

  Big however.

  In case anyone was observant (and shameless) enough to find this out and make a run for free shoes thereby skewing the supply and demand chain the store had going, someone at the shoe
store would ruin the shoes by taking one shoe per pair and running it through a band saw to cut it in half before disposing of them.

  “All we have to do,” my dad told me, “is find a shoe from one pair that isn’t cut in half that matches a shoe from another that’s not cut in half and, bang, you’ve got a brand-new pair of matching tennis shoes. Or close to it. Just a little physical effort and no money spent. Might be hundred-dollar tennis shoes, free for the taking. Perfect.”

  Oh god, I thought—not swearing, but a prayer for mercy. On top of pink bibs and tent-size camo T-shirts and boys’ small underwear briefs, both of which had been shrunk or stretched to fit a size medium kid, only not really, now I would be expected to wear a pair of tennis shoes that didn’t quite match.

  Clearly, this was exact right time and place to implement the new squirt-bottle system. I’d start slow and do it at the exact right moment and this time, this technique would work. It had to.

  I waited until right before we got to the dumpster. We had started at the grocery dump for the pig produce haul, stocked up on what we, or rather, the pigs, needed, and that’s when I saw SP start to move toward the shoe store dumpster. I followed closely, scanning the sky. It wasn’t overcast or threatening to pour or anything, but there were a few scattered clouds to provide cover for the next step in the training process. I waited, watching, timing it perfectly, and as he reached up for the dumpster lid, I sprayed the back of his neck with my squirt bottle before jamming it in one of the large pockets of my bibs, which, as my dad had predicted, were very handy and could hold, and hide, almost anything.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked, looking at the sky. “Is that rain?”

  I nodded, held out my hand as if feeling for more. “I think it’s going to pour.” I peered up at an almost-pure blue sky. “We’d better go. We don’t want that stuff in the back of the truck to get goobered up by the torrential downpour.”

  And, bless me, it worked. Dad nodded and we climbed in the truck and took the pig feed home, and even Carol didn’t seem to mind, didn’t look at my right eye or show her teeth to me in that scary smile of hers, mostly because she hated rain and always hid in the bathroom when we got bad weather. I had successfully pulled off one of the pamphlet’s training methods. Finally.

  Or, as Pooder put it, “You now have another arrow in your quiver. But you have to use it wisely.”

  It’s usually better to not follow most of Pooder’s statements with a question because sometimes you’d get a flood kind of answer. But I was on a high from the success and forgot that discretion is the better part of valor. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s common sense. The only way this can work is if SP—that’s what you’re calling him, right?—doesn’t ever know what you’re doing. So you have to keep varying your methods, keeping him off guard, so he doesn’t get wise to your attempts to alter his behavior. You’ve got the squirt bottle and Dairy Queen and diverting his attention with other side issues and maybe doing the broken-truck business now and then that he’ll have to take time to fix … see? The trick is you have to keep mixing them up. Maybe throw in a stomachache or two from time to time, and the sniffles—can’t go shopping if you’ve got a cold—or, better yet, the runs, because then you don’t have to go out in public with him and he’ll give you all the privacy you need at home. They all might work, maybe only some will work, but you’ve got to be crafty about timing and technique, control the frequency and don’t repeat them too often, mix it up so SP can’t spot the pattern—” He paused to take a breath and I cut in.

  “I’ve been keeping a journal where I write down each reinforcement I get him to perform and each attempt I make to change his incorrect behavior, so I can keep track of the order of things and not do anything twice,” I pointed out. “I’ve already been keeping it pretty random. And I keep my experiment notes hidden out in the feed shed, tucked under the overhang of the roof where it comes down to the wall covered with an old board. I log what I’ve done when I know he’s not looking.”

  “Good, I guess.” He frowned. “Although it’s worth pointing out that, as you may remember, I wasn’t sure you should do this in the first place. You have a dad most of us would kill for—but I can see the fashion and social difficulties you might have becoming lookatable if you don’t change him.”

  Right about then a mud turtle came ashore, saw us, realized its mistake, and hurried back into the water. Carol awakened just in time to see it—Pooder’s words—scurry across the mud and underwater, and she took after it. Somehow in all this time living by the river and going on the boat, she still didn’t completely understand water and seemed to think she could breathe it. She followed the turtle off the bank and kept going when she hit the water, like a fanged, hair-covered small submarine, totally disappearing under the surface. There was no real body fat on her to make her float—just whip-cord, pit-bull muscle—and she sank like a rock.

  She missed the turtle completely and I think she might have drowned if Pooder and I hadn’t jumped in and felt around in the muddy water until we felt dog fur and dragged her out.

  “Amazing mission focus,” Pooder said. “Absolutely amazing. She wasn’t going to come up for air. Wanted to get it done. Make turtle puree. We could all take a lesson from Carol.”

  A side note from Pooder: If your pit bull sinks in muddy water going after a turtle and dips out of sight and needs help to get back to dry land and an oxygen supply, in the interests of personal survival and the preservation of appendages, be careful of what and how you grab. It is significant to note that apparently pit bulls can reach any part of their body with their teeth. End of note. Except to say that Pooder and I took turns helping put Band-Aids on each other because even a warning nip from a pit bull can leave a small puncture wound.

  * * *

  Summer was fast drawing to an end and the school year was looming, so now began a more serious approach to training the SP. By consistent reference to the journal so as to implement my cautious utilization of the principle of positive reinforcement, alternating with now and then the use of negative reinforcement, I was starting to see an actual difference in Dad’s approach to his daily living. I had hopes that I might drag him to a real store to buy real clothes for me before the first day of school arrived. I had given up on the bike idea and was trying to convince myself that clothes make the man and could help me overcome the terminal uncoolness of arriving at school each day on the bus.

  Even Pooder congratulated me on my efforts. “I think SP has quit pooping on the rug. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” I couldn’t believe he used the word metaphorically and had to look it up. It means—along with a lot of other meanings—using one description in reference to another. Which is just as well. I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of times my father has ever pooped on a rug.

  But Pooder was right. My father had changed. I’d been working so hard for so long that I almost missed it when it finally happened.

  There came a time when the chicken population cranked up to between twenty and thirty chickens on any given day, and we had eggs coming so fast we couldn’t keep a good count of them. Dad put a sign up at the top of the driveway about “farm-fresh, cage-free, dark-yolk eggs for barter.” But most of the people who showed up just wanted to pay cash and pretty soon we wound up with some sixty dollars in egg money.

  That’s when I saw him, straight up, with my own eyes, go into an honest-to-goodness store and buy some fresh socks and brand-new T-shirts and a couple pairs of jeans for me.

  And I thought, I have arrived.

  At last, I will be marginally lookatable material.

  It wasn’t much, I’ll admit. But it was there, a crack in the foundation of my fashion disaster of a life, a little opening where the light of a better future could come through, and I was happy.

  But my dad wasn’t.

  I mean, it wasn’t that he was openly sour or anything, and I thanked him repeatedly for the new clothes—sounding as positive and
reinforcing as I could—and he smiled and nodded and said, “You’re welcome.”

  But his voice was too soft, almost a whisper, and I could tell that the shopping hadn’t pleased him near as much as it delighted and thrilled me. The success of my experiment in correcting his behavior wasn’t as satisfying for him as I thought it should be. The pamphlet had all but guaranteed me that consistent and applied training led to happy owners and equally happy puppies or, in this case, lookatable sons and none-the-wiser SPs.

  I let it go, let the off-feeling slide, and took an enormous amount of pleasure in shirts that fit right and socks fresh out of the pack and jeans that didn’t say HONEY BUNNY or have as many pockets as a herd of kangaroos.

  Things, I thought, would, could, only get better now that I had altered my dad and was ready to head into the new school year and face Peggy as a new man.

  Wrong.

  Pooder said it was my lack of mission focus. He criticized me taking my success for granted and not paying attention. And I suppose there’s something to that—I admit that I got complacent and maybe even a little smug. I mean, there were the socks and T-shirts and jeans that nobody had ever worn before and that fit my body without being washed and shrunk first. Wouldn’t you get a little dreamy over something that positive?

  The second-to-last weekend of summer, Pooder heard the hang-glider people were back at the same hill again. He wanted to go watch them—he swore that was it, just watch—and so we took our bikes (I was even feeling better about my bespoke—sorry, Pooder made me write that pun—bike these days) and pedaled out to watch the hang gliders who actually did know how to take off at will, glide with full vision, and land without terrorizing a herd of tiny horses.

  We arrived early as they were setting up and putting the gliders together and had time to answer Pooder’s questions. I noticed that the guys and girls who recognized us kept a barrier of bodies between Pooder and the hang gliders, and across the fields, that the Shetland ponies were crowded along the fence facing the direction of the glider hill, perhaps thinking they might get another shot at destroying the giant predator birds—or whatever they called them in their little horse brains. Once you’ve successfully changed another living creature’s behaviors, you start noticing how people and animals react in case you might need to pull up your training techniques again.