Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  But we had sailed into a trap. Our Captain called us up on deck to stand at attention. He informed us that Panamanian officials had contacted the ship that they would be conducting a search of the vessel. He begged all the students, teachers, and crew to please get rid of anything illegal they might have.

  “Please,” the Swedish captain implored us, “this is serious.”

  The Panamanian harbor and military officers arrived on a PT boat. Everyone from the ship stood on deck, nervously watched as every nook and cranny of the four-masted barque was searched.

  We sighed with relief when they acted friendly and told the Captain that they didn’t find anything. Stephanie, the school director, and her assistant went ashore with the officials, but the next day we heard they were being held in jail. The PT boat came back, and our ship was ordered to anchor in a backwater bay of Cristobel harbor. The PT boat and officers didn’t leave. They anchored alongside us, the machine gun uncovered and pointed at the ship. Rumors and wild speculation raced from teenagers to crew to teachers around the ship, but we couldn’t have imagined what eventually turned out to be the truth.

  The ship’s owner had originally leased the Antarna to the Oceanics School without informing the school of the extent of the rotten rigging or of daily mechanical fires in the engine room. Stephanie had signed the contract, interviewed students, hired crew and gotten the school underway. When the bills started mounting, she kept convincing donors to support the school through the thousands of dollars in bills to get the ship seaworthy, including going through dry dock in Vera Cruz. As we sailed to Panama, Stephanie was certain the ship’s problems were over and now wealthy passengers could come aboard to sail for a week at a time to experience and support this remarkable school at sea.

  What we didn’t know as we sailed into Panama was that the owner of the ship had flown in early to convince Panamanian officials to make a drug raid on the ship. He was certain that his bribes would work to kick off the hippie school, and that they would hand the now-gleaming, re-rigged, seaworthy Antarna back to him. Little did he imagine that the Panamanians, after searching the ship, would decide to take control of the ship for Panama, which they could do because the ship was registered under the Panamanian flag. They would hold the American students and teachers, and the international crew members, hostage. Stephanie, our director, was put in jail so we wouldn’t try to escape with the ship.

  Stephanie, always a smart fast talker, had gotten out of jail in a few days. Early on, we’d been scared, exchanging rumors like trading cards as we grasped onto any news of our fate. We heard the jail was full of Americans, sailors and hippie travelers. We heard the American Embassy wasn’t answering calls from Americans in trouble because they didn’t want to disrupt the Panama Canal negotiations.

  At first a harbor taxi arrived regularly with Stephanie, always looking unflustered with her smooth black hair and Jones of New York suits as she talked with the Panamanian officials. Stephanie met with the students to let us know she was hard at work making what would cost $6,000 in phone calls to everyone she knew in the states to get us out of here. She was letting our parents know. Not to worry. We watched and waited. We wondered which kid’s parent would have the most political pull to help us. One kid’s mom was a famous actress with her own show on TV, and a couple dads were CEO’s of big companies. We wondered whose calls to senators would have the biggest clout to release American kids being held hostage in Panama. Our bets were on the TV actress.

  The trade winds had stopped and there was no breeze in Colon Harbor. All over the ship, students camped out under lifeboats or under canvas strung up for shade at the fantail or lay sweating on their bunks with headphones on, listening to the Grateful Dead. We hadn’t seen the Captain or First Mate for days. They didn’t come out of their quarters. Some days we watched the parade of container ships steaming towards the canal. It started to feel like we had been living here forever. We passed the binoculars around, trying to make out what flag they were flying under.

  We turned our binoculars on the Panamanian Navy PT boat at anchor a few hundred feet from our ship. At the bow, the machine gun was still pointed towards our ship. Under cover, the crew had their feet up, hats down, and looked asleep to us. One of us would nudge another: “Maybe we could make a run for it and get out of here before they wake up.”

  “Yeah, sure.” We rolled on our backs, put a pillow under our heads and went back to reading. All over the ship we lived on books, working our way through all the novels by Herman Hesse, Lord of the Rings, the Dune trilogy, and Carlos Castaneda books.

  We waited and waited as our stores of food and water ran down, waited until Stephanie’s negotiations—and who knows how much money—were successful in freeing us. The Panamanian officials told us we were lucky and allowed to leave. We packed up the school books and supplies, the library, and our gear, filling an endless costly trail of little boats to a dock, loaded and unloaded onto trucks, then loaded onto a train, and carried across Panama to a privately charted plane to Puerto Rico. The ship would remain in a back bay for years, the sails and rigging rotting in the relentless sun.

  In Puerto Rico, we were loaded onto school buses, put up in a Catholic boarding school overnight, until buses carried us up and over narrow twisting mountain dirt roads to deposit the students and remaining teachers in front of a tiny one-room concrete block building overlooking pastures where cows with long horns grazed. Stephanie had arranged it all by phone from New York, finding a parent with a “farm” where we could stay until she found us another ship. Ever the magician, she had one almost lined up, she assured us.

  We swam in the breakers, read in hammocks, slept in clusters in a meadow with weary friends, too lost in dreams to talk much, until I woke up one morning. A young Puerto Rican man was reaching his hand inside my shorts. I sat up, looked at him and whispered, “What are you doing?”

  He smiled. “Don’t you want me?”

  “No!” I pulled my sleeping bag up to my chin. I lied, “I have a boyfriend,” and gestured to my collection of friends nearby.

  “Then why isn’t he sleeping next to you?” he asked persistently.

  I said firmly, “Go away.” Finally he did.

  That day, my brother and I decided it was time to go home. We hitchhiked to a little hamlet where there was a pay phone. We called collect. Our mother answered. She was fierce and crying at the same time. “Get to the airport. I will have plane tickets waiting for you. Come home.”

  She snuck into the bedroom while our father napped, took his wallet, found his credit card, stretched the phone cord into my room, and made her calls.

  The summer after the ship: Wood, Hubbard, Elizabeth, 1972

  PRESSURE COOKER

  1972

  I have the capacity in me for every crime.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  I HAVE NO MEMORY HOW OUR FATHER RESPONDED when we returned from the ship. But that summer it seemed our family disappeared behind a wall of thorns that grew up around the house, impenetrable, encasing us. It seemed we saw no one, and no one came to the glass house. Our father was home too much with little work. Our mother slipped out to work at the Probation Department in the city. The garden grew, we cooked meals, yet for me the summer remains only in fragments, scraps of nightmares, torrents of words yelled at all hours of night, as we were broken down, our minds battered like prisoners, separated from life.

  OUR MOTHER GRADUATED from college on a broiling hot day in June, with Honors in Criminal Justice. Woodie drove our family into the city for the ceremony. He passed dangerously, cutting in front of traffic. People slammed on brakes and honked at him. We braced ourselves in our seats, held on to the door handles, glancing wide-eyed to each other. He was furious. We were hungry and he wouldn’t stop for food. On campus, we climbed up into the football stadium finding empty seats, and sat under a broiling sun, watching hundreds of gowned figures cross a stage far below, for hours.

  I watched clouds float by, reflected i
n the silver mirrored dorm towering twenty-seven stories over us. I asked Woodie, “How’s it going at Sander Hall?”

  His face grimaced. He spat the words, “The students are animals.” He looked away furiously at the crowds of families and students watching the graduation.

  OUR FRIEND CHUCK told me later what happened at Sander Hall. The first winter had been bad: thefts, robberies, rape. Then arson. Someone tossed a firecracker down a trash chute. Smoke rose, fire alarms rang. The fire department came. 1300 students filed down the center staircase in the wee hours of the night to wait in the first-floor lounges until All Clear. Over the years, students started setting off fire alarms daily. Students descended with the alarms until many ignored them to try to sleep. Students lit paper stuffed in garbage cans. Others lit paper shoved in around the fire alarm. Two freshmen girls, good students from good families, were sentenced for arson. Sander Hall was called “The Firehouse.”

  We looked for our mother, who was down there in the crowds of students in black gowns. She was safe, away from Woodie. Afterwards, when we found her in the crowd, she was radiant, wearing her father’s gown, her short curly hair under her mother’s cap, waving her diploma. She kept repeating, “I did it! After all these years, I did it!”

  He growled at her, “What do you think you’ll do with that?” and stalked off.

  We followed him obediently. Tangled in a web, we began to dream desperate ways to escape.

  ON A DAY when no one was home, my sixteen-year-old brother, Wood, took the.22 from the back of our father’s closet in their bedroom. He loaded it and lay down on his father’s side of the bed, and put the gun to his head.

  The house was quiet. He heard the refrigerator humming, a lawn mower started up in the distance. The room was in shadow from the poplars on the east side of the house. He hated the smell of his father’s sweat in the mashed feather pillow under his head. He’d show that bastard. His eyes scanned the room and stopped on his mother’s bookshelf next to the window. The books she worked so hard to read, on prisons, concentration camps, and the history of Russia.

  He remembered sitting at the kitchen table with his mother, how she made spelling lists fun. How she pulled him towards her for a hug. How he felt getting home from the ship when he threw his arms around her at the airport. He relaxed his finger on the trigger. He looked at her side of the bed. He couldn’t do this to her. He heard the crunch of gravel of a car in the driveway. He jumped up quickly and put the.22 back in the closet.

  ON THE HIGHWAY between Cincinnati and the suburbs, in Loveland, there was a section where concrete walls lined the four lanes, a deep trough for heavily loaded trucks and commuters to roar through, three stories below the street above. Every time I drove home from the city through Love-land, I had to restrain myself from driving our old VW bus into the concrete walls. I went to sleep imaging how quickly I would vanish, hitting the wall at sixty miles an hour.

  MY BROTHER WOOD borrowed our mother’s car, a two-door 2002 BMW. Late one night in town near the Art Museum, he came down a hill so fast that when he hit a set of railroad tracks he was lifted airborne, and bent the chassis when he landed. He laughed when he told us his calculation for highway exits. “Take the speed limit, multiply by two and add ten.” My mother stared at him grimly. “I’ll kill you, if you kill yourself.”

  ONE DAY, AFTER hours of yelling, my mother left the house crying, got in her BMW and left. Not sure where she was going. Just to get away. Our dad ran down the stairs, got into his more powerful BMW and chased after her. She headed out of the village on a narrow two-lane road. He passed cars, honking as he raced to catch up. He overtook her in the opposing lane, and yelled, “Pull over. I have to talk to you!”

  Approaching traffic honked and screeched brakes before he pulled in behind her. He followed her onto the highway in his white luxury four-door BMW, pursuing her in her battered small grey BMW. Our father pursued her down the four-lane highway, quickly changing lanes with inches to spare at seventy miles an hour, with a crazed precision from his years as a racing car driver, trying to force her off the road. He would defend his actions later, saying, “I was trying to talk to her, and she refused.” He claimed he was the victim of her moods.

  She didn’t know where to go as she drove farther into the city, until she thought of her old friend, a lawyer. She’d be safe there, if she could make it. She followed parkways and back roads through neighborhoods, Woodie gunning his engine behind her. She pulled into their driveway, my father’s tires screaming to a halt behind her. He leapt out his door to chase after her, his voice roaring, “You will obey me!” Her friend appeared in time to throw open the heavy oak doorway for my mother, then to slam shut and lock, leaving my father to pace like a caged tiger on the road in front of the ivy-covered half-timber house. Hours later, he drove home. When she eventually returned, the yelling went on all night.

  ONE DAY, WHILE weeding alone in the garden, my steady heart jolted and stopped. I felt a strange absence in my chest. Then my heart began to race. I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t stand up. I sank down and lay on my back in the grass.

  Everything went still inside me. I felt strangely calm. I had watched my dad’s heart pound hard in his chest too hard and too fast as long as I could remember. When I was a kid, his heart would sometimes go too fast, they called it fibrillating, and it pounded so hard his whole body shook. He’d go to the hospital sometimes for weeks when they tried to slow it down. He almost died when I was seven. But he didn’t. He was okay, but they told him they couldn’t fix his heart. It would always be fast and irregular. He’d have to get used to it. But sometimes, when it went way too fast, he sank to the floor gasping for breath and had to be helped to bed.

  As I lay on the warm earth, my ribs felt like a delicate bamboo bird cage and my heart kept leaping and banging against the sides. I looked up into the elm branches arching high above me. There was no one I could call. The afternoon echoed around me. Another big jolt in my chest, a long silence, and then my familiar heartbeat came back like footsteps on a path covered with pine needles. I lay in the grass a long time, cradling my chest, before I slowly sat up. I was a girl who’d discovered she had her father’s heart.

  OUR HIPPIE FRIEND Chuck, who had become Jo’s best friend, sat with her at the round kitchen table when no one else was home. She was trying to figure out what to do. She felt stuck, stymied, unable to do anything. To get divorced was unthinkable for her generation. She kept trying, every day, struggling to get us through. But she was hopeless. “I’m just trying to save my family,” she said.

  He looked at her a long time. “What family?” He felt cruel and heartless.

  She looked at him, stunned. “You’re right.”

  HUBBARD, AT THIRTEEN, woke up nights, soaking with sweat, sobbing. He would dream for years of his father’s funeral. But he was sure it was all his fault. Lying in the dark, hearing his father’s occasional snore, the shifting of covers as his parents moved in the bedroom beyond his door, he felt sick with guilt. “What if imagining his funeral kills him?” He thought he was the worst person in the world.

  Hubbard knew what was coming, better than any of us. He knew our mother was leaving. Our father hated his son Wood, so Wood, of course, would go with Jo. Hubbard was a child but he knew what he had to do. He knew his father would stop at nothing. The only way to keep Woodie from killing our mother was to stay with his father. His father had to have a trophy, something he could hold over Jo. Hubbard knew what his sacrifice had to be.

  JO MET WITH Woodie’s psychiatrist a few times. But she felt like Phil Piker was trying to put her back together so she would keep the family and my father together. The last time she went, she told him, “Woodie’s always riding me and telling me what to do. He keeps throwing shit at me, and I have to catch it.”

  Phil asked, “Why do you have to catch it?”

  That night, our father was cooking furiously. Throwing out orders, he told Jo, “Get down the chafing dish.” She turned to h
im and said, “No.”

  My brothers and I stood, stunned.

  THAT’S WHEN THE yelling never stopped, no longer focused on us, it was all a barrage aimed at our mother. Her crimes were endless. She’d stolen his wallet to bring us home. She had changed. She wasn’t the girl he’d married. She was out to destroy our lives. She had to be stopped. He wouldn’t stand for this. His voice lashed out at all of us. Sometimes we stepped into the path of his fury to defend her. He turned his wrath on us, taking anything we said to use it against her, hurting her more. He’d roar at her, “Answer me! Confess! You are destroying our lives!” There was nothing anyone could do to stop the wall of words, the attacks. We tried to repeat what we’d said, but we couldn’t remember our words or our own thoughts after a while. His voice poisoned us and left us limp and hopeless. His voice rampaged through the glass-walled house every night and we couldn’t get away.