The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  On his first morning as skipper, Tupper called Lieutenant Kevin Marshall, one of the squadron’s nonflying administrative officers. He quickly went down his sailors, double-checking that they were all good to ship out for cruise in two weeks.

  The conversation went quickly until Tupper got to Whittle.

  “Is Master Chief Whittle ready to go?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Well, sir.”

  “Kevin, get in here.”

  Marshall walked down the long hall to Tupper’s office.

  “Kevin, we’re less than two weeks away from cruise, and you’re telling me my master chief can’t deploy?”

  Marshall explained where they were. Whittle was dealing with two kinds of trouble. One of his children had been seriously ill last year and he’d taken time off to deal with her problems. Tupper knew about that, but there was something else.

  Two wars had stretched the Army to its limits, so the Pentagon had taken to borrowing Navy personnel to fill noncombat slots in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Navy they were officially called IAs for Individual Augmentee but were known among the men as “goddamned IAs.” Whittle had just returned from a Black Ravens cruise when the Navy sent him to Afghanistan in 2008 to train non-commissioned Afghan officers. But at night the officers tended to fade back into the countryside and their Taliban roots. That left Whittle and thirteen sailors supervising military convoys on the roads in and out of Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan. Whittle and his men lived in constant fear of car bombs and other improvised explosive devices. Their fears were realized on September 20, 2008, when one of the trucks bound for Kandahar hit an IED, killing Army captain Bruno de Solenni and two Afghan soldiers. It fell to Whittle to ID and body-bag the three victims. He was never the same.

  Tupper had a decision to make. Ship out with a burned-out master chief or ship out without a master chief. He thought about it for a day and then called the chief in his office. He’d already made his decision.

  “Chief, are you ready to ship out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, you’re not. I’m leaving you at home.”

  Whittle began to cry, tears of shame and relief. Tupper handed him a box of Kleenex. The two men talked for a few minutes. Whittle suggested maybe he could meet the Ravens in Singapore, a month into the cruise. Tupper knew that wouldn’t happen. His sailor couldn’t stop apologizing.

  “I’m so sorry, sir. I’m letting you down.”

  “Shipmate, you’re not letting anybody down. You have your own war to fight. But I can’t take you with us.”

  Tupper and the Black Ravens had not even left Whidbey yet, and he was already a man down.

  Chapter Seven

  I don’t remember much about my baby days, but I’m told that Dad helps out more than most men. He does the dishes, changes diapers, and lets Mom head out with the girls. But he isn’t home alone all day with two screaming babies. He’s at work flying or at game two of the 1967 World Series with his brother-in-law, or he’s renting a small plane, letting his baby brother Paul take the controls as they circle above the Prudential Building in Boston.

  We move to Meridian, Mississippi, in 1968. That’s where Dad learns to fly jets and that’s where he crashes his first plane. Two years later, it’s on to Monterey so Dad can get his master’s in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School. That’s when I begin to remember things. One evening, Mom can’t find me in our small yard in base housing. She grows frantic. I hear her before I can see her.

  “STEPHEN THOMAS RODRICK.”

  I’m not really lost. I am playing catch with someone else’s father. She is pissed.

  “You can’t wait for your father? Fine, you don’t get to play with him either.”

  I whine that this doesn’t seem fair. Dad Substitute cringes and pats me on the head.

  “Good luck, buddy.”

  Mom is always there—she makes the sandwiches, she gives me my bath, she reads me Cat in the Hat—but Dad’s cameos are more dramatic. It is the last day of kindergarten in Monterey. I’m sitting outside of my classroom wearing Garanimals, a blue shirt and plaid pants that I hate. Inside, Mom and my teacher make small talk. They are killing time, waiting for someone. And there he is, Dad. He is late and runs down the hallway in black shoes and khakis, right past me, and closes the door behind him.

  I am five and small, but can already name the starting nine for the Oakland A’s. I also cry a lot: when my sister punches me, when I can’t make my hands do what I want them to do, most any time, really. The teacher wants to hold me back because of my size and emotional issues. Dad will not hear of it.

  “He will be bored. It’s a mistake. Don’t do it.”

  End of discussion. That memory is blurry, an underexposed Polaroid probably explained to me later. More in focus are two sweaty men in dusty green uniforms. Dad is buying them sandwiches. They are from the Mayflower Moving Company. Dad’s been transferred to NAS Alameda, so we’re moving from Monterey to Pleasanton, California, thirty miles outside of San Francisco. It’s a hot day in August. After the men finish eating, Dad peels off some bills from his black wallet. He shakes their hands and we head home.

  Our new garage is filled with boxes and crates. Our garage is always filled with boxes and crates. Some of them with Florida and Rhode Island addresses predate me. Even when we are settled, we are not. Green and gray stickers from moving companies remain on the side of Dad’s desk until Mom gives it away forty years later. Dad says everything is always ready to be packed up and shipped because there could be a disagreement with the Russians. I don’t understand; the Russians seem like pretty decent folks in the Soyuz scrapbooks Dad gives me on my birthday.

  Dad is stuck flying A-3s out of NAS Alameda. I don’t understand much, but I know this makes him mad. Vietnam is winding down and he never got in the fight. Late at night, Mom and Dad talk of classmates shot down and in prison camps or dead.

  “Pete, you’ve got two small kids. Thank God you’re not there.”

  I’m pretty sure Dad doesn’t thank God. His buddies are flying Skyhawks and Intruders. He’s flying something named a Skywarrior, but everyone calls it “the Whale.” I think this is an odd name for a plane. One day, Dad gives me a mimeographed piece of paper with the history and photo of the plane. He reads it to me. The A-3 was created big and heavy in the mid-1950s so it could launch from an aircraft carrier and deliver nuclear bombs a thousand miles away. But the Whale’s mission was made obsolete by intercontinental ballistic missiles that could deliver twice the nuclear payload twice as quick. The A-3 was turned into a tanker, circling carriers and refueling planes as they went off to bomb Vietnam and Cambodia.

  In the early 1970s, the A-3 is converted into a radar-jamming plane hoping to stop the surface-to-air missiles killing Dad’s friends in the skies over Vietnam. But Dad misses that too. His first A-3 cruise begins in the summer of 1973, just as naval air operations over Vietnam are ending.

  I don’t understand all that. I’ve got sports. Dad is a casual Celtics and Red Sox fan, but my interest is something else. I memorize the sports section of The Guinness Book of World Records and torture neighbors with stray facts about quarterbacks who caught their own passes. Mom and Dad have season tickets to the Oakland Raiders, but I’m too young to go. (Or so they tell me.) I listen to the three-hour pregame show and then watch the game with a babysitter.

  The Raiders are my heroes. One day while Dad is gone I see an ad in the Oakland Tribune for a charity fundraiser featuring future Hall of Famers Gene Upshaw and Art Shell. I beg a neighbor to take me. He says no at first, but I turn on the waterworks and he gives in. Upshaw and Shell are the first black men I’ve ever touched or talked with. It is the greatest day of my life. But Dad isn’t there. He isn’t there when I burst into tears when the Raiders lose to the Steelers on something called the Immaculate Reception. But Mom is there
.

  “It’s only a game. Jesus. Don’t be a baby.”

  She tries but doesn’t understand. I’m starting to get it. Dad’s never there. I learn a new term: workups. This means Dad gets up at five or six in the morning, throws his duffel bag in his car, and vanishes for three weeks at a time. He explains it to Terry and me one night.

  “Before we can go on the big cruise, we need to do little cruises.”

  I don’t know what a big cruise is. Let’s face it. I have some issues. School is so hard. I am seven and I can barely write my name and I definitely can’t ride a bike. And I can’t tie my shoes. I sit on my bed, practicing for hours, but never get my fingers to move my laces up and around. I go purple and cry.

  I do the same thing at school, especially during art class. One day, we are making tepees for Thanksgiving. The other kids cut their paper, put on glue, and draw on their new creations with Crayolas. I spend a half hour trying to complete the first step, cutting a triangle out of my paper. There are no green-handled lefty scissors, so I try to cut with my right hand, more like my right claw. I bawl and tell my teacher I can’t do it. She watches me fumble with the scissors. She then grabs my face and yanks it toward her own.

  “Stop joking around and acting stupid.”

  It takes her a few minutes to catch on that I’m not acting stupid. I just can’t do it. She pulls out a manila envelope and stuffs my crappily cut-out paper inside and dashes a note off to Mom. I take it home on the bus. Mom reads the note and sighs.

  “You know you’re embarrassing me, right?”

  Immediately, she regrets saying it. I can see it in her eyes. She’s trying so hard. And I know she loves me. She cooks and cleans and listens to my long monologues about the Raiders and third-party presidential candidates. For hours, she listens. And then Dad comes home and I fly to him.

  There are things I can do. I can read and I can run my mouth. Mom and Dad give me a boys’ history of the United States for Christmas, and I memorize all the small-type bios in the back. Who’s Alger Hiss? John Nance Garner? No one cares but me. There’s not a subject that I don’t have a thousand questions for: When was Halley’s comet coming back? How could Joe Rudi hurt his shoulder while lifting a bag of groceries? Why did Ronald Reagan always look so happy?

  This is California in the 1970s. My second-grade year is spent in a pod classroom where three teachers roam between ninety students. Everyone is always shouting with my voice rising above all the others until Mrs. Monaghetti loses it.

  “Can you please shut up for a while?”

  I try, I really do. My teachers don’t understand. I take tests and finish in the top 1 percent, but I can’t build a one-story house with Legos. At home, Mom says she’s trying her best, but I’m driving her to the loony bin. I believe her. One afternoon, she puts bright red lipstick on and picks me up early from school. We drive the forty-five minutes to the base, me chattering away, her preoccupied with traffic and our destination.

  I meet with a Navy doctor with tired eyes. We talk about Dad and what he does for a living. We talk about school and how boring it is. We talk about me getting along with Mom. After an hour, he pats me on the head, and Mom leaves the hospital with a bottle filled with white tablets.

  It’s Ritalin. I take one in the morning and then one from the school nurse around lunchtime. I can’t tell you if they help or not. Probably not, because the school comes up with a new idea: I’ll spend half the day with my regular class and half the day with special-ed kids.

  This is a disaster. I spend afternoons with retarded boys and girls a half foot taller than me who outweigh me by sixty or seventy pounds. I cry and they cry too, but their tears come with rage. One day, a kid with a crew cut throws a Chinese checkers game at my head, marbles and all. I hide in a closet.

  After that, Mom moves to straight bribery. Mom and the base psychologist come up with Snoopy Dollars; every day I keep my mouth shut and make my bed I get a fake dollar with a beagle on it. Once I reach twenty Snoopy Dollars I can buy baseball cards with the proceeds. It sort of works, and by summertime I have an almost complete collection of 1974 Topps cards, but Mom grows tired of keeping track. The contest ends.

  “I shouldn’t have to pay you to be good.”

  What does Dad say? Not much. He is a ghost.

  One Saturday, Mom says she needs a break. She takes Terry shopping. Dad is in the garage working on his MG. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and stained khakis. We live at the top of a hill in a new subdivision; I’m a little bit up the street riding my new blue bicycle. Well, riding it is a big fat lie. I’m six or seven, but still can’t exist without training wheels. So I push-pedal up the street. I go by Mr. Lewis’s house—the nice man who took me to meet Gene Upshaw—I’ve got so much new information for him! It’s about Reggie Jackson and Fred Biletnikoff and that song “Seasons in the Sun.” But he drops the garage door just before I get there. A couple of neighbor kids surround me. One boy starts in.

  “You can’t really ride that bike.”

  ‘‘Yes, I can.”

  “No, you’re a baby. You need training wheels.”

  “Can too.”

  “Okay, ride it down the hill.”

  By now there are four or five kids around me. I hope for rescue, maybe the ice-cream truck? No, too early. Dad? Nope. His head is buried in the MG. I look down the hill. It is steep but clear, just one car at the bottom. The kids keep talking, crowding in on me.

  And then I’m off. Did I jump or was I pushed? Doesn’t matter. I’m flying down the pavement, picking up speed. I’ve never gone this fast in my life. And I’m not tipping over!

  But then I start heading left. This isn’t surprising. I do everything to the left. I’m heading straight for the car, actually a yellow pickup truck. I try to steer to the right, but I can’t do anything to the right. I lean hard; maybe I’ll miss it.

  No.

  How long have I been lying here? Thirty seconds? A minute? Ten minutes? Where did the kids go? My bike’s front fender is twisted in. I see a small, sharp dent in the truck’s grill. Mom isn’t going to be happy. There are splashes of red on the handlebars. Where did that come from? I breathe in and hear a whistling noise. This is weird since I can’t whistle. I feel a breeze on my gums. That’s not supposed to happen. I put my hand to my mouth and touch teeth where there should be skin.

  Only then does it hit me. My face is ripped open below my lip. Still, I feel calm. I never feel calm. I know Dad will kill me if I just leave my bike here, so I slowly walk it back up the hill. The bent front wheel scrapes and wheezes every time it turns. My red shirt is a darker crimson by the time I get home. I walk into the garage and put my bike where it’s supposed to go. Dad is bent over with a wrench. I pull on his belt loop and he turns around.

  “Dad? Don’t be mad.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  It’s the first and last time I hear Dad swear. He picks me up and carries me inside. He wraps ice in a towel and holds it to my chin. For a second, he panics. What does he do? I see an opening.

  “Dad, I just want to stay here and watch Sesame Street. Just one show.”

  That snaps him out of it. We’re in his MG and the top is down. I don’t even ask why we pass two hospitals so we can drive thirty miles to NAS Alameda. My chin is crusty and shredded, but I’m happy. I’m with Dad. We pull up to the base hospital and he half carries, half walks me through the doors. A nurse looks at me strangely. I know her from somewhere. Then it hits me: I know her from here. I’ve been here so many times the doctor told Mom that I should wear a helmet.

  “Not you again. This is becoming once a month.”

  Dad blushes purple, just like me when I get angry! The nurse takes us into an examination room and peels off my blood-soaked shirt. I give up my towel and a compress is pressed against my chin. Someone comes in and gives me a shot. I look up at Dad. He gazes back, his face covered in a f
ive o’clock shadow even though it is barely noon. He brushes the hair out of my eyes. I’m about to get nine stitches inside my mouth and nine more on the outside to close the wreck that is now my chin. And yet I’m smiling, so much that I can feel the crusted blood cracking on my face. I’m here with Dad and it’s just the two of us. So what if I had to lose a pint of blood for it to happen? Doesn’t matter. It happened. I drift away to sleep. I am happy.

  But not for long. Dad goes away for seven months. This makes me a minor celebrity at my non-Navy school. The idea that a parent can vanish for most of the school year seems like an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man.

  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.