The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  But it was okay. His back might ache, but at least he was now doing something real, something that justified his family’s sacrifice. That night, he got his first good sleep in weeks.

  The good feeling didn’t last long. Doc called him early the next morning. One of his sailors had been gravely injured.

  The Prowler used nitrogen cartridges to blow down wheels and flaps if a mechanical failure prevented the plane from doing it the normal way. Seaman Ryan Headden was up on a ladder manning a hose refilling nitrogen through a Prowler’s nose wheel. When he was done, another sailor was supposed to cut off the nitrogen and then Headden would unscrew the hose. But something went wrong. No one turned off the nitrogen. Headden twisted off the pressurized hose and it whipped around and smashed him in the left eye, an eye unprotected because Headden had pushed his safety goggles to the top of his head.

  At first, the injury didn’t seem too bad. Navy doctors bandaged Headden up and sent him back to his room with ice and a Percocet. But Headden woke up the next morning and couldn’t see out of his left eye. The eye socket had swelled and exploded, detaching his retina.

  Tupper was furious. Where was the veteran chief who was supposed to be supervising the kid? Why was the most junior sailor performing tricky maintenance on a ladder while his superiors waited below? Why didn’t someone insist he wear his goggles correctly?

  But he pushed those thoughts out of his head temporarily. They needed to get Headden to an eye specialist as soon as possible. The nearest air base was in Oman, a two-hour flight away. Headden was bandaged up and prepared for a COD flight. Tupper dispatched a trusty chief to travel with the kid so he would be less afraid.

  Then the phone rang again. The COD was broken. Tupper cursed. The damned CODs were always broken. They were worthless. The Nimitz’s command then made a compassionate decision. The 1,092-foot-long nuclear aircraft carrier with 5,600 sailors in the middle of combat ops turned west and hauled ass for six hours until the Nimitz was within helicopter range of Oman.

  Tupper was grateful, but he also knew he was screwed. A sailor in his command had been injured while performing unsafe maintenance, forcing a warship to divert from wartime operations. Sure, the air wing kept flying missions to Afghanistan, but every pilot had to fly longer, every plane had to burn more fuel, every sailor had to work that much harder. It had happened on Tupper’s watch. It wouldn’t be forgotten.

  Headden was eventually taken from Oman to Bagram where an ophthalmologist specializing in battlefield injuries unsuccessfully tried to save the vision in his eye. Headden was medevaced to Germany and then back stateside to Walter Reed Hospital. Back on the Nimitz, another Raven sailor put his hand into a still-spinning jet engine, resulting in thirty-three stitches. Tupper and Vinnie met in his stateroom and tried to come up with a new strategy. They lowered their goals. Instead of being the best Prowler squadron in the fleet, they talked about getting through one day without kicking themselves in the balls.

  And he kept flying. On the long flights up and down the boulevard, some of the pilots and ECMOs bullshitted the whole way. On one flight, four Black Ravens spent five hours debating how they could introduce anal sex into a relationship after a no-anal-sex first year. But Tupper’s flights were filled with silence. He watched rivers, sparse forests of pine, and small valley towns pass below him, saying nothing but what was required.

  Back in his room, he stared at pictures of Beth and the kids and some Churchill quotes he’d taped above his medicine cabinet for inspiration. He started dealing with an emotion he hadn’t felt since he was eighteen. It was a dark thought he had not let enter his head before, not when he was at the academy, not when he was a test pilot, not even when he was Doogie’s XO. The feeling was doubt.

  But then he received an email from Brenna. She was stuck on an algebra problem and Mom couldn’t help. Tupper typed up some math tips he’d learned as a boy. A little later, Brenna emailed him back. “Thank you, you’re my hero.”

  That helped.

  October burned by. It was supposed to be the midway part of the cruise, but with the extension they were barely a third of the way through. Still, Beth and the wives went forward with their midcruise dinner back on Whidbey. Tupper had all the officers write letters to their wives and girlfriends that would be placed on their dinner plates. Tupper struggled with what to say in his note. He settled with describing him and Beth as two proud trees whose roots had grown intertwined. He knew she would think it was corny, but it was true. It was also true that it was hard to find new ways to say I love you after twenty years.

  Beth passed on some new school pictures of the girls and Tupper saw how much they had changed in just three months. A week later, he awoke to an email from Beth announcing in a sentence that Brenna and Caitlin had been baptized at the church the family had started attending two years ago. In an earlier time, Tupper would have been pissed at the unilateral decision making. But things that once seemed worth controlling simply didn’t seem that important now. He hoped they would gain strength from the water.

  Besides, there wasn’t a lot of time. One moment he was reading about his kids being baptized in Anacortes, the next he was 25,000 feet above 85 Charlie kilo, thirty miles north of Kandahar, listening to an out-of-breath tactical air controller huffing his way to the top of a hill so he could direct Tupper’s Prowler on an aerial path to support troops under attack.

  Naval aviators talk endlessly of mastering situational awareness, knowing where you are and knowing what comes next at all times while in the cockpit. But on the long flights back from Afghanistan, Tupper’s mind would toggle furiously between home and war, mission and family. He’d approach the carrier and his laser focus would return, but then he’d see his kids’ faces swim before his eyes as he parked his Prowler on the edge of the deck. Tupper knew his situational awareness was seriously fucked.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We lingered in Oak Harbor for just five months. There was an unspoken rule for widows: move on. All we did was remind our neighbors of the worst-case scenario. Besides, Mom said she didn’t want to drive down roads decorated with homemade welcome-home signs. That was a homecoming she’d never know again. I completely agreed. I loved Oak Harbor as much as a thirteen-year-old uncoordinated, fatherless ADD boy could love anything, but now I wanted to get the hell out.

  Mom considered moving us to her hometown of Virginia Beach, but that was a Navy town too, still too much blue and gold. Her sister Nancy insisted that we move near her in Flushing, Michigan, just outside of Flint. They were not particularly close, but she stepped up after Dad died—neither of Mom’s parents made it out for the memorial service—so Mom listened.

  Nancy was a tanned type A personality always changing in and out of tennis whites. She’d worked as a stewardess before marrying my uncle Larry, a suave dentist with a Clark Gable mustache who waltzed into rooms like he was starring in a movie only he knew about. They lived in a mansion and told Mom there was plenty of room until we found a place of our own. I delivered my last papers on April 25, 1980, the day of the failed mission to rescue the hostages in Tehran. We boarded a dumpy turboprop at a grass airfield just outside of Oak Harbor. Our plane took off and banked south toward Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Crosswoods grew smaller and smaller in the airplane window until it was gone for good.

  We arrived in Flint just as the auto industry was collapsing, but you wouldn’t have known it from my uncle and aunt. There was a Cadillac and a Jaguar in the five-car garage and a lake house up north. Mom hoped my uncle would serve as a surrogate father to me. It didn’t happen. I was thrown off by his constant presence. He came home for lunch every day, eating a sandwich and then dozing for a few minutes on the couch in his powder blue shirt as a game show droned on in the background. That seemed unnatural to me.

  We moved to
Flint before our house was finished because Mom hoped I’d make some friends before summertime. Unfortunately, Flushing Junior High was populated with kids in REO Speedwagon T-shirts, known by a previously unheard term: burnouts. They smoked weed and cigarettes before gym. Back in Oak Harbor, it was hard to buy candy cigarettes. Here, no one cared what Dad did or how he died. At lunch, I substituted chocolate shakes for my ice-cream sandwiches. I drank them alone and then wandered the hallways, trying not to be noticed.

  In June, we moved into a subdivision called Hidden Creek Drive. The subdivision’s name was a lie; the creek was pretty easy to find since there were no trees. GM middle managers filled the tract homes. There were two cars in every driveway, most religiously washed on Saturday afternoons. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood alone—most of the kids were much younger than me—and wonder about people who waxed and shined up metal just for the rain to fall and wash away their hard work. Maybe they had nothing else to do.

  Mom kept it together for a while. Her father came out and the two of us finished our basement, which consisted of me hammering the occasional nail and then Grandpa following behind me, pulling out the nail, and redoing my work. The walls of our new home were decorated with old pictures and plaques from my dad’s career, while models of his planes sat peacefully on the mantelpiece. But we never talked about him. Whole calendar years could pass without a specific mention of him. Dad’s parents came to visit when I was fourteen, and his name was not spoken.

  I no longer spent hours in my room conjuring up season-long triumphs on the football field. Instead, I devised narratives where Dad wasn’t dead. No bodies were recovered after the accident, so the rest was easy. They had ejected in the Indian Ocean and were immediately picked up by an enemy spy ship, probably Soviet. They were taken to a secret prison and locked away.

  But, somehow, Dad led a prison break. He took his crew across a no-man’s-land of mountain ranges and deserts until they staggered, barely alive, to a friendly border. We received a phone call in the middle of the night and through the crackle we could hear Dad’s voice.

  “I’m alive.”

  The story usually ended with me sitting at a table with Dad’s arm around me as he did an interview with the Today Show. The fantasy lived in my mind for years.

  That first summer, we drove to Cape Cod and shared a house for three weeks with my father’s sister, Lyn, and her four kids. One afternoon, I took the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard to see my Oak Harbor buddy Billy who was visiting his grandmother. Billy had two brothers, but this trip was just him and his dad, something I never experienced. I watched with glee as they short-sheeted each other’s beds and talked about their Pinto having 4-60 air conditioning; four windows down at sixty miles per hour. I didn’t want to leave.

  We drove back to Flushing a few days later, and the following Sunday just Mom and I headed to Mass. We parked and I told her there was something I wanted to discuss.

  “Billy’s dad said I could live with them back in Oak Harbor. Or maybe we could move back.”

  Mom slapped me hard.

  “You wanted to move here as much as everyone else did. Why don’t you try helping for once in your life?”

  She was right. That summer, Mom sold Dad’s MG to her probate lawyer. Minutes before he arrived, she stared at Dad’s car, still shrouded in canvas. I didn’t know what to say, so I rode off on my bike. That night, Mom was stone silent. At dinner, she stared at me through bloodshot eyes.

  “What?”

  “Why did you make me do that by myself?”

  I had no answer. Soon, September was here. I determined there was no way I would get out of Flushing High School alive. I begged Mom to shield me from the criminal element and send me to Powers Catholic, Flint’s parochial school. This was a bit counterintuitive, as Powers was located in a sketchy neighborhood of Flint, the murder capital of the country. But then again, Mom had just moved us to a city with 20 percent unemployment; faulty logic was the family ideology. I told her Dad would have wanted me there. She couldn’t argue with that.

  Powers was not the sanctuary I imagined. Most of the kids had attended one of the county’s K-through-8 Catholic schools. Many had friends dating back to first communion. I didn’t know anyone. This wasn’t new for me, but no one else was Navy, so they were more guarded. Strangers were intruders.

  I went out for freshman football. In Oak Harbor, I’d been decent in football because the league was done by weight, so I was thirteen playing against ten-year-olds. Here I was a 104-pound fifth-string defensive back on a team of seventy. I stretched one of my dad’s Naval Academy T-shirts over my shoulder pads for practice thinking it made me look tough, but I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  A wide-eyed redheaded sadist named Mr. Duncan was one of our coaches. He taught science, but Bunsen burners and splayed frogs were just the price he paid so he could stalk the sidelines like a Viking on a killing spree. Duncan lived for a football drill named Bull in the Ring. We’d all gather in a circle, start running in place, and make animal noises until Duncan screamed out two names, supposedly at random. Usually, he’d pair two kids of like size and talent. Other times, he went for sadistic comedy.

  “Artis!” “Rodrick!”

  Bill Artis was already six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. I tried to go low on him, but Artis went lower. I was flipped up in the air—a rodeo clown getting the horns. I landed in the dust with a thud. No one made a sound for a moment. The trainer checked my pulse. He assured everyone that I was not dead, and laughter became permissible. I would have laughed too, but I couldn’t breathe. Bill apologized after practice but also suggested I might want to consider cross-country. I should have listened. I got in for eight plays all season.

  I was placed in a number of honors classes because of my acute skill at filling in circles with a pencil. I found my people, so to speak, in Mr. Winchester’s history class. One of them was Gordie, the fair-haired boy of our class. I’d seen him on the football sidelines—he smartly nursed a wrist sprain for the entire season—but he seemed out of my social class, aka the untouchable new kid. He was blond and an expert soccer player, the Flint equivalent of an Ibiza playboy.

  In a strange bit of synchronicity, we shared a heritage: his dad was also a Navy pilot, if a distant one, living in Washington, D.C. We never really spoke about it, but any accredited child psychologist or sitcom writer could have predicted what would happen next. Together, we embarked on an unintentional competition to see who could have the most spectacularly underachieving high school career.

  It was the fall of 1980 and we had an unhealthy affection for Ronald Reagan. I’d grown up in California and Reagan was the governor when I was a little boy. On TV, he seemed cool and handsome. When he ran for president in 1976, I read everything I could, rooting for Reagan with the desperation I usually reserved for the Raiders. I cried when he lost to Gerald Ford. Now he was running against Jimmy Carter. Carter was an Annapolis guy but not an aviator, and Dad and his squadron mates hated him, blaming parts shortages on his White House. Oh, yeah, he also turned the Kitty Hawk around, indirectly leading to Dad’s death. I was not a fan. Gordie and I drew up business cards that read the Conservative Liberation Organization, ripping off Yasser Arafat. We celebrated Reagan’s landslide by toasting milk cartons in the lunchroom.

  Things at home started slipping away. Mom managed to keep us fed and chauffeured us to our various school activities, but her brave face was gone. Most days, she strug
gled to keep it together. I’d do puzzles with Chrissie while she fixed dinner with a furious clatter, banging pots and slamming glasses. We’d eat in silence, then we’d all go our separate ways: me up to my room to work on Dad’s escape, Terry to talk on the phone with her new friends, and Mom to put Christine to bed.

  My first-semester grades were a clot of B minuses with a single A in history. I gave them to Mom after dinner one night. She stared at the page for a full minute, as if she could make the letters change by sheer will. Then she threw the card at me, stormed upstairs, and slammed her bedroom door.

  I could hear her sobbing. Terry came out of her room, rolled her eyes, and took Christine down to the basement to play. I sat outside Mom’s door. I could hear her talking to someone.

  “Why did you do this to me? Why? I can’t do this. Why did you leave me? Why? Please, please come back.”

  I knocked softly on the door.

  “Mom, I’ll do better. I promise.”

  “GO AWAY.”

  The thing is, I didn’t do better. At school, I learned that the quickest way to stop the other kids from making fun of you was to make fun of yourself. In religion class, I memorized passages from the book of Job and started doing impromptu readings to spice things up.

  “My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.”

  The other kids would laugh with or at me. I didn’t care. I soon dropped out of honors classes. Mom took me to an adolescent therapist that spring. I sat through one session and couldn’t get over his awful wine-colored suit. I was no fashion expert, but I knew no one dressed that badly could help me. At school, a sweet, harmless counselor came up to me in the hallway. He took me into his office and we talked for a few minutes.