In the cockpit, Tupper allowed himself an instant of triumph while keeping an eye on his puke bag. He wanted to do a flyover of the Nimitz for the sailors of 135 still onboard, but the skies were soupy so the Black Ravens gave it a pass, preventing Tupper from giving the finger to the tower as they passed by at 450 knots. Instead, the Prowlers hit their tanker and then rendezvoused a few miles behind the boat. They were just sixty minutes from home.
I drove over to the base around the same time. I passed by Clover Valley Elementary School, where Timmy Newman had told me about his daddy’s crash. I looked at the “Welcome Home Ravens” signs that lined the road to the main gate and thought of Mom and understood better why she had to get out of there. It was thirty years on and I still felt the twinge that everyone else’s father was coming home, but not mine.
I walked into the Black Ravens’ hangar and watched from a distance. The wind whipped at American flags and the skirts of wives determined to dress sexy no matter how glum the Whidbey weather. I recognized them from the pictures that hung in the ready room. They were all young, beautiful, and nervous.
Their kids whipped around the hangar, nearly toppling a table full of beer. Many of the little boys wore miniature flight suits, their hair slicked back. Chicken’s kid came up to me, stopped smartly, and gave me a salute. For a moment, I was a child again. Mom was there too, licking her fingers and trying to tame my cowlick. She’s telling me to calm down.
Here, Beth Ware ran the show and did a quick head count. Stonz’s wife was running late. Beth knew Tammy Tornga would be ashamed if her husband landed after eight months gone and she was still in the parking lot. Beth called the tower, who relayed the message to Tupper. He understood. So he took the Black Ravens on one more lap around Whidbey.
Fifteen minutes later, the Prowlers came in low over the airfield, their Pratt & Whitney engines screaming. Everyone clapped while a Seattle TV station filmed the scene. The Prowlers then separated and peeled off one by one, landing two minutes apart. The planes then taxied across the runway slowly, a last few minutes of torture for the families.
The engines grew even louder. Moms slapped disposable earplugs into their kids’ ears. Then the engines were cut. Canopies popped open, and aviators began climbing down. Decorum vanished. Wives sprinted in high heels across the deck and threw themselves in their husbands’ arms. Vinnie gave his wife, Marci, a peck on the cheek and she handed him his boy. He kissed Henry on the cheek tentatively; it was hard to go from carrier deck to a new life so quickly.
Tupper climbed down last. Beth and the girls didn’t run at first, but then Brenna sprinted toward him. Caitlin followed. They group-hugged and Tupper wobbled for a moment. But he managed to keep his feet, a boxer staggering back to his corner. Commodore Slais offered a handshake and welcomed him home. Tupper gave the TV station a sound bite about what an honor it was to serve his country and how good it felt to be back in the USA. Then his path crossed with Crapper, his two sons looking smart in their flight suits. There was a momentary pause and then Tupper stuck out his hand.
Twenty minutes later, everyone was gone. Gone to catch up with their kids. Gone to fuck their wives’ brains out. I thought about going across the street to the Prowler memorial and putting my hands on Dad’s plaque, but it felt like an empty gesture. I watched kids and dads pile into their cars. I headed back to my motel room, picked up some Chinese takeout, and watched sitcoms for hours.
Sherm wasn’t on the fly-in. One officer had to stay onboard and supervise the load-off of the squadron’s gear the next day when the Nimitz pulled into Bremerton. Sherm volunteered; he had joined the cruise late, and besides, he reasoned, there was no one waiting for him. He needed a ride home, so I drove down the next morning.
Around 11:00 a.m., the Nimitz gracefully slid into its berth. A band played while mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and sons and daughters cheered and wept. The gangway dropped; and first-time fathers were allowed to disembark first regardless of rank. Tupper was there, still pale in a ski cap and a Carhartt field coat. He shook the hand of each Black Raven as their feet touched back on American soil.
The pier was deserted by 1:00 p.m. Sherm was supposed to be done by two o’clock, but this was the Navy, so the paperwork slid to three and three slid to four. The last papers were finally signed, and we took the ferry across to Seattle and made the long drive north. He called his wife and they talked for a few minutes, but all hope was gone; their marriage was finished. We pulled into his driveway in Anacortes just as last light was fading.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Sherm in a soft voice.
He took a breath and got out of the car. He turned the key and opened the door. The house was giant and modern, a Pottery Barn showroom after closing time. But there was no sign of life. His kids’ closets were bare except for some sad, stray reminders. Trent’s Mickey Mouse Halloween costume hung alone in the boys’ bedroom. A child’s finger-painting had fallen off the refrigerator and was curled up on the kitchen floor.
Sherm didn’t say anything. His blue eyes were unreadable. We made a run into town and bought a pizza and some more beer. Back at the house, Sherm wanted to show me something. It was a cruise video from his time flying Prowlers over Iraq during the second Gulf War. He popped the DVD into a giant plasma-screen television downstairs in his living room. Between the television and leather couch was Trent’s circular Fisher-Price train tracks complete with a ride-along engine and caboose. It had been too big to pack. Sherm turned up the sound.
“This was one of the greatest moments of my life. I want you to see it.”
He fast-forwarded through port calls and onboard pranks. Soon we were over Iraq in the first days of the air war. Sherm was filming it all with a hand-held camera. For the air attack on Iraq, the Prowlers, usually unarmed, were fitted with missiles specifically designed to destroy Iraqi radar stations.
“Watch this. We track on a Iraqi missile site. Then we fire a HARM missile.”
On the screen, Sherm’s Prowler jumps a bit and a speck of white light fires off from the left wing. Back home, Sherm laughed and pointed at a darker speck on the screen.
“We locked in on an Iraqi radar station. So we fired a missile and we didn’t see this B-52. And for a second we thought, ‘Oh, shit, we’re going to hit the B-52.’ But it went way over the B-52’s head. And then it went down and it did its job.”
Sherm rewound the DVD. We watched it a few more times. Then he told me something I already knew.
“I love what I do for a living. I just love it. It’s my life.”
He stepped over the train tracks. For a second, I thought he was going to connect the dots between the train tracks and the missiles fired over Iraq, about the cost of the life he had chosen. But he just clicked off the television and got us each another beer.
About a mile away, Tupper had company in the master bedroom bathroom. He’d rushed home from Bremerton to hear Caitlin’s piano recital, falling asleep as she played “Edelweiss.” That night, he and Beth had just gone to sleep when Caitlin barfed in her bed.
Tupper had been home a little more than a day and he’d already given his youngest the flu. They took turns in the bathroom. He’d throw up and then she’d throw up. Tupper told her he was so sorry that he had made her sick. But Caitlin didn’t mind. She brushed a stray hair off her face, gave him a weak smile, and held his hand.
“That’s okay, Daddy. I’d rather be sick with you here than be better without you.”
I left Tupper and Sherm in Anacortes and headed up to Mount Baker two days later. I rented a condo in Snowater, the same complex where my family had come as a boy. The next morning, I drove up the mountain and sat in the same lodge where I waited for Dad to ski his last, icy run of the day. I had not been there in thirty years.
I’d turned the tables, or so I thought. Not long after he died, I happily gave up skiing and devoted my life pursuits to things where I h
ad a baseline of competence. But then a funny thing happened. I missed it. I started skiing a few times a year in my thirties in Park City while covering the Sundance Film Festival and with my sister at Mount Bachelor near her home in Bend, Oregon. I wasn’t good, but I’d become proficient, dreamily content to carve down the same blue run off Park City’s Thaynes lift for hours and days.
I headed up to Baker with a specific goal. I wanted to ski down a run off the Shuksan lift that I remembered Dad skiing the winter before he died. Back then, we rode the chair up together and Dad tried to talk me into following him. But I was too scared. He went left off the lift and skied through the trees. I took an easier green run. I remember him arriving at the bottom with a big smile creased across the five o’clock shadow he allowed himself on weekends. I remember wishing I had the courage to go with him.
Today I was going to try. It was an idyllic spring afternoon, temperatures in the high forties and the mountain blissfully deserted. After a couple of shakedown runs, I jumped on Shuksan. I went left off the lift in search of a trail whose name I didn’t know and a route I was trying to conjure out of memory.
Baker is a tough guy’s mountain and prides itself on its lack of signs. I decided to go by feel. This was the first in a series of mistakes. The terrain grew steeper and narrower with every turn of my rental skis. The voice of reason told me to head back or at least ask one of the dwindling numbers of skiers for guidance. I did neither. Instead, I went farther until I found myself surrounded by a glade of trees on my left and an out-of-bounds sign on my right.
I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that the chairlift was to my left. If I found the chair, I could follow it down. So I pushed left, traversing the small sliver of a switchback trail. But I gained too much speed and my arm caught on the branch of an evergreen. My glove and pole were ripped off my left hand. By the time I skidded to a stop, my gear was twenty yards behind me.
Remembering Dad’s litter hate, there was no way I was going to abandon my stuff out here in the wilderness. I took off my skis and began hoofing it back toward my gear. No one would tell you this was a smart plan. My ski boots plunged through the spring snow and soon I was chest-deep in slush.
My heart pounded. I could hear my sister Terry calling me an idiot. It was at this moment that I realized I could die here. There was no one around. It was near the end of the day. No one knew I was here. It would be long after dark before someone noticed my car in the parking lot.
I pushed onward toward my glove and pole. At one point, I nearly slid off the trail and down a ravine before grabbing a scraggly pine. If the tree had given way, bad things would have happened. But it held. By the time I got my glove, my clothes were soaked with sweat. I then hiked back to my skis. It took me an hour to complete a fifty-yard round trip.
The morning’s brilliant sunshine was gone, replaced by late-afternoon gloom. From what I could see, I still had another seventy-five yards alongside a cliff edge before I made it to the regularly marked trail. A snowboarder stopped on a ledge about a hundred feet above me. He made no offer to help, only a “You stupid tourist” smile. I asked a question.
“Is the trail wider if I keep going straight?”
The snowboarder waited about fifteen seconds before responding.
“Sort of.”
He cackled, jumped the cliff, and was gone. I cursed his coordination and sidestepped my way to the trail for another twenty minutes, hoping that salvation waited just ahead.
I was half-right. It wasn’t so much a trail as a double black diamond mogul field stretching downward for maybe a quarter mile before leveling off near the chairlift. My sweat had turned into cold water on my skin and I couldn’t stop shivering. But at least I could see the bottom. I maneuvered my way down some of the run, falling every other turn, my knees buckling and trembling.
And that’s when I gave up. I plopped down in the snow and did a controlled slide down the rest of the trail on my ass.
I turned in my skis and sat in my old spot in the lodge for a half hour before I felt coherent enough to drive down the mountain. Back at the condo I took a hot bath. I then headed over to a cabin not far from where I was staying that was used by the condo association for barbecues, card games, and board meetings. Upstairs was a small room where Mom said Dad used to come and spend hours working on his fitness reports.
The room overlooked a trail and the Nooksack River, water flowing blue and white with the first of the spring’s snowmelt. I settled into a chair and looked out the window, my legs still shaking. I sat there and listened to the river run by in the darkness. It was the first moment of stillness I’d felt in months. I thought of my family. Mom, who hadn’t been on a date with another man. Terry, forever stoic about Dad. And Christine, who didn’t know him at all. I thought of my condescending attitude toward their denial while I was trying to set the record straight, retracing his steps, poring over his accident reports, and skiing his favorite old trail.
And I knew I was the fool.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I quickly recovered from my Mount Baker debacle and struggled on. Now that I’d bunked on the same aircraft carriers and experienced a flake of his life, I wanted to know more. At the top of the list was Boston College High School, his alma mater. Dad graduated from the Jesuit school in 1960, and that’s about all I knew about his four years there. How Dad ended up there was part of his mythology: it was the best Catholic high school in the Boston diocese and he’d aced the admissions test, earning him an academic scholarship. Outside of that, it was a typical Dad black hole. He shared no tales of high school shenanigans with me as a kid, and no high school friends ever dropped in for a visit.
But without B.C. High, there would be no Annapolis, no flight school. I wanted to understand his high-achievement adolescence and contrast it with my own teenage days, where I seemingly ruined Mom’s life and put my own future in a deep hole. There would be many great opportunities for self-flagellation.
I hit the B.C. High website and, for once, had perfect timing. The alumni page noted that the class of 1960’s fiftieth reunion was in three weeks. I made a couple of calls and was put in touch with the reunion’s chairman. The man didn’t remember Dad, but he insisted I come as the class’s guest. There was only one small problem: the reunion was being held in Boston, a place I still avoided years after the TP Incident. A wedding or work forced me to cross its borders from time to time, but it always left me brooding, self-medicating in a Hampton Inn with a convenience-store Eskimo Pie and a vodka cranberry.
Still, I drove up the Mass Pike on a sluggish Saturday afternoon in May. My breath shortened when I saw the hazy outline of the Prudential Building and then the unlit stadium lights of Fenway Park. I slipped by the Mass Avenue exit to my old South End neighborhood and turned up the Go-Betweens on the stereo, hoping to drown out the shitty memories. My directions told me to take exit 15 off I-93 South and I wound myself through a rotary turning on to Morrissey Boulevard near Dad’s alma mater.
That’s when it hit me. Christ on a cracker, Boston College High School was located directly across the street from the Boston Globe, my ex’s employer! I couldn’t believe it. I guess I must have known it in my head, but I’d been to the Globe only a handful of times and never to B.C. High. I was at the intersection of Dead Parent Avenue and Disappearing Spouse Boulevard.
The Globe was her world and I hated the place for that. She had a choice between me and the Globe, and the Globe won in a rout. Would an impartial observer see it that way? Probably not, but that’s why they’re called feelings. I pulled into the school’s parking lot and stopped the car. I sat there for forty-five minutes telling myself not to read too much into it. Meanwhile, the fight-or-flight voice in my head was screaming,
“Flight!”
“Just do it for five minutes,” I told myself. “You can do anything for five minutes.”
That was bullshit. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do for five minutes: hammer a nail, hold a yoga position, fake an interest in the Food Network, etc. This seemed like one of them.
Still, I got out of the car, muttered a “Fuck you” in the Globe’s general direction and started walking toward B.C. High’s glass doors. That’s when I remembered I’d neglected to change from my driving outfit of T-shirt and shorts into my suit. I ran back to the car and did a quick change in the backseat, drawing a few sideward glances from elderly arrivals wondering if they should call the cops. Now I was late.
This being Catholic school, there was a Mass scheduled to kick off the reunion. I ran into the school and followed signs toward a theater. I pushed open a door and a hundred sets of eyes fell on me. This wasn’t my usual neurosis. I was shaggy-haired and forty-three. All the men in the room were sixty-eight, give or take six months. Outside of a trophy wife, I was the youngest person in the room by a quarter century. I was the thing that was not like the others.
I wobbled up carpeted steps to the top of the theater, sitting a few rows beyond everyone else. I looked at the ruddy faces with their receding hairlines and thought of what Dad would have looked like old. Would he have a belly? Would his hair be gone? Or turned snow white? Would he have become a cranky son of a bitch like his father? Like I was becoming? Would Mom have been at his side in this very room? I wondered why I’d thought so little about this. The idea of Dad growing old rarely occurred to me. He was frozen in that black uniform with the American flag in the background.
Mass started before I could obsess any further. It was presided over by two members of the class of 1960 who had become priests. One of them noticed me sitting in the cheap seats. He urged me to move closer during a pause in the action.
The Magical Stranger Page 19