The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  After church came home changed and went to store with Woody on way home hit Mr. Smith’s car on window with snowball. He chased me, knocked me down in a & p parking lot.

  I’m pretty sure there has never been a son more elated to read about his father getting the shit kicked out of him. But that wasn’t what really moved me. I didn’t need a degree in psychotherapy to see that Dad’s home was not a happy place. His whole life—the altar boy gigs, the jobs, wandering in the woods for hours—was devoted to spending as little time as possible in the house on Herrod Avenue. It wasn’t open to interpretation. He and his buddies hitchhiked all the time, traveling fifty miles from home and back again in an afternoon.

  Got haircut, thumbed to Providence Rhode Island with Woody arrived at 1:01 and left at 1:54. Got ride to East Providence and waited 1 hr 45min for another ride. Mr. Sankus (287 Oak) went by and didn’t stop. . . . Mom saw me thumbing. Caught hell.

  And it wasn’t just to kill time. That summer, he planned a longer trip with his pal Woody.

  Worked on map for trip leave June 25th with Woody return around July 15 . . . decided to thumb on trip to Washington or Chicago or Pittsburgh.

  He never did take that trip, but why did he need to get away? Was it his father, so tragic and distant? I read in his boyish hand the first seeds of restlessness that would take him from Brockton to Annapolis and eventually to a violent death in the Indian Ocean. And in that restlessness I could see myself: my endless need to be somewhere else, doing something else, always moving.

  I took the diaries back to New York with me and delicately made copies of the pages. I found myself reading and rereading the passages when I should have been working on other things. I was thirteen years and fifty-nine days old the day he died. One day, I did the math and figured when Dad was the same age. It was March 4, 1956.

  Served 815 mass. Fr Donahue celebrant. Fixed Dots bike. Fooled around in woods with Woody and John Campbell. Got equip back from mike—see Saturday—went to show—saw Battle Cry. GREAT. Dishwasher all installed.

  I rented Battle Cry that night. The 1955 film is a Velveeta-laden adaptation of a Leon Uris novel about Marines in World War II. Calling it paint-by-numbers is charitable. The stereotypes burst onto the screen in the first five minutes. There’s the damn crazy lumberjack, the bookish kid, the gruff sergeant, and a light-fingered Italian greaser who gives a hot foot—I’m not making this up—to a Navajo who hops around the train going “how, how, how.” The boys end up at boot camp where they bond and realize—spoiler alert—that they have much more in common than they think and there’s no way they’re going to make it out of this cockeyed war without each other.

  But once every half hour or so, there was a real moment. Van Heflin plays their leader, Major Sam “High Pockets” Huxley. (We never learn why he’s nicknamed High Pockets.) His troops head into a New Zealand town on a day pass, and he’s left alone declining another officer’s offer of a night of debauchery. Huxley talks of the loneliness of command, a family far away, and I couldn’t help but think of Tupper.

  But then I watched it again and tried to put myself in a different place. It is a third-run theater on a gray evening in 1956 Brockton. I’m sitting there with Woody. We’re eating popcorn and talking at the screen. We watch men from towns just like Brockton fight, drink, chase skirt, and then kill the Japs. We hide our tears when High Pockets buys the farm on Tarawa.

  The war ends and the boys come back to their wives and children and live happily ever after. The credits roll. We cheer. On the way home, we dodge street trolleys, tackle each other, and reenact our favorite scenes, taking turns playing the hero. And maybe, just maybe, we think that’s the life we want.

  I talked to Dad’s sister Dot a little later about when she first remembered Dad talking about joining the military.

  “I’d say when he was about thirteen or fourteen. I don’t know where it came from or how it started.”

  Could it have all been put into motion that day at the movies? A boy thirteen years and fifty-nine days old sees a movie and starts down a path that ends with a boy thirteen years and fifty-nine days old losing his father and losing his way.

  Is that how it happened?

  Chapter Thirty

  Tupper’s favorite film is This Is Spinal Tap. The rock mockumentary about arrested men-children trying to be serious about their absurd profession was the perfect corollary for the life of a naval aviator. He prepared for his final flight knowing the angst was about to be turned up to eleven. It wasn’t going to be a quick turn around the Northwest and then touchdown and taxi to the Black Ravens hangar. Instead, Tupper was flying a Prowler to NAS Jacksonville, where it would be decommissioned and stripped for parts. The old man and his ride would hit the glue factory simultaneously.

  Originally, I was going to be in the backseat with Socr8tes for the flight. I still had my swim and survival quals and there weren’t a ton of Black Ravens volunteering for the 6,000-mile round trip. (The crew would fly back commercial.) But at the last minute, Commodore Slais informed Tupper that it would be his honor to take the last seat on his final flight. This was either a touching gesture or the commodore ensuring that Tupper didn’t do anything stupid at his last rodeo.

  The flight was typical Prowler, aka screwed from the start. Tupper made his way down the stairs from his office on an October morning in full flight gear. He opened the hangar door and found the entire squadron standing on the flight line saluting their skipper. There were pictures and handshakes. He loaded into the Prowler with Stonz next to him and Commodore Slais and Socr8tes in the backseat. He gave his sailors a final wave and taxied down the runway.

  That’s when the first red light flashed on the cockpit suggesting low pressure in the hydraulics of the landing gear. That should have been a no-go. But the commodore was in the back; he couldn’t see Tupper’s instruments. Tupper looked at Stonz, and his maintenance officer just shrugged his shoulders. Fuck it, Tupper thought. There was no way he was climbing out of the plane after that dog-and-pony good-bye. He turned back to the runway and gunned the engines.

  Flying with the commodore in the backseat made everyone nervous. They had plans to stop for fuel at an Air Force base in Grand Junction, Colorado. But just as they prepared their final approach, Tupper double-checked the field information and realized the base didn’t have the equipment needed to restart the Prowler after refueling. If Tupper hadn’t noticed, they might have been stranded in Grand Junction with the commodore for days until a starter could be shipped out. That would have sucked. They refueled in Roswell, New Mexico, instead and pushed on, overnighting at Robins Air Force Base outside of Houston.

  The Prowler was leaking fluid from its nose gear the next morning. Stonz tightened a few screws with a borrowed wrench and they left right after dawn. Tupper flew along the coast over Mobile, Biloxi, and Pensacola. The men lightened up the closer they got to JAX, sharing hairy stories from flight school. Before Tupper knew it, he was flying his final approach into Jacksonville Naval Air Station. He wanted to bend the sky one last time and bring the Prowler in on a tight break at 4.5 Gs, 450 knots, but he remembered the commodore was in the backseat.

  “Hey, Commodore, should we give them a show?”

  “Uh, we should stick to 350 and the regs.”

  So Tupper brought the Prowler in at a mild 350 knots. The Prowler hit the runway, taxied, and Tupper climbed down. His plane was now leaking three kinds of fluid from its nose. It was ready to be put down.

  I waited on the flight line at JAX with some of the base’s senior command and a giant red fire truck. It’s Navy tradition that a naval aviator is hosed down after his final flight. Tupper took off his helmet and waited patiently as
the cold water cascaded over him in the brisk October air. Commodore Slais shook his hand and posed for some pictures and then raced off to the airport to catch the last connecting flight back to Seattle.

  Someone told me that this Prowler was the oldest in the fleet, dating back to 1977. Had Dad flown it as a Black Raven or at VAQ-129, the training squadron? There was no way of knowing for sure, but I wanted to think he had. Since the plane was bound for the boneyard, the maintainers back in Whidbey had signed their names on the fuselage. Here in Jacksonville, Tupper and the crew did the same. Stonz nudged me on the shoulder and handed me a pen. I signed it “CDR P. T. Rodrick, 1943–1979.”

  There was nothing else to do except get very, very drunk. But there were obstacles. Canine, an old Prowler guy, ran the boneyard and seemed lonely down here in a forgotten outpost. He offered to give us a quick tour of the base, and we felt like we couldn’t say no. We rode over in a van to a faraway hangar and went inside. In front of us were six Prowlers splayed open like the catfish gutted by my grandfather in his Alabama garage. Some were missing cockpits; some were a pinkish color from being sprayed with preservatives that prevented rusting. Tupper and I exchanged looks. It was hard not to see his career and Dad’s life reduced to dissected and discontinued planes withering in the Florida heat. We wanted to be anywhere but there.

  But the tour dragged on and on. We were told in excruciating detail how a Prowler is embalmed, catalogued, stripped, and then melted down for scrap. About three hours passed by. We stepped out of the hangar to a fading sun. Socr8tes seriously debated making a break for a nearby exit, climbing a fence, and hitching his way to our hotel.

  We thought we had made our escape, but Canine wanted to show us one more thing: the Prowler parts depot that was housed in a nearby warehouse. It was straight out of a hoarders horror show. Rows and rows of Prowler screws, pads, and flaps were stacked to the ceiling. Stonz walked around in stunned silence, picking up random parts and mumbling.

  “I tried to get one of these for months. They said they didn’t have any.”

  The depot’s manager was a potbellied guy who had flown Prowlers back in the 1970s. I asked him a question.

  “Did you know Pete Rodrick?”

  The old man paused for a moment.

  “Oh, yeah, he was a real asshole.”

  I told him he was my father. The old man told me he was just joking. No one laughed.

  We finally made it to our hotel on Jacksonville Beach around sunset and tried to make up for lost time. There was whiskey, barbecue, and more whiskey. Tupper put up a brave front until the alcohol burned it away. Well past midnight, he asked me a question.

  “Can I still call myself a Navy pilot now that I have had my last flight? What if you were told you would never write again? Would you still be a writer?”

  I didn’t know the answer, so I changed the subject.

  “Let’s prank-call Sherm.”

  Tupper thought this was the best idea of the day. We called Sherm, and the skipper cursed him over the fact that the Anacortes Taco Bell closed at 10:00 p.m., an unacceptably early hour.

  “Sherm, that is an outrage. I want you to get on this first thing in the morning. This cannot stand.”

  Sherm’s voice was muffled, uncertain if his boss was serious.

  “Uh, yessir. I’ll get on that first thing.”

  Tupper gleefully snapped off my phone. We closed down a dive bar and did a final shot of Jack Daniel’s. How we got the two blocks back to our hotel I will never know. Tupper hugged me and mumbled something about sharing the last flight with him. I told him I loved him like a brother or some such nonsense. I made it back to my room on the eighth floor. I had to piss. I looked at the toilet and decided that wouldn’t do. I headed out onto the balcony. I dropped my jeans and sent a cascading arc eighty feet down into the hotel swimming pool. I zipped up and staggered to my bed. I felt closer to Dad than I had in years.

  We flew back to Whidbey in the morning, hungover, barely able to converse for the first leg. Tupper was largely silent; his skipper tour was ending in five days. The following afternoon, I drove up to Whidbey from Anacortes and stopped in to see him in his office. He was buried behind his desk in paperwork like the Robert De Niro character in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. He had to write fitness reports on all his officers and sailors in the next five days. He pushed the folders aside and we talked for a little while. He was in a sour mood; the moment his whole life had built to was passing and he couldn’t stop time. Tupper flipped through a Navy magazine that had a feature on squadron commanders. He pointed out the ones who would be promoted ahead of him.

  “That one was a suck-up.” He flipped the page. “That one had a sugar daddy protecting him on CAG’s staff.” He turned another page and let out a sad laugh. “That one, I have no idea how he got promoted. One of life’s great mysteries.”

  We talked about the squadron for a while. Mongo, the new XO, had arrived, and every time Tupper saw him it was like seeing a ghost. Vinnie was starting to assert himself in staff meetings, which rankled Tupper and made him feel more like a lame duck. But after we talked for a while I realized that wasn’t what was bothering Tupper. He talked about Vinnie organizing a bash commemorating the change of command and how excited the junior officers were for the party.

  “That was the squadron I was trying to create, but they wouldn’t give it to me.” He mentioned a long-nursed grudge, his men never showing up on his doorstep for an impromptu bash. “You know, they didn’t even green-light me. I’ve never been in a squadron where the skipper wasn’t green-lighted. Did they hate me that much? Was I that awful?”

  I reminded him that Doogie hadn’t been green-lighted. This just pissed him off more.

  “Do they all hate me because of Doogie? You can tell me.”

  I told him they didn’t hate him, but he didn’t believe me. That night, there was better evidence. At an Anacortes Italian restaurant, the officers of VAQ-135 gathered with their wives for Tupper’s change-of-command dinner. It couldn’t have been more different from Doogie’s farewell. The couples were dressed casually and the formality of the dining-out was replaced by toasts and drunken skits. Stoli led the JOs in a round of “What I Said, What I Meant.”

  What I said: excuse me from the Christmas Party. What I meant: I need to puke. What I said: nothing on a six-hour combat flight. What I meant: you’ve been in the biz long enough; you realize everyone around you is an idiot.

  Everyone laughed. Tupper stood up to cheers. He spoke about how grateful he was for everyone’s hard work. He mentioned the Wolf and presented him with a tiny pillow that read “Quiet, the princess is sleeping.”

  He then singled out his department heads for special praise. Their hard work had so moved Tupper that he bought each of them gifts. He called each of them by name up to the front of the room. He handed each of them a vaguely creepy Hummel-like statue of a German schoolboy in short pants that I’d found at a rummage sale. The wives were skeeved out, but the men loved it.

  The following Monday morning, it was all over. A band played for Tupper’s change of command. His family was there: Jim and Cindy, Beth and the girls. Tupper had asked me to speak, so I sat up on the podium with Tupper, Vinnie, CAG, and the commodore. The muckety-mucks read rote speeches from binders describing command as a wild roller-coaster ride.

  Then it was my turn. I looked out at the squadron and saw Beav and Sherm and Lil Chris and Stoli. And I saw the family I’d always wanted. I
talked about how kind they had been to me even if they thought I had hippie hair. Then I recounted what one of Dad’s maintainers had said about keeping Prowlers in the air:

  “The normal status was: One plane is close to fully operational. One plane has stuff broken, but works pretty good. One plane can fly, but nothing else works, and one is the hangar queen and sits in the hangar bay all tore apart.”

  Sound familiar? Now remember, this was when the planes were new. Understandably, the Navy sees all squadrons equal, no matter the age or condition of their aircraft. It doesn’t matter if you’re flying brand-new, fancy-pants Super Hornets or moaning and groaning middle-aged Prowlers. You must perform.

  That’s all great in theory, but let me provide some context. Commander Ware took over a bone-tired squadron that had been at sea for much of the past three years. His jets were between twenty-five and thirty-eight years old. And yet the Black Ravens flew an astounding 186 sorties over Afghanistan with a 98 percent completion rate on the last cruise.

  This is a tribute to Tupper, the department heads, the JOs, and the maintainers, the unsung heroes of the squadron. Tupper took a squadron that could have been counting their days to transition and transformed them—in my humble and biased opinion—into the best damn Prowler squadron in the fleet.

  Then Tupper spoke. He thanked CAG and the commodore and then looked at Beth and his girls sitting in the front row. He took a long pause, and when he spoke his voice cracked and wavered. He talked of being in the Black Ravens for thirty months and having been gone from home for seventeen of them.

  Caitlin, I missed your fifth grade. Brenna, I missed your seventh. I came home from eight months at sea and girls had become young women. I was not there to help with homework. I was not there when you needed your dad. I can’t get those months back.