The Tank Man's Son by Mark Bouman

Author:Mark Bouman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781414396040
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Dad reported his plans for raising the ship. He scrounged up some large sheets of canvas, donned his scuba gear, and with some well-executed underwater hammering, nailed the canvas sheets around the hull, a bit like one of the pigs in a blanket he loved to wolf down at breakfast smorgasbords. He figured he could then pump water out of the boat faster than the water could flow back in through the canvas. He figured right, and in less than twenty-four hours he had the ship floating again.

Talking to a couple of locals who came out to watch the operation, Dad filled in some missing details. The Patrol One had been built all the way back in 1901, and besides being used to inspect fishing nets on the Great Lakes, it had been used to transport moose to Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It was powered—or would have been powered if it hadn’t been a rotting, sludge-filled hulk—by a four-cylinder Kahlenberg diesel that weighed in at eighteen tons.

“Heavy as three bull elephants,” he told us, “and a propeller about as tall as Mark!”

Everything about the ship was oversize, which was a scale Dad loved to work in. Next came some critical hull repairs that let him pull off the canvas sheets and shut down his extra pumps: new lumber over the holes, waterproof paint, tar and caulking, and bilge pump repair. After that Dad tackled the engine, and despite needing to take apart, clean, and reassemble the entire thing, he got that beast running within a couple of weeks.

With the Patrol One floating—low in the water, but floating nevertheless—and the engine running, Dad was officially the captain of his own ship. It was nearly summertime. Mom was working full-time in a factory and trying to keep her household from falling apart or being swallowed by sand. Jerry was spending more and more time in our room, studying for his end-of-the-year exams, while Sheri was trying to spend as much time at her friends’ houses as she could. I was imagining a summer in which I left home every morning, striking out for the deserted woods.

As usual, our plans didn’t matter, because once the boat dried out, we would be saying good-bye to our house on Blakely Drive for the summer and moving on board the Patrol One.

“Here, Mark, take this suitcase to the car. We’re going to stay on the boat for a while,” Mom said when the time came.

“How long are we going to be gone?”

Mom sighed. “Not sure. Come back and get this one when you’re done—and don’t drop it. It’ll—”

“It’ll spill if I don’t hold it closed. I know.”

I stuffed the first suitcase in the trunk of the car. Dad had already claimed most of the space with boxes filled with greasy tools and other items from the shed. Once the last bit of luggage was loaded, the three of us kids crammed into the backseat, squeezed between bags of food Mom had packed. She was waiting in the passenger seat, fanning herself.

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