The Tank Man's Son by Mark Bouman Read Free Book Online

well away from our bodies, since more than once a blob of molten plastic had dripped onto our exposed skin, searing us for an instant before sputtering out. Once we were in the center, we worked our way outward, touching our torches to anything that looked flammable: phone books, shredded shirts, the odd scrap of lumber. All the while, our plastic-fueled torches burned a bright, nearly neon blue, even in the sunlight, and the sound of their flames   — ship ship shiiiip   —became a private language, telling where to step and what to burn.
    After we set fire to everything that wasn’t wet, metallic, or made of glass, we would retreat to the edge of the pile. Still holding our torches,we’d stand and watch the flames spread in fits and starts across the discarded landscape, sometimes stepping back into the pile to prod or relight some object. I could imagine I was a giant, watching an entire countryside burning, from the rotting valleys all the way to the peaks of rusty iron.
    Dad’s chore was pointless. The flames never consumed the pile   —there was far too much that couldn’t burn   —and over time it grew and grew. The valley was glutted with garbage, trash so damp and compacted that no burning short of an explosion could have altered its shape. Dad must have understood that. He knew the trash pile as well as anyone in the family, and he knew the shape of fire even better. Yet every few weeks he sent Jerry and me back to burn. And so my brother and I would stand, shoulder to shoulder, and watch flames become embers become smoke and ashes, and then we’d walk back up the sandy hill to the house, content for a moment that we’d done exactly what our father required.

    Once, when Jerry and I were trudging back from the trash pile at dusk, Dad barked at us to get some two-by-fours from behind the shed because he had something to unload from his truck. We knew the drill. Dad came home with strange objects all the time, and more often than not we had to help him transfer whatever it was   —nearly always something mechanical and too heavy for one man and two boys to move safely   —from the truck to the yard. We had no idea what this particular item was, but we could tell Dad was excited about it.
    “This baby was on a destroyer in dubya-dubya-two, boys,” he said. “Got ’er off a guy near Detroit for a song, and I’m about to get ’er working.”
    “But . . . what is it?” I asked.
    “A searchlight, Mark,” he answered, motioning us to come closer. He unbolted something on the back of the thing and pulled off a hatch, pointing to a deeply concave mirror.
    “This reflects the light and concentrates it.” He stopped to look atus, savoring the moment before adding, “Concentrates it enough to see things two miles away.”
    He nodded happily as we gaped at the mirror. “Yep, two miles. Don’t look into it or it’ll blind you. It gives out as much light as one hundred twenty thousand candles.”
    Jerry and I both blurted the obvious. “When are you gonna turn it on?”
    “I’ll hook it up and we can try it out,” he answered. I’d never heard him happier. As he began to fiddle with the searchlight, Sheri wandered out to watch.
    “What is that?”
    “It’s a searchlight from a destroyer!” I bragged.
    “What’s a destroyer?”
    “A ship ,” I said impatiently. “Now let Dad work.”
    It took Dad a while to get everything ready. He never seemed in doubt about what to do but moved around the searchlight quickly and purposefully, adjusting and tightening and lubricating, ignoring our questions until we stopped asking.
    Finally it was time. Dad had run a thick cable from the searchlight to a nearby generator.
    “This’d be useful on a ship   —it’s what it was made for, after all.”
    He looked at his audience, winked at Mom, and flicked a switch on the back of the searchlight.
    “And . . . There. It. Goes.”
    We stared, stunned. It was brighter than the sun   —the brightest