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

the weather wasn’t good for shooting, they would sit around the living room, playing records with German songs and talking about guns and Jews and wars. Their favorite leader was Hitler, and they all agreed he should have won the war. He was trying to keep his country safe and strong, but his other generals and communists and Jews lied to him and caused him to lose. But Hitler’s ideas were still alive, Dad said   —they were just waiting for the right time to rise again.
    Guns began to take up increasingly more space in our lives. The gun range and the gun tower were obvious to anyone, but more subtle signs of the Bouman weaponizing were everywhere: oil stains on towels Dad used to clean gun barrels, large drums of gunpowder in the laundry room, and shell casings littered all over the property, winking up from the ground. Jerry and I got used to answering Dad’s call, expecting tobe given some chore or a tongue-lashing, only to have Dad show us a weapon that was inside a crate.
    “You kids don’t tell anyone you saw this,” he’d say. “If someone asks, you don’t know a thing!”
    We quickly lost track of which guns we were allowed to talk about and which ones were hush-hush, but it scarcely mattered. Most kids in elementary school had no understanding of weapons, so they wouldn’t have cared about our secrets, and most adults wouldn’t have believed that kids our age knew the difference between a legal M1 carbine and an illegal German broomhandle Mauser that could fire on full auto.
    A police officer once came to my classroom to give a talk about neighborhood safety. When he asked if anyone had any questions, I piped up. “Do you guys ever have to deal with gas bombs?” He gave my teacher a strange look, then asked if there were any other questions.

    I never had any big plans. Most days all I wanted to do was play, eat, stay out of trouble, and get a good night of sleep. I didn’t like my chores, and I didn’t like school, but what could a guy do? They were just part of life.
    Dad’s behavior, though, caused me to change the way I lived. Jerry, Sheri, and I started to pay more attention to him, specifically so we could avoid him. If we were at home and Dad wasn’t, we kept our senses on constant alert, ready to scatter at the sound of his truck.
    “Dad’s home!” one of us would yell. It was like yelling Fire! in a movie theater. If we were inside, perhaps playing cards, we’d toss the cards back in the drawer and either race outside, assuming we could get out and away before Dad parked, or else race to our rooms and try to look busy. If we were outside, we’d head for the hills, getting far away as fast as possible. Who knew what job we might be given? One weekend he forced us to shovel sand and dirt into the driveway ruts for two backbreaking days, and then Monday morning he kept us home from school to finish the job.
    Sometimes Dad snuck past our radar, though. One afternoon, when Jerry and I were lounging on the living room floor drawing, Dad suddenly appeared in the doorway. “I need you boys to come help on the range.”
    We knew better than to dawdle, so we tugged on our shoes and jogged around to the back of the house toward the gun tower. Four of Dad’s buddies were already there, hanging around the bottom of the ladder, packing guns that looked big enough to bring down an elephant. They nodded, then went back to ignoring us. Dad showed up a minute later and shoved a stack of paper targets at Jerry, then tossed a roll of masking tape to me. We knew the drill by heart. While Dad and his friends climbed into the tower with their rifles and cases of ammunition, we ran the two hundred yards across the field to get everything ready for them. Jerry and I taped the first target to the front of the washing machine, and then we clambered up the mound on the left and took cover behind the dirt.
    The first shot rang out: a sharp, staccato crack, followed by an echo that rolled up and down the