Read Online Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand - Free Book Online Page B

abilities, but he was never flashy. He did what he did. Money to make a living motivated him, but his passion was fish. He liked being the guy who figured out what the fish were thinking. Filling up the boat was his joy. Men get fishing or they do not get it. Dad got it. Waiting for the next crab pot to rise to the surface drove him crazy with anticipation. He would tell us boys, “We have one reason to be alive, and that’s to kill all the fish we can, and if you have a problem with that, if you don’t want to work day and night to do it, you probably should get off this boat.”
    Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, Dad ordered Andy and me to put on “Gumby” survival suits on the beach at the end of the Spit. The Gumbys are constructed of thick red neoprene with feet and hands and a hood to protect men from a deadly cold sea. That day the wind was blowing up ten-foot waves off the Spit. The cold water would kill us in five or ten minutes without the Gumbys on. Dad ordered us to swim out to a skiff that was anchored a hundred yards offshore. The problem was, we could not swim in men’s survival suits. We were boys. But we did as we were told. The waves threw us back on the beach. We fell in the water, and rocks pounded me on the head. I almost drowned trying to swim past the surf. The tide gripped Andy and pulled him farther out into the Bay toward open water. He panicked and was shouting for help. He thought he was going to drown. Dad was yelling at him, “Swim, you bastard! Swim!”
    “I can’t make it,” Andy screamed back at him.
    “Don’t you ever quit, don’t you ever quit!” Dad shouted.
    “Come get me!” Andy shouted.
    “No,” said our dad. “Until you are dead, you never quit.”
    Tourists on the Spit who saw Andy’s thrashings alerted the harbormaster who raced his skiff out to save Andy, who said that was the first time he was afraid of the sea.
    Since that time, none of us Hillstrand boys ever quit—anything!
    Dad taught me another hard lesson. My mother had already warned me about stealing. When I was five I stole a candy bar, and she made me take it back and apologize to the storeowner. Six years went by, and some kids stole one of our 25-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines. With what my brothers and I viewed as perfect logic, in turn I stole a pair of oars. It was only fair. My father was enraged when he found out. And I lied to him about it. He kicked my ass and shoved me out the door. “I didn’t raise a family of liars or thieves,” he shouted at my back. “You are no longer my son. You are out of the family.” I was eleven. I slept overnight in a culvert in the freezing cold, as wet as a drowned rat. I went back home the next day because I had nowhere else to go and I was hungry.
    Like it or not, he made us who we are.
    Not long after my overnight in the culvert, I asked him how many beers would make me drunk, and he said, “Let’s find out.” He started drinking with me. It was cool getting drunk with your dad. The second time I was drunk, I downed a bottle of blackberry brandy. Dad was furious because he thought my friends had pressured me. He did not want his sons to be followers. For him, nuance and that moment’s frame of mind meant everything. He did not mind that we grew pot out on the Spit. It was all the same to him, and we grew pot by the bagfuls. Grandma Jo sniffed out the plants, pulled them out by the roots, and took them to her house in her pickup truck and burned them in an oil-drum fire. We laughed imagining her standing by the drum, watching the flames, getting stoned.
    Dad challenged us to make us better. He expected more of us. And yet he never refused us the freedom to be boys. My brothers and I were driving vans in town at ten and eleven years old. The Homer cop pulled us over and called our dad. Driving was a thrill, but Andy and I needed to find other things to go fast in. I went flying with friends with licenses, and I would hang out at the Homer