“Those are neat,” Mom said.
“Thanks,” John replied, brandishing the strange necklace he was wearing. “They’re called puka shells. I really like ‘em!”
“Puka,” Mom repeated with a grin. “What’s a puka?”
John shrugged. “I have more at home, I collect them.”
I was vaguely annoyed by how comfortable the new kid in our cub scout meeting was. Tall, gawky, polite. John Rankel went to a different school than my packmates and me and this was the first time I was meeting him. We all liked him well enough, but something about him baffled me.
Mom gave John a ride home after the meeting and he said. “Wait here Mrs. Watson, two minutes, I promise.”
Mom was too polite to turn down his request. He reappeared with a longer puka shell necklace. “I got this one in Florida,” he said holding the strand up for her to see. “It’s my favorite.”
Mom said something along the lines of “that’s cool” and he thanked her for the ride before striding back to his porch. As he waved, Mom mused, “Puka. What a nice boy.”
I was about 10 at the time and thought he was kinda weird. Now looking back, I can see that I envied his confidence and utter lack of shyness. He was comfortable with who he was, even at such a young age.
John moved away not long after that. He went to live with one of his parents down south of Indianapolis. But when he moved back to Speedway sophomore year, I instantly recognized him in the football locker room. John Rankel, the weird kid who loved puka shells, had grown up. He’d always been tall, but now he was a tower. He was probably 6’2” and pushing 230 lbs of muscle. Pretty big for a sixteen year old. Coach slotted him in at defensive end.
He remembered me, too. He grinned. “What’s up buddy? Been a while.” I don’t remember the pleasantries we exchanged after that. But I do remember him coming up to me after practice.
“Beau, these pants. I want these pants every practice. These are good pants. Can you make sure I get them?” He stood there in his sweaty cutoff shirt brandishing grass-stained practice pants. “If I put my number in them…”
I held up a hand. “Seniors get dibs on pants,” I reminded him. Pecking orders are important in high school, you know.
“Beau, it’s just one pair of pants. Hand me that sharpie.”
“John….” I frowned. My people pleasing impulses went to war with social protocol.
He grinned. “C’mon Beau. It’ll be between you and me.”
I sighed. “I’ll set ‘em aside, but if one of the seniors wants them, they get them. But I’ll try.”
He snatched the sharpie and put a dot on the elastic band. “Now you know which ones to give me.” His confidence was reassuring, and most days he got the pants he liked.
I’d walked in on the middle of a conversation, and Rankel’s face split in one of his cheesy grins when he saw me. “Beau’s the guy that’s gonna show up to the reunion with a super model on his arm.”
I hesitated before unlocking the equipment room, taken aback.
“Yeah dude, you’re nice and smart and you’re gonna be rich. The ladies are gonna be all over you. Just watch.”
I rolled my eyes. It was such a nice thought, but my crippling shyness and confidence issues made the idea preposterous. But, I’ll never forget him saying this to me. It’s one of the nicest things I’ve been told and it was completely unprompted.
It was easy to brush off this kind of compliment as someone “just being nice” but a few months later, I realized John actually did look up to me. Our final project in US Government is a debate. Our teacher split the class into groups of three or four and set teams against each other with an assigned topic.
As it turned out, I was in a group with Minh. You might characterize us as academic rivals—she and I had been tied for valedictorian all throughout high school—but we were also really good friends. John thought this was amazing. “Both of you together? On the same team? I gotta see this.” Again I rolled my eyes. Who wanted to do debates, let alone go watch someone else do it? Our teacher had a policy that if you could get permission from your conflicting class’s teacher, you could come watch any team’s debate. John said he was going to do it.
“You just want to cut class,” I told him.
“No, I need to see this. It’s gonna be awesome.”
And he did show up. He sat in the front row, with a spiral bound notebook and a pencil. The desk looked tiny under his huge frame and he grinned. He was genuinely excited. I couldn’t believe it.
Our teacher ended up giving the other team a slight advantage. He said they made a slightly better closing argument. We knew it was gonna be an uphill battle: he’s a pretty big conservative and the topic was capital punishment. “You guys were hosed,” John said afterwards. “That was awesome. You did great.”
This is one of the last conversations I remember having with John. We’d be graduating soon, he was destined to be a Marine and I’d be going off to Purdue. John was probably big enough to play college football if he’d wanted to. He likened himself as an idiot, but he was a good student and had good grades. But he was set on serving his country and would be enlisting as soon as he got his diploma. We were about four years into the Global War on Terror at this time, and I was becoming increasingly anti-war personally, but I respected his convictions.
On a hot June day in 2010, my buddy Mark called me. This was not abnormal; we hung out a lot between our jobs, and I figured he was calling me to go run over to the reservoir to fish. “Hey man.” He sounded like he was about to tell me about a ghost he’d just seen. “You hear about Rankel?”
No.
“He’s dead.” He’d taken a round from a sniper and didn’t survive. “There’s a service at the high school in a few days. I’m going if you want to ride together.” Yeah, I should pay my respects. Let’s go together.
I walked out back where my Mom was working in the garage. She knew something was wrong immediately. “You remember John Rankel?” Of course, the puka shell boy.
We cried together for a while.
The service was awful. Not in the production sense. The emotional sense. Seemed like the whole town showed up. His parents talked. Coach talked. It was his third tour. He’d been in Afghanistan after a couple tours in Iraq. He apparently was covering his squadmates and saved lives that day. They’d given him a bronze star. There were hundreds of people in the gym and it was so, so silent.
We all paid our respects. I remember him lying there in his dress uniform, too still, that grin of his replaced by a mask of serenity. A twenty-three year old boy, my age, gone. A boy who’d cajoled me to bring him the good pants. A boy who told me I’d marry super models. A boy who took time out of his schooling to watch me at my best.
A boy who looked up to me.
I didn’t realize what it’d meant, and I’m so sorry that when I thanked him for it, he wasn’t able to hear me.
It was a beautiful day out when John was laid to rest. The infamous Westboro Baptist Church was supposedly there. I didn’t see them, thankfully. I winced with each crack of the twenty-one gun salute. I went numb when a bugler played taps. I remember approaching a group of other classmates in their various military uniforms. Their grimness. How easily it could be one of them I’d be having this grief about. I pleaded with them all to take care of themselves, and hated war even more.
Mark drove me home in terrible silence.
I looked John up on the Fallen Heroes Project. There’s a quote on there from Coach Pelley: “There was nothing false about him.” As I write these words, I realize how true that statement was about John. My initial impression of him had been annoyance because of how comfortable he was being John. His earnestness, I’ve come to realize, was a rare thing and I think about it a lot. I’d like very much to tell him the impression he made on me, how he improved my approach to life and self-confidence. How he made a difference in someone’s life.
I’ve made it a mission of mine to tell people what they mean to me often because I know how awful it is to forever lose the chance to do it. I hope these words inspire you to do the same. I like to think John died believing in a world where people lifted each other up, so we can do right by him by trying to make that a reality.
I’ve always literally looked up to John. On days like today, I look a little higher.
Thanks, buddy. You deserved those good pants, and I’ll make sure to have ‘em next time I see you.