Amazing. Not so much the violence he observes but the veteran’s own reaction. He feels he is getting into a rage. The veteran hasn’t been that desperately angry in years, not since Viet Cong mortar splinters shredded his left leg. The Traumatic Syndrome is raising its ugly head. Our hero’s innate coolness is tested. Or so he hopes. (Maybe he has no innate coolness.)
This kind of mood shift has happened before, where he felt filled with cold, deadly rage, after he woke up in an empty trailer on a back road in inland Maine, about a hundred miles from Bunkport. The pre-veteran is now five years old. He is alone, even his dad’s bad dog is gone. Looks like nobody is aiming to return soon. Have the unemployment checks run out? No more food stamps and church handouts? Where are his parents’ clothes, guns, flashlights, the deer hanging upside down from the trees behind the trailer, the canned beans stacked under the sink? “Mom! Dad! Did you go to sell the empty beer cans?”
The pre-veteran charges about the empty trailer, kicking walls, until, crying, he falls back into his cot.
Jacko, his half-brother, happens to drop in and finds moldy bread and a dented can of sardines. Jacko says today is the day he has to surrender himself to jail. “Take care, kid,” Jacko says.
Jacko must have made a phone call in town (the trailer’s phone is dead), for a social worker in a minivan picks up the child and houses it in a shelter for the homeless. Uncle Joe, a small man with a weathered face and bright eyes under tufted eyebrows, picks me up. Me? I mean the pre-veteran.
“If you don’t give a shit,” Uncle Joe tells me, “it don’t matter.”
Uncle Joe would repeat that saying often, to himself mostly, in case things did seem to matter. It calmed him down, he told me. He wouldn’t be tempted to throw his tools around or hit me. In fact, he never hit me, all because of his magic mantra.
Jacko told me, when I asked him what the point of it all was (meaning him going back to jail a lot), that the point is something that depressed people worry about, the non-depressed don’t. Like him, Jacko, for instance. He just worked in the jail’s garden. During winter he read comic-strip books. “Me worry?” Jacko asked. Jacko didn’t look worried to me. He looked more like puzzled.
Tom Tipper, the ex-Harvard guy who escaped to Bunkport, my beer buddy at the Thirsty Dolphin counter, told me to reduce everything back to nothing. Everything comes from nothing anyway, and everything goes to nothing. “You can’t worry about nothing,” Tom said, “because there is nothing there to worry about.” He would drink more and say, “Essentially, of course.” He would drink more and say, “Of course, the exact opposite is also true.” He would drink more and say, “But then nothing is.” He would drink some more and say, “Get it?”
I would like to get it.
Sometimes I did, but not when the old seafaring couple got knocked over like tin soldiers hit by pebbles from a slingshot.
The military shrink, born in Laos, who looks like a late teener and is about half my size, the doctor I see every two months or so, told me to make a list of things I like to do and give him a copy. Whenever I see him he consults the list. Am I eating sliced radishes on sourdough toast? Go for walks with my dog? Go boating for no purpose? See that married woman? Quit after the fourth beer? Smoke a joint once a week? Try to read novels in Spanish with minimal use of my dictionary?
Maybe because I hadn’t seen Dolly for a while and was going slow on radishes on toast, I couldn’t help reaching for Uncle Joe’s deer rifle, checking the clip, arming the weapon, taking — using the scope attached to the barrel — meticulous aim, and pulling the trigger gently.
Twice.
The pirates, shot through the heads, hit the deck sideways. I cleaned the rifle, put it away, and lit a joint while the Take It Easy took it easy, drifting away erratically, vaguely aiming for open sea.
While, some hours later, I was ruminating, a chopper, alerted by a lobsterman checking his traps, who phoned the Coast Guard, dropped a crew to sail the yacht to their base at Southwest Harbor.
The next night a Guard lieutenant mentioned the event at the Thirsty Dolphin, after guzzling complimentary cold ones (support our troops) from patriotic Priscilla.
“We found four corpses,” the lieutenant told us: “Two perpetrators, two victims — it looked like to a state police detective we called in. Must have been a triple event. Crime andpunishment, for those who read Dostoyevsky. Amoral guys shooting immoral guys shooting a moral old man and his moral wife.”
The lieutenant is the head of the literary society that meets at the public library once in a while. He is smart.
“I would like to remind you,” the smart lieutenant said, “that justice carries a badge in our great country. Vigilantes will be arrested, prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” He pounded the bar. “We’ve got Homeland Security now.” He pounded the bar again. “Okay?”
We all pounded the bar. “Okay!”
“The victims,” the lieutenant continued, “were killed point-blank, with 9mm bullets fitting the pirates’ pistol barrels. According to the state police expert (he dropped his voice) who had the FBI looking in too, the pirates, in turn, got shot from some distance, say sixty feet. Bullets came from a rifle that we are now looking for.
“Who?” the lieutenant shouted.
“Who?” we shouted after him.
The lieutenant told us he supposed the shooter fired from an island, maybe. Or from another vessel, maybe. He was shouting again. “Are we dealing with an insurgent trying to save the world on his liberal own? Is anyone around here trying to think out of the box?” The lieutenant glared. “Would anyone in this town dare to believe there is no box?”
“A Che Guevara?” Tom, who wears a silk-screened Che Guevara T-shirt, asked.
The lieutenant glared at us through the righteous eyes of Fundamental Christianity. The sacred quest has started up again. Evil will be wiped out and replaced by A-1, one hundred percent, first-quality Good. This service will be rendered by uniforms, and suits with badges. Was he making himself clear?
We told him he was making himself clear.
Surprisingly, the lieutenant calmed down.
“Any of you ladies and gentlemen noticed anything remarkable relating, possibly, to this incident?” he asked us gently.
A sympathetic silence filled the Thirsty Dolphin.
“No?” he whispered.
We told the lieutenant that it is hard to notice much with all of those islands blocking the view, and there was some fog the day the yacht was found drifting, and being on the water is kind of fatiguing anyway. It’s the reflected sunlight that makes us extra tired. Hell, we are mostly working men (and in my case, crazy), we have no time to check on pleasure boaters. As the lieutenant said just now, interfering with pirates is government business, right?
The lieutenant asked Priscilla to pin his card on the big tamarack beam above the bar. In case some relevant detail ever came to mind. He also mentioned a reward. Ten thousand dollars, to be paid by one of the Take It Easy’s owner’s holding companies. Another ten thousand by the insurance people. Maybe more. There might be a Certificate of Reward, possibly issued by the governor, who knows? Otherwise by the Coast Guard. Signed in ink. Not stamped.
“Sure thing, Captain, when we hear something you’ll be the first to know,” Priscilla said, wiggling hippo hips and grinning helpfully. “Just leave it to us.”