Now he turned, looking straight at me. “You and your kind, you know nothing.”
I nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“We fought and bled and died for the generations to come, so you wouldn’t have to worry about secret police or cities being bombed or being sent away to a gas chamber. That’s what we did for you, and how do you repay us? By using your freedom to get drugged up and watch filth on TV, and complain that the stock market isn’t making enough money for you. Bah. The hell with you all. Makes me wish sometimes we’d get into another Depression, another big war, not this phony war on terrorism, so you can see what it was really like.”
“Your brother, Raymond,” I said, not rising to the bait. “That’s what happened, right? You got word that he died and you saw a chance for revenge, a way to get back at—”
He raised a hand from the phone and made a dismissive motion towards me. “Oh, you make it sound so cold and conniving, don’t you? The truth? You want to know the truth? I was seventeen years old, carrying a rifle almost as big as me. I was face-to-face, every day, with the enemy, with what we thought of as Nazis. Truth? Most of ’em were my age, that’s right, my age, and were scared at being so far away from home. They didn’t look so mean or so scary up close. So it was pretty easy duty. Just escortin’ them back and forth to the farmers’ fields or the forests. But then there came the news of Raymond...”
The old man looked out again to the parking lot. “My only brother. My best friend, really. My dad had died years earlier, so Raymond taught me how to fish and hunt and set traps out in the swamps for beaver. Older brothers sometimes get a kick out of raising hell against their younger brothers. Never Raymond. Oh, we had such grand plans, the two of us, when the war was going to be over. We were going into business for ourselves. Didn’t matter what kind of business, we never got that far in talkin’ about it, but what did matter is that we were going to stick together, the two of us, when the war was over.”
I sat silently there, letting him talk, my notebook still safely shut on my lap. He went on. “Then... Mother got the telegram. Back then telegrams were delivered by taxi drivers. Always hated seeing taxi drivers in the neighborhood, ’cause you knew they were delivering bad news. Poor Raymond. Died the day after D-Day, in France. Oh, how Mother wept, and I did, too, though I kept it secret from her. I was the man of the house, you know... I wanted to show her how strong I was...”
The music overhead stopped for a moment, as a nurse was paged to report to the reception center. I cleared my throat and said, “What happened at the PW camp, then?”
A slight tremor of the body. “I was young, I was so sad, and so angry... Those boys in the camp, most of ’em were captured in Italy and North Africa. They had nothing personally to do with Raymond’s death... But one night, I heard them laughing and singing. You know why? They were happy that the invasion was on, ’cause they knew the war would be over and they’d be going home to their families, their mothers and fathers, their brothers... I smoked back then... I had some matches... That’s all it took...”
He turned and looked back at me, his eyes moist. “The minute I set the fire, I regretted it, regretted it so much, Mr. Spooner... Those wooden buildings went right up and I could hear them screaming inside, screaming as they were trapped... I reported the fire and helped the firemen drag hoses there, but... Twenty-four... In the end, I killed twenty-four... But what else could I have done? They were laughing and singing while my brother’s body was getting colder and colder in the mud of France...”
I slowly opened up my reporter’s notebook. “Then why the calls to the newspaper every Tuesday? Why were you doing that?”
A brief smile came over him, just for a moment. “A man gets to my age, your mind starts racing backward, starts remembering. I found I had to say something, confess to someone, so that I could sleep at night. And the local newspaper seemed to be the place to do it.”
I uncapped my pen, started making a few notes, looking down at the notepad. “Well, here’s a newspaper reporter right here, ready to hear the whole story again, Mr. Gagnon. So tell me how it all happened, right from the start.”
His voice: “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m afraid I won’t let you.”
I looked up, ready for a comment about the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and all that, but Mr. Gagnon was now practicing his rights under the Second Amendment, and was pointing a large pistol at me that he had pulled out from underneath his afghan.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve lived here all my life. Raised a family. Became a supervisor in the mills and a selectman for twenty years in the town. This is my home, my place, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some stranger humiliate me while I’m still alive.”
And then he put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
A half-hour later I was sitting in the rec room. The shakes in my legs were finally beginning to subside as Connie Simpson sat next to me, a clipboard in her lap, looking at me with concern.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked.
I was embarrassed to say that seeing the gun pointed in my direction had caused me to soil myself, so I just quickly nodded and changed the subject. “It happened so quick, I couldn’t do anything... It was like I was nailed to that chair. Could not move.”
She gave a reassuring touch to my shoulder. “Happens, facing a firearm for the first time.”
I was still holding my reporter’s notebook in my sweaty hands, and I thought that when I got back to the office, I would toss it away. “Well, when he put it in his mouth like that and pulled the trigger...”
“Your yells could be heard on the other side of the rest home. Which is how I got called here.”
I stared down at the brightly polished linoleum. “Well, how was I supposed to know the damn thing was a toy?... It sure looked real.”
I think she tried not to laugh at me. “This is a good retirement home, Jack. They wouldn’t let him have a real weapon. It was just a toy, something his grandchildren would play with when they came. He was just messing with you, that’s all. A cranky old man. Look, most of the people who live here and work here are locals, and everyone—”
I interrupted her. “I know, I know, around here, everyone looks out for everyone. Everyone knows everyone’s history. Everybody knows damn everything except for those of us who haven’t had the good fortune to have been born in Boston Falls.”
There was a slight pause there, and Connie shifted a bit in her seat. “Look, you’re still pretty shook up. How about I give you a ride? You want to go home?”
“No,” I said. “Back to the office. I’ve got a couple of things to do.”
On the short drive back to the bureau, I rolled down the window of the cruiser and just let the air cool my face. I was embarrassed and humiliated and angry all at once, a deep mix of emotions that outweighed the tiny triumph I had in finally nailing the story down, in learning what had really happened here more than sixty years ago, and in finding out who the mystery caller was.
When Connie pulled the cruiser up next to the sidewalk in front of the bureau office, I turned to her and said, “Space cadet.”
She looked confused, and who could blame her. “Excuse me?”
“That’s why I got exiled here,” I said, feeling again that squishy, warm feeling that only comes from remembering how thoroughly I had screwed up. “Space cadet. Or, actually, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. A big hit TV series during the nineteen fifties. A guy came to the Manchester office one afternoon, old guy. Said he had been one of the major characters in the show. Had old photos, scripts, memorabilia, stuff like that. Now lived by himself in a tiny one-room apartment in the West End. Not a very nice place to live. Any other newspaper might have done just a small story, but he talked to my boss, a fan of old science fiction and science fiction TV shows and movies. So I got the story and did it up big. Front page of the Sunday edition, about a hundred thousand readers. Sort of a Where Is He Now? complete with heart-tugging photos of him living in one room with a fold-out couch and hot plate. A great story.”