“Yeah?”
The voice gave a name and an affiliation and without pausing to draw breath began hammering him with questions, each more inane and intrusive than the last—“What was it like out there? How many of them were there? How do you feel, you feel any different? You are a senior citizen, right—seventy years old, is that right? A war veteran? Did the alleged attacker say anything to you? He had a gun? Or was it a knife?” He tried to answer the man’s questions as patiently as he could, though Carolee was hissing at him to hang up and all he could think of was the cruise line’s slogan—Experience World-Class Indulgence—and wonder how in Christ’s name this reporter had managed to get his cell number, but finally, after a question about his service record—In Vietnam, was it?—he broke the connection even as the call-waiting light flared and he shut the thing off and stuffed it deep in his pocket.
“Who was that?” Carolee demanded.
“I don’t know. Some reporter.”
It was dark out over the water. They’d pulled the sliding door of their private veranda shut to thwart the mosquitoes and whatever else was out there—vampire bats, he supposed. The champagne in his glass had gone warm. He took a sip and made a face—it tasted like club soda with a dash of bitters and no more potent.
Carolee was giving him her severe look, her mouth drawn down and her eyebrows pinched together, a crease there in the shape of a V she’d been working on for sixty-four years now. “You don’t have to talk to those people,” she said.
The glass went heavy in his hand. He could barely hold his head up. “Yeah,” he said, “and you don’t have to swat flies either.”
Of course, part of the problem that first week was that he couldn’t seem to say no. He was a celebrity, an instant celebrity, the story plumbing some deep atavistic recess of the American psyche, and forgive him, because he knew it was wrong in every way, but after the third or fourth interview he began to feel he was only getting his due: Ex-Marine, 70, Kills Tour Thug; Quick Thinking Saves the Day; Costa Rica Tour Hero. If he stopped to think about it he would have been ashamed of himself—he was being manipulated, and worse, glorified not for any virtue, but for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes—but he didn’t stop to think. He’d never been interviewed on the radio before—or on TV either—and that shot up the stress level, of course it did, but he went through with every request until the requests began to trickle off in the wake of newer and riper stories, the mass shooting of the week, the daily bombing, the women imprisoned as sex slaves and all the rest of it.
There were calls from Hollywood too, producers making promises, naming sums, gabbling over the line like auctioneers—and that was what this was, an auction, make no mistake about it—but none of them ever followed through and he never received a letter from a single one of them let alone a contract or, god forbid, a check. But he didn’t want a check, didn’t want to be inflated any more than he already had been—who in his right mind would ever want to see a movie made out of his life, anyway? The camera pans down the street to focus on a frame house in need of paint in the sleepy lumber town of Fort Bragg, California, and there he is, ten years old and emerging from the front door to do something dramatic like walk to school, and here’s his mother calling to him like June Lockhart in Lassie, then we shift to the high school years, the junker car, the prom, Vietnam, college and Carolee, the birth of their son, student teaching, the rise up the rocky slope to the great and shining plateau of school principal, and all of it circling round the cruise ship and the blighted dirty jungle and one climactic moment to justify it all, this American life. Who would they get to play him—Sean Connery? Tommy Lee Jones? Travolta? Absurdity on top of absurdity.