Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

And here we go again. From what the veteran is witnessing from his vantage point between sheltering granite formations, the charming young men are about to take over another sea castle, the Take it Easy, a Walton Wharf creation with a price that takes awhile to write down due to a multitude of zeros.

A month before Elizabeth’s appearance I was listening to an older couple who recently sold their ancient wooden mini schooner after sailing her around the world. Not having gotten much for their worm-eaten vessel, they put an ad in the Down Easter Courier offering to take yachts from A to B, which was answered promptly by the owner of the Take It Easy. Would the couple take his brand-new multimillion dollar yacht from Bunkport, Maine to Mobile, Alabama?

Why, sure, sir.

The owners flew down, were impressed by the old weather-beaten couple; up-front cash appeared, hands were shaken.

“Godspeed and see you soon. If you need a crew, feel free to hire.”

Taking the Take It Easy out for trials, the couple (this hypothetical script has it) is approached by our killers, on one of Bunkport’s floating docks, unseen by our veteran.

Our veteran now sees the new victims, the old man in his weathered Greek sailing cap and worn U.S. Navy peacoat and his wife in an overall and a battered hat, kneeling on the boat’s deck, looking into the barrels of the pirates’ pistols. The young men bring back their guns’ hammers slowly — crrrack, crrrack — and lightly touch their triggers. The shots ring out loudly. The old folks are knocked over backward.

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.