Painfully, Cooper sits, and yet no one remarks upon his leg. “I need help,” he says. “My little friend said there is a doctor here.” The children, he sees, are outside, peering through the Laundromat’s filmy plastic windows, hands cupped over their eyes.
“You are a doctor,” one of the men says. It’s not a question.
This man—is this the chief?—looks about Cooper’s age, has poor posture and a small bowl of a belly, his Diet Pepsi T-shirt stained from recent meals. He’s smiling, showing off a silver tooth up front, but the Marshallese always smile, Cooper has read. It is their heritage to be pleasant, anything to keep the peace on their tiny atolls.
“Are you the boss?” Cooper asks.
“I am the mayor,” the little man says. “Harold Van Horn the third.” The others look at him with admiration. He speaks English very well; only his staccato delivery and especially his elaborately rolled “r’s” betray his mother tongue.
“You’re kidding,” says Cooper.
“It’s Dutch.”
“Dutch,” someone echoes.
Cooper nods his understanding. “I’m not a doctor,” he tells them. “I need a doctor for my leg.”
It should be simple, he thinks. Surely, even a remote islet like this has penicillin.
Harold-the-mayor gazes down at his leg and shakes his head with concern. “It looks infected, your leg!”
Somebody places a plastic tumbler of orangeade in front of Cooper. Without thinking, he drinks it down. Its warmth and sweetness nearly make him gag. But he wants more of it. His ears are burning.
“You have a doctor?” he asks. Is there an ice machine nearby? he wonders.
“You mean Dr. Thomas, the American?” Harold-the-mayor says.
American! Cooper has never considered himself patriotic or chauvinistic or jingoistic—he’s been indifferent to America’s power and prestige. He’s not political. He’s never been political. Geeks don’t care about such things. Or so he has joked. But lately he has been feeling increasingly—and grudgingly—political, now that America has invaded Iraq and too many Americans are insisting that this is payback for 9/11, even though it’s clear—and has been clear—that Sadaam had nothing to do with 9/11. Cooper feels pained by the spectacle, like a hapless witness to a playground fight where the bully punches the wrong kid in the nose. And it’s looking bad: last year’s supposed end to the invasion (“Mission accomplished!” the president boasted from the deck of an aircraft carrier) has devolved into an agonizing, bloody, embarrassing war. It could drag on for years. Another Vietnam!
Whenever Cooper explains his work—anti-ballistic missile defense—nobody hears anything but “missile”: you make missiles? Cooper makes missiles that shoot down other missiles. Actually, he doesn’t even make missiles, he makes guidance systems. Actually, not the guidance systems themselves but the programs that constitute the brains of those systems. See how complicated this is? His is a necessary, a useful, job. He agrees that tyranny must be defeated. But he’s not fighting tyranny exactly. He’s not fighting at all.
And he’s not a “patriot.” It’s not like he has an American flag sewn onto his windbreaker or blazoned on the bow of his boat. Still, when he hears this Pacific islander say the word “American,” Cooper shudders with a chill of excitement and surging pride because, out here in the doctorless swelter of sandspeck islands, Americans are a godsend: Americans get things done! If you’re in trouble, you want the Americans on your side.
Without Americans, the world would not have become the big, beautiful modern mess that it is, with movie stars and rock and roll and men on the moon and V-8-propelled sports cars and brick-thick hamburgers and super-sized milkshakes and 120-channel TV and air conditioning in every room and cloud-piercing skyscrapers and all-night supermarkets and 3-D monster movies and virtual reality video games. It’s junk, most of it. But it’s also an expression of an irrepressible will to do better. It’s a celebration too of a restless, reckless drive to live fully. Isn’t that why Cooper took the risk to sail all this way alone? He was restless and wanted to feel things he could feel only if he were reckless.
Now, surrounded by the enthusiastic chatter of the dusky wide-eyed people, he is overwhelmed by the sweet scent of their coconut oil, overwhelmed by the impossible remoteness of their tiny island, overwhelmed by the fact that here, in the middle of nowhere, he will see another American.
Tears burn at the corners of his eyes. America, the beautiful, land of the free, home of the . . . . “Dr. Thomas, an American?” Cooper gasps.
“That would be me.”
Cooper turns to see the American’s approach from a room in the rear, which must be a kitchen because the man carries a platter of steaming French fries.
They must have seen Cooper coming! They must have set up all of this for his welcome!
The American is a big bearded man with a sunburnt face and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He wears a T-shirt that says, across the chest in multi-colored block print, “Fruit of the Loom.” His Bermuda shorts look like they could use a good wash.
As soon as he sets down the platter of fries, a flock of brown hands flutters to them.
“Marvin Thomas,” he says. He sits heavily across the table from Cooper. As formidable as a bull walrus, though far from obese, he’s one of those guys who looks big and fit but has never jogged a block or lifted a five-pound dumbbell. “Everybody here calls me Thomas.” He extends his paw, which Cooper tries to shake but ends up squeezing only two fat fingers. “I used to be with the Corps.”
“Marine?”
“Peace.”
“You’re a doctor?” Cooper asks.
“Of American literature. A Melville man, to be exact. I hope you like Melville.”
Cooper wants to groan in dismay but, instead, he hears himself asking, “Can you help me with my leg?”
Thomas glances over the table, arches his brows at Cooper’s leg, then says, “It’s infected.”
“I need penicillin.”
Cooper tells him about the 45-pound bluefin. It pissed him off, how the blue refused to succumb after he’d fought the thing for a good half hour, after he’d played and pulled it to the boat finally, after he’d hauled it on deck and hammered it with his Louisville slugger. After all that, the beautiful bastard bucked, gills yawning, dorsal fins arcing at him, sun glinting from the yellow-blue of its gorgeous scales. It spooked Cooper, the life in the thing, and for a moment he wondered if he should kick it overboard because sometimes it’s better that way. Letting it go would have been a sign of respect.
At that moment, his heel on the blue’s bloody gills, the gaff got him and tore a searing thirteen-inch gash down the calf of his right leg. He can’t remember if it was the tuna that slammed it home or his own carelessness as he dodged the fish’s formidable tail. In anger, he batted the tuna until his forearms ached. Then, disgusted with himself, and disappointed that a great catch had become so ugly, he dragged the bludgeoned blue into the cooler below, then he tended his bleeding wound, flushing it first with peroxide. He dressed it with anti-bacterial salve and sterile gauze. He knew it’d be inflamed for a few days but he didn’t imagine it’d get like this. He used three bottles of peroxide on it, wasted his one bottle of rubbing alcohol, then his last bottle of vodka, but the gash only got worse.
“It’s the polyps,” Thomas says. “Coral’s in the air. Everything gets infected if you don’t soak it in hot salts.”
For three days Cooper debated whether or not to put in at the nearest lagoon. He’s five days east of the International Date Line—not more than a week from Kwajalein Atoll, where he’s supposed to start