In the early morning light, as the swallows’ calls began to ring out, a lone old man worked his body loose on the shore. He stretched all his muscles, starting at the top and working his way down, rolling his shoulders and taking little jumps now and then. He was getting to that age when it is difficult to maintain the full range of motion if you don’t take the time to loosen up every day. He had to be ready; he had a lot to handle on his own.
He woke up at the same time every morning and cooked himself a breakfast of eggs and ham. After exercising outside briefly, he walked to his greenhouse to check on the vegetables he was growing. Once that was taken care of, he headed to his underground lab, where he kept himself busy inventing until the sun went down.
Sometimes he created something entirely new, and sometimes he busied himself with improving an older invention. Thanks to the improvements he’d made a year ago to his Super Cleaner, Version Thirteen, he no longer needed to spend any time cleaning. With the press of a single button, it would clean his entire house for him without leaving a speck of dust behind. He was very pleased with this one; it worked just the way a genius’s invention should.
When he got home after the lab, he made dinner and sat down at the table by himself. Some folks in the nearby town had once inquired if he’d like a cat or some other pet to keep him company, but he wasn’t interested. In his mind, there was a certain pleasure to a quiet table. He washed his dishes, settled down for a nice bath, then turned out the lights and went to bed.
Once a week, he went into town to buy food and materials for his inventions. Everyone liked the old man, and a little crowd gathered each time he made an appearance. Many suggested, out of the goodness of their hearts, that he move into town, but he always declined the offer.
The man lived a very peaceful life. Of course, it wouldn’t be true to say that he was never lonely. There had been times in his past when his table was lively. He’d had meals that were noisy and raucous, and warm and pleasant.
Many things had changed over the years. The differences in his body were the most apparent; his muscles weren’t as strong, and he felt pain in his back more often. He never missed his morning and evening stretches. But the old man never lamented this or wasted his time moping. If he let it get to him, they’d just laugh at him.
After one morning’s exercise session, he was heading home when a man on a bicycle came riding up. He carried a bundle of paper in his hand, and he was shouting for the old man with great excitement.
“Hey, Wolf! You won’t believe what’s happened!” the man called out.
“What is it, Rudd?” the old man replied. “It’s too early for you to make such a racket.”
“Take a look at this! It’s the newspaper! There are bounty posters right on the front page!”
“Hmph.” The old man grumbled, taking the paper from the panting man. His expression didn’t change, but he moved quickly, adjusting his glasses so that he could get a good look at the picture in the newspaper.
Ah. There they are, he thought.
The article could be summed up pretty quickly: There was a group of nasty pirates who had settled in the North Blue in recent years, kidnapping youths and selling them off as slaves. They moved often, so the Navy was unable to find their hideout, and they were also ruthless fighters who couldn’t be defeated. There had seemed to be no resolution to the situation, until recently. A group calling themselves the Heart Pirates showed up at the nasty pirate crew’s HQ and completely obliterated the pirates, freeing all their prisoners. The Navy came by later and returned the freed prisoners to their families. The only comment the captain of the Heart Pirates would make was “I did it on a whim,” before departing in a submarine.
Featured on the front page of the paper was a picture of the two crews locked in combat. One of the captured youngsters had found a camera nearby and thought to snap a picture. It showed a young man with a fur hat and a large tattoo on his chest attacking an enemy with a violent look on his face. You didn’t need to read the article to understand how strong the young man was; the picture was enough. The image included others who seemed to belong to the same crew—some wore hats. There was a very large man, a woman, and even a polar bear in the group. Despite being outnumbered by their enemies, the group was fighting bravely and not giving an inch.
“It’s a great picture. Really shows you how proud and strong they’ve become. Oh, thinking about how far they’ve come from where they started, I just…” Rudd, the man on the bicycle, started to cry.
“Oh, enough with the weeping! It’s not a tearjerker!” said Wolf.
“I-I’m sorry…but aren’t you happy, Wolf? Just knowing that they’re doing well out there?”
“Hmph! I was never worried about them in the first place! I trained those kids, after all. They’d better not go around being defeated by inferior pirates. Plus, becoming a pirate means risking your life. If they chose that life and died, it would mean they just weren’t meant for it.”
“That’s a rather cynical way to think about it,” Rudd mused, “but not surprising, coming from you.”
“Oh, shut up. If you’re done here, get back to your work. I’m a busy man.”
“All right, all right. Stop by the station again the next time you come to town,” the man said, then swung his leg back over the bike and returned to where he’d come from.
After he had gone, the old man examined the paper again, this time excitedly poring over the front page. He took a close look at the bounty poster, where he saw the smiling face of a very familiar boy—no, a young man now.
Quite a long time had passed. It had been many seasons since he saw the youth, though he wasn’t keeping track of the years. All he knew was that those noisy days felt like the distant past now.
He remembered everything: Finding the boy in the cave; the day when the boy brought a polar bear back to the house; the time that boy asked two runaway orphans to be his followers. The old man remembered when the boy had saved his life after an accident with one of his inventions. He remembered the time they took a submarine to launch a sneak attack on some pirates who were marauding the town, and he remembered that he and the boy and his followers had risked their lives to win that battle. Finally, the old man remembered that the boy had stopped him from killing his own son, who was one of the marauding pirates. He remembered it all and could bring the memories back to his mind in vivid color.
As the man examined the other bounty posters, snow began to fall. The flakes shone especially bright in the sunlight. The old man approached the water’s edge and looked across the sea. He saw them on the horizon: The young men traveling vast oceans on a yellow submarine. One wrong move could mean the end of all of their lives, but they still smiled and laughed.
Somewhere out on the sea, his friends were alive, and they were fighting for the thing that he himself wasn’t able to reach. The thought of it warmed the old man and gave him courage. A renewed energy to face the challenges that awaited him in his own life suddenly coursed through his veins. He had to keep up with them; after all, he still had a job to do—keep creating the world’s most genius inventions. It was odd—his body had felt heavy earlier, but now it was light and full of vitality, like he was young again.
The loneliness was long gone. Images kept coming in the old man’s imagination: The young man with the tattoos, desperately trying to heal someone with a terrible injury. The young man with the casquette cap, cutting the hair of the man in the penguin hat and humming happily. The large polar bear, steering the ship through a powerful storm.
This was all he needed. If they were living their lives as they should, he couldn’t ask for anything more. But someday…perhaps he’d see them again.
“Can you hear me?!” he bellowed to the sea. “Nothing wrong over here! I’m leading a very fulfilling life! How about you?! Do you have smiles on your faces?! Are you proud of what you’re doing?! Are you any closer to true freedom?!”
There was no response, but the old man looked very satisfied. He believed the day would come when his friends would find true freedom and return to him with full smiles and empty stomachs to eat dinner around his table once again.
“Hmph…look at me, getting all sappy,” he muttered, and took off for the house with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.