'Pacific Overture' by Kevin Rutherford

Abel Quint, seventeen years of age, sat on a scuffed yellow barrel at the end of the harbor pier, his collar turned up against the wind. Snow swirled in the air. The prints of his seaman's boots along the boardwalk had already been obliterated by the fresh fall. But Abel didn't mind the cold. He preferred the tang of salt in his lungs to the oppressive atmosphere of his parents' home with the threat of an argument always in the air and the pervasive stink of his father's drinking. The winters were the worst – Amity was a summer town, and summer was when the work was good. Abel was a deck hand on the  Marlin, a thirty foot fishing boat chartered by the rich city folk who holidayed on the island. After Labor Day, Abel got laid off, and through the autumn and the winter worked a series of jobs – washing dishes, cleaning out driveways, – anything that kept him off welfare. He didn't want any hand-outs. He was going to make his own way in the world. His father laughed at him. What had he got that was so special? He was just a dumb-ass kid, who had left school barely able to read and write. What was he going to do with his life? And then his father took another pull on the bottle and turned his cruelty on his wife. Abel would leave the house, banging the door shut. Whenever one of his black moods came on him, he would run down to the sea, and simply by looking out at the vast Atlantic his nerves would settle.

In his hands he held a length of rope, which he absently turned and coiled into a series of knots. He remembered his grandfather teaching him, patiently guiding him through the movements. The little brown eel comes out of the cave, swims into the hole, comes out of the hole, and goes back into the cave again. They would sit out on the dock together, boy and man, as the sun went down, and he would listen to tales of the Great War and of the ships running the gauntlet of German submarines. His grandfather had died five years ago round about the time his mother had taken to religion.

Sundays were the worst. As usual, his mother had come back from church and started in on his father, who was already half drunk. Abel tried to shut out the shrill cries of scripture and the harsh curse words coming from downstairs. He grabbed his jacket and left by the kitchen door. He made his way down to the harbor, drawn by the cry of the gulls. Abel walked to the end of the dock and looked towards the horizon. The water was gray and marbled like a tomb.

After an hour of sitting there, knotting and unknotting a frayed length of rope, he began to regret leaving the house without eating. There was no point going home because there would be no food on the table, only his mother sobbing upstairs in the bedroom and his father slumped in a chair, an empty bottle slipping from his loosening grip as he drifted into a drunken sleep. If Abel walked into town, he could go by the diner on Franklin. He checked his pockets for loose change and trawled up eighty nine cents, enough for a sandwich and a soda. Abel took one last look out at the ocean and with a fisherman's eye noticed the dark mass of cloud gathering on the horizon. A storm was coming.

He walked back along the dock. As he passed the harbor master's hut, he noticed a small red glow coming from behind the unwashed panes - Frank Silva enjoying some solitude and a pipe of tobacco. He walked along the front and turned into Main Street. As he walked up the hill he heard the sound of running footsteps behind him. He turned just as a man ran past him. He then saw another man running in the same direction, and another, and a group of three together. They all seemed to be converging on one place: the town hall. Abel picked up his own pace and followed. Up ahead he could see there was already a crowd on the steps of the white clapboard building. He reached the edge of the crowd.

'What's going on?' Abel asked the man closest to him.

'You ain't heard?' The man said and then turned away, calling to a friend.

Abel elbowed his way through the crowd and pressed his way inside. The main entrance – which was nothing much more than a corridor that led to the various civic offices – was full of people shouting. One man – dressed for church in a sober suit and tie – was trying to bring some kind of order to the proceedings by standing on a chair and attempting to address the crowd. Abel recognised him as Rupert Vaughn, Amity's mayor and the father of a kid named Larry who had been a year behind him in high school, and had made a name for himself in the debating team. His dad had the same gift of the gab, and some people said that maybe he should run for governor.

The mayor raised his voice to be heard and the noise from the crowd finally subsided.

'Let's go back to the council chambers where we'll have more room. Have the women wait outside.'

Vaughn led the way down the corridor with the crowd pressing at his back. Abel followed and managed to slip inside the room just as they were closing the door. Vaughn and several of the selectmen had taken up position around the council table and the mayor was banging his gavel to call the room to order. The hubbub died down.

'Alright, gentlemen, please,” said the mayor. 'I know feelings are running high - '

'Damn right they are,' someone called from the back.

Abel could feel the growing anger in the room and he could see it on the faces of the men. He bent towards the man seated nearest him and whispered,

'Hey, mister, what's going on?'

The man turned and gave him a look of disbelief.

'Kid, you don't know? The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. You take a good look at that date there.' Here he pointed to a calendar on the wall. 'Remember that date, son. That was the date America went to war.'

It was Sunday, 7th December 1941.

At home Abel found his parents subdued. His father sat cursing the Japanese under his breath. His mother clutched a Bible in her lap, whispering verses. They ate an evening meal together, but hardly spoke. Abel went to his room and started to pack a canvas tote bag. Then he stood for a long while at the half-open window, breathing in the sea air and listening to the sound of the ocean. He lay down on the bed, not bothering to get undressed and fell into a troubled sleep.

The next morning he woke before the first light began to filter into his room. He took one last look at the cockpit of his childhood: the baseball pennants stuck to the wall, the model ships, a photograph of his grandfather in uniform. Well, that part of his life was over now. Downstairs in the kitchen he could hear his mother preparing breakfast.

Abel had thought about sneaking out before his parents were awake, but he felt he owed them at least a final goodbye. He lifted his tote bag and went downstairs. His father was hunkered down by the radio in the living room. He looked at his son and lowered his head.

'The President is going to speak,' he said. 'We're going to war, Abel.'

'I know, Pop.'

Abel had not spoken to his father in such a tone for a long time. Both were embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, but then Abel's mother came into the room, and when she saw the tote bag, her face collapsed and she began to cry.

Abel lifted his tote bag onto his shoulder. His mother stepped forward and put a hand out to him.

'You'll have some breakfast before you go?'

Abel took the hand in his.

'Sure, Mom. Scrambled eggs, bacon, smells good.'

They sat down together at the kitchen table and ate their last family meal as the voice of the President intoned on the radio from the other room. Abel wiped his plate clean with a heel of bread, drained a glass of milk and pushed back his chair. It scraped on the linoleum floor with a jarring sound.

Abel knew that his parents were standing there in the doorway watching him leave, but he did not look back. He hoisted the tote bag onto his shoulder and marched purposefully down to the sea.