Tunnel of Night by John Philpin

books that I withdrew from the library. From watching others. From practice.
    The child that I had been remained in me now—a lover of solitude, content with a stack of books, some music, and perhaps a slant on what my next act of defiance would be. When I was in my teens, my sisters husband said that I was oppositional, a troublemaker. He was right.
    I was only twelve the first time my mother grabbed the kids, left my father, and took us all to stay with my grandmother in Hull. I remember taking my firstspinning rod, an outfit from Sears Roebuck mail order, and walking to a wall behind the bait house at Nantasket Pier. It was a forbidden place. Dangerous, my mother said.
    “Why?” I wanted to know.
    “You might fall in.”
    “I can swim.”
    “No one would be there to help you.”
    I resorted to my secret weapon—sarcasm. “To help me swim?”
    “You are not to go near that place,” she snapped in her sharp, clipped tone that signaled the end of all discussion.
    My secret weapon never seemed to work with her.
    Her attitude reinforced my need to claim some independence. Sure I was defiant. I was going to do it my way. Obstacles—human or otherwise—were irrelevant.
    I went fishing. Alone. Grasping my good-luck charm: a large treble hook that I used for snagging shiners for bait.
    The water wore a multicolored halo of oil—a virtual slick that coated my line, the bobber, eventually my hands. No fish could have survived there. But there is more to angling than the fish. Ask any twelve-year-old kid with a bamboo pole and an empty afternoon.
    I sat on the pier until dusk, proving my point about fishing and not drowning.
    The real danger was one that my mother knew and hadn’t told me. Its name was Hector—the pedophile who ran the bait shop.
    I didn’t know any of the clinical words then, but I did know that there was something unmistakably threatening about Hector. The gestalt was wrong—the stale smells of beer, sweat, motor oil, and bait. The stubbleon his cheeks and chin. The matted black hair protruding from his Socony cap. The dirt-encrusted hands that gripped my shoulders as I stepped off the wall at the side of the bait shop.
    The hunter of fish had become a fish for the hunter
.
    Much later, when I asked my sister about Hector, she told me the truth.
    “Why didn’t Ma tell me?” I asked.
    “She won’t talk about bad things.”
    “Then how am I supposed to know?”
    “She says, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you.’ ”
    “But that’s what hurts the most.”
    When Hector’s hands closed on my shoulders, he never got a chance to say a word. I turned, raked his face with the big treble hook, then ran.
    “Hector’s face is all bandaged,” my sister told me. “They say he’ll have a bad scar.”
    Months after my fishing expedition, I saw the scar. I was walking along the breakwater toward my cave—a shelter that I had discovered in my travels, formed by scrapped slabs of gray and black granite—when Hector drove up in his old, light green Packard.
    “I’m gonna get you, kid,” he said.
    I shook my head.
    “You’re right. I can’t run along them rocks after you. But later. That’s when I’m gonna get you. When you don’t expect it.”
    I shook my head again. Then Hector floored the Packard, kicking up gravel and cinders.
    “He wants to give you nightmares,” my sister said. “He’s mean.”
    The bluefish closed its teeth on my arm. It was a gesture of mindless, random meanness
.
    Even as a twelve-year-old, when confronted with apredatory human, I shifted into an instinctive state. Fear disappeared. Rage bubbled up in a slow simmer. Then I acted.
    Late one night, when I was sure that everyone was asleep, I climbed out my bedroom window, creeping along the side of the house to the kerosene barrel. I filled a small jar, replaced the pin in the spigot, and walked down the hill to the bay.
    Hector’s house was in a setback near the breakwater. It was abutted on each side by a