How Swift Charger Did Not Win the Yacht Regatta

John Green, semi-retired owner and part-time proprietor of Green’s Convenience settled back in his chair and tried not to let the reporter understand just how much he was enjoying himself.

“That’s a great question,” he said, failing completely. “We’ve been here since the beginning, my daddy before me, and truth to tell John Jr. mostly runs the place now, but I’ve been sitting here the best part of my life. I seen everything.” He nodded towards the picture window of Green’s Convenience. The store was on a slight rise across the street from the water, and the view was spectacular.

The journalist nodded. He was working on a story called 100 Years of Crane Bay for the local tourist rag, and he’d just about accepted that life had let him down and wasn’t looking to pick him up again.

“I’m sitting here all day every day,” John told him, not entirely truthfully, “so I seen everything, but the most exciting thing I ever saw...”

He lapsed into contemplative silence, not because he needed to, just because he knew the right way to spin up a story. The reporter didn’t appreciate that.

“Mary, next door at the fish and chip shop, probably already told you about the time that the Orca whale beached itself on the cape. That’s a good story, only she gets it wrong. It wasn’t an Orca whale it was a kayak, and he wasn’t beached, he just came out of the water, and it didn’t happen here anyway.

“And I bet Seth Martin, next door to her, the news agent, told you about when Titanic struck an iceberg and sank right in Crane Bay. Course he’s batty as Dracula's underpants, but that did happen. Unlucky name for a glass-bottomed boat, if you ask me, and it wasn’t the right time of year for a school trip either.

“For my money, the most exciting thing I ever seen happen on Crane Bay was when Swift Charger didn’t win the yacht regatta."

John laced his hands over his belly and started spinning.

“Swift Charger was Don Ellington’s boat. His family used to be a big deal around here, so they had the cash to set their son up with a proper racing yacht, which we didn’t see a lot of in the regatta. Most of Crane Bay used to enter, sailing whatever they could get to float. The Boy Scouts rowed on a pine log one year. So we all thought a racing yacht was a sure thing, even though Don wasn’t much of a sailor and hadn’t had any luck in any of the other races.

“He could point a boat in the right direction, and from one end of the bay to the other isn’t much of a race, so why wouldn’t he win? That’s what we all thought. He was the only one on the water that cared enough to try, anyway.

“So the mayor fires the pistol, and the boats are off, and right away Swift Charger pulls way out in front, and maybe that was Don’s mistake. Maybe if he’d been content to lead the pack, Swift Charger wouldn’t have been such an obvious target.”

John Green shook his head sadly, remembering a bygone day.

“That’s when the terrorists arrived. I guess everybody says something like this after the fact, but they gave me the willies right away. They passed right by my window, four blond men with the same haircut in an old sedan. There’s something not right about that, I thought.

“They were all wearing the same pair of cool guy sunglasses too. When you were a kid and you drew the sun wearing sunglasses, they were those kind of sunglasses.

“They pulled into the car park on the head, you can see it there. All four of them got out of the car, and they were sort of pointing at Swift Charger, and then two of them get a sort of long thin tube out of the back. One of them goes down on one knee with the tube on his shoulder, and I thought to myself, that’s not a surface to surface missile, is it? But it was. He fired, and it tore off towards Swift Charger with a whistling noise trailing white smoke.

“Tragic. Radical Icelandic Separatists, they turned out to be. They sent a letter to your paper, but it didn’t clear anything up. I guess they wanted the ice to be farther away from the land. Honestly, we never understood what they wanted, or what they expected us to do about it, but there’s never any sense in violence.

“I went after them like a shot, and Seth, the news agent, was right behind me. I had my hand cannon, and he still had the machete that he used in the Emergency. We tore them to pieces, and they never fired twice, I’ll tell you that much.

“Course the first shot was a bullseye. Blew Swift Charger right out of the water. No survivors.

“Some of the Boy Scouts jumped off their log to help, and we lost a couple of them too.

“Tragic. I don't even remember who won the race now.”

The reporter hadn’t even bothered to hit record on his phone.

“That’s quite the story, Mr Green,” he said, as if the man couldn’t tell when he was being condescended to.

John Green grinned like a magician.

“I’ll show you a couple things,” he said. “Here’s the hand cannon.”

He reached beneath the counter and pulled out an enormous pistol. He set it in front of the reporter, to the other man’s obvious shock and discomfort.

“I’ll get the other thing from upstairs,” John added. He rolled himself backwards and then bounced out of his chair. He scurried up a staircase at the back of the shop, leaving the reporter alone with the gun.

It wasn’t long before the bell above the shop door rang, and a man who was plainly the younger John came in with an armful of boxes. When he saw the reporter he set them on the counter.

“Help you?” he asked.

The reporter tore his eyes away from the gun and smiled weakly at John Jr.

“I was just talking with your father.”

“I thought so, I know the look.” John Jr. clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about him. He’s been at loose ends a bit, since mom died. He just likes to talk.”

“He doesn’t just like to talk,” the reporter said, nodding towards the pistol.

John Jr. sighed, “Christ, he hasn’t hauled that thing out, has he? Don’t worry, it isn’t loaded.”

“It absolutely is loaded,” the reporter told him. “I was in Iraq.”

If the younger John had a response to that he didn’t get to use it before the elder John bounded back into the room with a metal cashbox in hand. He settled himself back into his chair and put it on the counter.

“Here we are,” John Green said. He opened the box and took out a pair of black plastic sunglasses with a dime sized hole in the right eye lens.

“Radical Icelandic Separatists,” he said, “I seen everything.”