Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  “The mainland side is in the lee of the wind, so we’ll get more breeze out here, plus we’ll be on starboard tack when we hit the mark.” She looked at me. “And that means?”

  “We have right of way.”

  “Finally, something out of your mouth that isn’t complete garbage.”

  I looked out across the water and smiled. For some reason I didn’t want Amy to see. As a rule, I didn’t take kindly to being belittled, by women or men. I didn’t think it was a good look on anyone, even myself. But from Amy I kind of liked it. Not in some warped masochistic way. I just liked the way she got to the point. Maybe it was a fair comment. Maybe what I was asking was complete trash. I could see that from her point of view. And maybe if I was better at my job, I wouldn’t need to ask such questions. Or maybe in my job I had to ask such questions because I got lied to a lot.

  We neared the island and Amy called us to get ready to tack, then like a well-oiled machine we did just that, the boom slipping across the deck in an orderly fashion, the sails repositioning as if they knew where they needed to be.

  “Nice tack, team,” called Amy. “Very nice.”

  I smiled even though my major contribution had been swapping sides of the boat. We headed back across the Intracoastal. The guy up on the bow said we were on a good line for the mark. We sailed into the wind in silence, and the breeze across the water cooled us somewhat. Dakota passed around a bottle of water and we all took some. No one seemed worried about catching something. There were no parents of preschoolers on board. I watched across the water as another boat that had banked away in the opposite direction tacked back, so it was headed in a criss-cross pattern to us. It also looked quick, but not quite so sleek as ours. More a cruiser, I guessed. I was starting to see how people fell in love with this caper. The fresh air, the patter of the water. There was an odd sense of camaraderie in working as a team despite my not even yet knowing the name of the two other guys on board. I had missed the dressing room camaraderie since I had retired from baseball. A group of guys, each required to perform as individuals but also as a unit. On bad days we were only as good as our weakest member, but on good days we were better than the sum of our parts.

  “Okay, guys, we’re nearing the mark, get ready to bear away,” said Amy. She looked at me. “We’re going to bear around the mark and ease the sails out gradually, okay?”

  “Got it. What about that boat there?” I pointed across the deck at the boat I had been watching. Its crisscross path was going to bring it mighty close to us.

  “What tack are they on?”

  I looked again. “Port.”

  “So?”

  “So they have to yield.”

  “Right. They’ll have to bear away and go behind us, then ease all the way around. They made a bad choice.”

  I got ready to do my thing, which wasn’t much, and the guy on the bow called the mark ahead and said Amy was right where she needed to be. I kept looking under the boom at the boat to our port side. These guys liked to run things close. It seemed to me we were on a crash course, but I knew these big boats turned way faster than I gave them credit for, and these racing skippers liked to test the limits.

  “Nearing the mark,” called the bowman.

  “Ready team,” called Amy.

  “Those guys look close,” I said.

  “They’ll turn,” said Amy.

  We were doing a good clip, even into the wind.

  “Ready,” called Amy.

  “Amy, they’re not bearing,” said Dakota.

  “They’re just trying to scare us off our game. Focus.”

  I was focused. On the boat heading to a point right in front of us, a point we were about to hit.

  “Amy,” said Dakota, this time with a nervous edge to her voice I hadn’t heard before.

  “Focus.”

  “Amy!”

  Amy glanced at the boat headed for us and yelled. “Rights!”

  They either didn’t hear, or didn’t care. But they didn’t make to move behind us. I gripped a cleat with one hand and a handrail with the other and prepared for impact. The other yacht sped directly at the midpoint of our side.

  “Crash tack!”

  I heard Amy scream the command but I didn’t know what she meant. I figured it out pretty quick. She spun with the wheel hard, and the rudder bit and the boat jerked back to starboard. Our speed died and the boat lost control, and the world turned side on as the boat fell sideways and the sail dove toward the water. The boom dropped toward me like a torpedo, but I was looking right at it so I got lucky.

  For a second, anyway. I threw myself down as the boom whooshed overhead, and I hit the deck hard. Then as the yacht lurched sideways I slid down, down toward the side of the boat. The edge of the deck was submerged in the water, the guardrails gone from view, and I flailed wildly for something to grab hold of, but nothing came. I plummeted into the water, and was up to my waist, about to join Will Colfax in the great deep, when I came to a screeching halt. Suddenly the world stood still. The boat didn’t move, it didn’t lurch further and I didn’t slip any deeper into the water.

  I looked up across the deck, toward the sky, and saw Dakota. She was holding on to a cleat above her head with one hand, and my shirt below her with the other. She winked. Then I saw Amy crawl up the deck and pull the wheel around. It didn’t have much effect as we were dead in the water, and even I knew that we needed to be moving for the rudder to work. Dakota pulled me up. She was stronger than I gave her credit for. I got my foot onto the guardrail and pushed myself up further, and then we crawled toward the high side of the boat.

  Gradually, like a slow-motion tree falling in reverse, the weight of the keel pulled the bottom down, and the mast moved skyward, gaining momentum, until the sails spat out the water they had collected and the mast sprang upright, and then continued past vertical and the boat leaned the other way, and I thought we were going to dip into the water on the other side, but the boat only went a little way, and then flopped back toward equilibrium, and settled upright.

  “Everyone okay?” called Amy.

  “Man overboard,” returned the guy who had been working the middle of the boat. The bowman had gone over. We cast our eyes over the water and I spotted him.

  “There!” I pointed .

  He wasn’t wearing a life jacket, but he was treading water with a huge grin on his face. The guy by the mast grabbed a life buoy and threw it out, and the one in the water grabbed it and kicked his way over to us. He swam around to the stern and Amy dropped a ladder and he climbed up onto the transom.

  “I needed a bath,” he said.

  “Who was that?” asked Dakota.

  Another yacht pulled alongside and the skipper yelled at us.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes, all accounted for,” called Amy. “Did you see that?”

  “I did. He would’ve t-boned you. Put your protest flag up.”

  “Who was that?” Amy called back to the other skipper.

  “Burnside .”

  “A charter yacht?” Amy said to herself. She directed her attention back to the other boat as it began to ease away.

  “Who’s skipper on that boat today?” called Amy.

  The other yacht picked up speed as the wind gathered in its sails, and the skipper turned back and cupped his hands around his mouth to yell.

  “Alec Meechan.”

  Amy looked down at the guy sitting on the transom, getting his breath back, and then she turned to look at me.

  “You still think he’s my type?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ALEC MEECHAN WAS unapologetic. Amy attended the protest meeting after the race, where she told me Alec had claimed that he had eased to go behind our boat and that Amy had panicked, crash tacked and cut off his line, so he had to continue forward to avoid an impact. None of the other boats who witnessed events agreed with him. The protest was upheld, and Alec’s boat was disqualified
from the race. He dismissed the whole thing with a shrug and a whatever , and then headed for the bar. There was talk of barring him from future races, but Amy said nothing would come of it because there wasn’t an actual accident. The whole thing was of no consequence to us, since we had crawled to the finish line near the end of the field, having been in first place at the final marker. Amy shrugged it off.

  “It’s just a twilight. It’s not the America’s Cup,” she said.

  “Still,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Really?” she said. “That’s your best line?”

  “No, that’s what I say when I offer to buy the crew a beer.”

  Amy gave a sheepish nod. I got five beers and the guy from our crew who didn’t go overboard helped me carry them.

  “I’m Miami, by the way.”

  “Jeff,” he replied. “I saw you play ball. ”

  “You did? Where?”

  “At Roger Dean Stadium.”

  “So you’re a Cardinals’ fan,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “You were good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You mind if I ask you something?”

  “Shoot,” I said, delivering the beers to our crew. Everyone shared a cheers, and the guy who had ended up in the water joined us with a towel, and told me his name was Rob.

  Jeff took a sip and looked at me. “You beat Palm Beach every time I saw you pitch. So how is it that you didn’t make the majors?”

  “You played baseball?” asked Amy.

  “I did,” I said. “And I did make the majors, sort of. Back when I was playing in California. With the A’s.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Jeff.

  “Yeah. I got on the squad in ’04, but never actually got to play.”

  “That sucks.”

  I nodded to him and sipped my beer. “You’re right, it did. But that’s life. I got traded for the next season, to the New York Mets, and they sent me down here to St. Lucie. That’s where I played out my career.”

  “That’s sad you never got to play,” said Dakota.

  “Sad? Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “It was a joy to play baseball for so long and get paid to do it.”

  “So you weren’t good enough?” asked Amy.

  “Geez, Amy,” said Jeff.

  “What? I just wondered why. ”

  I looked her in the eyes. “I don’t mind. I don’t know why. Sometimes it’s timing, sometimes another guy takes his chance at the right time when you don’t. Why I didn’t get my shot? I can’t tell you. The people who made the call never explained it to me.”

  “So were you good enough?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I think so. I think I could have matched those guys. But it’s easy to say you could win the America’s Cup if you never get to board a boat.”

  I drank my beer quicker than I had planned, but then I noted all my crew mates were matching me. I’d heard stories about how sailors drink. Rob and Dakota got another round, and I tried to slow down a little. I found it hard, and I wondered if it was the result of the adrenaline in our bodies after the near crash. But everyone seemed to chill and the place developed a nice easy buzz. We sat in the corner and Amy kicked back and I noticed her relax. She had a nice smile when she got around to dropping the frown. But she never lost the look in her eyes, an intensity as if she were analyzing the folks in the room like they were wind shifts. It was the kind of focus that would have burned Longboard Kelly’s to the ground. Even as she relaxed and enjoyed the company of her crew, her body stayed ready, like a coiled spring.

  I saw Ron across the room, a genuine smile in his eyes, so I excused myself and weaved my way through the crowd to him. He introduced me to a bunch of people whose names I instantly forgot, and they asked me about the incident , as it seemed to have been dubbed, and I gave them the Reader’s Digest version. Then I slapped Ron’s back, and told him I’d see him the next day at work. He winked, which told me that jail time was the furthest thing from his mind .

  I walked outside and stood on the dock and leaned on the steel balustrade for a moment. The sun had fallen and an almost full moon was out, lighting up the water. It was still balmy, but it was an ice bath compared to the earlier day, so I let the cooler breeze glide over me. The light from inside the yacht club lit the dock up for a moment as the door opened and then closed. I saw the silhouette of a man with a familiar shape walk away toward the promenade and then stop. Under the light of the canopy, where the yacht club valet did his thing, I saw the face that belonged to the shape.

  It was Drew Keck. I hadn’t seen him inside, but there were so many sailors in there it was like Where’s Waldo? I followed Drew to ask him about his boat project with Will, but I stopped when I realized that he wasn’t waiting for the valet. The nosey part of me wanted to see who he was waiting for, so I pressed up hard against the railing on the dock and slid as close as I dared to get. Drew lit a cigarette and sucked on it hard, once, twice, three times. Once was nothing. Twice was a habit. Three times was anxiety. He inhaled the cigarette almost literally, and then turned to a trash can with sand in the top where he crushed the butt. I had to give him props for at least not tossing the damned thing into the water. As he turned around from the trash can a conservative silver Mercedes pulled into the valet station. I saw the driver wave the valet away, with the flick of a toned, feminine arm, but I couldn’t make her out in the dark car. Drew Keck leaned into the passenger's side window as it dropped down. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the driver passed Drew something, and he stood back and tapped what appeared to be papers on the sill of the car. He made to turn away, and then I heard the driver call to him.

  “When, Mr. Keck?” she asked .

  “Soon. Days.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “Not for what I had to do,” he said, and then he did turn and walk away. I stepped down on a jetty between two large motorboats so Drew didn’t see me, but he was looking at whatever papers the woman had given him, and he paid me no mind. He headed back to the bar and I stepped back toward the valet to get another look at the Mercedes, but it was gone.

  I wandered back along the dock, thinking about whether to ask Drew who he was meeting, but I decided the yacht club, where he was a known quantity and I was not, was not the place to do it. Instead I resumed my position on the railing, looking out across the boats.

  I was watching a radar or some such thing spinning slowly on the top of a motor yacht, when I felt someone brush against my arm and join me leaning over the edge of the dock. I glanced aside and saw Amy. She had removed her cap when she had gone into the clubrooms and had not put it back on, so the breeze was playing with her short hair. I just watched her as she looked at the water. I wondered about the chip she carried around on her shoulder, and how that hardened her some. And I wondered if I would be like that if I had been met at every step of my baseball career by people telling me I wasn’t strong enough because I was a woman, or I couldn’t play because I was a woman. Or worse still, telling me I could be anything I wanted to be, and then never giving me my shot. We had some stuff in common. Everyone has baggage. I’d struck out some of the best batters in major league baseball, but I’d only ever done it at batting practice. Amy had been told by the likes of Drew Keck that she was too weak, so she had gotten strong. She’d been hired as a pro sailor by Will Colfax, and then he had deferred to Drew on all sailing matters. He probably paid her a fraction of what Drew got, too. She was told by the likes of Alec Meechan that she must be gay if she could rebuff his advances. No one’s life is a picnic, and a person deals with adversity or they don’t—it’s their choice. I just knew if I had lived through those comments, there’d be a few more busted noses around the Palm Beach Yacht Club.

  After the longest time Amy took her eyes from the water and put them on me. It felt like a retinal scan. She was soft and hard, strong and vulnerable. We looked at each other without
speaking for a time that would have made most people itchy. She didn’t smile, but she wasn’t frowning. Then she spoke.

  “You should take some sailing lessons,” she said.

  “You teach?”

  She nodded, gently. “Talk to Ron. He knows the guy who runs the sailing school.”

  I nodded in return, but said nothing.

  Then she touched my arm. “Nice sailing with you today.” And she turned and walked back into the club.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  BALMY EVENINGS BRING heavy days in Florida, when the whole place turns into a massive bain-marie , and the moisture rises from the wetlands that lie beneath the entire state to slowly braise everyone and everything. I woke early in a sweat, with a sense of unease that I couldn’t quite place. I got up, drank some water, and then stood on my balcony in the first light. The clouds hung like a false ceiling, and the wind had all but gone. It was the kind of day you prayed for rain, to drive away the humidity, and when that rain came as it inevitably would, you would regret your prayers as the fresh moisture did nothing but ratchet up the stickiness.

  I got in some shorts and an old Mets T-shirt and went for a run. The streets around my apartment were quiet at this time, the golfers and business types still working off their booze and all-you-can-eat seafood buffets. There was no traffic inside the community, and my footfalls echoed off the blacktop, bouncing off the apartment buildings and back at me. I jogged down to the community pool, and stopped. I just wasn’t feeling it. I wanted to open up like a gazelle and run, and something about the canyons of buildings made me feel closed and small. I took off my T-shirt and wandered into the beach entry pool, the incline slowly taking me deeper and deeper, until nothing was above water but my head. The pool wasn’t officially open until later, but that rule was only as good as the people who enforced it, and the complex owners didn’t pay for staff to wander the pool area at five in the morning. I wasn’t making any noise anyway. I was like an alligator, eyes and nose above water. I floated around for some time, thinking random thoughts, the kind that shoot into your mind like meteors, seem to take hold, and then get bounced out of the way by the next random thought. Except such thoughts were rarely random. I just didn’t know how they were connected.