Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  This was the year I’d started Josh’s Small Motor Repairs. I fixed outboards, chain saws, lawn mowers and other two-strokes most people despised and couldn’t keep running. About that same time, Grumps gave me his bright orange and quite dead 1974 VW bus as a project. By that Sunday, I’d already pulled the engine and torn it apart and was preparing to rebuild it a year before I’d be old enough to drive. So damage and reconstruction fascinated me, but storms spooked me.

  This was Bernard’s sort of day. Approaching it like a fight, he dared the wind to throw its best punch. Yet he was distracted by the fact that his baby sister hadn’t capsized. So while I froze out of fear, he paused out of disbelief. Regardless, we hesitated, and in those seconds Ruby yanked her centerboard, wobbled atop a wave, leaned forward and spanked the bow twice, as if urging a horse to sprint, then blew past us on a high plane, a foamy wake fanning off her stern like it does behind speedboats. I was close enough to see her relaxed and amused expression as she passed at twice my speed. Following her example, Bernard popped his board and sped up, rocking precariously, though he still couldn’t gain on her. My plan was to keep the board halfway down to sacrifice speed for control in hopes they’d both topple and the tortoise could outsmart the hares. But Ruby pulled farther ahead, though increasingly off course and out of control, accelerating toward shore. When Father bullhorned her to drop the board and jibe, she either didn’t hear or couldn’t alter course and continued speeding toward docks and stone bulkheads. And during this elongated moment, I loathed myself for wishing she’d capsize and blamed the two Bobos for forcing her out here at this age no matter how gifted she was and hated Bernard for making us all so hypercompetitive. I’d braced myself for being sisterless by the time she finally dropped her centerboard and prepared to jibe precariously near the docks in the bay’s lone patch of calm water.

  How she found this gentle gap amid the frantic boil didn’t make sense—so maybe it found her—but it was still too windy to jibe without capsizing. That’s the downside to dinghy sailing. Once the center of mass tips past the center of buoyancy, to use Mother’s terms, there is nothing but body weight to counter the heeling torque and keep you upright. So Ruby was doomed to crash into either the water or the docks. Yet she had seemingly somehow calculated all the angles and realized she could turn safely while her sail was briefly shielded from the wind by her nearly capsized hull because her Laser suddenly popped upright, and she sprang to the other side and hiked hard, sailing on a broader, safer approach toward the downwind mark, even throwing us a hoot and a parade wave before rounding the buoy and pinching toward the finish line several light-years ahead of either of us. We raced three more times as the wind slackened. Ruby won them all and, more amazingly, never capsized.

  Afterwards, Grumps wouldn’t shut up about my little Ruby and thanked God, Odin and even Athena. What the goddess of war had to do with any of it remained unclear as he quickly moved on to salute the Nordic god of wind, too. “Thank you, Njord!”

  Keep in mind these tales vary, depending on who’s telling them, and there are no undisputed accounts of Ruby’s early sailing spectacles. Part of the problem is that so much of what she did wasn’t plausible. She was also, as I’ve explained, an unreliable narrator herself. And as fishermen and sailors have proven through the eons—with the help of reflections, mirages and rum—the bar of truth is set lower over the water.

  Here’s another Sunday: midmorning in mid-August the following summer with heat waves steaming over the lake. The three of us wanted to be anywhere else as the Bobos set up a short course and agreed to let us quit as soon as we rounded it once or within ninety minutes, whichever came first. So began our epic crawl, drifting and baking across the becalmed bay.

  Bernard and I tried to manufacture our own wind by roll tacking, which involved rocking our Lasers to temporarily fool and fill the sails with the illusion of wind. So we rocked and flopped, drifting just slightly ahead of our sister, who was pointed in the opposite direction, and gazing up her mast into the sky.

  We were almost a third of the way to the upwind mark, thirty yards ahead of her, when I noticed her suddenly gliding, without sculling or roll tacking. Air and water and time stood still, yet our sister was clearly moving, staring up at the top of her mast, as if seeing or willing something. I whistled at Bernard and pointed. “Check her out.”

  “Oh, shit,” he whined.

  Unfortunately, we were increasingly accustomed to such Ruby moments. Part of our training involved studying the tiniest wavelets for hints of upcoming wind shifts. Correct reads made up for other blunders by giving you a more direct zigzag around the buoys—a favorable shift lifting you closer to the finish, an unwelcome one sliding you farther away. And this is where Ruby had a sixth sense, saw tiny ripples we’d missed, had more sensitive skin or—Bernard’s theory—was just ridiculously lucky. Regardless, she routinely anticipated implications before we ever did. Yet like I said, on this morning there was no wind to shift.

  She was still looking up, her weight well forward and leaning toward the side where the sail hung limply. But then things got strange: the only visible ripples on the lake were suddenly right in front of her bow. Bernard and I roll tacked furiously but were too far away to share her private puff, which soon vanished anyway. Still, it had given her enough to sail past us and around the windward mark, where her magic resumed, and her private ripples materialized yet again, behind her now. So she swung the boom out wide and sprawled her weight forward to lift the stern and minimize drag, steering with her toes now, seemingly not caring where she was going, just staring up her mast while these mini-zephyrs came and went directly behind her, pushing her toward the finish line. From a distance, her boat looked like an unmanned, motorless craft gliding through a windless calm as Bernard and I finally splashed around the upwind mark. We didn’t say a thing. Even Grumps went absolutely mute.

  THE WIND LOVES OUR SISTER

  By the time we got home, she’d been off to the roller rink for more than an hour. So we muddled about and tried to make sense of it all, mostly to ourselves. Nobody was shocked to get the call later that afternoon that Ruby had broken her wrist at the rink. She was as clumsy on land as she was supernatural on water. By the age of thirteen she’d already broken two fingers, an ankle, her nose, a rib, a tooth and now a wrist.

  Waiting for her and Mother to return from the hospital, we demolished leftover meat loaf and twice-baked potatoes while watching a Mary Tyler Moore rerun loud enough for Grumps to hear it. During commercials, he’d pick up a Steinbeck paperback, switch eyeglasses and reread a paragraph or two before the show returned while my father flossed in front of the tube, as he did whenever Mother wasn’t around, and Bernard, as usual, bantered sarcastically with the commercials while our black Labs, Isaac and Albert, huddled beneath my chair betting correctly that I’d slip them morsels. Grumps had seen this same episode many times but still outlaughed the canned audience. Then Isaac dropped a slobbery tennis ball into my lap that fell to the floor and rolled southbound toward the windows.

  Over time, the Johannssen manor, with its cracked foundation, increasingly leaned toward the blackberry hill and the lumberyard and, across the water, the Space Needle and the rest of the urban mirage out our windows. We lived near the Ship Canal, a man-made boulevard of fresh water curling west from Lake Washington to the Ballard Locks and Puget Sound. Everything felt stuck in time until the houses around us started selling and getting demolished and replaced with lot-stuffing mansions, leaving nowhere for dogs to crap but in our overgrown yard. Waves of peppy Realtors kept knocking like Jehovahs to let us know how much our “teardown” was worth.

  Visitors were often openly surprised to see how and where we lived, assuming such famous sailors and boatbuilders would be living so much larger. Yet the Bobos were more like struggling artists selling sculptures to the wealthy, a sticking point for Grumps, who prided himself on making boats that normal people could afford. Even when business roared, there were few home i
mprovements and never any cash sitting around. The less we’re worth, the Bobos liked to say, the less appealing we are to sue. They packed sack lunches and never paid to park. We were the only kids in our class who didn’t get braces; orthodontists, we’d been taught, were shysters. If we ate out as a family, it was fish ’n’ chips at Ivar’s snack bar. We never made it to Disneyland, Hawaii or Paris. Our vacations were all boating. And when Granny died of Benson & Hedges, as Ruby summarized, Grumps moved into the Teardown, which meant me and Bernard doubling up on Goodwill bunk beds.

  After Mary Tyler Moore, we watched dueling TV ads attacking Dole and Clinton while Bernard piled on, mocking them both. When I asked about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, Grumps blew his nose, one nostril at a time, then carefully folded the handkerchief like it was valuable. “Democrats are sailors,” he said. “Republicans are powerboaters.”

  “Clinton sails?” I asked doubtfully.

  Grumps hesitated, deferring to my father, who was clipping his toenails now. “No,” he said, “but he’d take it up long before Dole would.”

  That made sense, but Clinton didn’t look like he’d be of any use on a sailboat either.

  “Republicans drink all day and just motor their stinkpots from one marina to another,” Grumps elaborated. “Democrats have the decency to wait till they drop sails and anchors before getting plastered.”

  The ironies would come in time, of course, with Grumps puttering around in a comfortable stinkpot and my father turning conservative. But now my grandfather was bolstering his case, rattling off famous Democrat sailors—“JFK and FDR, by God!”—when Ruby slipped through the front door and was immediately confronted by Bernard.

  “How’d you do it?” he demanded.

  “I just fell,” she said, looking down at her bright plaster forearm. “Stephanie shot ahead, and I was just like trying to catch up when—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “On the course this morning. How’d you do that?”

  At this age, Bernard’s features were an arresting mix of Mother’s puffy lips and long eyelashes and Father’s large nostrils and massive forehead. But watching anger rise in my brother or father was the exact same thing, their eyes bulging, their jugulars swelling to make room as the blood barreled to their brains. Yet both of them often smiled while furious, flaunting their incongruities. Later that fall, Bernard would get kicked off the Ballard football team for tackling too hard in practice during the same month I saw him liberate house spiders the size of small turtles and read butterfly guidebooks so many times their spines fell apart.

  “How’d I do what?” Ruby asked, though her smirk said she knew.

  After Mother set a bowl of canned minestrone in front of her, she started slurping and disrobing, her rust-colored bangs sticking to her sweaty forehead, breathing audibly through her nose. Everything she did seemed to generate heat. With Mother still an enigma to me, too, at this point, I assumed all females were mysterious.

  Breaking her wrist didn’t make Ruby cry, but the sight of a purple starfish or the exuberant flight of a swallow might. Mother called it hormones, though Grumps had the same problem with getting choked up at the beauty or humor of things. He watched M*A*S*H reruns with a hankie.

  “Where’s your jacket?” Mother asked, still standing there watching her.

  Ruby blushed. “Gave it to Stephanie. Doesn’t fit anymore.”

  “Sure it does. Get your coat back, sweetie.”

  It was a recurring problem, Ruby giving things away—her lunch money, tennis shoes, Halloween candy, my box kite.

  “How’d you do it?” Bernard pressed.

  She shrugged unconvincingly. “What?”

  Bernard looked to us for help. “How. Did. You. Find. Wind. When. There. Was. No. Wind?”

  Grumps quit shelling pistachios and hunched forward to make sure he didn’t miss a syllable of her response. My father finished his wine, swallowing noisily, missing Mother’s scowl as she swept his toenail clippings onto a sailing magazine and then into the trash before grabbing herself a beer. (They were always a booze-gender switcheroo, with people mistakenly handing her the glass and him the bottle.)

  “I go where I think the wind’s gonna be,” Ruby finally said.

  “That,” Bernard snapped, his eyes flashing, “is complete bullshit.”

  “Bernard,” Mother scolded halfheartedly, having given up on policing his language long ago.

  “There was no wind to think about.” His voice had recently deepened, and all of a sudden he sounded like yet another demanding grown-up in our shrinking house. “None at all. Zero.”

  “It was light,” Ruby conceded, her slightly elevated eyebrow telling me how much she enjoyed torturing our brother.

  “No,” he corrected her, “there wasn’t any—except whatever was filling your sail.”

  “Maybe she just pays better attention out there,” Father suggested. “Have you considered that?”

  “No, because it’s bogus.”

  “We’ve all seen enough,” Mother interrupted, “to know there can be pockets and gusts anytime and anywhere.” Tucking her bangs behind her ears, she was in her final year of waist-length hippie hair before it abruptly went wiry, gray and short. And with her accent fading, she would, amazingly, begin to blend with the other moms.

  “All it really takes,” she reminded us, “is a little expanding air. And maybe Ruby was just creating more apparent wind than you were and it snowballed. The more you generate, the more lift you get and the faster you go, right? And that creates more apparent wind, which makes you go even faster and so on. That’s why iceboats can sail four times faster than the true speed of the wind, remember?”

  “Gee, wow, that’s terrific stuff,” Bernard retorted. “Except for the fact that four times zero’s still zero.”

  “Sometimes I see wind,” Ruby volunteered, “like colors on the water.”

  “Nice try,” he said, sounding bored. “Makes you sound cool, but it doesn’t explain why you’re always looking up.”

  “I just have this hunch,” she said, “this feeling about where it’s going to blow next. Now here…then there.”

  “So you hear voices,” Bernard sneered.

  “Just Daddy’s.” Ruby couldn’t hide her delight any longer. “But even you can probably hear that.”

  Our brother waited out the laughs. “Why are you always looking up? There’s no telltales up there. What’re you watching?”

  After a long pause, she said, “Just the sail and the air, I guess. Doesn’t Momma say that in light winds you gotta keep the air molecules in contact with the sail?”

  “You can’t watch goddamn molecules,” Bernard growled.

  “If you say so, Captain Slowpoke.”

  After the laughter fizzled all of us stared at little Ruby, slouching beneath an impish smile and a sunburned nose. At this juncture, she was baby soft and boy chested in a Madonna T-shirt she’d later be aghast to see herself wearing in photos. Her hands, though, hinted at the unusual, her fingers strangely longer than mine or Bernard’s. You noticed them when she got excited or messed around on a piano or told stories. And she had that showstopping left eyebrow, which she could lower, lift or curl independently of the other. Her pupils also were peculiar, oddly tiny, leaving us all lost in her big green irises.

  We killed time, waiting for whatever she’d say next. Mother jotting numbers on the back of a grocery receipt. Father quietly grabbing himself another glass of red. Grumps popping another tiny white pill and stroking his mustache. Bernard methodically cracking his knuckles and then his spine, click-click-click. Me opening the freezer and prying loose a grape Popsicle.

  What I wanted to ask was precisely where her wrist broke and what the X-ray looked like and whether her arm ached and how long it would take to heal and was it susceptible to breaking again in the same spot or would it be stronger than ever like a welded joint.

  “I look,” Ruby said slowly, milking the attention, “for which way the win
d wants to go.”

  Bernard snorted. “Very funny, but wind doesn’t think. It just blows or doesn’t.”

  Tearing the plastic with my teeth, I pulled out the Popsicle, split it in half and handed a purple stick to Ruby.

  “Tell that to the wind,” she said before sliding it into her smile.

  “Why does this keep happening to her?” our brother whined.

  The two Bobos rumbled with laughter, then Ruby pretended her Popsicle was a microphone and started into that love-shack song while Mother looked on pensively. She was the last of us to admit there was anything bizarre about Ruby’s sailing.

  There are so many variables, she kept reminding us. At her suggestion, we switched boats and sails. We strapped thirty pounds of weights to Ruby’s cockpit. We started at different ends of the line and veered to opposite sides of the course. Still, she almost always won, and eventually Mother became as moved by her daughter’s sailing prowess as she was drawn to mysteries and unsolved problems.

  Yet she rarely had satisfying answers when it came to Ruby. On this August evening, she sighed, leaned back and said, “Einstein loved to sail when there was little or no wind so he could scribble down ideas.”

  Bernard laughed bitterly. “I doubt there’s much deep thinking going on in Ruby’s boat.”

  “Then perhaps it will just have to remain a mystery,” our mother said. “As Albert liked to say, ‘Mystery is the source of all true art and science.’ ”

  Bernard shrugged. “Wow, that’s so insightful it makes me weepy. But sailing isn’t art or science.”

  “You’re right,” Ruby said. “It’s both. And have you ever considered that maybe the wind just loves me more than you?”

  Her left eyebrow soared, then her giggle turned into snorting laughter after she dropped her Popsicle into the lime-green-and-white carpet Mother had vowed to replace years before.