Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  “Just our luck,” Bernard grumbled before marching out of the house. “The wind loves our little sister.”

  SATANIC GEOMETRY

  Nine of us were working the boatyard most days in the momentous spring of 2012, not counting two desk jockeys, a parts guy and a few seasonal bottom painters. There was the occasional sober scholar studying manuals, but we were mostly wing-it boys with fix-it skills. What we tended to share beyond the usual handyman swagger was a tolerance for discomfort and a knack for improv with drills, wrenches, adhesives and blowtorches. Most of us—including Lorraine—squinted beneath ball caps all day and swallowed cheap beer till midnight, then rinsed and repeated, our bodies Christmas trees of cuts and bruises. If we had girlfriends—no telling with Lorraine—they didn’t last. But don’t pity us, especially if you own a boat and care deeply about it. We are the medics and surgeons of your inanimate world.

  The morning after my father’s ambush, I bounded into the yard with my brother so big in my mind that I almost felt him striding beside me. He’d written! Just a brief and cryptic postcard sent inside an envelope wedged innocently against the side wall of my post-office box but definitely his handwriting. I hadn’t realized how much I’d worried he was dead until I saw proof that he wasn’t. It’d been years since he’d sent me manifestos about American hypocrisies and ocean polluters. All his feisty irreverence had subsequently been reduced to terse postcards—then nothing for the past twenty-eight months. And now, it appeared, he was coming home!

  Gonna need new boat and new buyer. Tell Yoshito, yoshito999@gmail.com, that Minke will only deal with him.

  Just seventeen words, but I read them several times in hopes of squeezing out a little more meaning. Gonna need implied urgency, didn’t it? For Bernard, it probably felt dangerously specific. When he’d last risked visiting—for one night—I asked him how it felt to be back home. He’d paused, like it was a philosophical question, then licked his split lip and said, “I see any land as an intrusion.” That comment stuck with me, as did his eyes, which had turned a milkier blue as if he’d stared at the sun for so long that they’d faded like hull paint. Yet the unstated clues were clear. The April 3 Manila postmark—stamped just seven days ago—suggested that he was planning a spring slog across the Pacific. A new boat meant a different boat, no doubt larger, roomier and faster, though still small enough to solo; so thirty-seven- to forty-five-footers capable of quicker crossings. That he wanted me to find a boat for him meant he either had money or intended to liberate one. As for new buyer, he clearly expected me to help him smuggle again, and Minke must be his new alias. He also apparently needed both the boat and buyer badly enough to risk coming home. At least that’s what I squeezed from those familiar backwards-leaning letters on the back of a creased postcard with a bony off-balance Filipino woman in a flowery bikini.

  The only customers in the yard this early were Rex and Marcy, clumsily applying a second coat of cheap bottom paint. “How’s it look?” she asked, lowering a filthy dust mask to bare her teeth.

  “Sweet,” I said, as if this were the smoothest, raciest shellacking I’d ever seen.

  “Two coats will last us four years,” Rex announced.

  “Maybe three,” I said. “But you’ll still need to dive-clean her every six months or the barnacles will kill your speed.”

  They nodded fervently, then showed me the boat-maintenance and storm-sailing books they’d gathered, as if preparing to explore the world’s largest ocean in a small tattered sloop was just like cramming for any other exam.

  Eyes wandering, I scanned the backlit yard and the hull silhouettes looming like fiberglass whales on blocks, my gaze bouncing between a rudderless Ingrid 38 and a blistered Valiant 40. Rigged for soloing, either might be perfect for Bernard. Circling the Valiant, I was picturing my brother safely surfing the swells inside this bulbous vessel when Noah strode up in his oil-splattered overalls, sucking a Camel down to his fingertips, his other hand wrapped around a Red Bull.

  “Could get to Pluto and back in this bitch,” he said, pinkie-pointing at the Valiant. “The great Robert Perry designed her for durability right down to her loins.” I looked away as he grabbed his. “Now don’t go phobic on me, Josh. We’re all somewhere on the homo-hetero spectrum, a matter of degrees is all, predetermined shortly after conception in those intrepid first cells clinging to our mothers’ uteral walls. Am I right?”

  “Noah,” I said, stepping back. “Think I might enjoy my coffee here in a little peace?”

  “Not a chance.” He closed in again. “Pretty much all you can hope for in this crazy world, my friend, is a fingerhold on one thing you can know for certain. And you know what that is?” He chain-lit another cigarette, then exhaled through his nose like a dragon. “If you don’t replace the zincs, the propellers will corrode.”

  None of us ever knew what Noah would say next, whether profound or nonsensical, insulting or hilarious. Sometimes he’d yak himself right off a cliff or zag midsentence into politics or religion or some date I’d had months ago. “She was fine but pretentious, right?” We tried to keep him away from customers, which wasn’t easy; as our diesel savant, he had a bizarrely precise memory for substitute part numbers and a hand in most projects. A preacher’s son, he spoke in melodious rants and without warning would shift into impressions. His Obama was decent, but his Morgan Freeman was pitch-perfect: And they will march just as they have done for centuries, ever since the emperor penguin decided to stay, to live and love in the harshest place on earth.

  Another reason we tried to keep him out of sight was his out-loud testimony about growing up in a house where the Nativity scene graced the front yard year-round. Just to mention the name of his hometown alone—Boring, Oregon—could spark a harangue, as would any reference to his father ever since his Christian talk-radio program went national. In February, he’d used his swelling audience to predict the end of the world. Our world. This one. Yet again. He’d foretold it once before, in 1998, conceding afterwards that he’d simply made an easily corrected mathematical gaffe. This time he was certain. The rapture was coming on June 24—two months and fourteen days from now. Noah claimed he rarely thought about it, though the side effects kept mounting. His latest tic? Two or three involuntary head jerks, like a boxer dodging jabs.

  Then Big Alex came bounding toward us, so I set my coffee on the garbage barrel and braced for impact as he compressed my rib cage and scraped his whiskers across my cheek until he turned to Noah, who rolled his eyes in surrender. A recovering boozer, Alex had added a thirteenth step of his own, hugging friends and strangers, that made him yet another employee to shield from customers.

  “What a blessed day!” he gushed.

  Topping everything off, bowlegged Mick strolled up for his own morning hug. Short, young and bloodshot, he pointed at my father’s bedraggled Joho 39 in the corner of the yard. “What’s the story there?”

  Among thirty-one boats of varying values, sizes, shapes and conditions, Mick had somehow smelled a rogue.

  “You painting her?” he asked.

  “Eventually,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “He’s Frankensteining her ass,” Noah told him. “It’s an old Joho 39, as they’re affectionately called, a plastic classic built by his diddy and granddiddy back in the Pleistocene era of fiberglass construction. And our boy Josh is gonna Frankenstein her ass for Swiftsure or some other ridiculous race.”

  How could he possibly know what I hadn’t yet fully admitted even to myself?

  “And you want us to get freaky on her, too,” Noah said. “Just say it, my friend. You’ll feel better.” He stared at me. “Testify.”

  “You’re a wack job,” I said.

  “True enough, but can’t you at least admit you’re gonna ask for my help? ‘Oh Noah, good buddy, would you lighten the rigging and strap on a mini-bowsprit and recommend a rudder with less drag?’ All of which I’ll happily do if you’ll just answer the one bloody question no sailor has ever
adequately addressed: How can you get so amped up about going slightly faster than somebody else when you’re both going so fucking slow?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “Well, it takes training and intuition. And it helps if you understand hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. Think about it,” I said. “To most boaters, wind’s an obstacle, but it’s our fuel. We’re harnessing an invisible force. So it’s got some magic to it.”

  Noah laughed. “You’re speed walking. If you’re going slightly faster than the moron next to you, who cares?”

  I finished my cold coffee. “Do you consider the fastest rock climbers annoyingly slow? Why go to all that trouble when you could hop on a motorcycle and ride up the backside of the same cliff in five minutes?”

  “My point exactly,” he said. “Now explain Swiftsure. You guys act like you’re heading off to Lollapalooza or Burning Man, as if you can’t call yourself a real sailor until you’ve busted your Swiftsure hymen.”

  I shrugged. “It’s the biggest race around, an overnighter with hundreds of Canadian and American boats. I mean you head out into the ocean a bit, and then you surf the swells back to Victoria in the dark. It can be a wild ride.”

  “Wow.” Noah gave me his zombie face. “How courageous.”

  I quietly backed away as customers finally rolled in and began shuffling in tight orbits around their boats, waiting semi-urgently to yak with Jack, the rotund, self-described crippled midget who ran our yard.

  He used to work alongside us before a falling mast crushed three disks. Now Jack spent his days behind the question counter, and it couldn’t have happened to a more adaptable man. Part diagnostician, part psychiatrist, he was always on everybody’s side. With us, he lampooned delusional and fastidious boat owners. With them, he commiserated about soaring costs and scandalous fees and taxes.

  He was out front now in the thick mist—rising or falling, who could tell?—beneath the same faded red ball cap he never removed, not even to scratch his scalp. “Gotta understand,” he was telling a hefty man in a linen suit, “they build these things with the tops off and cram all the wiring and plumbing inside and then glue and screw the tops down so you can’t get at anything that matters ever again. So when things go wrong we cut into housings and crawl beneath the damn floorboards. Then, of course, there’s the satanic geometry of sailboat engine compartments. All my mechanics bring cells down with them so they can call us when they get stuck. Had to pry Big Alex out with a crane just last week.” Then he looked up and shouted “Josh!” as if he hadn’t seen me in months. “Got someone here you gotta meet.”

  I duly shook the large, silky hand of Randall P. Dodd, who turned out to be the owner of the shatter-cracked fifty-three-foot Carver near the fence line. Dodd’s midlife crisis, I was to learn, involved taking up yachting and splurging on this behemoth he’d humbly named Goliath. A tech exec, he’d ordered every last automated gizmo available until his computerized skipper could practically run his yacht from marina to marina. But on his third outing—during a surge of postcoital, single-malt hubris—Dodd overrode the autopilot and was actually steering, relishing his imperial wake and the virile roar of his twin 450s snorting $180 of diesel an hour, plowing ahead at three-quarter throttle and standing like Zeus on his flying bridge, when the depth alarms started honking. Fuck ’em, he thought. He could see damn well where he was headed as his twenty-three-ton novelty crashed into the well-marked although submerged Wyckoff Shoal at seventeen knots, gutting his transmission and launching his mistress, Candi, across the galley below and snapping her left clavicle.

  “Fix my boat, ASAP,” he told us, even after Jack warned him there was likely seventy grand in repairs. “Was just starting to get the hang of it,” he confided. “It’s part of who I am now, understand? I’m a boat captain.”

  After reassuring him we could rebuild his toy, I shuffled outside to join the smoke breakers listening to Noah mimic the Dos Equis pitchman—“ ‘Stay thirsty, my friends’ ”—until he noticed me and demanded an update on my dating misadventures.

  The boys gobbled up these stories. For some, they conjured time-enhanced memories of their dating primes. For others, they were joke reels. Even if I played it straight or dull, they smirked like jackals. And then? they’d ask.

  “Number Thirteen was the youngest,” I said. “She kept staring into her cell like it was a makeup mirror. Finally, she admitted she’d hoped I’d seem younger the way Brad Pitt seems younger. ‘But you really don’t,’ she said. ‘You seem pretty old.’ ”

  The boys hooted.

  I didn’t tell them I had Mother’s math on my side. She’d penciled out my dating master plan on Thanksgiving after Father had wondered aloud during dinner how I’d turned thirty-one without finding a potential wife yet. The last census, she estimated, showed seven thousand single women within five years of my age and thirty miles of my location. At least 10 percent were dating online, she estimated, with about half of those on Match.com. So if I dated thirty-five women on that site, or 5 percent of the available pool (more than the standard polling margin of error), the math suggested I’d find true love. At least so went her calculations. The unspoken assumption being that when Ms. Right showed up, I’d know. By this juncture, I was twenty-three dates in, well over halfway through the experiment with no romance in sight.

  “The closest I got to feeling like I had a girlfriend,” I informed the boys, “was with Number Twenty-One. I thought we were into each other. Bought her four dinners before she informs me she keeps dreaming that I’m making out with her sister. So I remind her I’ve never met her sister. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but I’m having a hard time forgiving you.’ ”

  The boys roared.

  “Number Twenty-Two dumped me,” I explained, “because I drank out of a Styrofoam cup.”

  “What?”

  “She picked me up in the yard, and I asked her to stop at the port office so I could grab some joe to go. They had paper and Styrofoam cups, but I made the wrong choice, and that was the final straw.”

  “How is that even a straw?” asked Leo, a pudgy fiberglasser famous for getting so stoned that he spray-painted BRING IT? on a freeway overpass, his sloppy exclamation point looking more like a question mark and leaving thousands of drivers to ponder what, in fact, they’d forgotten.

  “Styrofoam apparently oozes chemicals like styrene,” I told them, “which she says can kill you. I looked it up. It’s outlawed in California. Same stuff they used in Legos.”

  “I used to suck on my Legos,” Noah said. “And I survived.”

  “Till now,” I pointed out. “She says she’s okay with my lack of a degree and the fact that I smell like Jiffy Lube, but she cannot abide—she actually used that word—my drinking from Styrofoam cups. It’s a sign, she tells me, that we’ll never be compatible.”

  “Or a sign that she’s completely insane,” Mick suggested.

  “They have wings but cannot fly,” Noah began. “They are birds but think they’re fish. And every year they embark on a nearly impossible journey to find a mate.”

  “What the?” asked one of the new bottom painters.

  “March of the goddamn Penguins,” Mick muttered as we dispersed.

  The rest of my day sputtered through a succession of half-finished projects, none of which involved my father’s boat, though he’d called three times without leaving messages.

  By closing, Jack summoned me for a conference call with Blaine Stanton, the hospitalized owner of the nearly demolished thirty-six-foot sailboat we’d begun senselessly repairing.

  Blaine’s stents hadn’t helped. His aorta had ruptured, and he now was calling in before his next surgery, whispering that he was about to receive his last rites.

  “When I wake up I think about her,” he rasped through the speaker. “The thought of leaving her like that is too much for me to ponder.” We waited through a painful throat clearing. “I’m serious, Jack.”

  “
I know you are,” Jack offered.

  “I want Sophia saved regardless of what happens to me,” Blaine whispered. “Hear me? I just wired you guys another twenty K.”

  “Don’t you worry about her, Blaine.” Jack stared at the ceiling so his tears wouldn’t overflow. “She’s in capable hands, my friend. We’ll do right by your Sophia no matter what happens.”

  A SWEET VINCIBILITY

  Of the boys, I was the only boater. Everybody used to be, of course, but by now they were like bartenders who no longer drank. Me, own a boat? Do I look fucking crazy?

  Meanwhile, I owned two, an old wooden Star and an older Joho 32—my floating home. Both were squeezed into my discount double slip on the A Dock at Sunrise Marina, a ramshackle of piers, sheds and boats hitched to the western rim of the bay, a ten-minute bike ride from the boatyard.

  These docks were a magnet for every bad idea and flawed design on water, every wood, steel and ferro-cement blunder; a Chinese junk made of teak so heavy it took typhoons to move it, rotting Chris-Crafts and other relics from the ’60s and ’70s, as well as the occasional pampered sloop like Princess, a twenty-three-footer so beloved by its owner that jealous neighboring boats wouldn’t speak to it. Mostly, though, these were unloved seagull-shit palaces mossed over and nosed into the dock like drunks leaning against walls, with inverted masts, decomposing canvas and stiff mooring lines strewn about moldy cockpits like dead snakes. Yet somebody somewhere, amazingly, kept paying moorage out of guilt, ignorance or senility.

  Neglected boats tell stories. People get distracted, fired, sick or divorced, and their boats hint at sad messy lives, the blue tarps temporarily concealing the decline until the wind shifts and the harbor manager gets a whiff.

  There was a barracuda-thin, sixty-three-foot schooner that hadn’t left the dock in twenty-two years. Its psychologist owner tried to sell it once, asking twice what it was worth, predicting people would assume it must be exotic. They didn’t. Now it was full of rats the size of raccoons. That cute purple mini-tug on the C Dock was available for 14K, down from 17K last month. Prices fell by the week, and some boats sold twice or three times a year to the onslaught of delusional buyers overconfident about their renovation skills right up until they ran out of cash or visualized, in one alarming flash, all the work ahead. That was when they tracked down that liveaboard handyman they’d heard about who’d coach them through it for free—maybe even do it for them. Which was why I snuck aboard my Joho some nights without flipping on the lights and lay there in the dark, because otherwise: Tap tap. Josh? Got a minute?