Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  The two Bobos were watching a Get Smart rerun from their dueling recliners when Grumps turned up the volume for one of his favorite scenes.

  “Would you please turn that down?” Ruby asked from the couch, where she was sprawled out with her eyes closed.

  “What’d she say?” Grumps asked.

  “Turn it down,” I said.

  “What the hell?” Father demanded. “Go to bed if you need some quiet.”

  “I don’t want to move,” she said, later explaining that she’d been battling a PMS migraine. “Just turn it down.”

  “What’s she saying?” Father asked.

  “Please!” Ruby urged loudly enough for everybody to hear—right before the television blinked off along with the lights.

  Mother waddled out of her office in her robe. “My computer,” she mumbled. “What just happened?” She looked outside. “Everybody else still has power.”

  A second later the lights flickered back on, and Father started to reach for the clicker, but Grumps beat him to it and shook his head. After Mother retreated to her office, I turned off the living room lights, and we all sat quietly in the dark listening to the refrigerator hum and pop, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  On the drive to the airport, Ruby interrupted one of my boatyard stories to inform me that I needed to stop observing and start acting.

  “What makes you think you can say things like that?” I asked.

  “You should do more work for people who need it but can’t pay for it,” she told me. “Give some of your expertise away instead of just soaking people who can afford you.”

  “I think you’re turning into Dad,” I told her. “You insult people, then claim you’re just being honest.”

  She thought about that and said, “Point taken.”

  “I keep it simple,” I said, suddenly bent on explaining myself. “I fix what’s in front of my face. Then I move on to the next broken thing and try to fix that, too.”

  She closed her eyes and asked me to tell her a story about our childhood. “Something you, me and Bernard did, something I’ve forgotten.”

  That part was easy. Ruby had always been so entirely in the moment that no lobe of her brain had ever stored much. So I took a breath and shared the first memory that popped up.

  “The three of us biked to the lake when you were nine. Bernard wouldn’t let us wear helmets. And he invented some weird decathlon with events that all involved throwing or hitting rocks. He’d won everything, of course, by the time we got to the skipping. There was this dark-peach sunset under way that was tinting the entire sky. And that’s when you, on your final try, skipped a rock the size of a poker chip so many times that we lost count after twenty-three.”

  “No, not one of those,” she pleaded, her eyes still closed. “Tell me a story where I was totally normal.”

  A couple hours later, when I returned to the Teardown, Mother looked up and then showed me what she’d just typed on the screen:

  Introduction: We prove the existence of an immortal classical solution to the Navier-Stokes equations under the hypothesis of Statement A or D. Our methods are new, and with a solution starting as a limit of P-viscosity immortal solutions have been proved by the author.

  I stared at the words, diagrams and equations, hoping for any scrap of it to make sense as my body temperature kept rising. Lured by the million-dollar prize, fluid dynamicists had been using computers and dyes and every imaginable mathematical contortion to try and solve this problem. But my disheveled Swiss-immigrant rooftop astronomer was beating them to the correct answer? It had been a long time since she’d won teacher of the year. Former students no longer visited her every summer. What were the chances that she alone could take the chaos out of chaos?

  I read the introduction a second time and told her it sounded really complicated but also convincing.

  Later that night, she showed it to her physics pal at the university, who took forty-three minutes to spot two fatal flaws. Grumps later told me that she didn’t speak to anybody for three days, which explained why she didn’t return my calls from Olympia.

  A CLEAR VISION

  “This is ridiculous,” Mick whined, after his crowbar broke off another rotten plank, exposing more old ribs, rusted screws and black mold. “This shitbox ain’t worth saving.”

  It was the first Saturday of May—three weeks before Swiftsure and just fifty days till doomsday—with three of us prying brittle planks off Grady Rollins’s dilapidated yacht while the liveaboards sipped coffee and watched us work.

  “They actually get solid,” I said, tapping the hull with the backside of my crowbar, “once you get a few feet below the deck.”

  “Fantastic,” Mick said, “but why not do all this in the yard?”

  “Nobody will haul her out unless she’s insured. And nobody will insure her till the repairs are done. So?”

  “C’mon, Josh,” Noah said moments later. “I hate to give Mick any credit, but he’s right. This boat’s fried, done, kaput.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Then how’s this making any sense?” Mick asked.

  “Since when does sense factor into boating?”

  “What’re you charging him for this, anyway?” Mick now wondered.

  “What’s that matter?”

  “Oh, I see. Don’t worry my little head over how much you’re getting paid.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Getting paid.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant, Josh. Floating credit is your new business model?”

  “No, I’m just not charging him.”

  “You said you’d pay my rate!”

  “I will.”

  “Wait one motherfucking minute,” Noah said. “You’re not getting paid?”

  I sighed. “I like the guy.”

  “Man crush?” Noah asked. “You fancy the cut of his Wranglers?”

  “I like the way he thinks, okay? His dreams aren’t limited by his wallet.”

  Noah laughed. “Sounds like any other daydreamer to me.”

  “That’s what they said about Einstein.”

  “Who?” Noah asked.

  “Einstein,” I said.

  “No, who said it about him?”

  “I’d bill Einstein, too,” Mick let us know.

  “You’re both getting paid,” I said, “so let’s just do this.”

  “What’s Mr. Big Dreams plan to do with this thing, anyhow?” Mick asked.

  “Live on it,” I said.

  “Seems to me I heard Grady say he’s gonna die on it,” added Noah, who at my suggestion had bought a powerless powerboat on C Dock and moved into Sunrise. Its lack of an engine—one less diesel to work on—delighted him. But his father’s countdown to Judgment Day was taking its toll.

  The END IS NEAR billboard had gone right back up the next day, as if my blowtorch escapade were all in my head. Now all the late-night comedians were feasting on his father, and Noah’s head-twitching side effect had added a shoulder shiver.

  “Will you guys just look at something?” I asked.

  My original plan was to hire the boys to help me put the new keel on the Joho this weekend, but it still hadn’t arrived on Friday, inciting more phone rage from Father. So I dragged them over to the Grady project instead, and they followed me aboard now.

  “Actually, this thing must’ve been pretty cool once,” Noah admitted.

  “Yeah, back when it didn’t stink,” Mick added.

  “Check this out,” I said, carefully parting Grady’s old yachting magazine to its centerfold and laying it flat on a small teak table. “That’s what she used to look like.”

  Mick whistled through his front teeth. “Same type of boat?”

  “No, you are standing inside the exact boat that you’re looking at right there.”

  His eyes widened, and Noah glanced around, grinning.

  “Grady wants to put a piano in here,” I said, pointing across the salon.<
br />
  Noah laughed. “Like I said, he’s bonkers. What’s he do for a day job anyway?”

  “I don’t really know. Sells stuff, travels a ton, mostly back and forth to Texas, I think.”

  “So you’re working for free on a hopeless yacht owned by some dreamer you barely know,” Mick said.

  “That’s right.”

  Noah sighed. “You’d like him, too. Everybody likes Grady Rollins.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Mick said. “The man is likable.”

  “He’s on his ham radio whenever he’s around,” I said, “connecting with strangers at all hours. He’s good at it, too. It’s like he’s got this clear vision of what he’s doing on earth.”

  Mick groaned. “You call this a vision?”

  “Yeah,” Noah said. “And what, exactly, is yours, Mick, beyond a willing piece of ass and a pint of Pabst?”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  I opened my wallet and handed eight twenties to Mick, then began counting out the same for Noah.

  But he just stared at the bills. “If you’re not getting paid, neither am I, especially if there’s some sort of sainthood to be had here.”

  “Fuck sainthood,” Mick said, folding and pocketing his pile. “I don’t work for free. I’ve got a life to get back to.”

  Noah snorted. “What would you otherwise be doing today?”

  “I don’t know. Laundry, cloud monitoring, bug counting, air guitar.” Mick looked at us, eye to eye, then back again. “Well, for fuck’s sake. Now I’m the dick because I won’t work for nothing.”

  “Well put,” Noah said.

  Mick wagged his head, chewed his lip, then slapped the money back on to the table. “I’d rather starve than give you guys some imaginary higher ceiling.”

  “Calling,” Noah corrected him as we scrambled back onto the dock. “Higher calling.”

  “How about a dating story,” Mick said, bending over to grab a Sawzall. “If you ain’t paying, you could at least entertain.”

  “Number Thirty-Two looked a little too muscular,” I began. “Know what I mean? Like a Latvian bobsledder or something.”

  “How’m I supposed to picture that?” Mick asked.

  “Use what little imagination you have,” Noah suggested. “Continue, Josh.”

  “I didn’t think that much of it, but by the second drink I noticed she had a froggy voice and a bisected chin. She also had a switch-hitting name—Kerry with a K. I thought we were going sailing, but we hadn’t left the dock yet, and she was already getting aggressive. So I found myself panicking, trying to get a good look at her Adam’s apple. Then she proved her womanhood, and I woke up with bruises.”

  Noah nodded. “Everybody needs at least one psychobitch girlfriend to keep everything in perspective.”

  “Aren’t they all psychobitches?” Mick asked.

  “No, but the ones attracted to you probably are,” Noah clarified.

  Mick hesitated. “I’d really appreciate it if the shit you flipped wasn’t true.”

  “Sorry,” Noah said, “but I flip so much your way some of it’s bound to be.”

  “Is that an apology?” Mick asked me.

  “My mother says it’s hard not to go at least a little mad if you sleep with somebody who’s crazy,” I told them. “She has an equation for it: lust times bipolarity equals doom divided by regret.”

  That was a conversation killer until Mick glanced up and asked, “So then what sort of woman are you looking for anyway, Josh?”

  “Wish I knew. Maybe somebody who gets prettier the longer you look at her. Or somebody with no more ego or self-doubt than a bear in the woods.”

  “So that’s your ideal?” Noah asked, pulling off his protective glasses to get a better bead on me. “A female bear?”

  “I thought I had weird taste,” Mick said.

  Hours later, Noah announced, “I hate to admit it, but this work actually feels pretty damn good. Like we’re doing disaster relief in Haiti or something. Wouldn’t you agree, Saint Micholas?”

  Mick grunted, flicked his cigarette into the water, then picked up his Sawzall again and walked over to the increasingly exposed bow. “My old lady’s got a stand-up in the basement.”

  “A comedian?” Noah asked.

  “A piano!”

  “Then you mean an upright.”

  “She’s got some arthritis,” Mick continued, “so it never gets played. But it still works and she could probably be talked out of it.”

  “Is it any good?” Noah asked.

  “How good’s it gotta be! It’s a freaking free piano, okay? That Sinclair girl played ‘Frère Jacques’ on it when she was dating my brother years ago. Sounded perfect.”

  “Grady wants a baby grand,” I had to tell him. “I doubt he’d settle for an upright.”

  —

  Later that night, cooking a burger on the barbecue cantilevered off my stern, I was enjoying an uninterrupted half hour to myself when a man in new Levi’s, a dress shirt and surfer hair wandered up. “The argument could be made,” he said, “that this is your family’s prettiest design.”

  “Who’s arguing?” I asked.

  “I mean it’s slow compared to other Johos but saltier and sturdier and easier on the eyes,” he said, still smiling like a monkey. “Smells like dinner.”

  I finally stood up. “What do you need?” I asked, assuming he was the new charming liveaboard I’d heard about.

  “Just looking to chat about your brother for a minute,” he said. “My name’s Ed.” Then, as if an afterthought, he fished a bright white business card from his breast pocket.

  Edward C. Blackmun

  Special Agent

  U.S. Fish and Wildlife

  “People call me Ed the Fed.” He smiled again, then asked, “You heard from Bernard recently?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, once I found my voice, “but I’m in the middle of making a burger here.”

  “Of course! I can wait.”

  I opened the grill, flipped the meat and lowered the lid, then dropped down into the cabin to gather the bun, mustard, tomato slices and my thoughts.

  “No cheese?” he asked after I lunged back on deck, giving me that gummy smile.

  “I think you’re wasting your time,” I said. “I haven’t seen Bernard in years.”

  “Ah,” he said, “well played. But I asked if you’d heard from him.”

  “How about we start over,” I said, “and you tell me what you’re doing here instead of acting like we’re beer buddies.”

  He laughed. “Fair enough! But—who knows?—we might become friends. See, I’m here to help your brother. We know he smuggles. Could’ve arrested him long ago, but we’re more interested in the people he sells to and the lowlifes above them. If he helps us out a little, he can sail back free and clear into whatever sunset he chooses.”

  Smelling the burger burning, I lifted the lid again and slid the blackened patty onto the bun.

  “Perfect,” the man said. “I love it a bit charred, don’t you? So have you heard from him?”

  “He’s never been good at staying in touch.” I stacked tomatoes on the meat, wondering just how much this man—and, by extension, the federal government—already knew about me and my family.

  “You’re smart,” he said. “You don’t answer questions, but you don’t lie either. And you know I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure you’d heard from him. When you see him, give him my card and advise him, as his wise younger brother, that he should talk to me before he does anything else.” He showed off his pink gums again, then said, “Enjoy that burger, Joshua.”

  MOTHER WAVELETS

  The Teardown was tilting more than ever. The mighty Bobos could design boats that flew through air and water at extreme angles without leaking or buckling (with several exceptions), yet neither had ever felt compelled to lift a finger to prevent the slo-mo tumble of their one and only domicile down a blackberry hill into the Ship Canal. By May 6, 2012, you d
idn’t need to be a building inspector to notice the southbound lean. Plasterboard corners were ajar by an inch or more around beams and posts. Walking from the living room to the kitchen was an uphill slog.

  I snuck in quietly enough to not wake our second batch of Labs—Hubble and Magellan—or the snoring Bobos, my two simple goals for this late mission being to assess Mother’s mental health and to avoid any insults or demands from my father.

  I’d borrowed Noah’s car hours after Ed the Fed ruined my dinner and Mother called to tell me she’d had a breakthrough. Flipping through old notebooks of abandoned ideas, she’d found a way back in.

  “To what?” I’d asked.

  “Navier-Stokes!” Her giggle sounded addled or insane, maybe both. She cleared her throat and whispered into the phone, “It’s still unsolved, Josh! I’m gonna put this out there. I mean, when it’s ready. Not yet, no, but soon. I think this may be the one. Yes, yes. I really do!”

  I hesitated, unsure what to say that wouldn’t sound doubtful. I told her to hold on, that I’d be there later that night.

  I found her at her desk, bug-eyed and braless in mismatched plaid pajamas. Two walls were covered with whiteboards and graph paper, elaborate equations moving clockwise around the room like mathematical graffiti or some frenetic musical score with her slanting letters and numbers adding to the sense of dizzying motion. Her pupils were so dilated that her eyes looked like buttons, and her words were crazily rushed.

  “Wavelets!” she hissed, as if the word alone would ring everybody’s bells. “That’s my way back in. Mini-wavelets! What do you think?”

  What I thought was that the Navier-Stokes problem was a cruel unsolvable riddle designed to torment my mother. What I said to her was “I don’t know wavelets from whippets. So—”

  “At the center of wavelet theory,” she interrupted me, “is the mother wavelet, which spawns all other wavelets through scaling and translation.” She pointed at the equation above her desk: NVSK=EQ. “That right there gives me the algorithm for determining all the wavelet coefficients! Oh Josh, the subconscious is so fascinating. Once a mathematical mind has a clear notion of a problem, it keeps working on it whether you realize it or not.”