by Jim Lynch
“Please don’t,” I said, but it was too late.
ALMOST NORMAL
I’d arrived early, expecting signs of anticipation: meat marinating, a vacuumed floor, a tidied bathroom. Instead, it was as if they’d forgotten or didn’t believe anything unusual was about to happen because it looked like yet another humdrum Saturday afternoon at the Teardown, the tables and counters littered with newspapers, spindled sailboat drawings and coffee mugs, and the scratch-worn floors with tumbleweeds of black dog hair. Not until the Labs started yipping did the Bobos look up from an All in the Family rerun. Grumps held up a finger for me to wait while Archie called his idealistic son-in-law a meathead. Then they laughed all over themselves. The only actual sign of preparation was Father’s freshly dyed hair. I grabbed the remote and muted the commercial.
“What’s he doing?” Father asked, stopping his toenail clipping long enough to click the sound back on in time to catch the Jack in the Box punch line. Meanwhile, Grumps marveled at the sight of me, tugging on his mustache, deep into his second Rainier, a brittle Cannery Row paperback open in his lap. Neither had showered or put on a clean shirt, opened a window or washed a single dish.
“You do remember that Ruby—and possibly even Bernard—are coming to dinner, right?”
“Wow!” Grumps sat upright. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Can’t wait.” Father snorted. “Mary Poppins and the Easter Bunny joining us, too?”
I found Mother squinting at the computer in mismatched pajamas. She nodded when I reminded her about dinner, then held up a palm to let me know now wasn’t the time to talk.
“Might want to get dressed,” I whispered.
Without another word, I began vacuuming, probably the first time the machine had been plugged in since I’d last been here. For so long, Mother did everything when we weren’t looking, but for more than a decade now she’d been in her own world, quite distant from this one with its toilet rings and frayed towels and sheets we’d worn thin in the nineties. The house had remained a museum of family nostalgia and dated electronics. Out of oblivion, defiance or frugality, they’d never owned a DVD or even a CD player, much less a smartphone, and still played the same half-dozen jazz albums on the hi-fi. Mother’s old Compaq and Internet connection was their lone link to the modern age.
Father scowled at the noise I was making and turned the volume up again as Grumps hunched closer to the old Zenith. Deciding to attack the bathroom now, I pulled the plug on the vacuum and watched dust twirl around them in trapezoids of slanted sunlight. I was carrying the bulging bag outside when this utterly strange yet oddly familiar couple rounded the blackberries, arm in arm.
He wore an Old Testament beard, she a green beret. Their movements grew increasingly kindred as she handed her sack to him, broke free and ran toward me with an operatic shout of “Joooooshuaaa!”
I dropped the bag and waited to be crushed while her homeless-looking sidekick strode up, leading with his head and shoulders. “Little brother.” His voice had somehow deepened yet again. Ruby swung her arms around the both of us, and for a few seconds we hung awkwardly on to one another.
Bernard had called from a pay phone two nights before, and I’d hinted at the dinner plans, but to actually see him was still staggering.
“They don’t believe you guys are really coming,” I said.
Then Ruby and I spoke at once, neither of us hearing what the other one said. My eyes couldn’t focus, and my breathing was audible as my brother rubbed his palms together like a man trying to get warm around a fire.
“So they’re all here?” Ruby asked.
“Where else could they possibly be?” I resisted asking where her hair had gone and why she was so skinny. “Brace yourselves,” I told them.
As I shoved the squeaky front door open, I saw the Teardown through their eyes. It’d been six years since Ruby visited, eight for Bernard. The dogs went berserk, and the two Bobos couldn’t have looked more alarmed if we were masked burglars. Then Mother emerged from her office, fully dressed with a cheerful smear of lipstick.
I gave a circus bow. “Allow me the honor of presenting Mary Poppins and the Easter Bunny.”
“Well, look at you drop-jaws,” Ruby finally said, bounding over to give Grumps a noisy kiss, and then Mother and finally Father, while Bernard remained stapled to the floor.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Father rose hesitantly toward him. “For a second there, I thought you must be Ruby’s Latest Mistake.”
This brought oxygen and laughter to everybody except Bernard, who remained silent and hidden behind the beard, which looked even larger indoors, cascading to his sternum like a wool scarf.
“Speak!” Father demanded. “Let us know you’re you!”
“Ease, hike, trim,” my brother mumbled, the beard turning him into a ventriloquist. “Boat speed, boat speed, boat speed.”
Over the chuckles, Ruby said, “I found him walking up Eleventh.”
“You walked here?” Dad asked, still seated in his recliner.
Bernard nodded.
“Should’ve called!”
“No phone.”
“So where the hell you been?”
Bernard looked at each of us, everything but his eyes still concealed behind that beard. “Out in the world,” he said softly.
We waited for more, but that was it until Ruby chipped in, “See any flying fish?”
“Yes.”
“Any land on your boat?”
“Yes.”
“You eat any live?”
“Just one.” The beard twitched. He might have grinned.
“Well, well,” Father began, then tailed off or second-guessed his choice of words while Mother came closer, as glassy-eyed as Grumps, and grabbed one of Bernard’s chapped hands, pulling him down so she could kiss his sunburned cheek. At last he shook hands with the Bobos and dropped to the floor so the Labs could climb over him and try to lick his face.
“And what about Miss Ruby here?” Grumps asked, crouching toward her from his chair. “How’d you get so thin, sweetie? Any hair under there?”
She pulled off her beret and shook her imaginary mane, buzz-cut short along the rounded contours of her small skull.
“Will the surprises never end?” Father asked. “Why would you possibly—”
“Less wind resistance,” she said. “I’m all about aerodynamics these days. Why’d you dye yours blue?”
“What’s she even talking about?” he asked us.
Hubble’s tail knocked Grumps’s Rainier out of his hand and onto the floor.
“Want one?” I asked Bernard, loping toward the paper towels and the fridge.
“I like you in short hair,” Mother told her. “It draws even more attention to your beauty.”
Ruby fluttered her eyelashes and spun her face toward an imaginary bank of cameras before floating into the kitchen with her fresh vegetables.
The family that had filled this house with so much jabber for so many years was suddenly speechless. I followed Bernard’s eyes to the three half-hull models of the Joho 26, 32 and 39 above the never-used fireplace. Then I tailed him into our old bedroom doorway, Grumps’s room now, though he hadn’t changed anything, as if still just visiting, because there were the same bunk beds and posters and Bernard’s handwritten three-word manifesto when he was nineteen: EVEREST WITHOUT OXYGEN!
“Everything looks smaller.” He cleared his throat. “So much smaller.”
Slinking downstairs, we peeked into our parents’ bedroom, where we’d probably been conceived, and where they’d definitely slept beside each other on the same flattened queen mattress every day—minus Mother’s Arizona sabbatical—since 1975. Here the Teardown tilt was at its most visible, like a fun-house mirror or an Escher drawing, the headboard angling down and away toward the single-pane window, blackberries peeping over the sill. Father’s side was almost a foot below Mother’s, making it easy to imagine her eventually rolling down and smothering him midsnore
, while the entire house, like an unlatched suitcase, spilled the contents of our lives down the hill.
“Did you find Yoshito for me?” Bernard asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“When? Where?”
I showed him the disposable phone. “Call the number on the back when you’re ready to meet him.”
“I don’t want you feeling awkward again,” he said, pocketing the phone.
“Too late.” I handed him the special agent’s card and gave him an abbreviated version of our conversation.
Bernard’s expression didn’t change, as if he was used to dealing with much worse than this. “If he really knew anything, he wouldn’t have risked talking to you.”
“But if they’re listening to my calls,” I whispered, “they may know you’re here right now.”
“I doubt it.” Then he matter-of-factly pulled the phone back out, glanced at the number and started dialing.
“What the hell?” I closed the door behind us. “You’re calling him now?”
He shrugged, then said what sounded like “Ko-knee-che-wa” into the phone and fired off several terse sentences of Japanese, before turning to me. “You’ve got a car?”
“Yes, but—”
Then he held a finger to his lips and finished his phone chat with another blast of gibberish before hanging up and telling me, “Ten tonight. And yes, he knows about the fed, but he’s not worried. And, by the way, I won’t be needing a new boat.”
“Now you tell—”
Ruby burst through the door. “Hey! You can’t strand me with them.”
We sat at the table like rusty actors returning to a familiar set and script, and dinner felt almost normal for an exhilarating half hour, passing around the same old spaghetti and Ruby’s colorful salad. We played our old roles, for the most part: Father running things; Momma filling gaps with relevant info and facts; Ruby spinning stories, true and false; Bernard calling bullshit piece by piece with just his eyes; Grumps relentlessly positive, his wristwatch alarm ringing every ten minutes.
“He can’t hear it,” Mother whispered.
“But we can,” I said.
Ruby asked me about the boatyard, which led Grumps to reenact our planking exercise and Mother to ask about her farm.
“It’s getting too popular,” Ruby said. “We get a half-dozen applicants a day. Some are friends and relatives of my crew. Others just heard about it. I finally got talked into charging for tours.”
“Are there tours of other farms up there?” Mother asked.
“Not really.”
“Then why yours?”
“The gourds, mostly.”
“Really?”
“Who pays money to look at squash?” Father asked.
“Nobody ever listens to me!” I cried. “She grows the largest pumpkins in the universe!”
“The province,” Ruby said.
“How much you charge?” Father wanted to know.
“For a tour, ten bucks Canadian.”
“My sister the capitalist,” Bernard said.
“The word is philanthropist,” I said. “The money goes to some homeless foundation, right?”
“For crying out loud,” Father said. “You get a salary?”
“Just room and board, like everybody else.”
“But it’s your farm?”
“It’s our farm.”
“It’s hers,” I said. “Plus she’s got her own salmon run, but you probably forgot that, too.”
Grumps kept asking if he could get anybody wine or beer, with everybody saying yes except Ruby, who never once had a drink with us in this house. I watched the old man scrutinize everybody, then shake his head. “I’ve lost control of time,” he said.
The sharp double rap on the door tripped the two-dog alarm and jolted us all and especially Bernard, who sprang from his seat—his left elbow swinging high enough to flash his armpit holster—and slipped into the bathroom in one swoop.
Ruby followed the dogs to the door and greeted the shrinking Mrs. Trowbridge, our nosy neighbor.
“What a surprise!” she exclaimed, though it clearly wasn’t. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen you, Ruby!” Her eyes scanned the faces and counted the plates before she apologized profusely for interrupting dinner and left with a confused expression.
“You’re still a fugitive?” Father began as Bernard rejoined us, and I cleared the table.
“Far as I know.” Bernard took his seat with a wider stance, his hips parallel to the door.
“Let’s just beat this damn thing once and for all!” Father said.
“They’ll dismiss all that crap in a heartbeat!” Grumps added cheerfully. “There’s a statute of limitations, right? Nobody cares anymore!”
“They’ll dismiss the son of a bitch!” Father pounded the table twice. The dogs yipped, thinking somebody else was at the door.
“What if they don’t?” Bernard asked. “Those statutes don’t apply to people who run from charges.”
Father leaned toward him. “Can’t spend your life hiding from the Betsy Trowbridges of this world. If you’ve got to do a little time, then do it! You’ve proved you can do just about anything, by God. You can—”
“For once,” Bernard snapped, “try thinking instead of just pushing.”
Even the dogs looked chastened. Grumps took this opportunity to switch from Rainier to rum.
“Can’t you imagine,” my brother continued, his voice gaining clarity and momentum, “that perhaps someone who feels a need to climb the tallest mountains and sail the largest oceans might dread the idea of spending any time in a cage?”
Given how little he’d spoken, this sounded like the Gettysburg Address. But there was more.
“ ‘I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, the nation of wind, light and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.’ ”
“Moitessier,” I said into the silence that followed.
“Who?” Father feigned ignorance, then smiled begrudgingly. “Lord, how I hate that romantic son of a bitch.”
“Getting you into Canada would be easy,” Ruby said softly.
“Yes!” Father pounced. “Ruby will get you across, and the rest of us’ll meet you in Victoria on Friday!”
“C’mon, Bernard,” Ruby whispered. “Swiftsure! Nothing but family on board. No Betsy Trowbridges. No cops. Just tell us you’re in. Say the words. It’ll make you feel so good!”
The silence now was even longer. “I’m out,” he said. “I can’t. I won’t.”
There was just enough give in his voice, though, for Ruby to start rattling off exactly how fantastic Swiftsure was going to be this year, throwing out fake odds about old boats like ours with state-of-the-art sails winning in erratic conditions like those forecasted. “How could we possibly lose with Leif Eriksson himself on board?” she cried, pointing at Bernard. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who sees the resemblance!” She grabbed the photo of the Ballard statue off the wall and held it next to his head. They looked nothing alike. “Finally!” she shouted. “All the proof we’ll ever need to establish our direct lineage to the great Icelandic sailing hero himself!”
Father drummed his fingers on the table, the wine lowering his patience, before turning to Bernard. “So how you been making it anyway?”
“Creatively.”
“I bet, but legally or illegally?”
Bernard threw back his beer. “You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, but I do.”
“I sell butterflies,” Bernard told him, “and sink boats.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Father said.
“I’m just so happy we’re all here,” Grumps said, tearing up again. “Even if it’s just for right now.”
“Have we adequately thanked Odin and Thor for this reunion?” Mother asked.
&n
bsp; “Don’t forget Poseidon!” Ruby added, grabbing Grumps’s shot, tossing its brass-colored contents over her shoulder and splashing the Labs, who stood up to shake.
“C’mon Bernard!” she goaded. “Tell us some sea stories!”
“Already talked more tonight,” he said after a pause, “than I have in the entire past month.”
“Can I tell your stories then?”
His head bobbed, and she took it as a yes.
“So Bernard,” she asked herself, looking over her left shoulder, “were you ever serenaded by dolphins out there?”
“Almost every day,” she replied in her best Bernard mumble over her right shoulder. “They’d come out during lunch and dance in front of the bow, then hop up on their tail fins and salute me.”
“See any giant squid out there?”
“Tons of ’em, Oprah. Can I call you O? Off the coast of Japan, their tentacles were waving like bamboo in the wind.”
“Oh, come now, Bernard, did you see the Loch Ness Monster, too?”
“Nice try, O. She’s a freshwater creature.”
“You’ve been gone for years. Why didn’t you go all the way around the world?”
“Got lost in the Pacific, girlfriend.”
“Did you look into the eye of a whale?” Ruby asked her brother.
“Several,” he said.
“Did any of them speak to you?”
“Yes, but I’m still learning their language.”
Mother asked if he’d seen any northern lights as Grumps headed uphill to get more rum. Before Bernard could respond, Father said, “Can I tell you what I’ve seen? I’ve seen pants falling off my old man.”
“Got no butt to hold ’em up anymore,” Grumps hollered back.
“You’d make one unsatisfying meal for a grizzly,” Mother commented.
We looked at her, in disbelief, awaiting an explanation.
“Bears go for the buttocks first,” she said.
“Kinda like that sports broadcaster?” Ruby asked. “What was he called?”
“Albert!” Grumps laughed himself off balance. “Marv Albert: the butt biter!”
After we’d all collected ourselves, Mother felt compelled to make the case that we weren’t any weirder than most families. “We’re just more extraordinary,” she said, leaning into the table toward us. “And we remain close even when we’re far apart.”
