Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  Forty minutes later, we were still moving as well as anyone in our class and gaining on larger boats that had started twenty minutes earlier. “Eight knots!” Grumps cried, scanning the instruments. “Eight-point-three knots upwind!”

  Everybody but Father and I looked surprised. Mother was particularly puzzled. “These boats can’t do eight knots upwind, can they? When was the knotmeter last calibrated?”

  “Let it go, Marcelle,” Father said.

  Prone on the bow, Ruby watched the slot between the sails and said absolutely nothing, which meant everything was perfect, the foils curved like raptor wings for maximum velocity. Even Mother looked excited, silver bangs blowing across her inquisitive eyes.

  With the wind shifting ten degrees to the south, boats began tacking toward the Canadian shore. “Let’s make sure it’s a header before we go,” Father said.

  “Everybody’s already gone,” Bernard noticed soon after.

  “The lemmings aren’t always right,” Father told him.

  “Correctomundo!” Grumps chirped.

  “We might still go outside Race Rocks anyway,” Father added.

  “More adverse current out there for the next hour or two,” Bernard pointed out.

  Father waited long enough for it to seem like his idea, then said, “Prepare to tack.”

  “You see Wild Rumpus?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I got it.” His quick eyes bounced from our sails to the water to the boats crowded around us. “Everybody ready for a great tack? Hard alee!”

  We tacked flawlessly. That’s not saying a whole lot, but the jib was released exactly when it wanted to go, then snapped to attention on the other side in synch with the mainsail before being gradually yet aggressively squeezed into the starboard winch, minimizing the lull when we weren’t going full speed, all of this transpiring during an eighty-five-degree pivot through the eye of the wind with the boat settling onto its opposite rail and its preferred fifteen-degree upwind tilt for control and speed while heading directly at Wild Rumpus’s brand-new cockpit.

  “Starboard!” shouted its alarmed captain.

  “Hold your course!” Father bellowed, estimating angles and speeds to the intersection of the two vessels as we passed six feet behind this half-million-dollar forty-five-footer without forcing it to alter course or us to perform a penalty circle.

  The entire twelve-man crew, half of them draped over the rail in matching Wild Rumpus hats, gaped at our drab shorthanded boat and uncoordinated garb—or maybe at their sleek new chariot getting beat straight up, so far, by an old clunker. Or possibly—as word spread—they were gawking at the rarefied sighting of the legendary Ruby Johannssen. Regardless, they were staring, which was what inspired Bernard to make loud monkey noises followed by Ruby’s seal barks and Father shouting, “That’s enough!”

  We rode the lifts toward the shore, then tacked when we had to. “Who’s ahead of us?” Father asked.

  “In our class, nobody,” I said. “Everybody ahead of us owes us time.”

  His smile was so wide that I could see the gold cap on one of his molars. “We’re in this thing,” he said. Then, louder: “We are in this thing!”

  “And Poseidon willing, we’ll stay in!” Grumps seconded.

  “What?” Ruby shouted from the bow.

  “We’re in this goddamn thing!” Bernard relayed.

  “Whoop-whoop!”

  Mother rolled her eyes but couldn’t stop grinning.

  For another hour we did nothing but sail together with a teamwork that had long since vanished on land. Once we got past Race Rocks, Father let Ruby steer.

  Then the wind died.

  ZEPHYRS AND BROACHES

  Ruby would later claim the breeze was dying before she took over but, if so, only subtly. Regardless, within minutes, there was very little wind, then none at all. Without it, the advantage of our perfect start evaporated as the fleet gradually bunched up, lighter boats creeping toward us and the others marooned near the Canadian shore as if trapped in a drying painting.

  This sudden lull didn’t stop the racing, of course. Everybody kept watch for zephyrs, burning brain cells on theories about when or if to tack and which sails to fly, most of them now hanging superlight jibs called drifters. A few boats hoisted spinnakers, but the only puffs that materialized came right at their bow, inverting the chutes. Soon they were all doused and replaced with drifters. At Father’s request, Grumps lit a cigar to reveal the true direction of whatever wind there was, and the smoke went straight up.

  Despite the doldrums, we executed every slow-motion tack as if there were real wind and each maneuver might determine the race, with Bernard gently escorting the drifter from side to side like it was made of sacred cloth. Ruby gave the wheel back to Father, and we sat along the rail on the side where the sails hung to help give the boat a favorable go-fast tilt if it happened to move. We hallucinated puffs and wind lines all around us. Then it got worse.

  “The current,” my brother observed, “is about to push us backwards. We should anchor.”

  Grumps glanced at the instruments. “There’s three hundred and eighteen feet of water beneath us.”

  “Maybe we should tack back toward the middle,” Father said.

  “Where the current’s strongest?” Bernard asked.

  “We don’t know that,” Father said.

  “Sure, we do,” Mother corrected him. “And it’s going to get even stronger over the next hour. Two-point-three knots at the peak.”

  He glared at her. “I don’t seem to remember you saying much about current.”

  She shrugged. “Well, the wind wasn’t supposed to drop below five knots. That’s the surprise, not the current.”

  “I hate this goddamn race,” Father whined. “Every other year the whole thing turns fluky.”

  “The wind’s definitely coming,” Grumps said softly. “I just felt something on my face. You feel that?”

  “No,” Father said. “Why’s Ruby so quiet?”

  “She’s napping on the bow,” I told him.

  “What’s she so goddamned tired about? Where’s everybody else, Josh?”

  Looking through the binoculars, I rattled off which boat was where and how much time it owed us, or vice versa.

  “We’re going backwards,” Ruby announced upon awakening. We all looked for landmarks, and she was right. Actually, all the boats were going backwards. We just happened to be going the wrong way faster than the others.

  “We need to anchor now,” Bernard insisted.

  “We’re racing,” Father said. “Who else is anchoring?”

  “I see. Now the lemmings are right.”

  “We’re still in three hundred feet of water!” Bobo Jr. barked. “Even if it wasn’t a stupid idea we don’t have that much line.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Grumps contributed, “we’re going one-point-two knots in the wrong direction.”

  “Let me tie all the lines together,” Bernard grumbled, “and I’ll find the fucking bottom.”

  We eyed the ongoing conflation of the fleet near the rocks, the limp-sailed boats looking like a flock of exhausted swans.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Father grumbled.

  “We need to get closer to shore to anchor,” Bernard insisted as several more boats crawled past us.

  “Exactly how’re we gonna get there?” Father asked. “We’ve got no wind or steerage to go anywhere.”

  Ruby moseyed back to the cockpit and yawned. “Drop the sails. They’re pushing us backwards.”

  Father started to speak, then turned to Mother.

  She bunched her lips, bobbed her head and said, “In these conditions, it’s all about drag. And there will be less drag without them.”

  Once Father closed his eyes and nodded, we dropped the sails in unison and waited, studying the instruments, the glassy water, the distant landmarks, the other boats. Almost immediately, we stopped moving backwards in relation to the fleet.

  “Speed?” Father
requested.

  “Half a knot over the ground and still in the wrong direction,” Grumps reported cheerfully. “Almost a knot improvement over what we were doing.”

  “Yay!” Ruby celebrated. “We’re going backwards slower!”

  Barely heading the wrong direction made us temporarily the most productive boat around, or so it appeared as we passed Obsession, Ultimatum and Bedlam. Delirium’s crew was the first to copy our tactic. Within fifteen minutes, half of the surrounding boats had dropped their sails. Though by then it was too late, because there was a solo puff that we alone raised our sails in time to catch, allowing us to become the first to experience the thrill of sailing faster than the oncoming current. The wind built steadily and kept our speed at almost three knots for the next hour, good enough for us to dream we’d round the mark by dark. But then it abandoned us again, and more superlights approached our stern before ghosting past us.

  “How’re they moving over there?” Father demanded. “What the hell are they doing that we’re not?”

  “They’re just lighter,” Grumps soothed. “And it’s just gonna be fluky out here till it’s not. Wind’s coming.”

  “Really?” his son asked. “Where’s it gonna be coming from? Any of those clouds look to be moving to you? See any movement anywhere?”

  Mother coughed. “The weather report—”

  “I know what the goddamn report said. What about you, Rube? Any brilliant ideas, or you hoping to sneak in another nap?”

  “How about you shut your trap for a few minutes?” Bernard suggested. “Let’s see if that helps.”

  “Perfect,” Father replied. “Now I’m getting etiquette advice from a fugitive.”

  “Just relax,” Grumps told everybody.

  “Losers relax!” Father snapped, then rubbed his nose with his palm and lunged below, where we heard him devouring an entire roll of Ritz crackers.

  We ate dinner in shifts, sticking with one-hour rotations at the helm despite no wind whatsoever. Freya III sat facing the pumpkin-colored horizon with flaccid sails when the stories began.

  Lubricated by almost two weeks on land, Bernard shared remarkably detailed accounts of his travels through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia and told us his new personal heroes had committed their lives to preventing the slaughter of whales. “I might as well let you all in on a dirty secret of life on earth: international whaling laws are not enforced. The one place we truly need policing, there is absolutely none. Plenty of rules but no one to enforce them.”

  I watched Father silently reading the sails and water and instruments while gorging on a bowl of pasta to give his mouth something to do while Ruby took us for a vicarious ride in a jeep bumping down dirt roads through Nigeria with a team of people handing out boxes of polio and tuberculosis vaccines when they suddenly realize they’re completely lost.

  “Let’s focus on sailing,” Father said after he finished eating.

  “I’m sorry,” Bernard said. “Do we need to talk about you?”

  “Hell no, but maybe we could concentrate on what we’re doing here. You can tell all the war stories you want later.”

  “We’re drifting, not sailing,” Bernard clarified. “Being hypervigilant in light air is ridiculous. In no air, it’s insane.”

  “C’mon, Dad,” Ruby coaxed. “We’re getting to know each other again. What’re you and Grumps building these days?”

  He glanced at Bobo Sr., then dodged. “Little of this, little of that.”

  “Very little,” Grumps added, retreating into the cabin.

  “Suddenly everybody’s interested in the family business,” Father said to nobody in particular.

  “Chapter Eleven,” Mother said.

  Father shook his head. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  “You can tell the courts all about it,” she fired back, “but you can’t tell your kids? Well, they filed one of those Chapter Elevens last week.”

  “What’s that?” Ruby asked.

  “A polite way of saying bankruptcy,” I said.

  “What it is,” Bernard clarified, “is a way for corporations to hide from their debts.”

  “That’s enough!” Father snapped, then began coiling lines in the cockpit.

  “We got sued again,” Grumps said matter-of-factly, reemerging from below with a Rainier, “because we cut too many corners on yet another boat I didn’t want to build in the first place.”

  “No, we didn’t!” Father said.

  “Yes, you did,” Mother said.

  “Was I not far enough under the bus already?” Father asked. “If it’s sharing time, why don’t you tell the kids about your little talk with the principal?”

  She hesitated, looking meekly at each of us. “I’ve been encouraged to retire.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been a hard year. I fell asleep in class several times. I’ve been preoccupied.”

  “But she’s got it!” Father erupted. “That’s the crazy part. She has the solution and just won’t turn it in. She’s solved a million-dollar problem but won’t claim the prize!”

  “Because it’s still not ready,” Mother said sheepishly. “But it’s close. Or I hope it’s close.”

  “Listen, you all know I’m not smart enough to know what she’s even trying to prove,” Father said, coiling another rope into submission. “But I know that if Marcelle thinks she’s right, she probably is. Tell ’em who’s already looked at it. Tell ’em!”

  “A few friends.”

  “Friends? How ’bout the top fluids guy at the U?”

  “He’s a fluid dynamicist,” she said, “but hardly the top of anything. And just because they didn’t find anything wrong doesn’t make it right.”

  “So what’s to lose by throwing it out there?” Ruby asked. “If it’s wrong, so what?”

  “Exactly!” Father said, looking up at us and then back down at the frayed end of rope in his hands. “It’s time to claim your reward!”

  Mom shook her head. “I’m not motivated by the money.”

  “Well, we are!” Father cried.

  “Says the bankrupt boatbuilder,” Bernard mumbled.

  “Says the goddamn anarchist,” Father retorted, “who sank Doug Applegate’s yacht.”

  “What?” Ruby exclaimed.

  “Jesus, Rube, doesn’t any news make it to your door?” Father asked. “Applegate docked a seventy-foot stinkpot in Lake Union until it sank the morning after Bernard swung through town about—what was it, Son—eight years ago?”

  Everybody stared at my brother, awaiting his denial, but there wasn’t one. Grumps gulped more beer as Father said, “An insurance investigator dropped by the boathouse a couple months afterwards to ask when I’d last seen you. So how much you get paid for that one?”

  “Gratis.” Bernard looked sleepy, almost bored. “Scuttled that bad boy for free.”

  “My God,” Father said.

  “It was my pleasure,” Bernard added.

  “He’s joking,” Grumps said faintly. “Please tell us you’re kidding.”

  “How’d you do it?” I asked.

  “Broke in through a hatch and pulled the bilge fuse. Then I hacksawed a drainage hose below and tied an anchor to that and dropped it into the bilge below the thru-hull. It was simple, and I was careful. Wore gloves.”

  “Bernard,” Mother whispered. “Stop this. It’s not true.”

  “Nobody should own a toy that big,” he said plainly, “particularly not a man who kills mass-transit plans so everybody has to drive to his mall and pay to park in his garages. His boat was an obscenity.”

  “You’ve always been wild,” Father said, his bloated face shining with anger, “but I never took you for stupid. That obscenity was insured. You didn’t cost him a nickel!”

  Bernard shrugged. “The message was sent.”

  “What message exactly?” Ruby asked, collecting our dishes.

  “That there’s a leveling force out in the world when people get too selfish,” Bernard said,
as if explaining one of Newton’s laws.

  “And that’s how you see yourself?” Ruby asked from down in the galley. “The leveling force?”

  “Who the fuck else is gonna do it?” Bernard asked, snatching the frayed line from Father’s hand.

  “Wow.” Grumps groaned. “Don’t laws mean anything to you?”

  “I play by rules that make sense to me.” Bernard slipped electrical tape from his coat pocket and wrapped it tightly below the loose strands.

  “What do you think, Josh?” Mother asked. “You’re in the business of keeping boats afloat. Is it okay for Bernard to sink big yachts?”

  Avoiding her eyes, I checked the instruments—still no boat or wind speed—before answering. “I’ve always admired Bernard’s confidence that he’s doing the right thing even when he’s not.”

  He laughed, unclipped the blade on his hip and sawed through the taped section of the rope, and the loose ends fell away. “So what is it that wild and crazy Josh is hiding from us all?”

  “Just some embarrassing dates, I’m afraid,” I said, resenting his tone. “Remember, I’m the unambitious child.”

  “I don’t know,” Father said, scanning the water and sails again. “I think dating on the computer says plenty about you.”

  “Bobo,” Mother cautioned.

  “What? There’s obviously something he likes about how impersonal it is. That’s all I’m saying. Less risk of feeling anything, right? You can’t piss a computer off. Can’t make love to it either, but I guess that’s as it should be.”

  I tried to laugh but felt nauseous. “You don’t even know what online dating is.”

  “I know you don’t dive into life.” He sounded as if he’d been waiting for years to tell me that. “You don’t take risks or tell anybody off or ask anybody out or even try to get a better job.”