Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  “Is this an intervention?” I asked, hoping somebody would rescue me.

  Bernard pulled out a lighter and burned the freshly cut end of the rope until it melted into a unified tip.

  “I’d argue,” Ruby said slowly, “that Josh is the most ambitious member of our family.”

  Father laughed.

  “He’s the one,” she continued, “who’s always seen the best in each of us, especially in you.” She made a gun out of her thumb and forefinger and pointed it at him. “And he’s also the one who thinks he can fix whatever’s broken even though he knows it’ll just break again. He’s our confider and accomplice, and probably does the same stuff for a whole lot of other people. He tries, against crazy odds, to keep everything and everybody intact. That’s his ambition. It’s just so different from yours that you’re blind to it.”

  Everybody stared, awaiting my response to the most generous assessment of my life anybody could ever offer. Then they started yapping simultaneously about the size of whatever footprint, if any, I was leaving on the planet. I watched but didn’t listen.

  For so long I’d defined myself as so much smaller than these people. Sitting there, finally seeing them all together again, it was obvious they were neither giants nor immortals. I looked at Ruby’s bulging collarbones again, the thin stubble over her ears, and finally realized that her impetus for one last Swiftsure wasn’t because Grumps was getting feeble.

  “Oh, Ruby,” I said, stopping all conversation. “When’d you get diagnosed?”

  “What’d he say?” Grumps asked. “What’s he talking about?”

  Ruby’s eyes took a long time to find mine.

  “How bad is it?” I tried to say more but couldn’t.

  Mother’s hands started fluttering like caged birds. Father sat down and stood and sat again as if his flat cushion had turned into a sharp stone. Bernard looked straight up and swore inaudibly. Then Grumps said, “I’m lost, utterly lost.”

  “How bad is what?” Ruby asked. As convincing as her embellishments often were, she’d always been a lousy actor.

  “Ruby?” Mother said, her face pale and pinched. “What’s Josh talking about?”

  “Wind,” Ruby said, looking past us. “We’ve got a puff coming on the starboard quarter beam. Let’s ease the sails, nice and slow, while Bernard prepares the spinnaker, and then we’ll squeeze ’em all in just a hair and head up twenty degrees when it gets here.”

  We gently spun into action, as if the art of exquisite light-air sailing could suspend time and consequence. Ruby took the wheel, and Bernard glided forward to attach the halyard and get the chute ready while Father and I quietly adjusted the sails. Mother sat frozen, staring up at Ruby, as the boat mercifully began to move.

  “I’m through the worst part,” my sister finally volunteered, her fingers trembling slightly on the wheel. “If the chemo and radiation don’t knock it out, I’ll have to spend the rest of my days with just one booby.” She palmed her left breast. “So yes, I’ve got it, but look what it’s up against!” She clenched both fists and snarled. Then everyone listened to her answer Mother’s questions as if they were prepping for an oncology test, until Father elbowed into the discussion to see if he could bully some slacker Canadian doctors or insurance fat cats into healing his little girl.

  By the time we’d rounded the mark, it was past midnight, and the wind and waves were building behind us.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Ruby said.

  How many years had it been? Yet we all knew exactly what she was talking about.

  “I did do it partly to hurt you, which was cruel considering everything you’d hoped to gain from it.”

  Father played a flashlight over the main, then the jib, assessing their shapes. “Hard to tell if that was an apology or an insult,” he said. Then, after a few long beats, he asked, “You kids remember our trip to Bend?”

  “Of course,” Bernard said. “Our one and only family vacation not on a sailboat?”

  “I don’t,” Ruby said.

  “Well, you were four, maybe five, and you and I woke up early and went for a drive while everybody else slept in. We rolled through town with the windows down and the sunshine pouring in until this song came on the radio, and it was just me and my gorgeous smiling daughter driving around on this perfect brand-new day. You know I can never remember songs, but this one stuck with me because it was about this woman named Madam Joy who turned everybody’s head because she was so damn happy. I still think about it because it was right then I realized you’d grow up, turn everybody’s head and walk out of our lives. So how bad is it really, Rube?”

  She recoiled the mainsheet. “It’s starting to blow,” she said. “Let’s just sail.”

  I heard Mother and Grumps sniffling as the wind and swells continued to build. All the shuddering, whistling and snapping of spare halyards and loose shackles meant it was already gusting harder than forecasted. The waves got louder, sighing and snorting behind us, chasing us like bulls. With Ruby’s touch on the wheel, the Joho rode the swells well enough and veered upwind through the troughs for speed and control, then turned directly downwind for fast and efficient surfing. The boat lights astern began to fade and those in front brightened.

  “Eleven knots!” Grumps announced brightly as we dropped down the face of one wave, displaced foam fanning high on both sides of the cockpit.

  Father stood on the high side with the flashlight so he could better monitor and tame the rambunctious spinnaker. Bernard worked the vang, which along with the line in my hand helped control the boom and the mainsail as the wind continued to build.

  “Ease!” Ruby shouted, and the three of us simultaneously let out a little slack, reducing the pressure on the sails and curbing Freya III’s desire to tip wildly and swing up toward the wind. As we improved the rhythm of this tactic, she’d yell “Trim!” right before the boat stabilized, and then we’d tighten the sails and vang and accelerate again, carving a serpentine path through the waves.

  “Twelve-point-five knots!” Grumps rejoiced.

  As well as Ruby was steering, we were clearly going too fast for this boat in these conditions, surfing out of rhythm and somewhat violently, the bow diving lower into the rollers in front of us. We felt the size of the swells growing in the darkness. Mother was calling out wave patterns behind us but seemed out of synch, too, her information coming too late or not at all. Larger and higher funnels of foam hissed past the cockpit.

  “Let’s drop the chute!” Bernard yelled.

  “We’re fine!” Father shouted back as the silhouette of a new, water-ballasted boat glided past us with such balance and ease that the skipper was sipping coffee from an open cup. Following our own captain’s orders, we continued at full tilt with hopes of winning the trophy after all the handicaps were calculated—flooring this old El Camino downhill until the steering wheel started vibrating.

  “Twelve-point-eight!” Grumps hollered.

  When the end of the boom swung close to the water yet again, Ruby shouted “Ease!” followed soon after by: “I don’t have any rudder! Everybody on the stern!” We scrambled back, and she pointed us more directly downwind before the boat started rounding up on its own. “Losing rudder again!” she shouted. “Reduce sail!”

  “Thirteen-point-eight!” Grumps cried, no longer enthusiastically.

  “Dropping the chute!” Bernard yelled.

  “We’re fine!” Father insisted after we hit the next wave even lower and water sprayed over the cabin. “Let me have her!”

  He took the wheel, and Ruby worked the vang while I tried to trim the spinnaker. We went up and over fifteen knots in such smooth fashion that everything suddenly seemed under control, like when a jet shudders through the sound barrier. Or maybe there was a softening of wave angles, a peaceful aberration that allowed us to go even faster. I’m not sure. But we broke all our Joho 39 speed records for about ten minutes, as if all the gravity, torque, force and will that constitutes my family was grounded in the
math and physics that sent this old boat crashing ahead on this razor’s edge.

  Grumps looked at me and screamed, “What exactly did you do to this thing?” Then there was a slight wiggle in the mainsail, like it was reconsidering everything and no longer on our side.

  “Ease!” Father howled, fighting the wheel, but we kept turning up toward the wind, spinning on the keel until we were sideways in the biggest trough yet. And that’s where and when the boom and spinnaker, and finally the top of the mast, slapped the water.

  “Grab on to something!” Bernard yelled. “Hold on!”

  Going from record speed to a standstill in several seconds was enough to hurl us around like crash-test dummies as icy water gushed into the cockpit. Amid the chaos, I reached too late to stop Grumps from launching to the low side as all the Johannssen moxie and hubris were abruptly reduced to this swamped wreckage.

  I looked wildly about in the dark to make sure we were all still aboard. Ruby was the hardest to find. She’d flown forward, farther than Grumps, and his body was blocking my view of her. Neither of them, I slowly realized, was moving.

  “Get the spinnaker down!” Father shouted from behind the wheel, trying to steer a boat on its side that couldn’t respond. A swell rose underneath and lifted us up like an offering, or a sacrifice, before dropping us back down into another trough while Mother and I crossed quickly to the low side.

  Ruby said she’d knocked her head but felt fine, and Grumps said he might’ve whacked his knees. We couldn’t tell how badly hurt either of them was or if they even knew. The water on our legs was breathtakingly cold. By the time the next large swell arrived, the keel had started to do its job, righting us enough to stop the sea from pouring in. But the wind pressing against the sails still kept us nearly pinned to the water.

  “Lower the spinnaker already!” Father yelled again.

  “It’s stuck!” Bernard screamed back from the bow.

  “Release the halyard!”

  “I did!”

  “Pull on the damn chute!”

  “I did! I am!”

  I scrambled forward to help, but the halyard was too jammed and the spinnaker continued filling and flapping in the water. My brother growled and then climbed the mast until he stood atop the spinnaker pole. From there he grabbed the halyard and whipped it back and forth over his head, trying to free it above. He kept at it while arguing with Father about whether he shouldn’t just cut the fucking thing, then it finally sprang loose, and I was able to pull in some of the sail before the wind blasted it again and jerked me briefly off the deck. Father now had Ruby steer, then wedged himself into the cabin opening and told me to feed him the wet sail; this way, if it tried to fill again, it would have to pry him out of there like a cork. We didn’t need to test those physics, though, because the wind dipped enough for him to stuff the spinnaker below, and Ruby nimbly steered us back on top of a swell with just the mainsail flying.

  We had no idea how many boats passed us while we flailed in the dark. The fact we were even still in any race at all felt irrelevant and absurd. Yet we were off and running before the wind again—five knots, seven, nine—with Father back at the helm as the rest of us assessed the damage.

  Ruby was cold and chattering but making sense. Mother inspected her head with a flashlight and found no wounds. But after checking both of Grumps’s legs, she gasped at how quickly his right knee was swelling. Dropping into the rolling cabin, she reemerged with towels, blankets and dry clothes. I helped her pry Grumps’s pants off and strap what ice we had left to his knee, which was approaching the size of his head. Mother handed him the rum bottle, and I bundled him in blankets, slung a harness over him and clipped him to the lifelines.

  Everybody but Father took turns swapping out wet shoes and clothes as the cockpit finished draining.

  “Should we fly the chute again?” Father asked once we were all on deck.

  “Nooo!” came the crew’s reply.

  “Well, we need some kind of headsail,” he responded reasonably, and Bernard went forward to raise a small jib.

  “So, Josh,” Grumps said after another long silence in the rolling dark, “tell me what you did to this boat.”

  When I finished explaining, I told him he’d have to ask Father what the race handicappers knew about the alterations.

  “They know enough,” he mumbled. “You saw our rating.”

  “It should’ve been at least eight points lower,” I said. “You didn’t tell them about the rudder or the keel, one or the other.”

  Waiting for a response, Grumps shook his head sadly. “Well, that’s pathetic. You, of all people, Junior, never needed to cheat to win a sailboat race.” Then he chuckled. “But who knows? Maybe the rating was spot-on after all. She’s obviously a crazy horse downwind, huh? We proved that. But I gotta admit she sailed upwind like a scalded cat! Now go get dry and warm, and let Ruby steer for a while so we’ve at least got a shot in hell at finishing strong.”

  “Gladly,” Father said, and stepped aside. Five minutes later, Ruby asked Bernard to please raise the spinnaker again.

  Daybreak showed us ahead of Wild Rumpus and Delirium, both of them owing us time. So we let ourselves get excited, but then the wind died, then shifted, and we trudged through the worst of the adverse current and had to jibe twice before crawling over the finish line behind them both. Hope still flashed in Father’s eyes until we spotted Obsession and Bedlam, to whom we owed time, dropping sails up ahead as we powered silently back into Victoria.

  This was the part I hadn’t imagined, the aftermath. Ruby, Bernard and I folded, packed and stored the sails exactly how we’d been trained to. Next we scrubbed the decks while Mother made six sandwiches, each one tailored to our individual preferences. At the tumultuous race dock, she asked for ice, a wheelchair and a taxi. Amid the commotion of other boats arriving and tying up, Bernard and I carried Grumps up to a bench. This was when my brother disclosed that he’d be flying out of Victoria shortly.

  “Where to?” Mother asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I can,” he said.

  “What about your boat?” I asked.

  “Already sold her.”

  Now Father shook his head. “Will the mysteries ever end?”

  “I hope so,” Bernard said, “but I don’t know when.” He hugged Mother after she started crying, which sent Grumps into sobs on the bench until he was comforted by Ruby.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Father pleaded. “Can we hold this thing together for just a few more minutes?”

  Too tired or deflated to respond, the rest of us waited silently for the wheelchair. Or if we did say anything, I’ve forgotten the words. If I’d known this was the last time the six of us would all be together, I would’ve remembered every last note. But what I’m left with are just the main chords: Ruby pretending she’d see us again in no time; Bernard acting as if he were returning to some noble battle; Mother ruminating on our volatile family chemistry; Grumps nostalgic for the moment that just elapsed; Father taking every departure personally.

  Bernard left first, slinging his bag over his shoulder and sticking out his palm. Father pulled him close and said, “Thanks for sailing with us.” Then Mother and Grumps exited for the high-speed ferry to Seattle, and Ruby vanished on a slow one to Vancouver. Finally, Father and I pushed off and motored homeward out of the harbor. He insisted on taking turns napping and watching out for logs, but as it played out he slept and I steered the entire seven hours back to Seattle.

  THE MISSING HEART

  It must have been a puzzling sight, two men in coveralls sitting on overturned buckets behind a baby grand piano on a concrete raft propelled by a small Johnson outboard puttering through Sunrise Marina. Then, no doubt, even more baffling to watch them sidle up to an old, impossibly long yacht that could be seen as leaning toward either renovation or demolition. Only a sharp observer would’ve noticed the thirty-foot crane parked right in front of Shangri-la and subsequently connected the dots.

  “
So what really happened?” Noah asked me as Mick swung the crane arm over the raft.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you seem all messed up from your family-weekend thing. You guys win or what?”

  “Oh, hell no.”

  We slid padded straps, lined with fresh wax paper, under the soundboard and between the legs and looped all four ends over the crane hook.

  “Then why was it so epic?” Noah wanted to know. “That’s the only word I’ve got out of you so far. I mean it was just a race, right?”

  “Hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “Okay, for starters, my family never does anything in moderation. And if you factored in the racing handicaps—and that’s another story—maybe we were leading the whole thing before the shit hit the fan. But right when we were going our fastest is when we broached.”

  “How did that happen? I thought you guys are, like, expert sailors.”

  “Physics, Noah. Too much sail area up for that boat in those conditions. The whole thing was crazy. The redesign, our small crew…every piece of it.”

  We pulled the black tarp off the salon roof we’d already sawed open. Then I climbed down inside as Mick eased the piano off the raft.

  “But it wasn’t the sailing that was so epic,” I shouted over the drone of the crane. “It’s what was said.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like everything, like my sister’s got cancer.”

  “Oh, man.” He looked down at me, veins angling like fault lines across his forehead. “You mean Ruby?”

  “The one and only.”

  Mick didn’t like the alignment and set the piano back down and tried again from a lower angle.

  “Hey,” I shouted to Noah as the piano slowly descended toward our guiding hands. “How many days till the Rapture, anyway?”

  “Very funny.” He sanded his cheek stubble with the back of his glove. “Twenty-six,” he shouted back. “Part of me keeps worrying that delusions of grandeur are genetic.”