Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  The old public dock at Minstrel Island definitely wasn’t crowded. Its three fingers extended beneath the obviously defunct hotel, two robin’s egg blue wooden buildings with a boardwalk connecting them. The boardwalk had given up, collapsing into a shallow V and bringing down the hotel’s verandah with it. The only boat at the dock was a twenty-five-foot converted fishing boat with a ramshackle African Queen–style roof held up by lengths of galvanized pipe. A fat smokestack protruded through this makeshift canopy, to which was screwed a hand-lettered sign offering “Marine Services.”

  Wonderful, I thought, the local mechanic. I can tell him about the herring in our cooling system, share some guy time. We tied up across from him, and I followed Charley past upturned office chairs, abandoned crab pots, and a houseboat with a long-overgrown vegetable garden. When we got up onto the upper dock and I looked back, I saw a dark figure unfold itself from the wheelhouse of the boat across from us, step carefully onto the dock, and look around, as though coming out of hibernation.

  “Finish up,” I said to Charley. This was our chance to meet the local expert. When we reached the man, he was still in the same position. Charley ran up to him, stopped, growled, and hopped back onto Vera. I’d never seen that behaviour before.

  “A dog in a fucking life jacket,” said the man. “Hah.”

  “He can’t swim,” I said.

  “Whatever. What’s it like out there?”

  The man wore black socks and a week’s growth of beard. Stringy hair stood in all directions, as though he’d been the wrong way down in a sleeping bag. He sucked at a piece of orange and the juice ran down his chin.

  “I’ve been waiting here five days.”

  It looked more like five years. His eyes were red. The African Queen was piled with old VHF radios and tape decks, dismantled outboard motors, fuel cans. A portable Honda generator putted away from somewhere in the pile of junk.

  “Waiting for what?”

  “You can’t see those fucking boats?” He waved angrily. “Five of them, I gotta tow them all down to Egmont. Has to be a straight shot.”

  I could only count one, a small runabout I’d missed before. Maybe he saw five. One, five, the real problem was that Egmont was way back down the Sunshine Coast: through Johnstone Strait, five rapids, the Strait of Georgia. In one go? In a boat that — I looked over his shoulder — didn’t even have a towing post?

  “That’s tough,” I said. Man to man, trying not to make it sound like “that’s insane.” “Well, gotta go.”

  “Enjoy your day,” he said, staring hard at the invisible boats.

  Down below, Hatsumi pulled me hard into a corner. “What’s wrong with him?” she hissed.

  “Who?”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Well, maybe you should meet him.” I could see his feet through the porthole.

  “We can’t stay here. What if he’s an axe murderer?”

  “Oh, Jesus. He’s just . . . look, I’ll go back and find out a little more. Would that make you more comfortable?”

  Of course, Hatsumi was right; her sixth sense about people was rarely far off. He looked like an axe murderer to me too. Back I went.

  “To answer your question,” I said, “it’s windy. On the nose. Not so bad at night, though. Can you go at night?”

  “I can go any time I want!”

  “Then . . .”

  “I’ve got everything on that boat, radar, GPS, the iron compass.”

  Iron compass?

  “Look, I can navigate to Japan if I want. I’ve done it! I’m a fucking tugboat captain!”

  Hatsumi would be hearing all this. So far, he hadn’t actually admitted he was an axe murderer.

  “I just have to feel good first.”

  How do you deal with irrational people? Especially when you’re tied up next to one at an abandoned dock? Listen to their concerns? Call the cops? There weren’t any cops on Minstrel Island. But there was someone else, or there would be soon. Over the maniac’s shoulder, I watched a handsome converted tug, grey, maybe fifty feet long, nose toward the empty finger across from our little tableau. Reinforcements.

  “You don’t feel good?” I said.

  “No! I had a stroke! Three days ago! Look at my hand, I can’t feel nothing.” He made a claw. “I can’t go anywhere, see? And nobody tells me what to do. You smoke?”

  “Do I smoke?”

  “Don’t. If you do, quit. This is what it did to me.” The claw again. “Marijuana too, thirty years of it. Doctor told me that was even worse. I was in hospital three days ago.”

  That I could believe. He needed to go back. He was getting worked up. If I thought he was crazy, what was he thinking about me?

  “Well,” I began.

  “Dog in a life jacket. Hah!” He limped back to the runabout behind us and began fussing with the motor. In a moment, he was gone, rounding the end of the dock and heading at high speed toward the Blow Hole. It was going to be some singalong tonight.

  Hatsumi crept out, following the small boat with her eyes until it vanished into the narrow channel.

  “Maybe he is a little eccentric,” I said. “But look! We’ve got company.”

  “The batteries stopped working,” she said.

  “You’re kidding. Well, maybe they can help. Not the weird guy, those two.” A breezy attitude seemed important.

  A man and a woman were coming down the main dock. Hatsumi was in no condition to talk to anyone, so I strolled down to head them off.

  “I’m Brent.” The man stuck out his hand. There was a lot of dirt under his fingernails. Brent had a huge head, tangled grey hair, and yellowish horse teeth that I would see a lot over the next few hours. His high forehead was creased in parallel chevrons, as though he was constantly struggling with some weighty conundrum. We shook hands while I read his T-shirt: Garden Naked. I could see checkered boxer shorts through a tear in his sweat pants. He looked slept-in.

  “Far out! This is Kim.”

  Kim’s hand wasn’t horny and grease-stained, like Brent’s. It was slender, like the rest of her, and quite young. I thought, twenty? Twenty-four, tops?

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “You know this guy?” I pointed to the African Queen.

  “Never saw the boat,” said Brent.

  “But you’re from here, right?”

  “Alert Bay. Kim’s from Amsterdam.”

  “I just landed in Vancouver,” Kim said. “I’m a little tired.”

  This was more like it. An axe murderer and a fifty-year-old hippie satyr; finally Vancouver Island was producing the characters I’d come to expect.

  “Welcome to . . . where should I welcome her too, Brent?”

  “The real world, man.” Brent threw his arms wide. “Don’t worry about the weirdo, we’ll sort him out. Where is he?”

  “Out . . . there. But he’ll be back. In the meantime, what do you know about electrical systems?”

  The willowy Kim drifted off to explore the ruined buildings on shore; Brent lumbered aboard Vera; Hatsumi watched warily from a corner as he peered at what little you could see of Vera’s network of electrical veins without ripping the boat apart.

  “I think it’s the main battery switch,” I said.

  Brent fiddled with the main electrical panel. His fingers were twice the size of mine.

  “I dare say it is,” he said finally. “I’ve got a box full of switches at home.” He brightened. “But hey, this’ll all look better after a bottle of wine, right? Come on over, later.” He climbed out and lumbered off after Kim.

  “See?” I said. “I told you everything would work out.”

  We didn’t see anyone for the next two hours. The axe murderer’s generator droned on. I wandered up to the ruined resort with Charley and saw no sign of Brent or Kim. Back in the bushes, behind the sagging main buildings,
a shack with its step rotted away might have been a school; peering over the ledge, I thought I could see a blackboard and a faded picture askew on a peeling wall. Out back, a tangle of rusted fuel tanks had tumbled to the ground beneath a gnarled and barren-looking apple tree, a porcelain cream jug in the dirt, hummingbirds. I dug out the jug while Charley rooted half-heartedly in a musty corner. Even the rats had abandoned the place.

  When we emerged from the bush, I saw Brent heading back down the dock, trailing a length of rusty exhaust hose.

  “Let’s take them up on their offer,” I said to Hatsumi. “Anyway, we can’t cook with the house batteries kaput.”

  “Take it back,” she said, pointing at the cream jug. “It’s bad luck. And I’m freezing.”

  We both needed to mellow out. I pulled my wife up the companionway and led her across to Brent’s boat. “It’ll be cozy in there,” I said, rapping on the varnished mahogany door.

  But Brent’s boat was freezing too. He and Kim didn’t seem to notice; they sat at the wooden galley table next to an inviting-looking but unlit diesel stove, with a bottle of wine and an ashtray between them. Only Brent had a glass.

  “Far out!” he said, deftly picking up the thread of our earlier conversation. He got up and fetched two more glasses. “Lots of good times, right here.” He patted the table, and I could believe it. The galley was a generous space, with plenty of windows and a view forward to the wheelhouse. I could easily keep an eye on the axe murderer’s boat. Brent, it turned out, was a contractor for the Department of Fisheries, taking biologists out for weeks at a time to sample for young salmon. It would have been a nice place to unwind after a long day with the plankton nets — as long as Brent turned the stove on. I drained my glass in an effort to warm up and reminded myself it was mid-July.

  “Now you” — Brent jabbed an oily finger in my direction — “you need to loosen up. I can see the boy inside you — let him out, man!” He turned to Hatsumi, who was now chugging steadily. “Don’t you think so, Hattie? You don’t mind if I call you Hattie?”

  Kim wasn’t drinking. If I was going to be taken to task for not loosening up, it was going to be a long night. Axe murderers and battery switches wouldn’t be on the agenda. A doobie appeared in Brent’s fingers. He began to orate.

  “This whole area is dead now, but when I was a young guy, it was rocking. I had a bachelor’s in psychology, but I couldn’t wait to get on the fishboats. Guys were making a hundred thousand a season, all kinds of boats working all day and all night, you could get fuel everywhere, not just a couple places like it is now. Stayed at that hotel up there. I was nineteen. They had to sneak me drinks. That’s how I got this rum-soaked voice.”

  He dragged on the joint and waved it at us.

  “I don’t,” said Kim.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “You need a good spanking,” said Brent. “Come on Hattie, there’s a good girl.” Polite to a fault, my long-suffering wife pulled some marijuana into her lungs. Charley coughed from his place on the floor.

  “That dog gets between you guys,” said Brent. “I know. I’m a good judge of feelings.”

  Outside in the dark, a blue heron let out its warning craak, and Brent grinned. “Hear that, man? That’s what it’s all about!” He pinched the joint out and went back to the wine. My wife was turning green. We sat back and listened, and I let my mind wander. Was Kim his girlfriend, or just a visitor he was showing around? Did Brent’s fisheries clients smoke pot in the evenings? Was marijuana bad for dogs?

  Finally I said, “Brent! Early start.”

  “Roger that.” He jumped to his feet and shook my hand and we filed out. I drew the heavy door open and inhaled cold night air.

  “I dare say it’s the battery switch,” said Brent.

  Across the way, Vera was dark and cold. We ate some dried squid to soak up the alcohol and Hatsumi crawled into the V-berth. I gave her a goodnight kiss. Her hair reeked of pot. She mumbled something into her pillow. It sounded like, “I want to go home.”

  Kill All the Lawyers

  After Hatsumi went to sleep, I cleaned up a day’s clutter in the galley, retracing the steps of the dishwashing ballet that I would perform twice a day: wet the dishes with a little water from the foot pump, squirt soap onto a cloth, scrub and rinse with another few foot-strokes of precious water. Then drain, dry, and refile everything in rack and drawer. The battery problem Hatsumi had discovered didn’t seem to extend to our dedicated engine-starting battery, so I poached enough electricity from that one to light the sink. Outside, the moon was pallid behind a veil of cloud. The axe murderer’s generator droned on.

  Already our boat was changed, the tangle of tools and wire and grease guns that filled Vera in the weeks before departure had miraculously transformed itself into books, dog toys, basil plants, and laundry dangling from the clever Japanese drying racks Hatsumi hung from the cabin ceiling. But I couldn’t relax; tomorrow would take us through an unavoidable section of Johnstone Strait and then to the town of Port McNeil, the second last settlement of any size before we took the irrevocable step of crossing the Nahwitti Bar. I needed something to take my mind off it all, so I dug out my father’s file on malpractice suits. An hour of legal nuts and bolts, that would put me to sleep.

  The first thing I found was this quotation, from the Nicene Creed of the Anglican church: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” The words introduced the chapter on “Malpractice and Negligence,” which my father had photocopied from a book called The Doctor and the Law: A Practical Guide for the Canadian Physician. The adversarial system, its author felt, should not be the only way of dealing with problems in medical practice because there will be times in a surgeon’s life — many times — when the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do are equally risky. Medicine was full of Catch-22s.

  The author of The Doctor and the Law also wasn’t much in favour of contingency fees, which removed the objectivity of lawyers by giving them a financial interest in the outcome. Contingency fees incensed my father, as might be expected of someone who had just watched more than $400,000 go to the lawyers who had bargained a settlement against him. Doctors and lawyers are never likely to see eye to eye on this subject. Doctors say, “We have to treat everyone who comes through the door. We can’t cherry-pick and take only the ones we’re most likely to get a good result with. So why should a lawyer be allowed to?”

  At the time of my father’s malpractice case, anguished commentary abounded: on the rapid increase in awards, on the cost of insurance literally driving doctors away from their practices, on the unseemly profits made by lawyers. Even back in the 1980s, most malpractice suits didn’t go to trial; if they did, the courts would have been hopelessly tied up. For a case to go to trial, either the issues were highly contentious, or one side would rather fight than flee. That was my father. I shouldn’t have been surprised; as a boy, he’d taken on all comers. “You helped your friends,” he wrote in his memoir. “Fighting was as natural as breathing.”

  And so, after spending a few hours trying to understand the legal process, I found myself back at my Big Question: When the result of his obstinacy came crashing down on his head, why couldn’t he get over it? Why couldn’t he say, as my wife and 167 million other Japanese say every day, shikata ga nai? (“It can’t be helped”).

  Before we left, I’d called up his last family doctor, a man about my age who I’d come to know and like. We’d met for lunch at a Polish delicatessen, taking our glistening mounds of artery-clogging food to an out-of-the-way table.

  “I don’t eat like this that often,” he said, forking a sausage. If he did, he must burn it off somehow; he was lanky and fit-looking. I asked my question before he’d even stopped chewing; I couldn’t wait. He swallowed and said, “His ego, of course,” as though I’d asked h
im one of those skill-testing questions to which nobody could fail to know the answer. “Just couldn’t take it.”

  “Yeah, but don’t other doctors have egos? Don’t lots of them get sued?”

  “Sure we do,” he said. “I did, along with a couple of other doctors, just like your dad.”

  “And?”

  “We lost.”

  “And?”

  “I got over it. Part of being in practice. I acted to the best of my ability with the information I had.”

  I couldn’t imagine my father leaving it at that.

  “We get these newsletters from the Medical Protective Association. You know what they keep reminding us? The ones who get sued the most are the ones that don’t communicate well with patients. The godly ones.”

  “Like my dad?”

  “I never saw him in practice. You know what else they tell us? Don’t be defensive. Don’t ignore people. If something goes wrong, apologize. It reduces the number of suits.”

  “Never happen,” I said. A big ego could get you a long way, I was beginning to realize, but once it was conclusively deflated, especially late in life, there was no recovery. I’d heard the same message from another physician, Charley Brown.

  Charley Brown was a little younger than my father. He appeared often in family photo albums, sailing, playing Ping-Pong, mugging in a lawn chair. In my father’s last months, Charley came faithfully to the care home, cajoling him outside, mediating in disputes about the best way to care for a crotchety and still-imperious retired neurosurgeon.

  I went to Charley’s townhouse shortly after my lunch in the Polish deli. Outside, sunglassed retirees crept past pastel house fronts. Inside, Charley’s place was tidy and dark. His wife had died a year earlier, from cancer; like all doctors, he was able to provide a dispassionate description of her condition while clearly still reeling from the loss. A large grey cat wandered through the empty house, tinkling.