by Jim Lynch
“I don’t care for your tone,” he said.
Looking past him, I continued, “And to get the starter out, you’ll have to pull the alternator, of course. But you might want to snap some quick photos beforehand so you remember how it’s all supposed to look. Then you just pop the alternator off and yank the starter and remove the solenoid, right? Wrong. First, you gotta loosen the freshwater reservoir or the starter won’t come out. And in pulling the starter you’ll probably jostle some coolant hoses—metal tubes, actually. Volvo prefers metal over rubber, I’m guessing, because they’re more expensive. But you won’t fully appreciate this complication till you try to put the starter back in with its new solenoid, which you might find at Al’s Alternators. He’ll know without looking whether he has one or not. If he doesn’t, he’ll order it and charge you sixty-nine bucks. Then you’ll have to jostle the coolant tubes again to get the starter and new solenoid back in there. The antifreeze might start leaking now, but you can’t really tell until—”
“Look,” he snapped, his mouth twitching. “Like I said, I don’t care for your tone in the slightest.”
“I don’t either,” I admitted, sighing and scanning the yard, where Big Alex was hugging limp customers.
“Sometimes these things never get solved,” I told the guy as gently as I could. “The truth is the solenoid might not even be the problem. When it comes to electrical systems and salt water, there’s corrosion you can’t see. There are gremlins and ghosts. Sometimes you have to start over and replace everything. But I’m betting and hoping it’s the solenoid. Anytime you want me to stop, just say the word, and I’ll move on to less-exasperating projects.” I opened my bloody hand and offered him the sawed-off wrench.
I knew he’d complain to Jack and I’d get the mini-lecture, but when he started grumbling about gremlins and ghosts, I dropped back into the engine compartment and bonked my temple. Fortunately, by the time I resurfaced with the other three bolts, he was gone, and I sat on deck with my head throbbing and watched Lorraine working on Audacious yet again. The dermatologist who owned it tried to compensate for his mediocre racing skills with the most extravagant bottom-painting ritual in the fleet. He pulled Audacious twice a year to have Lorraine sand, paint, burnish and repaint the bottom and then burnish and paint again. She’d indulge his every head game, applying sheets of copper paint that ran four hundred a gallon and scared off sea life a mile away. Whenever the doc won anything, he’d swing by and hand her two Ben Franklins out of gratitude or perhaps backhanded lust.
To be fair, Lorraine had odd powers over all of us. It might have been her eyes, so brown they looked black, or her ability to outwork and outswear everybody with her spectacularly foul bilingual mouth. Hijo de puta machista, we learned, means “sexist motherfucker.” Besides that, though, we knew little about her beyond the tattooed bird that peeked over her worn jeans whenever she bent over, though most of the time we couldn’t see the bird, her jeans or her face beneath the sexless zippered suit and the industrial respirator she wore while making sailboat bottoms obscenely smooth. She’d had a weekend fling with Noah, a year ago when he was sixty pounds lighter. Afterwards, he pretended to be okay with being just friends, but all she had to do was give him the slow eye and he got so light-headed he’d almost pass out. As overhyped as her work might have been, I knew I’d probably be asking for her help before long.
With that thought, my eyes swung across the yard. Just glancing at my father’s tattered Joho hurried my blood. Since his lollygagging lecture two days ago, I’d been sending his calls straight into voice mail and then deleting them as soon as he started to get pushy. This morning, though, he’d made Grumps leave the message.
“I hope you’re getting a chance to work on that Swiftsure boat we’ve got down there,” he said woodenly, followed by muffled background murmuring. “Well, what do you want me to tell him? Oh, hell.” Then directly into the phone: “I’m sure you’ll do the best you can, Josh. You always do.”
I peeled my eyes off the needy Joho—Grumps obviously had no clue what all Father wanted me to do to it—and focused on Rex and Marcy shuttling boxes of canned food up the ladder into their freshly painted boat. Days earlier, they’d shown me the full library they’d assembled, mostly dated dramas of similarly unprepared couples heading out to nowhere.
Climbing down now, I strolled over and asked them if they’d found the charts they’d need, and Rex unfurled a small-scale map with a yellow highlighter marking their route to Alaska.
“Nice,” I said. You might as well navigate with a globe, I thought.
“You guys taking any sailing lessons?” I asked.
“Nope,” Rex said.
“Navigation classes?”
He shook his head.
“Registered or documented the boat yet?”
“Nah.”
“What about survival gear?”
“You can overthink these things,” Rex explained. “We’re experiential. We learn by doing.”
So there I was once again, trespassing through delusions while Marcy devoured a banana. “You meet Josie and Paul yet?” she asked. “They’re from Boulder. We’re giving them pointers—well, Rex is—since they’re heading out, too.” She pointed at a young tattooed couple slumped beside another neglected sloop that probably couldn’t make it to Seattle.
Not wanting to meet any more adventure migrants in my dream-trampling mood, I checked on the progress Mick and Leo were making on grinding and reglassing Sophia.
When Jack waddled up, I tried to preempt his lecture. “I gave that guy the business after he accused me of running up the bill.”
Jack waved me off. “I told him you’re the best and said I’d talk to you. Now we’ve talked.” He twisted his mustache and pointed at Sophia’s bow. “Blaine rang me the minute he got out of surgery again. Said he felt fantastic. Told me again not to worry what this costs. Said he’d just mix the receipts with the kitchen remodel and score points with the wife for investing so much in her project.”
When customers began lurking for Jack’s attention, I shuffled outside to join the smokers and, without even a prompt or a request, began recounting my latest dating fiasco.
“So Number Twenty-Four invites me to her parents’ place on the west side. Her mom’s frantic in the kitchen and has so little to say I’m already sensing her disappointment in me. And her old man’s all gold watch and pricey scotch. Only drinks Glenlivet, he informs me. ‘Everything else is piss.’ Says that twice, maybe three times. Still, I was almost liking him till he started razzing me about sailing. ‘Never understood the attraction,’ he says, like I’d asked.”
The boys hooted.
“ ‘Takes all day to go absolutely nowhere,’ he tells me. ‘And all those tangled ropes? No thank you. Don’t understand why anyone would consider it worth the hassle unless they couldn’t afford a powerboat.’ ”
More hooting.
“This guy’s killing me, but the catch is I wanted to sleep with his daughter again. She had this zest for sex that made me feel nineteen again.”
Their eyes widened and the hooting resumed, but then I described the family-style dinner we’d had with her triple-chinned father, a self-made man, as he constantly pointed out, who suddenly disclosed that he owns a forty-seven-foot Bayliner, something his daughter had failed to mention.
“So your flying bridge is about eighteen feet off the water,” I tell him.
“That’s right,” he says.
“And I’m guessing you’ve got twin three-thirty Cummins diesels? Freshwater cooled.”
He bunches his lips. “Impressive,” he says, glancing approvingly at his daughter.
“You go fast and put out a huge wake, don’t you?”
He nods proudly, though one bushy eyebrow starts to lift.
“Know what my father calls boats like yours?” I ask.
His smile is cold. “Stinkpots?”
“Something like that,” I say. “But guess what my brother calls boaters
like you.”
He tilts his head to get a better bead on me.
“Cocksuckers,” I say.
The boys snort and howl. “That is so dogmatic,” said Mick, boatyard leader in vocabulary gaffes.
“Pedantic,” Noah corrected, then spasmodically jerked his head back twice.
A billboard had gone up that morning just a block away from the boatyard with a simple message: THE END IS NEAR. Everybody figured it had something to do with Noah’s doomsday father, but nobody dared ask him about it.
“So how’d all that go over with the zesty daughter?” he asked.
“Amazingly,” I said, “she never called me again.”
As usual, I didn’t want to tell them about dates who’d dumped me because I was too dull or too desperate, too withdrawn or too candid. In less than an hour, Number 25 and I went from bonding over similar childhoods to knowing too much to ever want to see each other again.
I looked past the boys to the limp marina flags. Johnny and I had put in a practice day that week, so we were theoretically as ready as ever to do well if the wind remained light tonight.
I backtracked and told the boys about Number 9. “She seemed crazy about me till she did my chart and found out I had four planets in Scorpio. ‘It was never gonna work,’ she told me. ‘I can’t be with a man who’s secretive and misogynistic.’ ”
“Massage a what?” Mick asked.
“She dumped our boy Josh,” Noah said, “because he had four planets in Scorpio. That’s the takeaway.”
“Which planets?” Leo asked.
“For twenty days and twenty nights,” Noah began, “the emperor penguin will march to a place so extreme it supports no other life. In the harshest place on earth, love finds a way.”
THE GRAVITY OF ONE SAILBOAT
We began our prerace rituals as the rising wind turned the bay from placid green Jell-O to corrugated iron. The entire Star fleet was out tonight, so when the countdown began twenty-one boats were traversing the invisible starting line like manic hamsters.
“At the two-minute horn,” I told Johnny, “we’re gonna head directly away from the line for almost a minute, then jibe around and come screaming back and hit the middle at full speed right at the gun. Got it?”
“Yes, Captain Kaz!”
Once we’d nearly executed that plan, we were turning heads because, for once, we were moving faster than everybody else, especially Mario, who as usual was stalling near the less-crowded left end of the line, which suddenly was where we were heading now that the wind had shifted. But before we got alongside him, we lost our uninterrupted breeze to two other boats, both of which Mario left behind with his mysterious acceleration until he squirted free into clear air, his lead growing as we drifted toward the rear.
Once we could finally tack, we were yet again too light or too clumsy to keep the boat level. After finishing second to last in the next two races, I snapped at Johnny to quit apologizing for things that weren’t his fault, which triggered another apology before he caught himself. We jibed back toward the marina in quiet awe of our inadequacies. Why did I race at all? To remind everybody I was no Bobo or Ruby Johannssen?
The dock offered no relief. A flock of liveaboards loitered near my pier, distracting me enough that I didn’t notice we were arriving too fast, and Johnny didn’t have enough time to stop us from thumping the dock and crunching the brittle bow. Waving off his further apologies, I glared at my needy neighbors who were hoping, no doubt, for just a little advice.
“Not tonight,” I nearly shouted.
Most of them immediately retreated, but Rem, the B Dock narcoleptic who’d recently bought a rotting yawl for next to nothing, stepped forward. “I just got one quick question,” he said, an empty Pabst dangling from his pinkie.
“Sure, Rem, but it’ll run you a buck-fifty a minute starting”—I glanced at my watch—“right now.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up filthy palms and backpedaling. “Excuuuse me.”
Johnny helped roll the sails in abashed silence and knew better than to bow to me tonight.
Then I seized the corner booth of the tavern, but Number 26 never showed. Or maybe she looked inside, saw a brooding tramp clutching a foamy pint and moonwalked right back out. She’d later blame it on an emergency involving her half brother’s girlfriend, though she never rescheduled. Her insistence that dates share her recycling ethic had already struck me as an unromantic deal breaker anyhow.
The first beer went down like it was trying to put something out. The second agitated me to the brink of calling Pop to tell him to get his pipe dream out of my yard. What had he called it? A family project. No, this was a selfish scheme for one reckless Bobo Johannssen Jr.
While other Star skippers brayed away at their table, Mario strolled over with his beer to interrupt my bitter blues.
“So your family’s sailing Swiftsure this year?” he said.
I chuckled, then stared till he started fumbling with zippers. “Where’d you hear that?”
“I hear your sister’s gonna be there, too.”
“No kidding. You might want to get your hearing checked.”
“We never actually dated,” Mario abruptly disclosed. “I mean, I always liked Ruby and didn’t date anybody else till I was older.”
I shook my head. “What beer are you on already?”
“I wrote letters when she was in Africa, least one a month for that first year. She never replied, but that didn’t stop me. That’s kinda why I started coming down here three years ago, because I kept thinking she’d eventually come out sailing with you.”
I whistled. “That’s some seriously flawed thinking.”
“All I’m saying,” he said now, his chest rising, “is I’d love to sail with that girl again.”
“I get it, Mario. We all would.”
He stared, waiting for more. “Just holding hands felt like a holy experience.” His voice actually quavered. Then he turned and hustled out the back door.
My third beer replaced martyrdom with wonder at all Mario Seville had just disclosed, which in turn somehow made me feel guilty about snapping at the liveaboards.
Grabbing a tool bag, I began my rounds in the gentle rain by climbing inside Georgia’s port lazarette and tightening hose clamps on both sides of her bilge pump to regain the suction. Then I showed the former nun how to do it herself and fended off her offer of cheap wine and Doritos. Next stop was Trent’s mildewed powerboat. Listening to his struggling diesel, I speculated aloud about a clogged fuel line or a weak injector pump. Then scrambling around the stern, on a hunch, I banged and reamed the fuel vent with a screwdriver until crud spilled out. The engine started easily, and I waved off Trent’s eight bucks—“all I got handy.” Next came the nudist couple who eagerly wanted to know the pros and cons of propane and diesel heaters. When I finally got to Rem, he was sitting hatless in his cockpit in the steady rain, listening to a piano concerto—conducting it, actually.
“Hey, Remy.”
His hands froze in midair, then his eyes opened. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know…I mean, like I—”
“What ya got?”
He pointed at the port-side deck, where water pooled an inch deep between the cabin and the toerail. “Leaks like a mother right down into the cabinets. Bucket a day sometimes. Wanna peek below? Maybe the railing needs rebedding, I don’t know. But there’s a million fucking screws poking through, and I don’t know how to…”
I tuned out the rest while I pulled out my drill, inserted a three-quarter-inch bit and bored through the bottom of the toerail at the boat’s beamiest point. “Hey!” Rem sputtered. “You can’t do that, can you?”
After I recoiled the drill, the new hole gushed like a hose. “Doesn’t solve your problem, but at least slows it down. You need more scuppers so the water doesn’t gather here. Once the hole dries I’ll come by and coat it with epoxy so the rail won’t rot.”
“Wow, man. That’s totally awesome, but like I
mean I don’t have—”
“See ya, Rem. Get back to your Bach.”
The rain fell harder, its familiar encore rattling tin roofs, thumping tarps and swamping decks and drains. Live on a boat in western Washington, and rain becomes your roommate. We get those monsoonlike dumps, but our specialty is intimate and unrelenting rain. You hear its percussion on your cabin top and feel its dampness in your nose and clothes even when they’re both dry. No heater or dehumidifier or thermostat or detergent is a match for this moisture. The first R-rated movie I ever saw was Fatal Attraction, with Glenn Close playing that psycho mistress who tells Michael Douglas, “I’m not gonna be ignored!” That’s the sort of rain we get.
Finally retreating to my own boat, I stopped on the dock to answer my trembling phone.
“Hey, Josh,” said a friendly woman’s voice. “How the hell are you?”
“Ruby?”
“Who else?” she asked, as if we talked every third day instead of every third year. “Hello? Can you hear me? Josh?”
“Great to hear your voice!” I yelled.
She laughed. “You think I’ve got just one?” Then she unleashed a lungful of elegant French before channeling some choppy African dialect. “I’ve gotta run soon here, so tell me how that boat makeover’s coming. Dad says”—she mimicked his sulky baritone—“ ‘He’s not doing a damn thing yet.’ I told him, ‘Don’t play me, old man! That doesn’t sound like my brother.’ What’s wrong with Momma anyway? She sounded like a dial tone. She okay? Hello, hello?”
“I’m here! So Dad put you up to this?”
“What? The other way around. I’m putting you all up to this. Swiftsure, Josh! It’s time! Hold on a sec.” Her phone sounded like it had fallen. “Put that anywhere!” she shouted into the background, then said, softly, to me, “So tell me you can make that boat fast.”
“Hardly.” I snorted. “It’s a stupid old piece of shit.”
She sighed. “Listen to you! Who pissed in your Cheerios? Somebody’s gotta win. Why not us? I told Grumps to double up on the blood thinners because he doesn’t want to miss this humdinger. Hello?”