by Jim Lynch
The two Bobos wore matching floppy sailor hats—as if they might be called to duty at any moment—and yakked nonstop. Oh boy this. Christ almighty that. Bernard rocked in place a few paces apart from us with half his head shaved, the other half flaunting Nordic locks. He’d recently become a vegetarian and a mountaineering zealot, scaling Rainier three times over the summer while reading everything Edward Abbey ever wrote. His T-shirt insisted that we TAX THE RICH!
Also in attendance was Ruby’s latest boyfriend, a sallow, indoorsy Ballard teen with a gold hoop earring that made Father twitch his jaw muscles. His name might’ve been Zach or Jack, but all I remember for sure is Father called him the Latest Mistake. Mother was also there in the flesh, but so distracted she might as well have been in her office.
Ruby popped out front in the first race and tacked away from Mother Superior toward the right side of the course, even though both Bobos simultaneously pointed out the left side looked windier and that she should be covering Superior, blocking her wind. She made good time toward the windward mark before the breeze shifted ten degrees, at which point she tacked again and rode her new course straight for the buoy while most of the fleet had to tack twice to get on the same path. Rounding the mark, she was twenty yards ahead of the second-place boat.
“Still backseat driving?” Bernard asked the Bobos.
Through binoculars, I watched Ruby build speed downwind despite the fluky breeze. Near the finish, she jibed once more than necessary, second-guessing which end of the line was closest, and got nosed out by a former Olympian from Florida. Mother Superior finished fourth.
“Let it go,” Grumps told my father, who kept demanding that somebody please explain why she picked the wrong end of the goddamn line, though second place kept her in contention.
Between races it got hotter yet, as if some orbital wobble had tugged us closer to the sun. Bernard used this break to stride up the beach shouting, “Will the person who left an Australian shepherd inside a gold Lexus SUV with the windows up please free her now!”
The two Bobos stopped arguing long enough for Father to ask what the hell Bernard was yelling about. “The kid’s out of control,” he said to Mother who gave no sign she heard either of them.
The next race started well, but Ruby picked the right side of the course again while most of the fleet went left, apparently gambling on another favorable shift that never happened. She finished third.
“What in God’s name!” Father roared. “Why can’t she play the odds? Is that too much to ask of her?”
Bernard checked to see if I was catching this, seeing as he’d told me earlier that Father wanted her to win for him.
Ruby’s Latest Mistake picked this moment to go confessional as we stood silently overlooking the Sound. “My parents want me to get a job,” he told me and my brother. “Like at Red Robin or Walgreens or some boring shit like that. I won’t take just any day job, though. Know what I mean? Get that on your résumé and you start to look like a lifer.”
“Know what I think?” Bernard casually asked. “You should lower your standards and realize it’s highly unlikely that anybody would want to hire you to do anything.”
It took the kid a moment to digest this. “Well, fuck you, too,” he finally said.
“Fuck me?” Bernard grabbed the boy under the arms and threw him, upwards as much as backwards. To his credit, he stuck the landing and immediately held up his palms in surrender.
Bernard stormed off toward the parking lot again, then down to the most crowded stretch of the beach. “Will the douchebag with the pretentious Lexus please free your overheating dog right now!”
After the Bobos reworked the scores, Mother calculated that Ruby should be able to still win the trials if she finished in the top five and ahead of Mother Superior in the final race. By then the northerly was generating foot-high rollers that favored longer, stronger sailors. Yet Rube nailed the start so perfectly that we feared she was over early, surging a boat length ahead of Mother Superior and using her rights to force her to tack. Then she covered her, back and forth across the course, blocking her wind and expanding her lead to the windward mark, which Ruby rounded in third and her nemesis in fifth.
Father continued questioning her decisions, saying she should just sail to win. Yet on the downwind leg, she was the fastest boat, and by midpoint, she’d climbed into second. For the last loop, she played the shifts and overtook the leader by cutting inside her around the windward mark. From there Ruby was just one smooth downwind run to the Olympics. Cheers rose up as word spread. Locals and Ballard High friends and fellow racers like Mario Seville all started shouting out over the water. The two Bobos spouted nonsensical cheers. Even Mother, who’d been almost morose till now, yelled, “Go, Ruby! Go!”
Leading by thirty yards approaching the finish line, she was guaranteed to win unless she capsized. People began crowding around us to experience the family’s reaction. Mother hugged the two Bobos while I hid tears behind the binoculars. Her speed, once again, didn’t make sense. How does anybody separate from sailors this good?
Then things suddenly turned strange.
She was headed for the left end of the finish line, which made sense given her location and wind direction. If she stuck to it, she wouldn’t need to jibe. Yet at the last instant she did exactly that, pivoting ninety degrees and sailing parallel to the line like she’d done on that earlier race, but at a sharper, more inexplicable angle.
“What’s she…,” my father murmured. “Did the wind shift that much?”
“She’s just…,” Grumps muttered, hugging himself.
“Did her rudder snap?” Mother asked.
“Is she doing a penalty turn?” Bernard wondered aloud.
“She must’ve already finished!” Father insisted.
“Give her the horn,” Grumps pleaded.
Then we watched her veer past the buoy marking the far end of the finish line as the boat behind her crossed and received the horn followed by another congested threesome, including Mother Superior. Honk-honk-honk. Then another three, honk-honk-hooonk.
As this spectacle unfolded, I could already tell it would be one of the indelible moments—amid billions of faded and meaningless ones—that would make up my life.
Earlier that week, Ruby had asked what my dreams were like. I hadn’t said much other than that they kept waking me up. In hers, she told me, she was rarely herself. “When I wake up it startles me to remember that to everybody else I’m always just this Ruby you see right here. It’s so much more personal.”
“What is?”
“Being awake.”
Wrong-way Rube sailed off toward the center of the Sound as the rest of the fleet crossed the line in clumps and bleats. Onshore, Father seized up like an engine that’d run out of oil. Years later, he’d call it the single most hostile thing anybody had ever done to him. I admit tasting some of that acid, because if given Ruby’s gifts I’d have served them like a slave. Bernard, however, found her decision nothing short of exhilarating.
“Moitessier!” he shouted, jamming his wolf smile up near our father’s purple mug. “Serves you fucking right! Moitessier!”
I’m not sure Father could’ve connected those dots at that instant, how Ruby passing up victory could be seen as a nod to the mystic Frenchman he’d forced us to study. At that instant, I doubt he could have told you who Moitessier was. Perhaps Ruby wasn’t channeling the guy anyway. Afterwards, she told a reporter and the rest of the sailing universe that she wanted to sail less, not more, and to work at things she wasn’t already good at, like the piano and French and religion and boyfriends. She also said she wanted to go to Africa for the Peace Corps more than she wanted to go to Australia for the Olympics, a comment mulled by millions, toasted by many. By then, though, her explanations barely mattered. Her meltdown was a two-sentence national news brief. As it turned out, had she finished that race she would’ve been the favorite in Sydney.
Two months later, Ruby and our father
were mentioned in Sports Illustrated in an article about kid stars snapping under parental pressure. That mortification was followed by an unrelated business-journal story about the Puget Sound boatbuilding landscape, with one anonymous competitor saying Johannssen & Sons had been an obsolete family enterprise for more than a decade. It took me years to realize that in Bobo Jr.’s mind, Ruby’s Olympic run was his financial ace in the hole. Her success, he’d envisioned, could resuscitate the Johannssen brand.
What actually transpired inside her head at the end of the race remained unclear. She thought of Moitessier, yes, but only after she’d abandoned course. Asked point-blank what she’d been thinking when she decided to jibe, she said, “I wasn’t.”
How different would our lives have been if she’d simply finished?
To get Bernard out of his face, my stricken father backhanded the air, as if fending off yellow jackets, his knuckles grazing my brother’s cheek. Seemingly innocent, accidental contact, though as Mother would later point out: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Regardless, Bernard responded by planting both hands in Bobo Jr.’s chest and sending him reeling, his fleshy neck whipping loosely backwards but then forward as his skull bounced off a log, which sent me airborne into my brother’s ribs, tackling him into the sand.
What happened next turns fuzzy and fractured for me, but I believe my father crawled toward us like an incensed bear until Grumps, galloping in our direction, tripped on the same log and yelped like something had snapped.
I have no idea what Ruby’s Latest Mistake did during this or how my nose bled on everybody. But I know plenty of people saw the family pig pile and tried not to make eye contact with any member of our barbarous clan. And I recall Mother’s strangely detached inventory of injuries and how my ubiquitous blood made everything seem worse than it was.
In hindsight, I think of this whole episode as our family’s big bang, jettisoning Bernard to the South Pacific, Ruby to Africa, Mother to Arizona, and me and Grumps right down the road. Within a year, Father would be living alone in the Teardown, and more than a dozen would pass before the whole family gathered in the same room again.
While the rest of us regrouped on the beach, Bernard stormed into the parking lot with a rock the size of a softball. He set it on the roof of the Lexus, grabbed a gallon jug of water out of a nearby pickup and cut the top off with the knife he carried on his belt, then used the rock to shatter the driver’s window of the SUV. With the alarm blaring, he opened the door, freed the unsteady dog and guided her toward the water.
What lingers next is Mother saying, during our shameful hobble to the cars, “It’s finally over.” Leaving me to wonder if she meant our childhood or our family unit. Or, seeing how Ruby’s sailing magic had stitched us together for so long, the central drama of our existence.
She found a tissue to dam my nose and told me to tilt my head back. The sky, I saw, was milky blue, but the moon was surprisingly clear and full yet so oddly ringed, and I told her so.
“So what do you think is going on with the moon?” she asked.
“Some kind of reflection?” I guessed.
“Yes, but of what?”
“Just tell me.”
“It’s sunlight,” she said, “bouncing off the moon and reflecting off crystals in the upper atmosphere. Nice, huh?”
She looked up at me, her smile gone. “It’s over,” she said again.
When we’d get home, she’d retreat to her office to unpack the Dobsonian telescope I’d helped her pick out, including a foot-wide mirror that cost $850 and a smaller one for $150, expenditures we’d hidden from the Bobos. She’d sucked me into her astronomy mania, at one point insisting that I slow down and imagine what it must have been like for Edwin Hubble to discover in 1925 that the universe was expanding, the galaxies moving apart from one another faster and farther all the time.
“Guess what they call that moon?” she asked now, handing me another tissue. “C’mon, you can get this.” Her eyes were still on the sky. “What’s it look like?”
“An eyeball?” My nose felt cold and numb and large beneath my hand. “I don’t know, Mom. A poached egg?”
I waited, knowing she’d eventually tell me.
“A moon halo,” she whispered, her hand clutching mine. “Isn’t that beautiful. It’s called a moon halo.”
DANCING ON A COP CAR
The next time we saw Bernard he was on television.
He’d packed all his climbing gear and left home before we’d returned from the beach fracas and read his simple note: I’M OUTTA HERE—B.
Six days later, he left a message on the house phone when he knew nobody would be there, telling Mother he’d landed a job and wasn’t coming home anytime soon. So don’t leave the light on.
After I called around, a friend of his finally shared a number for one of his new mountaineering pals, who told me he’d been hired as a climbing ranger at Mount Rainier.
Irritated that I’d found his bunkhouse number, Bernard reluctantly disclosed that he was making first ascents and decent coin—he had lots of new words—and had found a sassy waitress to play with at night.
“Everybody wishes you’d just come home,” I said, though I was mostly speaking for myself. “The Bobos need you at the boathouse.”
He snickered. “I’ve got a job outside on a magnificent mountain. Why would I want to go back to laying fiberglass indoors?”
“Loyalty” was the word that popped out of me.
His laughter hurt my ears. “Then just come visit,” I said weakly.
That busted him up again, though by then I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at me, at the notion of a visit or at the antics of his sassy girlfriend on his end of the line. What astonished me was that he didn’t apologize for leaving me to patch the family back together.
Another five weeks of unreturned calls whirled past before Ruby and I drove to Rainier. We poked around the bunkhouses but couldn’t find anybody who knew him. So we wheeled up to the lodge at Paradise, asked where we’d find the climbing rangers and received the same useless phone number. His waitress, though, was easy to spot.
“He left the mountain eleven days ago,” she told us.
“Quit?” I asked, trying to place her accent.
“Fired, technically, but the case could be made that he quit.”
“So what’d he do?”
She looked at me long enough to rotate a wad of blue gum around her mouth three times. “We were having our monthly staff meeting,” she said, glancing into the kitchen. “The supe was giving us the same old customer-service crap. He was more worked up than usual, though, like maybe his wife was holding out, you know? And Bernie just told him off in front of everybody.”
Bernie, I thought. “Brilliant,” I said.
“Listen, y’all want anything to eat?”
“What’d he say?” Ruby asked.
She leaned closer and rearranged our water glasses. “The supe was reminding the climbing rangers they weren’t getting paid to have fun. He’d heard how often they were skiing off the summit and whooping down the mountain. ‘Sends the wrong message,’ he told them. Then he bitched about our lack of cheeriness and even went after Travis, the bug guy, saying his insect tours were running too long and screwing up other schedules. That’s when Bernie stuck his hand up and told the supe it’d be a whole lot easier working here if he wasn’t such an imperious fuckstick. We had to look up imperious afterwards. Fuckstick we knew.”
“Fired on the spot?” I asked, marveling at Bernard’s penchant for mouthy beauties.
She nodded. “Like I said, he seemed ready to go.”
“Where to?”
She shrugged. “I’m just a junior-college girl from Louisiana, but I’m guessing he would’ve told his family if he’d wanted y’all to know.”
An obese customer waved for her. She rolled her eyes and her gum again before taking a long last look at the huge black X on Ruby’s white T-shirt and hustled off, her hips rocking o
ut figure eights.
The shirt hinted at one of Ruby’s many postsailing phases. When the yearbook came out the following spring, she’d look like the most outgoing senior imaginable. Group photos would show her in the Cultural Awareness Club (for two weeks), the Environmental Club (quit by the third meeting), the Thespian Club (auditioned but never acted), Knowledge Bowl (never competed), the Mountaineers Club (went twice), the Japanese Club (just for the picture). The only outfit she stuck with was the Red Cross Club. Her classmates probably assumed she craved popularity, but I think Ruby was just trying on new identities. At this stage, four weeks into her senior year, she’d recently finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and couldn’t quit yapping about how he’d reinvented himself in prison. If he could do it in jail, her thought bubble seemed to say, why can’t we do it out here in freedom? So when I saw that shirt, I bought it even though it fell to her knees.
As Bernard’s girl sashayed back past us, Ruby stepped in front of her. “Please tell him his sister and brother need to hear from him.” Then she tilted her head to the side and cracked the smile that had always kicked open every door in her path. “Please,” she said again.
And maybe she did, but we still didn’t see or hear from Bernard till Ruby spotted him two months later on television. It was day two of the soon-to-be-famous WTO riots, which she’d attended that afternoon with her latest dubious boyfriend, a chubby kid with big ears, a lopsided grin and a vocabulary consisting of man, like and awesome.
The Bobos and I were reeling from nine straight days of work, with Grumps’s neck locking up again and Father denying, as always, any soreness or fatigue, though he moaned and dozed in the recliner. The house already felt awkwardly muted with Bernard’s absence, Mother’s self-seclusion and Father ignoring Ruby.
After he pretended not to hear her account of getting mildly teargassed hours earlier, I finally snapped. “Quit your pouting already. You wouldn’t stand for it in any of us. She’s your daughter. Grow up.”