Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  His words, upon waking, were, for him, astonishingly contrite. “Do me a favor. Tell me how I ended up being such a piece of shit that nobody will live with me anymore?”

  This landmark question/admission came near midnight on a Sunday in September 2000. Until very recently, our family had clung to such reliable and predictable orbits. We’d had our slight wobbles, yes, but with each of us always drawn toward the others, and with Bobo Jr. exerting the central pull. Yet in the past year, we’d all left him, like Jupiter’s moons suddenly liberated from their orbits. Even Grumps had packed his monogrammed suitcase and abandoned the Teardown. Ignoring his son’s insults and pleadings, he’d stormed out with his floppy hat and his pants belted high after the first defective-product and personal-injury lawsuit was filed against Johannssen & Sons. (Father’s vaunted light and fast Falcon 35 had been dismasted in a mere fifteen knots of wind.) Grumps needed space so badly he’d gone to live with his estranged sister and had taken the Labs with him because he didn’t trust his boy to feed them.

  In the month since that dramatic departure—even though the two Bobos continued working in the same boathouse six days a week—Father had been living by himself for the first time in his life.

  Stunned by the sight of his disarray, I had no answer to his startling question before he reworded it. “How’d I become such an asshole that I’m left all alone here?”

  “I’m proud of you,” I said finally, noticing the terraced bags beneath his eyes, “for at least being aware of your role in this situation.”

  “Ah, backhanded praise from my unambitious son,” he said, jerking himself completely upright, his righteousness returning. “That’s how far I’ve fallen.”

  “What makes you so sure I don’t have ambitions.”

  “Your life to date.”

  “And what do you know about it?”

  “Who knows you better than me?”

  “Just about everybody, starting with me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps what?”

  “Perhaps you need a glass of wine.”

  “I never liked wine. How could you not know that about me? Just because you had a brief role in my creation doesn’t make you the expert.”

  “What’re we talking about here?”

  “How’d you get the silver?” I asked abruptly while he was still off balance.

  “What silver?”

  “Grumps said you could’ve had the gold.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Yeah, but you never talk about it. Everybody’s always been ‘Wow and congrats, you got a medal!’ But why not the gold?”

  “He screwed me.”

  “Who?”

  “So I covered him.”

  “Who?”

  “The Italian, Sorrentino. Fouled me twice but never took a penalty turn. He was in line for the bronze, so I made damn sure he didn’t get any clear air. Thought I’d get the gold anyway. I was wrong, but it was worth it.”

  “Really?”

  He paused. “I don’t waste time regretting my decisions.”

  “Why not? You second-guess everybody else.”

  “Quit cross-examining me!” He waved his hand like he did when he was telling people to go to hell. “You all changed. I’m still the same.” He was almost yelling now. “You need to look at yourselves!”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “You are still the same, and that’s the problem. You’re incapable of change.”

  “You’re jealous,” he parried, “because you’ve got nothing to change from or to. No plans, no philosophy, no talent.”

  Blood pinged in my temples, but instead of walking out I cracked a beer and refilled his glass of red. “You get mean when you know you’re wrong and somebody calls you on it. But you don’t scare me anymore. Why do you always whimper in your sleep anyway?”

  He squinted, measuring my question. “I don’t whimper.”

  “Oh yes you do. And always have. Like a dreaming dog. You were doing it just now when I walked in.”

  He exhaled. “Go pick a fight with somebody who can’t squash you like a bug.”

  I started to rise.

  “I’m sorry.” He sighed. “That was stupid.”

  I sat back down. “Did you just say you were sorry?”

  “I’m spent, Josh. Will you just look at these drawings with me. Could you do that and quit harassing me?”

  He unfurled blueprints of popular boats that had even-thinner construction than the experimental Falcon 35 we’d built for that litigious orthodontist the year before. I studied each drawing with him, picking out the four I thought would best bolster his case that the Falcon was not a risky or reckless design.

  “So what’s this whimpering about?” I asked again.

  He took a sip before leveling his gaze on me. “Maybe it beats screaming.”

  “But what’re you dreaming about?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Then why am I asking?”

  “It’ll only make you think even less of me.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He rose with a grunt and refilled his glass. “I was maybe a year older than you are now, hobbling down a steep mountain with my left foot so infected with jungle rot I could hardly feel it,” he began, staring out the window. “I’ve got a rifle digging a hole in my shoulder, and this kid from Mississippi, Bobby Fontaine, won’t stop talking. It’s just me and him. We were told to go to a lookout and report back. Bobby was one of those high-maintenance talkers who end every sentence with ‘you know?’ or ‘know what I mean?’ He needed constant confirmation. So you had to keep saying ‘Uh-huh’ because otherwise you’d never get to the end of his goddamn stories. And this one was about some Ole Miss receiver who Bobby swore could go pro. So he’s describing some of his miraculous catches and keeps turning back to make sure I’m not missing any details. But I’ve zoned out. I’m walking down a mountain I know I’m gonna have to climb back up. The whole thing felt like punishment. They kept telling us to take the longer, safer route, but to me it just looked like the hardest route, so I talked Bobby into the shorter one. He’s still turning back to check that I’m still listening. And then there’s a distant pop—like a harmless firecracker—and Bobby’s blood and brains are all over me. So I go down on the ground with him, and I can’t breathe. It takes me a whole lot longer than it should’ve to realize I haven’t been shot, too. And my goal at that point is not to kill whoever shot Bobby but to do whatever it takes to not get killed myself. If I don’t move, I think maybe I won’t die. Finally I do, though, and I put Bobby on my back, as a shield as much as anything, and climb back up the hill and lie about what route we took and where the shots came from,” he plowed on, looking directly at me finally, his voice downshifting for the epilogue. “So instead of court-martialing me for disobeying orders and endangering a fellow soldier, they put a medal on me. If I’d just taken the safer route, Bobby might still be around. Or if I’d just kept saying ‘Uh-huh,’ he wouldn’t have spun his head and that bullet would’ve gone through mine instead, and you, Ruby and Bernard wouldn’t exist either. So there could be something in there that cycles through my dreams and makes me whimper a little every now and then.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s some nasty stuff to try to forget. But it doesn’t sound like you did anything anybody else wouldn’t have done, right? And don’t most war medals feel somewhat undeserved?”

  He sighed, then chuckled. “You’re underrated. You know that?”

  “Only by you.”

  We stared at each other until I said, “How ’bout you show me these drawings one more time, okay? Could we go back to that?”

  He worked his jaw like he wasn’t finished chewing something, then forced a smile and ran his hands over the blueprints to flatten them out again.

  “Eventually you’ll all come back,” he told me when I got ready to leave. “And the truth is I’d rather die tomorrow than live another month without your mother.” He l
ooked away before mustering a half shout, “You’re all coming back!”

  Grumps was the first, though only after Father got busted for drunk driving and needed to be collected from the Wallingford police station. Given that he now needed to chauffeur the jailbird everywhere anyway, Grumps moved back in and unpacked his little monogrammed suitcase. Then he returned to his recliner to reread East of Eden and watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns, the witty dialogue of which he often delivered before the actors. They ate nothing but frozen food—pizza, burritos and TV dinners—until Mother returned from Tucson four months later.

  She’d spent most of her time there peering through enormous telescopes and avoiding grading papers. “I wasn’t much better than my laziest students,” she admitted. “I’m embarrassed by that, but I guess you never get too old to let yourself down.”

  Ballard High gladly hired her back, though. And for a spell Mother and the Bobos were pleasantly reunited, the three of them treating one another like precious new roommates.

  THE SHIP OF MIRACLES

  Eventually even Ruby returned for seven days of fund-raisers in September 2002. She looked pretty much the same but moved and spoke like someone who’d done and seen things the rest of us hadn’t. And she was onstage before we had a chance to get used to her again.

  Grumps had coaxed the yacht club into hosting her first presentation during a preseason schmooze for local racers, though even powerboaters flocked to see the Johannssen kid who’d tacked away from the Olympics to go help poor Africans. The girl known for her sailing magic, as the shortcut mythology went, was now on the ship of miracles. She napped most of the drive up from the airport. And I worried for her when we rolled into the jammed parking lot, though she just glanced at the overflow mob and yawned.

  While our club wasn’t the swankiest, it had its fair share of pomp and sexism and old-growth fir paneling, and it felt increasingly exclusive, or maybe I just started noticing the bigger boats and the brighter bling. What I knew for sure was that the dues sparked monthly arguments at the Teardown. Grumps called our membership a business investment. Father argued they’d hire us to build their boats anyway. Regardless, we all felt like outsiders by now, particularly Grumps, who looked like a living artifact from Seattle’s wooden-boat days as he made the rounds shaking hands. Wealthy new members were as foreign to him as the bitter craft beers now on tap. Rainier wasn’t even offered anymore. The last strong link we’d had was Ruby, back when all the members were giddy to see the club’s initials next to the winner’s name.

  With her late flight, she hadn’t had a moment to change, yet her long black dress seemed like part of the show, with its pattern of intertwined giraffe necks. Given a microphone and a murmuring audience, Ruby started calmly, as if she’d adopted Mother’s professorial style, carefully explaining the mission and daily regimen of Mercy Ships. Yet the theatrical Ruby soon resurfaced when she began milking stories and speaking louder as her presentation took on the rhythm of a sermon.

  She discussed Africa’s rampant problems, such as benign tumors and excessive tooth enamel that Western medicine had long since alleviated with routine procedures. Then she talked about all the blind children whose sight they’d restored.

  “It’s my favorite part of the job, playing with these kids. I sit in a room with them afterwards and help them get used to not being blind. Then I pull out a big purple balloon and we bat it around.” She flashed pictures of herself with the children.

  A woman behind me grumbled that she’d assumed Ruby would be talking about sailing.

  After explaining how the ships were funded by donations, and how everybody on board was unpaid and working for the honor, Ruby closed with one final story. “I’ve seen more disfigured people than you could imagine,” she said. “And to be honest, it was hard to look at them at first, but once you connect with two or three, it gets easy. Eventually you look them all in the eye and see only the people inside. And some you’ll never forget. Like Kortolo.”

  She flashed two images and waited a few beats, sipping water, studying the crowd’s recoils and oh my gods. The cantaloupe-sized growth on the woman’s jaw was so large it was crushing her windpipe and distorting her entire face. Only her right eye was visible. One couple rose and shuffled out of the room. Then another.

  “Kortolo was so disfigured,” Ruby said softly, “that her husband banished her from their home. By the time we docked in Togo, she’d been living in the woods and came out only at night. It took desperation and a huge leap of faith,” she said, her volume rising, “for her to stand in line in the morning light to see if these white doctors on the fancy big ship could help her.”

  She quieted again. “The line was maybe a hundred yards long that day, filled with crippled and disfigured people. Keep in mind that most of their relatives and neighbors consider these ailments curses, not medical problems. So just being here was an act of courage. Yet Kortolo stood out even in this crowd.”

  The screen turned from old-fashioned slides to modern video that showed hundreds of Africans standing three or four deep along a gangplank and the grassy shoreline, like fans waiting to get into a concert. The yacht clubbers generated only a faint hubbub until the footage closed in on the mounting commotion near the back of the line where somebody was being passed overhead from hand to hand toward the front. The camera followed this progression as the body finally came to a stop and was placed on its two feet.

  Kortolo.

  The lens zoomed in on her twisted hippo face, then on my sister’s red hair—as if the video had suddenly gone from black and white to color. Ruby took Kortolo’s hand and led her onto the ship.

  People gasped and muttered. Another couple walked out. Then Ruby flashed photos of Kortolo after multiple surgeries. Suddenly she had a face that was easy to look at: scarred along the left side, yes, but otherwise appealing with a brand-new titanium jaw. When the lights flipped on, even some men dabbed their eyes. (Grumps’s face was in his hands.)

  “During the ship’s five-month stay in Togo,” Ruby said, double checking her numbers as never before, “we removed two hundred and eighty-one tumors and seven hundred and ninety-four blind patients were given sight. I’m honored to be part of this, and I’m asking you to join me in being part of it, too.”

  Mother and the rest of the Johannssens stood, except for Father, until Grumps reached down and coaxed him to his feet. Others were applauding, but there was also an agitated murmur as some sailors retreated to the open bar by the wall of framed photos of former commodores in white hats and snug jackets with epaulets and gold pins. Ruby fielded polite questions about the countries she’d seen, though much of the crowd had stopped listening by the time a tall, graying man in front said, “We all appreciate you coming here, Ruby. Sounds like gratifying work. But could you spend just a minute or two reflecting on your racing days and how your life might have been different if you’d finished that Olympic quali?”

  Ruby’s left eyebrow twitched. “I don’t think about that at all. I came here tonight to talk about Mercy Ships.”

  “Well, I get that,” the man responded, loudly enough to kill the background jabber, “but most of us here tonight are sailors. So we assumed you’d talk a bit about racing, seeing as how you did it at such a high level. Some of us hoped maybe you’d enlighten us as to why you did what you did a couple years ago.”

  She stared at him as if translating his English into a more familiar language. “I don’t reconsider my decision that day, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said to a suddenly rapt crowd. “I’m fine with how things played out. Even back then I never thought about sailing, except when I was doing it. Now I don’t think about it at all. I think about helping people who desperately need it. And I’m happy to talk more about that.”

  There weren’t any more questions, and the donations were stingy enough to incite Grumps to terminate our membership the following month.

  Ruby did five other presentations—at three churches and two schools—during the w
eek she was home. I was her driver, because she still didn’t have a license, so we had plenty of time together. Yet for the first time ever, she felt distant, like she was in a hurry to be someplace else and discussing something else. Even simple conversations turned challenging, as if she’d lost the ability to feign interest in our mundane dreams and concerns.

  In public, though, most of her talks were electric, reigniting speculation and rumors of what, exactly, was so special about the Johannssen girl. But at home she refused to perform and barely participated. When old boyfriends appeared at the door, she didn’t give any of them much more than a hug or a hello.

  While Father kept quiet during most of her visit, on the last day he informed her, after biting an apple so aggressively it cracked like axed kindling, that her presentations reminded him of tent revivals. “You sure as hell turned into quite the little con woman,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Let’s be honest, Dad,” she said, rising from the couch. “You haven’t given me anything in years. Plus, giving isn’t really your thing, is it?”

  Mother and I gawked at them both as Ruby floated out of the room like it was an offhand exchange.

  A couple days before, she had told Grumps he should quit drinking while his liver still functioned. She’d also listened impatiently to Mother share her fascination with nineteenth-century fluid-dynamics equations that are still used daily in the modern world.

  “I can see why that interests you, but why does it excite you?” Ruby asked. “What has math contributed to psychology or philosophy or even biology? And physics basically just talks about the stage on which the human drama plays out, right?”

  Mother blushed as if she’d been slapped. “Trying to understand the physical universe,” she said through clenched teeth, “has always been the paramount human drama.”

  During that visit, I was again reminded that Ruby still couldn’t execute fourth-grade math in her head or find her way home from downtown. But she unlocked Grumps’s neck, raised thousands of dollars and provided another inexplicable Ruby moment to add to the collection.