by Jim Lynch
“Yes, yes, yes!” he suddenly shouted, optimism and red wine bursting from his pores. “Great work! Great, great! Doesn’t it look great?”
“It looks,” I said slowly, “like a gamble.”
“That’s what we do, Josh!” He was so excited he looked sunburned. “We take chances!”
Bounding to the truck and back, he returned with Mother’s little camera and started flashing.
“Taking pics for the handicappers?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said, snapping more photos.
“Because if you don’t tell them everything,” I said as casually as I could, “your reputation could be ruined. You know that, right?” This was hard to say on an empty stomach, but I kept going. “You could be blackballed.”
He horselaughed. “Yes, yes, I’ll tell the bastards what they need to know. But my reputation? Are you serious? I’m trying to keep the family business alive here! When we were winning, we turned away orders, Josh. Right now it’s so much worse than your grandfather even knows. All we need is a little buzz.” He ran both his palms all along the starboard waterline as if performing some sort of faith healing. “How’d you get it so smooth?” He was beaming again. “It’s you and me, Josh. It’s our turn!”
Bug-eyed and gaping, my father looked maniacal, but I still indulged the possibility that between his derring-do and my practicality we’d slapped together a boat that could add something to the Johannssen legacy, though most likely a prelude to disaster. Instead of sharing that thought, I said, “Bernard might be coming home sometime in the next week or so.”
His head spun so fast I heard cartilage pop in his flabby neck. “What’d you say?”
“You heard me. He’s apparently passing through town.”
“He called?”
“Just a confusing postcard. Probably all bullshit anyway,” I backpedaled. “And even if he shows, I highly doubt he could be talked into racing with us. So don’t go there.”
It was too late. The image of Bernard, this boat and a full family crew at Swiftsure throbbed in his temples as if the future was right in front of us and we weren’t just two grown men walking around a cheap old freakish sailboat in a closed boatyard on a moonless spring evening.
THE PIRATE AND HIS BUTTERFLIES
The first time Bernard returned from sea it was late 2004, when a hailstorm blew him into Seattle on a thirty-four-foot New Zealand sloop I’d never heard of.
The buyers he asked me to meet at the gate of the marina looked like bad guys in a Bond flick, one of them tiny and shiny bald in a charcoal suit, the other a tall grizzly in a tricolored polo. “Top of the morning!” the little guy said in a slightly British accent, though he could pass for Spanish and it was midafternoon. He introduced himself as Antonio and his looming sidekick as Hector, neither of which sounded plausible. Antonio chattered about weather and airplanes and what he kept calling Americana the whole stroll up the frosty dock while sweat bubbled on his sidekick’s lunar forehead despite the chill.
I expected to find Bernard in the cockpit again, where he’d been sitting like a hologram when I’d shown up twenty minutes earlier. Without warning, my brother had finally come home! “Meet me on the Bell Harbor guest dock in two hours,” he’d said into my phone before hanging up. It’d been five years and three days since he’d left. Ten months since his last postcard. Yet here he was. Alive!
From three docks away, I’d spotted him hunched over a mug of steaming tea. As I closed in, he began to resemble a weather-whipped version of his former self, his skin multiple shades of red and brown above his beard and across his brow, where bangs no longer tumbled. His chest was a few sizes thicker, his eyes a lighter sun-bleached blue and spoked with wrinkles whether he was smiling or not. I was too excited to speak sensibly. My first words were “So what’s the plan?”
His squint and shrug said far more than I just had. “To finish this tea,” he said, “and hang out with my brother.”
“You miss voting?” I then inexplicably asked. Followed by “What kind of auxiliary you got in this thing?”
He waved me aboard, then stepped past my trembling hand and hugged me tight without spilling his tea.
Even when we’d shared a room I’d never known his inner world, but he’d gone from difficult to read to impossible. All he’d tell me about the buyers was that when they came below, I should be quiet and very alert. “The less you know the better,” he said with an oddly raucous laugh as if he’d been alone so long he’d lost all sense of appropriate volume. But it was hard for me to assess anything. Just watching him in person, shifting his weight and moving his hands, was thrilling.
I escorted the dubious duo to his boat, where we stepped aboard and descended into the gloomy cabin. Bernard was waiting there in the shadows, amid the mild stink of laundry and urine and some faint rancid odor I couldn’t identify.
“Never understood the attraction of boats,” Antonio said with a forced chuckle as we settled around the drop-leaf table with Hector hovering against the hatch steps, the only place he could fit, his watermelon skull eclipsing all daylight. “Now, a car,” the little man continued brightly, “that I can understand. Something like a Jaguar”—he gave it three pompous syllables—“offers efficiency and elegance. A boat is someone else’s naughty daughter. Perhaps I take her for a ride—ha-ha-ha!—but I certainly don’t want to own her!”
He translated his aside to the lummox in Spanish as Bernard flicked more lights on, and my eyes registered, with amazement, his sentimental indulgences. I’d sent him dozens of photos, yet he’d tacked the same shot of Ruby in the exact spot on his boat where I’d put it on mine, to the left of the navigation table—her hair a flame crowded by disfigured black faces. He’d also posted the same photo of Ruby levitating between us on the dock. I watched the giant’s slitted eyes crawl over every surface.
Bernard didn’t shake their hands or even say hello. He flipped on a bright battery-powered lamp, slid it to the middle of the table, then pulled a shallow Tupperware bin from beneath the V-berth and put it next to the lamp. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
“Plenty of time for all that, my good man. What we are establishing here is the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership.”
Bernard popped a false smile of his own. “I’m sorry. Can I offer either of you gentlemen a cocktail?” Then he turned to the big guy. “¿Te apetece un cóctel, caballero?”
“Sure!” said Antonio. “We’d love one, wouldn’t we, Hector? How refreshing. A bilingual American!”
Again, the big guy showed no sign of hearing, much less comprehending.
Bernard poured spiced rum into four plastic glasses. The little man raised his for a toast, but Bernard was already opening the Tupperware. Inside were sealed plastic pouches, and I recognized the bitter stink of dead insects—supermodel butterflies in this case, as big as my hand, with forked tails and velvety black wings.
“Ahhh,” Antonio purred. “Swallowtails.” He pulled a thin round magnifying glass the size of a silver dollar from an inner suit pocket. “You mind?”
“Dig in,” Bernard said, his skin twitching below his right eye.
The little man began studying the wings, one by one, then the tails, each butterfly absorbing thirty excruciating seconds of scrutiny, as if this were a high-stakes diamond transaction. “I was assured you had Grade A, amigo,” he said without looking up.
“I wish you’d pick one accent and stick with it,” Bernard told him. “These are all Grade A.”
It occurred to me that our only exit was blocked by the enormous mute.
“Well, my good man, perhaps one or two are,” Antonio conceded. “Surely you have more?”
“Take another look, Pedro.”
“Perhaps you should, captain. These six here are all Grade B or lower.” He offered Bernard his magnifying glass and, when he wouldn’t take it, laid it on the table and made a steeple with his fingers. “I’m sorry, but we are interested only in Grade As, my good man.”<
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“I’m sorry, too.” Bernard shrugged. “Because I don’t barter.”
“Surely you have more, no?”
Bernard bunched his lips and glanced at me, then turned to the bow and retrieved two more containers.
The little man looked at the bugs more quickly this time. “We were told you might have a queen or two as well? Weren’t we, Hector?”
The big man didn’t blink.
Bernard laughed too loudly again. “Ornithoptera alexandrae? Me?”
Now I knew he was bluffing. He’d written me an entire letter about the queens of Papua New Guinea.
“Perhaps we should all have another shot,” he suggested.
He filled his glass, then passed the rum as Antonio razzed Hector in Spanglish for not having touched the first drink yet.
Then Bernard pulled a flat metal case from behind his head and opened it to display two green, black and yellow butterflies with wings the size of Ping-Pong paddles.
“You caught these alive, yes?” asked the little man, leaning in closer with his lens.
“Of course.”
“And terminated them in what manner?”
“The proper one.”
“You can see where colors bled near the body, no?”
“Nonsense.”
“Surely you know that to guarantee no smearing they have to be slowly asphyxiated in a kill jar.”
“Take another look,” Bernard encouraged him, “now that the rum has cleared your head.”
“Ha, no, my good friend. What I know is what I see.”
“Me too,” Bernard said, and then to me: “You know how you collect stories? Let’s see how true this one rings: While making the rounds, I’ve been warned about this unusual duo that strong-arms sellers. Probably completely different guys. Some other chatty bald dwarf with a funny accent and some other silent Sasquatch. Yet the similarities are why I asked you to be packing today. Just to be on the safe side, see?” He turned to the mute. “Now I strongly suggest you resist reaching for whatever’s digging a hole in your backside there, Mr. Munster. Have you ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? No? Well, Butch is a talker played by Paul Newman, who looked something like me, though not quite as handsome. And Sundance, well, he was the quiet one played by Redford, who unfortunately—for my narrative purposes—bears no resemblance to my brother. But he was a quick draw, see, with one catch,” he was saying now, “he had to be moving to shoot accurately. And that’s the other difference between them, because my brother’s never needed to move. He’s just as fast and accurate if he’s running or sitting as still as a barn owl.”
Their eyes swiveled between the two of us while my heart slammed. Still, I managed to raise my left eyebrow, not nearly as dramatically as Ruby could, but still easily my most intimidating gesture.
“Pow,” Bernard said.
Antonio flinched, but the big guy just continued to perspire. If this dragged on much longer, he’d melt.
Bernard laughed, then whispered, “If you secretly want those queens or swallowtails, the price has just gone up.”
“Oh, come now,” Antonio said, though his lips had gone dry and smacked with his words. “You’ve misread us entirely! Let’s have another shot, my good man.”
“Get off my boat.” Bernard’s eyes flipped to Bigfoot, who’d started to move forward.
“Please!” the little man implored, raising his palms. “Most of your butterflies are beautiful. Some are rough, perhaps, but overall quite lovely.”
“I was gonna give you all the swallowtails for six and let you walk with the queens for four,” Bernard said calmly, “but now it’s fifteen for the package.”
“Come now. We don’t—”
“Get off.”
“Business and spite rarely mix, my good man.”
“One more good man and my good brother is gonna start shooting.”
“We’ll take ten thousand,” I mumbled.
Bernard’s eyes swiveled between them and me. My mouth tasted metallic. I stuck my left hand in my right armpit to hide its spontaneous quiver. Less than a minute later, my brother was counting fifties into ten stacks of twenty.
Then the two men filed out with the butterflies, Antonio commenting pleasantly on the fickle weather and the nagging twinge in his knee. “Aging,” he said cheerfully, “is such a curious adventure.”
Afterwards, Bernard handed me a mug of water. I hadn’t moved or spoken. I sipped half of it, my pulse still fluttering, then dumped the rest over my head and let the water roll down my face and into my shirt.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Bit more intense than expected, but I’ve seen a lot worse.” He pointed to a scar on his neck I hadn’t noticed, then pulled up his shirt to reveal a discoloration below his ribs and an arcing pencil-thin seam near his left nipple. “He was right, you know? Those swallowtails were Bs not As, but he can sell them as As, and he knew I knew. And, like he said, the queens weren’t asphyxiated, but they were definitely As.” At that point, my brother pushed three stacks of fifties toward me.
Finally, I relocated my voice and made a point of not looking at the money. “You kill and bag rare butterflies, then illegally sell them to thugs? That’s what you do?”
“Slow down, prosecutor. For starters, the queens were playing possum on the bow. What was I supposed to do, not put a net over them when they’re worth a thousand bucks each? The swallowtails? I caught half of them, but they’re not truly endangered or they wouldn’t have swarmed me in the hills near Manila, right? Practically flew in my mouth!”
“Sounds to me like some flew up your ass.”
“There he is! Brother Josh coming back to life! Okay, if it makes you feel better, I’ll admit I don’t like dealing butterflies. But they’re bugs, all right? Bugs that happen to be gorgeous and only live for a month or two if they’re lucky. In this scenario their beauty endures on the walls of twisted rich bastards. Listen, there’s people out there poaching beautiful, big-brained whales, but you want me to worry about these garish bugs?”
He pushed the stacks of bills closer to me. “C’mon, Josh, you know I owe you. Besides, you more than earned the bonus. But it wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed. They knew other people knew they were here. A couple levels above them is a cat named Yoshito. Nobody wants to piss him off. So you see, I’m just a daring pawn in a much-bigger game.” He puffed his chest. “Or perhaps a gallant knight.”
“You’re a fucking pirate is what you are.”
He brayed yet again. “Man, it’s fantastic to see you.”
I told him his felony charges were so old they’d be dropped or plea-bargained to nothing if he turned himself in.
“You still don’t get it,” he said. “This isn’t my home anymore, or even my country. I’m not turning myself in to a court I don’t respect. And to be honest, I’ve only just begun.”
“Begun what?”
He stared at me for what felt like a long time, then said, “Please do that with your eyebrow again.”
Instead, I gave him the shorthand version of the family update: Mother’s escalating obsession with unsolvable problems; the two Bobos settling on the Falcon 35 lawsuit for more than they could afford; Ruby no longer returning letters or e-mails since she’d left Mercy Ships to deliver vaccines to Nigerian villages.
After a long pause during which neither of us could summon a word, he said, “How would you go about scuttling big boats?”
“You mean sink them?”
“I think the verb scuttle is more socially acceptable.”
I took a breath and started trying to fit the fifties into my pockets. “The first thing you want to do is disable the bilge alarm,” I began.
After we had dinner that night, he surprised the resident Johannssens, who couldn’t stop gawking at him. He tossed Grumps a brick of Cubans and even shook Father’s hand before scooping Mother into a twirling hug. Then he hoisted Grumps, too, cradling him like a child. “You’re shrinking, old man!”
When he po
ked his head into Mother’s office, he saw all the equations on her walls and then big-eyed me as if I were responsible for the mounting madness. He didn’t give us any of the answers we wanted. He stayed at the Teardown for an hour and thirty-five minutes and told me he’d exit the harbor before dawn.
Leading the news later that next morning was the discovery that a $1.8-million yacht belonging to the owner of a Bellevue mall had sunk at the dock in Lake Union.
Inside an envelope nailed to the pier was a typewritten note, the press would later divulge, that proclaimed:
This is the end of the world as you know it. Better warn your greedy friends.
THE VERY BEST MOMENT
For the final touches, I paid full price for Lorraine to paint the Joho’s bottom baby butt smooth and for Noah to balance the mast and rigging before Tommy lowered our Frankensteined boat into the calm bay for the last launch of the day.
The sailmaker showed up just then, waddling down the ramp with a jib bag twice her size followed by Mick carrying the even-larger new mainsail.
“There’s no wind,” I warned her.
“Up to you,” she said, heaving the jib over the lifelines onto the bow. “But I’d rather sail in nothing than drive back home in that traffic.”
The two Bobos arrived five minutes later in matching floppies and midconversation about something that made them both look ill. “Sorry we missed the launch,” Father bellowed as he thundered down the ramp, though I knew he hadn’t wanted my grandfather to see Freya III—as I’d renamed her—out of the water.
Without Ruby to straighten him with her odd little massages, Grumps looked like a tree left out in too many storms: his hips and shoulders increasingly misaligned, his feet and knees at different angles, one leg bowed and the other straight and stiff. Even his mustache was catawampus.
We motored out with the Bobos crawling all over the decks as if they’d never seen this model before while I slogged through small talk with the sailmaker about how long she’d been at North Sails and what other projects she was working on. Then she pulled worn sailing gloves from her pocket, fed the new slugs into the mast and gave me the thumbs-up to hoist the crinkly new see-through, charcoal-colored mainsail. We raised the massive jib of the same fancy material until the two sails hung side by side like brand-new wings. With the Bobos alternately interrupting, she described the desired draft and camber of the sails in different winds, of which there was currently not a whisper.