Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  Nearly twenty people, including Trent, Georgia, the nudists and the other regulars, were watching by the time the first plank came steaming out of the box. Then, with our thick gloves, Noah, Mick and I carried it over to the exposed port bow and clamped it onto the yacht’s solid vertical ribs. “Let’s go!” Grumps shouted, simultaneously coaching and narrating, a Rainier in his hand now, given that he’d never heeded any beer restrictions on Saturdays. “Get some screws in her, boys!” Noah and I predrilled the planks, then spun the screws tight, and the hot, moist plank bent into place.

  While we caulked the seams, Grumps backhanded his sudsy mustache and responded to every silly boatbuilding query, as if he’d hoped to be asked those exact questions, weaving answers with outtakes and digressions. “I was never any great shakes as a sailor myself,” he volunteered after cracking another Rainier. “Thought I was good, but along came Junior. Could see the difference by the time he was eleven. Then, of course, there’s my granddaughter. After watching little Ruby, I realized I had only the faintest notion of what it means to sail.”

  “How ’bout Josh?” Noah asked. “Could he sail worth a shit?”

  “Sure, he could!” Grumps fired back. “But he was mortal like me. You know the best thing about a sailboat?”

  Oh no, I thought, stepping back. Here he goes.

  “The greatest single thing is it hooks you on something you can’t really explain to anybody, not even yourself, and that’s one damn humbling experience.”

  Even grumpy Lorraine smiled along. Mick had power-sanded the stern well enough for her to follow him with two coats, even touching up bare sections without once complaining. I saw Grumps checking out her double-fisted style, rolling with her left and brushing the bubbles flat with her right to make it all look sprayed. When he asked how she’d matched the flat-gray hull paint so perfectly, she sucked hard on a Camel, then knocked the long ash into the can, stirred and grinned.

  Grady wasn’t due back for two days, but that didn’t prevent him from ambling up shortly after seven when this spontaneous party had swelled around his yacht and we were just one steam away from entirely replanking the port bow. He stood there with a shiny new bruise below his left eye, looking like a man struggling to catch up with the present. “So what’s this all about?”

  I stepped forward. He still hadn’t seen the bow. “Grady,” I said, “meet my grandfather.”

  “A high honor, sir.”

  “Well, don’t get all carried away, Mr. Grady. I do believe the honor is mine to meet someone these fine people consider deserving of all this labor.”

  That’s when Grady started glancing around and saw the fresh cedar on the bow and lurched backwards like he’d been stung. Noticing activity at the back of his yacht, too, he stepped away, buying time, and found Lorraine standing in a dinghy, a smoldering joint pinched between her lips now, freehanding SHANGRI-LA in gold letters to the stern.

  “Don’t look!” she cried. “I haven’t shaded it yet!”

  He turned away and inspected the sky, then covered his face with one hand. “My deal didn’t go through, Josh,” he said softly, sidling up to me.

  “What deal’s that?”

  “Doesn’t mean the next one won’t,” he continued quietly. “It’s just that, I mean, you people are the best, but right now I really can’t—”

  “This one’s on us, Grady.”

  “No, wait. What?”

  Rem started laughing, and Grady tried to join him.

  “You’re joking, of course,” he said. “Sorry, I’m short on sleep. Please, just give me an invoice or the hours and parts or whatever’s easiest. Can’t pay much of anything till late next week, but I’m good for it. You know I’m good for it,” he repeated, as if convincing himself.

  “Maybe you can hire us to do something else,” I said, “but this phase is our treat. No charge.”

  Grady started to speak, then turned away from us as though somebody had just hailed him from the north.

  “The last plank is cooked,” Grumps announced. So we secured and caulked it in place as Grady rocked from foot to foot until my grandfather shuffled up beside him and said, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Boats embody dreams like nothing else, don’t they?”

  After we cleaned up, Rem pulled out his Weber and the nudists (clothed tonight) brought a dozen frozen burgers, and Georgia, the former nun, provided bottles of red and bags of Doritos while Grumps passed out cigars and shared his repetitive asides about everything he couldn’t believe: how he’d outlived his wife by twenty-five years, how pricey everything was getting, how light they were building sailboats these days. “I’m shrinking,” he volunteered after another beer. “Every day I wake up a little shorter, but from my vantage everybody else is just getting taller. Like Josh there, still a growing boy as far as I can tell.” I then overheard him telling Lorraine how he gets up to pee in the middle of the night and sometimes nothing comes out. When he started sipping his third scotch, I led him back to my slip and down the steps into a thirty-one-year-old boat he’d built and onto a narrow bunk he’d designed.

  “As far as floating ghettos go,” he said, reclining with a yelp, “I like this one a lot.” Then he laughed. “Bernard needs a woman like Lorraine.”

  “We all do,” I said.

  “No, you need Sunita.” Then he yelled her name like a battle cry: “Su-ni-ta!”

  “That’s enough,” I told him. “So, no false teeth to take out or prosthetic limbs to hang up?”

  “Your mother’s a wonderful woman,” he said, “but she may be losing her mind.” Then, even more abruptly: “And what the hell did you and your father do to that boat? He’s so excited he can’t see straight. It’s all over his face. More than fancy new sails, that’s for damn sure. Can’t get a lick of work out of him. The entire world is on hold until that almighty race. He played you like a banjo, didn’t he?”

  He rolled over and started breathing audibly, in perfect cadence, before I could respond.

  CATS IN SPACE

  As the planking party rolled into darkness, the liveaboards sheepishly told me, one by one, about the projects they wished I could help them think through. That Samson post or anchor winch they wanted mounted to the bow. The installation of an inverter, a new diesel or a composting toilet. Most of them, though, for now, were simply happy to be here.

  “Living!” shouted the new stoner on D Dock.

  “Life!” Rem hollered back.

  “Eating!” Noah pitched in, even louder. “Reading the paper on the toilet in the morning!”

  As the sky continued to clear, I mentioned that the space station would be flying directly overhead at 10:37 p.m.

  “The what?”

  “The International Space Station,” Noah told them in his anchorman voice. “Our boy Josh keeps track of these things. It’s a research vessel—with astronauts from where?”

  “Russia, England and here, mostly,” I said. “They go up for six-month shifts.”

  “And fly directly over us?” Rem asked doubtingly.

  “They orbit the earth every ninety minutes,” I said. “So yes, sometimes, like tonight, they fly right above us.”

  “And you know this how?” demanded Trent, who increasingly saw himself as the marina’s attorney as well as the resident expert on Frisbee golf, windsurfing and federal drug laws.

  “My mother,” I said.

  “My momma tells me who’s got prostate cancer,” Rem said. “Who’s in Parade magazine and what a pound of hamburger costs nowadays.”

  “They do research up there,” I said.

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” Trent countered. “So like what do you claim they’re studying up there?”

  “Like how to build a spaceship,” I said, “that can tour the galaxy. That sort of thing.”

  “C’mon.”

  “They learn all sorts of stuff we can’t figure out down here,” I explained, “because of all the gravity bearing down on us.”

  “Like what?”
Trent demanded. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Like what meds might work on osteoporosis,” I guessed. “That sort of thing.”

  “So they got lab mice up there?” Grady asked, looking straight up.

  “They got a mice problem is what they got,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Trent objected.

  “Their lab mice escaped and made babies in the ductwork,” I told him.

  “No fucking way.”

  “So they sent up cats,” I added.

  “That’s complete bullshit!” Trent exclaimed.

  “It’s true,” Noah said. “They sent up three bloodthirsty cats. NPR had a program on it.”

  “You don’t listen to NPR,” Trent said. “You just listen to your doomsday daddy.”

  “Two calicos and one Siamese,” Noah added, ignoring the allegation, which was true. Since moving into the marina, Noah had listened to his father nonstop. When he wasn’t tuning in on his boat radio, he was moping around with headphones.

  “Think about it,” I said. “It’s low gravity, right? So the cat-and-mouse, chase-and-kill scenes are all in slow motion.”

  More people turned to listen.

  “All true,” Noah said. “They selected the best mousers in the country, just like they pick the best astronauts. Trials and everything.”

  “Very low gravity up there,” I said. “God knows how the litter box works.”

  And there they all were, crouched and slouched on a rotting dock, stargazing and contemplating floating cat turds, when a familiar young woman materialized, though nobody recognized her till her teeth flashed beneath the dock light.

  “Marcy!” Mick blurted.

  Everybody was suddenly manic with happiness to see her, though we kept peering behind her for signs of Rex. As chaos resumed, I pulled her aside and asked what had happened.

  “When we got out of the strait,” she said, “I was celebrating. Finally! You know? The Pacific! The swells were maybe five feet at most, but coming right at us. And it was getting dark. Rex had talked about that boat being just fine in ten- or twenty-footers. ‘Bring ’em on!’ he’d been saying for weeks. Then, once it got dark and one broke over the bow, he started shouting that our boat was way too small.”

  “Was he seasick?”

  “No, but his voice sounded funny. ‘I’m a little scared, too,’ I told him, ‘but we can handle this.’ ‘I’m not scared!’ he yelled back. ‘But I’m not stupid either!’ Then he gave me hell for rushing him into this. Just because I was going blind didn’t mean he had to die, too.”

  “You’re going blind?”

  The tears behind her thick glasses made her big eyes look even larger. She took a breath and said softly, “There aren’t many happy endings if macular degeneration gets you when you’re young. But for now I can still see.” She raised a fist in mock celebration. “So we made it back to Port Angeles, left the boat there and hitched down here.”

  “So what’s the new plan?”

  “We’re taking a break from each other,” she said. “He’s driving home to St. Louis, and I just really want to find someone who’ll head back out with me and not freak out.”

  “In your boat,” I said, “I’d probably lose it, too.”

  “But you could fix anything that broke, and you wouldn’t yell at me the second things got hairy.” Her chest rose with a deep breath, and then she stepped forward and hugged me.

  There are moments when you feel opportunity rising like one of those homemade hot-air balloons made out of garbage bags and candles.

  “Josh!” Noah yelled. “Is that it?”

  Looking up, without releasing Marcy, I spotted it instantly by the size and speed of the moving dot of light, so I raised a thumb.

  “There she is, ladies and gentlemen,” Noah said. “Your International Space Station.”

  “That’s a plane,” Trent insisted.

  “No, it’s a satellite,” Georgia argued.

  “The army base sends up crazy, teched-out shit all the time,” Rem offered. “Could be one of those fake UFOs they throw up there to fuck with us.”

  “No,” I said as Marcy released me to hug Lorraine. “That’s definitely the station. Looks like it’s going about the speed of a fast plane, but it’s actually flying two hundred and twenty miles above us and ripping along at about seventeen thousand miles an hour.”

  “He makes this stuff up as he goes,” Trent accused.

  “Like I said, my mother’s into space.”

  “Mine’s into reality TV,” Mick said. “Bitchy Housewives of Wherever. Just loves that shit.”

  I shouted to Grady, “Call ’em on your ham.”

  “Who?” he yelled back.

  I pointed up. “Nothing but air between us. Call the space station!”

  “Whiskey Zero Sugar Victor callin’ the space station,” Grady shouted into his radio seconds later. “Whiskey Zero Sugar Victor tryin’ to reach the International Space Station. Do you read? Over.”

  “His accent is confusing them,” Noah speculated. “They think they’re flying over Oklahoma.”

  Grady tried again. But the fast dot was gone, and everybody ran out of commentary and conspiracy theories as Marcy and Lorraine strolled off the dock together. Then Noah and I endured a few more maintenance requests and drunken lies till only the two of us were left drinking water and watching the sky. I hadn’t seen him this relaxed in weeks. He asked about my dates.

  “Haven’t had any online in a while,” I explained. “I tried to go old-school yesterday, you know, to just ask somebody out—in person.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Poorly.”

  I admitted that I’d become so accustomed to the online-dating ritual—exchanging Q-and-A e-mails before graduating to phone chats and coffees or dinners—that I didn’t know how to call Sunita Banerjee on the phone and just ask her out. I didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend. She wasn’t on Facebook or online period from what I could tell. Finally, I’d driven to Seattle and visited the North Sails loft under the pretense of grabbing the spinnaker we’d had her repair, pretending not to have heard Father had already picked it up.

  When I finally spotted her, she was just a torso next to a sewing machine sticking out of a hole in the glossy pine floor that made the vast loft look like it might double as a dance studio. At first, I didn’t recognize her, because she wasn’t wearing a hat, and her black hair was all over her shoulders.

  After my bogus spinnaker story, I blurted out an interest in buying a new genoa for my own boat, which wasn’t a complete lie, seeing as how every self-respecting sailor is always contemplating jib upgrades. “Maybe you could come out with me sometime,” I mumbled, “and give me a little advice on which sails to fix or replace, that sort of thing.”

  She studied me, as if speed-reading my face, her left pupil straying slightly. “Is this work or social?” she asked. “Because I’ve got a young daughter, and no family in the area.” She took a breath. “What I’m saying is I don’t go out just for something to do, if that’s what you’re looking for. So are you asking for headsail advice, or are you asking me out on a sailing date?”

  “Work,” I said, panicking. “I’d really like to know what you think.”

  “Maybe,” she said, then looked down at the Dacron jib she was repairing. “I might be able to combine it with another trip down there for another job.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Perfect.”

  “But not this month.” She sounded almost stern now.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “We’re buried,” she added, looking directly up at me again. “And I don’t have much time for any out-of-town work. Not with a four-year-old.”

  “Awesome,” I said.

  “What’s awesome?”

  “Four-year-olds.”

  She half smiled and retreated to her world of fabric and physics and invisible forces.

  Noah rubbed his forehead. “You told her four-year-olds are awesome?”

 
; “I know, I know. But my only somewhat-steady girlfriend left me after I told her I wasn’t crazy about kids. It took her all of a month to find some guy who was. So now I tell everybody that I love kids so much I’m considering opening my own day-care center.”

  On that pathetic note, we headed down the dock to our respective bunks. I got a few hours of anxious dreams before I brewed coffee and tried to stir Grumps, still dressed in the same fraying shirt he’d worn to the planking party.

  “I can’t lose you,” I said, surprised to hear my fears aloud after three nudges failed to wake him.

  “How the hell’re you gonna do that?” he asked without opening his eyes. “ ‘Scuse me, anybody seen my grandpa? Seem to have misplaced the old fart.’ Maybe what I need is a dog collar that says: MY NAME IS BOBO SR. I LIKE CANADA GEESE, RAINIER BEER AND PRETTY SAILBOATS. IF FOUND, CALL JOSH.”

  “All right,” I said. “Cork it.”

  His eyes finally opened and attempted to focus, then closed again. “If I ever get to that embarrassing point where I can’t speak or wipe myself, when everybody says to just pull the goddamn plug, remember that I’m not everybody. Don’t think you’re doing me any favors by tossing me into Lake Union with a forty-pound Danforth around my neck. Okeydoke? I want every last day I can get my aching hands on. And then I want an Icelandic burial. I’ve told your father all this, but he never listens. Nothing fancy. Just roll me up in a blanket and drop me in a crevasse, preferably on Rainier, but Baker would do. That way, I’ll be preserved forever, mustache and all. It’s a vanity, I’ll admit.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. You got it. Meanwhile, what is it you want for breakfast?”

  “Funny,” he said, then sat up with a yelp and a groan. I handed him his trifocals. He set them aside and blew his nose, one nostril at a time. “Nothing tells you exactly how old you are like mornings,” he said cheerfully. “Swiftsure, Josh! And we’ve got a family dinner the Saturday before, right? Ruby swears she’ll be there, too.” He rotated his trunk with a groan, stretching his shoulders. “It all makes me want to yodel.”