The Sailors

He guided the weary old thirty-footer out of the marina channel and into the bay. The breeze, unimpeded now by the stones of the breakwater, tightened the sails, and the boat lifted into the swells. It was always at that moment, when the tiller came alive in his hand, that he felt he had been born to sail. It was a pity he had never been able to buy a boat of his own. He had rented boats, or sailed with friends, or friends of friends, people who had also fallen in love with the sea and had more money. Or who didn’t: this boat belonged to his pal Bob, who could afford it only because he was willing to live on it. The wind in the sails leaned the boat and filled it with an ecstatic trembling. It was the sign that Bob waited for in his cluttered cabin, where he had been doing his accounts on the back of an old paper bag.

Bob was a soft and heavy man with a face so expressionless you would have thought it paralyzed. Once in a while he smiled or, when he was angry, sneered. That was all you’d ever get out of him. When he still lived on land, they’d gone out together on rented boats, splitting the cost, and Bob finally decided to buy one. He couldn’t be bothered to learn how to sail, though. Every once in a while Bob would telephone suggesting it was time to take the boat out again.

A sailor without a boat can’t afford to say no. At ten o’ clock, just before the seabreeze would make up in the bay, he would open the gate to the floating dock, walk down the ramp, and find the unnamed sloop with the clutter of blankets, tarps, and loose ends of ropes decorating it. By the time he was finished cleaning and tidying, the activity would have awakened Bob, who would slide open the cabin door and lumber out into the cockpit. They never greeted each other.

…The wide bulge of the Pacific opened around them. There was nowhere to go in the few hours they had free, so he usually chose the weather buoy that rocked in the swells far from shore as a destination. He knew the compass heading by heart, and on good days, like today, he could see it, a faint black dot, elusive as a seal’s head in the water. He turned the boat slightly, held the tiller with his knee while he reached to adjust the braided lines that tightened the sails. Bob sat on one of the cockpit benches, huddled in an old hooded sweatshirt bearing the acronym of a university he’d never attended. The breeze shook his sparse hair. He stared at the horizon, his face as blank as a boiler-room wall. “The buoy?,” he said at last.

“Yep. The buoy. Got a better idea?”

Bob shrugged his shoulders and slumped back onto the faded blue cushion.

The heavy old boat came alive, rolling gently over the swells. The sky was pale blue and impossibly empty, except for birds and the occasional jetliner angling upward from the airport up the coast. From the tiller the sailor could see into the cabin, which was littered with blankets, soda cans, styrofoam fast food boxes, paper bags, and a small satchel that held cash, mostly in ones and fives. Bob was a hawker at a flea market, selling cheap wallets, sunglasses, and little brass doodads. Cardboard boxes of his merchandise slumped on the cabin floor. In the darkness farther in the sailor could see the unmade bunk. He never went into the cabin unless he had to use the head. He preferred to hang it over the lee rail if he had to urinate. It was better to stay outside.

The shore diminished behind them, the people on the beach becoming little black dots. Little black dots with their own visions of the sea. The sailor turned his gaze to the bulge of restless blue. He adjusted the sails again. The boat leaned a little farther, the water whitened at the bows. Bob lifted himself heavily up and climbed onto the deck. Moving with clumsy care, he made his way forward to the bows, where he would sit, one hand grasping the forestay, till they had gone around the weather buoy and come back to the breakwater. It wasn’t a very comfortable place to sit. It was where the motion of the boat was most exaggerated, but that was where Bob liked to sit. He had confessed that he fell asleep there sometimes.

The sailor looked ahead, slouching a bit to see under the rounded sails. Bob had settled himself in his spot. In the gray sweatshirt he looked like a sailbag left behind on the foredeck. The boat rocked with a slow steady motion as it climbed over the successive swells. It was ironic: sometimes the sailor got seasick, even after all these years, but Bob never did. The sailor wasn’t seasick today, but he remembered.

A porpoise jumped a little way in front of the boat, water drops sparkling as they flew off its glistening gray back. Bob must have seen it but didn’t react. The sailor wondered what Bob’s face looked like as he stared away over the sea. He was always steering the boat, so he had never seen it. Bob could sit there for hours, staring at the horizon as the boat rose and fell under him. That was really why sailors went out there, wasn’t it? To feel the wind and tide through a boat, and to stare at the restless sea.

The wind freshened, and the sailor reached to adjust the sails once more. Then he turned to the horizon again, his own face wearing an expression he had never seen.