Into the Wind Read online

  So there might not have been any more to this story, if Dad, when he’d come into my room to say good night on the next Saturday, hadn’t told me about something on his mind. I was in bed looking through my sailing books and trying not to think too much about Mom. I’d been imagining myself, just like in the pictures, sailing across the bay, or gliding back into the marina, the sail gently flapping, slowing us down, the boat coming to rest beside the dock, where I’d step off with the bow line in my hand, as easy as stepping into a room.

  Hands in pockets, Dad leaned back against my desk. He looked uncertain and even more tired than normal, I guess because Lizzy had been chewing him out for not doing the laundry again. I put down the yard-long length of rope that I had in one hand and put my finger in the page of the book I was reading —instructions for tying some fancy knots. As usual, Dad wore his wrinkled khakis and True Value shirt. He came over and picked up the end of the rope and looked at the two half hitches I’d made around the bedpost. He gave it a little tug. “Nice,” he said. “That’ll hold… unlike the Red Sox relief pitching lately.” Then he seemed to weigh whether he should say something else or not. Finally, he said, “Guess what.”

  I perked up, thinking he might have some news about Mom.

  “You know that funny old woman, Hazel, who sells paintings in that little garage in town?”

  I didn’t say yes or no.

  “Well, this afternoon at work, she came through the door in her wheelchair, rolled right up to me like she owned the place and asked, ‘Would your son like a summer job?’ Never mind that I was trying to help another customer at the time. When I said, ‘I’ll be right with you,’ she didn’t seem to hear. She kept right on talking. ‘I believe his name is Rusty,’ she said. ‘I saw him some days ago on the dock, and it occurs to me that he might like a small but steady job for the rest of the summer.’ Russ, do you know this old lady?”

  That was Hazel all right, and I said yes, I knew who she was. But feeling so strange about her, I didn’t say how I knew her, or how well.

  “Anyways, she says she has some jobs to do around her house. Cleaning up, cutting grass, washing windows—that sort of thing. You’d work three afternoons a week, her afternoons off, and she’d pay five dollars an hour. If you’d like to do it, she said you should drop by her shop—you know, the Art Barn—or her home. She said she lives on Oak Lane.” Dad shook his head and his eyebrows went up. “Then she turned on a dime and rolled straight out the door. She wasn’t much interested in hardware.”

  Right off, I didn’t know what to think

  about this.

  “If you’re interested,” Dad said, “you might talk with her first to make sure you’ll get along with each other—she’s a piece of work, that lady. On the other hand, you do have all your afternoons free, and I bet you could find some use for the money. Whatever you decide is all right with me. It’s your call.”

  Pretty accurately, Dad had described what was ping ponging back and forth in my brain. What would it be like to work for Hazel? She was so weird. Would the money be worth it?

  After Dad had gone across the hall into Lizzy’s room to say goodnight, I did some math

  calculations, something I didn’t usually do for the heck of it.

  In my head, I figured that at five dollars an hour, I’d have to work three hours to buy that $14.55 wind indicator that Buddy D sold at The Dock Shop. This meant that after working only one afternoon, I could have it, that arrow-shaped indicator for the top of my mast, a kind of special weather vane that spins in any direction and always points into the wind!

  Then I made a bigger calculation, which I did with a pencil on a page of one of my sailing books. I wrote $110.95, an unbelievable amount of money, as the numerator. I divided by five, and found that after twenty-three more hours of work, I could buy a round mooring buoy with a bright blue stripe, so I wouldn’t have to tie my boat to the dock like a dinghy. Instead, I could moor it a little ways out in the bay, where it would swing around with the changing wind, the sun winking on its polished wood and chrome, as bright and proud as the summer people’s big sailboats.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Job

  So the next day, I went from school to Hazel’s cottage. When I walked up to it, the front door was partway open, and although she couldn’t see me and I hadn’t even knocked yet, Hazel’s raspy voice called out over her music, “Rusty, come on in!”

  She was sitting in the armchair beside the fireplace, her white hair lit up beneath the standing lamp. She was wearing those round glasses that you see on grouchy librarians, and it hit me that maybe this wasn’t the best idea, coming here again, even if I might get a job out of it.

  “Welcome. Give me a couple minutes,” she said, turning a page of her book. “Make yourself at home.”

  I put down my backpack, took a magazine off the stack of National Geographics, and sat cross-legged on a patch of floor that wasn’t covered in books or magazines. Marigold, purring and tickling me with her long whiskers, slid in and out of my arms, so I had to lift up the magazine to read about some amazing birds, called chimney swifts, that fly from caves in South America to their summer homes in chimneys as far away as Canada.

  “Lunch is on,” Hazel said in a while, closing her book and leaving her glasses on the arm of the chair. “Come whenever you’re ready. Tuna sandwiches.” She got up and with her cane hobbled into the kitchen while I followed. She was wearing an olive green dress without a belt and with little yellow flowers printed on it.

  “Read anything interesting?” she asked.

  I told her about the chimney swifts.

  “Fascinating!” Fascinating was one of her favorite words. She liked to be fascinated. “Rusty, if you don’t turn out to be a sailor, you could be an ornithologist and study birds.” Something else clicked in her mind, and then something else again: “Or maybe you could be an astronomer! Sailors used to sail by the stars.”

  On either side of the table, two sandwiches were already on separate plates. One plate was beside a glass of powdered milk, the other beside a glass of water. Next to the glass of water lay the same plaid napkin Hazel had given me the other day, only now it’d been pulled through a shiny, stainless steel shackle, U-shaped with a bolt across the open end, which you use to connect lines to sails on boats.

  “A shackle!” I said.

  “I thought you’d like it.” She looked very pleased. “A perfect napkin ring. I bought it at The Dock Shop yesterday.”

  “How did you know I was coming?”

  “I didn’t… But I had a feeling.”

  And I also had a feeling: that she was watching me out of the corner of her eye, as if to figure out how I was doing. We sat. I pulled my napkin out through the shackle—I noticed that her napkin ring was a simple wooden O—and we started eating.

  “So what’s on your mind?” she said, though I’m sure she already knew.

  “My Dad said you had some work for me, if I wanted to do it.”

  “Well?”

  “Well…” I swallowed down what was in my mouth. “I think I’d like to.”

  Hazel put down her sandwich and actually pumped her fist in the air. “Terrific! I have the afternoon off. So why not start right away?” Then she paused. “After you’ve done some homework.”

  • • •

  My first job, after twenty minutes of math and after we’d had some sliced peaches, was to cut down the tall weeds and grasses that had made Hazel’s little front yard look like a hayfield. I used what she called a “scythe,” an L-shaped tool with a long shaft and a foot-long, double-sided blade at the bottom that you swing back and forth like a golf club, chopping off the grass near the ground. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but eventually I did, more or less. You just wade in and start swinging… and keep swinging, moving slowly forward, the blade going in big arcs, making a swack sound, and with clumps of cut
grass flying this way and that. It was hard, hot work, so I took off my T-shirt and hung it from the waistband of my shorts. Grass stuck to my sweaty skin. My back, shoulders, and arms began to ache, but behind me was a lengthening path where I’d swung the scythe, and there was that sweet, hot smell, as the cut grass baked in the sun.

  Now and then I had to pause to catch my breath. Through the open windows, I’d hear Hazel’s music rolling out in waves. Often she’d be singing along with it, her voice deep and usually in a language I didn’t know. But even then I could understand if the music was happy or sad. Twice, she came to the front door, leaning on her cane and holding out a glass of lemonade in her free hand. And once with tears in her eyes.

  At first they scared me. What’s wrong?

  “It’s so beautiful, that music,” she said. “Can you feel it?” She seemed to feel everything. “That’s what we’re all about.”

  What in the world did she mean by that? I didn’t know how to respond, except to say thanks for the lemonade. It had ice, mint leaves, and real pieces of lemon in it, and because of the lurching way she moved and because her hand shook a little, some of it slurped out over her wrist.

  But that didn’t bother her. Nor me. What remained in the glass, which was wet, cold, and very sticky, was the best lemonade I’ve ever tasted.

  Looking over the yard, Hazel said, “That’s good work, Rusty,” though it really wasn’t that good. I’d cut the grass unevenly, like a bad haircut. But that was another thing that didn’t seem to bother her. “Thanks,” she said.

  And then each time, after I’d finished my lemonade and chewed up the ice, and as Hazel watched from the doorway, I waded into the tall grass again and swung that scythe as hard as I could, hacking through what was in front of me.

  • • •

  That evening at supper, Lizzy was on the rampage again. “What a stench! You smell like a

  locker room! And there’s bits of straw or something all over you. What have you gotten into now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, staring at the potato salad that she’d plopped on my plate.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell her?” Dad said. “It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, Russ. I’d be proud if I was you.”

  “So tell me,” Lizzy said to me in her mean, teasing voice, twirling a loop of hair on her finger.

  “That’s enough!” Dad said to her, his voice rising. “Rusty got a real summer job. You should be happy for your brother!”

  “A job? Rusty? That’s a laugh! Doing what?”

  “Cutting grass. Raking. Cleaning up!” I blurted out.

  “For who?”

  “None of your business!”

  “Oh, isn’t that precious?!” She turned to Dad. “He doesn’t do anything around here, except for watering Mom’s garden, just standing with the hose, spraying the flowers until they’re practically drowned, which isn’t work at all! He can’t even clean up after himself!”

  On and on, she went like this, but just then her words didn’t hurt so much, because folded tight in my pocket were three crisp five-dollar bills. Though I was right there at our kitchen table, and I could hear Lizzy talking and talking, in my mind I was sitting on the narrow side-deck of my boat. I was on a starboard tack, with the sail full, the sheet (the line that operates the sail) alive in my right hand, the tiller in my left, and my eyes on a thin, silver shaft at the top of my mast. It was sharp and straight as an arrow.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Gust of Wind

  Three days later, after I’d painted the shingles on the south end of Hazel’s cottage, I actually bought the wind indicator.

  “It’s the best one I’ve got,” Buddy D told me at the shop, rubbing his curly red beard. “Doesn’t flinch. Looks right into the eye of a gale.”

  Using a standing ladder I borrowed from Jack, the maintenance man, I clamped the indicator onto the top of my mast, and it worked! When my boat was docked, it showed me the wind’s precise direction, even if I couldn’t feel a breath of air on my skin. And when I took my boat out on the water that afternoon, it showed me what’s called the “apparent wind,” a mix of the actual wind and the wind that your boat makes when it’s moving, which is the wind that you sail by.

  As I’d been doing now for a couple of weeks, I was practicing my tacking. I was learning how to zig-zag upwind, or against the wind. Each time I turned the boat, I was getting better at switching the tiller and sheet from one hand to the other, and moving from one side of the boat to the other—all while ducking beneath the swinging boom, that big horizontal pole attached to the bottom of the sail and to the mast. I’d just finished a pretty smooth tack. I was a quarter mile from the marina. The sky was bright. I was wearing sunglasses. And just as I’d imagined it a few days before, I was sitting on the side-deck, sailing comfortably along in a steady breeze. It was perfect weather. Low waves. I thought I was doing everything right, just like it said in my sailing books.

  Then, as I looked up at it, my wind indicator suddenly tilted, and at the same instant the surface of the water nearby turned gray, and a gust of wind from behind me hit the sail with a terrific WHOOOMPH!!

  Frantically, I held onto the sheet for as long as I could. The tiller jumped from my other hand. And next thing I knew, I was looking up at my sneakers against the sky, and I was flipping backwards over the deck and into the water, while the boat, like a dead fish, rolled over on its side. The sail and mast fell flat on the waves.

  Where are my sunglasses? I thought as I coughed and spat out salty water, my eyes itching, my life jacket pinching under my arms, keeping me afloat. Nothing made sense. What am I doing here? How did I get here? The water was freezing and my heart was pounding. Everything was so bright.

  In my sailing books, there are instructions for what to do when you capsize. Always stay with your boat. Turn the boat until the hull is facing into the wind. Stand on the keel until you swing the boat upright. Climb in at the stern.

  It sounds so easy, just follow directions. But I’m telling you, that’s not how it happens, not when one second everything’s under control, you’re warm and dry, and the next you’re shivering and scrambling in the water.

  “You okay?!” At first I thought it was a voice in my head. A moment later, Jack, along with

  another guy in a bathing suit, appeared nearby in his motorboat. “Hey Sonny, you need a hand?” he yelled over the noise of his idling motor. Jack called everyone under sixty “Sonny,” even if he knew you.

  “I’m all right,” I called back, though I was afraid I might cry. I was treading water now, staying close to my boat, but I was still spitting and shivering. With both arms, I grabbed and held onto the keel that stuck out of the hull horizontally, about a foot above the water.

  “Why don’t you come aboard?” Jack said. “Lenny here can take care of your boat, get it upright and sail it back.”

  Something about this made me clench inside. “No,” I said. “I can do it.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes!”

  The two men looked at each other. “Well, we’re not going anywhere. I’ll give you a couple shots at it, and then I’m hauling you out of the water with my bare hands, if I have to. I don’t want you going blue on me, Sonny!”

  Climbing onto the keel of a sailboat floating on its side is like pulling yourself straight out of a swimming pool and onto a low diving board, except that everything’s swaying and slippery. I got my chest up on the keel once and slid off. Another time, I got my feet on it, squatting, and fell off again.

  “Give me another chance!” I yelled. And now I was crying. On the third try, I managed to stand on the keel while clutching the side-deck, but I wasn’t heavy enough to push the keel beneath the water and turn the boat right side up.

  “Hold on!” the man named Lenny said, and he dove in and swam right up to me. “You just need a little more meat on y
our bones!”

  He was as big as a walrus, with lots of meat on his bones, and when he pulled down on the keel, the hull slowly turned upright, the mast and sail rising off the water, as I scrambled up and over the side and back into my boat.

  “Good!” Jack yelled from the motorboat, as Lenny swam back toward him.

  Water streamed off me. The boat rocked. My heart kept pounding. Luckily, there were no more gusts just then, so as Jack and Lenny watched, I was able to grab the sheet and the tiller. Jack gave me the thumbs up sign. I sat again on the starboard deck and checked my wind indicator that was still clamped to the top of the mast. Water sloshed around my shins, bogging down the boat. Still, I managed to turn and sail slowly back toward the marina, as the motorboat followed behind.

  Drifting into the dock where I always tie up, I saw Hazel waiting in her wheelchair, with her

  binoculars on a shoe lace around her neck. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  What does it look like? I said to myself. “I capsized.”

  “Well, as long as you’re okay… It happens to everyone who calls himself a sailor. How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. A big gust came out of nowhere, and the boat turned over.”

  “And did you turn over away from or toward the wind?”

  By then I was out of the boat, my sneakers squeech, squeech, squeeching with every step. I tied the bow and stern lines to cleats on the dock. “Away from it,” I said. “Why are you asking me all this?” I was embarrassed enough already.

  “Hmmm,” Hazel said. “When the gust came, did you let go of the sheet?”

  “No. I held on as long as I could.”

  “All right. Let me give you a tip. Sometimes you’re right to hold onto the sheet for all you’re worth. But sometimes you get hit so hard that it’s best to let go and let the wind have its way. You’ll get the knack of it. Don’t worry.”

  Well, I did worry. How would I ever know these things? Would I capsize again? I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to learn to sail anymore.