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“You look like a model,” he said.
“Maybe I oughta call Cruising World.”
“Yeah, you look kinda gay,” he said.
“That’s a sailboat magazine, you dope,” she said, taking a mock swipe at him.
Ke
“Nice truck,” Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.
“Ke
“Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive,” he said, tongue in cheek. To Ke
“Got it before the last attack,” Ke
“Yeah, yeah . . .”
They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tu
“Look at this guy, putting up his ’chute,” Ke
“You ever sailed?” Ke
“A couple times, on Superior,” Lucas said, shading his eyes. “You feel like you’re on a runaway locomotive. It’s hard to believe they’re barely going as fast as a man can jog.”
“A man doesn’t weigh twenty thousand pounds like that thing,” Ke
They unloaded a cooler from the back of the truck and Lucas carried it across the parking lot, past a sunta
Lily led the way through a narrow gate in the chain-link fence, Lucas right behind her, Ke
“There she blows, so to speak,” Ke
“Nice,” Lucas said, uncertainly. He knew open fishing boats, but almost nothing about sailboats.
“Island Packet 28—it is a nice boat,” Ke
“Not too late for kids,” Lucas said. “I just had one myself.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Lily laughed. “I should have a say in this.”
“Not necessarily,” Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. “The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn’t have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework . . .”
“Fuck the sailing, let’s go back into town,” Ke
“God, I’m looking forward to this,” Lily said. “The flashing wit, the literary talk . . .”
Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Ke
“You could live here,” Lucas said to Ke
“I do, a lot of the time,” Ke
Ke
“You gotta be careful,” Lily said anxiously, watching him.
“Yeah, yeah, this takes two fingers . . . .” To Lucas he said, “Don’t have a heart attack—it just unbelievably fucks you up. I can run the engine and steer, but I can’t do anything with the sails, or the anchor. I can’t go out alone.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, fuck it,” Ke
“What does it feel like?” Lucas asked.
“You weren’t go
“It feels like a pro wrestler is trying to crush your chest. It hurts, but I don’t remember that so much. I just remember feeling like I was stuck in a car-crusher and my chest was caving in. And I was sweating, I remember being down on the ground, on the floor, sweating like a sonofabitch . . . .” He said it quietly, calmly enough, but with a measure of hate in his voice, like a man swearing revenge. After another second, he said, “Let’s get the sails up.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, slightly shaken. “I gotta pull on a rope, right?”
Ke
Lucas got the mainsail up. The jib was on a roller, with the lines led back to the cockpit. Lily worked it from there, sometimes on her own, sometimes with prodding from Ke
“How long have you been sailing?” Lucas asked her.
“I did it when I was a kid, at summer camp. And then Dick’s been teaching me the big boat.”
“She learns quick,” Ke
They slid lazily back and forth across the river, water rushing beneath the bow, wind in their faces. A hatch of flies was coming off the water, their lacy wings delicately floating around them. “Now what?” Lucas asked.
Ke
“That’s what I thought,” Lucas said. “You’re not even trolling anything.”
“You’re obviously not into the great roundness of the universe,” Ke
Ke
“You’ve got a cabin on a lake, right? Don’t you have buoys?”
“On my lake? If I peed off the end of the dock, I’d hit the other side. If we put in a buoy, we wouldn’t have room for a boat.”
“I thought the great North Woods . . .” Ke
“There’s some big water,” Lucas admitted. “Superior: Superior’ll show you things the Atlantic can’t . . . .”
“I seriously doubt that,” Lily said skeptically.
“Yeah? Well, once every few years it freezes over—and you look out there, a horizon like a knife and it’s ice all the way out. You can walk out to the horizon and never get there . . . .”
“All right,” she said.
They talked about ice-boating and para-skiing, and always came back to sailing. “I was pla