Five for Forever (6 page)

Rick held up his hand. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Last night I saw the Jimmy Fallon skit and now you flash that brilliant smile of yours in our office. This is just too much.”

Hal looked left and right between them, while Rick fetched a cup of water from the cooler to help Josh settle down. “What am I missing here?”

Louise made a face, and Josh rubbed her back gently. “See, Lou, I told you, people loved yesterday’s reel. You should be proud even of your lows.”

“Josh is right,” Rick added. “It was a very funny but at the same time a very sweet piece. You must have been scared to death when you delivered the lines.”

“Hello, can someone please tell me what is going on?” Hal insisted.

Louise gave Hal a glance and then extended her hand once more. “Nice to meet you Hal, my name is Louise. Louise Waters.”

His eyes widened, and the jaw went slack. “Ohmygod-ohmygod-ohmygod,” Hal uttered. “You are Louise Waters! I think I am going to faint!” He drank the water intended for Josh. “I am so, so sorry I didn’t recognize you. Meeting one movie star is already too much for me.”

“No problem. Josh and I are used to that.”

“Let me tell you,” Hal started, “that for years you’ve been my favorite movie star. I think I have you on VCR, DVD, special editions, Blu-ray, and USB sticks. I love your work. I love you!”

“Thank you, you are very kind.” Louise took the fandom onslaught with grace.

“Shall I fetch a bucket of cold water?” Rick said, and Hal shook his head. “I am fine. I am more than fine. I will never feel better in my life.”

“Let’s pretend nothing has happened, and we’ll start over,” Rick said. “Josh, you want to talk about a boat with us?”

Josh cleaned up his tears from laughing with a tissue that Louise had handed him and held up the memory stick. “Let’s have a look at the stuff that is on there and I’ll tell you my story.”

Hal turned his computer monitor to the small group and inserted the USB drive while Josh recounted his early East Coast sailing days, the legacy of his trainer, and the inheritance of a rotten wooden boat stored in Portland, Oregon. “My trainer’s name was John Scott. The pictures were taken by John’s grandson a week ago, after the will was read and the existence of the boat became known to the family. The son was kind enough to take a lot of pictures and a walk-around video with his smartphone. Let’s start with that.”

Hal double-clicked the video file and maximized the picture. It showed the dusty and dark surroundings of a shed or garage, with a lot of boxes, metal sheets, and rusty machine parts blocking the view. The angle became better, and they recognized that the shed was pretty long, maybe a former production floor or boathouse. “It’s a long-term rental, they say, on a private estate,” Josh said. “Direct deposit, every month for the last thirty years. Thirty years! Isn’t that crazy!”

“Know the size of the boat? Judging from what we see here it must be over forty feet,” Hal estimated.

Josh checked in his email. “John’s son said about sixty feet. Quite a big boat. For a wooden one, I guess.”

“Size doesn’t matter when it comes to wooden boats. Much longer boats were in existence,” Hal remarked.

“Wow!” Rick said, and Hal held his breath. As the video panned out and the grandson climbed onto some ladder or big box to change perspective, they saw more of everything. The space was almost completely filled with a yacht made of brown wood. Even though the picture was not optimal quality, you could see rotten wood, holes in the hull, and everything metal either rusted or covered with some sort of sheen. What excited the two wood builders was the design. A sixty-foot yacht with a shape that couldn’t be described as anything other than unique—the way the keel line ran from the bottom as thinly as possible up to where the main body became wide for the last sixty inches or so.

“I guessed right. You guys know a beauty when you see it,” Josh said, observing their reactions.

Hal pointed at the screen. “Elegance, pure elegance. It was made for one thing only: speed, speed, speed.”

“This baby is big, but it will react like a boat half its size,” Rick said. “The slightest pull of the rudder will turn it around; it will dance over waves instead of fighting them.”

Louise listened to the boat talk while sitting behind the other desk in the room, which clearly belonged to Rick Flint. Where Hal’s desk was pure post-tornado, Rick’s had a clear structure of clean heaps of paper, probably one for each current project. She studied the family pictures beside the big computer monitor.
Four kids, can you believe it? So sweet, especially the little one. And a lovely wife. You are a long way away from that picture at thirty-six, Lou-baby,
she thought.

“Josh, you have something very special here. Broken, but special,” Rick summarized. The camera had made a complete walk around the yacht. As the structure had to be over ten feet high, it could only capture the underside view; no deck structure nor interior was visible.

“The photos show a little bit more,” Josh said, and Hal began scrolling through.

The three men were scrutinizing the photos, zooming in here and there, oohing and aahing in various places over “the lines” and “the prospect of sailing her on a stormy day.”

“You guys sound like you’re poring over Taylor Swift nudes,” Louise said from her side of the desk.

Hal was looking up. “You got some?”

“You are not serious, right?” Louise stared at him.

“Every male is serious about TS,” Hal defended himself.

“Especially in the nude.” Josh nodded seriously.

“And it’s a fact,” Rick added.

“Guys! Maybe she’ll reconsider her stance on that topic after I’ll tell her when we have lunch on Thursday,” Louise said. And with a nod to the pictures in front of her, she looked at Rick and added, “And I’ll tell your wife.”

“If you do, make sure to tell her that I love her,” Rick said, but without a smile.

“I will,” Louise said, but she saw that she had hit a touchy spot, as Hal was cringing and giving his partner a look.

“So, guys, back to the real beauty here.” Josh pointed at the screen. “What would be the course of action if I want to see this baby in the water by summer?”

Hal and Rick looked at each other.

“You tell him or me?” Rick said, shrugging at Hal. “It’s no problem at all, Josh. If we are talking summer next year. Or the year after.”

“You guys need a year and half to repair a boat? Or maybe even longer?” Josh asked incredulously. “You are aware that money is no objective here.”

“Do you know anything about wooden boats?” Hal asked.

“Nope, that’s why I’m hiring you guys.”

“There is this builders’ joke: There are only two kinds of wooden boats—they are either in good shape or they get sold.”

“What is the joke?” Josh asked.

Louise laughed her multimillion-dollar screen laugh, and all the men looked over at her. “Sorry, that
is
funny. Josh, it means that you inherited a piece of junk, and it is very expensive to fix. Remember what I told you earlier, your old coach chose you because of your money.”

“Louise is right,” Rick explained. “A wooden boat is a living thing. It’s not like you set the fiberglass hull and then the lifespan of the boat is determined by the lifespan of the hull. A wooden boat is like a thousand-year-old Japanese temple. Made of simple wood and constantly rotting away. Within those thousand years, every piece of the temple will be replaced many times over; it might even burn down completely once in a while. But still, in spirit it remains the original temple. The purpose or the provenance is not determined by a single piece of it, but it is always seen as a whole complete structure.”

“Okay, I’ve seen those temples myself, and I always wondered how they preserve the wood for a thousand years. Now I understand, they don’t. So it is like the spirit remains, but the body gets upgraded now and then.”

“Sounds like in our profession,” Louise threw in.

“About right. Same with a wooden boat,” Rick said. “And I might tell you in advance that it is most likely cheaper to take the measurements of your inheritance and build a completely new boat from scratch. And scrap this one here.” He tapped with his pen on the monitor.

“Forget about that. John had a reason to pass this boat along to me. There is some hope or some spirit connected to this, so I plan to honor his legacy.” Josh stood by his former coach and mentor.

“And we stand by our evaluation. This summer is out. Anything on timing and cost after we have had our hands on it for the first time,” Rick said.

“I’ll ask a logistics company to move it. It can be here by next week.”

“Got any information beside what we’ve seen? Anything on its history, previous owners?” Hal asked.

“You know as much as I do, guys.” Josh spread his hands. “John Scott was my sailing coach in my early twenties. We lost track of each other when I started acting. So, are you in or are you in?”

“We are in, of course . . .” Hal started.

But Rick brought the discussion back to commercial terms. “I suggest the following: You have the boat transported here. We evaluate its condition and the options to restore it to its former glory, and we’ll do an investigation into its history for a flat fee of ten thousand dollars. In return, you receive a cost estimate, which you can use to order the restoration with us, or you can use it to have a discussion with any other builder.”

“Ten thousand dollars sounds steep for a simple offer,” Josh said thoughtfully.

“We are the best builders on the West Coast, ask anyone on the East Coast. You save five thousand dollars to either fly in someone from the East or transport it there. And be prepared that this cost might be the tip of the iceberg. The full restoration will go into seven figures.”

“Jesus, man, you are scaring me. This sounds like a bottomless pit.”

“Welcome to the world of wooden ships. It’s peanuts compared to real estate, but definitely more than historic cars,” Rick said.

“All right, you got yourself a deal on the ten thousand,” Josh said, and he and Rick shook hands. “To whom do I make out the check?”

As the little Porsche left the yard, Rick and Hal stood side by side, their eyes following the disappearing superstars.

“Now that’s what I call a classic case of
boatstruck
!” Hal said. Among wooden boat lovers, this was a regular term that indicated both the passion behind a boat and the recklessness to fall in love with a project that could drive you into ruins.

“Our luck,” Rick said and waved the check. “I better bring this to the bank to clear fast. I think we managed to avert disaster.”

Rick headed back to the office to fetch his jacket, and Hal called after him. “Did you do a dead-Bella joke with Louise Waters back there?”

“Guess I did,” Rick said, feeling uncomfortable. “Do you think I will rot in hell for that?”

“Not sure whether I am scared or proud of you.”

“Me neither,” Rick replied.

On their drive back, Josh glanced over at Louise. “Saw you ogling the kids’ pictures. Adorable?”

“Yeah. Looked like a perfect family.”

“Uh-oh, Lou got the family blues. Biological clock ticking away.”

Louise looked over the Pacific in the early evening light, all quiet, occasional boats cutting the dark blue. “Might be.”

“That also explains your friendship question?”

“Maybe it is a combination. My place in life, what I’ve achieved, and what I haven’t.”

“Isn’t it natural that we always look for the other thing? Grass greener and all that? Never happy where we are, flying to the moon and back to see how it looks on the other side?”

“Now you have an explanation for everything.” Louise groaned.

“I’ve been completely down for uncountable times with drugs, booze, and what not. There seem to be sane stretches, only to be replaced by a long slope down to hell. So I can tell you, some of us can’t stand still, we keep shuffling our feet. You’re among us,” Josh said.

“What if you’re wrong? What if I am not supposed to be Louise Waters, movie star? What if I was meant to be a simple soccer mom in Akron, Ohio?”

“I’m sure we would be having the same conversation. Two colleagues driving home from a sales training for Hewlett Packard. Louise complaining about her cheating husband and the new dog peeing on the carpet. And sales manager Josh telling her that they would be having the same conversation if they were not in Akron, Ohio, but driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in Josh Hancock’s restored 356.”

Louise had to smile at that and poked him in the side. “You!”

“Don’t worry. The blues will pass with the next project or affair you’ll be having.”

“Kids would be nice.”

“Kids should stay away from our industry.”

“Keep them locked away in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio.” Louise nodded. “You got that right.”

They drove for a while in silence.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Josh asked.

“I wonder if the serious boatbuilder, Rick, is happy in his life. So perfect with the wife and kids,” Louise said.

“Normal people, normal problems. You fancy him?”

“He was a handsome guy. My type, actually. Great chin and smile, easygoing, the outdoorsy type. But not a flake. Serious. A rock. But taken. I hate her!”

Josh made a meow noise and a cat paw gesture, and Louise laughed. “Look at me, I am jealous of a woman I have never even met.”

“And he is a mere mortal, not goddess and god like us.”

“Then there’s that,” Louise agreed.

“Malibu, next exit. That was a fun afternoon, Ms. Waters, if I may say so,” Josh said.

“Absolutely. Thanks for enduring my blues.”

“All in a day’s work. Not best friends, but good buddies.”

Josh steered the car off the highway and into the cul-de-sac where Louise’s house was located and stopped in front of the house. The bodyguard stopped twenty yards behind. Paparazzi had other plans; no one was in sight.

“Hey, what are you smiling about so smugly? You got the blues, remember?” Josh said.

Louise held up both of her thumbs. “I think the new Hewlett Packard printers will kick ass on Black Friday!”