AGAINST THE WIND
a novel
Jim Tilley
Against the Wind
Copyright © 2019 by Jim Tilley
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tilley, Jim, author.
Title: Against the wind : a novel / Jim Tilley.
Description: Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018055 | ISBN 9781597098359
Classification: LCC PS3620.I515 A73 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018055
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I made my foray into fiction from writing poetry, I participated in several fiction workshops at Bread Loaf both in Vermont and in Sicily. I would like to thank the participants in those workshops and the various faculty, too many to name individually, for their combined insights, critique, and guidance on excerpts from early versions of this novel. My wife, Deborah Schneider, has my undying gratitude on many levels—as my literary agent, but more than that as someone who could get through to me her opinions on what was working and what was not in various drafts of the manuscript. Although she does not like to read a manuscript more than twice, she abandoned that rule many times over for me. As always, whether it’s a collection of poetry or a long personal essay or a book of fiction, I am indebted to Kate Gale and Mark Cull, the co-founders of Red Hen Press. Kate had me re-imagine the several chapters that conclude Against the Wind, not once or twice, but three times. It was a pleasure working with her. I am convinced that Mark is one of the best book designers alive.
for Deborah
CHAPTER 1
The details are not unusual. He collapsed during the meeting; the paramedics arrived. They carried him on a stretcher down the freight elevator, gave him some nitroglycerin. Making it to the hospital on time without getting stuck in New York City traffic—that was a bit unusual. It turned out to be a minor heart attack. He stayed in the hospital less than a week recovering from a routine procedure to install stents in two obstructed arteries. It’s the longest he’s ever spent confined to a room.
It gave him time to think. That part is also unusual. Ralph has led a hard-charging life that has given him little time to think about anything other than work. Little time that he’s chosen to take because he knows the answers to his important questions are not what he wants to tell himself. It was easier to focus on the court cases at hand. The notion of a bucket list had never entered Ralph’s mind until the episode with his heart. But lying in bed all day with only the occasional stroll down overlit hallways, he imagined the upcoming canoe trip, a reunion of old camp friends. They’d been hard to find after more than forty-five years, and sadly, harder to convince.
The past three months brought another reunion. This one by chance, although, reflecting on it in the hospital, Ralph suspected it was bound to have happened, three onetime grade school friends coming together again, he and Lynn, high school sweethearts, he and Dieter, high school rivals, Dieter the loser in the battle for Lynn’s affections. Thrown together in a fight over wind farms in the county where Lynn now lives.
All in all, the unfinished business of past lives brought forward and played out, offering opportunities to put things right.
Mark, Ralph’s second-in-command at the office, visited the hospital only once. When he started to talk business, Ralph told him to carry on running the office without him, much as he has done for the past year. Ralph’s sharp-tongued assistant, Mary Ann, came to the hospital every day. On one visit she caught him flirting with a nurse, an attractive woman, a good twenty years younger.
“So you had to have a heart attack to rejuvenate your love life?” Mary Ann said, looking directly at the nurse, not Ralph. The embarrassed nurse excused herself.
“You’re such a positive influence. She probably thinks you’re my wife.”
“I know you too well.”
That nurse reminded him of Lynn. The short brown hair, the way she had it pushed back behind her ears, her grayish eyes, and especially her small, thin lips. When Mary Ann left, he lay back and let his head sink into the pillow, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Thought back to a dinner with Lynn three months earlier after not seeing her for more than twenty-five years. Thought back to the twentieth high school reunion. Back to the days in high school. The run-ins with Dieter. The time at summer camp. Canoe trips.
Ralph remembers Lynn’s statement word for word. I’m dying to hear the story of how the boy who couldn’t get enough of the outdoors turned into a lawyer representing big energy companies. She called him out and he had no answer. A week after their dinner at Café Boulud, three months before the heart attack he didn’t expect, he still has no compelling answer. Lying back in the recliner watching the trees in the park wrestle with the heavy wind, he muses on the consequences of bad weather on canoe trips and in life.
He eases himself out of the recliner. Standing on a step stool in the guest bedroom, he retrieves a box from the top shelf in the closet and rummages through its contents, setting aside the blue ribbons for winning grade school races, newspaper clippings his mother saved religiously, Boy Scout merit badges, and his Sunday school bible. He digs until he finds the prize-winning essay from his junior year in high school, a piece the judges thought was fiction and mistakenly moved into the story category. He removes the rusted clip from a sheaf of yellowed papers.
TRIUMPH OF THE RIVIÈRE ROUGE
by Ralph MackenzieOctober 18, 1965
All five of us—Jack, Steve, Bill, Maarten, and me—had been camp friends for years, returning to Kiamika summer after summer. We were experienced canoe trippers. Each of us had earned the Voyageur Award. The mission of our last trip as campers was to complete a circuit that hadn’t been attempted in ten years, a seven-day route beginning at Lac Rouge, looping north and west, then south and back east to