An hour after discovering the oil leak, we were back on the dock in Port McNeill. This looked like a no-brainer. Oil in a circular pattern came from something that was spinning. The only candidate was the driveshaft — except that I’d pulled the coupler apart two months before and cleaned out all the gunk. Mind you, I’d paid a mechanic in Victoria to put it back together because I didn’t have the special tool needed. But how difficult was it to tighten four bolts?
I picked up the phone to call the mechanic who’d done the job, and it rang in my hand.
“Don’t come back.” It was Chris. “Absolutely not.”
“But I thought . . .”
“A little rot in the bilge? Ha! We’ve already got an appointment with another oncologist, in Vancouver. I’m fine, never felt better. Finish your trip.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“No buts.”
“I mean, we can’t finish our trip. Not until I get the engine going again.”
“Now that sounds interesting. Tell me everything, but quickly. We have to leave for Vancouver. I’ll think about it on the way.”
Next, I called the mechanic in Victoria.
“Impossible,” he said. “No way oil can come out of that coupling.”
“But it is!” I said. “You owe me a little time on this one!” I had paid him four hundred dollars.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Port McNeill was full of fishing boats. They all had diesel engines. I buttonholed a water taxi operator and scribbled down two names he gave me. When I called, both were booked solid.
“A week, maybe more,” said one. “Or you could try Phil, over at the chandlery. He’s got a mechanic.”
Phil.
It was Friday. Phil was terribly busy. He didn’t show any sign of remembering me or the thousand dollars I’d spent in his store a few days before. If anything, the place looked even more chaotic. I insisted.
“Come with me,” he said. I trotted into a loading bay. Time sheets were fixed to the wall. Phil stabbed one with his finger. “Booked solid. See?”
“I know, but . . .”
“Come here.” Phil led me back to the service counter and picked up the phone. He stared into space and narrowed his eyes, as though there might be another diesel mechanic hiding behind a ceiling tile.
“Look,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got a gentleman here, his engine’s throwin’ oil off the ass end. Gotta be the seal needs replacing. You’ll have to drop the transmission.”
“It’s not the seal! There’s a brand new seal in it!” I bleated. Phil put down the phone. He continued to look over my head.
“My guy doesn’t work Saturday. But he’s making a concession. Eight thirty tomorrow, at the dock-head.”
The woman who manned the cash register approached and tugged at Phil’s sleeve.
“What?” he said.
Dave arrived later in the day on the ferry from Sointula, and I walked with him to the parcel depot, which was in the lobby of a motel at the top of a steep climb. I sat outside on the curb and watched the ferry inch back to Sointula. Dave came out empty-handed.
“I guess it was too much to hope for,” he said as we trudged back down the hill. He didn’t seem fazed by the prospect of spending half his holiday waiting for an engine part. Clearly this was someone I could learn from, on many levels. When Dave thought something was funny, he let you know, but in a sideways fashion. Loud laughter or lamentation seemed equally foreign to him as though, after a lifetime spent moving people and their things around the coast, anything can happen was something he felt in his bones.
“I had a friend once,” he said, as though reading my thoughts, “he used the phrase, eagerly awaiting the next disaster.”
“What happened to him?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Lost him to cancer,” Dave said, as though reading my thoughts again. He left on the next ferry.
The wind rose again in late afternoon. A sister ship, identical to Vera but much newer, entered the harbour and tied up a few fingers away. The owners found me staring morosely at our greasy engine.
“I admire you,” the man said. He was shivering, in a red Port Townsend hoodie. He looked like a miserable goblin.
“We had a terrible time getting here,” said his wife. They were both in their mid-thirties; she had the lean, pinched look of a dedicated runner. But not a sailor, apparently.
“The wind was horrible, on the nose all the way. Are you guys going around the island too?”
“If I can fix the engine,” I said.
“That’s why I admire you,” said the man. “I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d probably call 911.”
“Would you mind sailing along with my husband?” the woman asked. “He has no mechanical skills.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“She’s flying back home tonight,” said the goblin. “I’m continuing on my own.” He looked at his feet. “I guess.”
We agreed to meet later that night, go over the planning he’d done for getting across the Nahwitti Bar and around Cape Scott. I realized with a shock that I’d been so tied up with axe murderers and hemorrhaging engines I’d given no thought at all to the make-or-break question of when we would cross the bar. But if the engine got fixed tomorrow, we’d be sitting in Bull Harbour twenty-four hours from now, listening to the surf and gnawing our nails. A chat with Patrick (the goblin’s name was Patrick) might be good for both of us.
His wife hurried off to meet her seaplane and Patrick trudged over to the laundromat to download weather forecasts.
“I still can’t decide,” he said later when I visited him on his boat after dinner. There was a pair of street shoes aligned neatly on the side deck. Unlike Vera, which looked strenuously inhabited by two adults and a dog, there were no towels clothespinned to the lifelines, no sandals jammed beneath the wheel, no dangling underwear. Patrick’s boat looked as though it had just come out of the mould.
He handed me a notebook. “This is what I figured out, when to cross the bar,” he said. “As far as I can tell, we’d have to go in the middle of the night. To hit slack tide.”
“Or not at all,” I said. He looked terrible, and his calculations seemed way off.
“I’m totally freaked out.” He looked at me imploringly.
“Maybe you should sleep on it,” I said. “I’ll drop by before breakfast, and we can talk, okay?” I felt sorry for Patrick, but I hated being put in a position of responsibility. I had enough troubles with my own inexperience, my own motley crew.
“Okay,” he said.
But by seven o’clock the next morning he was gone — almost. I caught up to him just as he was casting off.
“Couldn’t sleep all night,” he said, fumbling with the engine. Last night he’d looked miserable. Now he looked desperate. “I’m gonna go out there, then decide whether to go north or south.” I didn’t think there was much question which direction he’d choose. He gunned the engine, swung helplessly into the boat behind him, then scraped noisily along its entire length, removing teak and fibreglass, until he was free. South for sure, I thought. We never saw him again. When I got back to Vera, Hatsumi was up, standing in the galley in her pyjamas. She had a serious look on her face.
“That dream again,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“Who is this dead guy, anyway?”
“I can’t see his face. He’s lying on his stomach.”
“Hey,” I said, brightening. “Maybe it’s Phil!” But she didn’t laugh.
***
Phil’s mechanic was named Danny. He showed up an hour late, a friendly forty-year-old whose complicated explanation for his tardiness I only half-listened to. In my experience, mechanics blame lateness on (a) their other clients or (b) their families. I waited until he’d finished the story about his daughter’s hockey practice and pointed to the perfect circle of oil around my shaft coupler.
“It’s engine oil, all right,” he said, rubbing some between a finger and thumb. “But no way can it come from that joint.”
“So where’s it coming from? And how does it end up in that circular pattern?”
“We’ll just have a look-see.” Danny had an easy, aw-shucks manner that almost had me believing he knew what he was doing. He carefully wiped the engine clean and peered hard at it.
“Lookin’ for leaks,” he whispered, as though the engine might pucker up at any moment. I peered hard too. Even Hatsumi popped her head up through the companionway and had a look. Danny ran practised fingers over the Yanmar’s ridges and bumps, like an eighteenth-century phrenologist. He sat back.
“It’s coming from around the air cleaner,” he said. I felt the air cleaner; it was bone dry. “You just can’t see it,” he reassured me. “Believe me, some of these oil leaks, well, you just never see ’em. Here’s what I want you to do.”
He took out a pen and sketched a complicated tube and bottle reservoir I could use to measure the amount of engine oil coming out of the exhaust breather hose. “Do it yourself. It’ll save you some money.” I liked the sound of that. Danny packed up his rags and spray bottle of engine degreaser and heaved himself out of the cockpit. He hadn’t actually used any tools. “Let me know how it goes,” he said. I’d had twenty minutes of his time.
It took me two hours to find the supplies and rig up Danny’s bypass gizmo. The sun got warmer, boats started to leave. On my way back from the auto supply store, I stopped at the chandlery, where my bill for Danny’s services was miraculously typed up and waiting. Two hundred forty dollars. Phil stared at me impassively.
“This had better work,” I said.
But it didn’t. When I ran the engine, Danny’s test device stayed dry, and brown oil still flew off the shaft coupling.
“For God’s sake,” I said. “We paid two hundred bucks for — what was that anyway? A consultation? I’m going to have another word with Phil.”
I muttered to myself all the way back up the hill to Phil’s kingdom. What, I asked myself, actually happens to men like him when they finally lose their crown? After a career of staring down the opposition and terrorizing your staff, what happens when you retire? When things start to go wrong? When you’re crouching in front of the doctor doing up your pants and trying to get your head around the terrible news he’s giving you? Well, I already knew the answer to that one; I’d watched my father boil over in a dreary hospital corridor and seen the hollowed-out look he had when he realized nobody was listening anymore.
But Phil wasn’t retired yet. He heard me out, staring as usual at the ceiling. His face worked. Was I finally getting to him, reaching the little kernel of decency that surely even Phil retained? He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“Come with me,” he said.
“No.” I got around in front of him. He was a big guy, that was part of his power. I had to look up.
“Phil,” I said, “I just paid you two hundred forty bucks for a mechanic’s opinion. Which turned out to be wrong. And now I can’t even get hold of him.” It was true, I’d tried his cellphone twice; I’d have done anything to avoid having to deal with Phil again. “So, what am I supposed to do now?”
Phil looked down at me. Then he looked away.
“My friend,” he said, “here’s the way I see it. You’ve reached a point where . . .” Phil thought for a moment. My heart thumped. Phil was going to apologize. He was going to refund my money. He’d met his match.
“. . . a point where, well, you’ve just got to decide what you’re going to do next.”
I marched out of the store. The four batteries I’d pushed uphill to save Phil the trouble of collecting them were still stacked by the door. The phone rang in my pocket.
“I know what’s wrong with your engine,” said Chris.
“Where are you?”
“Vancouver. New doctor. Now listen. It’s not engine oil. It’s transmission fluid.”
“I know! It has to be! Just, nobody will believe me!”
“They don’t know how to think,” said Chris. “The transmission fluid wicks past the new seal because there’s a screw thread on the shaft. Then it collects inside the coupling.”
“Until there’s enough that it starts to fly out?”
“Exactly. The same thing happened to me. Here’s what you have to do.”
Hatsumi and I took the shaft coupling apart, doubled like contortionists and working opposing wrenches. Just for fun, she carefully sniffed a sample of the oil that had escaped and compared it with a known sample of engine oil.
“He’s right, they’re not the same.”
When the coupling came apart, a little lake of foul-smelling transmission fluid poured out. Following Chris’s instructions, I cleaned the mating surfaces with acetone and a toothbrush while Hatsumi walked back to Phil’s shop to buy a tube of gasket cement.
“No way I’m going back there,” I said.
When she got back, I filled the cavity with bright blue gasket goop, plastered the mating surfaces, and bolted everything back together. By the time I’d finished, my knees were dancing from being folded up so long. I didn’t even worry about whether it would work; I knew it was fixed.
That evening, as I walked Charley, we passed a couple of Kelsey Seafoods reefer trucks being loaded with halibut. He darted off to sniff at the seawater pouring from the tailgate. The last of the light behind the green hills of Malcolm Island turned the Coast Mountains into a wavering purple line, like the tracing of an uncertain heartbeat. Charley raced around behind me, playing keep-away with a plastic Listerine bottle and a dog three times his size. I still liked Port McNeill; even the dogs were friendly.
But we were finally on our way. A pit stop in Port Hardy and then a half-day run to Bull Harbour, where we would undoubtedly encounter a gaggle of nervous yachties obsessing about the best time to cross the Nahwitti Bar. We’d join them, we’d figure it out, we’d do it.