Night Soul and Other Stories (16 page)

My son approached and the moon came out and blanched the lake waters. He told us who we were looking at across the lake. He went into the house. My wife reported that she had emptied the coin receptacles at the laundromat, been to the bank, and returned to pay the part-time girl her wages, when the black man and the extremely long-haired blonde had driven up in that silver car of theirs. They were really quite nice, my wife said, but they came in with three loads, and the only two machines not in use were being occupied by two of those punk kids. You know, the stocky, broad one, and the tall, skinny, Asiatic-looking boy with the tiny blue star on this cheekbone. Well, they were leaning up against these two machines by the window and Lung was communicating by sign language with their friends loafing on the sidewalk outside. The black man asked if they were using the machines and the Mayor asked what did he think they were doing. The black man had an unpleasant worried look on his round face, and he spoke again and was ignored by the two kids who might as well have been outside instead of blocking the machines, one of which was later found to have a puddle extending from under it. They’re not exactly kids, I said. They’re kids, said my wife. Well, they don’t have enough to do, I said, and why am I hearing this
now
? I said. The shaved-headed pug they called the Mayor was talking with his hands to the girl outside with all the lipstick who had her cards laid out on the hood of that enormous old car, she’s Lung’s girl, my wife said. How do you know that? I asked, and where was everybody else? “Asiatic” didn’t describe Lung, I was thinking—though having thought this I saw my wife might be right, though my son had told me the father was German-Irish. That’s what I was getting to, said my wife. The black man had that awful worried look, and just then who do you think got up but Seemyon, who was reading, and came over and in that English of his told the boys to move it. Seemyon? said Zanes; it’s his second home. Well, he said he was the best friend of yours, said my wife, which surprised me, and the Mayor said, Luck-y guy (like that), and on the way out the door the Mayor said, Black mother, but the woman said over her shoulder emptying one load, What’s your problem, Sonny? and the Mayor looked in the door again and said, You’re the one with the problem, Blondie, and the black guy almost made a move but didn’t. But where was everyone else? I asked. I heard Lung outside say something, said my wife; then all the kids got into the car and left, said my wife. But I’ve spoken with Lung, I said. Aren’t you listening to me? my wife said.

Seemyon Stytchkin frequented the laundromat by day. He kept his bulging military pack neat and he read his book and talked to those using the machines. He welcomed those entering. Once he mopped up a woman’s emergency overflow while she was taking a long-distance call. A spring immigrant from Belarus and a trained marathon runner, Seemyon had been unwilling to take the exam for a taxi license in New York upon finding that the three hundred dollars he would have to raise to pay the taxi commission before he would take the exam was unrefundable should he fail. But at that moment in time, as these Americans said, he happened to see the motto “Live Free Or Die” on the license plate of a car being towed away from a No Standing zone one late winter day in Greenwich Village and noted that the state was New Hampshire. Having determined to go there, he purchased a small single-burner camping stove.

On the final leg of his foot journey north he was within running distance of the state capital and he began to jog. He entered a hilly town with arrows in all directions giving the mileage to lakes and ponds as yet unseen. He pulled up in front of a laundromat. He looked at his watch. He decided to end his two-month trip. A man with a goatee was grinning at him through the plate glass window. I was that man.

A silver sports car driven by a blond, not unRussian-looking woman had backed away from the laundromat and turned to accelerate down a steep hill, disappearing at speed into the dark one-car entrance of a narrow, shingle-roofed shelter built over the river, only to reappear on the far side. Seemyon had learned from his late father, the carpenter Vladimir, that one must have
two
good reasons for a major decision. As he was to tell me weeks later during the summer, arriving here, passing through New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, day turning to night, night to day, he had discerned in laundromats a closeness yet privacy between machine users, also a feedback here between machine and human occasioning acquaintanceships and time to read and think, a powerful collective motion within humming immobility. I said that to tell the truth our customers generally just sat and stared into space. Had I considered adding a dry cleaning operation to the laundromat, not to mention offering customers the option of leaving their laundry to be machined by the management? No, I liked the semi-automated, coin-operated integrity of our place. The second reason for Seemyon Vladimirovich’s decision had been the silver car, for this car with its unforgettable license plate motto was the car Seemyon had seen being towed away in New York a few weeks before.

Zanes, what did you expect when you put your hard-earned cash into this place? Seemyon said one day, indicating the laundromat and the machine users. That it would work
for
me, said I. Money has a leakage factor, Seemyon went on, holding his book against his chest. It must keep moving, he said. Take this laundromat, he said. Water flows into the machine and stops. It is useful only while it is in the machine. It is moved and it stops. It is used and becomes then used water. It must move on—just as the water that replaces it must move into the machine from someplace else. The machine must hold the water, as I have proved when a machine has overflowed; but it is necessary for the machine also to let the water go. It is all motion and the prevention of leakage. When you left your job last year you were taking what you had and making it flow into a new system rather than holding on to what had been used. It would have leaked away if you had not made it move into a new system. You want to rid sometimes the system of water for a certain cycle and not bring in new waters. I found that I had gotten hungry listening to Seemyon Vladimirovich. Come to think of it, I was thirsty.

Zanes had been unmindful of the recipe collection his wife had compiled. She had begun, it seemed, years ago. Now it was going to be printed as a book. She said it was arranged like a story and she said—he had heard her say it like a promise—that she was sure they wouldn’t make a dime on it. But now an astounding offer had come her way from New Hampshire TV.

Some days I liked Lung more than my own son. Sometimes I was unconscious of this. I told Lung of my wife’s TV pilot. Ex
po
sure, Lung said. That’ll fix her, I said.
Co
verage, he said. Tall in his huge-shouldered, otherwise unemployed suit, he joked, Do we get to come for a meal on camera? They were not even asking
me
, I said until my wife established herself enough to make viewers curious about her private life. Lung coughed and coughed, as if this was how laughing came out of him. We’ll look for you, he said. I said, Dawn is the time to see me. He coughed again and made some signs through the plate glass to the girl with the cards on the car hood, and she signed back. Lung said, She says you like the canoe, stick with the canoe. The mayor arrived on his dirt bike and surveyed the scene. He didn’t miss much. The black man and the blonde had recently eaten peaches while doing their laundry.

One airless morning the eve of Labor Day weekend, when Zanes’s wife was awaiting a visit from the New Hampshire television people to iron out details for the pilot cooking series she would host at home, Zanes found his plate glass window smashed in two places that now looked target-like. A pink swastika had appeared on the glass door of the laundromat and someone’s face also in pink with a grin.

The town cop agreed the perpetrators were a nuisance, but you could monitor just so many Yamahas and dual-exhaust wrecks passing through town. Zanes said he would talk to the visiting Russian to see what he knew. The son of the hardware store proprietor had done a hurry-up replacement on the window and by midafternoon the jeweler girl who worked for Zanes part-time had razor-bladed and Windexed the swastika and the face off the door. Zanes had been unable to persuade the unpredictable repair man to stop in on his way home to check an old and possibly failing Speed Queen dryer. Zanes thought of Glyph Hills, but his son had gone to the state capital to visit a sporting goods store with a college girl in the hang gliding group. Zanes went home himself, found a second car in the driveway, assumed it was the TV people, put on a pair of trunks he found in the barn, and took his canoe out. He bent to his work. But he wondered what that long bark canoe felt like. Its length and strong delicacy. Its secret speed. Its time.

They were extremely lean, my son and Lung. Never having seen them together, I had not compared their faces. A narrowing and angle of the eyes in Lung and perhaps in my son gave a hint of the steppes. My son was younger than he looked, and Lung, I thought, older, though in sleep an alien age crept over his forehead and mouth, some pinch of pained concentration. I had long since thought through the utility of my time device. I had only to assemble it. But of what materials? People had a right to it. Like water-driven cars. Like the surprise union of two thoughts. I named a river town in Connecticut where there was a well-known laundromat and asked Seemyon on what day he had arrived there. He knew that laundromat. Had he seen the silver sports car pause there that day traveling at far greater speed than he? Seemyon was a runner and a reader, a Russian and would-be American; he ran everywhere, ran out to Glyph Hills, reported back. A talker and a listener, he would make sense of the Zanes life story and tell back even what I did not want to remember. You have made up three thousand greeting cards and twice sold your apartment in the city, he reminded me. When did all this happen? I said.

Zanes bent to his work. He paddled on the right side and kept on course by turning the blade inward as he was finishing his stroke. But he needed no course, he aimed at a brown duck with a white circle around her eye, then at jazz music coming from the south cove, a thump and groan, a wail and persistent intimacy which would have drawn him and his leakless yellow fiberglass onward had not Zanes shipped his paddle on the floor in front of him. Straddling his gunwales he let the water cool his feet. An outboard passed containing the Mayor and a blond, very tanned, glowering fellow.

Seemyon Vladimirovich was pulling beans for a market gardener who permitted him to camp on her land. He had “a thing” about firm ground, he was respectful of boats and saw their use value but had no use for them himself. Zanes scanned the shore. His wife was shaking hands at great length with a man.

Zanes stood up and the bow of his canoe jutted out of the water. Why should that happen when his weight remained the same? He crouched and made his way forward. He heard the drone of an outboard; it did not seem to be closing on him. He stood up and put a foot on a gunwale and rocked his canoe. Equilibrium stubborn as a gyro seemed built into the seamless molded material, and he applied himself and rocked the gunwale lower. Now with both feet he brought the gunwale down into the water but, meaning to jump, he lost his footing. His heels slipped out from under him, and as the other gunwale rolled up behind him the canoe went over. Zanes sat down hard on the capsized bottom and, his arms circling for balance, he slid backwards into the lake. To the north, he heard a voice laughing.

Treading water, my hand upon the overturned canoe, I heard laughter to the north and recalled my paddle. Despairing very generally of my life, I went under and came up in the familiar darkness of the boat. It is as if the day has capsized and not you. A canoe is one boat you can find privacy under. You could adapt a boat for just this purpose. The fiberglass bottom sealed out the light of the sun but not the music from the cove—had it risen in volume? Was the sun graining its way through the fibers of my roof? Why should I not stay here? I could always work on my time device. A wind was coming up, and I heard a breathing sound of paddling.

He treaded water and in his mind smelled fish scales. A wind came up. Zanes felt a wash against his dome. A regular plash and churn approached, and, on a distressing day of smashed plate glass and the invasion of the TV people, he felt in the presence of some second reason he had come to be here—not habit, not comfort, not escape—a future voice that needed no words and was a return.

One bright mid-September afternoon, alerted to what he saw entering his woods, Zanes was not ignorant of the black man and what he brought. The canoe visibly shifting upon the diminutive roof of the silver sports car and overshadowing it, the black man had no right to drive in through the woods like that on a September afternoon. How do you drive with the front end of a canoe over your windshield? The bow like a beak closing down over the hood over-slung it a good three feet. The single length of clothesline securing the bow to the middle of the front bumper went taut and slack as one tire hit a pothole, and the back end of the canoe was raked by a dangling, half-split pine bough. If the red blanket protecting the car roof wasn’t actually slipping, a corner of it hung unevenly half over a window, and the clothesline around the broad belly of the canoe that passed through the windows was working loose so he was going to lose that canoe. The black man had no right even to
ask
to leave it “for the time being”—getting out of his car, its weird long load between them, and sauntering around the bow so he and Zanes could see each other. Not a tall man, he had a round African face. The bow had two yellow-green leaves stuck to it.