Night Soul and Other Stories (17 page)

Mr. Zanes? the man asked, as if the name wasn’t on the mailbox out on the road; I believe you operate the laundromat in the village? What a lovely spot, how much frontage do you have? He was getting around to what he really had in mind, which was incredible coming from summer people who were practically complete strangers.

He treaded water. He heard the wind faraway. 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 voice.

Did he hear it?

The voice said, Is anybody home? Alive inside the power of his pantings, he laughed out loud and felt his long dome bumped and a scratching as of sandpaper.

The Zanes’s fiberglass canoe had been rammed more than once. By a slow-moving outboard Chris Craft piloted by a priest and carrying a group of elderly Catholic ladies, and again by an inboard Chris Craft when its operator had become fascinated by two girls he was pulling each on one water ski and had seen Zanes in time to steer off, just shaving Zanes’s bow though putting Zanes himself in the path of the tow rope. Sideswiped also by an aluminum canoe swinging around on a tow rope behind an outboard; attacked twice by visiting freshwater wind surfers yelling commands at him right up to impact; and once, during an eclipse of the moon, rammed by his own dock. Almost imperceptibly nicked, the fiberglass hull kept its finish.

I knew the voice after all and ducked under the gunwale to come up and show myself to Conrad Clear’s brother. Oh, you’re all right, the black man said peering down as if my identity had not been at issue. I thought you might be—the black man did not finish. Balanced large-scale and old above me, the bark canoe up close seemed to touch my eyes.

He treaded water and felt the rusty drip-stain and snake mottle over the hull. Along the gunwale every few inches were bindings of some woody material. The birch had aged, it was interesting to examine, a mottled pale brown. Which side of the bark was the outside of the tree? On the outside a flap of bark the length of the canoe came down below the gunwale. The word “outwale” came to him. The outwale’s come loose in a couple of places, he said, and the black man said, The outwale? That’s not good. He leaned over to look and the canoe tipped with him.

You know these powerboats, they start polluting the environment around this time on a Friday, Clear said. Aren’t boats crazy? Swinging about, he backpaddled to say, Well, back to work. It was a joke. Work, I thought. What if my time device already exists? It might still need to be repaired from time to time.

Store a canoe complete with paddles and cushions “for the time being”? Now how would that be possible when at this point in time the Zanes’s garage was out of the question?—and as for the barn…

At least have a look at it, the black man said. He worked on his knots at the back bumper. He ran the clothesline out from stern to stem, where the slender bow thwart it was lashed to could have snapped considering how the bow had been bucking. You could feel his duty, he almost loved the canoe; it did not seem to be his. At last he and Zanes raised the canoe off the top of the silver car, gripping the gunwales at each tapering end of the canoe, feeling it try to turn over. Grass brushed against the bottom like a drum when they laid it down. The canoe creaked somewhere in the length and give of its gunwales, its ribs and grain and pegs. The men stood near each other, looking into the canoe. Its grand lines flared to a beam so wide it seemed low and was. Which end was which? Ribs curved with a beautiful singleness up to the gunwales, and, out of the bent tension in which they seemed to grip and bow the ribs, as you ran your eyes over it and felt it the canoe developed a force of tightness and actual lift, as if the noble forcing of the ribs into the oval narrow form turned the weight inward into lightness. Zanes ran his fingers along a carved rib that tapered just below the gunwale. I think the ribs are cedar, the black man said. He breathed and Zanes knew he was watching him. Yes, the man said. I suppose the thwarts are, too. Zanes knelt and drew his palm along the outside of the canoe, the weather-rusted, raw but not raw bark. The outwale, did you say? the man said. I guess I did, Zanes said. Seams, evidently covering vertical splits in the bark every couple of feet, were sealed or reinforced (if they were seams) with ridges of some hardened, pitchy-looking gum. Zanes went inside and ran his fingers down a rib to the floor where a damp green leaf was stuck. He stood up and the black man lowered his eyes to the canoe and nodded. You could take a trip in it, he said.

This long boat that was interesting as hell asked too much, it was a present to be shared and left you stupid on your home ground, outwitted but maybe not. Zanes could hear himself think as if his thought slipped out of him. Please use it, the black man said. It would be better if it were used. You probably know more about this thing than I do, the black man said. He looked at the lake. The Zaneses’ yellow fiberglass canoe was beached and overturned near the little dock. A paddle leaned across it. This one is a lot of fun, the man said. I almost didn’t make it here. It’s eighteen feet long. It’s tippy, but it’ll take four people if you’re not going far.

The paddles were on the small side as if for short strokes, and a moose carved in a burned-looking brown appeared on each narrow blade, a jaw behind the muzzle and no horns. I saw you out in it, said Zanes. Yes, said the black man. He glanced at his watch. Zanes looked at his. They had been standing here with the canoe for a good half hour. Have you ever tried paddling amidships when you’re alone in that long canoe? Zanes asked, you might get better control in windy conditions. Too late, said the black man. Where’s the blond lady? Zanes asked. She’s long gone, said Conrad Clear’s brother; she didn’t even stay through Labor Day. This belongs to her son. But who knows where he is—or cares. Zanes said, Not me, and, saying it, changed his mind. Why don’t you care, he asked the black man, if you love his mother? His father spoiled him, and now he’s eighteen, was the calm reply.

Cluttered as the barn was, the canoe could conceivably be slung from the rafters. Does it leak? Zanes asked, when he had meant to say no to the whole proposition, especially the fifty dollars. Not much. You splash a little, said Clear; I’ve heard a canoe like this will last about ten years. He looked at the lake. We have the house another ten days, but I have to go. This is one pretty man-made lake, he said. Zanes said, Come back, and the man laughed. It was interesting to see a black man out in this boat said Zanes, and Clear laughed sharply in an erupting way so Zanes felt uncomfortable and then didn’t. How’d he get hold of it? Zanes asked. Oh his father presented him with it, but he could care less, Clear said. Who could? asked Zanes. The man laughed. My canoe’s going to last fifty to a hundred years, Zanes said, yours you can recycle. The man laughed. Zanes remembered once seeing him come close inshore shortly after dawn.

One early morning in August before I drove in to the village to open the laundromat I checked our meteorological station for temperature and humidity, and for precipitation during the preceding twenty-four hours. At eye level upon a four-legged stand, this white-shingled box on the slope above our modest beach had come with the house. It had belonged to a veteran of the Coast Guard who had retired inland from Cape Cod.

I smelled the difference between grass and pine, between kerosene from the barn and the relatively new paint on the old shutters of our house, smelled the difference between a dewy asbestos shingle fallen from the barn roof which needed repair and some moldy residue close by, possibly the field mouse not quite left for dead by the cat watching at the foot of the sugar maple. I will smell at a distance. I will get down on my knees to prove to myself that this was what I smelled.

I looked down the shore. The herons feeding on the reflections in the lake shallows when I coasted near in my canoe were nowhere to be seen this morning. The early sky was like the lake; brisk ripples set by a northeast breeze came at me like sound. One day I would look up and see my son in the sky “boating” from one thermal up-draft to the next, hung in his tapered cocoon sack like an insect’s body below its red, green, and yellow LITE DREAM hang glider wings purchased for him probably quite soon by his father. Then the dark waters cooled the air above it as my winged son who in this noble new useless sport wished to invest his all, ventured into lake space, lost lift, tilted steeply downward as if to attack the lake, and dived at a bright trajectory only his father might intercept in his admittedly heavier-than-air fiberglass canoe.

I raised the door of the weather box to fasten it shut, and I heard the soft dive and gulp of a paddle and the following churn. Turning, I found the black man and his unusual canoe close inshore, and felt he was not yet a father. Why does anybody in a boat passing your trees, the windows of your house, your modest dock, trespass seemingly more than a person walking in your woods? I smelled coffee richly dripping and poppy seed blue corn muffins being lifted from the kitchen oven. The black man nodded at me and swept his paddle wide to bring his bow around. Was it a green boulder I had never seen? The boat answered instantly, its always surprising length unwieldy spun from the stern. The man flipped his paddle over to the other side and steadied his bow for the far cove. “Boat” is what you call a canoe if you are a serious canoeist. He had quite a considerable bald spot coming. He was taking his canoe out first thing before anyone was awake. That was a canoe. I smelled a shallot, a tablespoon of sweet butter frying, a yellow pepper in there. I thought, My wife’s cookbook, my time machine. All these words she was using!

The TV fellow was really extremely brown in his blue jeans and black crocodile T-shirt. He was saying goodbye in the driveway. His name was Guy. He told me I must be mistaken, there were no herons on a lake like this. You sure they weren’t flamingoes? the man joked. I must be imagining them, I said, maybe that’s why they’re so tame when I approach them at dawn in my bark canoe, have you ever
eaten
heron? He said, Oh you have a bark canoe. We’re boarding it for someone, my wife said. When he was gone, my wife acted embarrassed. We rolled the canoe over. She was admiring the canoe and I was standing right behind her.

You didn’t have to, you should have taken the fifty dollars just for the responsibility. It’s a very valuable canoe, she said. It’s strong, I said, and went and gave it a killer kick with my workshoe. One of those boys, the Oriental-looking one, told me it was a wild canoe. It was a trip, she said. It may be here forever, I said, you know these well-off city types, next year they’re island-hopping in Greece. Sounds like
you’d
like to go, she said. Yes I would, I said; but she shook her head, No you wouldn’t, she said.
You
might, I said, thoughtlessly, and she laughed. She realized I was right. Maybe you’ll tell me when the time comes, I said. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, she said undecided. He said it belonged here, I said. Now why did he say that?

The man had left a New Hampshire number that was not local.

I want to work on it, I said without thinking. You what? she softly demanded. How did those kids hear about it? I said. They’ve seen it, my wife said, I heard that nasty little punk the Mayor that the police wouldn’t arrest say to the fortune-telling girl with all the lipstick and one or two others standing there,
Yeah
,
yeah
, he said, they better take
care
of that weird canoe. I don’t think he’s dangerous, I said, just a learner. Nasty, she said, shitty-looking little resentful unemployed loafing big-talking window-smashing sex-retarded potbellied bully racist—she ran out of words—Mayor, I said, helping her out, and she nodded seriously, Yes, Mayor, she said. She put her hand on my shoulder. Guy said they will give us a new counter and sink unit.

He got his son to help sling it from two beams. But then Zanes had to examine the inside again, and they lifted it out of the slings and laid it down out on the grass. The boy had to meet his friends. A college girl from the hang gliders came and picked him up, it was her last day.

Zanes knelt and smelled the bark strips that bound each end of the tapered bow thwart to a gunwale. Five thwarts—shorter at bow and stern, longer amidships. How did you tell bow from stern? He sniffed the stitches, the lashings. What did cedar smell like? A cedar closet. But cedar? He didn’t think he had a cedar tree. One hairy, fraying lashing has loosened. He pulled at the loose binding and found he could unwrap and unthread it. Would the mid-gunwales spring if a short thwart at bow or stern gave way? He tried to understand how the bark flap along the outside of the canoe was attached. All this sort of at the same time. He turned the canoe over on the grass. It was clouding up. The canoe could be left where it was. It was a boat that liked cool weather. Not a living thing at all, so why
was
it alive? A red squirrel appeared on the overturned bottom and was sitting upright, looking like it was getting ready to chew on the canoe.

The hoodlum window-smashing energy-spenders who according to me had gotten the date of Halloween wrong, had been traced to the college town nine miles away through the license plate of a girl’s now unregistered but recently spottily repainted Toyota sedan in the trunk of which was found a paint brush wrapped in plastic wrap that smelled of thinner and betrayed specks of pink on the metal casing in which the bristles were fixed. The plot thickens, Seemyon Vladimirovich said. Why didn’t I care?

These youths were regular spectators at Glyph Cliffs. And had been pointed out to the police there by Seemyon as having hassled the black man and the blond woman at the laundromat. The evidence remained inconclusive. When I came to unlock the coin boxes that evening, Semyon pointed out the Mayor, Lung, and a California-looking fellow in the group on the pavement outside as if I had not seen them. Something in me had not. It was the canoe. It was racism pure and simple against the black man who had come in with the white woman, Seemyon said, pure and simple. He reached for his military pack, he was leaving. I believed he might one day soon break into a run and depart for the state capital. I said if they knew the black man was the brother of a well-known jazz player, they would feel different. They do know that, said Seemyon to my surprise. Who is this California-looking fellow? I said. They come and go—and the swastika? said Seemyon, staring into my face. I think they just don’t have enough to do, I said. Then hire them, said Seemyon, glancing at his watch. This place pretty much runs itself, I said. Tomorrow is another day, said Seemyon, you should visit Glyph Cliffs and check out the hang gliding technology, he said. The lumberyard owner who was also a contractor had obtained for me a four-foot cedar board. It had a soft, less sweet hue, a wood tinctured with a rose or purple shadow compared to the simpler brown of varnished plywood; and it was rippled with creamy, narrow white lengthways shapes of grain knotted with ovals tilted like galaxies. The canoe spent the night outside, and like a sleepwalker I went out once to touch it and saw a split of light in the cove across the lake. The next morning I noticed a thwart-lashing loose at one end.