The woman shipped her paddle across the bowstem and twisted around to look at her companion. Her hand on the gunwale, she spoke until she was through. Something was happening. Hair to her waist, she had on a dark two-piece bathing suit. Her hair seemed too long. Hands on the gunwales, she raised herself and, her elbows shaky, listed a knee. This stabbed into the gunwales an un-watery force, the woman shrieked, the near gunwale dipped, and the black man muscled his paddle in over the blade to jump them forward as the woman’s paddle slid into the lake. His voice came across the water laughing or groaning. He snatched her paddle as it passed. They’re kneeling, the boy said, that’s how you paddle that canoe. Lower center of gravity, said his father. That’s a fast canoe, said Zanes’s son. His father laughed and clapped him on the back. It belongs to somebody, he said. You probably couldn’t sink ours, said the boy. Zanes followed his son’s eyes. The black man two hundred yards away had swung his canoe around and could see them.
My time device would not take me back to the early settlers fighting off the Mohawks and Malecites or up into the dazzling, state-of-the-art patents necessarily. One morning in our apartment whose days were numbered, I distinguished below me the sounds of small truck, taxi, large truck, sports car, motorcycle, and the peep of bicycle brakes; I was cleaning myself—as my father used to say—rinsing razor, answering the questions of the night. I was measuring the haircut I had bought from the proprietor of that village laundromat. And it came to me that we would go and settle there.
You could say that Zanes’s canoe was a good-enough canoe. A fourteen-foot light fiberglass molded with thwarts that would take your weight and with a bottom, according the in-all-probability-lying original owner, equal to any late-spring whitewater you would run, or any swift summer shallows. Such a trip outside the lake to begin with would require a car or pickup truck to get you to the river if that was what you felt it necessary to do with a canoe on the lake waters. At dawn when your wife and son are asleep. In the heat of the afternoon when you want to cool your feet over the side—swim off your canoe—capsize your canoe and that’s OK, too.
Rowing looks like work. Like exercise. A canoe on the other hand was to take out. To feel it greet you, hold you again and you it. To let the power of the water give against the blade like swimming. The lake was part of the canoe, it occurred to Zanes. A canoe was to look at as it passes. You don’t need one, unless you think you do.
Unemployed youths from the next town, or from Christian settlements in the hills, had found it useful to privately commandeer the orthopedist’s old green canvas and wood canoe a hundred yards down the shore from Zanes’s small dock once when the owner and his wife and seven or eight children were not around, though they did not damage it. An expenditure of energy is what you would call that. Or wait for the right night to borrow the lawyer’s glass-bottomed rowboat that belonged in the Caribbean, not up north. Again, an expenditure of effort, a response to stimuli. Or if experiment calls, wham some absent owner’s kayak with a two-by-four, imagining its highly resistant polyethylene to be fuselage.
Watch this man-made lake some weekday afternoon with no viable river exit, and one day you see them—two, three, four of them, in black in the hot sun with freeze-dyed hair. A shirt slashed down the back and over the shoulder, an oversized suit jacket with rips safety-pinned. Jammed-sounding music on a ghetto blaster the size of a small suitcase. A skull pendant, an iron cross from the war. Not fishing, not talking—what are they doing? The sleepy, lean one named Lung sits with the bird-hunting boomerang across his knees, he coughs hard, his face turned to the sky. They’re in a rowboat that looks familiar. Have we seen that skiff before, moored to the blue buoy in the south cove, or did they haul that from someplace with a hook-up behind their car and launch it at the public beach at the north end?
Alternative sportsmen, they will whack the soda dispenser at the laundromat even after the can drops. Will hang out on the sidewalk outside, chuckling at each other, will sit on their bikes, will lean against somebody’s car, rolling it an inch or two against the brakes. There is Lung, with at least one slanted eye and a huge suit over his T-shirt; for he will talk to you. The little, portly, shaved-headed one is called the Mayor. Outside on the hood of a great old automobile that belongs to someone are spread the fortune cards of the girl with all the lipstick. Why do they hang out here, and why do they leave in an instant as if they all suddenly know something? Again, an expenditure of effort. They will empty warm soda on the pavement. Zanes the owner said to Lung, Why don’t I mind you people. You’re not here most of the time, Lung said. Where am I then? Zanes said. Living the lakeside life, said Lung.
Your vehicles are uninspected, the wheels of that enormous vehicle are way out of line, you don’t work at anything, you smoke too much, you go in for fortune-telling when you could control your future, you don’t trouble the laundromat but what are you doing here?—look at how my son organizes his life—you let time which you think you’ve plenty of escape you, and I would like to catch the waste of your way with time or use you in the working-out of my time device: These things I would have said to Lung as the representative of that punk crew if I had found the words, for I think he would have listened. In any event he came back to my premises regularly; and, though he was scarcely older than my knowledgeable son, I felt that through some fellow feeling he would answer me sometime.
Zanes got his ideas shaving. He was looking at the stretch of upper jaw and cheek across which he drew his razor. He took care not to invade his goatee and mustache, but the mirror images of his eyes went their unseen way. Silent cars that generated power out of water was one of his ideas; underground energy-saving dwellings was another; that no idea was absolutely new but built on existing ideas was still another. When he took his canoe out, Zanes also thought.
The ideas knew how to get away sometimes. Opening a whole wheat pizza operation in the space vacated by a Lebanese bakery between the laundromat and the yarn shop was another idea. But Zanes’s wife, who loved him, pointed out that his reason for coming here had been to have time, because the laundromat, already surprisingly profitable in a rural community, would practically run itself. As it had for the elderly couple who had died in each other’s company of natural causes one afternoon during a visit by the dryer repairman to inspect malfunctioning pilots. She was right: Zanes had a restless mind, that was all. His father had always said, Retire early, look ahead, go into something else. Zanes thought of expanding to a second laundromat in a town nine miles away where there was a small college. He thought of a bookstore. But was it true what she said, that he was looking for work? She did not find him lazy, only unconscious. He woke in the night and looked at her and smelled her.
Fire flared in the far cove one summer night when Zanes and his wife were waiting for their son to return from hang gliding at Glyph Cliffs. The flames were above the beach and must be on the porch of the black man’s rented house. Zanes and his wife stood on the slope above their little dock. Figures leapt to the mutter and slide of music and in the light seemed to open and close, and a blank window was a dark, inchoate part. Voices were succeeded by the silent fire. They went at it again.
A light bulb shot on and off in the house with an afterglow in the mind. Three or was it four people were dancing or wrestling or arguing, the tones distinct yet not the words. Something was going on. Look, the fire’s calmed down, Zanes heard his wife say softly. They were squirting lighter fluid on their steaks probably, Zanes said. His wife elbowed him. He imagined her, and knew her words had reached some reservoir in his brain, where she was swimming at night, the luminous things like tiny muscular wakes lit up her thighs and the curve of her back. The sky’s upper air by contrast was so full of gravity.
Headlights flung into the woods behind them. High beams wobbled and swung in past the barn, and the boy was dropped off. That’s a relief, his mother said. He had said he was ready for his first cliff launch, he was doing ground runs with borrowed gear but it wasn’t so great yet
. He was fifteen. A girl had driven him home. He told his parents what he had learned about the people across the lake. He always knew everything.
Zanes said they should install an anemometer next to the weather vane on the roof. His son put his hand on his father’s shoulder. His son asked less. Had he learned his winds yet? The boy said there was only one way to do that. Let me know when you want me to come to the cliffs, his father said with unwieldy affection. Angry voices rose across the lake, and someone was singing at the rented house.
I entered the village never thinking I would have a haircut today. The elderly man who kept the barbershop informed me that he and his wife ran the laundromat but that even with twenty washers it practically ran itself. I saw a used, heavier-than-average fiberglass canoe and bought it before I left town. I asked the former owner to look after it for me. I breathed deeply and felt the air filling the space of my chest to be measured by another lifetime. I learned the following week that the barber had died hours after he had cut my hair, and I began to look at my haircut. I thought of the work that the man had done on me. I grew a goatee.
Zanes’s son approached. The moon moved from behind a cloud, which was also moving. His hair was sticking up as if he had been asleep. He said that the black man who had the house across the lake and the canoe was the brother of a jazz musician from Boston named Conrad Clear and was a banker in Revere. The black man? his father said—where do you suppose he picked up that canoe? The blond woman was from New York. Her teenaged son had his own house in the mountains north of here. Where does a teenager get off having his own house in the mountains? said Zanes’s wife. But he was in China for the summer, said her son. Who was in China? asked Zanes. Her son was. And he has his own house? Zanes’s wife asked. Where do you get all this? said Zanes. It’s his canoe, said his son, he gave it to his mother to use. Doing other people’s business, thoughts get diluted by the days, the days empty out into the night—and some leisure was gone. The boy did not wish to talk hang gliding. Zanes asked what was the best put together of the hang gliding rigs. The boy said LITE DREAM was a good one. His mother wondered if many people came out. A few just parked and watched, was the reply.
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 wat
ers. 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. Exposure, Lung said. That’ll fix her, I said. Coverage, 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.
Night Soul and Other Stories Page 13