Night Soul and Other Stories (18 page)

His son paddled stern and they took the bark canoe over to the south cove. Zanes did not tell him where to go. The two summer houses were boarded up. We ought to take that overnight trip we always talked about, said Zanes. He didn’t know what his son was thinking. They swung around and in the October woods Zanes saw someone move. Yet this need not be unusual. He turned to speak to his son and got a look at someone whose head had a fleeting Indian look to it. He glanced back not quite far enough to meet his son’s eyes. You want to get your own hang gliding equipment, I want you to have it, he said. I have to pay for it, his son said. Well, I think you should pay for some of it, but it’s going to cost a few hundred dollars before you’re done.

His son held his paddle steering and Zanes scarcely looked again at the fellow watching them from the shore. He thought the head had been shaved, it caught the forest light. I’m going to pay for all of it, Zanes’s son said, if you can loan me the money. I was thinking that you might need someone to help run the other laundromat if you decide you want it. A twinkle of water appeared between the planks in front of Zanes’s knee—had he dripped the water in with his paddle? It came to him like common sense remembered that you patched a leak on the outside, and you would have to find it first. He would buy a hunk of roofing tar. His shoulder ached and he lifted his paddle blade over the bowstem to the left side. He dug in hard and the bow moved its knowing focus. Maybe his son had not even wanted to paddle stern. I’m not going to acquire a new operation just to give you a part-time job, Zanes said. The shaved Indian head in the south cove had not been the Mayor’s, at large and trespassing where nothing much was at risk, it hadn’t even been shaved but it had given off a light. Is there somebody over there? Zanes said. Probably, his son said.

All but one of the machines were in use that evening. A half-gallon milk container was on fire on the sidewalk and three youths watched it burn down. I adjusted the station band of my transistor to get the President’s eight o’clock message to the nation. I had been looking forward to listening to it with Seemyon. Semyon had already told me what the President would say. Seemyon was ruddy and thoughtful. He had heard the press release broadcast on the 4:00
P.M
. news while taking a break with his employer. A woman came and I gave her two dollars in quarters, the change machine had broken down.

No one among the machine users seemed to be waiting for the President’s speech.

Seemyon glanced at his large, complex wristwatch. Zanes wanted to get home to the canoe. Zanes was both here and at the lake. What if space was time? Your ideas are ringing a bell, he told Seemyon, shall we listen to the President even though we know what he is going to say? Zanes turned up the volume. Yet he had had an idea that he really wished to broach with the Russian and now it was gone, and in its place was a split of light between the green boards upon a window of the rental house. Zanes had seen it when he had slipped out in the middle of the night to touch the bark canoe. How did the maker get the cedar strips to bend into ribs? He soaked them.

I had known since the city that the source of a leak is often not at the point where the leak is experienced. Used for his own purposes, the laundromat and village and I would soon be left by Seemyon, who was moving on.

But to conclude my point, said Seemyon: Your laundromat—these look-alike, top-loading, electrically linked machines—is engaging actually in automated
thought
, I believe.
And
—Seemyon glanced at his watch—you will be glad to know that I saw a jalopy with a pink swastika at the Glyph Cliffs an hour ago. I recognized the hooligans and I have their license plate by heart. You have helped me; I try to help you now.

The bark was turning darker; what happens to a tree with its bark peeled off, does it grow new skin? But of course!—the maker had cut
down
the birch tree first. I saw the rings, I felt the decades and felt for them.

The gunwales had been lashed to the bark hull through threading holes. These had evidently been made with an awl, they had widened and you could see the daylight through them. So in the unlikely event that you were that low in the water you would have almost a natural leak. Zanes looked for marks of birds’ beaks. The ribs held the bark, and the gunwales held the ribs—almost forty ribs. A body was what it was. Zanes got himself under the thwarts and lay down in the canoe. His wife called from no doubt the kitchen.

She did not call again. Her hair awake like a perfume over my cheeks, unconsciously I savored the fresh herbs in her hair, the scent of baking in the material of her dress and the moisture along her collarbone; and though she must raise herself a little to bring her knees forward rib by rib along the floor planks where the cradling gunwales were widest apart, with my hands like a gentle massaging shoehorn I made sure the small of her back and her strong, flaring behind did not exert pressure on the thwart and so she rubbed it only in passing.

If a thwart broke, then the other four would be under increased tension, and if another broke, the gunwales could begin to spring and the canoe would begin to open, undoing the maker’s work. Flat on his back but not quite flat, Zanes smelled the sharper, gamier cedar and the sweeter birch, he gripped a thwart like a ladder rung. Who made this boat? Who really owned it?

Inside the canoe his arms imagined themselves reaching out. Lengthways bark flaps along the inside of the gunwales as well as the outside were sewn in with bark and you had to believe with a tool made by the maker. Parts became distinct; the beautiful canoe could loosen in your mind. Zanes thought how you would begin, once you had skinned a great tree. Stake it out.

He had forgotten the cushions. He could see that her knees hurt as she drew her paddle blade back through its stroke and lifted it to bring it forward, she sat back on her behind and leaned her back a little against the bow thwart. Can you lean against there? she said, showing her her profile. I guess so, he said. She paddled once and held her paddle across the bow for a moment having earned what came next. Zanes, what are you going to do about the hang glider question? she inquired. She started paddling bravely, so Zanes had to bring them back on the blue buoy they were supposed to be making for. It was October time, a lovely bond of early chill, leaves small and preciously sharp among the pines. I want him to have the equipment, Zanes said. I can feel the water under me, his wife said, I can just feel it. You know, Zanes said, you better not lean back too hard on that thwart. She said, It feels like it’s vibrating right up my legs, you know?

She did not care what we did, we were there, she did not need to look around.

Zanes worked the slings toward each other along the beam. Now they could cradle the seventy-pound canoe upside down—so he could get in under it and raise it out himself. The beam he and his son had chosen put the canoe directly under a small leak in the roof. Zanes didn’t hesitate to leave the canoe outside on the grass if he would need it later, but he sensed that the bark hull didn’t like direct sun. He could go and look at it, the seam pitch softening on a warm October noon, and he would tuck for the time being a lashing that had come loose back into the awl hole.

They had an accident off Glyph Cliffs. The Californian-looking fellow had borrowed a rig and, launched, it had simply fallen as if there were big holes in the wings.

You have a canoe there, the voice said over the phone late at night. Which one are you talking about? I said, not thinking where I was. The good one, the young voice said cuttingly. I hung up on the insult, guessing it was the absent owner, it didn’t sound as nasal as the Mayor. It was certainly the middle of the night, I was in my time device probably and thought nothing of the interruptions to my sleep. I would speak to Lung in case the Mayor had some mischief in mind. I had perhaps not actually been asleep. I was taking the canoe apart. Opening it. I went back to bed. Would I put it back together?

Clear apologized for calling so late the following night. I was asleep. The blond woman had asked Clear to phone me, but
she
, then, would not get off the phone with him. Her son was coming to collect his canoe the day after tomorrow. He said you didn’t want to give it to him, Clear said, and I told her you were right. It’s his turn, I said, and Clear laughed.

He woke to the window, a darkly single, ghastly or friendly, occupied light lifting the maple from below, but it faded and moonlight from the lake came down, as he came awake. He listened to his hair rub and pull between the pillow and his scalp and he laid his fingers upon his wife’s hunched shoulder. He listened with hearing as sharp as his mother’s the day she died. What was she listening for?

Along the cedar gunwale of the bark canoe, feeling the flaps of the inwale and the outwale and the bound stitchings which, he now believed, were of slit spruce root, somebody was running a hand. Running ahead all along the edge of the canoe fore and aft, both sides, foreseeing use, recollecting the method part by part of the maker. But who was the thief? And was it thievery? A night engine soft as an electric car would not have been able to mask tires mashing driveway gravel and dirt: and he had heard nothing, he had seen on the great canoe only hands. The canoe attracted others to it, they were in its future. It was not the Mayor making off with the bark canoe or taking a two-by-four to it in the middle of the night. Zanes felt only the silence of four in the morning near him on his way to the bathroom with his clothes. He would risk his wife’s waking, because he and the thief were going to take the canoe out.

Some forgetfulness softened the piney night air—was it humidity?—and the descending clarity of late October waited moonlit in the sky. In balance the bark canoe held by its gunwales above your shoulders might have lifted off above your head if you had given it the exact path it asked. You know your ground and where the spongy bank gives way toward the dim beach, the active little wash at the edge and the summer detergent froth. Water at the shins, and the long frame balanced is flipped over into the water, the paddles loosed from their coupled lashing at two thwarts amidships.

It’s light above but the canoe is dark, is it that the light of night at whatever distance needs extra speed to catch our canoe, or is it a clandestine humidity we turn upward in as the paddle lifts forward? There’s no one else in the canoe, it quivers slightly on the dark water feeling you with a sideways quickness that is a promise of forward speed. The paddle stroke gives heart to the boat. As if an hour has passed and you’re meeting yourself coming back, a cough comes from the north or from the shore. Pulling hard on the paddle with the hand just above the blade, you lean joyfully back against the thwart and it gives way and tears free.

Upright, you go on, you control it all with your torso and you find the water in its powerful give nearer than the skin of your knees, or is it water on the floor planks and if so where has
it
come from, China?

We have a serious leak. Is the leak like worry, no more than worry? Like a brief time, the split of light visible in the cove is between the boards of a window belonging to that house and you have already seen it, yet this may be the actual first time, and if you got right up next to it the lighted space inside would open to you.

Light rose to the surface of the lake and how long had this trip gone on? It’s a measure of its own leak—this canoe—but the inch of water around your knees, does it come from one leak, and at what rate?—there’s no wristwatch, it’s on the bed table near your wife, and this canoe needs to be repaired on home ground.

At a hundred yards your trees and the brick end of your house and the person standing on your bare, barely visible dock are beginning to take shape though it won’t be day yet. Is water itself pressing against the leak now, and is this another part of the bark canoe, this leak? The person dwarfing the dock second by second is certainly Lung, and it must be five-thirty. Why is there not much time?

Zanes beached the bark canoe and told Lung where to find the sawhorses. He told him to keep his voice down. Lung came from the barn with a sawhorse in each hand, his elbows back. There was actual work to be done. Why was Lung here? Zanes turned.

I saw through the sifting darkness of the shore across the lake, but I could not see the split of light in the summerhouse. The moon had gone on. If there was a car over there it would be silver.

They carried the canoe up the bank, an inch of water shifting fore and aft, and they set it on the sawhorses. The bottom was wet and they might need more water inside to show the leak. Zanes went to the barn and found the shiny rock of roofing tar inside a bucket. Would tar work? Every minute things showed more. Lung had on a jean jacket and green chinos. Then Zanes saw the bicycle. Find some dry wood, he said, I think I’ve got a pot in the garage, keep your voice down. He filled the bucket at the lake. Lung hadn’t said a word.

Over there the sky filled the trees out like growth and darkened them with a dawning darkness. I found the silver car, part hidden by house or trees or distance. Like the canoe, it had been used by others for the summer. The bark canoe waited above the ground. I poured in my water, a drip had appeared only near the stern between the seventh and eighth ribs.