CANOE REPAIR

It was sunset and the boy was angry and wanted to be somewhere else. His father listened to him breathing. What did the boy expect? That’s the difference between you and I, Zanes’s fifteen-year-old son concluded cuttingly. And all Zanes had wanted to know was what was the use in soaring hundreds of feet above the granite hills and lakes in an expensive thing called a hang glider that might get you killed. Naturally Zanes would want to take a look at the contraption to see how it was made. What was so terrible about a father wanting to do that? The boy wanted to be somewhere else at this moment and at the same time he didn’t. Zanes saw dark lake water cooling the airs above so rapidly that, venturing into lake space, an airborne figure loses altitude and tilts steeply downward. They stood side by side staring at the lake. Zanes was glad of the lake and the long alien canoe passing along the far shore.

 

It came out of a cove as quiet as deer swimming. The canoe was moving and it was still. Of that Zanes was certain. He and his son watched it and were absorbed in what had passed between them. What in hell is that thing? Zanes said. Remote were the glowing forms of two men paddling upright in unison and a woman amidships leaning back. Where were they bound? They were taking a spin. The man in a flowered shirt paddling stern was a black man. That’s no fiberglass, said Zanes, unless—it’s not a fake birch bark, is it? That’s an Indian canoe, said Zanes’s son, who knew everything, and Zanes breathed easier. Well, that’s no Indian paddling stern, said the father. His son laughed and punched him on the arm. Dad, he complained. His son was trying.

I bet that boat can fly, the boy said. It looks, Zanes said—alive was what he nearly said—it looks like deer swimming. Deer? his son said. It would run rings around that old tub of ours.

Against pale poplar and dark pine along the far shore the canoe moved slick and straight, its motion simple as the lake, hidden and obvious and still. Two houses back in that cove had been built by a contractor for summer rental. One of them materialized at sunset, towels draped on the rail of the deck; at sunset a window beamed blindingly like one long flash.

 

I knew I would be called to give it up before I was ready. I think now that I have removed it in slow parts one after the other. Many a good canoe will have its thieves, though with the newer types of canoes it is harder to get the parts loose. Some don’t even seem to have parts. This was an old style, though quite new-made, one part bound to another.

Once when I lived in the city I took a trip into the country. I entered a village and saw a laundromat. An elderly lady with blackest-dyed hair watched through the plate glass window. She was not, somehow, doing her laundry. She was watching for someone. Her hands came to her hips, a panel truck pulled in at the curb. It was the dryer repair service. It had the same name as mine—Zanes. There was a barber shop next to the bakery, and I thought, I like this town, this village, and I will visit the lake. But first I will have a trim.

 

It was a drab midsummer afternoon and Zanes and his son came out of the barn where they had been making a space in which Zanes was determined to start from scratch and try to build a kitchen counter and sink unit. They were getting along. They had come out apparently to feel the faint rain swept across the lake by a southeast breeze. The unusual canoe was out there along the far shore, and the black man and the blond woman were paddling not quite at the same pace. They worked together with an uncertain sedateness. You felt they were talking. The canoe’s animal flanks and low length absorbed the two paddlers, who seemed to be sitting on seats below the level of the gunwales. The two Zaneses watched with pleasure as an outboard, with a man in the stern and a small child facing him, passed the canoe close and the canoe took the wake.

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 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. 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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

Only one awl hole was broken, but the stitches were loose or ragged or out. Zanes pointed out the loose stern thwart. Lung moved it gently on the hinge of its one good binding at the other gunwale.

 

I took my sheath knife and I split, not too well, two slender lengths and we put them between the gunwales to check the span. Length of thwart is width of gunwale.

 

The whittling took time, the tapering and the shortening. I had no awl. It got light. A narrow bit did it even better. But the patch—the tar to tar the leak! I said we should have started the tar before cutting the wood because the patch would take time to dry. Lung said what was my rush. I went to the bank and looked at the cove and the silver car. Some tree gum had been used for one already existing patch, you could smell it. The patch takes time to dry. Like putting a potato in to bake long before the hamburger gets into the frying pan, we needed to do the patch.

 

Or one person can do one job and one can do the other. But Lung wants to be in on the patch.

 

That’s it for that pot, I said quietly. Turn it into your tar pot from now on, said Lung. He poked the fire in the barbecue. What were you doing here? I said. I was here before you, said Lung. I was here when you came down and got the canoe and took it out, he said. I didn’t have much time left, I said, unconsciously putting things together now. You busted that piece, Lung said. Better go back to the lashing, I said. How did I know that the owner of the canoe was coming soon? Was it my time device operating again?

 

A canoe is what it makes you do. In the dewy cool the patch was soft still. He had used a fraction of the tar he had broken off to heat, and it was receding now to glassy bituminous hardness. He had wiped the putty knife on the grass.

 

I felt my wife awake, but not my son. Have you seen my son at Glyph Cliffs? I asked. Lung drew a thong of bark taut from the thread hole and, holding the bottom of it, knotted the rough lashing as tightly as he could. He checks everything out, Lung said, he helps them get off.

 

I’d like to do this again, Lung said thoughtfully. I mean I didn’t get to go out in it. Maybe you’ll have to bust it again for us to repair it. Then again we could make one from scratch now that you see how it’s put together, it’s a very cool thing. I used to like to shoot birds you know but I was never that crazy about boats, I’d like to take a spin in this one but I got to go to work now.

 

Why didn’t you speak up when I came out here in the dark in the first place? Zanes asked. Felt stupid, said Lung. I guess I did say catch me early, Zanes said.

 

Across the lake the silver car moved and its length seemed to collapse. We had a smell of road work from the tar. We went and ran our hands over the tough skin of the hull and lost track for a minute. Lung got under it and looked at his handiwork. I thanked him. He didn’t look at me. We stared at the hull for a while.

 

This has to go back to the owner, Zanes said. You always have the other one, Lung said and laughed. Why are you called Lung? Zanes asked. It’s whatever you want, Lung said. Answer me, Zanes said, laughing.

 

What’s going on here? my wife occupying the moment in her blue robe said through the screen door that shone in the sun. I said, Lung, I don’t know where the time went. I’ll bet you didn’t even know I was here, my wife said. You weren’t, I said. My wife asked Lung if he would like some breakfast. He said he never ate in the morning.

Lung’s bike seat was too low and I offered to raise it, but Lung was on his way. So long, Lung, said my wife humorously. Let’s have dinner on camera, Lung called back. The patch was of course not dry, but the canoe could be moved. The alarm clock in my son’s room started distantly ringing. The patch was soft and the hull of the canoe was damp. The alarm got turned off. I think Lung likes you, my wife said, but he certainly picks an early hour for his visits. We had to work on the canoe before the owner came, I said. The owner? my wife said. Is he going to take it?, thank goodness. Well, what do you know, she said—for just as Lung had pedaled out of sight onto the town road, the silver car had entered the woods. This particular canoe trip was over.

 

Low and slow it made its way among the potholes and ruts. The driver was a blond fellow. The clothesline was in the barn.

Who’s that driving? asked Zanes’s wife.

Don’t you remember? asked her husband.

 

Above me, I felt the presence of my son at his window. If I didn’t take down the screens, it would soon be summer again.