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.