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.