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.