Night Soul and Other Stories (15 page)

Covering it in my mind—the whaleboat—like a kayak—an old World War II seaplane pontoon—but seeing that I hadn’t wasted time on a model boat because whatever was in it still belonged to me though I envisioned (hand-witnessed) some bent-necked lute, great African flutes or nameless anti-War zithers I saw played on the streets of Manhattan and Burlington, I heard my name called. And a dumb impression passed through me. It kept the far sound and the near one apart—about that exact watchful listening animal sound outside my tool shed, husky, firm, it was a girl against the outer wallboards of this tool shed house of mine as close as a hand on my shoulder saying my name, confident it was I inside, a waitingly modest first name but aimed devotedly by her.

“Your father was quite the speaker?” said the women listening to me.

“Public.”

The younger sister, Liz, my down-the-road or across-the-field neighbor, would I let her in? It was like good advice or my character, that closer noise outside my shed—Liz’s hands and bright, broad cheeks, a naïve lift in her walk, her devotion subtle—or some contemptible mistake I was going to make—thinking, What is it I deserve?

Working my boat, I said.

Their house with dark green tarpaper siding was weirdly incomplete, my father thought, for a guy in the construction business, and why the tarpaper? Liz and her sister and their parents lived there, slept, ate, went to the bathroom, undressed, and watched TV there, and left it empty when they went to town. Her father and uncle had added a platform pool in back. All year round Lisa and Naomi lived bodily in that house (which enabled me, for all my family, to
rely
on those girls, anyway Liz, who was almost my age).

I laid the hull down on the bench carefully and went to unlatch the door just as Liz’s knock came upon it.

The pig tails I was used to at her ears had joined and thickened to one great braid today, strange and of an intelligence and history that included me. I let her in and dropped the latch, the cork grip of her fishing pole swinging a little, why did she bring it in? Her chewing gum a gummy cinnamon closeness when she put her hand on the boat right away, we stood shoulder to shoulder, hand near hand, embarked on almost a project though what less than life? No need to say a thing, I was in my own place, and smelling in her hair bark or scalp or the ground between here and her house, her politeness in relation to the workbench and her taken for granted and, like schedules and habits and shared food, averagely authoritative knowledge of her older sister Naomi’s gait and sway and breasts so that, on my knees for a second before Liz came down beside me on the tool shed floor to see me sand a gunwale and spit on it, I smelled the new denim stiffness of her jeans—like sourdough bread or her body, her instinct I would now say; as if it could tell me what her older, harsh sister looked like dressing—as if that was the thing at stake—the accelerating unknown, or just a weather advisory.

Liz took the whaleboat from me and turned it over and ran her thumb across it. “It’s a whaleboat,” I said. “Who’s gonna catch a whale with this?” she said—“they had harpoons,” she said. She smelled it—unlike a country girl—and put it to her ear and made a face. I looked at her and took it back. “They use them in the Coast Guard,” I said. I could do anything on earth—no problem—or I could be here with Liz or tell her to go. She looked at this pretty amazing little hull as if she was looking at me and took it back into her hands and then gave it back to me, as if
I
should say something.

What? What did I know? That her dad had been looking for her and took a cello for a violin and the door creaked but I didn’t look around right away at him? I did him an injustice. It was me he came to see
and
Liz even that he looked for (visit his daughter at her friend’s?)—I saw she must have described my shed, my wood, my chisel work—though not my hands or their touch, my soothing height, my questions or puzzled pal’s love for her, but enough to stimulate her father; for, better than I, she must have known what you say and what you don’t, and today he’d come as an I didn’t know what, who had forgotten whatever it was he had to do and became a man with nothing to do but come over here. Interested in my mother, too. A country man, Liz’s dad could muster as much basic, staringly puzzled interest in another as any city hawk keeping in touch, pursuing a surprise conversation with an alien on the subway.

Learning to notice eyes, I saw Liz had practically black hair and blue eyes but no hair on her arms whereas Naomi had fine flax-white hair. My sister, who would trim her hair into the sink and leave it there, spent an hour brushing her hair looking thoughtfully or irritably elsewhere so that I would ask her anything at all in the way I had with words. Liz had taken my hand pulling me somewhere without looking at me when I went with her and her mother and father (he put his hand on my head) and her sister Naomi to the IGA (my father debriefed me later). Today she had said, “You busy?”

Naomi her sister is tall (“big-boned is what she is,” my father had said). I thought breasts, breasts either loved you or didn’t, and saw you always and waited, I liked all girls and all breasts, they were equally near. Naomi was always about to be a bully. Instead, she would say something funny—taking charge, though—so you thought you knew, but then you didn’t, as if her
being
nice was a coincidence or cut off from your hope that she would be. Last weekend she went with her mother and father and Liz quite happily to see her mother’s cousin and her cousin’s son who had won a Purple Heart, which I had Liz describe. I decided to call Whelan “Whelan,” the way Naomi did.

I told her this friend of my father’s was coming today from Vietnam, Frederick. Because she said, “Does he live there?” because I gave her a look. She asked what he was
doing
there, because I remember I said, “Prob’ly shooting gooks,” because I didn’t
know
honestly what he was doing, he wasn’t in the military but was against the war and had brought me a small, beautifully written-on thimble-size silver cup made by a Vietnamese once, and I had said “gooks” when Liz didn’t know what it meant, much less that
we
didn’t
say
that word, lest you be burned at the stake as a Hawk yet her father Whelan I found I couldn’t quite imagine saying it either, though I knew the word from my own father and his war
against
those who used it.

It is afternoon, nobody called me to lunch, Liz’s fishing pole is leaning in a corner, why did she leave it? Was she mad? I step out of my shed and look around.

The woman I am telling much of this to shakes her head, I see what you meant, that you were like the place. I laugh, but she does not. A pleasure in each of us.

Down near the brook, I devise an unheard-of canoe route across Vermont west to the Hudson like an early white trader along our rushing stream, often shallow or going nowhere, portaging where I had to, and thence down to New York where my dad’s at his rally if I’m asked on this past July 4th. The war was magical, if I’m honest in the warm, remembering woods on the river bank among poplars and elder bush. Hearing “Mekong” in the mercurial eddy around a rock where a dark trout waited suspended in gloom. Hearing in the near distances “Cao Dai, Tayninh” from a crow, two crows, three crows, somewhere low overhead. Somewhat as I, minor and privately American and not quite my father’s son, if I’m honest, sitting on the toilet at night conceived the war historically and technically and as a promise of curious successes in my later life as if government men or their deeds my father worked non-violently and violently against and rightly abhorred were some type of money in the bank for me. The war a magic of commuting copter gunships frowning down on a screen and field of sniper-infested jungle foliage, leaning, banking, sliding to shape at the controls virtually the space of the air just above what was never to be fully known below the trees and down in the famous VC tunnels which enthralled me in their construction laid out for us in detail by a visitor, the mined geography of a war without front lines. Control, a technique of control, doing things at a distance employing remote lighted panels like NASA’s in Florida and Texas. The tools and equipment of war my great-uncle liked. In particular, the sonar gear on his 311-foot Coast Guard cutter which they would test in northern waters in the vicinity of blackfish or “bigger fry” though sonar was pretty much saved for annual maneuvers with the Navy. I had my woodwork still, a boat or viol; and my town friend coming out—I wanted to get my hands on his air rifle and wondered what sudden death was like; and, as I can explain, though guilty of disloyalty, I was at the same time riveted and inspired, tall for almost twelve—looked thirteen at least, a more independent type of person. Where do crows go in the winter? Nowhere much, said Rob, friend of the family, intimate of my mother, sometime Nature mentor of mine:

:who knew two dozen mushrooms (not counting those that grew on a huge white ash in off the blacktop back near the covered bridge)—knew the scat of a dozen “critters,” had a moondial by his attic window at home and of the heavens had talked to me last summer and this at night trash astronomy I could tell he really felt though he offered me what would interest me and another evening brought his bronze sextant—the graduated “limb” a sixth of a circle (
sex
-tant, now more than a sixth) to teach me angular altitudes: the stars crowded and fixed, “astronomer, you’re always losing things,” a shooting star descending not as if overhead were the legendary canopy we hear of but a dark flat and deep field graphed briefly and laughably by this stroke fading across a screen—which took us to the summer triangle, Deneb to the left and Altair below and overhead to Vega and the tiny parallelogram harp above this island of Vermont a melancholy angle in his words and the voice, and how to bring the horizon up to the star.

Surprising how little music in the constellations. Harp, lyre, swooping eagle (you see Altair, the brightest), falcon, vulture. I opt for vulture, Rob said, at odds one night the summer previous but he did not fret in front of me. “Harp star, tortoise,” he said drily. “That cold blue glare”—did I know Lovecraft?—“yaller to Australian telescopes, I understand, isn’t it green, don’t you think it’s green?” The herd-boy and Vega—the weaving girl—more “trashy astronomy” (Rob called it) that night, but it was the Pole Star, North Star, Polaris twelve thousand years ago and in twelve thousand AD it will be again. Our sun, our solar
system
moving in the general direction of Vega at twelve miles a second—it would take it 450,000 years to reach Vega—twenty-seven light years to Vega might as well be infinity. The cosmos is in fact unthinkably big, let it go, let it go bang.

Of my boat, Rob said there was hard and soft maple, both of them hardwood. Mine was the soft variety. The woman to whom I tell these things can see the boy had a number of interests in those days. The boat…and the fishing pole…you and Liz went fishing.

Yes, but…how was I like the place?—you said you saw what I meant.

Yes. How were you like the place? You were there.

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.