Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat
IT WAS THE THIRD DAY OF AN AUGUST HEAT WAVE. Within an hour of the sun’s rising above the spruce and pine trees that grew along the eastern hills, a blue-gray haze had settled over the lake and trailerpark, so that, from the short, sandy spit that served as a swimming place for the residents of the trailerpark, you couldn’t see the far shore of the lake. Around seven, a man in plaid bathing trunks and white bathing cap, in his sixties but still straight and apparently in good physical condition, left one of the trailers and walked along the paved lane to the beach. He draped his white towel over the bow of a flaking, bottle-green rowboat that had been dragged onto the sand and walked directly into the water, and when the water was up to his waist, he began to swim, smoothly, slowly, straight out in the still water for two hundred yards or so, where he turned, treaded water for a few moments, and then started swimming back toward shore. When he reached the shore, he dried himself and walked back to his trailer and went inside. By the time he closed his door, the water was smooth again, a dark green plain beneath the thick, gray-blue sky. No birds moved or sang; even the insects were silent.
In the next few hours, people left their trailers to go to their jobs in town, those who had jobs — the nurse, the bank teller, the carpenter, the woman who worked in the office at the tannery and her little girl who would spend the day with a babysitter in town. They moved slowly, heavily, as if with regret, even the child.
Time passed, and the trailerpark was silent again, while the sun baked the metal roofs and sides of the trailers, heating them up inside, so that by midmorning it would be cooler outside than in, and the people would come out and try to find a shady place to sit. First to appear was a middle-aged woman in large sunglasses, white shorts and halter, her head hidden by a floppy, wide-brimmed, cloth hat. She carried a book and sat on the shaded side of her trailer in an aluminum and plastic-webbing lawn chair and began to read her book. Then from his trailer came the man in the plaid bathing trunks, bare-headed now and shirtless and tanned to a chestnut color, his skin the texture of old leather. He wore rubber sandals and proceeded to hook up a garden hose and water the small, meticulously weeded vegetable garden on the slope behind his trailer. Every now and then he aimed the hose down and sprayed his boney feet. From the first trailer in from the road, where a sign that said MANAGER had been attached over the door, a tall, thick-bodied woman in her forties with cropped, graying hair, wearing faded jeans cut off at midthigh and a floppy tee shirt that had turned pink in the wash, walked slowly out to the main road, a half-mile, to get her mail. When she returned, she sat on her steps and read the letters and advertisements and the newspaper. About that time a blond boy in his late teens with shoulder-length hair, skinny, tanned, shirtless and barefoot in jeans, emerged from his trailer, sighed and sat down on the stoop and smoked a joint. At the last trailer in the park, the one next to the beach, an old man smoking a cob pipe and wearing a sleeveless undershirt and beltless khaki trousers slowly scraped paint from the bottom of an overturned rowboat. He ceased working and watched carefully as, walking slowly past him toward the dark green rowboat on the sand, there came a young black man with a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other. The man was tall and, though slender, muscular. He wore jeans and a pale blue, unbuttoned, shortsleeved shirt.
The old man said that it was too hot for fishing, they wouldn’t feed in this weather, but the young man said he didn’t care, it had to be cooler out on the lake than here on shore. The old man agreed with that, but why bother carrying your fishing rod and tackle box with you when you don’t expect to catch any fish? Right, the young man said, smiling. Good question. Placing his box and the rod into the rowboat, he turned to wait for the young woman who was stepping away from the trailer where, earlier, the middle-aged woman in shorts, halter and floppy hat had come out and sat in the lawn chair to read. The young woman was a girl, actually, twenty or maybe twenty-one. She wore a lime-green terry cloth bikini and carried a large yellow towel in one hand and a fashion magazine and small brown bottle of tanning lotion in the other. Her long, honey-blond hair swung from side to side across her tanned shoulders and back as she walked down the lane to the beach, and both the young man and the old man watched her as she approached them. She made a brief remark about the heat to the old man, said good morning to the young man, placed her towel, magazine and tanning lotion into the dark green rowboat and helped the young man shove the boat off the hot sand into the water. Then she jumped into the boat and sat herself in the stern, and the man, barefoot, with the bottoms of his jeans rolled to his knees, waded out, got into the boat and began to row.
For a while, as the man rowed and the girl rubbed tanning lotion slowly over her arms and legs and across her shoulders and belly, they said nothing. While he pulled smoothly on the oars, the man watched the girl, and she examined her light brown skin and stroked it and rubbed the oily, sweet-smelling fluid onto it. Then, holding to the gunwales with her hands so that her entire body got exposed to the powerful sun, she leaned back, closed her eyes and stretched her legs toward the man, placing her small, white feet over his large, dark feet. The man studied the wedge of her crotch, then her navel, where a puddle of sweat was collecting, then the rise of her small breasts and her long throat glistening in the sunlight. The man was sweating from the effort of rowing now and he said he should have brought a hat. He stopped rowing, let the blades of the oars float in the water, and removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. The girl, realizing that he had ceased rowing, looked up and smiled at him. “You look like an Arab. A sheik.”
“A galley slave, more likely.”
“No, really. Honestly.” She lay her head back again and closed her eyes, and the man took up the oars and resumed rowing. They were a long way out now, perhaps a half-mile from the trailerpark. The trailers looked like pastel-colored shoeboxes from here, six of them lined up on one side of the lane, six on the other, with a cleared bit of low ground and marsh off to one side and the outlet of the lake, the Catamount River it was called, on the other. The water was deep there, and below the surface and buried in the mud were blocks of stone and wooden lattices, the remains of fishing weirs the Indians had constructed here and used for centuries until the arrival of the Europeans. In the fall when the lake was low you could see the tops of the huge boulders the Indians had placed into the stream to make channels for their nets and traps. There were weirs like this all over northern New England, most of them considerably more elaborate than this, so no one here paid much attention to them, except perhaps to mention the fact of their existence to a visitor from Massachusetts or New York. It gave the place a history and a certain significance, when outsiders were present, that it did not otherwise seem to have.