The Rigger's Canoe

My girlfriend left me six months ago. Elspeth. Three years, gone over a text message that said "I think we want different things." Which was true, probably, but she could have at least used punctuation.

So when my coworker mentioned her brother's friend needed a house sitter for a week, I said yes before I heard any of the details. That's the kind of decision I make now. Proud, impulsive, stupid. Pick two.

The details turned out to be interesting. The client was a circus rigger. His name was Dirk Goode, he was thirty-four, and he lived in a converted shed behind a funeral home in a small Vermont town. I want you to sit with that for a second. A shed. Behind a funeral home.

"Is that a joke?" I asked on the phone.

"Why would it be a joke?" Dirk said. His voice was calm. Weirdly calm. The voice of a man who spends his days making sure trapeze artists don't die. "Rent is cheap, the garden is nice, and Mr. Pellamy downstairs doesn't mind the noise. There isn't any noise."

"Because you're a rigger."

"I rig at the fairgrounds, forty minutes away. I'm very quiet at home."

So that was the arrangement. Free place to stay for a week, look after the house, water whatever needed watering. He said something about a canoe, and I said sure, whatever, how hard can a canoe be. Remember that sentence. It comes back.

* * *

I arrived on a Monday in June, twenty-eight years old, one duffel bag, and a head full of nonsense about proving I could handle anything alone. The garden behind the funeral home was, I will admit, beautiful in a neglected way. Rose bushes gone wild everywhere. A stone birdbath with a slow leak. A narrow canal running along the back fence, dark and lazy, leading to a pond somewhere past the trees.

The shed itself was better than I expected. Dirk had put in real windows. There was a bed, a little stove, shelves of books about knots, which is a real genre apparently. It smelled like cedar and old canvas. Good smell, honestly. I've smelled worse apartments I paid real money for.

The bed was made with military precision. Hospital corners. The man folds sheets like he's defusing something. And sitting on the pillow, plump and pink like a fat sleeping animal, was a hot water bottle.

Under it was a note. His handwriting was neat and small, like everything else about him.

"This is my bottle. Fill it with hot (not boiling) water each night. My back is bad from fifteen years of catching people who fall, starting in college. If it leaks, there's a spare under the sink. Please do not lose the bottle. It has sentimental value."

Sentimental value. A hot water bottle. I laughed out loud, alone in a shed behind a funeral home. Then I felt a little bad about it. The guy catches falling circus performers for a living. His back has every right to be bad. Still. Sentimental value. The note had a small careful drawing of the bottle next to the words, like a passport photo, like he was afraid I wouldn't recognize it.

"Okay, Dirk," I said to the empty shed. "Your bottle lives."

* * *

The canoe was the problem.

I spotted it the first morning, resting beside the canal behind the rose bushes. Nice canoe. Wooden, well oiled, clearly beloved. There was a single paddle leaning against the shed wall. One paddle. One canoe. Two ends of a canoe.

I looked around, half expecting a second paddle to materialize. Nothing. Just roses and a birdbath and the quiet hum of the funeral home's air conditioning.

Now. A lesser man would have called immediately. I am not a lesser man. I am a man who was dumped by text message and had something to prove to nobody in particular. I carried the canoe to the water, put the single paddle in, and got in.

I made it maybe thirty feet. The canal is narrow and the canoe is tippy and I have the balance of a filing cabinet. But I managed. I paddled out toward the pond and it was actually kind of nice, all that green hanging over the water, dragonflies doing their business. For about four minutes I felt like someone who had his life together.

Then I went to switch the paddle from one side to the other, hit a submerged branch, and nearly went swimming. I caught the gunwale, the canoe rocked like a carnival ride, and the hot water bottle, which I had brought along because I'm an idiot who takes instructions too literally, flew out of my jacket and into the canal.

I swear the water swallowed it with an audible gulp.

I sat there, heart hammering, watching the pink shape sink. Sentimental value. Fifteen years of bad backs. I was going to have to call a stranger and confess I'd drowned his emotional support hot water bottle in a canal behind a funeral home.

I fished it out with the paddle. That part went fine, actually. Scooped it up like the world's saddest fairground game. But it was the principle of the thing. I'd had the bottle for four hours.

I paddled back to the bank, dripping and humbled, and called him. He picked up on the second ring.

"Hello, Perry. How's the shed?"

"The shed's great. Dirk, quick question. Completely hypothetical. Is there only one paddle?"

A pause. Not a long one. Just a calm pause, the kind of pause you'd use with a child who asked why the sky was blue.

"There's a second paddle," he said. "Behind the shed, on two nails, under the tarp."

"Behind the shed."

"On two nails. I keep them apart so they don't warp against each other. It's a whole thing."

"You didn't mention that."

"I mentioned the canoe. I assumed the paddles were implied." He said it without a trace of smugness, which made it worse. "Is everything all right? You sound winded."

"Everything's fine. I'm fine. Everything's extremely fine."

"Perry."

"The bottle went in the water, okay? For like eight seconds. It's fine. It's drying in the sun right now like a little pink sunbather."

Another calm pause. "Did you fill it with hot water first? Not boiling?"

"Why does that matter for a swimming trip?"

"Boiling water stresses the rubber. That's how bottles start to leak. Was it boiling?"

It was, in fact, boiling. I said nothing. The silence said it for me.

"Well," Dirk said, and I could hear him almost smiling, the way you can hear a smile over a bad phone line. "There's a spare under the sink. But the main bottle should be fine. Give it a night and check it for leaks. And Perry?"

"Yeah?"

"Use two hands on the paddle. Both hands. Every stroke. The canal looks slow but it's deeper than it looks."

"That's what she said," I said, out of pure reflex, to a stranger, about a canal.

He laughed. Actually laughed. A short, warm, surprised bark of a laugh, and then he hung up before I could feel embarrassed about it, which was probably intentional. Everything that man does is probably intentional.

So there I was. Day two. I'd nearly drowned, lost a hot water bottle to a canal, lied about water temperature, and made a bad joke at a rigger. And it was only Tuesday. I put the second paddle, which I found behind the shed exactly where two nails held it apart like lovers kept separate for their own good, into the canoe. Then I went back inside to check the bottle for leaks.

The roses were doing fine, in case you wondered. They needed no help from me. Nothing in that garden did, really. It was just me and my pride, and my pride had a hole in it about the size of a hot water bottle.

I woke up the next morning with a crick in my neck, which felt like an insult. Fifteen years of catching falling acrobats and the house sitter gets the bad neck. I filled the main bottle with properly not-boiling water, did the leak check Dirk described, squeezing it over the sink as if defusing a rubber grenade. One small drop at the seam. Then nothing. I counted it as a win.

The rest of Wednesday went fine. I took the canoe out with two paddles and both hands, and I only hit one branch. Progress.

Thursday I got cocky, and Friday is when it all fell apart again.

I had a run planned for the afternoon. The pond past the trees was supposed to open up at the far end, and I wanted to see it. I got my wish. I also got a wind that came up out of nowhere, the kind that funnels down a canal like it has somewhere to be, and it pinned me against the far bank in the reeds. I pushed off. The canoe spun. I pushed off again. The canoe spun the other way. At some point, and I want to stress I don't remember deciding this, I ended up standing in two feet of water holding a paddle, watching the canoe drift away without me like it had better plans.

I caught it. Eventually. I hauled it back up the bank, bailed it out, and stood there soaked to the underwear in June air that had turned suddenly cool, and thought, well. At least the bottle was safe in the shed.

That's when I smelled smoke.