Loon Lake (21 page)

Someone kicked down a door. “They don’t really wreck a door,” he said. “’At’s just a ordinary vegetable crate they stomp on. Splinters real good.”

A horse-drawn carriage. “Shucks, them’s coconut shells rapped on the table.”

“Hush, Loll,” his wife said. “I cain’t hear!”

After the program was over he lectured on how they made houses burn, typhoons blow, trees come down. He had us close our eyes and did these things up against our ears to get the effect of amplification. He was good, too, insane, I began to realize, once people got through their courtesy it was their madness they shared.

He had heard some
Arabian Nights
drama about a desert chieftain who skinned his victims alive.

“Ah don’t wanna hear this, Loll,” his wife said.

“Hold on, honey—see, Joe, I couldn’t figger it out, Ah thought and
thought, it was the damnedest thing! But I got it now, close your eyes a minute, this’ll turn your hair white.”

I hear a piteous wail, screams, sinister laughter and the unmistakable stripping off of human skin inch by inch. I have to look. Off my left ear he was tearing a piece of adhesive tape down the middle.

No, not exactly my type, I would not under ordinary circumstances choose to associate with Lyle Red James, but I knew when we walked off to work together in the morning Clara would have coffee with his wife, maybe during the day they’d go to the grocery store together I saw the child given from one pair of arms to the other—I would listen to a hundred nights of radio for that.

And at the front gates of the plant every morning a car or two of cops parked there, just happening to be there. Not that I thought they were looking for me but if they were I imagined Red James as my disguise. If the cops were looking at all, it was for a man walking by himself—that was my reasoning. And anyway, what they would have to accomplish to get to this point wasn’t very likely. They would have first of all to locate Mrs. Lucinda Bennett’s car in Dayton, the guy wasn’t that stupid that he wouldn’t paint it. But even if they did, they would know only that they were looking for a wooden station wagon registered to clever Joseph Bennett Jr. But even then, how did that get them to Jacksontown, Indiana? But supposing they were here, they wouldn’t find it anyway, it was parked off the street behind a garage and under a ton of snow. I probably couldn’t find it myself. But supposing they found it, they’d be on the lookout for a hobo boy, a loner walking by himself to work in the morning and not Mr. Joe Paterson loping along step for step with the world’s biggest fucking hayseed.

It always proved out to my satisfaction if I thought about it but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it again each morning going to the punch clocks under the thousand fists like rifle fire we are going into the trenches and over the top in the barrage of time clocks, I always checked my position before I went down there.

I sought disguise, every change in Clara and me a disguise, nobody who knew Clara Lukaćs and was in his right mind would look for her on
Railroad Street. I liked us having neighbors, yes, and living to the life the same as everyone else, living married, looking like an automobile worker’s family for life, appearing to these people next door as mirrors of themselves, shining in their eyes so they couldn’t even describe us after we’d gone.

I remember the way Red James walked. He wasn’t especially tall but he took long stiff-kneed strides, loping along there in the freezing morning while everyone else was hunched up, head bent in the wind, it was something you had to tear to get through, but here was Red, shoulders back, head up out of his collar, the long neck bobbing, and he chattered constantly, made jokes, told stories.

“A smart man’ll put beans in his mule’s feedbag. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Doubles the rate of progress.”

“Come on.”

“’Strue! The fartin moves ’em along. Clocked a mule once sixty miles a hour on a handful of dry beans. Fastern’ ’ese here cars.”

That was the kind of thing. He held out his arms; the snow driving thick like white sheets flapping in your eyes, yelling “Toughen me up, God, usen me up to it!”

And he sang, too, always some damn hillbilly song in that adenoidal tenor of his kind as we went down toward the plant one point of raw color bobbing crowing

Hear the mighty eng-ine
Hear the lonesome hobos squall
… A-goin through the jungle
On the Warbash Cannonball!

And at work I found myself hearing his voice in the machines, in the rhythm of the racket, without even knowing it, doing headlight after headlight, I would sing to myself in Red James’ tenor: keeping time to the pounding racket, I would hear the mighty eng-ine, hear the lonesome hobos squall, a-goin through the jungle, on the Warbash Cannonball.

——

One evening I came out of the gate and somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, no one was there. When I turned back, Red James was grinning at me.

“You comin to the meetin, ain’t ya?”

“What meeting?”

“Union meetin.”

“Well, I’m not a member, Red.”

“I know you ain’t. This is a recruitin meetin, anyone’s got the balls.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I never told Clara I wouldn’t be home.”

“Boy, the little woman sure has a holt a you. She’s with Sandy anyways, you come on with me, they’ll figger it out.”

So I went along with him to this meeting in some decrepit fraternal lodge a few blocks from the plant. It was up a couple of flights, fifty or so men sitting on camp chairs in a badly lighted room. I recognized a few faces from the line, we smiled, catching each other out. I thought, Look, if you’re doing the life, do it. I took a seat in the last row. Red had disappeared. The people running the meeting sat at a table in front of the room. I couldn’t see all of them but they looked like Paterson toughs, they wore buttons or had their union cards stuck in the bands of their hats. I thought as Mr. Bennett was spread out and made into a corporation he may have enlarged, but so did the response, I couldn’t see anyone in his personal service wearing his green putting a union button on their collar.

The meeting began with the pledge of allegiance and then the president rapped the gavel and called on the secretary to read the minutes.

Lyle Red James stood up and cleared his throat. “Herewith the o-fishul minutes a the last meetin,” he said in a most formal manner. “As taken by yo Sec’tary Loll Jimes, Bennett Local Seventeen, union card number three six six oh eight?”

This called up a cheer and a burst of applause from the audience.

“Just read the damn minutes, James,” the president said.

I hadn’t known he was a union official, he had sprung it on me, it was queer, the faintest misgiving, I had thought the deception in our friendship was mine. I tried to think that whole meeting why I was
bothered, I knew he was a damn clown I hadn’t understood I was his audience.

I wanted to talk to Clara about it when I got home. Anyway, she’d be interested to know why I was late—but something else was on her mind entirely.

“Did you know,” she said to me, “Sandy James is all of fifteen years old? Did you know that? She got married at thirteen. Can you beat that? And she does everything, she goes to the store she knows what’s good and what isn’t, she takes care of that kid like royalty, feeds that stupid hick better than he deserves, washes, shops, cleans, Jesus! The only thing I haven’t seen her do is sew the American flag!”

W
hat kind of time was this, a matter of a few weeks, a couple of days, minutes, and this other couple was in us, through us, I couldn’t remember when we hadn’t known them and lived next door.

In the second war we used to jam each other’s radio signals, occupy the frequency, fill it with power.

Clara didn’t think much of Red James but she never said no to one of their invitations, she had fixed on young Sandy, in that way she attached to people who interested her, locking on her with all her senses. I sometimes became jealous, actually jealous, I felt ashamed, stupid it was the diversion I had hoped for, it was just what I had counted on, I jammed myself when I saw the way Clara looked at Sandy, watched every move she made. Worrying about survival was something new to her and she was engaged by it, as by the little baby, the smell of milk and throwup, a bath in a galvanized-tin tub with water made hot on a coal stove, and all the ordinary outcomes of domestic life which presented themselves to her as adventure—how could I feel anything except gratitude! I thought every minute with Sandy James put Clara’s old
life further behind us, I felt each day working for my benefit I was a banker compounding his interest.

In the James kitchen Clara watches Sandy James dry the baby after her bath, the baby in towels on the kitchen table, two lovely heads together and laughing at the small outstretched arms, the gurgling infant, the women laughing with pleasure. I am noticed in the doorway, the heads conspire, the flushed faces, some not quite legible comment between them as they turn and look at me, smiling and giggling in what they know and what I don’t.

I liked Sandy myself, I thought of her as my ally, the chaperone of my love, this child! I found her attractive especially in the occasional surprised look she gave me, as if she were an aspect of Clara and the current of attraction was stepped up by that.

“She was made to have babies,” Clara said to me. “You can’t see how strong she is because she doesn’t know anything about clothes, all her things are too big for her, I don’t know where she got them, but when she doesn’t have anything on you can see how well built she is in the thighs and hips.”

Clara’s attentiveness to his wife did not go unnoticed by Red James, when we were all together he did what he could to affirm the universal order of things. One night he brought out his infant girl from their bedroom. Baby Sandy had no diaper or shirt. He held her up in his hand and said, “Looky here, Joe, you see this little darlin between her legs? You ever see them pitchers of gourami fish in the
National Geographical?
You know, them kissin fish? Ain’t I right? Now I got two of em, two lovin women with poontangs just like that!”

This made Sandy James stare at the floor, her face reddening to the roots of her hair. “Lookit!” he said, laughing. “Colors up like the evenin sun!”

Clara sighed, stubbed out her cigarette and took Sandy and the baby into the other room.

He one night pours two shot glasses of Old Turkey I don’t know what we’re celebrating does he see Clara’s hand touch Sandy’s hair?

He says, “Hey, y’ll see this here little girl, I kin make her do what I want, laugh, cry, anythang, watch.” He begins to laugh, a silly high-pitched
little laugh. Sandy ignores him, he jumps around to get in front of her puts his hand over his mouth, tries to keep from laughing, after a minute of his pyrotechnics she can’t help herself, begins to laugh, protesting too of course,
“Shh, shh
, your gonna wake her Loll,
shhh
, you’re wakin her up!,” but he’s really funny and she is laughing now, a child laughing, and in fact I’m laughing too at the mindlessness of the thing and suddenly he stops, face blank, staring at her puzzled his mouth turns down at the corners a sob comes out of him, he puts his arm up to his eyes, cries pitifully, we know what he is doing so does Sandy but she goes very quiet and asks him quietly to stop, he ignores her, keeps it up, crying to break your heart. “Oh Loll darlin’,” she says, “you know I cain’t tol’rate that,” and then her eyes screw up, her lower lip protrudes, she is reduced, begins bawling, arm up, fist rubbing her eyes, she has a hole in the underarm of her dress, her red hair.

“What I tell you!” Red James says, laughing. “This li’l ole thang, look there she’s a-just cryin her heart out!” and she is, she can’t stop, he goes to her to comfort her maybe a bit sorry now that he’s done this but she’s furious. He tries to put his arms around her, she brings her leg up sharply, knees him in the groin, stalks off. Red James has to sit down, he takes a deep whistling breath.

And that’s when Clara began to laugh.

I
n a great dramatic scrawl, full of flourishes:

To Joe—

Herein all my papers, copies of chapbooks, letters,
pensées
, journals, night thoughts—all that is left of me. Dear Libby is to keep them for your return. And you will return, I have no doubt about it. I have thought a good deal about you. You are what I would want my son to be. More’s the pity. But who can tell, perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.

w.p.

Loon Lake

Oct 24 1937

T
hree little words.
Suree rittu waruz
. The girls had voices like cheap violins and they kept their wavery pitch as the car careened around abrupt corners, horns blasting, peddlers and old monks falling out of the way. It was three o’clock in the morning and the shopkeepers were already unrolling their mats heaving the flimsy boxes of fresh wet seagreens from the beds of trucks pitch-black the Tokyo sky above, Warren looked up as if to pray like a seasick sailor keeping his eye on a fixed point a light in the Oriental heavens channeled by tile roofs the heavens flowing in an orderly manner unlike the progress of the Cord, its headlights flashing the startled faces of the poor Japanese street class taking their morning fish soup hunkering beside small fires in metal drums. White-gowned attendants at the Shinto shrines sprinkled the cobblestoned courts with handfuls of water.
Suree rittu waruz
.

The car braked to a halt and Warren and the ladies pitched forward over each other hysteric laughter they all climbed down where are we he said and they led him triumphantly to the next bistro of the infinite night this one a
mirikubawa
. A what? Warren kept saying as they were led in
through the smoke up on the platform three black musicians were playing
jazzu
and a waitress got to the little table almost before they sat down and they all watched the expression on Warren’s face as the drinks were ordered and then the rollicking hysterico laughter as he tasted the white substance in the sake cup
mirik
it was milk this was a milk bar and their civilization had triumphed again in producing for the American their friend the one substance they never drank and were astonished that anyone could, cow’s milk, the very sort of thing that made the Westerners smell that characteristic way from their consumption from birth of the squirted churned curded and boiled issue
issyouee
of the ridiculous cow. They did not like the smell of course and only one
garu
from whom he learned the
Chiara-stun
and what merriment that was that they had to teach him his dance, a bold brown-eyed bow-legged thing with her bobbed hair and low-waisted dress pleated to flare out above the knees had the nerve in the intimacy of his room one dawn to hold her fingers squeezing her own nostrils while he fucked her looking down over the upraised knees upon which he rested his bulk she was lying there holding her nose and squeezing her eyes shut but making the sounds of pleasure too how odd and later he said do I smell so bad do I need to bathe no no she said with
moga
merriment you can never washu away you it is
ura smerr
, you
smena butta
Penfield-san a
whore tubba butta