Loon Lake (27 page)

Everyone is out the printers and milk-wagon drivers butchers and laundry workers hotel porters store clerks and seamstresses newsboys and electricians and bakers and cooks steam fitters and barbers all under the management of the central labor council and it is a very well organized show Warren stands in the streets some trucks are running with signs under the authority of the strike committee and the milk gets to the babies and the lights stay on in the hospitals and the linen is picked up the food cold storage continues to hum and the water from the waterworks and the garbage trucks exempt by the strike committee continue to pick up the wet garbage but not the ashes and the watchmen continue to guard the fences and the mayor confers with the strike committee and
not a shot is fired not a fist flies not a harsh word they even have their own cops war veterans big men standing with armbands the Labor War Veteran Guard to keep the strike out of the streets, to break up crowds, keep the soldiers and cops from finding excuses to make trouble they can’t machine-gun air they tell Warren move on brother keep your temper enjoy your vacation and by the third day the provision trades are feeding thirty thousand men in their neighborhood kitchen and the nonprofit stores are springing up everywhere not even the union newspaper is allowed to print for fear of unfair competition to the struck big papers Warren is thrilled the city is being run by workingpeople it is that simple they are learning the management techniques it started with the shipyard strike and now it is Revolution pure and simple says Warren’s landlady big woman large jaw blue eyes taller than he wiping red hands on her apron the Bolsheviks are in Seattle they’re here just like in Russia, they are a plague like the flu it spreads like the flu they ought to be taken out and shot I’ve worked hard all my life and never asked favors nor expected them and that’s why I’m free and beholden to no one Warren tries to explain that’s the same thing he’s seen the feeling beholden to no one independent men of their own fate and also the incredible tangible emotion of solidarity key word no abstract idealization but an actual feeling I had it too in the signal battalion the way we looked after each other and were in it together an outfit many men one outfit and I swear Mrs. Farmer that has got to be a good thing when you feel it not necessarily the woman said the Huns felt the same feelings I’ll bet and took care of each other in their trenches and that don’t make me love them anymore they sank ships with babies in them she is in her way a well-entrenched opponent and as always Warren thinks about this point of view to which he is opposed to find the merit in it and test it against his deepest suppositions they are having a good time at the kitchen table she likes him he talks well and is a gentleman and a veteran and pays in advance every two weeks look Mr. Penfield supposing they came in here and told me how to run my house and when to clean the stairs and when to change the sheets and what church to go to and how to teach my children at this moment one of them runs in a remarkable five-year-old little girl broad smooth brow wideset huge light eyes thick hair natural grace dirty knees little socks
drooping wild little thing stands between the great-legged mother stares at the boarder with head tilted light in eye clear recognition of his total flawed being what’s that Mr. Penfield the great granite mother how could she produce this wisp this unmistakable deity she is scratching the inside of her thigh now with the heel of her shoe a ballet dirty white underdrawers he says inspired well Mrs. Farmer I’ll tell you now not hesitant confident fearless of opposing opinion nobody knows what human nature is in the raw it’s never been seen on this earth even Robinson Crusoe came from something even Friday and so it seems to me the Huns like us shoot if you give them guns and enemies but love if you will give them friendship and a common goal come down with me and walk among these men and see their spirits change because they’re not under someone’s heel you take away men’s fear and be surprised how decent they can be you don’t make them climb over each other for their sustenance give them their dignity and the right to run their lives you release the genius of the race in the forms of art and love and Christian brotherhood. Oh Mr. Penfield you’re a good gentle man I’m afraid you don’t know the ways of the world very well I have some leftover pie here let me make a pot of tea go along and play honey the child doesn’t move she is cleaning her lips with her tongue like a cat arms resting indolently on her mother’s skirted thighs outside the kitchen curtain the green rain makes its soft hiss it is Warren who runs along in a flurry of stumbling knocking over the kitchen chair proving his lack of ease in the ways of the world she looks after him shaking her great jawed head sweet dupe he goes to his room grabs books passport razor the child runs upstairs to the hall-landing window looks out at Warren Penfield hurrying downhill he sees turns his head back sees her the power of her eyes like a jolt to his heart his face is wet the rain like her tonguelicks it is this more than anything which sends him back to the docks in torment in scorn the woman is right I am a fool if this strike goes on the committee who runs things will be as bad as dictators everything’ll be the same only with different names do these men on strike absolve themselves of personal private insensitivity in bed in kitchen do they know how to deal with their own children or parents refrain from gossip and all the heavy baggage of personal private evils vanity lust self-abuse the things in Latin the dreams it was she God what are you doing she is come
back in impossible form God what are you doing I am haunted hounded you torment me with the little I have to live for God what are you doing a basso horn from the sound another from the harbor white smoke like Morse code from the stacks of the ships berthed along the streets what is going on pardon me a small Japanese turns what is all the horn-blowing he scintillating merry-unsmiling we go now he says
stoorock ober
What? Impatient Japanese shouts to clarify to this white fool
stoorock ober! stoorock ober!
runs off from the hills of the city church bells car toots the distant shouts of men who have been men sounding like the gentle rain the Japanese runs up a gangplank one bulb hung from the prow throwing a dazzling green halo of rain over Warren’s eyes the
stoorock
is
ober
Warren goes aboard the
Yokohama Trader
books passage God what are you doing

“Y
ou’ve got the wrong man,” I said. The chief smiled. He wore his hexagonal blue cap now with the raised gold embroidery on the peak. He wore his tunic. He was sitting here for revelation, he had brought in a stenographer, more cops, and an older man in plain clothes.

I said, “The F. W. Bennett Company employs an industrial espionage agency to find out what’s going on in their plants. The name of the agency is Crapo Industrial Services. Maybe you don’t know this but I think you do. They put spies on the line and if possible in the unions themselves.”

“Let’s not waste time,” the chief said.

“Red James was one of these spies. He came here two, three years ago just as the union began to organize the men. He got to be an officer of the local. He was secretary, he took minutes, he kept records, he made reports to his employer Crapo Industrial Services.”

The chief turned to the stenographer, a gray-haired woman with a mole on her chin. She closed her book. I might be setting up to finger the union but I was talking funny. True! I had found a voice to give authority to the claim I was making—without knowing what that claim would be, I
had found the voice for it, I listened myself to the performance as it went on. These fucking rubes!

“The union scheduled a strike just after the new year,” I said. “The idea, see, was that if the trim line was shut down, eventually every other Bennett plant would have to shut down too because Number Six makes all the trim. So it was a big strategy of theirs and Red reported this. Right away there are layoffs, half the machines are dismantled and shipped to another plant, and the strike is up the creek.”

“And that’s why the union goons killed him,” the chief said, looking at the plain-clothes man.

“But it wasn’t them,” I said. “It
looked
like it should be, I myself thought for a moment it was, let me tell you, Chief, you don’t look for complications when your head’s getting beat in. Does anyone have a Lucky?”

Where was this coming from? I had learned the basics from my dead friend Lyle James. But the art of it from Mr. Penfield, yes, the hero of his own narration with life and sun and stars and universe concentrically disposed on the locus of his tongue—pure Penfield.

“I’ll try to make this as clear as I can,” I said, taking a deep drag on my cigarette and nodding thanks to the cop with a match. “I know by sight every officeholder in the local, and every national big shot who’s been in town since October. I know by sight most of the members—and this will surprise you but there aren’t that many, considering the size of the work force at Number Six. But there are people who wear the same clothes and talk the same talk who don’t work on the line and never will. And they are the ones who jumped us.”

The police chief had risen. “You better know what you’re doing, son.”

“I made them for a traveling band, one of Crapo’s industrial services,” I said. “And that’s who they were. If you really want Red James’s killers, it’s very simple. Speak to Mr. Thomas Crapo, president. You can reach him in the phone book—unless he’s on his honeymoon.”

The man in plain clothes stepped forward. It was clear to me now he was not in the department at all. He was dressed in a pin-stripe suit with a vest and a high collar and a stickpin in his tie. He had thin graying hair, and had the prim mouth of a town elder or business executive. To this
day I don’t know who he was—a manager of Number Six, a town councilman, but anyway, not a cop. I knew I could work him.

“What is it you’re trying to say, young man?”

“I’ll spell it out for you, sir. The agency murdered its own operative.”

“That’s a most serious charge.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It certainly is. But we’re in a war, we’re talking about a war here, and anything’s possible. Once the company moved the machines, Red’s days were numbered. The union found him out. That made him no longer of any use to Crapo, in fact he was worse than no use, he was a real danger.”

“What?”

“He was an angry man. They’d left him to the dogs. He knew probably as much about Crapo as he knew about the local. He wasn’t just your average fink who’s been hooked for a few dollars and doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Red was a professional, an industrial detective, and he worked for Crapo in steel, he worked in coal, he’d done a lot of jobs and this particular assignment was very crucial and only the most experienced man could be trusted with it.”

The police chief shook his head. He motioned to the stenographer to leave the room. He stood quite still and watched her close the door behind her. He turned to me he understood the reckless suicidal thing I was doing.

“But as I say, if you read your history of the trenches, the front lines at Belleau Wood, the Argonne, and so on, you find more than once the practice of sending out the patrol either to rescue or to kill their own man who has been captured—so that he doesn’t give them away. War is war, other lives are at stake and war is war.”

“I was with the Marines at Belleau Wood,” the man in the business suit said. “I know of no such story.”

“It was the British who did it,” I said quickly. “I disremember the place and time, but it wasn’t the Americans, it was the British and the French, and of course the Huns they did that all the time. But you don’t have to believe it. Look at the chief here. First thing he thinks, a Crapo man is killed, it’s the union who killed him. Why not, who would think different! And if he can make that case, if Crapo can trick him into making it, look
what he’s accomplished. He’s set the union back twenty years. They’re no union anymore, they’re hoods and killers, nobody wants them, no working stiff wants comrades like that, not even Roosevelt wants that. Why, that in itself is enough to make it worthwhile—just to get the union defending itself from charges, just putting suspicion in people’s minds—that’s worth one op’s life, I can tell you.”

“All right, son,” the chief said, coming around to the front of the desk.

“I know my rights,” I said. “You are all witnesses. I’m telling you the truth as I know it, it’s out now, it’s out in this room and will be on every wire service in the country if you got any ideas of changing my testimony.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” said the man in the business suit.

“This boy lies,” the chief said. “He lied before and he’s lying now. He’s a punk from New Jersey who we found with a gun and the widow’s insurance money in his kick. He’s making this all up.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I made up Tommy Crapo and I made up Crapo Industrial Services, didn’t I? Or did I get it from the newspaper? That must be it, they must advertise in the newspaper. I can give you Red James’ op number, the one he put on his reports, but that’ll be made up too. I can give you the Illinois plate number of a cream-colored La Salle coupe with white sidewalls, but that’s made up too. It’s all made up. Buster is made up too, he doesn’t exist.”

“Who is Buster?”

“Buster who got Mrs. James to waive her rights for two hundred and fifty Industrial Services’ dollars. Oh listen, mister, why doesn’t anyone ask the right questions around here? Look at this, a roomful of ace detectives and not one of them thinks to ask how I know so much, how I knew Lyle James, how I got to be his friend, what I’m doing in this lousy town. Is it an accident? Do you think I like going around getting my arm broken and stitches taken in my face? Do you think I do this for laughs?”

An amazing current, a manic surge, I couldn’t stop talking, listen Clara, listen! “I wonder at the human IQ when professionals cannot see through disguises. But if I was wearing a regular suit like this gentleman, if I was wearing my own suit and tie and my face was washed and my hair combed, then you would listen, oh yes. And if I told you Lyle Red James was not
just an operative for Crapo but a double operative, that he really worked for the union, that they made him not two weeks after he came to this town, because you know, don’t you, he was not much good, he was a fool, a hillbilly, a rube, I mean they saw him coming! And they made him, and showed him how if he kept working and nobody the wiser, he’d get not only his pay envelope from Bennett and not only his salary from Crapo but his payoff from the union’s cash box! Why, this strike at Number Six was a decoy! They never intended to strike Jacksontown, that was to send the company on a wild-goose chase shipping its damn machines every which way. Oh yes, gentlemen, when that strike comes, and it is coming, the birds will be singing in Jacksontown, it will be a peaceful day at Number Six and you won’t know a thing till you hear it on the radio.”