Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  But it was here I also learned about California. In California you could eat the oranges off the trees, along the seaside boulevards the avocados fell when they were ripe and you found them everywhere and peeled them and you ate them on the seaside boulevards. When you were sleepy you slept on the sand and when you were hot you went wading in the warm Pacific surf and the waves lit up at night off the shore with their own light. And off beyond the waves was a gambling ship.

  I decided to go to California.

  Armed only with his unpronounceable last name, he went down to the freight yards to begin his journey. He confuses this now in his mind with the West Side slaughtering plant such atomized extract of organic essence, such a perfumery of disembowelment, that in the fetid blood spumed viscera mist above the yards helplessly flew flights of gulls schools of pigeons moths bats insect plagues all swirling round and round in a great squawking endlessly ejaculative anguish.

  I found a door that slid open, got it wide enough to slip through, climbed in, pulled the door almost shut behind me stood in the darkness breathing triumph. The car lurches again, almost stops, begins to roll, I was thrown into something that moved. I look around my private car my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness, soot and pungent cinder begins to flow through the boards, that railroad tang, my eyes see all around the perimeter of my private car a cargo of youths. We are the shipped manufacture of this nation there must have been thirty or forty of us in that car gradually my eyes made out fifty sixty sitting on the floor by the dawn in eastern Pennsylvania at a siding in the chill frosted morning a hundred of us jumped and ran when the bulls came shouting ahead from the engine. Later alone in the tall weeds of another crossing a toot and leisurely around the bend bell-clanging another stately red ball my chance I make for it all around me from the weeds a thousand like me leap I thought I was alone.

  I let it go. All my gaunt brothers in my own rags carrying my roped valise hopped the freight. I watched it go. I put up my collar pulled my cap down on my head stuck my hands in my pockets and headed north up the road.

  Come with me

  Compute with me

  Computerized she prints out me

  Commingling with me she becomes me

  Coming she is coming is she

  Coming she is a comrade of mine

  Comrades come all over comrades

  Communists come upon communists

  Hi. Hi.

  We are here to complete our fusion

  We are here to create confusion

  Do you confuse coming with confession?

  Do you fuel for nuclear compression?

  I’m for funicular ascension.

  Decline all word temptation

  Define all worldly tension

  Deride all prayerful intervention

  Computer nukes come pray with me

  Before the war, the war, after the war

  Before the war the war after the war the war before the war

  Disestablishes human character.

  Computer data composes World War One poet

  Warren Penfield born Indianapolis Indiana

  City of Indians in the Plains Wars after the peace

  City of Indians going about their business

  Indian poets in headbands walking on grid streets

  Secure in their city of Indian architecture of cool concrete

  Bernard Cornfield Investors Overseas Securities

  Data linkage escape this is not emergency

  Before the war before the last war

  A boy stood on the dirt street in Ludlow Colorado.

  The wind of the plain blew the coal dust under his eyelids

  The wind blew the black dust down the canyons of the Sangre de

  Cristo. The clothesline stretching across the plain

  The miner’s cotton swung its arms and legs wildly in the wind.

  A miner’s wife stepped from a tent with an infant girl

  suspended from her hands. She held the child beyond

  the edge of the wood sidewalk over the dirt the dust blowing

  back along the ground like hordes of microscopiccreatures running.

  The infant’s girl’s dress raised under her arms

  she hung from her knees and underarms

  so as to have her hairless child’s fruit expressed

  for the purpose indicated by the mother’s sibilant sound effects

  punctuated with foreign words of encouragement.

  The boy standing there happening to be there remained to watch

  shamelessly and the beautiful little girl turned upon him a face

  of such outrage that he immediately recognized her

  willing white neck companion of the old monk it’s you

  and with then saintly inability to withstand life she closed

  her eyes and allowed the thin stream of golden water to cascade

  into the dust where instantly formed minuscule tulips

  he beheld the fruition of a small fertile universe.

  When the nights were bad, when the uncanny sounds in the woods kept him awake, when the crack of a twig in the pine forest was inexplicable or some distant whimpering creature sounded in his mind like a child being fucked he swore it was still better than going with the red ball. Whowhoo. Better to take alone whatever came. Soft web of night threads across the face. Something watching breathing in the dark a few feet away. He had heard of people having a foot cut off for the dollar in their shoe. It was still better. It was still better to take alone whatever came. Better to die in the open. Whowhoo. Lying in a city mission flop in the great stink of mankind was worse. Arraigned in the ranks of the self-deluding in their bunkbeds was worse.

  It was the bums of the commonest conversation who angered him the most, the casuists of misfortune who bragged about the labels inside their torn filthy coats, or swore there was some brand of alcohol they wouldn’t be so low as to drink. Or the ones who claimed to be only temporarily down on their luck, en route to some glorious destination not where they had a job waiting or a family, but where they were known, where what they were did not have to be proved.

  I didn’t want these mockeries to my own kingship of consciousness, with all the conquests of my life still to come. How could I hope or scheme however idly in a flophouse with a hundred others, a thousand others, a hundred thousand others where the dreams rise on the breath and dissolve one another in a precipitate element not your own—and you are trapped in it, a dark underwater kingdom fed by springs of alcoholic piss and sweat, in which there live and swim the vilest phantoms of God.

  And strangely enough each morning I woke up still alive. In the lake villages and the small towns of old mills, I was moved along by the constable but a shade more gently. I didn’t feel like a tramp when I asked for work. I even had a certain distinction. We were like birds or insects, pestilential, when we buzzed or flocked in great numbers, but one sole specimen could be tolerated with a certain scientific interest. Sometimes I washed dishes for a meal. Sometimes I stole my food. Sometimes I found a day’s work at some farm.

  Then in one town, walking down the main street in a manner that suggested I had someplace to go, I saw coming out of the drugstore three midgets and a heavyset dwarf who huddled over them like their father. They took their quick little steps down the street, all talking at the same time, the muscular torso of the dwarf jolting from side to side with each step. I followed them. Even when they noticed me following them I followed them. They led me to the edge of town. In a grass lot between two stands of trees was the Hearn Bros. carnival, a traveling show of tattered brown tents, old trucks, kiddy rides and paint-peeled wagons. I heard the growl of a big cat.

  Ah, what I felt standing there in the sun! A broken-down carnival—a few acts, a few rides and a contingent of freaks. But the sight of it made me a boy again. I was going backward. Those ridiculous bickering midgets had called up my love for tiny things, my great unslaked child’s thirst for tiny things, as if I had never held enough
toys that were small to my small hand. Holy shit a carnival! I knew it was for me as sure as I knew my own face in the mirror.

  I hung around. I made myself useful. They were still putting it together. I helped lay the wooden track for the kiddy cars. I heaved-ho the tent ropes, I set the corral poles for the pony ride. There were three or four tired stiffs doing these things. I recognized them for what they were, everyone of them had a pint of wine in his pocket, they were no problem at all. I thought the Hearn Bros. were lucky to have me.

  But nothing happened. Nobody paid attention. At dusk the generator was cranked, and the power went on with a thump. The string lights glowed, the Victrola band music came out of the loudspeakers, the Wheel of Fortune went ratatat-tat, and I saw how money was made from the poor. They drifted in, appearing starved and sucked dry, but holding in their palms the nickels and dimes that would give them a view of Wolf Woman, Lizard Man, the Living Oyster, the Fingerling Family and in fact the whole Hearn Bros. bestiary of human virtue and excellence.

  The clear favorite was Fanny the Fat Lady. She sat on a scale that was like a porch swing. Over her head a big red arrow attested to six hundred and eight pounds. Someone doubted that. She responded with an emphatic sigh and the arrow fluctuated wildly, going as high as nine hundred. This made people laugh. She was dressed in a short jumper with a big collar and a bow in her hair, just like Shirley Temple. Her dyed red hair was set in waves over her small skull. The other freaks did routines or sold souvenirs and pamphlets of their life stories. Not the Fat Lady. She only sat and suffered herself to be gazed on, her slathered legs crossed at the ankles. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Finally I caught her attention, and her little painted mouth widened like the wings of a butterfly as if it were basking on some pulpy extragalactic flower. The folds of her chins rising in cups of delicate hue, her blue eyes setting like moons behind her cheeks, she smiled at me and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled, sitting there with each arm resting on the base of a plump hand supported by a knee that was like the cap of an exotic giant white mushroom.

  I realized she was slow-witted. Behind her and off to the side was a woman who was keeping an eye out, maybe a relative, a mother, an aunt. This woman looked at me with the alert eyes of the carney.

  And as I went about I saw those eyes everywhere behind the show, alert carney eyes on the gaunt man with a white shirt and tie and sleeve garters, on the girl in the ticket booth, on the freaks themselves staring out from their enclosures. What were they looking for? Life! A threat! An advantage! I had that look myself. I recognized it, I knew these people.

  But I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. By midnight the crowd had thinned out. The lights were blinked in warning and the generator was turned off. The last of the rubes drifted back into the hills. They held Kewpie dolls. They held pinwheels.

  I saw the acts going into their trailers to find some supper or drink some wine. I sat across the road with my back against a tree. I wanted a job with the carney. It seemed to me the finest possible way to live.

  A while later a truck came along running without headlights and it turned into the dark lot. I sat up. I heard the truck doors slam. A few minutes later an old car and three men got out and walked into the carney. Other men arrived on foot, in jalopies. A few lights had gone back on. I crossed the road. There was some kind of renewed commerce, I didn’t understand. I saw the belly dancer standing in the door of her trailer her arms folded a man at the foot of the steps tipped his cap. I saw the girl who sold tickets outside her booth she was looking into a hand mirror and primping her hair. At the back end of the lot in the shadow of the trees a line of men and boys outside a trailer. I went there and got on the end of the line. A man came out and talked in low tones to the others. I heard something moaning. Another man went in. From the trailer came these sounds of life’s panic, shivers and moans and shrieks and crashings and hoarse cries, the most awesome fuckmusic I had ever heard. I got closer. I hadn’t seen before sitting on a chair at the foot of the trailer steps that same woman attendant from the afternoon who kept a close and watchful eye on the crowd in front of Fanny the Fat Lady.

  I led her from the trailer to the tent in the afternoon and back to her trailer at the end of the night. She placed her hand on my shoulder, and walking behind me at arm’s length with a great quivering resettlement of herself at each step, she made her stately trustful way down the midway.

  Once she hugged me. She was surprisingly gentle I did not share the popular lust for her I was embarrassed and maybe frightened by that mountainous softness I pulled away. Right away I saw I’d made a mistake. Fanny had a cleft palate and on top of that the sounds she made were in Spanish but I could tell her feelings were hurt. I moved to her and let her hug me. She put her warm hand on the small of my back. I thought I felt the touch of an astute intelligence.

  She was truly sensitive to men, she had a real affection for them. She didn’t know she was making money, she never saw the money. She held out her arms and loved them, and it didn’t matter what happened, if they came in the folds of her thighs or the creases in the sides of her which spilled over the structure of her trunk like down quilts, she always screamed as if they had found her true center.

  I decided that between this retarded whore freak and the riffraff who stood in line to fuck her some really important sacrament was taken, some means of continuing with hope, a ritual oath of life which did not wear away but grew in the memory of her around the bars and taverns of the mountains, catching her image in the sawdust flying up through the sunlight in the mill yards or lying like the mist of the morning over the clear lakes.

  On the other hand it was common knowledge in the carney that fat ladies were the biggest draw.

  I got along with all the freaks, I made a point to. It was as if I had to acclimate myself to the worst there was. I never let them see that I had any special awareness of them. I knew it was important not to act like a rube. After a while they stopped looking at me with the carney eyes and forgot I was there. Some, the Living Oyster for instance, were taken care of by members of their families who lived with them and probably got them their jobs in the first place. There was about them all, freaks and family, such competence that you almost wondered how normal people got along. There was a harmony of malformation and life that could only scare the shit out of you if you thought about it. The freaks read the papers and talked about Roosevelt, just like everyone else in the country.

  But with all of that they lived invalid lives, as someone in the pain of constant hopeless bad health, and so their dispositions were seldom sunny.

  The Fingerlings were mean little bastards, they were not really a family but who could tell? They all had these little pug faces. They used to get into fights all the time and only the dwarf could do anything with them. They used to torture Wolf Woman. What she had done to arouse their wrath I never knew. They liked to sneak up on her and pull out tufts of her hair. “That’s all right,” they screamed, scuttling out of her way. “Plenty more where that came from!”

  And every day the rubes paid their money to see them and then went off and took a chance on Fortune’s wheel.

  I had great respect for Sim Hearn. He was the owner of the enterprise. He was pretty strange himself, a tall thin man who walked with a stoop. Even the hottest days of the summer he wore an old gray fedora with the brim pulled way down, and a white-on-white shirt with a black tie and rubber bands around the sleeves above the elbows. He had stick arms. He was always sucking on his teeth, alighting on a particular crevasse with his tongue and then pulling air through it. Cheeup cheeup! If you wanted to know where Hearn was on the lot, all you had to do was listen. Sometimes you’d be doing your work and you’d realize it was you he was watching, the cheeup cheeup just behind your ear, as if he’d landed on your shoulder. You’d turn and there he’d be. He’d point at what he wanted done with his chin. “That,” he’d say. He was a stingy son of a bitch even with his words.

  I was fascinated by him. Sucking
his teeth and never speaking more than he had to gave him an air of preoccupation, as if he had weightier matters on his mind than a fifth-rate carney. But he knew his business, all right. He knew what towns to skip, he knew what games would go in one place but not another, and he knew when it was time to pull up stakes. We were a smooth efficient outfit under Sim Hearn. He’d go on ahead to find the location and make the payoff. And when we drove into town he’d be waiting where we could see him sitting behind the wheel of his Model A with one arm out the window, the rubber band around the shirt sleeve.

  His real genius was in freak dealing. Where did he get them? Could they be ordered? Was there a clearing house for freaks somewhere? There really was—a theatrical agency in New York on lower Broadway. But if he could, Sim Hearn liked to find them himself. People would come up to him and he’d go with them to see what was hidden in the basement or the barn. If he liked what he saw, he named his terms and didn’t have to pay a commission. Maybe he had dreams of finding something so inspiring that he’d make his fortune, like Barnum. But to the afflicted of the countryside, he was a chance in a million. I’d go to work one morning and see some grotesque I hadn’t seen before, not necessarily in costume at show time but definitely with the carney. Sometimes they didn’t want to display themselves in their own neighborhoods. Sometimes Hearn’s particular conviction of their ability was lacking or maybe he hadn’t figured out how best to show them. They required some kind of seasoning, like rookie ballplayers, to give them their competence as professionals. One would be around awhile and disappear just as another would show up, I think they were traded back and forth among the different franchises of this mysterious league.