Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  The man who’d been helping came out, lit a cigarette and went off along the trail. I moved to the hangar itself, staying out of sight of the doorway. I leaned my back to the wall.

  “You have a good nature,” I heard Mrs. Bennett say.

  “Oh my dear!”

  “Would you like to go on a flight? Probably not. But a really long flight. Just the two of us. Would you consider it?”

  “What? Where?”

  “I don’t know. The Far East. Shall we do that? Fly across the Pacific.”

  “The Far East?”

  “Yes, pooh bear. A long flight. You and I. Oh, that’s a good idea! Who knows what might happen.” She burst out laughing. “Warren, if you could see the expression on your face! The dismay!”

  “Lucinda, what—How is it possible? Am I misunderstood?”

  “Oh, foolish thing—I don’t mean that! Good God!” She was merry now. “It’s a practice made too thoroughly disreputable by its devotees, don’t you think?”

  That evening the four of them met for dinner. I stood on the terrace just out of the light cast through the windows and I watched them at their drinks. A fire blazed in the huge fireplace. Mounted prey gazed down at them. Clara was wearing a gown of sequined silver. She looked cheap. She sat staring at the floor, cowed, maybe even stunned into silence, by the nuances of civilization in that room. The gentlemen wore black tie, in which Mr. Penfield managed to look as rumpled and ill-prepared for life as ever. With his characteristic expression of appeal for love and understanding he glanced habitually at the others, but especially Clara. Lucinda Bennett smiled faintly and kept up her end of the conversation. Only F. W. Bennett seemed to be enjoying himself. He became so animated he stood up to deliver his sentences. He went to a table behind the leather sofa and held up a large flat book opened, and resting on his arm, and he read from it and laughed and looked at the others for their reaction.

  I went through the woods to Clara’s cabin and found her luggage standing just inside the front door. There were three bags and a hatbox. I got all of them under my arms or hanging from my hands, and struggled up the hill to the garage on the far side of the tennis court. This was the old Loon Lake stable. It housed five cars. In the last stall was Mrs. Bennett’s car, a rarely used gray two-door Mercedes-Benz with a canvas top and spare tires in the front fender wells. I looked for the ignition key where Mr. Penfield had told me to—in the bud vase on the right-hand side in the back. Yes. I packed the bags in the trunk, which was not large, and put the hatbox in the back seat. I turned on the map light and by its glow learned the European-style shifting. There were four gears, and a diagram of their positions was imprinted on the mother-of-pearl knob of the floor shift. The dust on the seat cracked under me. I flicked at it with a chamois cloth. The odometer showed less than ten thousand miles. Then I saw it was not even miles, it was kilometers. Lucinda Bennett had told Mr. Penfield it was a 1933 model. Clearly, her interest in machines did not include cars. The license plate was up to date, however.

  I swung open the doors as quietly as I could and got in and started the engine. I backed out. It was a noisy car—I later found it was only forty horsepower—and I drove it the few yards to the gas pump shushing it as if it were a baby. I filled it with Mr. Bennett’s personal ethyl and then I gave each tire a shot of his air. I was wearing his knickers and argyle sweater and brown-and-white saddle shoes. I tried not to get them dirty.

  I was ready to go. I waited behind the wheel. It was a snug little car. The seats were gray leather. The doors opened front to back. I went over some road maps. I sat there and got the feeling of the car and worried about driving it well, and wondered where to go and what I would say to Clara Lukaćs and what she would say to me. I worried that people seeing me behind the wheel would think I was rich. I didn’t once reflect on the lately peculiar conforming of life to my desires. I didn’t think of Lucinda Bennett’s generosity or despair, or Mr. Penfield’s, nor even reach the most obvious conclusion; that I was leaving Loon Lake in somewhat better condition than I had come. Calculating, heedless, and without gratitude, I accepted every circumstance that had put me there, only gunning my mind to the future, wanting more, expecting more, too intent on what was ahead to sit back and give thanks or to laugh or to feel bad.

  I peered through the windshield. I watched the trees shaking in the night wind. I unlatched the canvas top and pushed it back a bit and looked at the stars, which seemed to shimmer and blur as if the wind were blowing through them.

  Eventually she got there, hurrying along with Mr. Penfield holding her arm, while she held her gown off the ground to keep from tripping. She wore a fur jacket over the gown. He opened the door, but before she could slide in, he grabbed her and hugged her and started to gabble something. I saw all this with their heads cut off. I saw her push him away. “War-rin, please!” she said.

  Then she was in the car beside me, in an atmosphere of fur and cold air, and she slammed the door. Penfield peered in, then ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side. I started the engine and threw the toggle switch for the headlights. I adjusted the throttle. I rolled down my window and he thrust something in my hand, a wad of bills. “I wish it was more,” he said. He gave us advice of many kinds, cheerful assurances, warnings about the road, the weather, appeals to keep in touch, phone numbers on bits of paper, promises, vows, thrown kisses—and to this fitful love song I put the car into first, and off we lurched down the road.

  We were taking what was called the back road, away from the main house; there was a sudden bend, and Mr. Penfield, waving in the night in his black tie, veered out of my rear view.

  I leaned forward, attentive to the clutching, and gradually, as we made our way bumping and sliding over this gravelly unpaved circuit through the Bennett preserve, I got the hang of it. We drove for quite a while. I glanced at her. In the glow of the dashboard I saw her young face.

  I think now of that long drive down through the forest to the state road, dogs appearing from nowhere to gallop yelping alongside, their breath sounding metallic, like the engine; and disappearing just as suddenly, then again one or two of them, then for a mile a beating pack; and she saying nothing, only holding the leather strap by her window, looking out to the side, to the front, her eyes following them tracking them, the youth of her illuminated in the low light. Finally we outdistanced them all.

  She sat back in her seat. She took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it.

  “What do you think he’ll do when he finds you gone?” I said.

  “An interesting question,” she said.

  And so we descended from Loon Lake, Clara’s clear eyes fixed on the farthest probe of the headlights, and I looking at her every other moment, in her composure of total attention, going with the ride.

  Every morning she swept the dirt path outside the monastery wall. She always wore the same thing, a simple kimono and those wooden slippers, you know? She was fifteen or sixteen years old but her hair was cut in the bowl cut of young children. Hair as black as night. She never smiled, but when she glanced at me there was such a flash of recognition from my soul that I went weak with joy.

  Oh, Warren.

  I used to wake up before dawn and do my chores and manage always to be at the gate when the sun rose and she came to do hers. She was the daughter of some working family down the street. They sweep the streets there with straw brooms. The unpaved streets. They sweep the dirt, compose it. They compose everything, they pick the fallen leaves one at a time.

  How did you get to her?

  I wish you wouldn’t phrase it that way, Lucinda. We knew each other on sight. We had to. My Japanese was less than rudimentary. Her English nonexistent. Only the upper classes studied English. It was a great social distinction to know English. A workman’s daughter couldn’t aspire to that.

  Light me a cigarette, will you?

  I have in my life just three times seen a face in dark light, at dusk or dawn or against a white pillow, in which there i
s a recognizably perfect perception of the world, some matched reflection of the world in her eye’s light as terrifying and beautiful in equal measure. Am I coherent?

  A moral light? Is that what you mean?

  She lives through her fear to her curiosity, there is a stillness of apprehension, like an animal’s stillness of perfect apprehension of its predator, and it is gallantry to break the heart.

  I wish we had known each other when we were young.

  Her father and several uncles made up a delegation to complain about my conduct to the monastery officials, who of course did not have to be told. I had broken every rule in the book. At the moment both sides gathered to come down on us we slipped away together and took the train to Tokyo. We found a room.

  Is this when you became lovers?

  I suppose so. I thought I could support us by teaching American customs and manners to Japanese businessmen. They wanted that. They were studying us intently. They listened to jazz and danced the Charleston. You’re not crying, are you?

  It makes me sad. I know what happened.

  I left the house one morning. I had an appointment to see someone at the U.S. embassy. It was a Saturday, the first day in September, 1923. As I walked down the street, I lost my balance but suddenly people everywhere were screaming. The streets were cracking open. I ran back, the city was falling down everywhere, I climbed over rubble, I saw her coming after me with her arms raised, the cobblestones heaved, the street broke open, it filled with water, I reached her and grabbed her hand just as the earth sank away and she fell in, she fell from my hands and where the earth had been there was a steaming lake. What is that up ahead, Lucinda? It looks very dark.

  It’s nothing. A line squall.

  The nights seemed to race by. The weather got colder. The freaks got nastier. We came one day to a town less promising than any I’d seen. It was shut down and boarded. One tavern and one store were open. I don’t remember the name of this town, it was like a tree with just a branch or two still alive.

  In a lot beside the boarded-up railroad depot Sim Hearn gave the signal and the carney put up for business. In the evening we turned on the lights and a few mountain people straggled in but most of the time the freaks talked to each other because nothing else was doing. The rides went around empty. I thought Sim Hearn had lost his marbles.

  The next night the same thing, the wind blew through the booths and rattled the tent flaps, they sounded like over the mountains somewhere there was some gang war of Tommy guns going on.

  I thought Sim Hearn was telling us the season was over by enacting the news. The cook built a fire on the ground and heated an ash can of water. He scrubbed his pots and pans with brown soap. Other people were packing. Mrs. Hearn grabbed my arm and we stepped behind a wagon.

  “Hearn goes no farther,” she said. “Look, a sweater I have for you so you wouldn’t be cold.”

  She was a pain in the ass with her presents. She brought me cigarettes, oranges, she washed my clothes, all in secret of course. Nobody knew about it except the whole carney.

  It chilled me to think Sim Hearn might know it. But his distance from me was unchanged and his peculiar authority maintained itself in my mind. It was as if no matter what I did to his wife I could never break through that supreme indifference. I decided no man was that godlike. I decided he didn’t know. I wished he did know. Then I wouldn’t be some nameless creature so low as to be beneath his line of vision.

  The next morning we struck everything but the show tent. We raised the wood shutters on the wagons and nailed them shut. We pushed the wagons into an old car barn across the tracks from the depot. After lunch a few people left with their bags or bundles. Nobody said so long or even looked at anyone else. I think I was shocked. Despite all my other feelings about the carney, I could believe it was a privilege to be attached to it. It angered me that people would walk away as if Hearn Bros. had no more distinction than a mission flop.

  On the other hand, why should it be different? Sim Hearn couldn’t care less if any one of them lived or died and they knew that. He was going to take the trucks down to Florida for the winter and let them get down there on their own. If they showed up, he’d hire them; if they didn’t, that was all right too.

  Fanny the Fat Lady’s wagon was in place and hadn’t been moved. I saw Mrs. Hearn coming out of her trailer. “Fanny wheezes like calliope,” she said.

  “Well, why doesn’t someone get a doctor?”

  She put her hand on my cheek and looked in my eyes. “I worry to think someday if we are not together what will happen to you.”

  Several of the freaks were leaving in a group. I was told to take a truck and drive them about fifteen miles to a town called Chester, where there was a spur line to Albany. It was the afternoon, already getting dark. In the cab with me sat the woman who took care of Fanny. The whole ride she wept and blew her nose. She spoke to herself in Spanish as if her running stream of thoughts and sorrows came up over the banks every now and then. She thought I wasn’t looking when she lifted her skirt and fingered the metal clip of her garter to make sure it was fastened properly. I saw tucked in the top of her stocking a wad of bills that looked like a lot of money.

  I let off the truckload of freaks and their keepers in Chester, New York, and they hopped, climbed or were lowered from the tailgate. They went limping and scuttling into the waiting room carrying their bags like anyone. Why not? They were mostly immigrants, after all—the same people but with a twist who worked for pennies in the sawmills or stood on the bread lines. But I imagined the Stationmaster seeing through his grill this company of freaks in ordinary streetclothes approaching him with questions of schedule and tickets.

  Why didn’t I get on the train with them? Did I really want to drive a truck to Florida? Did I want to bang Mrs. Magda Hearn in more states of the Union?

  I thought of the freaks as pilgrims or revolutionaries of some angry religion nobody knew anything about yet.

  When I got back it was already dark. I could tell something was wrong, there were lots of cars there and wagon teams. I cut the engine and stood on the running board. Beyond the lot was a hill that rose steeply, blacker than the sky, I could see its outline against the blue-black space of sky behind it. I thought I heard a scream. I listened—it was something else, a drumming of the earth or the sound of a rug being beaten. I walked toward the show tent, there was the dimmest light in there. A man stepped out of the shadow and put his hand on my arm. A flashlight shone in my eyes. “Who’s this?” a voice said.

  And then I heard Magda Hearn. “It’s all right. He’s with the show.”

  My arm was still held and I could feel the consideration of this intelligence in the mind behind the light. The flashlight went off. I made out the figure of a state trooper, blocked hat and gun and Sam Browne belt. Then my arm was released, the marks of the fingers still on me, like the afterimage on the eye.

  Magda Hearn was walking me toward the show tent. “Joe,” she said, “I want you to see, to understand. And I wait for you in the car. Do you hear me?”

  “What’s going on?” I said. “What are the police doing here?”

  “Joe, please to listen.” She was whispering in my ear and in each cycle of her crippled gait, the sibilance rose and fell in waves of urgency.

  Then I passed through the flaps.

  The show tent had a few rows of wooden bleachers and a small ring where the ponies could run around and the bareback sisters, if they were so inclined, could do their turns. A cat act had been featured here for a while.

  The bleachers were empty. One bulb burned from the tent pole. Eighty, maybe a hundred men stood in a circle in the dirt of the ring. I couldn’t see over their backs but I heard the not unfamiliar night music, the grunts and gurgling moans and squeals of Fanny the Fat Lady. As the rhythm got faster the crowd shouted encouragement. Then I heard that peculiar basso thumping as if the earth itself was being drummed. Then an abrupt silence and the hoarse male roar of expiration. Whi
stles and cheers came from the crowd, men turned outward, I saw them drinking from bottles, exchanging money. Staggering through the ring, buttoning his pants, was a grifter I recognized. He sank down on his knees beside me, removed a flask from his back pocket and took a long pull.

  Some sort of hot shame rose from the roots of my sex into my stomach and chest: it felt like illness. I pushed forward and saw Fanny on her back, arms and legs flung outward. She was naked. She lay twitching, each spasm jerking her flesh into ripples. She wheezed and fought for breath. The sweated slathered flesh was caked in dirt, but with white crevasses in the folds of her and a red blotch in the middle. I was pushed aside and spun around. A moment later another lover had fallen on her. The crowd yelled and jammed up around me. She was quickly brought to pitch, her great back rising and thumping into the earth, but this one didn’t last long, and to great merry raucous hoots and jeers he stumbled out of the ring.

  Almost immediately another rube was moving forward for his turn. I jumped him just as he unbuckled his belt. I knocked him down and kicked him in the groin. He yowled, doubling up and clutching himself and I took his place crouching beside Fanny, facing them all, my fists clenched. I was screaming something, I don’t remember what, it stunned them for a second, and then they were laughing and taunting me and shouting at me to wait my turn.

  Fanny lay there trembling in her agony and her eyes were rolled into her head. Her mouth was open and giving off gasping animal wheezes. Maniacally, I felt betrayed by her, as by life itself, the human pretense. I became enraged with her! In my nostrils, mixed with the sharp fume of booze, was an organic stench, a bitter foul smell of burning nerves, and shit and scum.

  Then something flew out at me, a pint bottle, or a rock, and caught me low on the forehead. I went down, dazed, clutching my eyes, bright lights in my brain. I had fallen on Fanny, she was like some soft rotten animal carcass. Her arms helplessly went around me. I was panicked and tried to get free. My struggles were mistaken—I was pulled out of her grasp by my feet and dragged through the dirt and kicked and rolled and yanked to my feet and given a clout on the side of the head.