Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  “I have not been smart,” I said. “I suppose my mind has been on other things.”

  I made a sharp turn into a side street and started looking for the poor part of town.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “A German convertible with bud vases and New York plates. You don’t often see that in these here parts.” She thought awhile. “Is this a hot car?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Soon enough we were going through the dingy sections where the bums were standing on the sidewalks and the garbage spilled into the streets. The Buckeye State Used Cars enterprise looked grim and satisfactorily seedy, I turned in there and commenced a negotiation. The man with his fat dirty fingernails showed me there was not even a book on such a car. I said that was because it was so expensive they didn’t figure anyone could afford it. He said maybe so, but how could he sell a car where you could not get the parts if they broke? I said nothing ever broke on a car like this. He said how could he take ownership on a car that had no papers? I said it was my family’s car and since when did you walk around with papers of your own family’s car? He said why did I want to sell my family’s car? I said I was running away to get married and needed cash. “How are you going to run if you don’t have no car anymore?” he said. “I’m going to buy a modest well-tuned vehicle from you,” I said, looking with bright honest earnestness into his face.

  He walked around the car several times. He glanced at Clara in the front seat, I had told her to put on her fur jacket. “That is my fiancée,” I said to him softly, “of whom they don’t approve.” I could see him thinking: They wouldn’t go after their own kid.

  Come with me

  Combust with me

  “Someday,” Clara said over the noise, “maybe you’ll be able to buy it back, or one like it.”

  “What?”

  “I said someday you could hope to get it back.”

  “I’ve got my car,” I said, pounding the dashboard. “I’ve got papers for it. I’ve got a hundred fifty simoleons in my pocket. Is that bad? We can get to California if we’re careful.”

  “California?”

  “That’s where we’re going. Didn’t you know?”

  “I wasn’t informed,” she said, holding on to the leather strap over the door. She peered ahead, frowning. I had taken in partial trade a 1930 Chevrolet station wagon with wood-panel sides that shook and rattled, and floorboards that jumped in the air every time we hit a bump. It had a high polish on its tan-and-brown body and admitted to fifty thousand miles.

  “I didn’t know dead people were that unusual. I saw them all the time. I wandered around holding my bottle and seeing these dead hunkies lying on tables. I dragged my blanket around behind me. I wasn’t frightened. My father would smile at me.

  “When I was older I began to understand things a little more. I thought, for instance, that anyone who was dead had to have a hole in them. I didn’t know people died without holes in them. Then I figured it out one day. Some old guy was being dressed who died of natural causes. He’d made it all the way. So I knew then about natural death.

  “But it was just the business, you know, it was nothing special, we lived in an apartment right over the business I played after school outside in front of the stoop and there was my father driving up with his hearse, they’d back up into the garage and he and my brother took the body into the back. And that was the way things were on West Twenty-ninth Street.

  “And then my mother died but my father didn’t handle it, someone else from another funeral parlor came and took her away. Just like doctors don’t treat their own families. But maybe it was because she was religious. None of our church got buried with us. We were Greek Orthodox but the business was nondenominational. My father was not highly regarded in church. I saw more Romans and Jewish rabbis at Lukaćs’ than I did priests. Anyway, my father moped around a long time. He didn’t know what to do with me. He hired this black lady to take care of me. She was okay but she drank. She stood at the window whenever there was a funeral downstairs. She’d count the numbers of cars to see how important the dead guy was. She’d count the number of flower cars. Sometimes she called me to come look and I began to look too. You’d see all these flowers in the flower cars, sometimes in three, four cars of flowers, it was too much, like huge mounds of popcorn, I didn’t like it. I hate cut flowers. All my life they made a stink coming up through the floor below, there was always somebody downstairs you could smell flowers through the dumbwaiter.

  “But then if it was really a big affair it would be worth watching. My father and brother all dressed up in their shiny black suits. He’d hire on men on these days. People coming to pay their respects, filling the parlor, crowds standing out on the street. And then outside all the cars in a line, double-parked with their headlights on, all these black mourners’ cars twice around the block. And the cops would be there checking on who showed up, standing across the street and watching. And the photographers with their big flash cameras taking pictures, and the next morning in the News or the Mirror there was a picture of somebody and in the background the canopy said Lukaćs’ Funeral Parlor.

  “But he didn’t need the publicity and he didn’t care. He was just some dumb hunky, he didn’t care about anything, he didn’t talk much, he just did this work. And he got this clientele over the years, he wasn’t in the rackets himself, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t make judgments and he just got to be the one they used. He didn’t care who he buried, why should he, the kind of work he did why get excited. After a while he had to expand. He bought the brownstone next door, and put a new streamlined face across both houses. And then there was a showroom and a reception desk.

  “And I was pretty grown-up now. I wouldn’t stay in school. I’d worked for a while at the five-and-ten just to have something to do. But he was getting fancy now and he needed someone for the reception desk and to answer the phone who could talk right. So he asked me. So I thought, Why not? I mean when I was a kid I used to get it at school. That’s why I had no friends at St. Clare’s. They came around at Halloween with sheets on and rang the front bell. Clara Cadaver, Clara Cadaver. Well, shit, I only had boyfriends, anyway. I mean as a kid my friends were boys. I played street hockey.

  “But anyway, I didn’t mind. I wore a black dress. I wore stockings and high-heeled shoes. I had an allowance for the beauty parlor. And that was my job. I got to meet some real people. It was an entrée, as they say. What’s that sound? The engine doesn’t sound right.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s okay. Maybe I need a little oil.”

  “It’s getting dark, anyway—where do you suppose we are?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  I had a terrible feeling, a chilled feeling because of her lineage, her criminal lineage, I thought of it as a caste, some kind of contamination she had been born into through no fault of her own and I thought it was mine now too; if I wanted her, what she was was mine too, what she brought with her we both had now.

  But I was also happy that she had told me, that in the dreamlife of the road the hours sitting next to each other and facing in the same direction brought things out we might not have otherwise said. We told each other about our lives, we gave each other our lives while we looked at the road backward into ourselves. Even though afterward we didn’t remember what we said, or were too proud to admit we remembered.

  “We lived across the river from each other, you realize that? We could have shouted at each other across the Hudson, two snot-nosed kids. Little did we know we were destined to meet! We saw the same Tom Mix movies. We ran along the sidewalks pointed to the sky at the same airships!”

  “What?”

  “No, really, playing hockey”—I wanted to make her smile—“don’t you remember? Maybe our teams played each other. We made the puck from the end of the wooden cream-cheese box, right? We wrapped it in black tape, am I right?”

  It seemed very important in this moment to
make her smile.

  “Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember the ‘I cash clothes’ man? On Twenty-ninth Street? The water wagon, running alongside it for the spray? Don’t you remember how we went to the candy store for ice cream?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No, really, Clara. One hot afternoon we bought Dixie cups and stood on the sidewalk in the sun with our wooden spoons. You remember. Licking the ice cream off Joan Crawford’s face?”

  When Clara fell asleep I put on my coat, closed the door quietly and went out to look around. In addition to everything else snow had hit this burg, a heavy wet fall that stuck to your eyelashes and got into your shoes.

  The rooming house was highway robbery—twelve dollars a week, paid in advance. Restaurants came to another two, three dollars a day. If I took her to the movies, another forty, fifty cents.

  I had even bought her a gold wedding band—for her protection, I said.

  I hadn’t told her there was no money to get the valves reground. She thought we were in Jacksontown another day or two at the most. I could manage two day-coach fares to Chicago. But what would we do in Chicago—freeze our ass there?

  And so, hunched in his khaki coat from the Great War, the big spender wandered through downtown Jacksontown, Indiana—Heart of the Hoosier Nation, as the sign said. Everything built of red brick, the bank, the library, the city hall, the armory. Stores occupied, the black cars parked at angles against the curbs, he notices the traffic, a heavy traffic rolling quietly through the snow, the sky gray, heavy flakes like soundproofing tamping down the horns, muffling the engines, even the streetcars grinding along hushed in the flanges, sparks flaring in the dark afternoon, the dark turrets of the armory the dark green cannon on the lawn with the mantle of white snow.

  I saw everywhere on every street jalopies of every description, valises and boxes strapped to their fenders, children and grandparents high in the rear seats, scarfs wrapped around their heads. I saw furniture covered with blankets tied with rope on the beds of broken-down trucks. I saw out-of-state license places: Kentucky Tennessee Georgia Arkansas Michigan Missouri.

  I boarded the Railroad Street trolley to see what would happen. It banged its way sharply around corners and picked up speed. Soon it was out of the downtown area barreling between two endless rows of semiat-tached bungalows, block after block. Eventually it veered into a dark street, a canyon of the sides of buildings, moving slowly now, many men walking in the street, the bell clanged, an unbroken chain-link fence blurred my eyes, if I opened the window I could touch it.

  Last stop the doors hissed open at the main gate. Here a crowd of men stood waiting to get in, a quiet intense crowd not orderly but silent. The snow came down. Even as I watched, the crowd grew pulsing like something underwater.

  Behind the locked gates uniformed men stood chatting as if nothing was going on.

  I looked up at the block-long sign across the tops of two buildings. BENNETT AUTOBODY NUMBER SIX was what it said.

  That evening I took Clara to dinner at the Jacksontown Inn, the best restaurant in town. It had tablecloths, candles, black busboys, and the roast beef au jus went for two dollars and a half.

  “I see in the paper where every state is covered with snow from here to the Rockies,” I said.

  She eyed me warily. The true color of her hair beginning to come through, her hair was fluffier too, she had given up the beauty parlor she believed they would ruin her if she had her hair done in the Midwest.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I did a little exploring while you were having a nap. We could be in worse places. There are jobs here, people have money in their pockets, they’re shopping in the stores and going to the movies. They have three movie houses downtown.”

  She cut her roast beef.

  “And you want to hear something funny? The big employer and why everything is humming is your friend and mine Frankie W. Bennett. His Number Six plant.”

  She put down her knife and fork, dabbed at her mouth with her napkin and sat there.

  “Oh, Clara,” I said. “I’d be happy if I could just look at you across this table for the rest of my life.”

  “That would be a lot of roast beef,” she said.

  “You didn’t wear your gold ring!”

  “I forgot.”

  I ate and drank energetically. “Anyway,” I said, “as long as we’re stuck here—so long—as we’re here awhile—I thought I’d tap into old Frank—build up our cash reserve for the run to California.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, they’re hiring at the Number Six plant.”

  “So?”

  A sip of water from my cut-glass goblet. “I caught on there this afternoon. Nothing to it. I just gave them my shining innocent face. I mean there were these guys standing around with their toolboxes and employment records all wanting the same dumb unskilled jobs I put in for. No contest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was obvious I didn’t have a union background. They don’t want someone who’s a wiseass. They want the ones who don’t know any better.”

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  “I thought I explained,” I said. “I thought I explained that.”

  She didn’t say anything, we resumed dining. Occasionally she’d look up and smile sweetly at me, in the silence there at the Jacksontown Inn the unarguable terror of things was driven home to me.

  “I don’t see why you should get on your high horse,” I said. “Is it any worse than sleeping in his bed? Is it any worse than stealing his car?”

  “I think I’ve got to leave now.” She stood.

  “Do you mind if I pay the damn check?”

  We walked through the snow back to the room. I grabbed her elbow, she shrugged me off. “Clara, for God’s sake, what is it I’ve done, after all? I got a job! A job! Is it a fucking crime to get a job? There’s no money! We’re here in the real world now, don’t you understand? There’s no money!”

  In the room she started to pack. I willed myself to be calm, there were other roomers on the same floor, I didn’t need landlady trouble on top of everything else. “Clara, please don’t be like this. Please listen. All right, this is the worst shithole town in the frozenest fucking country there is. It’s so fucking cold I can’t believe how cold it is. And there’s no reason to stay here. Except that it’s Bennett’s! That’s why, Clara. That is the true reason why. Because I’m gonna work his line without his knowing and walk away from his machine with my wages in my pocket and he’s going to get us to California! That’s why.”

  She was still.

  “You hear me, Clara? Because it’s living right under his nose. That’s why. Because it’s the riskiest thing! It’s the toughest and most dangerous and the classiest thing. That’s why.”

  She sat on the side of the bed. “And what am I supposed to do here all day while you work his line and make your classy wages? Huh, big boy? What am I supposed to do?”

  My God, it was laughable, it was heartbreaking but at least she asked the question. Neither of us was twenty! We were children—who were we, what chance did we have? In her question was one half of an instant’s perceiving, dimly appreciated, of only the most obvious possibility of life comprising the history of mankind.

  I sat on the side of the bed next to her, whispering in her ear, “You don’t realize what you’ve done to me. Me, the carney kid! You’re making an honest man of him, it’s horrible. I have all these godawful longings to work to support you, to make a life with you, I want us to live together in one place, I don’t care where, I don’t care if it’s the North Pole, I’ll do any fucking thing to keep you in bonbons and French novels, Clara, and it’s all your fault.”

  “Oh Jesus, he’s crazy, this boy is crazy.”

  But I felt this weird tickle-behind-the-spine unprecedented truth of what I was saying. Before I said it I hadn’t known I felt it: we could change, we could make our lives however we wanted! And the steps Clara
had taken to molldom and to the high forest of Loon Lake were dainty steps, steps avoiding the muck of her reality and mine. And this was where we truly belonged, not on the road but stationary, in one place, working it all out in the hard life.

  “You got anything better to do?” I said.

  She sighed. “That’s the crying shame of it.”

  Data comprising life F. W. Bennett undergoing review.

  Shown in two instances twenty-five years apart of labor

  relations lacking compassion or flexible policy understanding

  workers’ needs. His dramatization suggests life devoted almost

  entirely to selfish accumulation of wealth and ritual use thereof

  according to established patterns of utmost class. It is

  alleged he patronizes unsavory elements of society for his

  business gain. It is alleged that he is sexually exploitative.

  It is suggested he is at least unmoved by the violent death

  of another human attributable to his calculated negligence.

  Countervailing data re his apparent generosity to

  worthless poet scrounge and likely drunkard Warren Penfield.

  A hint too of his pride in Lucinda Bailey Bennett’s aviation

  achievements. A heart too for spunky

  derelict kids.

  Your register respectfully advises the need for additional

  countervailing data. History suggests of the class of which Mr.

  F. W. Bennett is a member no unalloyed spirit of evil the dimes

  which John D. Rockefeller senior gave away compulsively to

  people in the street became the multimillions of his sons’

  philanthropies. Andrew Carnegie’s beneficence well attested,

  as well as William Randolph Hearst’s Milk Fund for Babies.

  And examination of the general practice of families of

  immeasurable wealth in US suggests their generosity cannot