Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  There is Clara.

  They look at each other, a wave of emotion overcomes them both and they hug. He holds her at arm’s length and he laughs. He is charmed by her. He shakes his head as if to say, Oh what am I going to do with you!

  “Sit down, son.”

  Side by side they lean against the cream-colored car and they talk. Clara’s wearing her fur jacket. He says something to her, he smiles and holds her arm, whispers in her ear, it is as if he is in some night club somewhere at a dark table, and the intimate things he has to say are covered by the music of the swing band.

  I am at the window.

  “Son of a bitch, what does he see out there?”

  “Clara!”

  She has pulled her arm away, I hear something, I hear the high wordless whine of impatience with which she sometimes fends off the male approach.

  “Clara!” I pound the window. He seems undismayed by her response, as if he knows too well it is a ritual, that it is in fact a form of encouragement.

  “CLARA!” My arm, I am jerked back, a cop is pulling down the dark shade, is this my last sight of her head half turned as if she’s heard something hair blowing back from her face eyes shining the winter courtyard as if she’s heard something in her past, someone, just losing hold in her consciousness?

  “Boy, don’t you know you’re being interrogated? Don’t you understand that?”

  I am slammed back in the chair.

  “I gotta talk to Clara Lukaćs. She’s out there.”

  “All in good time.”

  “It’s important! Look, I’ll answer anything any goddamn questions you can think of just let me talk to her a minute.”

  The cop is still behind me I have risen from my chair he presses me back down.

  Another cop has come in and places Red James’ gun on the desk. He takes up position with his back to the door, his arms folded.

  The chief examines the gun. “A very serious piece of equipment. This is what the department should be carrying,” he says to the cop. “Not the shit we got.”

  “Never been fired,” the cop says.

  Do I hear a car door slam? If I am to remain sane I must believe she is not leaving. I must believe she is handling things in her own way. I must believe that she is capable of dealing with Tommy Crapo as she knows he must be dealt with to get him off our backs. I will believe these things, and take heart and deal for my part with the situation in this room. An hour from now we’ll be on our way. We’ll make a slight detour down to Tennessee and then head for California. We’ll be laughing about all of this. We’ll be talking about the adventure we had.

  “Where’d you get this, son?”

  “It’s his. Red James’.”

  He shakes his head and smiles. “Didn’t do him much good, did it? You take it off him?”

  “No, it was in his house. It was hidden behind the radio.”

  “Yesterday you went down to Mallory the pawnbroker’s. You collected six hundred dollars on the deceased’s insurance policy.”

  “That’s right. The money belongs to Mrs. James. I’m holding it for her. She’s fifteen years old and we’re taking her home to her folks.”

  He nods, not to indicate he believes me, but as if to maintain the rhythm of the questioning. I look at the clear-eyed, steadfast face of the police chief, the lean face carved from his mountainous self. I’ve underestimated him.

  “You expect them to give you trouble?” he says.

  “Who?”

  “Her folks you’re taking her home to. That you were packing this thing.”

  “It wasn’t for that.”

  “What was it for, then?”

  “I was glad to find it. I sat up all night guarding the door with it.”

  “Why?”

  “Until we got out of town, in case someone came after me.”

  He gives me his full attention. “Who?”

  “I don’t know who. Whoever killed Red.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. If they thought I saw them? If they thought I could pin it on them?”

  “Could you?”

  “I told you. I didn’t see anything. I got hit from behind and went down and it all fell on top of me. Could I see my girl, please?”

  “Well, if you were afraid, why didn’t you call the police? You think this is the Wild West?”

  The policemen guffaw.

  “Why would anyone want to kill him, anyway?” the chief says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re in the union, ain’t you?”

  “You have my billfold!”

  “Maybe you killed him,” he says.

  “What? Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Sit down, son. And watch your language.”

  “Oh, this is swell. This is really swell. No, I didn’t kill him, he was my friend, we lived next door to each other!”

  “Did you fool with his wife?”

  I hear the ticking of the school clock. From far away comes the metallic screech and thunder of the car couplings as they make up the trains at the freight yards.

  “Answer, please. Did you fool with his wife?”

  The way is open for my full perception of official state-empowered rectitude. I am suddenly so terrified I cannot talk.

  “Did you?”

  I shake my head. A weakness, a palpable sense of my insufficiency drifts through my blood and bones.

  “Okay,” he says, “we could hold you for possession. But I think we have enough to hold you as material witness. You know what that is?”

  I shake my head.

  “You’re all we have to go on. You were there when it happened. It means we hold you while we work up the case. I make it you diddled the wife and decided you liked it too much. The insurance didn’t hurt neither.”

  And now I find my voice. I’m swallowing on tears, I’m producing tears and swallowing them so that they don’t appear in my eyes. “Hey, mister,” I say, “look at me, I don’t look like much, do I? My arm’s been broke, one side of my face is stitched up, I’ve been pissing blood … Jesus, since I came to this town I’ve been short-paid, tricked, threatened, double-crossed, and your Jacktown finest felt they had to work me over to get me here. I probably don’t smell so good either. But I tell you something. You wouldn’t hear from my mouth the filth that has just come from yours. I mean that is so rotten and filthy, I’d get down on my knees and beg that little girl’s forgiveness if I was you.”

  “You oughtn’t to tell me to do anything, son.”

  “Or else you’re being funny. Is that it, are you being funny? I mean what’s the idea—that I killed him before he broke my arm or did I kill him after he broke my arm? After? Oh yes. It makes great sense, it really does: with my one arm I was able to get him to hold still so as I could bash his head in. And then just to make sure everyone would know it I lifted him on my back and took him out to the street to get a ride to the hospital. Smart!”

  “He’s pretty stupid,” the police chief says to the cop, “if he thinks we have to be smart.”

  The policeman laughs. The chief looks at me with the barest hint of a smile on his face. “You don’t like my story, maybe you have a better one.”

  You don’t like my story, maybe you have a better one.

  Do you think, Paterson, we’d threaten a man in public a few minutes before we meant to jump him in a dark alley use your brains lad.

  My brains.

  Clara asked me about my work one day I told her she was furious. What’s the matter? Don’t move, look at how you’re standing: it was so, my hands were in the air as if I were tying the cable, my feet were spread as if I were standing on the vibrating cement floor, I had not only told her, I had acted it out and I hadn’t known I was doing that. I understood then the abhorrence of men on the line for bravado. The failure of perception is what did you in.

  A murder is valuable property it gives dividends how much and to whom depends on how it’s adjudicated.

&nbs
p; I thought this was about Clara it is not it is about my life.

  Tommy Crapo didn’t think this up, he didn’t do this to me, he didn’t have to. You don’t have to buy the police chief in a company town—he’s in place! This dolmen stone skull has been here since the beginning of time.

  I held up my hands. “Look,” I say softly, new tone of voice, “you’re making it wrong, it wasn’t like that. We were family friends, Red and me. My fiancée Clara and his wife Sandy. We took care of their baby for them when they went to the movies.”

  “Your fiancée!”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Clara and I are engaged to be married. You don’t know my Clara or you wouldn’t think I had an eye for another woman.”

  “She’s something, eh?”

  “Well”—I sit back in my chair and smile in reflection—“only the best, most beautiful girl in the world!”

  The chief folds his arms. One of the cops leans over, whispers something to him. He listens while he stares at me. “Maybe we ought to see the little lady,” he says.

  The cop leaves, closing the door behind him. We all sit there waiting. It might be night the dark shade a globe light hangs from the middle of the ceiling the wood floor the oak furniture my chair creaks. The walls are painted dark green from the floor to halfway up, light green to the ceiling. I hear footsteps. I stand. The door opens the cop holds it open for Sandy James with her baby. From the empty hall behind her a cold wind sweeps into the room.

  “Sandy, where’s Clara?”

  She stares at me unable to speak. But from her eyes gleams a sorrow not her own and a small light of courage or hope of possession. I see the decisive functioning matriarchy I have not before seen in her. It comes to them regardless of their age or intelligence when they have settled their claims.

  In the winter of 1919 Penfield is in Seattle, walking the streets down by the docks, the rain green-gray, the escalloped seascape etched by rain. Life is a mist shining on his young face soothing his eyes, what his eyes have seen. He is wet and cold but not uncomfortable, there seems in this section of the world at this moment of his life a letting up of insistent death, no one he loves had died lately, he is all out, no mother father lover or signalman the bombs are still, the machine guns silent, the awful murderous insolence of mankind for the moment distracted. But the peace is killing him. Why is he here? He knows no one in Seattle, he knows no one in the whole country, he is one hundred percent bereft, he has come across the continent because it made the longest journey, there had been in his mind some expectation, the importance given to the being from the presumption of travel, but he has a room in a boarding house in West Seattle like the room they gave him in Nutley, New Jersey, in return for his medal and he walks down the hills to the docks. Why? He stands on pilings and looks at the water sloshing into itself infinitely accommodating to all blows objects hammers rainpocks taking it all, pour beaches in drop mountains in break off continental shelves the water gulps the water caresses it is the nature of the water to leave nothing untouched unloved even me thinks Warren Penfield. It is not that he has the urge to jump in but only that he lacks arguments why he should not. It is a rather thoughtful unemotional contemplation. This dark drizzly afternoon he throws his book in, one of the precious copies of his volume of verse, Sangre de Cristo, it blots, spreads, wafts, and solemnly raising its binding like wings dives into the great Sound. He leaves the pier and goes down a cobblestone alley and finds a bar a space for his own broad back collar up between the other broad-backed collars up a whiskey the bar dark wood honorably scarred a whiskey the damp air hung with smoke making the smoke of cigarettes a cloudmist he notices how crowded the bar is on a working afternoon he leaves the mist now inside the brain drifting over the lobes of the brain like clouds over the stone mountains the city is still. A block or two from the waterfront it looks better to him at the end of streets the bows of steamships loom over the clapboard buildings, he finds the conjunction of the sea and the street exciting, bowsprits and lines of the old coal-fired riggers gently bobbing over the cobblestones, the creak in the green-gray rain the gulls in glistening drift through the rain there is another country, of course! the sea is to connect waterfront streets at the far ends of the earth. Such moments of elation keep him gliding over his despair he goes now for the solace that never fails up the hill toward the center of town to the public library. What goes on here the library is packed with men reading the newspapers riffling the card boxes roaming the stacks making the shapes of the words with their lips the librarians flustered by the sudden accession to learning of the working world flush-faced, glasses slipping down their noses they are reduced to whispering among themselves and feeling hurt. But Warren likes this! He unbuttons his jacket pulls off his cap sits at an oak table and feels the strength of these men reading the papers on sticks quiet respectful as can be of this repository of words he starts to ask a question quailed by the frown of the man next to him who knows you’re not supposed to talk in a library Warren goes to the granite front steps the men clustered here smoking hunched in their collars in the sweet rain he is too shy as usual but something is happening that is very strange his landlady said nothing he will get a newspaper but block after block no newsboys on the corners alarmed now it is February getting dark in the afternoon the green is leaving the sky the street lamps beginning to glow weakly the rained emptiness of the city he hears something missing, no streetcars! the overhead wires gather the last light in silver lines an inadequately populated city in the bakery window there is no bread in the grocery no milk everyone knows something he does not know he waves at a passing car black ignoring him he begins to run stores closed where has he been follows men walking following other men walking stays close stays in step hears now a human sound of population turns a corner a suddenly illuminated warehouse great golden light pouring through the doors they are all going here and suddenly he is inside the clatter of plates and flatware, the steam of soup and the skyline of sliced bread he knows what to do it is twenty-five cents, a bowl of soup two slices of bread gobs of tub butter stew mashed potatoes an apple coffee in a tin cup twenty-five cents rows of sawhorse tables in endless lines refectory benches under the warehouse lights animation conversation all men thousands of men eating dinner and down at the end of one table at the far end in front of his tray in wonder Warren Penfield poet coat open the sound is of raucous life chopped fine in silver flutes and strings and drumfeet and shimmering lifesong the men eat hot food drink strong coffee it is not Ludlow it is not billets it is not distant thunder it is not the whingwhir of machine guns it is the General Strike of Seattle February 6, 1919, the first of its kind in the whole history of the United States of America.

  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 pape
rs 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