E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

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.

I found myself on my knees, behind the crowd. I was wet. Blood streamed in my eye. But the ceremony continued. There were men drooling there. There were onanists. There were gamblers betting on the moment of death. Later there were men leaping on her, on each other, squatting on her head, crawling over her, falling on her, shoving bottles in her. There were gallants calling for order, for some law of decency if all pleasure was not to be lost. And Fanny giving up a human appearance by degrees, trumpeting her ecstasies to the killing passion of the rubes.

From one only was there absolute quiet in this mayhem. I looked at him. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat brim. You wouldn’t know his connection with these spermy rites except for the indolence of his stance as he leaned against the bleacher supports with his bony arms folded and his ankles crossed. And I could swear I heard, through the hoarse cries and shouts and shrieking and orgiastic death, the thoughtful and preoccupied sucking of Sim Hearn’s tongue on his teeth.

Riding over the mountain in the Model A, Joe became aware of where he was. She accelerated, the headlights brightened; she braked, the headlights dimmed. The bones of his legs sounded the ground pitch of the engine. Mrs. Hearn’s face luminous in the night, she urged the car forward with her chin, her furrowed brow, her shoulders putting english on the turns. At the bottom of a hill she gunned it, halfway up plunged with her left leg, shifted to second, she came over the tops of the hills with her horn blowing, headlights making a quick stab at the night sky.

“Of course they never live long, such creatures — the heart won’t beat for them … All summer Sim Hearn watches — he watches and then he sees the signs — she doesn’t take breath as she should — from the bed she cannot lift herself … The people know Hearn — he gives something special at end of summer, a grand finale … The word goes through the mountains… Look where we are — we make time better than I hoped.”

In the early hours of the morning she judged us safely away and turned into a motor court and paid for a cabin in the pines farthest from the road. Wedged into the rumble seat was my broken-down valise with everything I possessed in the world. She had packed it for me. I carried it and her frayed black Gladstone into the room. She locked the car and locked the cabin door behind us and pulled the shades and then pulled the light cord.

The bed had a khaki blanket but no sheets. Two lumpy gray pillows. Magda Hearn rummaged in her bag for a white cotton face towel. She spread the towel on top of the bureau. The room had the shit smell of old untreated wood. She removed from her purse a manila envelope and from the envelope removed a stack of greenbacks which she placed on the cotton towel.

“Sim knows to get the money out before the fun starts,” she said. “To Albany to the bank he thinks I am going.”

She wet her thumb on her lower lip and stood at the bureau counting the money. I sat down on the bed and took off my shoes and socks. She wet her thumb on the inside of her lower lip, pulling it down so that for a moment her teeth showed her expression went slack. She was a while counting.

“Fifteen hundred and eighty-four dollars!”

She dug in her purse and extracted a wallet and from this withdrew another wad of bills.

“And plus salary which he never paid!” she said in a tone of vengeful triumph. The thumb applied to the red inside of her lip. She counted aloud this time. “Two hundred I squeeze from you, you bastard!”

She opened her Gladstone, interrupting herself to press her lips strongly on my mouth.

She pulled the string tie of a small canvas coin sack and spilled a stream of coins on the bed.

She lay on the bed making separate piles of nickels and dimes and quarters and halves, the little piles collapsed and came together because she was shaking the bed with her guttural glee. She started over, she was keen on pennies, too — if there had been coins of smaller denominations, she would have counted them, too. She was ready to count coins forever and to bitterly calculate the suffering she had done for each one.

“Joe Joe Joe! Tomorrow we trade his car and its license and buy new. We drive to California you and me. We are in our new car on way to California before even he thinks is something wrong!”

She gave up the count and lay on her back in the coins. She lifted her arms. “Come to me, come to Magda. You know what?” Kissing me, running hands on me, opening one by one the buttons on my fly. “To Hollywood we are going. I have read the magazines, I understand the movie business. I sell my life story. A film of my life! Everyone will know who Magda is.” She unbuckled my belt, she opened the buttons of my shirt. She kissed my chest and pulled the shirt down off my shoulders. “And who knows who knows, with your looks, my Joseph, with your body, why you cannot be movie star? And we will love each other and have great sooccess. Shall we?” Laughing, going down on me. “Shall we?”

She had no idea I had actually caught evil as one catches a fever, she didn’t understand this, she thought my passion matched hers. I wanted to do to her what had been done to the Fat Lady, I wanted the force of a hundred men in unholy fellowship, I went at her like a murderous drunkard.

I fucked past her joy into her first alarm, I saw on her face under the weak glare of the hanging bulb the dilated eye. I was enraged by the flaws of her, the unnatural cleft of her left hip, one buttock was actually atrophied, the raised veins behind the knees, the hanging breasts like deflated balloons, the yellowed face with loosened folds of skin at the neck rising in parallel rows as she turned her head from me this stinking Hungarian hag this thieving crone bitch with the gall to think she had me for her toy boy her lover chuffing now like a fucking steam engine I brought the tears to her eyes she would acknowledge nothing she resisted and then the voice did come, and then the voice louder and more insistent, and finally she seemed to be urging me along as if we were together, the lying cunt in the Pine Grove Motor Court, our music mingling with the night wind in the pines the tree trunks creaking the million crickets. I ended and began again. We wrestled. She begged me to stop. Tears of mourning came from my eyes. I let her fall asleep. I woke her, made her moan. At one point the coins sticking to the wet ass, the wet belly, I invented a use of Magda Hearn so unendurable to her that with the same cry that must have come from her the day she fell twisting from the trapeze, she flung herself off the bed — a moment’s silence, then the sickening shaming sound of bone and flesh slamming into the floor, a grunt. I lay on my back on the bed not daring to look, I heard a small soprano cry, a deeper moan, a whispered curse. I lay still. After a while I realized I was listening to the snores of an exhausted human being.