E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

He had turned it on as casual as he could be and while it warmed up consulted a newspaper. “How ’bout Mr. First Nighter ,” he said, “seein as you folks’re from New York,” he said to Clara.

Yes, they had culture!

We sat in dutiful appreciation and listened. Mrs. James had put her baby back to bed and sat now, a child herself, cross-legged on the floor right in front of the speaker, she wanted to get in there behind the cloth with those people.

In the casual grant of their warmth and circumstances we are so installed in the life as to have neighbors, we have started to live in their assumptions. I look at Clara she is way ahead of me, she is wearing her gold band.

As the drama crackled through the night the husband displayed enlightenment as to how the sound effects were made.

Someone kicked down a door. “They don’t really wreck a door,” he said. “’At’s just a ordinary vegetable crate they stomp on. Splinters real good.”

A horse-drawn carriage. “Shucks, them’s coconut shells rapped on the table.”

“Hush, Loll,” his wife said. “I cain’t hear!”

After the program was over he lectured on how they made houses burn, typhoons blow, trees come down. He had us close our eyes and did these things up against our ears to get the effect of amplification. He was good, too, insane, I began to realize, once people got through their courtesy it was their madness they shared.

He had heard some Arabian Nights drama about a desert chieftain who skinned his victims alive.

“Ah don’t wanna hear this, Loll,” his wife said.

“Hold on, honey — see, Joe, I couldn’t figger it out, Ah thought and thought, it was the damnedest thing! But I got it now, close your eyes a minute, this’ll turn your hair white.”

I hear a piteous wail, screams, sinister laughter and the unmistakable stripping off of human skin inch by inch. I have to look. Off my left ear he was tearing a piece of adhesive tape down the middle.

No, not exactly my type, I would not under ordinary circumstances choose to associate with Lyle Red James, but I knew when we walked off to work together in the morning Clara would have coffee with his wife, maybe during the day they’d go to the grocery store together I saw the child given from one pair of arms to the other — I would listen to a hundred nights of radio for that.

And at the front gates of the plant every morning a car or two of cops parked there, just happening to be there. Not that I thought they were looking for me but if they were I imagined Red James as my disguise. If the cops were looking at all, it was for a man walking by himself — that was my reasoning. And anyway, what they would have to accomplish to get to this point wasn’t very likely. They would have first of all to locate Mrs. Lucinda Bennett’s car in Dayton, the guy wasn’t that stupid that he wouldn’t paint it. But even if they did, they would know only that they were looking for a wooden station wagon registered to clever Joseph Bennett Jr. But even then, how did that get them to Jacksontown, Indiana? But supposing they were here, they wouldn’t find it anyway, it was parked off the street behind a garage and under a ton of snow. I probably couldn’t find it myself. But supposing they found it, they’d be on the lookout for a hobo boy, a loner walking by himself to work in the morning and not Mr. Joe Paterson loping along step for step with the world’s biggest fucking hayseed.

It always proved out to my satisfaction if I thought about it but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it again each morning going to the punch clocks under the thousand fists like rifle fire we are going into the trenches and over the top in the barrage of time clocks, I always checked my position before I went down there.

I sought disguise, every change in Clara and me a disguise, nobody who knew Clara Lukaćs and was in his right mind would look for her on Railroad Street. I liked us having neighbors, yes, and living to the life the same as everyone else, living married, looking like an automobile worker’s family for life, appearing to these people next door as mirrors of themselves, shining in their eyes so they couldn’t even describe us after we’d gone.

I remember the way Red James walked. He wasn’t especially tall but he took long stiff-kneed strides, loping along there in the freezing morning while everyone else was hunched up, head bent in the wind, it was something you had to tear to get through, but here was Red, shoulders back, head up out of his collar, the long neck bobbing, and he chattered constantly, made jokes, told stories.

“A smart man’ll put beans in his mule’s feedbag. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Doubles the rate of progress.”

“Come on.”

“’Strue! The fartin moves ’em along. Clocked a mule once sixty miles a hour on a handful of dry beans. Fastern’ ’ese here cars.”

That was the kind of thing. He held out his arms; the snow driving thick like white sheets flapping in your eyes, yelling “Toughen me up, God, usen me up to it!”

And he sang, too, always some damn hillbilly song in that adenoidal tenor of his kind as we went down toward the plant one point of raw color bobbing crowing

Hear the mighty eng-ine

Hear the lonesome hobos squall

… A-goin through the jungle

On the Warbash Cannonball!

And at work I found myself hearing his voice in the machines, in the rhythm of the racket, without even knowing it, doing headlight after headlight, I would sing to myself in Red James’ tenor: keeping time to the pounding racket, I would hear the mighty eng-ine, hear the lonesome hobos squall, a-goin through the jungle, on the Warbash Cannonball.

—

One evening I came out of the gate and somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, no one was there. When I turned back, Red James was grinning at me.

“You comin to the meetin, ain’t ya?”

“What meeting?”

“Union meetin.”

“Well, I’m not a member, Red.”

“I know you ain’t. This is a recruitin meetin, anyone’s got the balls.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I never told Clara I wouldn’t be home.”

“Boy, the little woman sure has a holt a you. She’s with Sandy anyways, you come on with me, they’ll figger it out.”

So I went along with him to this meeting in some decrepit fraternal lodge a few blocks from the plant. It was up a couple of flights, fifty or so men sitting on camp chairs in a badly lighted room. I recognized a few faces from the line, we smiled, catching each other out. I thought, Look, if you’re doing the life, do it. I took a seat in the last row. Red had disappeared. The people running the meeting sat at a table in front of the room. I couldn’t see all of them but they looked like Paterson toughs, they wore buttons or had their union cards stuck in the bands of their hats. I thought as Mr. Bennett was spread out and made into a corporation he may have enlarged, but so did the response, I couldn’t see anyone in his personal service wearing his green putting a union button on their collar.

The meeting began with the pledge of allegiance and then the president rapped the gavel and called on the secretary to read the minutes.

Lyle Red James stood up and cleared his throat. “Herewith the o-fishul minutes a the last meetin,” he said in a most formal manner. “As taken by yo Sec’tary Loll Jimes, Bennett Local Seventeen, union card number three six six oh eight?”

This called up a cheer and a burst of applause from the audience.

“Just read the damn minutes, James,” the president said.

I hadn’t known he was a union official, he had sprung it on me, it was queer, the faintest misgiving, I had thought the deception in our friendship was mine. I tried to think that whole meeting why I was bothered, I knew he was a damn clown I hadn’t understood I was his audience.