E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

The puppet play told the story of two lovers who, faced with adversity, decided to commit suicide together and so at the intimate crucial moment there were eight presences onstage.

A cold bright sun glittering on the snow, dazzling the eyes, you couldn’t tell where you were, in what desolate tundra of the world. But men got to work. The stamping of thousands of feet muffled by the deep snow.

Inside the Autobody the great clamoring noise seemed distant, a distant hum, as if the peculiar light reflecting the snow outside were a medium of shushing constraint.

It was an ominous day, I felt something was wrong, from down the line it came like a conveyed thing, going through my station like a hunk of shapeless metal with no definable function.

But I knew secrets, I was in on secrets.

At lunchtime the whistle blew, belts slowed down and stopped. I listened to one generator in particular, pitch whine dropping deeper and deeper to nothing. I went to my locker, men rubbed their hands on rags and looked at each other. Then someone came in who thought he knew where the trouble was, and holding our sandwiches and thermoses, we drifted toward it, we climbed over the car bodies and trod the motionless belts as if walking on tracks, and we came finally to an area flooded with bright daylight.

Two great corrugated sliding doors were open, I could see outside to a flatbed railroad car. Granulated snow gusting in. Sticking to spots of oil and grease. The cold sting of the day blowing in.

“Here, you men, you don’t belong here!” A uniformed guard coming toward us with a scowl.

They were dismantling a whole section of machines, unbolting them from the floor and preparing to hoist them on pulleys. Someone said they were tool-and-die machines for the radiator grilles.

At quitting time I waited in front of the tavern across the street from the main gate. Red didn’t show up. I walked quickly in the dark down Railroad Street.

“The train I ride on is a hundred coaches long, you can hear the whistle blow nine hundred miles . You see, Joe, when the New Year comes soon as everone’s past the Xmas bonus, soon as everone begins to think a the spring layoffs as you cain’t help but doin when the year swings round, that’s when we’re a-settin down. You understand the beauty o’ that? The union’s allotin considerable monies. You see what you don’t know is that Number Six makes all the trim for the Bennett plants in three states. Do you take my meanin? Ever bumper. Ever hubcap. Ever runnin board. Ever light. When we set down come January, ever Bennett plant in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana is gonna feel it. ’Course I’m trustin you with this, you cain’t tell no one, it’s a powerful secret compris’n the fate of many. Ohh-oh me, ohh-oh my, you can hear the whistle blow nine hundred miles.”

When I got home Clara wasn’t there. I went next door. She was standing in the bedroom doorway holding Sandy’s baby.

Two men were sitting in the parlor. They were dressed in work clothes. Sandy introduced me, they were members of the board of the local and I thought I recognized one of them from the meeting. He was a skinny little man and he didn’t look at me as he talked. “Yeah, Paterson,” he said, “I seen you around.” His eyes darted to the phone on the desk.

The other man was younger, bulkier, he had a fixed smile on his face as if he had trained himself to it. “We’re waitin fer Red,” he said.

They sat back down. Sandy James didn’t know what to do with them, she stood there rubbing her palms on her hips. The parlor was awfully crowded, I thought, with all of us and a Christmas tree too with the tip touching the ceiling the star awry.

“You and James buddies, Paterson?” the little man said.

“Yes.”

He nodded, kept nodding as if unaware of the brevity of my answer.

And then the phone rang and he jumped up as if he had been waiting, and grabbed the receiver. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, that’s it.” He hung up.

“Well,” he said looking at the other one, “I guess we’ll be on our way,” indicating the door with his chin. “Sorry to trouble you, Mrs. James.”

“Red should be home right soon.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” the little man said. “Just tell him we were in the neighborhood. Nothin important.”

They left, she locked the door after them.

“Oh, it gives me the jitters,” she said, “strangers comin round and askin questions.”

“Like what?”

“Where we got our lovely furnishins? How long we had the radio?” I went over to the desk, for the first time I noticed the phone had no number written on it the little white circle was blank.

“Where is Red?”

Sandy looked at me and down at the floor.

“Come on, Sandy, for God’s sake,” I said.

“To a meetin,” she said. “A secret union meetin.”

“A board meeting?”

“I guess.”

I didn’t argue with her. I motioned to Clara and we went back to our side. The house, banked with snow, was without draught, sealed, like a tomb. I didn’t know why but I felt bad, I felt desolate, I didn’t care about anything.

“Hey, big boy,” Clara said. “Let me see you smile.”

Later in our bed I was so huge with love for her it was a kind of mourning sound I made, plunged into my companion. The ceiling light was on. Her head was turned from me, her eyes were closed, her knuckles were in her teeth, high color spread up from her throat suffusing her face, her ears, this was not my alley cat of gasping contempt raking her nails down my back this was my wife connected to me by the bones of being, oh this clear ecstasy ravage on the skin, reluctance it was happening, lady’s grief of coming.

I said to Red James, “Will you tell me what’s going on?” my voice feeble and complaining. I already knew in this town of thirty thousand the crucial action was at my eyes, I was centered in it, it could not be less clear than something I would read in the newspaper. I was at the fulcrum where the smallest movement signified distant matters of great weight.

And he answered wonderfully not as if he had until this moment deceived me but as if I’d always known and admired him for what he was.

“See, Joe, I coulda stayed on, you know? Hell, I had it so finely made I mighta run for somethin someday in the national. But the client don’t give a hoot fer that. He gets the intelligence and he spooks like a horse in a hurricane. I mean I’d laugh if I didn’t feel like cryin.”

We were walking home men everywhere talking in groups LAYOFFS! in the headlines flyers announcing a mass meeting trampled in the snow. Red suggested we stop in for a drink. We stood in front of a tavern I’d not been in before, the light in the window was gold and orange, it looked warm in there, I felt I’d better have something.

We sat in a booth in the back under a dip in the patterned ceiling. Behind us was the door to the toilet. We sat in this plywood booth drinking twenty-cent shots with water chasers I smelled the whiskey in my head odor of piss cigarette smoke the sweat of every man in the room.

“’Course I ain’t without choice, they’s a little job at the Republic Steel in Chicago. Ain’t no auto worker in Jacksontown gonna follow me to pull steel in Chicago. An’ ifn there is, just in case, looky here.”

He pulled a paper bag from his lunch pail, shook a small bottle uncapped it put a drop of liquid on his right index finger rubbed the liquid into the red hairs on the knuckles of his left hand. He spread the hand on the table: the red hairs were black.

“You like that?” he grinned, my stunned silence, he signaled the bartender for two more. “But hell, I’m thinkin to drop industrial work. You been to the city of Los Angeleez?”