E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

Eventually it dawned on him, the fucking radio of course, he pushed it away from the wall.

It was a small radio in a big cabinet. Under the tubes and behind the black paper speaker was a cigar box. In the box a.32-caliber pistol. He had never handled a gun before. It was heavy, felt loaded smelled oiled and sufficient. He put it back closed the box.

Wedged in the space between the tube chassis and the cabinet one of those cardboard accordion files with a string tie. This he lifted out. He pushed the radio back against the wall.

“Sandy!”

He sat on the floor. She knelt next to him. He watched her hands, she withdrew a marriage license a white paper scroll, she unrolled it holding it with both hands to her face as if she were near-sighted. She withdrew newspaper cutout coupons, a pack of them, the kind people saved for premiums, she withdrew the baby’s birth certificate, she withdrew a wedding photo of Mr. and Mrs. Lyle James all dressed up smiling on the steps of a clapboard church. He had to let her cry over that one in her silent way palming the tears as they flowed. She withdrew a leather drawstring purse, he thought the deliberation of her movements would drive him out of his mind, she untied the string widened the mouth of the purse and shook out several shiny bright medals with ribbons.

“Was Red in the war?”

“Nossir.”

“Stupid of me to ask.”

She withdrew a printed policy of the Tennessee Mutual Life Insurance Policy. Its face value was a thousand dollars. That would have to do.

“Aren’t there people who cash these things right away? Wills, IOUs, stuff like that?”

“Factors,” Clara said.

“Yeah, factors. I bet I could get sixty, seventy cents on the dollar. This is as good as cash.”

“It’s not yours,” Clara said.

“I didn’t say it was. Would you mind coming into the other room a minute?”

Clara followed him into the Jameses’ bedroom. He closed the door. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe you want to see your old sweetheart again. Have a few laughs.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what I think. But if we don’t move our ass out of here we’re finished.”

“Maybe so, but that’s our problem, not hers.”

“If we are all tending to our own problems,” he said, “we can walk out this minute. We’ll let the fifteen-year-old widow shift for herself. Is that what you want?”

“You’re hurting my arm!”

“Why do I have to explain these things!”

“Let go of me. It was your idea, big boy. I didn’t tell you to move to this shithole.”

He went back to the parlor.

“Sandy, I’m prepared to take you back to Tennessee. I mean we’re all finished in Jacksontown, I assume you understand that. You will spend Christmas with your family at your ancestral home. I am proposing we join forces, you and Clara and me, pool what we have and help each other. And I give you my word I will make good on every penny of the whole thousand.”

The kid was silent. He waited. He realized this meant yes. “Okay,” he said, “it’s settled. We have a lot to do. He has to be buried. What are we going to do about that?” He looked at Clara. “Hey, Sandy, I bet you didn’t know we had an expert among us.”

The briefest bewilderment on Clara’s face, what had she done wrong, did he blame his broken arm on her, his stitches? His mind was functioning now, he had calmed down, he was the old Joe of Paterson working things out. But one nick of this gem of a mind flashed the spectral light of treachery.

She smiled appreciatively almost shyly, with a dip of her head, a curl at the corner of her lips, her eyes sparkled, she had it, she knew it before he did, the secret wish, the resolution.

“Ah want the best,” Sandy James said.

“Why not?” said Clara. She knelt down next to Sandy and put her arm around her. She tilted her head till their heads touched. “You’ll have the best,” Clara murmured. She looked up at him. “In Jacksontown it won’t cost that much.”

While Clara was on the phone I asked Sandy James how she felt about her furniture.

“It’s all paid,” she said.

“So much the better. I could get it appraised and you’d make a clear profit.”

She clutched her baby and looked around the parlor. Her eyes were large. “Wherever I live I’m gonna need a chair and table. I’m gonna need a bed to sleep in.”

“Okay, okay, I’m just asking, is all. I’ll figure something out.”

An hour and a half later I had everyone packed. I called a Yellow Cab and by the time it pulled up I had both women and the baby and the bags out on the sidewalk.

Nobody was watching. No car followed us. I took us back to the rooming house Clara and I had stayed in when we first hit town. I rented two rooms adjoining. I got everyone settled.

“Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?” Clara said.

“Not at all. I’m going to the factor. Then I’m going to pick up my back pay. Then I’m going to sec what I can do about a truck for all that shit of theirs.”

“You better slow down. You don’t look so good.”

“I can imagine.”

“You can’t leave town before the funeral.”

“I understand that. But we’ll get a good night’s sleep. You don’t object to a good night’s sleep, do you?”

“She doesn’t know what hit her yet. You’re not giving her the chance.”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

We stand on either side of Sandy James, who holds her baby. I hunch into my khaki greatcoat. It is buttoned over my cast and I have pinned the sleeve. The grave has been dug through the snow and through the ice and, with scalloped shovel marks, into the frozen earth. I study the crystal formations of the grave walls. I imagine lying there forever, as he is about to do.

The stones around us lean at all angles as if bent to the weight of the snow banked against them. The graveyard is in a desolate outlying section of town. It is on a rise that commands a view of the adjoining streets, one filled with the blank wall of a warehouse, the other fronting a lumberyard. A traffic light at the intersection. Over the racks and open sheds of the lumberyard I can see to the tracks and signals and swing gates of the Indiana Central.

The Baptist preacher is garrulous, Southern, like the fellow in the coffin. He speaks of God’s peppers. An image comes into my mind of a green field of pepper plants and I wonder at the eccentricity of all the glories of God’s fecund earth to speak of peppers.

I look from the corner of my eye at Sandy James. She stares into the grave. I see the tracks of her tears on her cheeks. I see the corneal profile of her green eyes. The baby comes into view, leaning forward in curiosity, her arms wave over the grave, cheeks puffing their steam of baby breath.

I cannot see Clara, the mother and baby block my view of Clara.

I shift my weight from one leg to the other. A dozen or so union men are standing behind us. They hold their caps. There are others too. The reporter who questioned me in the hospital, his ferret face under a brim hat, his plaid Mackinaw.

Two green-and-white police sedans and a police motorcycle and sidecar are parked in front of the warehouse across the street from the entrance to the graveyard. The cops sit on their fenders and smoke cigarettes.

A cream-colored La Salle with whitewall tires turns the corner and slowly cruises past the cops and out of my line of vision. I hear a motor cut off, the wrench of a handbrake.

“Do not question God’s peppers,” says the preacher.

I’m trying to think. What are all these people doing here? All night I sat in a chair by the door with a heavy pistol in my lap and I tried to think. I tried to lift my head and open my eyes, shake off the exhaustion of my bones to think.