E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

Now I do have a thought. It is really very foolish. It is that these people — the union men, the cops, the reporter — they’re all staying. I mean this is where they live, Jacksontown, Hoosier Heart of the Nation, it’s their home, it’s where they make their lives. The reason this preacher twangs on and on is because he too lives here. He’s in no hurry, why should he be?

All of them, it’s a big thing this funeral, an event. I look at the landscape, nothing is moving, even the sky looks fixed, residential.

I shiver, a chill ripples through me. I feel their entirety of interest and attention as some kind of muscling force. Some large proprietary claim in the presence of these people displaces me.

I am dispossessed.

I square my shoulders and stare straight ahead. It seems important not to reveal from my expression or my posture that I understand this. I know what it is now. It is the whispering return to my body of my derelict soul. Oh, my derelict soul of the great depression! What’s happening to me — I feel guilty! Guilty of what? I don’t know, I can’t even imagine!

Finally the twanging ends and with great satisfaction in the holiness of his calling, he closes his Bible, turns his face upon me and I nod and shake his hand. The ten-dollar bill folded in my palm passes to his. He murmurs something to the widow and for no additional charge grazes the baby’s cheek with the tips of his theistic fingers. Then he’s gone. Clara moves around in front of Sandy and hugs her and turns her away from the gravedigger, who with his shovel propped against his hip is spitting on his hands getting ready to go to work.

We walk slowly to the gate, a hand taps me on the shoulder. “Paterson?”

I turn. The heavyset man with the blue knit cap the expert on hell. Behind him three or four others.

“We don’t want to disturb Mrs. James at this time. We have made up a pot.” He puts a folded wad of bills into my hand. “The boys from the local.”

I must have looked shocked. He moves close to me.

“Do you think, Paterson,” he says in my ear, “that we would be so stupid as to permit ourselves to be overheard threatening a man in public not ten minutes before we meant to jump him in a dark alley?”

“What?”

“Use your brains, lad. I’m sorry for the beating you took, but if it was us you’d be in the grave beside him.”

He moves off, I find Sandy and Clara, I hold Sandy’s arm, I feel her bewilderment of sorrow. Faces appear, condolences drift in the cold air flutter for a moment fall.

They knew my name.

They thought it matters to me who killed him.

Clara catches sight of the cream-colored La Salle. She frowns and turns away with an involuntary glance back uphill to the grave. The color in her cheeks, the thin skin she has for the cold, the blue translucence of the eyelids, the tears in the corners of her eyes.

We are through the gate, walking on pavement. I’m between the two women. I hold their arms. It is becoming more difficult to move forward. Several bulky policemen, awkward, they don’t seem to know what to do with themselves.

“Pardon me.” A man tips his hat to Sandy. “Mr. Paterson, I wonder if you’d mind.” I can’t hear him.

“What?” There seems to be some problem. It is some misunderstanding, it’s becoming difficult to move forward, we’re in a crowd, it banks higher and higher against our progress.

“What?” I hear my own voice. “What questions? I already answered questions.”

“We just want to talk to you a few minutes, clear up some things.”

I look behind me — we’re completely hemmed in now, cops in front, the working stiffs behind us, the reporter at the edge of things his chin upraised. Everyone is terribly interested.

“I’m sorry,” I say truthfully, “there’s no time.”

I hear laughter.

“I’m responsible for these ladies, I can’t leave them alone here.”

It is explained that they will come down to the station house with me. They can wait for me where it’s warm. I am reasoned with. Just a few minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience. Clara and Sandy are being led to one police car, I to another. Just as the door opens for me I balk. “Clara!” I try to turn around, call her. I have changed my mind. I want to put her and Sandy in a cab. I want them to wait at the rooming house.

“Don’t make it hard,” a cop says.

My good arm is twisted behind my back I am bent forward at the waist the muffling of blue bulk a stick is brought up smartly between my legs I’m pushed into the car. I have the terrible sickness. I’m aware of people scattering as the police car makes a careening U-turn and picks up speed. A siren. I’m thrown against the back seat against the door we veer around the corner the cop next to me pushes me away with the tips of his fingers. “Relax, sonny,” he says. “Enjoy the ride.”

At a certain point Railroad Street made a ninety-degree curve and you could leave it, cut across an empty lot, and reach it again a block closer to home. The lot was filled with rubble, bricks, rusted sled runners, pieces of baby carriage, garbage a feast for Saint Garbage remnants of chimneys and basement foundations and all of it covered with snow. I was thinking it was the place to be, the place to be, I stumbled along drunk, to tell the truth, drunk on two glasses of rye through this moonscape of white shit. I heard the distant bell of the trolley and saw over a tenement roof the flash of its power line like the explosion of a star. I fell and fell again, cutting my knee on something sharp, getting a sockful of snow, but Red James jaunted along smoothly he even sang one of his songs the funeral dirge of the Southern mountains, hearing the whistle blow nine hundred miles, the condemned man in prison the betrayed lover the orphaned child everyone across the night suffering loss and failed love and time run out raising his head to hear the whistle blow through the valleys of the cold mountains. And then I was down again, hard this time and I shook my head to find myself on all fours I hadn’t fallen. I heard something terrible, a grunt of punched-out breath, snapped bone, a man retching. I tried to stand I was flattened by a great weight, a violent steam-rolling weight pressing my face in the snow my forehead slashes on something sharp at my eye the snow turning wet and black the weight is gone, I scramble to my knees, breathing that is tearful, a desperate exertion, a mass of bodies tumbled past me I heard Red scream and hurtled myself against this mass of black movement butting it with my head taking purchase like a wrestler grabbing a leg a sleeve a back. Everything fell on me and I felt going down my arm twisted the wrong way I heard it break. This seemed to me worth a moment’s contemplation. I lay still and even found a small space in the snow to spit out blood. I lay there under the murder. The intimacy of the shifting weights, the texture of their coats on my face, sobbing rages, one vehement crunch and I heard, we all heard, the unmistakable wail of a dead man. Then a hissing gurgling sound. Then no sound. After which, silence from us all and the night coming back in this silence, the weight lifted from me by degrees I look up portions of the night sky reappear suffused in the milk light of the moon I hear something sibilant, hoarse, it is my own breath, the wind brushing past my ears, I hear hitting hitting but it is the heart pounding in my chest.

He was heavier than he looked, I dragged him one-handed by the collar he kept snagging on things at the edge of the lot I found the right terrain, pulled him to the top of a flat rock and then sitting on the incline below it and easing him over my shoulder and sliding down in a sitting position to the sidewalk and standing up with the full heft of him in a fireman’s carry on my good side, I took us to the curb under the streetlight to wait for someone passing by.