E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

“Did you?”

I shake my head. A weakness, a palpable sense of my insufficiency drifts through my blood and bones.

“Okay,” he says, “we could hold you for possession. But I think we have enough to hold you as material witness. You know what that is?”

I shake my head.

“You’re all we have to go on. You were there when it happened. It means we hold you while we work up the case. I make it you diddled the wife and decided you liked it too much. The insurance didn’t hurt neither.”

And now I find my voice. I’m swallowing on tears, I’m producing tears and swallowing them so that they don’t appear in my eyes. “Hey, mister,” I say, “look at me, I don’t look like much, do I? My arm’s been broke, one side of my face is stitched up, I’ve been pissing blood … Jesus, since I came to this town I’ve been short-paid, tricked, threatened, double-crossed, and your Jacktown finest felt they had to work me over to get me here. I probably don’t smell so good either. But I tell you something. You wouldn’t hear from my mouth the filth that has just come from yours. I mean that is so rotten and filthy, I’d get down on my knees and beg that little girl’s forgiveness if I was you.”

“You oughtn’t to tell me to do anything, son.”

“Or else you’re being funny. Is that it, are you being funny? I mean what’s the idea — that I killed him before he broke my arm or did I kill him after he broke my arm? After? Oh yes. It makes great sense, it really does: with my one arm I was able to get him to hold still so as I could bash his head in. And then just to make sure everyone would know it I lifted him on my back and took him out to the street to get a ride to the hospital. Smart!”

“He’s pretty stupid,” the police chief says to the cop, “if he thinks we have to be smart.”

The policeman laughs. The chief looks at me with the barest hint of a smile on his face. “You don’t like my story, maybe you have a better one.”

You don’t like my story, maybe you have a better one.

Do you think, Paterson, we’d threaten a man in public a few minutes before we meant to jump him in a dark alley use your brains lad.

My brains.

Clara asked me about my work one day I told her she was furious. What’s the matter? Don’t move, look at how you’re standing: it was so, my hands were in the air as if I were tying the cable, my feet were spread as if I were standing on the vibrating cement floor, I had not only told her, I had acted it out and I hadn’t known I was doing that. I understood then the abhorrence of men on the line for bravado. The failure of perception is what did you in.

A murder is valuable property it gives dividends how much and to whom depends on how it’s adjudicated.

I thought this was about Clara it is not it is about my life.

Tommy Crapo didn’t think this up, he didn’t do this to me, he didn’t have to. You don’t have to buy the police chief in a company town — he’s in place! This dolmen stone skull has been here since the beginning of time.

I held up my hands. “Look,” I say softly, new tone of voice, “you’re making it wrong, it wasn’t like that. We were family friends, Red and me. My fiancée Clara and his wife Sandy. We took care of their baby for them when they went to the movies.”

“Your fiancée!”

“Yes, sir,” I say, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Clara and I are engaged to be married. You don’t know my Clara or you wouldn’t think I had an eye for another woman.”

“She’s something, eh?”

“Well”—I sit back in my chair and smile in reflection—“only the best, most beautiful girl in the world!”

The chief folds his arms. One of the cops leans over, whispers something to him. He listens while he stares at me. “Maybe we ought to see the little lady,” he says.

The cop leaves, closing the door behind him. We all sit there waiting. It might be night the dark shade a globe light hangs from the middle of the ceiling the wood floor the oak furniture my chair creaks. The walls are painted dark green from the floor to halfway up, light green to the ceiling. I hear footsteps. I stand. The door opens the cop holds it open for Sandy James with her baby. From the empty hall behind her a cold wind sweeps into the room.

“Sandy, where’s Clara?”

She stares at me unable to speak. But from her eyes gleams a sorrow not her own and a small light of courage or hope of possession. I see the decisive functioning matriarchy I have not before seen in her. It comes to them regardless of their age or intelligence when they have settled their claims.

In the winter of 1919 Penfield is in Seattle, walking the streets down by the docks, the rain green-gray, the escalloped seascape etched by rain. Life is a mist shining on his young face soothing his eyes, what his eyes have seen. He is wet and cold but not uncomfortable, there seems in this section of the world at this moment of his life a letting up of insistent death, no one he loves had died lately, he is all out, no mother father lover or signalman the bombs are still, the machine guns silent, the awful murderous insolence of mankind for the moment distracted. But the peace is killing him. Why is he here? He knows no one in Seattle, he knows no one in the whole country, he is one hundred percent bereft, he has come across the continent because it made the longest journey, there had been in his mind some expectation, the importance given to the being from the presumption of travel, but he has a room in a boarding house in West Seattle like the room they gave him in Nutley, New Jersey, in return for his medal and he walks down the hills to the docks. Why? He stands on pilings and looks at the water sloshing into itself infinitely accommodating to all blows objects hammers rainpocks taking it all, pour beaches in drop mountains in break off continental shelves the water gulps the water caresses it is the nature of the water to leave nothing untouched unloved even me thinks Warren Penfield. It is not that he has the urge to jump in but only that he lacks arguments why he should not. It is a rather thoughtful unemotional contemplation. This dark drizzly afternoon he throws his book in, one of the precious copies of his volume of verse, Sangre de Cristo , it blots, spreads, wafts, and solemnly raising its binding like wings dives into the great Sound. He leaves the pier and goes down a cobblestone alley and finds a bar a space for his own broad back collar up between the other broad-backed collars up a whiskey the bar dark wood honorably scarred a whiskey the damp air hung with smoke making the smoke of cigarettes a cloudmist he notices how crowded the bar is on a working afternoon he leaves the mist now inside the brain drifting over the lobes of the brain like clouds over the stone mountains the city is still. A block or two from the waterfront it looks better to him at the end of streets the bows of steamships loom over the clapboard buildings, he finds the conjunction of the sea and the street exciting, bowsprits and lines of the old coal-fired riggers gently bobbing over the cobblestones, the creak in the green-gray rain the gulls in glistening drift through the rain there is another country, of course! the sea is to connect waterfront streets at the far ends of the earth. Such moments of elation keep him gliding over his despair he goes now for the solace that never fails up the hill toward the center of town to the public library. What goes on here the library is packed with men reading the newspapers riffling the card boxes roaming the stacks making the shapes of the words with their lips the librarians flustered by the sudden accession to learning of the working world flush-faced, glasses slipping down their noses they are reduced to whispering among themselves and feeling hurt. But Warren likes this! He unbuttons his jacket pulls off his cap sits at an oak table and feels the strength of these men reading the papers on sticks quiet respectful as can be of this repository of words he starts to ask a question quailed by the frown of the man next to him who knows you’re not supposed to talk in a library Warren goes to the granite front steps the men clustered here smoking hunched in their collars in the sweet rain he is too shy as usual but something is happening that is very strange his landlady said nothing he will get a newspaper but block after block no newsboys on the corners alarmed now it is February getting dark in the afternoon the green is leaving the sky the street lamps beginning to glow weakly the rained emptiness of the city he hears something missing, no streetcars! the overhead wires gather the last light in silver lines an inadequately populated city in the bakery window there is no bread in the grocery no milk everyone knows something he does not know he waves at a passing car black ignoring him he begins to run stores closed where has he been follows men walking following other men walking stays close stays in step hears now a human sound of population turns a corner a suddenly illuminated warehouse great golden light pouring through the doors they are all going here and suddenly he is inside the clatter of plates and flatware, the steam of soup and the skyline of sliced bread he knows what to do it is twenty-five cents, a bowl of soup two slices of bread gobs of tub butter stew mashed potatoes an apple coffee in a tin cup twenty-five cents rows of sawhorse tables in endless lines refectory benches under the warehouse lights animation conversation all men thousands of men eating dinner and down at the end of one table at the far end in front of his tray in wonder Warren Penfield poet coat open the sound is of raucous life chopped fine in silver flutes and strings and drumfeet and shimmering lifesong the men eat hot food drink strong coffee it is not Ludlow it is not billets it is not distant thunder it is not the whingwhir of machine guns it is the General Strike of Seattle February 6, 1919, the first of its kind in the whole history of the United States of America.