E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

It was an amazing discovery, the uses of my ignorance, a kind of industrial manufacture of my own. And the more it went on, the more I believed it, taking this fact and that possibility and assembling them, then sending the results down the line a bit and adding another fact and dropping an idea on the whole thing and sending it on a bit for another operation, another bolt to the construction, my own factory of lies, driven by rage, Paterson Autobody doing its day’s work. I was going to make it! This was survival at its secret source, and no amount of time on the road or sentimental education could have brought me to it if the suicidal boom of my stunned heart didn’t threaten my extinction.

“What strike, how do you know these things!” The businessman was beside himself. “Who is this fellow?” he said. “Damn it all, I want the truth. I want it now.”

The police chief went back behind his desk and sat down. He looked at me, fingered the corners of his mouth. He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through his hair and put his hat back on.

“You don’t like Crapo very much, do you?”

“We fancy the same girl,” I said.

“And that’s why you’re fingering him — or trying to?”

“No more than he’s done to me, Chief,” I said. “But I got a better reason: I don’t condone killing and neither does Mr. Bennett.”

“Mr. who Bennett?” he said, frowning terribly.

“Mr. F. W. Bennett of Bennett Autobody. Is there any other?”

Here the man in the suit found a chair near the wall and sat down and glared at me.

“I’m a special confidential operative,” I said. “I was sent here by Mr. F. W. Bennett personally to check on the Crapo organization. Their work has been falling off lately. Mr. Bennett takes nothing for granted, especially not the loyalty of gangsters. I worked into the confidence of Crapo’s chief man in Number Six, Lyle James. Mr. Bennett himself arranged for the next door to be available. He thought I had a better disguise to be married and so I brought with me a lady”—here I faltered—“I happened to be serious about. This is the unofficial part, Chief, and I expect every man in this room to keep quiet about this part. I met this lady when she was with Mr. Crapo and we took to each other. We couldn’t help it. And, well, he is not a man to forgive, as you can see by my condition and the circumstance of my being here before you.”

And now there was silence in the room.

“You are awful young to be what you say,” said the police chief. He turned to the others. “It’s too crazy. Jacksontown don’t need stuff like this. There are so many holes in this story it’s like a punchboard. Why should Mr. Bennett need to do these things, you tell me? And if he did them, why would he find some kid like this not old enough to wipe the snot from his nose? No, I’m sorry, Mr. Paterson,” he said, “you’re smart enough to throw the names around, but you were a punk when we pulled you in and as far as I’m concerned you’re still a punk.”

“My name isn’t Paterson,” I said. I smiled and looked at the man in the suit and vest. “It’s easy enough to check,” I said. “In my billfold on a piece of paper is the phone number of Mr. Bennett’s residence at Loon Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. You may not know about that place, it’s his hideaway. Call him for me. I get a phone call of my choosing anyway, isn’t that the law? That’s who I choose to call. Tell him also I’m sorry about the Mercedes. It may be on the lot of Buckeye State Used Cars in Dayton, Ohio. But it may not. Tell him I’m very sorry.”

I thought in the silence that ensued they could hear my heart beating its way back to survival.

“Yes, sir,” the chief said, “and who should we say is calling?”

One of the men laughed. I was livid with rage. Oh Penfield. Oh my soul. I could barely get the words out. “You stupid son of a bitch,” I said to the chief. “Tell Mr. Bennett it’s his son calling. Tell him it’s his son, Joe.”

I don’t remember the names of towns I remember the route, southwest through Kentucky and Arkansas, across northern Oklahoma and the top of the Texas Panhandle and then into New Mexico, a spooncurve that I thought would drop us gently into the great honeypot of lower California.

We drove through small boarded-up towns, we drove down dirt rut roads and through hollows where shacks were terraced on the hill beside the coal tipple. We drove through canyons of slag and stopped to pick up chunks of coal to burn in the stoves of our rented cabins. The road went along railroad tracks, alongside endlessly linked coalcars loaded and still.

We drove over wood-paved iron bridges I remember rivers frozen with swirls of yellow scum I remember whole forests of evergreen glazed in clear ice, shattered sunlight, I had to strap a slitted piece of cardboard over my eyes to see the road.

In January the thaw and false spring in the Southwestern air and when we were stopped at a roadside picnic grove for our lunch we could hear the thunderous cracks and groans of rivers we couldn’t see. But then it froze again, cold and snowless and I remember stretches of brown land treeless swells of hardscrabble imbedded with rotted-out car frames and broken farm tools.

We had problems with the truck blown tires batteries fan belts oilsmoking flipping up the vented hood hot to the touch it was a journey fraught with peril. But you didn’t have to think. It was simple, life was staying warm keeping on the move finding food beds being thrifty. We met people in trucks loaded like ours with furniture and we talked with them and gave the appraising looks of peers, the few chilled humans in motion. But most of the time we had the road to ourselves.

I bought the newspaper wherever we were. In Arkansas and Oklahoma lots of people were robbing banks, it seemed to me important to come into a town looking respectable. People on the go did not have social standing. The eyes of the waitresses in the cafés or the grudging grim men and women who rented rooms. I held the baby like a badge. Cleanliness, propriety, the cheerful honest face, mediation in a cold suspicious land. I made a point of tipping well and flashing my roll, I didn’t like that moment of hesitation before the man cranked up the gas tank or the landlady took the key off the board.

In every state Sandy noticed the Justice of the Peace signs in front of clapboard houses. I told her they were legalized highway robbers who lifted travelers of five- and ten-dollar bills I said they handed out jail sentences to hobos but she knew them from the movies as kindly old men who would open their doors late at night to marry people they had wives in hair curlers and ratty bathrobes who smiled and clasped their hands Sandy and I were not mental intimates.

I don’t mean she was stupid she was not, only that she asked no questions, she was already persuaded, like Libby at Loon Lake. She took instruction from the newspapers and radio she marveled at the Dionne quintuplets. But I was very kind to her and patient. We had shared sorrows, we knew something together, and this made me tender toward her. I liked the smell of her after a night in bed, the heat of her under the covers. I took a sweet pleasure in our lovemaking even though she was shockingly ignorant of what she could get from it. The first time as I sat on the edge of the bed she hiked up her flannel nightgown lay herself across my lap. “Not too hard?” she said over her shoulder and buried her face in a pillow. I caressed her ample buttocks and backs of the thighs I felt a film of clammy sweat in the small of her back I thought I had learned more of her late husband’s tastes than I needed to know. She seemed relieved that I wanted no preliminaries and arranged herself on all fours on the bed presenting herself to me dog fashion here I did not demur. One had limits. She braced her arms and set her haunches and even gave them a little twirl now and then. I came quickly for which she afterward rewarded me with a quick kiss on the mouth before she went off to the bathroom.