E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

I got a fire going and made it as large as I could, I threw everything I could find into it, it was a damn bonfire and I crouched beside it trying to get warm I made an involuntary sound in my throat for my dereliction, my loneliness, the callow hopes of my life. Who did I think I was? Where did I think I was going? What made me think it was worth anything to stay alive?

The fire blazed up. I wanted to get in it.

At the first light of the morning I climbed the embankment and set out down the tracks in the direction the train had gone.

Compare the private railroad car sitting on the Santa Fe siding one night in 1910 in front of the mine near Ludlow Colorado whose collapsed entry was being dug away by rescue crews. Late at night by the glow of torches they began to bring out the dead hunky miners, some so impregnated by coal dust they looked like ancient archaeological finds of considerable significance. Some had been blown to pieces and were assembled on the cold ground by thoughtful colleagues who matched the torn halves of pants legs or recognized what head went with what trunk. The boy followed these deliberations and remarked on the sepulchral interest of assembling pieces of bodies matching and discarding, trying this arm here that foot there on the dark ground, the chill of the October night on the slag hills, the black mineral mountains looming darker than the night sky, the boy noticing the darkening stains around the bodies as blood blacker than coalwater. Some miners were brought out intact, uninjured and looking only slightly stunned to have breathed all the available air until there was no more. Some faces had the look of irritability that comes when something small has gone wrong. Others had eyes rolled into their heads in exasperation others had sorrowed into death and by some curious self-embalmment of the skin left the tracks of their tears like shining falling stars through their grizzled faces. The rescue work was commanded from the private railroad car, a property like the mine and like the miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and in the car a self-sufficient unit with bedrooms kitchen small library and a row of partners’ desks were three or four officers of the firm some in gartered shirt sleeves efficiently dealing with the wives making settlements pushing waivers across their desks proffering pens matching the tally sheets to the employment records and in general dealing so efficiently with the disaster that the mine would be back in action within the week. The only thing that threatened this work performance was the occasional embittered woman who would come in screaming and tearing her hair and cursing them in her own language. They would nod to one of the private peace officers and the troublesome woman would be removed. Gradually in his inspection of the disaster the boy found his way into the car and in the moment before he was ejected he observed one of the company officers, a stolid man impassively wiping the spittle from his cheek. The brass plate at his desk informed the boy of F. W. Bennett Vice President for Engineering. Warren felt the rough hand of the armed guard on his neck and then the coolness of the night air as he flew from the top of the rail-car step to the graveled ground. His knee was embedded with bits of stone as the miners had been peppered with coal fragments, so he understood that feeling. To understand what it meant to be buried alive in a mountain he sat later with his eyes closed in the night and his hands over his ears and he held his breath as long as he could.

Every day to school she wore her faded dress of flowers, horizontal lines of originally cheery little tulips row upon row. It came below her knees and there the cast off shoes, boots practically, hook-and-eye boots all cracked and curled, there the boots began, and so nothing of her was uncovered except the neck above the high collar of frazzled lace, and the wrists and the hands and the incredible face that struck my heart like a jolt every time I raised my eyes to look at it.

Migod. When it was possible to feel that way.

Wasn’t it. I used to wake up before dawn and wait impatiently for the light to come into the window so that I could jump out of bed and get ready for school. I would sit on the front wooden step and wait for her to come down the canyon. She would smile when she saw me.

Were you her best friend?

We were each other’s only friend. Her English was very bad. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand. They all sat there with their immense eyes and watched her every move. They never smiled, even when she scratched her head with her pencil and her wig moved up and down on her forehead. She taught them the pledge of allegiance phonetically.

I would like to have known you then.

You would not believe it, Lucinda, but I was very sensual.

I believe it.

No, you’re smiling. But I was, I really was. I lived in such an alerted state that even the daylight sifting through a cloud would give me enormous shuddering response. My friend and I used to play after school in the hills above town. The sun would go down behind the Black Hills but we’d see it to the east still on the plains, moving away from us on the flat plains, racing away in a broad front like an army losing territory on a map. In the shadow in some gully or behind some rock she’d lie in my arms and look at me with her dark eyes, frightened and speechless by our strange intimacy, frightened but not spooked. She could say my name but not much else. She rolled the rr’s. Wadden.

Light me a cigarette, will you?

Is this boring?

No, it makes me sad, though. I know what happened.

I have in my life just three times seen faces in dark light, at dusk, or at dawn, or against a white pillow in which the fear of life was so profoundly accurate, like an animal’s perfect apprehension, that it encompassed its opposite and became the gallantry to break your heart.

Go on.

One day I remember late in the summer, before we all had to leave Ludlow for the flats, we were playing up there at some run-off. Some black-water run-off falling off the rocks somehow, so filthy with coal dust that just putting your hand in it was enough to dye yourself black. She didn’t want to get her one and only dress wet, she’d get a beating for that, so she tied it up around her waist and hunkered there by the stream to play. She wasn’t as old as I. She was a younger person. She wore nothing underneath. It was very lovely. Because I had become still she became still. She let me touch her. She let me run my hand over her small back. I could feel the bones in her ass. I could feel the heat under her skinny thighs.

Was this when you became lovers?

Perhaps so. I mean I know we were at one time or another, I remember that it happened, but I don’t remember the experience of it. What is that up ahead, Lucinda? It looks very dark.

It’s nothing. A line squall.

Heave said his father and they swung the wooden chest up on the wagon bed. Now make it fast. He pushed up with his hands landed lightly on one knee and stood up beside the chest and worked it firmly between the bureau and the slatted side gate. He glanced up the canyon. They were coming along steadily now, mule-drawn wagons like his own or the two-wheeled handcarts which required the woman to throw her entire weight stiff-armed on the handle to keep it from rising and the man around the front braking with his bootheels dug into the ground.

She was nowhere in sight.

The sky was heavy almost black, it felt like evening although it wasn’t yet noon. A fine drizzle misted on the skin and made everything slippery to hold. Each drop of rain seemed to contain a seed of coal dust. If you rubbed the water on the back of your hand it smeared black. Hey his father shouted keep your wits boy! He nearly fell backward as a cardboard box hit him in the chest. He grabbed it. His mother came out of the house with her arms full of pots and pans. His parents went in and out of the door bringing him things which he found a place for on the wagon bed. Gradually he realized he was constructing the model of a city. Seen from a distance, the boxes and headboards and chairs and chests were the skyline of some glorious Eastern city, the kind he had seen in the rotogravure, New York maybe, or St. Louis.