Loon Lake (11 page)

And then he was telling us about the war, of all things, a veteran, migod, would he bring out the poppies? But soon we were inside his images, listening like children, the mule-drawn caissons sinking in the mud, the troops in greatcoats and tin helmets riding the mules’ backs, kicking their boots sharply against the mules’ flanks, the bracing of backs on six-foot wheels, spokes like baseball bats tires of steel, each soldier alone and miserable inside his coat, charred trees beside the road the sky showing through city hall, gusts of acrid air blowing from the front, and here is Corporal Penfield riding the signal wagon, flag tubes strapped to his back like quivers, a helmet tilting over his eyes because the strap is too loose, and on his lap the crate covered with a khaki blanket shifts perceptibly, the pigeons whirring with each dull boom lighting the sky like lightning miles ahead.

He was dangling a medal. He had taken it from his pocket. He handed it to me. The colors of the ribbon had bled, there was thread and lint attached to it, but it was a Silver Star and it was his.

I leaned forward put it in her hand leaning forward over the bear rug between us, our hands grazed I felt the heat of her hand.

And there in our minds as we looked at the palpable proof was Signal Corporal Penfield during the battle of the Somme dispatched urgently to semaphore the artillery to drop some heavy stuff on the encircling Huns.

“The field telephone didn’t work, there wasn’t even a damn pigeon left.” He paused to wet his throat. “So I took the old semaphore flags and went up to the top of a hill where I could be seen, because even though it was night the star shells were like the Fourth of July and it was brighter than day. I could see out over no man’s land. I sent my message”—here he lifted his arms, attached to the glass and bottle and did a half-hearted pantomime—“and a while later the artillery came in on target, and that’s what I got the medal for.”

“You’re a hero,” she said, smiling. She dropped the medal in his lap and then raised her glass to her lips.

“No, but, love, you haven’t heard the end.” He dropped his chin to his
chest. “I was so terrified I didn’t send the message I was supposed to. What I semaphored was the first verse of a poem.”

“What?” I said.

“‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream,’ and so on,” he said. “And a while later the shells came in on target. It was very strange.”

She was laughing. “In the war—in the battle?”

“Surely you know it,” he said. “The Intimations Ode? Didn’t you have it in school?”

“But why?”

“I don’t know why. Maybe I thought I was going to die. Maybe it seemed to me the only appropriate thing
to
say. Anyway, after I got the medal I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army returning it and telling him it was more properly William Wordsworth’s.”

“But it wasn’t a medal for poetry,” I said, and immediately felt like a fool.

“Apparently not, Joe of Paterson. Apparently not. I had to go for psychiatric tests. They pinned the medal on my bathrobe. They kept me under observation for ninety days in Nutley, New Jersey.”

“Where?” she said, happily laughing. He looked up at her, victorious in her amusement. “Oh, Warren, you old fuck, where?” She threw back her head and laughed and laughed, I gazed at her throat, her neck, it was a moment in which I could look at all of her as she sat in her white satin robe, she bending forward now in her laughter, the robe unfolding like unfolding wings so that I could see her breasts.

Then I realized Penfield was looking at me, with his head lowered, with raised eyebrows, a characteristic expression, I knew at once, full of sadness, full of self-acknowledgment, and as she reached out and touched his head he too began to giggle, he was in love with her, and soon they were both laughing and I was laughing, but trying not to for some reason, feeling badly that I laughed, feeling ashamed.

I hadn’t realized how drunk they were. A few moments later, in silence, she put her glass down and reached out, holding his head in her arms. He looked up at her, and behind her shingle of hair he kissed her, his hand
with the bottle going up involuntarily, another semaphore, and I heard her sob, and then both of them were crying.

I tried to leave, but they wouldn’t allow it. All at once they were very physical with me, placing themselves on either side of me and leading me back to the middle of the room. Penfield went to stoke up the fire. She led me to my chair and pressed my shoulders firmly with her small hands and then sat across from me and studied me solemnly. Until this moment her primary awareness had been of Penfield, she had not quite acknowledged me, as if one person at a time, and only one, could occupy her mind. She was always to be this way, intense and direct with whatever she fixed upon, and whatever the affront to those on the periphery. It was not snobbishness or anything like that—she was in fact reckless of her self-interest in a situation, and that I think was the center of her force and effect. She knew nothing about courtesy in the sense of not being subject to it. She blazed through her feelings and suffered the consequences.

I began to realize as we talked that she was no older than I was. I was stunned—I was not yet twenty—I equated power and position in the world with age.

“You live here?” she said. “How do you stand it?” I rubbed my palms on my knickers. I looked with alarm at Warren Penfield, who said, “Clara, he’s my surprise for you,” and came back to his place on the floor.

She had a throaty voice with a scratched quality. Her diction was of the street. “Whats ’at mean!” She gazed at me, her eyes widening, and I was certain, as if a chasm were opening around me, that she was as fraudulent in this place as I was. I drank off my wine.

“You remember the night you heard the dogs?” the poet said to her, and leaned forward to refill my glass. “Joe here is taking each day as it comes—like you, Clara.”

I saw realization light her eyes. She went to the fire and sat down before it with her back to us. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I drank more than I should have. The fire looming her shadow across the low-ceilinged room. Later we heard the rain falling, a heavy rain that seemed to do something to the draught. Wood smoke came into the room
on gusts. At this point we were all standing, I had removed my shirt, and she was tracing the scars on my chest and arms and neck with her fingertips.

I could smell her, the soap she used, the gel of her hair. The firelight flared on our faces as if we were standing with the poet in his war.

“He told me it was a deer, that they took a deer,” she said. “That was a lie.”

“Yes,” Penfield said, watching her fingers.

“What class,” Clara said. Tears were suddenly coming down her cheeks.

“I could help you leave,” Penfield said. His eyes closed and he began moving his head from side to side like someone in mourning. “I can get you out of here. We can leave together.” His sentences became a hum, a soft keening, as if he were listening to some private elegy and had no hope of an answer from her.

“That son of a bitch,” she said with the tears streaming. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

Certain contracts having quietly been made in mountains
certified convicts having mislaid their companions
I direct you eight hundred Mercator miles west
to the autobody works on the flat landscape
dawn whitening the frost on the corrugated shed roofs
the smokeless stacks the endless chain-link fence
the first trolley of the morning down Division Street
discharges workers in caps and open jackets but not workers.
The pickets roused from their sleep huddled by steel-drum fires
the cops awakened in their cars rubbing their misted windshields
the second trolley of the morning tolls down Division Street
discharges workers or workers at first glance
but somehow not resembling the strikers grouping uneasily
in front of the main gates of the autobody works.
The cops make calls from phoneboxes on the corners
the third trolley of the morning grinding its flanged wheels
on Division Street stopping the arrivals stepping down now
seen in the light their expressions of newly purchased loyalty
appearing as an unaccustomed cause in their shrewd appraising eyes
the insignia of their dereliction, jackets with pockets of pints
shoes tied around with rope, medals of filth,
mercenaries with callused fingers discovering
the cobblestones pried so easily
by ones and twos and hefted as many as until the tracks
of the trolleys of Division Street stand up from unpaved beds.
Open trucks arrive filled with the faces not of workers.
This army can take the city apart and put it back together
if it so wishes or perhaps wrap the electrified lines
stringing the utility poles overhead around each individual striker
until he may go self-powered into eternity.

Cops start patrol-car engines drive quietly away
certain black sedans now arrive between arrivals
of the crowded streetcars and trucks some men in overcoats appearing
among the seeming workers resembling only slightly now the pickets
with the eyes of lepers staring at them
no saints present on this wet gray morning to kiss them,
so numerous now they do not even have to look at whom they will face
when they walk over them into the plant and throw the switches.
And primly planning the action deploying forces
is a slim and swarthy man in overcoat and pearl-gray fedora
a dark-eyed man short but very well put together
friend of industrialists, businessman who keeps his word
and capable of a gracious gesture under the right conditions.
Only now, as with a gloved hand he beckons one of the strikers
an aged man with white hair and rounded shoulders
who has called out brothers don’t do this to your brothers
to meet him between the lines alone in no man’s land
does a small snapshot of rage light his brain.
He impassively demonstrates the function of the cobblestone
a sudden event on the workingman’s skull who has met him
surprised now at the red routes of death mapped on his forehead
turning to share this intelligence with his brothers
hand lifted too late as the signal for the engagement to begin.

A
nd then the life quickened, suddenly the people in green were scurrying about purposefully, there even seemed to be more of them, and I knew without being told that the master of Loon Lake, Mr. F. W. Bennett, was in place.

One morning I was mucking out the stables. Two horses were made ready for riding. The wide doors swung open admitting a great flood of light, the horses were led out, and I caught a glimpse of her in jodhpurs, velvet riding jacket, she was fixing the strap of her riding helmet. The doors closed. I climbed over the stall gate and ran to a window. A bay flank and a shiny brown boot moved through my field of vision. I heard a man’s voice, a quiet word of encouragement, and then she, on her lighter mount, passed my eyes, the boot not quite secure in the stirrup.

I ran to the doors and put my eyes to the crack: the back and head of white hair were all I could see of Bennett before Clara’s figure loomed up on her fat-assed horse, she didn’t roll with its footfalls but took each one bumping, her black riding helmet slightly askew.

And then horses and riders passed behind some trees and were gone.

I raked shit.

In the evening I went to Mr. Penfield’s rooms and we listened to the scraps of dance music carried from the main house on the wind.

“I suppose I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” I said.

“What?” He had been staring into his wineglass.

“When it comes to his attention.”

“You can’t be sure, Joe of Paterson. I have made a great study of the very rich. The one way they are accessible is through their whim.” He swallowed some wine. “Yes. I have not told you this, but six or seven years ago when I came up here at night along the track, as you did, I knew where I was going. I had traced Frank Bennett to Loon Lake and I intended to kill him.”

“I have the idea myself,” I said. He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Mr. Bennett was amused. I was invited to remain on the grounds and write my poetry. Yes. And now you see me.”

“I do,” I said. “I see you.”

“I know what you think. You think living this way year after year and not going anywhere, not doing anything, I have lost my perspective. It’s true! It’s true. So that everything that happens, every, oh God”—his eyes go heavenward, he swallows some wine—“small thing, is monumentally significant. I know! I lie in wait like a bullfrog lying in wait for whatever comes along for his tongue to stick to. Yes. That’s the only part of me that moves, my tongue.”

He dropped his chin on his chest and stared at me with his bleary red eyes. “You want to hear me croak?”

“What?”

He emitted the sound of a bullfrog, never had I heard such a blat of self-disgust I didn’t want to. It was not one night like this but several I remember, sitting in his living room over the stables, piles of books on the floor, a desk covered with papers, composition notebooks the kind I used in school, clumps of dust on the floors, ashtrays filled to overflowing, ashes on the carpet, on the window seat, he drifts back and forth back and forth between the wine bottles and the window, and all the while Miss Clara Lukaćs dances rides swims dines in the provinces of Loon Lake, mysteriously advanced now to the rank of its mistress.

“I don’t think it’s a small thing,” I said. “I think it is monumentally significant.”

“Yes,” he says, and he pulls his chair closer to mine, “this is not the first acquaintance. And it has nothing to do with who I am or the way I look, it’s always the same—the immediate recognition I have for her when she appears, and the ease with which she comes to me whatever circumstances I’m in, whatever I’ve become. Because I have no particular appeal to women and I never have, except to this woman, and so the recognition must be mutual and it pushes us toward each other even though we don’t talk the same language. And so, you see, now again, even though I’m indisputably fatter and more ridiculous as a figure of love than I ever was. And even though” his eyes brimmed—“she is faithful to nothing but her own life.”