Loon Lake (23 page)

I
said to Red James, “Will you tell me what’s going on?,” my voice feeble and complaining. I already knew in this town of thirty thousand the crucial action was at my eyes, I was centered in it, it could not be less clear than something I would read in the newspaper. I was at the fulcrum where the smallest movement signified distant matters of great weight.

And he answered wonderfully not as if he had until this moment deceived me but as if I’d always known and admired him for what he was.

“See, Joe, I coulda stayed on, you know? Hell, I had it so finely made I mighta run for somethin someday in the national. But the client don’t give a hoot fer that. He gets the intelligence and he spooks like a horse in a hurricane. I mean I’d laugh if I didn’t feel like cryin.”

We were walking home men everywhere talking in groups LAYOFFS! in the headlines flyers announcing a mass meeting trampled in the snow. Red suggested we stop in for a drink. We stood in front of a tavern I’d not been in before, the light in the window was gold and orange, it looked warm in there, I felt I’d better have something.

We sat in a booth in the back under a dip in the patterned ceiling. Behind us was the door to the toilet. We sat in this plywood booth drinking twenty-cent shots with water chasers I smelled the whiskey in my head odor of piss cigarette smoke the sweat of every man in the room.

“’Course I ain’t without choice, they’s a little job at the Republic Steel in Chicago. Ain’t no auto worker in Jacksontown gonna follow me to pull steel in Chicago. An’ ifn there is, just in case, looky here.”

He pulled a paper bag from his lunch pail, shook a small bottle uncapped it put a drop of liquid on his right index finger rubbed the liquid into the red hairs on the knuckles of his left hand. He spread the hand on the table: the red hairs were black.

“You like that?” he grinned, my stunned silence, he signaled the bartender for two more. “But hell, I’m thinkin to drop industrial work. You been to the city of Los Angeleez?”

I shook my head.

“Well, they’s a need for operators there. They’s so much messin around what with them movie stars and all, you see, ever good wife needs to make her case sooner or later, if you get my meanin. As does ever good husband. Yessir, they’s opportunity in Los Angeleez.”

He was nervous, talking with much careless confidence his glance kept flying up to the room behind me and coming back to me and flying off. It happened in the crowded bar that the lower register of his voice was lost in the babble of the room, so half of what he said I couldn’t hear, I only saw the trouble he was in enacted on his face, in the animated appearance of him spiky unshaven red hair around the Adam’s apple, the suddenly large teeth threatening to engulf his chin, pale white eyelashes pink-lidded eyes staring through their mask.

Joe was suspended, blasted. Gone was the wiseass street kid, gone in love, gone in aspiration, gone in the dazzlement of the whole man, the polished being.

“See, if the union was smart they wouldn’t never let on they knowed. Take their losses this hand, play for the next, string me along without me knowin and use me against the company and tell me one thing and do another and trick Bennett right out of their shoes. An’ shit, everyone
woulda made out all around, the union ’cause they knowed ’bout me, the company still thinkin they had their inside op, and me still drawin my pay in good faith and doin my work.”

He slumped against the back of the booth. “Hell, it’s all the same anyways, the boys’ll get their wages and grievance committees and such and it won’t matter, the company’ll just hike their prices, everthin’ll be the same. But you see, they let me know they know and the company knows they know and I’m not good to anyone anymore leastwise to myself and now I gotta take that poor chile and move her out of her home.”

“Red, it is so weird! You recruited me!”

“I surely did. I brought in numbers a good men an’ true.”

“Let me ask you, does Sandy know?”

“What, about me bein a detective? Aw, Joe,” he said with a grin, “the poor chile has so much of a man in me already did I tell her the whole truth she’d go out of her natural mind with love!”

It now occurred to me to ask why I had been told. I was at the point of perceiving his peculiar genius, which was to make a lie even of the truth. He was waving his hand, calling someone, I turned just as two men arrived at the table.

“Set yourself down!” Red greeted them.

One slid in beside me, the other beside Red. I had never seen them before. They were heavy middle-aged men, one wore a suit and tie and coat with the collar turned up, the other had on a lumber jacket and a blue knit cap.

“See,” Red said to them without any preamble, “I ain’t sayin I didn’t make a mistake. I don’t want you to think that, whatever happens.”

“That’s all right, Mr. James,” the one in the overcoat said. He was sitting next to me. He pointed at me with his thumb. “And this is him?”

“My good friend and neighbor Mr. Paterson,” Lyle Red James said.

“I see,” the man in the overcoat said. He twisted in his seat and leaned back to look at me.

The fellow across from him pulled off his cap. He sat hunched over the table holding the cap in his fists. He was a white-haired man and his florid face was covered with gray stubble. He now spoke, his eyes lowered. “James,” he said, “there is a particular place in hell, in fact its innermost
heart, where reside for eternity the tormented souls of men of your sort. They freeze and burn at the same time, their skin is excoriated in sulfurous pools of their accumulated shit, the tentacles of foul slimy creatures drag them under to drink of it. This region is presided over by Judas Iscariot. You know the name, I trust.”

Red began to laugh. “Aw, come on,” he said, incredulous, “that ain’t no kind of talk.”

Then this man with the cap in his hands turned to Red and looked at him. I saw tears in his eyes. “On behalf of every workingman who has gone down under the club or been shot in the back, I consign you to that place. And may God have mercy on my soul, I will go to hell too, but it’ll be a joyful thing if I can hear your screams and moans of useless contrition from now till the end of time.”

“Hey, brother,” Red James said, “come on now, you ain’t even tried to see if I’m tellin the truth. That ain’t exactly fair!”

Both men had risen. The man with the blue knit cap leaned over and spit in Red’s face. The two of them made their way into the crowd and went out the door.

Red was impassive. He splashed some water from his glass onto his handkerchief and washed himself. He glanced at me. “Catholic fellers,” he said.

A few minutes later we left the bar. My blood was lit with two whiskeys, and with the imagery of sin and death in my brain I wanted to ask him more questions—questions!—as if I didn’t already know, like some fucking rube I beg your pardon would you spell it out for me please! Clara, I still had time, there was still time for me to get her and throw our things in a bag and get us the hell out of there. Instead I walked with Red James down Railroad Street in this peculiar identification I made with him, as if only he could guard me from what I had to fear from him, and on Railroad Street where it made a sharp turn there was a shortcut across an empty lot the moon was out and going across this terrain Red glanced at me as I tried to phrase my questions he looked at me with genuine curiosity, as if, with all his figuring he had not figured me to be, in this outcome, that stupid. And we went across the snow moon of the frigid night making our way to our joined homes and fates as if nothing had
happened and two ordinary workers had only stopped for a drink in the time-honored way. He was singing now in his nasal tenor the ritual that comes on the excommunicated

The train I ride on is a hundred coaches long
You can hear the whistle blow nine hundred miles
Ohh-oh me, ohh-oh my
You can hear the whistle blow nine hundred miles.

A
t one point the police asked me if I knew who it was. I shook my head. “I never even saw them,” I said. This technically was true. But I thought I knew them anyway. I recognized the sentiment. I heard in the furious contention the curses of my own kind. Swaying and tumbling all together, we were one being in the snow, one self-reproaching self-punishing being.

The police wore their blue tunics over sweaters. Their hips were made ponderous by all the belts and holsters and cuffs and sticks hanging from them. They were tough and stupid, there were four of them in the hospital emergency room, four cops writing their reports on pads wound with rubber bands. Then the reporter arrived from the local paper, a thin small man in a Mackinaw and fedora, and he asked them if they had found anything in the lot. I could tell it had not occurred to them to look.

When Clara got there with Sandy I was lying on a table in one of the treatment rooms and on the table next to me was the body. I think I’d been given something before they set my arm because I saw Sandy’s
stunned very white face but I didn’t hear the sound she made. The attendant pulled away the sheet the lips were curled back from the teeth like he was grinning and Sandy passed out. Clara, who was holding the baby, grabbed Sandy’s arm and kept her from falling while the attendant ran for the smelling salts. I thought it was still Red making her do whatever he wanted.

Sometime later I had a chance to talk to Clara for a minute.

“He was a company op,” I said.

She shook her head. “The poor dumb galoot.”

“None of this had anything to do with us,” I said, “and I danced us right into it.” I didn’t want to talk this way. I looked in her eyes for the judgment and not finding it tried to put it there by talking this way.

She touched her fingers to my lips.

“He couldn’t have been placed better,” I said. “It was a secret strike plan, nobody knew except the officers. And then the company took out half the machines.”

“Some men came to their house this afternoon,” she said.

“What?”

“Just when it was getting dark. We happened to be on our side. At first Sandy thought it was the radio, that she left it on.”

“Did you get a look at them?”

“I didn’t want to. I heard what they were doing. They tore the place apart.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s lousy that she got hit with all this,” she said.

“Well, now I know why they didn’t believe him.”

“What? I don’t think you should try to talk.”

“No, it’s all right, I’m doped up. I’m saying he was trying to pin it on me. I guess he couldn’t think of anything better.”

“What?”

“But they weren’t buying it because they must have got into his files.” I found myself panting in the effort to speak. I was having trouble catching my breath.

At this moment I saw in Clara’s calm regard the disinterested under-Standing
of a beat-up face—as if nothing I had to say was as expressive as the condition I was in.

“He tried to make me the fink,” I said. I realized I was crying. “The son of a bitch. The goddamn hillbilly son of a bitch!”

She turned away.

I stayed that night in the hospital and once or twice I realized the moans on the ward were my own.

In the morning I caught a glimpse of myself in the metal mirror of the bathroom—arm in a sling, a swollen one-sided face, a beauty of a shiner. I found myself pissing blood.

I was released—I supposed on the grounds that I was still breathing. I walked a couple of blocks to the car line. A clear cold morning. I sat in the streetcar as it gradually was engulfed in the tide of men walking to work. I thought of trying to work the line with a broken arm. I was out of a job.

Men stepped aside to let the streetcar through. Faces looked up at me. I had pretended to be one of them. That was the detective’s sin.

When I got home I found Clara and Sandy James and the baby asleep in my bed. The house was cold and there was a fetid smell, faintly redolent of throw-up or death, it was a very personal smell of mourning or despair. I got the fire going in the coal stove—I was learning with each passing moment the surprises of a one-armed life.

I went next door. The place was a shambles. Red’s desk had been jimmied open, the sofa cushions and chair cushions were piled up, the braided rug was thrown back, his collection of pulp magazines was tossed everywhere. His secretarial ledgers were on the floor, one with the names and addresses of the membership, another with his meeting minutes. I found boxes of mimeographed form letters, a loose-leaf folder with directives of the National Labor Relations Board, a scattered pack of blank union cards.

Inside the splintered front door, stuck in a crack, was the carbon copy of a handwritten memo dated some months before. It had been stepped
on. It was addressed to someone with the initials C.I.S. It was signed not with a name but with a number. But I could tell who the writer was, Red wrote a very chatty espionage report, very folksy. He spelled grievance
greevins
.

The bedroom was no less worked over. I straightened the mattress and lay down and pulled a blanket over me. I knew that I should be thinking but I couldn’t seem to make the effort. Eventually I fell asleep. A wind came along and worked at the broken front door, banging it open, banging it closed, and I kept waking or coming to with the intention of seeing who it was, who it was at the door who wanted to come into this pain and taste of blood.

In the parlor a man was picking up papers and tapping them into alignment on the floor. It was the tapping that woke me.

“Hey, pal,” he said.

He wore a topcoat that was open and followed him like a train as he duckwalked from one item to another. His hat was pushed back on his head.

He stood up with an effort. “Oh boy,” he said, “these old bones ain’t what they used to be.”

A lean face, pitted and scarred, very thick black eyebrows, and carbon-black eyes with deep grainy circles of black under them. A heavy five o’clock shadow. But the skin under all was pale and unhealthy-looking. He had collected Red’s union records and was stuffing them now in a briefcase. He righted the armchairs and looked under the cushions. He felt around the desk drawers. He stacked Red’s pulps, flipping through each one to see if there was anything in it. He was very thorough. And all the while he talked.