Loon Lake (29 page)

He wondered seriously if love wasn’t a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that’s where the love was, in the combined circumstance. This was not the Penfield view but it could be argued. Joe looked at other couples old and young and wondered what they saw in each other, working their little businesses, or pushing their jalopies west, or eating their meals together or holding the hands of a child between them. Maybe all the world’s pairs, dreary and toothless and stumbling drunk, or picking at garbage pails or waiting on the street for a flop knew about love as, say, he and Clara Lukaćs never had. They knew it could incorporate passion or prim distaste, it might be joyous or full of rage, it might carry extreme concern of any kind, or unconcern, but it was presumed to survive challenge. All it was, was a kind of neutral constancy. Sandy knew it! You just made the decision, all you needed to do was decide to have it and love was yours. Nothing grand, nothing monumental, and not a prison either, but a sort of sturdy structure of outlook, one that wouldn’t break under the weight of ideas and longing feelings terrors visions and the world’s awful mordant surprises.

“Sandy,” he said, “let’s get married.”

She hugged him until he thought the truck would go off the road.

“We don’t want a new start, Sandy, we want a new life. A whole new life. When we get to California. Okay? That’s the place.”

She was more than amenable. “Oh my, oh my,” she said, hugging the baby. “You hear that, darlin? We’re gonna have a proper daddy. Yes we are! Oh my!”

There followed a period of solemn discussion. I explained that to make
a true marriage we both had to shuck the ways of our old lives, its attitudes, its assumptions. “I know I won’t be able to live a road life anymore,” I said. “I know I have to plan to make something of myself. And I have ideas, Sandy, a man can do a lot starting from a small investment. More than one fortune has been made that way, I can tell you.”

She nodded.

“So I know I’ve got to give up my past life and I want you to think about giving up yours. Do you ask in what way?”

“Yes sir.”

“In the way of style, Sandy honey. In the way of more ambition of style. Now, take this truck for instance. They stop trucks like this by the hundreds at the California state line. They don’t want people coming in looking like Okies, you know? In fact I’ve read if you can’t prove you have a job waiting they won’t even let you in.”

“This truck is bad?”

“Very bad.”

“But how else we gonna move the furniture and all?”

“Ah, well, the furniture, that’s the next thing I want to talk to you about.”

An hour later we were in a fair-sized town east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There was a big junk store at the edge of town. Sandy and I stood with our luggage in the dusty street while the furniture was unloaded. A man scrawled a big number in chalk on each piece or tied a tag to its leg. Sandy watched her chair and sofa, her big Philco radio disappear into the darkness of the store. I patted her shoulder.

It was cold and very sunny. The man counted out sixty dollars into my hand.

“Where’s there a used-car lot?” I said to him. He walked around the truck, looking it up and down. He leaned his weight on the lowered tailgate. “I’ll take it off your hands,” he said. “Not worth much, though.”

I got seventy-five dollars for the truck, for which I had paid a hundred in Jacksontown. Twenty-five dollars to transport us across six states didn’t seem at all bad.

I tied two of Sandy’s bags with rope and slung them over my good
shoulder. I held another valise under my good arm and a fourth in my good hand. Sandy carried the baby and the remaining bag and, slowly, and with many halts, we shuffled several blocks to the railroad depot. It was a small station on the Santa Fe line and in a couple of hours a train was coming through to Los Angeles.

I checked the bags and took my wife-and-baby-to-be across the street to a diner and left them there. I found a barbershop a few blocks away. The barber removed my bandages and pulled out the stitches. He shaved me and gave me a haircut. He gave me a hot towel.

Then I had an idea. I stopped in a drugstore. My cast was supposed to be on for six weeks, but it was a torment. The druggist did the job as several customers looked on.

I was shocked my my pale thin arm. The break had been down toward the wrist. My fingers ached when I tried to move them. But it was good to be rid of the weight of all that plaster and to sport instead a couple of splints and adhesive tape.

To celebrate I stopped in a haberdasher’s and bought a dark suit with a vest and two pairs of pants. Eighteen dollars. The tailor did up the cuffs for me on the spot. I bought a white shirt and a blue tie for three-fifty. Even my old khaki greatcoat looked good after the man brushed it and put the collar down. “Wear it open,” he said, “so the suit shows.”

Sandy didn’t recognize me when I walked back into the diner.

“Is that you?”

“It’s either me or George Raft,” I said.

The idea was coming clear to her. We still had an hour before the train arrived. She took one of her bags from the check-in and repaired to the ladies’ room.

I remember that depot: it had wooden strip wainscoting and a stove and arched windows caked with chalk dust. I sat on the bench with Baby Sandy and held her on my lap. I felt her life as she squirmed to look at this or that. She wore a wool cap from which hair of the lightest color peeked through. I untied the string under her chin and pushed back the hat and it seemed to me now the hair was more red than I remembered. It seemed to me too as we regarded each other that her facial structure
was changing and the father was beginning to show. “Oh, that would be a shame,” I said aloud. She grabbed my tie in her fist.

And then I looked up and standing there Sandy James in a dress of Clara’s and hose and Clara’s high-heeled shoes. She was looking at the floor and holding her arms out as if she were on a high wire. Her face was flushed, she dropped her bag and grabbed hold of the bench.

“I’m fallin!” she said with a shriek.

“You’re not falling,” I said.

She had combed her hair back and put on lipstick a little bit crooked. She wore a coat open over the dress I hadn’t seen it before it was creased but it was fine a dark creased coat not originally hers any more than the dress or the shoes, but it looked fine, it all looked fine.

She was awaiting judgment with mouth slightly open eyes wide.

“Aw, Sandy,” I said, “you look swell. Oh honey, oh my, yes.” And she broke into smiles, glowing through her freckles, her pale eyes crescented behind her cheekbones in a great face of pleasure, and there was our life to come in the sun of California—all in the beaming presence she made.

And so we sat waiting for our train, this young family, who would know what we had come from and through what struggle? We were an establishment with not a little pride in ourselves and the effect we made in the world. I thought of a bungalow under palm trees, something made of stucco with a red tile roof. I thought of the warm sun. I imagined myself driving up to my bungalow in the palm trees, driving up in an open roadster and tooting the horn as I pulled up to the curb.

A while later an interesting thing happened. The Stationmaster told us through the gate that the famous Super Chief was coming through from Los Angeles. We went out on the platform to watch it go by on the far track. And after a minute it thundered by, two streamlined diesel engines back to back, and cars of ridged shiny silver with big windows. It shook the station windows with its basso horn, and a great swirl of dirt flew into our eyes. It was going fast but we could see flashes of people in their compartments.

Sandy grabbed my arm: “You see her! It’s her, omigod, oh, she looked right at me!”

A moment later the train was gone and I stood watching it get smaller and smaller down the track. “Didn’t you see her?” Sandy asked. “Oh, what’s her name! Oh, you know that movie star, you know who I mean! Oh, she’s so beautiful?”

It was true, the Stationmaster said a few minutes later, you could get a glimpse of Hollywood stars every day, east and west, as the Super Chief and the Chief went by. But he wouldn’t know in particular which one we had seen. “Oh, you know,” Sandy kept saying to me. “You know who it is!” She stamped her foot trying to remember.

I had thought it was Clara. I laughed at myself and lit a cigarette, but long afterward something remained of the moment and located itself in my chest, some widening sense of loss, some heartsunk awareness of the value I once placed on myself.

The cars were crowded, valises and trunks piled near the doors at each end, bags and bundles stuffed in the overhead racks. We found a place toward the rear of one overheated car and we settled ourselves. We sat stiffly in recognition of the established residence of the other passengers. The car gave off the smell of orange peel and egg salad. People wore slippers instead of shoes, they slept covered with their own blankets and they chatted with each other like neighbors. Children ran up and down the aisle.

Passers-by stopped to admire the baby. We could not resist the social demands of the situation. Sandy was soon talking away, introducing us in our prematurely married state. Everyone else in the car, and in the car ahead of it and the car behind, was from the same town in Illinois. They were members of a Pentecostal church. A man told us they were moving to California to set up a new community on donated land south of Los Angeles. “Yes, thank Jesus Christ our Lord,” he said. “We shall take ourselves into the Pacific and be baptized in the waters of His ocean.” The idea so overwhelmed him that he broke into song. Soon everyone in the car was singing and clapping hands. Sandy smiled at me in the excitement of the moment, she was thrilled.

By evening I believed I had heard every number in the repertoire. They
were good generous people if you didn’t mind their conviction. After Sandy fell asleep across our seat they covered her with their blankets. An older woman happily shushed Baby Sandy to sleep in her arms.

I stood between the cars and smoked my cigarettes. This train was no Chief, it made frequent stops, and each time I got off to look around. As the night wore on, the train lingered at each stop although no one got on or off and only a sack or two was flung aboard the mail car. At one station, a small town in the desert, I thought I smelled something different in the air, like a warmer breeze or another land. It was very late. All the pilgrims on the train were asleep. Steam drifted back from the engine. I felt strange, as if coming out of shock. I felt as if I knew no one on earth.

I wondered if this wasn’t really the last stop, if California was like heaven, unproven. In this flatland of grit and rubble, you might sense the barest whiff of it in the air or intimation in the light of the sky—but this was as far as you got.

I wandered to the rear to the end of the platform. I picked up a folded newspaper from a Railway Express baggage cart—the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper a week or two old. I looked at the pictures. I was looking at Lucinda Bailey Bennett the famous aviatrix, two whole pages of her at various times of her life. She stood beside different airplanes or sat in their cockpits. A separate ruled column listed her speed and endurance records by date. At the bottom right-hand page of the story she was shown under the wing of a big two-engine seaplane. She was waving at the camera. The caption said: H
ER LAST FLIGHT
. Behind her, climbing into the cabin, was a large man, broad of beam, unidentified.

I turned back and found the beginning of the feature: Lucinda Bennett’s plane
The Loon
had been given up for lost over the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. F. W. Bennett was quoted as saying that if his wife had to die, surely this was the way she would prefer, at the controls of her machine, flying toward some great personal ideal.

Images of falling through space through sky through dreams
through floor downstairs down well down hole downpour.
Birds that fall into the sea as a matter of lifestyle include
kingfishers canvasbacks gulls heron osprey pipers tweaks.
Birds that fall most prominently into fresh water are loons
a type of grebe. Sixteen lakes in the Adirondack Mountains
named Loon Lake. The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten.

Clara has time to think, the space to realize her thinking mind. Never in her life has her life been so uncrowded, something she never before realized consciously how crowded her life was how people from her infancy had always been in her eyes, how the sounds of them had always been in her ears, how their presence moved in her their wills directed her even insofar as she created opposition she had been crowded by them their wills their voices their appearance directing her their cars and trucks the rumble of the elated horns horses pulling wagons splatting dung in the street, peddlers pushing their carts the stone blasting out of the rock of Manhattan tying in the girders with rivets, slapping in the stone, every
manner of machine whining growling rumbling roaring in its own pitch, and all the gangsters of menace all the pain, others and her own, and the sound of fear in her, her own fear which she hated most of all because it was the loudest noise in the universe, the nuns at their prayers, kids shouting down the street, the muttering of murderous intention, and every square inch of space in her eyes blocked out by stone and tar and moving metal, by dark stairs and painted apartment walls, by overstuffed furniture by cots and pots and sinks and roaches and tin plates and later by phony butlers and the pretensions of the earth’s scum, there was nothing left in her eyes for a bee gravid with being bending a flower to the earth, or for simple blue skycolor unpenetrated by the spires of skyscrapers, or for something small and lovely to be contemplated for its own seriousness, like a comb or a hand mirror or a goldfish in a bowl, there was no chance, nothing reflected, nothing gave back from the contemplation of it, even her dreams were pure shit they did nothing for her, they were her days all over again, filled with the same people the same things in different arrangements or proportions but the same the same. So she stands quietly after some days molecularly reassembled widely spaced in her own density and watches through some branches and some leaves which have interest in themselves and pay her for the most marginal attention as she watches between them the lake water flung like a cast of silver grain in the gray day, two wakes widening behind the pontoons of the airplane finally losing the chase like porpoises turning back underwater as the green-and-white plane exchanges one environment for another and rising slowly turns, twists in the air rising turning its wings concentrating to a point then flaring out the plane falling swiftly away into the sky losing its color finally its shape and becoming possibly a speck of dust in her eye and when she blinks it is gone altogether, made of cloud made of sky gone even the sound of it gone, and she stares at the silver-scattered lake, the green leaves at her eyes, the branches and the big important journey of the ant along the twig.