Loon Lake (6 page)

The road inclined gradually around the side of a mountain, one side dropping away to show the darkening sky.

And then, below, a broad lake came into view, a lake glittering with the last light of the day. I stopped to look at it. Something was moving, making a straight line of agitation, like a tear, in the surface.

A moment later a bird was rising slowly from the water, a bird large enough to be seen from this distance but only against the silver phosphorescence of the water. When it rose as high as the land it was gone.

The rest of my survey I made in darkness, by the light of stars. I had come on some isolated reservation, and its center was a cluster of buildings on the mountain overlooking this same lake: a lodge of two stories, and several smaller outbuildings, barns, stables, garages. Even in darkness I could tell that the buildings, like the little station house at the bottom of the trail, were uniformly of log construction.

My vantage point was from the land side, a rise in an enormous rolling meadow beside a tennis court fenced in wood and mesh. I did not try to move closer to see in detail what was in the light of the lodge windows, all ablaze everywhere, as if great crowds were inside. I knew there were no crowds. The wind amplified in gusts the strains of a dance band. When the song was over, it began again. It was a Victrola record of a tune I recognized, “Exactly Like You.”

The perverse effect of this music and the lighted windows was of a repellent and desolate isolation.

Now the wind came up stronger across the meadow, it was off the lake and carried the water’s chill. I looked up to the treetops of the wood behind me and saw them prancing and bucking in the way of a hard life of eminence. I was fixed by my own pride from going to the back door of this establishment and asking for a place to stay or a meal. I didn’t know if I had the stamina for a night on these grounds, but it was as if I was reflecting the clear arrogance of whoever owned this place and traveled to it by imperial railroad, for I was goddamned if I would ask him or them for anything.

I didn’t want her to see me like this!

I remember squatting behind the little tennis shack and keeping myself company with my cigarettes. I smoked one after another and made a community around their glow.

Now I’ll tell what I don’t remember. I don’t remember the sound they must have made, the uncanny sound as it separated itself from the wind in the trees, of group exertion, breath chuffing across twenty or thirty hanging tongues, yelps of murderous excitement. Was the moon out? I rose from my crouch seeing something like an earthwave coming toward me, as if the ground were advancing in a sort of rolling quaking upheaval. This gradually distinguished itself as the furred musculature of shoulders and chests and legs, and I think now I must have seen the face of the lead dog, flung into moonlight, its maddened red eyes like the tracers of those launched fangs. If I didn’t see it I’ve dreamed it a thousand times.

Goddamnit, if city boys knew any animals at all it was dogs. But these were like nothing I’d ever seen. Not that I had the leisure for contemplation. I held up my forearm and his teeth tore it like a piece of paper. Together we rammed into the side of the tennis shack. And then the others were up, tossing themselves at me in their fury but with great inefficiency, they turned on each other snarling for getting in each other’s way though they were effective enough to my pain and screaming terror. I was kicking at them and flinging them off going for the throat trying to tear my throat out, I was kicking and waving my arms and fists and howling like a dog myself and knowing that if I went down I faced something more than the end of my life—shit—the extenuated appreciation of its end, piecemeal, my life taken from me chunk by chunk drop by drop every nerve shrieking.

I think I can imagine some faint memory of the odor of those dogs, feel the closeness of their life, their wild heartbeat! I hear their snorts and the snaps of teeth on air, I remember the toothtumblers lock once the flesh is found, the quick release and regrip down to the bone.

I recall without difficulty the intimate apprehension of prey in the jaws of a maniac life beyond all appeal.

Somehow I was vaulted or inspired upward in some acrobatic backward tumble through the unframed shack window. I took one of the dogs with me, slamming it fixed in my wrist against the inner wall of the shack while
the heads of the others appeared outside the window, a fountain of faces leaping and falling back in rage in frustration. But then one gripped the sill with its paws and began to pull itself up till its own weight would get it inside, I grabbed a tennis racquet hanging in its press and swung toward that head down on those paws. The dog fell out of sight and the other, who had come in with me, stunned loose from its slam against the wall, I now caught on the back with the racquet edge in its heavy press and broke its spine. They were not uniformed pedigreed hounds, they were every kind and make, and this one, a smaller mongrel, I lifted howling and threw to the others.

Things immediately got quiet. I heard the yelps and moans and grunts of appeasement, the soft sound of flesh being fanged. The small moonlit square of night I saw from the floor of the shack was peaceful with stars. Maybe I heard human voices, or the firing of a rifle or a gun, but I’m not sure. I lay there and as the blood flowed from me I lost consciousness.

Adirondacks.
Region first known for wilderness industries trapping hunting.
Earliest roads were logging trails out came the great trees
chained to sledges. In the winter blocks of ice were sawn
from the frozen lakes and carried in procession on funicular tracks
uphill to the railroad depots for shipment to the cities.
In early spring the tapping of the huge sugar maples
and the sap houses sweet blue smoke hanging over the green valleys.
In summer the natives grew small corn and picked wild berries
and grilled trout on open fires by the edge of rock rivers.
But one summer after the May flies painters and poets arrived
who paid money to sit in guide boats and to stand momentously
above the gorges of rushing streams.
The artists and poets patrons seeing and hearing their reports
bought vast tracts of the Adirondacks very cheaply
and began to build elaborate camps there thus inventing
the wilderness as luxury.
Loon Lake a high mountain retreat cratered as purely cold and
clear in the mountains as water cupped in your hands.

I
n the morning the old man, Bennett, gave them all woolen ponchos and took them for a speedboat ride on the lake. She sat up front between him and Tommy. Tommy put his arm around her but she preferred to lean forward in the lee of the windshield where she avoided the wind if not the cold space it left as it blew by.

The little flag in the stern flapped like a machine gun. In the back seat there was no protection at all and they were truly unhappy. The cigarette was whipped out of Buster’s mouth and taken in the air over the wake by a black-and-white bird, some sort of gull. She saw that, having turned to smile back at them, her knee just touching the old man’s pants leg, and Buster, looking startled, saw it too. It seemed to fall away into the sky; He faced her stupidly, his mouth still open and a piece of cigarette paper pasted on his lower lip.

She knew Bennett was showing off for her, rearing the mahogany speedboat through the waves as if it were Buck Jones’ Silver. The sky was very low and the tops of the hills around the lake were shrouded in clouds. The clouds drifted through the trees and she was startled by that intimacy. She thought clouds should stay up in the sky where they belonged.

They had come to the closed end of the lake. The old man throttled down and the boat settled flatter in the water. There were marshes here and dead striplings poking out of the water. He headed straight for the trees and she felt Tommy clench up until a notch appeared in the shoreline. They went into a channel at slow speed and rode serenely by a beaver lodge of wet dark sticks and mud. The old man pointed it out.

She imagined the beaver pups inside their lodge lying on shelves just out of reach of the wavelets lapping their feet.

Then they were out in an even bigger lake with the hills somewhat farther away and a broad stretch of sky higher over everything. It turned out the old man owned this lake too. She wondered if he trained the crazy bird who came down from the sky for a cigarette.

——

Later, in the boathouse, Buster was so relieved at having survived travel on water that he told everyone about the bird.

That was a loon, the old man said, a kind of grebe. They all respectfully considered this intelligence.

You knew that didn’t you Buster, Tommy said.

They put their ponchos back on the wall pegs and reclaimed their fedoras. There were other speedboats in the boathouse, each in its own berth. There were racks with wooden canoes. It was a brown log boathouse with casement windows in the same style as the big house up the hill.

There was a man there to take care of everything.

Bennett led the way. She noted how easily he moved up the path, his back straight, beautiful white hair. These people knew as no one else how to take care of themselves. He was dressed for the outdoors, with boots and a red plaid flannel shirt.

She held Tommy’s arm and enjoyed the warmth of the land on her back. It looked as if the sun might burn through the clouds. She felt good. She felt like dancing. She watched her own feet walking in their strap shoes. They were grown-up-looking feet. She was arm in arm with Tommy, pulling him in close, trying to match strides up the hill. She watched his small black wing-tipped shoes pacing along, their shine ruined, and the cuffs of his pin-stripe flapping dust from the ground.

Up ahead the party was met by a fat guy. He saw her and stood as if struck by lightning. He had been coming down to the lake but turned now with another glance at her over his shoulder and ran along behind the old man.

She held Tommy’s arm, held him back and let them all go out of sight up the hill.

You’ve got to be joking, Tommy said.

She rubbed against him. She kissed him and ran her tongue over his lips and leaned back from him holding her groin against him and looking into his eyes right there in the mountains of the Adirondacks.

Well the kid’s impressed, Tommy said.

She nodded while looking into his eyes. The tip of her tongue appeared in the corner of her mouth. He disengaged her arms and stood back from her.

That’s how much you know, he said.

I
t’s who she is, thinks Warren, definitely, now dressed in flimsies and struggling with the torments of her class but it’s her, the same girl, returned to my life, changed in time, true, changed in place, changed let us be honest in character, but how can I doubt my feelings they are all I have I have spent my life studying them and of them all this is the indisputable constant, the feeling of recognition I have for her when she appears, the ease with which she comes to me regardless of the circumstances, for I have no particular appeal to women, only to this woman, and so the recognition must be mutual and it pushes us toward each other despite our differences, and our inability to understand each other’s language, and here it has happened again though I am indisputably older fatter and more ridiculous as a figure of love than I have been before. Always I am older. Always we do not understand each other. Always I lose her. Oh God who made this girl give her to me this time to hold let me sink into the complacencies of fulfilled love, let us lose our memories together, and let me die from the ordinary insubstantial results of having lived.

W
hat he intuits from the coolness of her conversation or the moods that come over her is that she did not expect to find herself in her present situation. She is not devious and did not plan this. She seems to take each day as it comes and is clearly forged in her being by the race of men she’s had to deal with. In short, they are equals. The realization sends him to the bottle with a shaking hand.

Naturally she would think he was part of the old man’s retinue. It was a natural assumption. At drinks that evening they’re alone. Can I tell you a story? he says. Outside, the rain is heavy, the kind of rain that tamps down the wind. Smoke from the big fireplace drifts into the room like a wisp of cloud come in from the mountains.

I’ve lived here for six years. I’m a poet and the Bennetts are my patrons. But I found this place on my own and when I came here it was to kill him.

The old man?

Yes.

She has to this point only half listened but now he is rewarded by her direct gaze. She sips her Manhattan. She is wearing pleated linen slacks and a thin blouse half buttoned. She likes to show herself.

I swear to the lordourgod I will make her see who I am.

People I loved died because of the policies of one of his companies. He owns lots of companies.

You know what he’s worth?

Worth? What can it matter. I haven’t got a dime myself, he says conscientiously, as if he’d made it his life’s achievement. Millions, billions, the power over people. So I was going to kill him. I got through the dogs with just a tear or two and introduced myself out on that terrace there through the dining room one morning with my knife in my pocket.

She turns and looks through the big bay windows. She turns back.

But you didn’t, she says.

O
ne night when the dogs are in the neighborhood he takes two wineglasses and a bottle of his table red and closes his door and half walks half runs over to her cottage.

I thought you might need some company, he says.

He follows her inside. She wears a robe. She is barefoot. He realizes she answered the door without breaking stride. She is pacing the room. Her arms are folded across her breasts.

The doors to her terrace are closed and locked. The curtain is pulled shut. The room smells of cigarettes. He pours the wine.

Later they are sitting on the floor beside the bed. He has been telling her about his life. He has recited some of his work. She has listened and smoked and held out her glass for wine.