Loon Lake

24

I drove out of the mountains through the night and found the way to Utica, New York, coming into city streets in the rain at three o’clock, passing freight yards, warehouses. She was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her, I bumped the car gently across the railroad tracks and headed south and west toward Pittsburgh.

I wanted to log as many miles as I could before Bennett got up in the morning.

By dawn I was clear-eyed exhausted, feeling my nerves finely strung, the weariness in the hinges of my jaws, you are never more alert. Red lights in the dawn at intersections between fields, I saw the light of dawn shoot clear down the telegraph wires like a surge of power, I passed milk trucks and heard train whistles the sun came up and flooded my left eye suddenly it was day commerce was on the roads we had survived Loon Lake and were cruising through the United States of America.

I woke her for breakfast, we walked into a diner — some town in Pennsylvania. Clara in her fur jacket and long dress and Junior in his knickers and sweater. Someone dropped a plate. Clara is not awake yet — a hard sleeper, a hard everything — she sits warming her hands on her coffee cup, studies the tabletop.

“This won’t do,” I said, steering her by the arm to the car.

“What?”

“It’s asking for trouble.”

I found an Army-Navy Surplus Store. I bought myself a regular pair of pants, work shirt, socks, a wool seaman’s cap and khaki greatcoat. I bought Clara a black merchant marine pullover and a pea jacket. I made her change her clothes in the back of the store. Then I did.

Mr. Penfield had pressed upon me about eighty dollars in clean soft ones and fives, bills that looked as if they had spent years in a shoe box. I added to this the forty dollars or so of my own fortune. The clothes had come to twenty-eight, and another dollar and change for breakfast.

“What kind of money do you have?”

“Money?”

“I want to see what our cash assets are.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s really swell.”

“Look in my bag if you don’t believe me.”

“Well, how far did you think you could go without money?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

It was the best of conversations, all I could have wished for. I scowled. I drove hard.

We took the bumps in unison, we leaned at the same angle on the curves. I didn’t know where we were going and she didn’t ask. I drove to speed. I stopped wondering what she was feeling, what she was thinking. She was happy on the move, alert and at peace, all the inflamed spirit was lifted from her. She had various ways of arranging herself in the seat, legs tucked up or one under the other, or arms folded, head down, but in any position definitive, beautiful.

Come with me

Late that afternoon we were going up a steep hill along the Monongahela, Pittsburgh spreading out below us, stacks of smoke, black sky, crucible fire. By nightfall I was numb, I couldn’t drive another mile. We were in some town in eastern Ohio, maybe it was Steubenville, I’m not sure. On a narrow street I found the Rutherford Hayes, a four-story hotel with fire escapes and a barber’s pole at the entrance. I took a deep breath and pulled up to the curb.

In the empty lobby were the worn upholstered chairs and half-dead rubber plants that would have been elegance had I not been educated at Loon Lake. I had never stayed at a hotel but I knew what to do from the movies.

I got us upstairs without incident and tipped the bellboy fifty cents. “Yes, suh!” he said. I chain-locked the door behind him.

We had a corner room with large windows, each covered with a dark green pull shade and flimsy white curtains. Everything had a worn-out look, a great circle of wear in the middle of the rug. I liked that. I liked the idea of public accommodation, people passing through. Bennett could keep his Loon Lake. I looked out the window. We were on the top floor, we had a view of greater Steubenville. In the bathroom was a faucet for ice water.

Clara, who had been in hotels before, found the experience unexceptional. She opened her overnight bag and took over the bathroom. I smoked a cigarette and listened to the sounds of her bathing. I kept looking around the room as if I expected to see someone else. Who? We were alone, she was alone with me and nobody knew where we were. I was smiling. I was thinking of myself crouched in the weeds in the cold night while a train goes by and a naked girl holds a white dress before a mirror.

This was a double bed I had booked and she hadn’t even blinked. That would seem reason to hope. But for Clara Lukaćs there was no necessary significance in sleeping beside somebody in the same bed. She came out of the bathroom without a stitch. I undressed and turned out the light as cool in my assumptions as I could be. A high whine of impatience, a kind of child’s growl, and a poke of her elbow was what I got when I happened to move against her in the dark. Just testing.

She curled up with her back toward me, and those vertebrae which I had noticed and loved were all at once deployed like the Maginot Line.

—

In the morning she woke out of sorts, mean.

“What in hell am I doing here?” she muttered. “Jesus,” she said, looking at me. “I must be out of my mind.”

I was stunned. My first impulse was to appeal.

“Look at him, hunky king of the road there. Oh, this is great — this really is great.” She snapped up the window shade and looked out. “God damn him,” she said. “And his wives and his boats and choo-choo trains.”

She began to dress. She held up blouses, skirts, looked at them, flung them down. She sat abruptly on the bed with her arms full of clothes and she stared at the floor.

“Hey,” I said. “I told you I’d get you out of there and I did. Didn’t I?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey, girlie,” I said, “didn’t I? You have a complaint? You think you’re some hot-ass bargain?”

“You bet I am, hunky, I can promise you.”

“Well then, go on,” I said. “Go back to your fancy friends and see what they do for you. Look what they already done.”

I got out of bed, pulled on my pants and socks, and stuck my feet in my shoes.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Here,” I said, taking out my wallet. I crumpled a couple of singles and threw them on the floor. “That and a twitch of your ass will get you back to the loons.”

“You’re not leaving,” she said. “You’re not leaving me here!”

“You can go back to your career fucking for old men,” I said. I put on my shirt and combed my hair in the mirror over the dresser. “It’s probably as good as you can do anyhow.”

The mirror shattered. I didn’t know what she had thrown. When I went for her she was reaching for the Gideon Bible to throw that. I grabbed her arm and we knocked the bedside lamp to the floor. I pinned her to the bed. She tried to bite me. I held her by the wrists and put my knees on each point of the pelvis.

“You’re hurting me!” I moved back and let go of her. She lay still. A queer bitter smell came from her. It was anger that aroused her, confrontation was the secret.

But when I found her she was loving and soft and she shrank away softer and more innocent of her feelings than I had dreamed.

I held her, I loved the narrow shoulders, the small-boned frailness of her, the softness of her breasts against me. I was kissing her eyes, her cheeks, but she cried in the panic of the sensation, her legs couldn’t find their place, she was like a swimmer kicking out or like someone trying to shinny up a pole.

I wanted her to know the sudden certainty declaring in me like God. I was where I belonged! I remembered this!

But she didn’t seem to be aware of how I felt, there was this distracted spirit of her, her head shook from side to side with bursts of voice, like sobs, as if someone was mourned.

Our lovemaking was like song or like speech. “Don’t you see,” I asked again and again, “don’t you understand?” And she shook her head from side to side in her distraction. I couldn’t overcome this. I became insistent, I felt my time running out, I felt I had to break into her recognition. It’s you, I wanted her to say, and she wouldn’t she wouldn’t say the words.

And then the tenderness was gone and I was pounding the breath from her, beating ugly grunts of sound from her, wanting her to form words but hearing savage stupid gusts of voiceless air coming from her.

In my moment of stunned paralytic grief I groan I go off bucking I think I hear her laugh.

For several days we made our life sleeping till mid-morning and getting on the road and driving again till the sun went down and we could find a bed. We drove through boarded-up towns, we ate blue-plate specials and we slept in rooming houses with linoleum on the floor and outhouses in back or in small motor-court cabins with the sound all night of the trucks rolling past. Night and morning we made love it was what we did our occupation our exercise. But always with great suspense in my mind. I never knew if it would happen again. I didn’t have the feeling anything was established in her. She fucked in a kind of lonely self-intensification. She slept without touching me, she slept with no need to touch or hold me, she went off to sleep and it was as if I weren’t there.

I would think about this lying in the dark while she slept. I was there for her, I was what she assumed, and I was willing to be that, to be the assumption she didn’t even know she was making. And then one day she’d discover that she loved me.

Once in a while, usually in the numb exhaustion of daybreak, I’d look into her face and see an aspect there of the acknowledgment I wanted in the gold-washed green eyes. There would be humor in them. The lips slightly swollen and open, the small warm puff of breath. She’d giggle to see neither of us was dead and she’d give me a cracklipped kiss a soft dry kiss with the hot pulp of her lip against mine.

She liked to be inside her appetites and her feelings. Whatever they were. One day in a rainstorm I skidded off the road. I was frantically spinning the wheel, I couldn’t see through the rain, it had turned white, opaque, but Clara was laughing and shrieking like a kid on a carnival ride. We thudded into a ditch. Water softened the canvas top and began to leak through and we sat at a tilt as if in a diving plane, in clouds. I thought we might drown. Then we felt the car rise, somehow the water floated us free, and when the storm passed over, we gently drifted a half mile or so in the flood like some stately barge down a stream. She loved it, she loved every second of it, her fingers gripping my arm, the nails digging into my skin.

Sometimes we went out at night walking some main street to a local movie. She liked to stop in a tavern and drink ten-cent beers, she liked the looks she got, the sexual alert that went off every time she walked into a bar or a diner. One time someone came over to the booth and started to talk to her as if I weren’t even there. It seemed to me unavoidable what I had to do. He was an amiable fellow with a foolish grin, but with the strength in him of belonging in this bar, of being known in this bar, this town, he looked down and saw my knife, the tip making an indentation in the blue shirt and the sprung gut. He was genuinely astonished, they don’t use knives in boondocks of the Midwest, he backed off with his palms up.

She had turned pale. “What’s the idea, do you know what you’re doing?” She spoke in a soft urgent whisper leaning toward me over the table.

“I do,” I said, “and if you don’t stand up and get your ass moving I’ll do the same to you.”

Outside I grabbed her arm. She was in a cold rage but I had the feeling, too, that I had done right, that I had shown her something she wanted to see.

“You know something?” she said as I hurried her along to our room. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

I thought they were the first words of love I’d heard from her.

In Dayton, Ohio, I saw in the rear-view mirror the unmistakable professional interest of a traffic cop as we drove away from his intersection.

“I have not been smart,” I said. “I suppose my mind has been on other things.”

I made a sharp turn into a side street and started looking for the poor part of town.

“What’s the matter?”

“A German convertible with bud vases and New York plates. You don’t often see that in these here parts.” She thought awhile. “Is this a hot car?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Soon enough we were going through the dingy sections where the bums were standing on the sidewalks and the garbage spilled into the streets. The Buckeye State Used Cars enterprise looked grim and satisfactorily seedy, I turned in there and commenced a negotiation. The man with his fat dirty fingernails showed me there was not even a book on such a car. I said that was because it was so expensive they didn’t figure anyone could afford it. He said maybe so, but how could he sell a car where you could not get the parts if they broke? I said nothing ever broke on a car like this. He said how could he take ownership on a car that had no papers? I said it was my family’s car and since when did you walk around with papers of your own family’s car? He said why did I want to sell my family’s car? I said I was running away to get married and needed cash. “How are you going to run if you don’t have no car anymore?” he said. “I’m going to buy a modest well-tuned vehicle from you,” I said, looking with bright honest earnestness into his face.

He walked around the car several times. He glanced at Clara in the front seat, I had told her to put on her fur jacket. “That is my fiancée,” I said to him softly, “of whom they don’t approve.” I could see him thinking: They wouldn’t go after their own kid.

Come with me

Combust with me

“Someday,” Clara said over the noise, “maybe you’ll be able to buy it back, or one like it.”

“What?”

“I said someday you could hope to get it back.”

“I’ve got my car,” I said, pounding the dashboard. “I’ve got papers for it. I’ve got a hundred fifty simoleons in my pocket. Is that bad? We can get to California if we’re careful.”

“California?”

“That’s where we’re going. Didn’t you know?”

“I wasn’t informed,” she said, holding on to the leather strap over the door. She peered ahead, frowning. I had taken in partial trade a 193 °Chevrolet station wagon with wood-panel sides that shook and rattled, and floorboards that jumped in the air every time we hit a bump. It had a high polish on its tan-and-brown body and admitted to fifty thousand miles.