Loon Lake

28

I was on headlights. First I attached with four screws two metal frames the screws lay in a bin the frames met at the convergence of two small belts the left frame from the left belt the right down the line. Sometimes the pieces didn’t match, sometimes the wrong piece came down the wrong side and sometimes, the thread not being true, I had to hammer the screws in, everybody did.

Next I affixed the crossed pieces to the inside of a curl of tin shaped like a flowerpot. I then inserted through a hole in the pot about four feet of insulated wire that came to hand dangling from a big spool overhead. I snipped the wire with a pair of shears, knotted the wire so it wouldn’t slip and put the whole thing back on the line for the next man, who did the electrical connections, slapped on the chrome and sent it on to the main line for mounting on a fender.

That was the operation it’s what I did.

High above my head the windows of the great shed hung open like bins and the sun came through the meshed glass already broken down, each element of light attached to its own atom of dust and there was no light except on the dust and between was black space, like the night around stars. Mr. Autobody Bennett was a big man who could do that to light, make the universe punch in like the rest of us.

And all around me the noise of running machines, conveyor belts, the creaking of pulleys, screeching of worked metal, shouts, the great gongs of autobodies on the line, the blast of acetylene riveting, the rattling of moving treads, the cries of mistakes and mysterious intentions.

And then continuously multiplied the same sounds repeated compounded by echoes. An interesting philosophical problem: I didn’t know at any moment what I heard was what was happening or what had already happened.

It was enough to make me think of my father. The man was a fucking hero.

Then they speed things up and I’m going too slow I drop one of the tin pots on the wrong side of the belt the guy there is throwing tires on wheel rims and giving the tubes a pump or two of air he ignores my shouts he can’t take the time. And then the foreman is coming down the line to pay me a call I can’t hear him but I don’t have to — a red bulging neck of rage.

And then they stop coddling us and throw the throttle to full and this is how I handle it: I am Fred Astaire in top hat and tails tossing up the screws into the holes, bouncing the frames on the floor and catching them in my top hat of tin. I twirl the headlight kick it on the belt with a backward flip of my heel. I never stop moving and when the belt is too slow for me I jump up and stomp it along faster, my arms outstretched. Soon everyone in the plant has picked up on my routine — everyone is dancing! The foreman comes pirouetting along, putting stars next to each name on his clipboard. And descending from the steel rafter by insulated wire to dance backward on the moving parade of car bodies, Mr. Bennett himself in white tie and tails. He’s singing with a smile, he’s flinging money from his hands like Stardust.

Shit, how many more hours of this … I thought of Clara I thought of us driving to California in the spring. And then I thought, What if she just left, what if she met someone and said to him, How do I get out of here?

And then I resolved not to think at all, if I couldn’t think well of Clara, I’d turn my mind from her knowing I was racked, knowing I couldn’t physically feel hope in this hammering noise. But I didn’t have to try not to think, by the middle of the afternoon my bones were vibrating like tuning forks. And so it had me, Bennett Autobody, just where it wanted me and I was screwed to the machines taking their form a mile away in the big shed, those black cars composed bit by bit from our life and the gift of opposition of thumb and forefinger, those precious vehicles, each one a hearse.

On the other hand everyone had the same problem I heard stories of people hauling off on a foreman, or pissing on the cars, or taking a sledge hammer to them, good stories, wonderful stories, probably not true. But the telling of them was important. I was the youngest on my line, jokes were made about that — what a woman could still hope for from someone my age. Jokes were important.

The line was a complex society with standards of conduct honor serious moral judgment. You did your work but didn’t kiss ass, you stood up for yourself when you had to but didn’t whine or complain, you kept your eyes open and your mouth shut, you didn’t make outlandish claims brag threaten.

Yet none of this was visible when we pressed through the gates in the evening, a nameless faceless surge of men in soft caps in full flight.

Clara and I lived on Railroad, the street of the endless two-family bungalows. I had my choice — to take the streetcar, which was faster, or walk and save the carfare.

I ran.

I stopped only long enough to pick up a movie magazine or True Confessions, I liked to bring her small surprises keep her busy keep her occupied.

Sometimes I’d find her waiting at the window looking out the window — the dark industrial sky, the great bobbing crowd of men flowing down Railroad Street making a whispering sound on the cobblestones like some dry Midwestern sea — and she’d be holding her arms, the bleak mass life scared her as some elemental force she hadn’t known, not even realized by the way she stood and watched that she gave it her deference.

We ate things heated from cans. We had two plates two cups two spoons two knives two forks. Our mansion was furnished army-camp fashion by the company. Behind the back porch was the outhouse.

We stayed in the kitchen till bedtime, I tossed pieces of coal in the stove, it never seemed to be enough. Clara sat reading, she wore her fur jacket she wore it all the time. She was fair and couldn’t take the cold, the winter had done something to her face, coarsened it, rubbed the glamour from it. Five minutes out of doors her eyes watered, her cheeks flamed up. She didn’t use make-up anymore.

All of it was all right with me. I still couldn’t take my eyes off her. I tried to remember the insolent girl with the wineglass in her hand and the firelight in her eyes.

“I’m glad you’re laughing,” she said.

I had a scheme for getting us from kitchen to bed. I heated water in the black coffee pot and then ran the pot like a hot iron over the mattress. I undressed her under the covers.

I loved it cold, I loved the way she came to me when it was cold, as if she couldn’t get close enough. But this particular evening I remember she stopped me in my lovemaking, she put her arm on my shoulder and said Shhh.

“You hear that?” she said.

“What?”

“Next door. They’ve got a radio.”

I lay on my back and listened. I heard the wind blowing the snow in gusts along Railroad Street. Sometimes the snow came in through the cracks and in the morning you’d find it lying like dust inside the front door.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Listen.”

And then I heard it, very softly through the wall, it was dance music, the swing band of a warmer world, it made me think of men and women on a terrace under a full moon.