Loon Lake

29

Their place — the mirror of our three rooms — astounds me. No trace of company domicile, it’s all been washed from the walls and strained from the light coming in off the street. We sit on stuffed horsehair chairs, there is a matching sofa, behind the sofa a lamp with a square translucent shade of the deco design. A braided rug covers the parlor floor and glass curtains adorn the windows. Amazing. On the desk in the corner a private phone. Who would have thought people on Railroad Street had their own phones?

The subtle giving to the newcomers of their protection. Lyle James smiles sitting on the sofa with his hands on his overalled knees, he’s one of those crackers, hair like steel wool, reddish going to gray, a face of freckles so that he appears to be behind them looking from his pink-lidded eyes through them as from some prison of his own innocence, buckteeth smiling.

What does he see? In Jacksontown, crossroads of the world, he thinks he’ll see everything given enough time. These two are just getting their legs, the boy looking at her as if she’s sick about to die, or have a fit, but it’s his fit more likely, that’s what’s important to this boy, not how he feels but how she feels. And she, one spooked little old girl, she smokes her cigarettes, crosses her legs, stares at the floor, that’s the way it is with folks from the East.

Mrs. James comes in from the kitchen holding a platter with chocolate cake and cups and saucers and napkins. Another freckled-face redhead, but a pretty one with light eyes, a plump mouth sullen in a child, provocative in a woman. Which is she? She is very shy, blushing when her husband boasts that she baked the cake herself. She wears an unbuttoned sweater over her dress, school shoes, ankle socks.

We’re all Bennett people, neighbors, fellow workers, this is Clara, hello, this is Sandy, hi, Clara, this is Lyle, this is Joe.

They are Southerners, like so many of them here, but with my tenacity, I recognize it, they talk slower but feel the same. He must be thirty-five, a lot older than his wife, crow’s-feet under the freckles, they act dumb but I don’t believe it.

I detected the sly rube who liked to take city slickers.

Clara talks to the wife. Clara in this conversation is the older woman from New York, Mrs. James maybe sixteen years old stands in awe of that sophistication. And then a baby is brought out, the child wife has a baby!

The establishment of them sitting modestly for our admiration: people are strong, they prove themselves. You see, Clara? You can wrest life from a machine and walk away.

“’A course,” he was saying, “all this work ain’t just the season. You wouldn’t know but they was a wildcat strike last summer. Quite a to-do at the main gate. The company brought in strikebreakers. A feller was killed. They closed the plant down, fired everone. Everone!”

I nod, this is man talk.

The baby began to cry, the young mother unbuttoned and gave her breast right in the parlor, neither of them made anything of it. I glanced at Clara. She was intent. She watched the infant suck, she watched the mother and child. Expressed in Sandy James’ face just that absorption in the task as the doll mother’s in her solemn game.

“I started out in trim,” Lyle says. “Now I hang doors. You get a few more cents a hour. Hands don’t cut up so bad. Lemme see your hands,” he said. I held them out, swollen paws, a thousand cuts. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s it.”

After a while he went over to the radio we had heard, obviously his pride and joy, a Philco console of burled wood big as a jukebox. A circular dial lit up green when he turned it on, it had regular and shortwave broadcasts, and a magic tuning eye like a cat’s green eye with a white pupil that grew narrow when he brought in a station.

He had turned it on as casual as he could be and while it warmed up consulted a newspaper. “How ’bout Mr. First Nighter,” he said, “seein as you folks’re from New York,” he said to Clara.

Yes, they had culture!

We sat in dutiful appreciation and listened. Mrs. James had put her baby back to bed and sat now, a child herself, cross-legged on the floor right in front of the speaker, she wanted to get in there behind the cloth with those people.

In the casual grant of their warmth and circumstances we are so installed in the life as to have neighbors, we have started to live in their assumptions. I look at Clara she is way ahead of me, she is wearing her gold band.

As the drama crackled through the night the husband displayed enlightenment as to how the sound effects were made.

Someone kicked down a door. “They don’t really wreck a door,” he said. “’At’s just a ordinary vegetable crate they stomp on. Splinters real good.”

A horse-drawn carriage. “Shucks, them’s coconut shells rapped on the table.”

“Hush, Loll,” his wife said. “I cain’t hear!”

After the program was over he lectured on how they made houses burn, typhoons blow, trees come down. He had us close our eyes and did these things up against our ears to get the effect of amplification. He was good, too, insane, I began to realize, once people got through their courtesy it was their madness they shared.

He had heard some Arabian Nights drama about a desert chieftain who skinned his victims alive.

“Ah don’t wanna hear this, Loll,” his wife said.

“Hold on, honey — see, Joe, I couldn’t figger it out, Ah thought and thought, it was the damnedest thing! But I got it now, close your eyes a minute, this’ll turn your hair white.”

I hear a piteous wail, screams, sinister laughter and the unmistakable stripping off of human skin inch by inch. I have to look. Off my left ear he was tearing a piece of adhesive tape down the middle.

No, not exactly my type, I would not under ordinary circumstances choose to associate with Lyle Red James, but I knew when we walked off to work together in the morning Clara would have coffee with his wife, maybe during the day they’d go to the grocery store together I saw the child given from one pair of arms to the other — I would listen to a hundred nights of radio for that.

And at the front gates of the plant every morning a car or two of cops parked there, just happening to be there. Not that I thought they were looking for me but if they were I imagined Red James as my disguise. If the cops were looking at all, it was for a man walking by himself — that was my reasoning. And anyway, what they would have to accomplish to get to this point wasn’t very likely. They would have first of all to locate Mrs. Lucinda Bennett’s car in Dayton, the guy wasn’t that stupid that he wouldn’t paint it. But even if they did, they would know only that they were looking for a wooden station wagon registered to clever Joseph Bennett Jr. But even then, how did that get them to Jacksontown, Indiana? But supposing they were here, they wouldn’t find it anyway, it was parked off the street behind a garage and under a ton of snow. I probably couldn’t find it myself. But supposing they found it, they’d be on the lookout for a hobo boy, a loner walking by himself to work in the morning and not Mr. Joe Paterson loping along step for step with the world’s biggest fucking hayseed.

It always proved out to my satisfaction if I thought about it but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it again each morning going to the punch clocks under the thousand fists like rifle fire we are going into the trenches and over the top in the barrage of time clocks, I always checked my position before I went down there.

I sought disguise, every change in Clara and me a disguise, nobody who knew Clara Lukaćs and was in his right mind would look for her on Railroad Street. I liked us having neighbors, yes, and living to the life the same as everyone else, living married, looking like an automobile worker’s family for life, appearing to these people next door as mirrors of themselves, shining in their eyes so they couldn’t even describe us after we’d gone.

I remember the way Red James walked. He wasn’t especially tall but he took long stiff-kneed strides, loping along there in the freezing morning while everyone else was hunched up, head bent in the wind, it was something you had to tear to get through, but here was Red, shoulders back, head up out of his collar, the long neck bobbing, and he chattered constantly, made jokes, told stories.

“A smart man’ll put beans in his mule’s feedbag. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Doubles the rate of progress.”

“Come on.”

“’Strue! The fartin moves ’em along. Clocked a mule once sixty miles a hour on a handful of dry beans. Fastern’ ’ese here cars.”

That was the kind of thing. He held out his arms; the snow driving thick like white sheets flapping in your eyes, yelling “Toughen me up, God, usen me up to it!”

And he sang, too, always some damn hillbilly song in that adenoidal tenor of his kind as we went down toward the plant one point of raw color bobbing crowing

Hear the mighty eng-ine

Hear the lonesome hobos squall

… A-goin through the jungle

On the Warbash Cannonball!

And at work I found myself hearing his voice in the machines, in the rhythm of the racket, without even knowing it, doing headlight after headlight, I would sing to myself in Red James’ tenor: keeping time to the pounding racket, I would hear the mighty eng-ine, hear the lonesome hobos squall, a-goin through the jungle, on the Warbash Cannonball.

—

One evening I came out of the gate and somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, no one was there. When I turned back, Red James was grinning at me.

“You comin to the meetin, ain’t ya?”

“What meeting?”

“Union meetin.”

“Well, I’m not a member, Red.”

“I know you ain’t. This is a recruitin meetin, anyone’s got the balls.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I never told Clara I wouldn’t be home.”

“Boy, the little woman sure has a holt a you. She’s with Sandy anyways, you come on with me, they’ll figger it out.”

So I went along with him to this meeting in some decrepit fraternal lodge a few blocks from the plant. It was up a couple of flights, fifty or so men sitting on camp chairs in a badly lighted room. I recognized a few faces from the line, we smiled, catching each other out. I thought, Look, if you’re doing the life, do it. I took a seat in the last row. Red had disappeared. The people running the meeting sat at a table in front of the room. I couldn’t see all of them but they looked like Paterson toughs, they wore buttons or had their union cards stuck in the bands of their hats. I thought as Mr. Bennett was spread out and made into a corporation he may have enlarged, but so did the response, I couldn’t see anyone in his personal service wearing his green putting a union button on their collar.

The meeting began with the pledge of allegiance and then the president rapped the gavel and called on the secretary to read the minutes.

Lyle Red James stood up and cleared his throat. “Herewith the o-fishul minutes a the last meetin,” he said in a most formal manner. “As taken by yo Sec’tary Loll Jimes, Bennett Local Seventeen, union card number three six six oh eight?”

This called up a cheer and a burst of applause from the audience.

“Just read the damn minutes, James,” the president said.

I hadn’t known he was a union official, he had sprung it on me, it was queer, the faintest misgiving, I had thought the deception in our friendship was mine. I tried to think that whole meeting why I was bothered, I knew he was a damn clown I hadn’t understood I was his audience.

I wanted to talk to Clara about it when I got home. Anyway, she’d be interested to know why I was late — but something else was on her mind entirely.

“Did you know,” she said to me, “Sandy James is all of fifteen years old? Did you know that? She got married at thirteen. Can you beat that? And she does everything, she goes to the store she knows what’s good and what isn’t, she takes care of that kid like royalty, feeds that stupid hick better than he deserves, washes, shops, cleans, Jesus! The only thing I haven’t seen her do is sew the American flag!”