Loon Lake

41

I don’t remember the names of towns I remember the route, southwest through Kentucky and Arkansas, across northern Oklahoma and the top of the Texas Panhandle and then into New Mexico, a spooncurve that I thought would drop us gently into the great honeypot of lower California.

We drove through small boarded-up towns, we drove down dirt rut roads and through hollows where shacks were terraced on the hill beside the coal tipple. We drove through canyons of slag and stopped to pick up chunks of coal to burn in the stoves of our rented cabins. The road went along railroad tracks, alongside endlessly linked coalcars loaded and still.

We drove over wood-paved iron bridges I remember rivers frozen with swirls of yellow scum I remember whole forests of evergreen glazed in clear ice, shattered sunlight, I had to strap a slitted piece of cardboard over my eyes to see the road.

In January the thaw and false spring in the Southwestern air and when we were stopped at a roadside picnic grove for our lunch we could hear the thunderous cracks and groans of rivers we couldn’t see. But then it froze again, cold and snowless and I remember stretches of brown land treeless swells of hardscrabble imbedded with rotted-out car frames and broken farm tools.

We had problems with the truck blown tires batteries fan belts oilsmoking flipping up the vented hood hot to the touch it was a journey fraught with peril. But you didn’t have to think. It was simple, life was staying warm keeping on the move finding food beds being thrifty. We met people in trucks loaded like ours with furniture and we talked with them and gave the appraising looks of peers, the few chilled humans in motion. But most of the time we had the road to ourselves.

I bought the newspaper wherever we were. In Arkansas and Oklahoma lots of people were robbing banks, it seemed to me important to come into a town looking respectable. People on the go did not have social standing. The eyes of the waitresses in the cafés or the grudging grim men and women who rented rooms. I held the baby like a badge. Cleanliness, propriety, the cheerful honest face, mediation in a cold suspicious land. I made a point of tipping well and flashing my roll, I didn’t like that moment of hesitation before the man cranked up the gas tank or the landlady took the key off the board.

In every state Sandy noticed the Justice of the Peace signs in front of clapboard houses. I told her they were legalized highway robbers who lifted travelers of five- and ten-dollar bills I said they handed out jail sentences to hobos but she knew them from the movies as kindly old men who would open their doors late at night to marry people they had wives in hair curlers and ratty bathrobes who smiled and clasped their hands Sandy and I were not mental intimates.

I don’t mean she was stupid she was not, only that she asked no questions, she was already persuaded, like Libby at Loon Lake. She took instruction from the newspapers and radio she marveled at the Dionne quintuplets. But I was very kind to her and patient. We had shared sorrows, we knew something together, and this made me tender toward her. I liked the smell of her after a night in bed, the heat of her under the covers. I took a sweet pleasure in our lovemaking even though she was shockingly ignorant of what she could get from it. The first time as I sat on the edge of the bed she hiked up her flannel nightgown lay herself across my lap. “Not too hard?” she said over her shoulder and buried her face in a pillow. I caressed her ample buttocks and backs of the thighs I felt a film of clammy sweat in the small of her back I thought I had learned more of her late husband’s tastes than I needed to know. She seemed relieved that I wanted no preliminaries and arranged herself on all fours on the bed presenting herself to me dog fashion here I did not demur. One had limits. She braced her arms and set her haunches and even gave them a little twirl now and then. I came quickly for which she afterward rewarded me with a quick kiss on the mouth before she went off to the bathroom.

She thought of it like cooking or changing the baby, a responsibility of domestic life. I wanted to awaken her surprise her but I was in no hurry. I enjoyed her the way she was. One morning with the light showing the streaks in the window shade I studied her face as she lay in my arms and suddenly her eyes flew open and she stared at me fearfully but not moving in that second or two before she remembered where she was who she was who I was. She drew a sharp breath and her green eyes swam with life. I hugged her and decided I loved her. I put her on her back and made love to her and took my time about it and detected a degree of thought or contemplation in her before the thing was done and she jumped out of bed to see to her baby.

Ahead of us on the road each morning a lowering sky, I felt under it as under a billowing tent as far as the eye could see. The roads became straighter, the land flattened out. No snow now, what blew across the land was a gritty red dust that shimmered on the road in the sun in rainbows of iridescence. Also accreting spindly balls of desert rubbish bouncing over the rocks and blowing up against the fences like creatures watching us go by. We went through one-street towns with red brick feed stores and tractors parked in the unpaved streets. We passed foreclosed farms with notices slapped on the fenceposts like circus bills. The towns were less frequent. There were no rivers creeks mountains trees, just this rocky flatland. But one day Sandy yelled to stop the truck. I pulled over. She thrust the baby in my hands and jumped down from the cab and ran back along the ditch. I watched her in the mirror. She came back with a sprig of tiny blue flowers, she was so happy, she tied them with a string and hung them from the sun visor.

The desert didn’t alarm her. She had grown up in the mountains but country was country and she knew its rules and regulations. She knew the names of snakes and birds and pointed out the dry beds of creeks. One day the truck broke down in the middle of nowhere and she turned all around with her hand shading her eyes wise Indian maid and figured where to get help by the way the land was fenced. I remember that. We found a ranch about three miles down a dirt road intersecting the road we were on, just as she predicted.

But it was slow going, I began to think we were strung between outposts of civilization, the shadow range of mountains that cheered me when I first saw it one late afternoon seemed each new day as far away on the windshield. I didn’t know what we would do in California but I knew it would take as much money as we could save to do it with. I came awake at night and wondered what I had in mind. The truth was I had no ambition, no ideas, no true desire or hope for anything. I was aware in the darkness of the forced character of my affections. I’d find myself angry at Sandy. I liked to surprise her in her sleep and be in her before her body could respond to make it easier. She would come awake gasping but throw her arms around me and hold on for dear life.

One evening, trying to do something about the way I felt, I found a reasonably good roadside café and we had steaks and beans and red wine. There were candles in little red glasses on the table.

“Clara told me about you,” Sandy said.

“What?”

“Oh, long before I dreamed anything like this.”

“What did she say?”

“Just that she was sweet on you. You know. The way girls talk.”

“Yeah, well, I was sweet on her too.”

“I thought you was married. I thought she was your wife!”

“Yeah, well, she’d be anything you wanted if you wanted it badly enough.”

A particularly cold day, with the enormous blue sky turned almost white, we saw a man and a woman and a boy at the side of the road beside their old Packard touring car. I pulled up. Their gears were locked. A decision was made that the man would remain with the car and its heavy freight of steamer trunks and crates. He wrapped a scarf around his head and folded his arms and sat down on his running board and his family got up in the truck with us to ride to the next town. The woman must have been in her forties. She wore a dusty black coat with a fur collar half rubbed away and a tired felt hat that was nevertheless set off at a smart angle. She said her husband was a pharmacist. He had had his own store back in Wilmington, Delaware. Now they were on their way to San Diego, where they hoped to make a new start. “A new start!” Sandy said. “Why, that’s what we’re doing!”

When we had dropped them I said, “What do you mean we’re making a new start?”

“What?”

“All they want is to open another drugstore. They want to do what they’ve always done. That’s what a new start means.”

“Well, I was just chattin with that lady.”

“You think I want a job in an automobile factory? Or is it your new start you’re talking about? I mean this furniture of yours we’re dragging three thousand miles: Is that your new start? So you can find some rooms and put the furniture in them just the way you had it in Jacktown? That kind of new start?”

“I don’t know why you’re so put out with me.”

“Because if that’s what you mean, say so. Let’s settle it here and now. I’m not your husband and even if I was I wouldn’t make my living as a stoolpigeon.”

She looked at me now in bewilderment, and holding her baby to her, sat as far from me as she could get. She stared out the windshield with her chin on the baby’s head. God knows her remark was innocent enough. But the confidence behind it I found irritating — as if living and traveling with her I must fit her preconceptions. I suppose what really bothered me was the strength of character behind this. I felt if she didn’t even know what she was doing as she did it, I couldn’t hope to change her.

Then of course in a few miles Joe was sorry, he apologized, which encouraged her to sulk and afterward to regain her good cheer.

Sandy could have said he was traveling on her money. But it never occurred to her. It occurred to him, however — he was not unaware of his talent for using other people’s money, he was not unaware of his attraction to other men’s wives, he was not unmindful that his life since leaving Paterson had been a picaresque of other men’s money and other men’s women, who in hell was he to get righteously independent with anyone? This kid was giving him her life everything she owned and all he could do was kick her in the ass for it.

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: HER 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.