Loon Lake

9

Thinking about that girl standing in front of the mirror and holding up the white dress on the train gliding past me out of sight, I came along the track before I even knew it into the main street of a mountain village.

It was noon on the church tower. A pretty lakeside village with a general store a gas pump a white hotel with rocking chairs on the porch, a bait-and-tackle shop. I wanted to keep going but there was a cop on the corner. Casually I crossed the street and went into a diner and ordered the baked ham and brown beans in a crock and coffee. When I finished I ordered the same thing again. The waitress smiled and the chef himself looked out through the porthole of the kitchen door to see this prize customer.

I got out of that village without trouble resuming my walk just beyond the station crossing, following the rails that forked off into a narrower cut of trees. The track went through some woods circled around a small mountain lake and then it started up a grade a long slow winding grade, I was not already in love with her but in her field of force, what I thought I felt like was some stray dog following the first human being it happened to see.

In the late afternoon I came to a miniature station house of creosoted brown logs complete with ticket window and potbellied stove. It was empty. Out the back door was the sidetracked private railroad car.

I climbed aboard. Each room had a narrow door with brass handle opening onto the corridor going down one side along the windows.

Here was the room of grand appointments where the men were drinking a card table of green baize and leather with receptacles for poker chips, a bar with bottles and glasses in fitted recesses, a Persian rug of rich red tone, paneling of dark wood, books in the shelves The Harvard Classics. A faint odor of cigar smoke. I brushed the tassels of the lampshades with the back of my hand.

Everything in this room, unlit and still, seemed more awesome than from the distance of the night, for it was quite clearly owned. That was the main property of the entire car, not that it was handsome or luxurious but that it was owned.

In the girl’s bedroom I sat on the plump mattress newly made up with fresh sheets thick quilt of satiny material there was no sign of her of course not a thread not a bobby pin but as I thought about it the faintest intimation of a scent, a not unfamiliar scent, I inhaled deeply, a variety common enough to have previously informed the nostrils of a derelict somewhere before in his wandering one summer night in the carney perhaps.

The afternoon light came through the window at a low angle between the trees it suddenly faded the car darkened I left. Outside, the sky was showing stars as it does earlier than you think it should in the last of the summer.

I was so blue. I was sorry I’d found the car, if I hadn’t found it I could have thought about it for the rest of my life. If any. But now I felt let-down stupid at a loss what to do. The breeze had a chill and I supposed I couldn’t do better going back as I’d come, so I followed the one road from the small station as it ran uphill into the woods.

Long before I got there, probably from the moment I left the village, I’d been on private property. They were the same hills and forest and stone of the natural world, they looked like the Adirondacks, but I was walking in fact on a map of fixed color, crimson perhaps.

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.