Loon Lake by E L Doctorow

Author:E L Doctorow [Doctorow, E L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Depressions - Fiction, Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.) - Fiction, Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.), historical, Fiction, General, Depressions, Young men - Fiction, Literary, Young men
ISBN: 9780307762986
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 1991-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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