Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page A

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 andstone 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