Loon Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

Watertank Hill.
    Please Jack his wife said.
    What you going to do with the money lad?
    I don’t know.
    That’s moren a day’s wages. Are you proud?
    I don’t know.
    You won’t make four dollars when you come below. Did you know that?
    Yes.
    If there still is a mine. Are there any other english-speaking there aren’t are there?
    I don’t think so.
    Well then you had to be boy of the year didn’t you.
    Please Jack.
    Didn’t you.
    I suppose.
    The only one they can call up to the platform and trust to say thank you properly. No polack wop or damned greek knows to say thank you for makin me boy of the year does he?
    I don’t know.
    And your ma’s going to find a clean shirt for you that day won’t she. And she’ll comb her hair back and put the comb in it and go with the tears of thanks in her eyes for the company school and the company supply and the company house and the company boy of the year.
    You poison everything Neda Penfield said. You make everything bad, you make a child feel bad for being alive. There’s nothing worse than that. There’s no evil worse than that.
    But he minded less than his mother thought he did. He wanted his father to talk this way. It was very helpful to him. The consistency of their positions was all he asked, that his pa be unyielding and full of anger, that his ma be enraged or worse frightened by her husband’s spiritual tactlessness. Warren knew they were poor and lived lives the color of slag. Heknew there was nothing beautiful in Ludlow but he was eager to get up each morning and test the day. He knew the real evil was his own, the eye and ear that took in everything and suffered nothing. He accumulated meaningless useless data that nevertheless bewitched him. The thick bulbed vein in his father’s hand, for instance, in contrast to the thin greenish vein in his mother’s. The characteristic smell of the house and the privy were noted and recorded. There were certain objects he liked very much. His mother’s tortoise-shell comb, the teeth broken off in several places. The coal stove, whose shape was like a naked woman, her long neck disappearing through the roof. He liked to see underwear drying on the line the wind animating it to a maniac dance. Sometimes he thought of the flapping long Johns as a desperate signaling of imprisoned or tortured people. He was absorbed by the sun rising and the sun setting or the rain when it fell from rock to rock. He was excited by any kind of violence, a parent hitting a child a man hitting a woman. When he happened to see such things he would be suffused with a weird heat. His heart would beat furiously and then he’d feel sickened and would feel like throwing up. Until he broke into a cold sweat. Then he would feel all right again. He listened now with eyes downcast but in some contentment to their argument, enjoying the words of it, the claims and counterclaims, agreeing with each in turn they were so well matched and spoke so well the images that flew through his mind on their words.

 
    I got out of bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the money from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the window of her car. The wind blew.
    I threw the bills into the wind.
    I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower, the kind you pumped the water for yourself. I stood in the shower of cold spring water and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and I watched the sky turning gray and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first bird waking.
    I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes. Shivering, stipple-skinned, I struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.
    All morning I went up and down the hills of timber. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of a