Loon Lake Read Online Free PDF Page B

curved in an arc around the rock hill, there was a fair chance it would be going slowly enough to hop. Coming down from the roadbed, I found a bare patch of ground spotted with oil. And beside the charred remains of a fire I saw a flask of clear glass and a lady’s shoe with the heel torn off. So others had stopped here in their great study of the outdoors—it was a station of sorts.
    I gathered a great bundle of kindling, but I was too tired to build a fire. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head and I watched the sky. The sun had gone down but the sky was still blue, a very pale blue, with a few high clouds still golden with sunlight. Soon I was lying in the dusk and feeling the chill of the evening but the sky was sunlit and blue and so far away in its warmth that I felt I was looking at it from a grave.
    ——
    I fell asleep that way and sometime during the night was aroused by a train whistle. I lay there listening for it again in case I had only been dreaming. Again I heard it, this time somewhat closer. I stood up and tried to pound some circulation into my stiff hulk. The train was coming without question now. I had no idea what time it was, the sky was black, starless. I thought I could hear the locomotive. I moved toward the embankment and waited. I could hear the engine clearly now and knew it was moving at a slow speed. The first I saw of it was a diffuse paling of the darkness along the curve of the embankment. Suddenly I was blinded by a powerful light, as if I had looked into the sun. I dropped to my knees. The beam swung away from me in a transverse arc and a long conical ray of light illuminated the entire rock outcropping, every silvery vein of schist glittering as bright as a mirror, every fern and evergreen flaring for a moment as if torched. I rubbed my eyes and looked for the train behind the glare. It was passing from my left to my right. The locomotive and tender were blacker than the night, a massive movement forward of shadow, but there was a passenger car behind them and it was all lit up inside. I saw a porter in a white jacket serving drinks to three men sitting at a table. I saw dark wood paneling, a lamp with a fringed shade, and shelves of books in leather bindings. Then two women sitting talking at a group of wing chairs that looked textured, as if needle-pointed. Then a bright bedroom with frosted-glass wall lamps and a canopied bed and standing naked in front of a mirror was a blond girl and she was holding up for her examination a white dress on a hanger.
    Oh my lords and ladies and then the train had passed through the clearing and I was watching the red light disappear around the bend. I hadn’t moved from the moment the light had dazzled my eyes. I’d heard of private railroad cars but was not prepared. I was under the impression I would see it again if I waited. I waited. I heard it going down the track and listened until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Into my vacated mind flowed all the English I never knew I’d learned at Paterson Latin High School. Grammar slammed into my brain. In an instant this vision ofincandescent splendor had left me more alone and terrified than I knew it was possible to be.
    I got a fire going and made it as large as I could, I threw everything I could find into it, it was a damn bonfire and I crouched beside it trying to get warm I made an involuntary sound in my throat for my dereliction, my loneliness, the callow hopes of my life. Who did I think I was? Where did I think I was going? What made me think it was worth anything to stay alive?
    The fire blazed up. I wanted to get in it.
    At the first light of the morning I climbed the embankment and set out down the tracks in the direction the train had gone.

 
    C ompare the private railroad car sitting on the Santa Fe siding one night in 1910 in front of the mine near Ludlow Colorado whose collapsed entry was being dug away by rescue crews. Late at night by the glow of torches they began to bring