The Daredevils (42 page)

“I think you're right. I don't think he held grudges. He was moving too fast. I will give him that. I will give him more than that. But I won't say he hasn't got it bass-ackward where the self and the act are concerned.”

“He's not the thinker you are, Chick.”

“I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not.”

“I don't know, either.”

“My father too,” said Charles, “was a very forgiving man.”

“Not at the end, he wasn't.”

Vera spoke so softly Charles wasn't sure what she'd said, or even if she'd said anything. Maybe it had just been a sigh that wanted to be words.

“I can't forgive the bombers,” he said.

“No,” said Vera.

The sun shone across the flat wind-surging windless-falling land as if it were a simple world of clear light, black dirt, and green plants, of wheat growers and wheat and a little hotel where they could rest when they could not get home.

“I have been—
I am
—scared to death,” Vera said, completing her thought.

Charles began to suspect the presence of a force, a new kind of gravity, that had begun to draw things unto itself.

Daisy spoke and Vera studied her critically, thinking her altogether wrong for the part. She was too funny for this dry routine. The subject was the “double profits” the millers were enjoying as they shipped grain to Liverpool and war-hungry England. She had a chart that showed the price spread between Duluth and Liverpool, the handling, insurance, ocean freight, and elevator costs, and the amount of the second cut of profit—and Vera, the true performer, thought she was reading her text. It was possible she was simply trying to appear calm and rational, but it was flat, nobody was being moved. Carefully Daisy began to suggest that the war was not a good war, that it was not the war that was being advertised at all. She made reference to a newspaper report that had German women being required by their government to bear children. And then she said that she believed American women would never let themselves be used as “brood sows for future wars.”

Everybody in the hall felt the drop in pressure. Daisy was applauded bravely by a few people in the crowd, but Vera and Charles could see the needle of the barometer moving counterclockwise around the dial. And yet nothing happened.

Charles's question: Why had nothing happened? He didn't mean “a dramatic arrest”—he meant “nothing.” The pressure dropped and that was that. Was somebody waiting for somebody else to do something else, something more? Did certain somebodies know less about who all the players were than Charles thought they did? Not likely, but possible. Another slim chance: even dead, Father's power wasn't entirely illusory, and he—and by guesswork extension, Daisy—was being handled with kid gloves. And re Father: Why had he not moved to have Charles removed? Was it possible he too had been biding his time—until suddenly he decided his time was up? Did he think Charles might do something politically, actionably, profitably heroic? Or had he—where had he been before he came to rest finally in San Francisco? In New York or London or . . .?—letting power slip through his fingers like sand? A genuinely good man cannot withstand the vicissitudes that come of power wielded—not forever, he can't. Hadn't Father been a genuinely good man? Charles found himself thinking that he had been, whatever that thought might be “worth.”

Perhaps Charles's removal was underway.

The expected explosion—he paused over the word as it appeared and faded in his brain—over Daisy's key phrases had failed to occur: was this like an actor forgetting his lines? Or was there a greater script than the actors realized. The force, the gravity, was similar if not identical to the force he felt onstage in ideal circumstances—or even less-than-ideal circumstances. The force he believed he felt. Perhaps in any but the most amateurish circumstances, when the force, if it was present at all, was reversed, repelling all the people and things in the space.

Had he just equated bad acting with detonation, a supersonic exothermic front driving a shock wave through a medium that cannot withstand it?

He had: there was a weird beauty and justice in it, somewhere, somehow . . . that nevertheless failed to address his certainty that some other kind—or simply degree?—of power was coming into being.

He had felt the supersonic exothermic front driving the shock wave only as one feels the wave of ocean water after it has crashed on the beach,
when it is all but spent and about to recede, back into that from which it had come, a tremendous but dying energy—lapsing, paradoxically, not into quiescence or something “lesser,” but into a greater energy. He had felt it twice, the waves each time strong enough to knock him down, but only because another body had taken more of the blow before it reached him, and he was quite sure he understood how it ripped a hole in one kind of reality, exposing another kind of less stable reality; and he had witnessed a far greater force, perhaps the greatest force in the universe, visible, apprehensible, for only as long as it took to cause everything he had before that point assumed to be the only reality to disappear; and he had seen in its wake an apparently equally relentless force recreate, rebuild, make visible once more what had disappeared. He had felt the impalpable, incomprehensible, so-called psychological gravity of two actors acting selflessly on a stage and drawing thereby the concentration of a hundred or two hundred “observers.” But what was happening here, now, was different.

The next stops were Fargo and Moorhead, where nothing—it was preposterous now—other than angry shouting and angry applause in a cold wind under a low, dark, swiftly but barely perceptibly moving sky, like a dark turbulent river, also happened. Small groups of rough-looking men glowered and spat threateningly and told them to get out of town, as if they were in a play. Charles, imagining himself to be a person who could no longer be “troubled” in the ordinary sense, did not think he could be more troubled in the ordinary sense—which was even more troubling in the extraordinary sense he had reserved for himself and Vera. The bomb had exploded on his stage in San Francisco. Now, here, where gunfire was expected to erupt, where he had planned on it, according to a very real sort of script that he had not actually seen but which he believed with all his heart existed, where the explosion of a bomb had to be considered a strong possibility, seeing that improvised violence was the modus operandi everybody had tacitly agreed
to, here there was only a group of bad actors in the shadows, representing “consequences” in a way that seemed only sordid, cowardly, contemptible.

Get out of town?

They did. They cut across the state, out of the wheat and into the woods, into Big Timber, to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where Wobbly strikes had been failing for a decade—failed very much in the way a man might enter a wood, walk strongly and confidently for a while, only to find at the first moment of doubt that he was lost.

The two Wobblies who had in fact gone missing more than a month earlier were still missing.

Several people had told them that Bemidji would be the big stop, that there would be trouble, and someone in Chicago had even gone so far as to counsel against Bemidji, against even getting off the train to stretch their legs. The question was: Who was the someone in Chicago—nominally from the IWW, but did they know that with working certainty?—and was he speaking out of genuine concern for their welfare, or was there worry that the NPL would have some kind of “success” in Bemidji? If so, who did not want NPL success in Bemidji. The MCPS certainly—but how, in this hypothetical scenario, had the MCPS managed to influence the Chicago Wobblies? The Chicago Wobblies were as pure a current as could be, even in the most turbulent stream.

Were they not?

Three telegrams awaited Charles at the Paul Bunyan Hotel.

The first:
DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH IWW.

The second:
DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH TROUBLEMAKERS CLAIMING ASSOCIATION WITH US.

The third:
YOU ARE OPERATING WITHOUT USUAL SANCTION. PLEASE EXPLAIN.

The news that certain “watchdogs of loyalty” had become “junkyard dogs of loyalty” and were embarrassing and compromising the MCPS was of course not news. Disavowal of a relation between the MCPS and the IWW was something else that went without saying, making the saying,
of course, profoundly suspicious. And while the whereabouts of the two missing Wobblies remained unknown, “a drifter” had been found dead. His identity and the circumstances of his end were not known. As for the lack of usual sanction: he had it. He had it in writing, in his briefcase, as was usual with sanction. If whoever had telegraphed him was under an impression to the contrary, it could mean one of two things: sanction had been reconsidered and made to disappear, perhaps like the Wobblies but with the additional pretense of “never having existed in the first place,” or the divided house that the MCPS always had been, perforce—how could so many powerful men agree on any notion of safety, public or otherwise?—had become dangerously destabilized.

The women wore dresses with flower prints, anticipating by days or perhaps weeks the actual blooming of spring, the men clean overalls, some with a tie and some without. Charles overheard one man defend his tie by stating the business here was every bit as solemn as the business of a Sunday morning and he would show it a like respect. Some men and women looked about themselves, eager to share their outrage, while some laughed and conversed. A few smoldered, moving awkwardly about with hatred and fear constricting their limbs and faces—lungs, hearts, stomachs too. The same man who'd defended his tie said, “I agree that times are bad, but I don't care to be told how to do a thing, neither by the railroads nor by the socialists.” A line of men stood at the back of the hall, and Charles could not say if they were embarrassed to be there or had a darker purpose in mind. To his left he felt Vera stiffen; he turned and saw the man he'd seen at the Hillsboro town hall.

“Excuse me,” said the man, his face suddenly, without Charles having noticed the movement, very close to his own, smiling. “Are you one of Winter's people?” He looked and acted like an overzealous salesman.

“You betcha,” said Charles. “I am a man for all seasons.”

The man cocked his head stupidly, and Charles crossed himself for no apparent reason. Then he nodded as if with unction. The man stepped back and
looked at Charles, as if not terribly amused but willing to play along. Charles crossed himself again, with a hint of truculence, and nodded. Then he said he knew John Winter. He knew him better than the man knew his own daddy.

“All right,” said the man. “Stay here and listen to what she says and then—”

“Don't tell me how to do my job, bud,” Charles interrupted him.

“Where's your notebook, sport?” the man demanded in an angry whisper that caused spittle to form. “I'm going to get the sheriff. I've already got some folks lined up to press charges.”

Charles had his little black notebook out and was flapping its cardboard covers at the man's face like a yapping mouth. “You do that.”

When the man went out the door, Daisy came in. She looked long and hard at Charles and Vera as she walked past them. She made her way to the front of the hall, mounted the platform, and moved behind the podium. After a moment, the quack and whine of voices settled, and she began her speech. She got through the “double profits” section and started in on the war. She mentioned the newspaper report dealing with the forced impregnation of German women, then repeated her belief that American women would never let themselves be used as brood sows for future wars, at which point three men and three women left their seats and departed the hall. The men at the back began to boo and heckle her. She continued to speak without seeming to notice, as the action seemed rather perfunctory, rehearsed as things are rehearsed in the early days of rehearsal—not menacing or even intrusive. When she was done and the audience was making for the doors, the sheriff and several deputies walked in, bowling people out of the way until they got to Daisy, who paled and stepped back. People still in the hall stopped in their tracks, and a few outside came back to crowd the doorway.

“What is the charge?” asked Daisy weakly.

“Sedition, you stupid cunt,” said the sheriff irritatedly. “Get with the program.”

He tugged on her arm so violently that she lost her balance and would have fallen to the floor had the sheriff not been holding on to her, carrying her along like one would a stumbling toddler.

Marched past Charles and Vera, she appeared to pull herself together and again looked straight and meaningfully—or was it imploringly?—at them.

Charles's knees and bladder immediately weakened. His face began to burn and his vision to blacken around the edges. Had he gotten himself into something, mainly because he could?
I am an anarchist. I am a daredevil. You see? Excellent. Where is everybody going? I haven't even—

Then it got worse. He felt as if something long and sharp had punctured his stomach and was being driven upward through his lungs to his heart, which was about to explode. He felt as if this great incorporeal spear were hoisting him off his feet. Dancing a strange little dance to keep his balance, he felt absolutely certain that his new role was to draw a weapon and rescue Daisy, to warn the servants of evil back back back, and then to run off into the night and never be seen or heard from again.

It was the heroic act that would link the lost past and the uncertain future, a great surge of blood in a flash of light that would reveal the great world, the good world, but which could only last seconds.

And indeed by the time he reached the door, Daisy and her captors could no longer be seen, and he was blinking and swallowing in confusion and darkness—feeling not shame but something more absurd, like regret.