by Mark Helprin
“What do we want?” the chief asked. “Hey, we want to party. We want to ride our hogs. We want to kill some Pagans or Angels. We want to kill someone famous. Stuff like that. That’s how you get on television.”
“Have you killed anyone famous?” Freddy asked.
“There isn’t anyone famous in New Jersey. If you get famous, you move out of New Jersey.”
“We’re here.”
“Freddy!” Fredericka protested.
“I’m making a point. You, are you the leader?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your name?” the prince asked.
“Peanut.”
“Is that a surname or a Christian name?”
“It’s my first name, man. Otherwise, I’d be Mr Peanut.” The Devils laughed. “Nobody in his right mind would call the head rider Mr Peanut.”
“They would in the antebellum South if you hadn’t reached your majority and you were addressed by a slave or white trash, wouldn’t they, Mr Peanut?”
“The dude’s crazy,” said one of the Devils.
“Freddy,” Fredericka said, trying to pull him away.
“Fredericka, please! Would you prefer that I address you as ‘Peanut’ or ‘Mr Peanut’?”
“Me?” asked Fredericka.
“Him,” said Freddy.
“Don’t call me Mr Peanut.”
“Then I shall call you Peanut, and you shall call me Freddy.”
“Yeah.”
“Peanut, you say that the Para-moose Devil Cats would like to kill someone famous.”
“Yeah?”
“And that you can’t find anyone famous in New Jersey.”
“Freddy,” Fredericka asked, “are you mad?”
“Please, Fredericka.”
“It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“No it isn’t. Mr Neil said we could operate as we wished. How else could one possibly expect to conquer single-handedly a country of more than two hundred and eighty million people? Just because they’ve given us noms de guerre doesn’t mean we have to use them. And, as you know, we haven’t even had a chance to open the capsules.”
“We could make up a name. I could be Lady Clydesbee, and you could be Lord Danforth.”
“We’ve already told them who we are.”
“We didn’t hear,” Peanut said. “We’re drunk, and we’re, like, focussed on what you look like.”
Freddy stood to his full height in his doughnut suit and moose-coloured cap. “Do you imagine that we are more ludicrous than you?”
“Yeah,” said the Devils, but they were drowned out by a jet flying overhead. When it had passed, Freddy resumed. “Let’s get back to the point. You said. . . .”
“I know what I said,” said Peanut. “No one’s famous in New Jersey except Thomas Edison, Molly Pitcher, and that bitch Joyce Kilmer, and that’s only because they’re rest stops.”
“If you killed someone like, let us say, Joyce Kilmer, would that be satisfactory?”
“Yeah. It would be big stuff if we killed a chick who was a rest stop.”
“Joyce Kilmer was a man.”
“No shit.”
“Then,” said Freddy, “what about us? We’re famous. I’m the Prince of Wales. She’s the Princess of Wales. Here we are, in New Jersey, voilà.”
Fredericka sat on the ground and put her face in her hands.
Seeing that they had never heard of him or any other prince of Wales, Freddy sought to clarify. “The Prince of Wales is the heir to the British throne.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Freddy explained, “that the queen is my mother, and that when she leaves the throne I will be the king of England.”
“So fuckin’ what?” asked Peanut. “This is New Jersey. Who fuckin’ cares?”
Fredericka looked up, her hands still held as they were when they cradled her face. “You don’t care?”
“Why should I?”
“I’ll tell you this,” said Freddy, to Fredericka’s considerable frustration. “If you kill us, you’ll be on television for weeks, and years later you’ll be in the crime and biographical retrospectives.”
“No shit!”
“Think Charles Manson. This is my proposal. I saw you with the bayonets. Why don’t you pit your best man against me. That would have to be you, Peanut, wouldn’t it? And if you kill me, you’ll be famous and you can have her,” Freddy said, pointing to Fredericka.
“He can not have me,” Fredericka said indignantly. “I’ll be the judge of who will have me.”
Freddy turned to her and said, “Be quiet, you’re spoiling it.”
The Devils, more than Peanut, who would have to do the fighting, liked the proposition. “But what do I get?” Freddy asked.
“You get killed,” Peanut said, a little nervously.
“But what if I don’t get killed? What if neither of us gets killed, or I kill you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“If I win, what do I get?”
“What do you want?”
Freddy pointed toward the biggest motorcycle, which was standing alone and had the most music coming out of it.
“You want my hog?” Peanut asked.
“Put the keys to the other hogs in a bag on the handlebars of yours. Yours, engine running, will sit two hundred feet down the road, with her on the back seat.” Fredericka gave a hrrumph. “All the Devils shall stay here, and we will fight twenty-five feet from the hog. If you win, you win. If I win, we’re off and I’ll drop the other keys at the end of the road.”
“Don’t you trust us?” Peanut asked.
“As a rule, I don’t trust people who wear swastikas, no,” Freddy said.
“Okay,” said Peanut, too drunk to think.
The prospect of a duel charmed the Devils into near sobriety. They rushed hither and yon, and no longer did they walk in staccato steps sideways or backward as they collected their keys and moved Peanut’s motorcycle. Peanut himself managed quickly to become undrunk. Perhaps it was because his twenty-two stone could soak up alcohol like a sink, and he had had only thirty bottles of beer.
Walking up the road, Fredericka asked, “Have you ever fenced with someone who weighs as much as a grand piano?”
“If anything, it’s to my advantage. Clarence is very slight but it’s hard for me to best him.”
“That’s with foil or épée. What about sabre?”
“Darnley is also slight.”
“And short.”
“Yes, but he’s the best in England, Fredericka.”
“Do you use your strength against him?”
“In a way.”
“What if you couldn’t?”
“I don’t think I’ll have difficulties,” Freddy said. “Peanut is neither fit nor agile.”
“The bayonet is shorter than the sabre, Freddy.”
“These are long bayonets.”
“But they are shorter. Have you fought with one?”
“This is not the time, Fredericka, to sap my confidence.”
“Can you back out? Why don’t we just run away on the hog?”
“I’ve given my word.”
“Freddy, what if you’re killed and left in this swamp, and I’m gang-raped and become the chattel of Mr Peanut?”
“It’s too late to fear,” was the answer. He started the motorcycle.
Fredericka sat herself on the back seat. “It’s such an ugly machine,” she said. “Am I to wear a helmet?”
“No, we shan’t wear Nazi regalia.”
Freddy turned to walk toward Peanut, who approached with a bayonet in each hand. One blade was about two and a half feet in length, the other less than a foot. When Peanut drew close, Freddy said, “I hope the long one’s for me.”
“It isn’t,” said Peanut.
“That’s not cricket,” said Freddy, picking up the small one after Peanut had thrown it to the ground.
“We made an oral contract,” Peanut told him. “You specified ba
yonets, I accepted, and you raised no objections. You didn’t narrow the terms.”
“Are you a solicitor,” Freddy asked, trying to fix the rickety handle of the short bayonet, “a lawyer?”
“I am,” Peanut said. “I am, in fact, a fuckin’ litigator, if you must know.”
“I would imagine,” Freddy told him, trying to delay, “that for duelling with bayonets and wearing Nazi accoutrements you might be disbarred.”
“What I do in private is my own business, guy.”
“In England, it wouldn’t be.”
“This is New Jersey. It’s like Born Free.”
“Whatever that means, it isn’t quite fair that your bayonet is a sword and mine is a paring knife.”
“We made a contract,” said Peanut, lifting his bayonet above his head and bringing it down with tremendous force where Freddy would have been standing had Freddy not jumped to the side. Though the ground bounced with the impact, Freddy jabbed Peanut’s side with the short bayonet. It went through Peanut’s leather but was stopped before it touched flesh.
“You’ve got body armour,” Freddy announced. The answer was a bayonet stroke that would have sliced through oak. Freddy blocked it with his own paltry blade, which flew into the swamp as Freddy fell backward, hands stinging. Peanut raised the long bayonet above his head as he had before.
Were Freddy to roll too soon, Peanut would change the path of his stroke and catch him as he went. Were he to roll too late, he would be hit. Still, he was unafraid. The narrow band beyond which action was in vain appeared to him almost as if it were a glowing graphic superimposed on the warm night air. Associated with what he knew would be his correct timing and subsequent survival was a burst of joy that welled up within, a gift from on high that guided him to exactly the moment he sought. As the blade was forced down, he saw it blur in the air. He delayed his roll, and felt motion building within. And then, seemingly too late, he did roll, the blade missed, and the ground vibrated once again.
In a moment he was up on his feet, dodging the bayonet as it came whistling past in a horizontal sweep. He did not have to say words of encouragement to keep himself in the fight, for he wanted to be nowhere else, even if he had no idea what to do next. As far as he was able or willing to think ahead, he would dodge without end, confident that his energy would not flag before that of his adversary. In fact, though it was not a thought, he sensed in the part of the mind that can deal with such things during a combat that this alone kept him alive. He seemed to float, his reflexes on fire.
Peanut’s blade went up, but in the clear space it left came a long bayonet thrown by Fredericka, handle first, flying as if of its own volition into Freddy’s grip. In a split second born of a lifetime of swordsmanship Freddy parried well. Now it was cricket. Freddy was so much a better fencer than Peanut that he relaxed and stayed in place, parrying each attack with ease. He had never been able to do this with his fencing master, who was far too good, but the perfect defence had always been his ambition, in that he would suffer no harm and do no harm. Thus, he stood for the next five minutes, rooted on one spot, while Peanut moved mountains of weight in thunderstorms of grunts, breathing and sweating like a water buffalo, before he finally collapsed.
“I won’t kill him,” Freddy told the surly Devils, “but you see that I could. We’re off now, like birds from a crisp corn pie and faster than a falling raccoon.” He and Fredericka mounted the idling motorcycle and drove away. Moments later they heard the sound of many motorcycle engines. “They had spare keys,” Freddy said, increasing their speed on the sandy track.
“Can you drive this?” Fredericka shouted over the wind as they whipped through the reeds at fifty miles per hour.
“I’ve just learnt.”
Coming out onto the road, they flew off the curb, and when they hit the pavement the radio came on. The beat of the music thundered louder than their engine and made their growing speed seem natural and safe. Going too fast to know where they were going, they enjoyed it despite the absurdity and danger, both of which they assumed were characteristics of the country itself. By driving at first on the left side of the road, which proved disconcerting to oncoming traffic, they lost the Devils. Freddy was a jet pilot and sometimes drove very fast, but now he drove particularly fast because of the strange music. Trained to the highest standards by Britain’s finest musicians, conductors, and theorists, he had been lifted to the celestial sphere by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and he knew his Handel, Verdi, and Brahms. That is all true, but nothing in his experience had prepared him to be rocketed ahead by the blues, in a new world and a new life. He knew instantaneously that deep in the heart of American civilisation was its music, and that deep in the heart of its music was the miracle of the open road.
Entering the New Jersey Turnpike at 140 miles per hour, they could afford neither to take a ticket nor to choose their direction. Physics sent them south, and they found themselves hurtling into the summer night, flanked on all sides by machines gliding with them in the direction opposite or at cross purposes. Even the air was crowded with activity. Planes flew above in bug-like, slow circles, flashing multi-coloured, rising with a roar, or descending floodlit onto vast prairies of concrete spotted with soft violet lights.
With their parachute silks trailing behind them like courageous brush-strokes, the air and oxygen forcing into their lungs, and the roar everywhere, they passed at unthinkable velocity through an unthinkable landscape of light. Here were mantis-structured refineries where amber lamps blinked in unknown code beneath sheaths and coronas of flame. Here were bridges that leapt bays, distant lighted towers, flags spotlighted against the sky, thick traffic that flew in air, ships pulled up to land, and nothing still, fixed, or set.
“I believe,” Freddy shouted above the wind and the insane mumble of the engines, “that we are on our way, more or less, to Philadelphia.”
“Isn’t this dangerous?” Fredericka shouted in turn.
“I suppose so,” was the answer. “I’m inexperienced and we are going a hundred and forty miles per hour.”
“Why don’t you slow down?”
“We’re being chased by Devils.”
“We lost them,” Fredericka averred, “when we went the wrong way on that single-direction ramp and crashed through the hedge.”
“I didn’t do it deliberately. The wheels have a gyroscopic effect. The machine wants to go in a straight line, and I’m loath to lean into a turn: it’s so heavy I don’t know if it will come back up again.”
“Freddy, just slow down.”
They dropped to 120, which seemed more civilised. “We must buy dollars,” Freddy declaimed into the wind, which carried it back to Fredericka, “we must find a hotel, we must sleep, we must wash, we must get new clothes and a car, and we must see a dentist.”
“After the hairdresser,” Fredericka insisted.
“I advise that you have your hair cut short. We’ll run out of money soon enough, which means that you’ll have to wash it yourself. Even now we can’t really afford a hundred pounds a day for hair, can we.”
“If I have it cut it will be a lot more.”
“Why? I pay six pounds. What do you pay?”
“I don’t have my hair cut in an army barracks, thank you,” Fredericka said. “It’s a bit more complicated.”
“How much more complicated could it be? How much have we been paying?”
“Thir charges five hundred and fifty pounds for a full cut, which includes everything else, so you come out radius, ready to dedicate an orphanage.”
“Do you mean, radiant?”
“Everyone looks at you.”
“Where does he get off charging that kind of money? It’s madness.”
“No, it’s because he cuts my hair that he can do that. Everyone wants him now.”
“I’m aware of the effect,” Freddy said. “The trick is to let them charge other people more because they do business with us, but to demand that they do it for us for nothing. You tell them at
the beginning that it has to be that way. It’s a kind of tax.”
“And what if they won’t?”
“They’re finished, and they know it.”
“But Thir is already known for cutting my hair.”
“You could destroy him by putting egg and ink on it and showing up at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve done that kind of thing.”
“I know.”
“It works. Why am I so hungry? We need a good relais de la campagne.”
“Freddy, what kind of car can we buy for less than ten thousand pounds?”
“I suppose it will have to be previously owned.”
“That’s disgusting. Who knows what people do on the seats?”
“A plastic Yugoslavian mini, probably.”
“You mean the kind you can lift? I’d rather use the train.”
“In America, Fredericka, they don’t really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.”
Far south of Rahway, where the road cut through trees and fields rather than the busy floor of hell, two New Jersey state troopers sat in their cruiser hidden behind an abutment. They had decided to rest for a few minutes before they darted out to give another ticket, and were enjoying the night air and the sounds of tree frogs and crickets when Freddy and Fredericka sped by.
“What was that?” one asked.
“I don’t know. It clocked at a hundred and twenty-eight point three.”
“But what was it?” the driver said as they pulled out onto the road.
“It looked like a two-humped camel draped in cheesecloth. It was like two guys with big fat white bodies and little tiny brown pinheads.”
“Was it a motorcycle?”
“Whatever it was, it had only one headlight. You’d better turn on the siren.”
A few minutes later, when Freddy saw the flashing lights in the mirror on the windscreen, he shouted to Fredericka that he thought their speedometer was defective. This was because what he took to be either an ambulance or a fire engine seemed to be gaining on them from very far away. As it grew in the mirror, he calculated that either it would have to be going 150 miles an hour or he and Fredericka would actually be travelling at sixty rather than 120.
