The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

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  Contents

  Chapter 1. He Killed Him with a Motorbike Headlamp (What He had in his Hand).

  Chapter 2. Spiritual America

  Chapter 3. He had Come a Long Way to that Moment of Quick Violence,

  Chapter 4. Blanks

  Chapter 5. Valera is Dead

  Chapter 6. Imitation of Life

  Chapter 7. The Little Slave Girl

  Chapter 8. Lights

  Chapter 9. It Was Milk

  Chapter 10. Faces

  Chapter 11. The Way We Were

  Chapter 12. The Sears Mannequin Standard

  Chapter 13. The Trembling of the Leaves

  Chapter 14. The Rules of Violence

  Chapter 15. The March on Rome

  Chapter 16. Hookers and Children

  Chapter 17. Match My Mood: The Life of Ronnie Fontaine

  Chapter 18. Behind the Green Door

  Chapter 19. The Day Rome Was Founded, April 21

  Chapter 20. Her Velocity

  Acknowledgments

  About Rachel Kushner

  This book is for Cynthia Mitchell.

  And for Anna, wherever she is (and probably isn’t).

  FAC UT ARDEAT

  1. HE KILLED HIM WITH A MOTORBIKE HEADLAMP (WHAT HE HAD IN HIS HAND).

  Valera had fallen back from his squadron and was cutting the wires of another rider’s lamp. The rider, Copertini, was dead. Valera felt no sadness, strangely, even though Copertini had been a comrade in arms, someone Valera had sped along with under the Via del Corso’s white neon, long before they both volunteered for the cycle battalion in 1917.

  * * *

  It was Copertini who had laughed at Valera when he’d crashed on the Via del Corso’s streetcar tracks, which could be so slippery on a foggy night.

  Copertini considered himself a better rider, but it was Copertini who had been going too fast in the dense woods and slammed headfirst into a tree. His bike frame was mangled, but his headlight bulb had an unfractured filament, which now weakly illuminated a patch of dirt and stiff grasses. Copertini’s motorcycle was a different model than Valera’s, but they used the same lamp bulb. Valera wanted a spare. A spare would be handy.

  He heard the faint whoosh of a flamethrower and the scattered echo of shelling. Combat was on the other side of a deep valley, near the Isonzo River. It was peaceful and deserted here, just the silvery patter of tree leaves moving in the breeze.

  He’d parked his motorcycle, left his Carcano rifle fastened to the rear rack, and was working to free the headlight, twisting to loosen the lamp nestle from its socket. It resisted. He was tugging on its anchoring wires when a man darted from behind a row of poplars, unmistakably German, in the green-and-yellow uniform, and helmetless like a rugby player sent into battle.

  Valera pulled the heavy brass casing free and went for a dump tackle. The German was down. Valera tumbled after him. The German scrambled to his knees and tried to grab the headlamp, which was just about the size and shape of a rugby ball but heavier, with a braid of cut wires trailing it like a severed optic nerve. Valera struggled to regain control of the headlamp. Twice he grubber-kicked it but somehow the German ended up in possession. Valera grounded him, kneed the German in the face, and pried his fingers from the headlamp. There was, after all, no penalty here for foul play, no one to flash him a red card in the quiet woods. His own platoon was miles ahead, and somehow this lone German was loosed from his pack, lost among the poplars.

  The German reared up, trying to shoulder-charge him.

  Valera brained him with the headlamp.

  2. SPIRITUAL AMERICA

  I walked out of the sun, unfastening my chin strap. Sweat was pooling along my collarbone, trickling down my back and into my nylon underwear, running down my legs under the leather racing suit. I took off my helmet and the heavy leather jacket, set them on the ground, and unzipped the vents in my riding pants.

  I stood for a long time tracking the slow drift of clouds, great fluffy masses sheared flat along their bottom edges like they were melting on a hot griddle.

  There were things I had no choice but to overlook, like wind effect on clouds, while flying down the highway at a hundred miles an hour. I wasn’t in a hurry, under no time constraint. Speed doesn’t have to be an issue of time. On that day, riding a Moto Valera east from Reno, it was an issue of wanting to move across the map of Nevada that was taped to my gas tank as I moved across the actual state. Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat’s cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north.

  From there the land was drained of color and specificity, sage-tufted dirt and incessant sameness of highway. I picked up speed. The faster I went, the more connected I felt to the map. It told me that fifty-six miles after Fernley I’d hit Lovelock, and fifty-six miles after leaving Fernley I hit Lovelock. I moved from map point to map point. Winnemucca. Valmy. Carlin. Elko. Wells. I felt a great sense of mission, even as I sat under a truck stop awning, sweat rolling down the sides of my face, an anonymous breeze, hot and dry, wicking the damp from my thin undershirt. Five minutes, I told myself. Five minutes. If I stayed longer, the place the map depicted might encroach.

  A billboard across the highway said SCHAEFER. WHEN YOU’RE HAVING MORE THAN ONE. A bluebird landed on the branch of a sumac bush under the high-clearance legs of the billboard. The bird surfed its slack branch, its feathers a perfect even blue like it had been powder-coated at the factory. I thought of Pat Nixon, her dark gleaming eyes and ceremonial outfits stiff with laundry starch and beading. Hair dyed the color of whiskey and whipped into an unmoving wave. The bird tested out a short whistle, a lonely midday sound lost in the infinite stretch of irrigation wheels across the highway. Pat Nixon was from Nevada, like me, and like the prim little state bird, so blue against the day. She was a ratted beauty-parlor tough who became first lady. Now we would likely have Rosalynn Carter with her glassy voice and her big blunt friendly face, glowing with charity. It was Pat who moved me. People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.

  I paid for my gas to the sound of men in the arcade room playing a video game called Night Driver. They were seated in low-slung cockpits made of sparkling, molded fiberglass, steering jerkily, pale-knuckled, trying to avoid the guardrail reflectors on either side of the road, the fiberglass cockpits jiggling and rocking as the men attempted to steer themselves out of catastrophe, swearing and angrily bopping the steering wheel with the heel of a hand when they burned and crashed. It had been this way at several truck stops now. This was how the men rested from driving. Later I told Ronnie Fontaine. I figured it was something Ronnie would find especially funny but he didn’t laugh. He said, “Yeah, see. That’s the thing about freedom.” I said, “What?” And he said, “Nobody wants it.”

  My uncle Bobby, who hauled dirt for a living, spent his final moments of life jerking his leg to depress the clutch while lying in a hospital, his body determined to operate his dump truck, clutching and shifting gears as he sped toward death on a hospital gurney. “He died on the job,” his two sons said, unmoved. Bobby was too mean for
them to love. Scott and Andy had been forced to oil Bobby’s truck every Sunday and now he was dead and they had Sundays to themselves, to oil their own trucks. Bobby was my mother’s brother. Growing up, we’d all lived together. My mother worked nights, and Bobby was what we had as a parent. Done driving his dump truck, he sat inexplicably nude watching TV and made us operate the dial for him, so he wouldn’t have to get up. He’d fix himself a big steak and give us instant noodles. Sometimes he’d take us to a casino, leave us in the parking lot with bottle rockets. Or play chicken with the other cars on I-80, with me and Scott and Andy in the backseat covering our eyes. I come from reckless, unsentimental people. Sandro used this against me on occasion. He pretended I was placed in his life to torture him, when it was really the other way around. He acted smitten but I was the smitten one. Sandro held all the power. He was older by fourteen years and a successful artist, tall and good-looking in his work clothes and steel-toed boots—the same kinds of clothes that Bobby and Scott and Andy wore, but on Sandro they added up to something else: a guy with a family inheritance who could use a nail gun, a drill press, a person not made effete by money, who dressed like a worker or sometimes a bum but was elegant in those clothes, and never hampered by the question of whether he belonged in a given situation (the question itself was evidence of not belonging).

  Sandro kept a photo above the desk in his loft, him posing on a couch next to Morton Feldman in his Coke-bottle glasses, Sandro looking cool and aloof, holding a raised, loaded shotgun, its barrel one long half of the letter X crossing the photograph diagonally. Slashing it. It was a black-and-white image but you could see that Sandro’s eyes were the whitish-blue of a wolf’s, giving him a cold, sly intensity. The photo was taken in Rhinebeck, where his friends Gloria and Stanley Kastle had a place. Sandro was allowed to shoot guns on their property, various handguns and rifles he had collected, some of them made by his family’s company before they got out of the firearms business. Sandro liked shotguns most of all and said if you ever needed to actually kill someone, that was what you’d want, a shotgun. That was his way, to tersely let it be known in his light accent, barely Italian, that he could kill someone if he had to.

  Women responded to this. They came on to him right in front of me, like the gallerist Helen Hellenberger, a severe but beautiful Greek woman who dressed as if it were permanently 1962, in a black shift and with upswept hair. We ran into her on Spring Street just before I departed for Reno to pick up the Moto Valera for this trip. Helen Hellenberger, in her tight dress and leather flats, holding her large black pocketbook as if it were a toolbox, had said she wanted so badly to come to Sandro’s studio. Would she have to beg? She’d put her hand on his arm and it seemed as if she wasn’t going to let go until he said yes. Sandro was with the Erwin Frame Gallery. Helen Hellenberger wanted to steal him for her own gallery. He tried to redirect her by introducing me, not as his girlfriend but as “a young artist, just out of school,” as if to say, you can’t have me, but here’s something you might consider picking up. An offer she had to maneuver around in order to press on and get him to commit to the studio visit.

  “With an art degree from . . . where?” she asked me.

  “UNR,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t be familiar with the school’s initials.

  “She’s influenced by Land Art,” Sandro said. “And her ideas are great. She made a beautiful film about Reno.”

  Helen Hellenberger represented the best-known Land Artists, all midcareer, blue-chip, and so I felt especially self-conscious about Sandro’s insistence that she learn about me, my work. I wasn’t ready to show with Helen Hellenberger and in his pretending that I was, I felt Sandro was insulting me without necessarily intending to. It was possible he knew this. That he found some perverse humor in offering me in lieu of himself.

  “Oh. Where did you say—” She was feigning a low-level politeness, just enough to satisfy him.

  “Nevada,” I said.

  “Well, now you can really learn about art.” She smiled at him as if depositing a secret between them. “If you’re with Sandro Valera. What a mentor for someone who’s just arrived from . . . Idaho?”

  “Reno,” Sandro said. “She’s going out there to do a piece. Drawing a line across the salt flats. It’s going to be great. And subtle. She’s got really subtle ideas about line and drawing.”

  He had tried to put his arm around me but I’d moved away. I knew how I looked to this beautiful woman who slept with half her roster, according to Ronnie Fontaine, who was on her roster himself: I was nothing but a minor inconvenience in her campaign to represent Sandro.

  “So you’ll be going out West?” she’d asked before we parted ways, and then she’d questioned me about the particulars of my ride with an interest that didn’t quite seem genuine. Only much later did I think back to that moment, look at it. You’ll be going out of town? Reno, Idaho. Someplace far away.

  When I was getting ready to depart, Sandro acted as if I might not be coming back, as if I were leaving him to solitude and tedium, a penance he’d resigned himself to enduring. He rolled his eyes about the appointment Helen Hellenberger had wrangled.

  “I’ll be here getting eaten by vultures,” he said, “while you’re tearing across the salt flats, my unknown competitors drooling over you like stunned idiots. Because that’s what you do,” he’d said, “you inhibit thought. With your young electricity.”

  When you’re having more than one. I sat at the truck stop, facing that billboard, naively thinking my young electricity was enough.

  Helen Hellenberger’s stable of Land Artists included the most famous, Robert Smithson, who died three years earlier while I was a student at UNR. I had learned about him and the Spiral Jetty from an obituary in the newspaper and not from my art department, which was provincial and conservative (the truth in Helen’s snub was that I did learn more from Sandro than I had in art school). The foreman who built the Spiral Jetty was quoted explaining how tricky it had been to construct it on such soft mud, and that he had almost lost some very expensive equipment. He was risking men and front loaders and regretted taking the job, and then the artist shows up in the Utah summertime desert, it’s 118 degrees, and the guy is wearing black leather pants. Smithson was quoted declaring that pollution and industry could be beautiful, and that it was because of the railroad cutoff and the oil dredging that he chose this part of the Great Salt Lake for his project, where the lake’s supply of fresh water had been artificially cut, raising the salt content so high that nothing but red algae could grow. I had immediately wanted to see this thing made by a New York artist in leather pants, who described more or less the slag-heap world of the West I knew, as it looked to me, and found it worth his attentions. I went there, crossed the top of Nevada, and came down just over the Utah border. I watched the water, which pushed peculiar drifts, frothy, white, and ragged. The white drifts looked almost like snow but they moved like soap, quivering and weightless. Spiky desert plants along the shore were coated in an icy fur of white salt. The jetty was submerged but I could see it through the surface of the water. It was the same basalt from the lake’s shore, rearranged to another form. The best ideas were often so simple, even obvious, except that no one had thought of them before. I looked at the water and the distant shore of the lake, a vast bowl of emptiness, jagged rocks, high sun, stillness. I would move to New York City.

  Which was an irony, because the artist himself had gone from New York to the West to make his specifically Western dreams come true. I was from the place, the hard-hat-wearing, dump-truck-driving world the Land Artists romanticized. So why did Helen Hellenberger pretend to confuse Idaho and Nevada? It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West. If that’s what I was going to be. Sandro declared it, “she’s influenced by Land Art,” but this also served to explain away the fact that he was with a woman so young, with no detectable pedigree or accomplishments. Just his word.

  When I was little
, skiing in the Sierras, I felt that I was drawing on the mountain’s face, making big sweeping graceful lines. That was how I had started to draw, I’d told Sandro, as a little girl, five, six years old, on skis. Later, when drawing became a habit, a way of being, of marking time, I always thought of skiing. When I began ski racing, slalom and giant slalom, it was as if I were tracing lines that were already drawn, and the technical challenge that shadowed the primary one, to finish with a competitive time, was to stay perfectly in the lines, to stay early through the gates, to leave no trace, because the harder you set your skis’ metal edges, the bigger wedge of evidence you left, the more you slowed down. You wanted no snow spraying out behind you. You wanted to be traceless. To ride a flat ski as much as possible. The ruts that cut around and under the bamboo gates, deep trenches if the snow was soft, were to be avoided by going high, by picking a high and graceful line, with no sudden swerves or shuddering edges, as I rode the rails to the finish.

  Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.

  The first winter I was dating Sandro we went to the Kastles’ place up in Rhinebeck for Christmas. It snowed heavily one night, and in the morning I borrowed cross-country skis and skied across a frozen pond, made tracks that went across it in an X, and photographed them. “That will be good,” Sandro said, “your X.” But I wasn’t satisfied by those tracks. Too much effort, the plodding blobs of ski poles every ten feet. Cross-country skiing was like running. It was like walking. Contemplative and aerobic. The trace was better if it was clean, if it was made at some unnatural speed. I asked the Kastles if we could borrow their truck. We did doughnuts on the snow-covered meadow beyond the frozen pond, me spinning the steering wheel like Scott and Andy had taught me, Sandro laughing as the truck’s tires slid. I made broad, circular tracks in the meadow and photographed those. But it was only about having a good time upstate. I thought art came from a brooding solitude. I felt it had to involve risk, some genuine risk.