The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  Copyright © 2016 Gary Amdahl

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

  Names: Amdahl, Gary, 1956-

  Title: The daredevils: a novel / Gary Amdahl.

  Description: Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015036912

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.M38 D37 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036912

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of Counterpoint

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-766-4

  for Leslie Brody, who inspired this novel’s first draft in 1984, and who refused to let me give up on it, even when I suggested I would burn it and myself up before I returned to it, even when there was an actual burning of one draft—even when I threw another draft out with the garbage, retrieving and saving that ream and actually hiding it from me, with the help of our late great friend, the poet, writer, and teacher Joan Joffe Hall, who sent it to me ten years later, and to whose memory I also dedicate this book.

  “Hand this man over to Satan immediately,

  so that we may save him later.”

  —The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians

  “. . . and it turned out that not from cunning and not

  from fear were they so hushed within themselves,

  but from harkening.”

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, #1

  “A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for ‘volunteers.’ Even a sick man can willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people’s affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination.”

  —William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

  “Fear . . . invites the Devil to come to us.”

  —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  Contents

  Part One: The Truth A and The Falsehood B: The Old Stage Set Coming Apart at the Seams

  Part Two: “The American”

  Part Three: “The Watchdogs of Loyalty”

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE:

  THE TRUTH A AND THE FALSEHOOD B:

  THE OLD STAGE SET COMING APART AT THE SEAMS

  Two boys squatted together on either side of an open limelight box. They were adjusting the mixture of gases entering it, with an intensity of care—both nodding silently as if at the idea of it—that was preternatural. The block of lime began to glow, and the light grew brighter and brighter until it seemed it could become no brighter, not in this world, and still it grew.

  But then the older boy’s sense of care appeared to slacken while the other boy’s intensified—perhaps in compensation. Both boys felt this change with a shiver.

  The older boy went down the main aisle and climbed up on the small stage, across which the curtain, depicting a tranquil northern lake, was drawn. He was wearing a false auburn beard that was much too big for his face, a monocle, a cream-colored suit that was his size and which in fact he owned, and a bowler hat that was also comically big, forcing him to tip it stylishly to one side to keep it from interfering with the all-important monocle. Because the side flaps of the limelight box had not been clapped in place, light was not focused on him but filled the entire theater. He saw the other boy, who was closest to the source, in a heavenly, deathly light that disturbed—even perhaps, in the strict medical sense of the term, shocked him: hellish and heavenly and dead and alive and perfect. It was one kind of light but another as well, a light that was even stronger, even stranger: he thought it must be a kind of hallucination or a kind of madness. He did not feel well. And yet he was able to make a bizarre distinction and say that neither did he feel unwell.

  His friend, who was the son of the plumber who ran the gas for the theater, wore a greasy newsboy’s cap that hung down over the sides of his face like the floppy ears of a hound, and a pair of short pants that were comically large: held up by braces, they were like a stiff gabardine barrel into which he’d climbed to hide himself, the top crossing his bare suspendered chest, the ragged hems brushing the floor and under which his toes peeked out. He had a fat, wet toothpick in his tiny pursed mouth, so that from the stage, in that incredible light—light the older boy perceived now as “sensitive,” so sensitive it picked up motes of dust and magnified them—he appeared to be smoking a cigarette or small, fancy cigar.

  The older boy watched the other as intently as the other watched the flame. He positioned himself exactly center stage and let himself be hypnotized. The light was a host or vector of some kind of fever, a means of generating or regenerating through fever a superior or at least supernatural life.

  Father had said: it was only acceptable temporarily, for a very brief time, to be susceptible to that kind of day-dreamy indolence or outright weakness of mind, if that was how you insisted on seeing it, if at the same time you were reconciled to the unspoken but daily admonition that the only transformative powers to which a man, Charles in this case, might aspire were political, Christian, and expensive.

  “I am wearing this disguise for no particular reason,” he announced.

  He was speaking loudly and clearly, but in a special way, as if performing. Was he performing? He mused in a satisfied way. He was sure he could pass for twenty in the disguise, even though he was a little short yet—and, most importantly for the immediate artistic concerns, his voice had not yet broken. He tapped the jeweled end of a walking stick in the palm of his hand, as if he was waiting impatiently for his friend to do something. And there it was again: Performing? If so, for who, and why?

  Toulouse-Lautrec, he wondered. Was that who he was thinking of? I need a sketch pad. His voice was sure to break any minute. He did not know if he wanted it to happen or not. If Mother intends to castrate me, she has got to act now, he thought. I’m joking, he thought. Right? How good, really, is my voice? Good enough for Mother to want to cut my balls off to save it? How many times had Mother said, “You can never find a castrato when you need one”? Many, many times. If Mother thought someone had failed to catch her witticisms, she would back her horse up and gallop over them again.

  It was the finest treble San Franciscans had heard in a generation of boy choirs. How many times had Mother said so? How many times had people owing nothing to Mother, under her influence in no readily a
pparent way, said so?

  Many, many times.

  He could sing well.

  He knew it was true, even if he refused comment. It was an accident of evolution. Not the right word, he knew, but that was how he saw it: it had come down through the ages, a million years of yodeling homo this and homo that and landed in his pristine voice box. He believed it—the essential, ideal Voice—had reached its zenith in Mother’s contralto, but he was her baby. His brothers and sister could sing—as certainly could Father—but not like he could, not like Mother could.

  An accident. Or gift from God, depending on whom he was talking to and what kind of mood he was in. And just as Plato said would happen to an ideal, it was degenerating—even as he spoke! He had to laugh at that one, and in the peal of that angelic laugh he thought he heard the first creak of a shiver of a crack beginning to form, his perfect little larynx beginning to bulge and thicken and coarsen.

  Mother? Sharpen the knife.

  He called out to Little Joe who was still muttering and tinkering with the limelight: he told him he thought it was funny. In a distracted stage whisper—incredibly enough, Little Joe seemed to be performing too—faintly annoyed perhaps, or even “faintly annoyed,” the toothpick stretching the corner of his mouth, Joe asked Charles what it was he thought was funny, and did he mean funny strange or funny ha-ha.

  Charles considered the remark. He felt an urge to get down off the stage, to tinker and advise and pester, as an adult might, not to “play” with his friend—the specter of that kind of performance rose and fell ominously in Charles’s soul before he had a chance to acknowledge it, as what, a loss?—but engage him as his brothers did their opponents in the debating club across the bay in Berkeley—surely my young friend understands that his abridgment of my remarks constitutes a fraud—but the remark stayed in his throat and unsettled him somewhat. He looked at Joe and could not help but wonder if he wasn’t after all talking to a gnome or a dwarf or a wizard—or the ambulatory foetus of such fantastic creatures. Then he recalled the boy’s father asking the same question, “Funny strange or funny ha-ha, Mr. Minot?” calling him “mister” instead of “young sir” as he usually did. And recalled too this colorful workingman’s fondness for toothpicks, all fourteen members of his colorful working family seeming to chew them at once.

  But it was as if he, Joe, were the one putting on the show. That was what was funny.

  “What?” Joe whispered, preoccupied but not annoyed.

  Charles could hardly hear him. “I have often been struck,” he howled in that chilling way that only a strong treble can, “in my many days and nights in the theater, during rehearsals or between acts, at how much more interesting the stagehands moving the furniture and props about are than my fellow singers and actors.”

  He had made many sorties in this mode of the theatrical extempore, was constantly improvising, well, what would you call it, wit? Ready intelligence? Rhetorical exuberance?

  But this: this was something different. He certainly had his rhetoric down and was more than facile in his manipulation of it, but had he not said something interesting as well? In a theatrical way? Falsely magnificent but with an aura of strange truth faintly glowing around it?

  Joe made no reply; not, Charles thought, out of a lack of sophistication, but because he’d reached a critical point in his tuning of the gas.

  The limelight now poured from the box so brilliantly it almost made its own sound. Joe himself was an incandescent ghost. The seats for many rows behind him stood out blood red, little rips in the fabric clearly visible, like gaping wounds, each snarl of thread or nubbin a blemish, or hairy mole. Most of the small theater was in fact illuminated, the carved demons and angels of the proscenium arch looking blinded as if by attempted entrance to the Eternal Paradise of the stage, just beyond the Earthly Paradise of the curtain.

  Suddenly Joe flipped the lids of the box closed around the filament, focusing the light onstage and causing himself and most of the theater to vanish in the deep black spaceless space of the surprised optic nerve.

  Charles let the walking stick swing to his side and raised his free hand to his face, shielding his eyes.

  Certainly it is a kind of fever, he thought.

  “Only it’s in reverse,” he said, continuing the earlier thought. “I am onstage, but watching you offstage.”

  Then Joe went too far and the limelight went out with a loud firecracker pop. “That’s funny,” he said as the darkness and silence overwhelmed them. His small, soft voice was musing and concerned. Charles could hear it perfectly now: it was genuine.

  “Funny strange?” he asked, decreasing the volume but intoning grandly, “or funny ha-ha.” His voice filled the theater in an imitation of the corrupt, jubilant oratory of his father and his father’s friends. “I say to you, funny straaaaaaange? Or funny HA-HA? Ladies? Gentlemen? Which, I put it to you now, for the hour is upon us, will it be?” Charles brought the walking stick around to his front, folded his gloved hands around the fake jewel, and waited.

  “You’re strange,” said the quiet voice barely making its way out of the darkness. “You can take it from me. Anybody says you’re not, you tell ’em come see me. We’ll set this person straight.”

  Charles nodded solemnly. It was true as true could be. It was 1906, and all bets were off. La Belle Époque was over. Everybody agreed the world had never been stranger. Europeans were expressing cheerful optimism in the so-called great alliances, but that didn’t stop them from thinking there was something terribly strange in the air. A new world? Not the Americas, not the United States of America—something far more new? Was that possible? It was the American Century. Father’s good friend President Roosevelt had said so. Charles was expressing neither idle nor psychotic conversational wonder. He wasn’t good for much more than nodding and smiling and furrowing his shining young brow when the conversation was politics but that did not mean he was failing to take it in, somehow, on some level of concern, and Father made sure he got the basics, over breakfast, with the others, and had a first-rate opinion ready if called upon to amaze everybody with his firm but gentle Christian savoir faire. Father also urged Charles’s older brothers to go to Japan, if they wanted to steal a march on the young men who were too focused on simply making a pile of money as fast as possible and spending it in Europe while there was still a Europe to be purchased.

  “Go to Japan. You will not regret it.”

  “We’re Californians, Father. We are Progressives.”

  “California is not what it once was, gentlemen. Neither is Progressivism. Go to Japan.”

  A little light could be seen now way up high around the edges of the doors leading to the third-floor lobby, and though it was a weak and alien, an unpleasant light, he made his way off the stage and into the disorienting maze of voice-filled stairways. He did not emerge until he was on the third floor. As he opened the stairway door, he glanced at the row of little rectangular casement windows. They showed oddly vivid rectangles of a grassy square and the empty space that would soon be the foundation of the Silesian Brothers church. To the left of the little windows were big French windows, opening onto a small balcony. He meant to examine the strange images made by the little windows, but went to the big ones. It was a warm, still, sunlit afternoon. The park was divided by the setting sun into shadow so lustrous it was almost golden, the darkest amber maple syrup you could find, or molasses, and a solid, marble-hard and almost deathly white. Limelight white. There were paraders on the far side of the park, accompanied by a small brass band that he couldn’t hear, going around the square, and they moved from golden darkness into blinding light and back into darkness. Charles tugged a key from his waistcoat pocket and opened the doors.

  It took him a moment to sort out: the paraders were shouting something he could just barely hear in a military cadence in the absence of music from their band, while directly below him, just across the street, a small group on a bandstand was singing a folksong. The bandstand was drap
ed with red, white, and blue bunting, and there were large flags hanging around their poles at the corners: the USA, the California, and two he couldn’t make out, labor unions no doubt. The marching band began to play, but as they were on the far side of the square, Charles couldn’t make out much beyond the unmistakable rhythm of the march.

  This was one of the sensations that stayed with him: music, acting, performance was everywhere he looked. It wasn’t an intellectual observation, it was a feeling. Nobody was not performing. That was to say, nobody was not holding their real selves back, in readiness for something else he and they could not imagine.

  Nobody was not performing: it must be a consequence of the expulsion from the garden. A mass psychosis that nobody noticed anymore, or cared about.

  There was a large crowd, he guessed, massing mostly out of sight toward the intersection of Stockton and Columbus.

  The folksingers crooning on the bandstand with their backs to him, arms linked around waists, tightly swaying, were apparently a barbershop quartet, but a girl, or a small young woman, hopped up on the stage and stood in front of them. She was so small Charles couldn’t see over the massed backs of the large men of the quartet, but he could hear her over their harmonizing quite clearly:

  “They go wild, simply wild, over me

  I”m referring to the bedbug and the flea;

  they disturb my slumber deep, and I murmur in my sleep,

  they go wild, simply wild, over me.

  Oh the bull he went wild over me,

  and he held his gun where everyone could see.

  He was breathing rather hard when he saw my union card,

  and he went wild, simply wild, over me.”

  Charles leaned over the balcony, counting: Hundreds of people? There were shouts, some booing. Popular tunes with seditious lyrics made many San Franciscans uneasy to the point of irritation—he had often heard the vogue for it derided—and diffuse applause muffled by something pointedly not the wind, as there was still not the hint of a breeze.