The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  Father and Mother returned safely from Iceland, revealing that there had been as well a detour to the Svalbard Archipelago, on Norway’s arctic coast, with a Boston coal baron named Longyear. Andrew and Alexander came from Sacramento for a short visit to welcome them home, and they were joined a day later by Amelia and the Reverend Ruggles, who had been attending a meeting of President Wilson’s Ecumenical Council. Because Charles no longer lived at the family home, and had not seen anybody in his family for quite some time, he wore the false auburn beard when he came for dinner. Neither Father nor older brothers nor Tom Ruggles, seemed to notice. Amelia pretended not to, and Mother merely watched him, as was now her wont, closely but neutrally. Only the younger brothers, Gus and Tony, saw it for what it was. They laughed hysterically but quietly between themselves, and would not reveal the source of their amusement. The men discussed the trip to Iceland, and Charles pretended to be surprised, even a little ashamed of himself, when he appeared finally to understand that the purpose of the trip had not been sport fishing, that the reference to the tying of flies had been ironic, and that the facilitation and encouragement of negotiations for control of Iceland’s commercial fisheries had been the real activity, along with the study of general opportunities for people with ships, which were carrying mutton and stockfish to Belgium and France, where normal husbandry had been interrupted by the sudden deaths of millions of young men. Iceland was Danish, Father said—as Danish as Mother, whose great-grandparents on her mother’s side had been born, lived, and died in that country—but was seeking its independence. Denmark had, during various decades of the last few centuries, been desirous of, even desperate for, buyers of Iceland, but independence had never entered into it. Now it appeared that the United States might one day not too far in the future consider purchasing the country. That was the kind of place America was now. Just as a rich man might buy himself an island and declare himself king of it, a rich country could buy a poor one and run it like any other business. And while the Icelanders, Father admitted, were experiencing a desire for nationalism that was moving and gratifying to witness, and while they were justly proud of operating the world’s oldest parliamentary republic and causing a society to subsist in which neither a ruling clergy nor aristocracy could find handholds—he wanted very much, and he said this twice, wanted very much for Iceland to understand, yes, first and foremost to understand and then naturally to accept, America’s influence, and, not coincidentally, to prosper as they had never done before. Not ever, he repeated coolly. They had demonstrated perfectly well that the end of communal anarchism—and Charles particularly should understand the term was being used advisedly but pointedly—was poverty. Grinding, centuries-long famine and misery. They take their fish from open rowboats, he said, and so can spend no more than a day at a time on the water, and shallow water at that. Which does not prevent them from drowning at an appalling, not to say incredibly unprofitable, rate. One hundred sixty-five men had been drowned in a single day—which was not only a terrible tragedy but a significant percentage of the country’s male population. Decked ships from England had been fishing Iceland’s waters for centuries, literally centuries, but the new steam-driven trawlers were simply sweeping up everything in their wake. Not because, Father went on with a more pronounced gravity, their captains were heartless sons of bitches or blind idiots, or because their owners were evil villains working hand in hand with corrupt tyrants, but because the world was changing and the English could no more not fish from their overwhelming trawlers than Charles could not not enjoy, for example, his motorcycle rides now that he had acquired the capability for that powerful—make no mistake about it—thrill.

  “So fishing was good,” Charles said.

  “You know I don’t care for sarcasm from anybody—”

  “Yes, you have said so.”

  “—much less my sons—”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “—so don’t let me hear it from you again.”

  “It was a joke, Father.”

  “It could indeed have been one, but was not,” said Father with mild authority. “The mean look in your eye gives you away. I don’t like to hear what comes out of your mouth when you look like that and I don’t like to see you look like that.”

  “All right,” Charles said, reddening over the auburn beard, which now felt ridiculous. “You put me off-balance with the motorcycle reference. I sold or am selling them all. I am no longer interested in thrills.”

  “Are beards back in fashion?” he asked.

  “No,” giggled Amelia, “they most certainly are not.”

  “You look like your grandfather,” said Father. “Quite remarkably.”

  “Yes,” said Mother. “He does.” The father-in-law was clearly present, while the son clearly was not.

  Mother and Father both murmured with bemused approval, and it was hard to say if they suspected the beard’s falseness.

  “I was wearing it when the theater caught fire. I can’t bring myself, for some odd reason, to take it off.”

  No one knew what to say. One of the girls appeared in the doorway and indicated that the chauffeur was idling in the eastern portico. The family collected themselves and went out to inspect Father’s latest purchase, a new automobile, a Mountain Wagon, manufactured by the Stanley firm and powered by steam. There were four rows of bench seats and no roof. If it proved a reasonable conveyance, they would take it to the ranch. The controls of the steamer, however, baffled the chauffeur, Albert, a tiny man who’d once been a jockey, causing some embarrassment and minor delay. After a few anxious minutes, they set off for the Presidio, and a picnic. Mother became convinced as the journey wore on that the boiler would blow and kill them all, and swore that her first ride in the Mountain Wagon would be her last. Everyone began the ride wearing goggles and dusters, but shucked everything when it became clear they weren’t going to reach any terrific velocity. Father in fact felt it safe enough to put his big-brimmed Western hat on. With his long coat and knee-length boots and immense drooping moustache, he once again looked like the rancher he sometimes thought he would liked to have been, or the cavalry officer he had been in his youth, once in a while even perhaps a gunfighter, a righteous gunfighter, of course—certainly a San Franciscan from the old days. When these characteristics came to the fore, there was almost no hint of the refined and sophisticated man of law, the prosecutor of graft in the city’s Golden Age of Graft, “The Regenerator,” one of those men who are seen behind the man at the podium, the westernmost confidant of Colonel Roosevelt, a potential purchaser of Iceland.

  Charles moved his goggles carefully to his forehead and made sure his beard was still securely fastened to his face. Then he moved the goggles from his forehead back over his eyes with a snap that he hadn’t intended and which caused some pain to his blush-sensitized face.

  “Mockery is for weaklings,” Father said, returning to his earlier remonstrance, but drawling noticeably this time.

  “‘I am a weakling,’ he said mockingly,” Charles said. His beard lifted up and flew away without a sound.

  He could feel Father staring at him with dark gunfighter impassivity for some time. It was certainly not a mean look, but for all its immobility of feature it was a violent one. The wind ruffled their heads of luxurious Minot hair. The picnic was being hosted by the detested but important San Francisco businessman and socialite, Durwood Keogh. Keogh was a director of United Railroad, and was widely considered to be both audaciously younger and more winningly handsome than could rightly be expected of one of the ultimate authorities of so deeply entrenched and spectacularly powerful a presence in the daily life of the nation as a railroad. Some frankly dismissed him as a figurehead, a playboy, and a dolt. Others thought he was secretly accomplished, and, ominously, “more than able.” A few political philosophers of influence, however, holding leisurely conferences at both, interestingly, the Bohemian and the Pacific clubs, presented him as neither dolt nor efficient executive disguised as dol
t, but as purely ruthless, or ruthlessly pure, in the service of convictions that were not his own, which could not be his own as he was unable to think on that moral level, but which he held, as a mean-spirited child holds candy. With a delight, that is to say, that obscures the poisoned ferocity of the need. Father believed he was dangerous in just this way: purity was ruthless, he said, again disregarding his own purity, his own ruthlessness, because they were products of deep belief, not superficial greed and power: Keogh had no staying power, while Father had Jesus Christ. But his neighbor be damned, he loathed Keogh personally as well. He had done his best to put him and all his associates, avowed and otherwise, behind bars, and it was none other than Keogh’s uncle, the ur robber baron, whom he’d caused to flee the country. The Jew in jail, and the spectacularly corrupt robber baron fled: Father’s legacy, in case anyone cared to remember the horrible failure of the Spring Park Water Company when the quake and fires had destroyed the city. And of course they’d found a way to shoot at him. He was always getting shot at—it only strengthened his disdain for shooters. But nothing had ever come of it, and here they were, nine years later, their mutual hatred softened with a kind of nostalgia for the shooting, and the volcanic hatred that could bring things to a shooting pass, and even the kind of respect that comes when two men find themselves not only still standing but thriving, in Golden Old California, when so many others were dead and gone.

  Keogh had just returned from a trip to Mexico with General “Black Jack” Pershing. They’d been sent to apprehend or kill the internationally infamous political celebrity and terrorist Pancho Villa, who had crossed, a couple of months earlier, the international border into the little adobe village of Columbus, New Mexico. There he had murdered a dozen and a half of the tiny town’s citizens, pillaged it, and burned it to the ground. Pershing and Keogh had failed in their mission and seemed almost forlornly stupid as they wandered about northern Mexico—at least from the vantage point of the northern capitals of the United States—but nobody blamed them, as that vast and primitive country seemed to have been expressly designed as a haven for barbarian villains.

  So said Durwood Keogh anyway, leaning against his automobile in his jodhpurs and tapping one long strong flank with a crop. He made it look like the Minots had gathered around him, but it was he in fact who had approached them, affably, sportingly, generously. They all had bigger fish to fry, did they not?

  It was preparedness for war in France that Keogh had taken up as his cause and duty upon his return to San Francisco. He had been named grand marshal of the Preparedness Day Parade, three months off yet, scheduled for mid-July to dovetail with Independence Day, but already a major and popular theme of civic discourse. German spies (a term synonymous with anarchists for more than a decade now) were said to be preparing too: to bomb the parade, kill paraders, and make a mockery of freedom and democracy. The attack on the Minot Theater—so went one highly controversial strand of public discourse—had merely been an exploratory jab.

  Charles had never heard such an idea, but remained impassive and silent, as did Father. Were they suddenly playing some kind of poker? Mother, nearly under her breath, begged Keogh’s pardon, but Keogh ignored her.

  They were going to blow the city to pieces.

  Charles remained as he was, resisting the urge to say that cities were made to be blown to pieces, that in reality they were in a constant state of being blown to pieces and rebuilt, so what was Keogh’s beef?

  Keogh had organized a volunteer cavalry troop—businessmen with time on their hands, fellow socialites, most of the polo team from the Burlingame Country Club—and got them immediately front and center in the public eye. There, it was stated proudly and unconditionally in all the best and most trusted newspapers that they would function as a deterrent to the mad, the craven, and the un-free. They might lunch at the Fairmont one day, conversing by way of exaggerated anecdotes about tactics, then be off to the beach or the Presidio. For security reasons, times and places were never officially announced, and Keogh often took his boys to a place other than the one to which he’d said they be going, sometimes in the company of a professional cavalry officer for drills, sometimes not. Spectators in the know (Amelia Minot Ruggles, for instance, who did in fact work twelve hours a day in various hospitals but managed to remain informed, discreet, sophisticated, and sympathetic) arrived punctually at even the most secret exercises, accompanied by reporters from William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner.

  “Sanguinary feeling for an all-out war with Mexico is building, wouldn’t you agree, Minot?”

  “Not at all.”

  “No, of course not.” Why he had opened with reference to his failure, rather than the triumph to come, was mystifying—unless you understood he wanted a fight.

  “How much money did you and Black Jack spend on your vacation down there? 130 million dollars is what we all heard.”

  “You’ve got to spend money to make money. You know that very well, Bill! You know that better than most of us, I dare say! ‘The Regenerator!’ Why, your office supplies bill alone . . .! Genuine expense, Bill, don’t get me wrong! I’m not complaining even if some of that ink went on my indictment, which I have hanging in my office, did you know that? I say your office supplies bill alone could have bought you, where was it, Iceland? Lucky for you, you had that vacuum tube to the White House and a Moral President who didn’t think twice about using federal money to help his old friend buy, what was it you used to say, good dogs who do what they’re told? But listen, that’s all water under the bridge, forgiven and almost forgotten. We’re talking about now and we’re talking about Mexico: these people are the enemies of our country. You’re going to count beans in the face of racial degeneracy and unrepentant hatred?”

  “The enemy is in the main amorphous, and where it has recognizable form—say a bandito generale, for example—the checklists for confirmation that he is indeed foe and not friend never quite tally up convincingly. Wilson can’t tell, and none of his men can, either. Some honest men think Villa should have, could have been, our friend. But we’re too busy tinkering with what we think are the mechanisms of the oldest civilization in this hemisphere, mechanisms so complicated they are useless to the Indians or whatever you call them when they’ve sold their white blood for a mess of potage.”

  “I am impervious to your speeches, as you well know, Mr. Minot!”

  “You can’t tinker with another country.”

  This struck Charles as a rather flat contradiction of Father’s recently stated principles, but he said nothing, suspecting there was an important distinction to be made somewhere between the tinker and the purchase.

  “Destroy it, then. Occupy it and do your ciphering afterward. Pick your man and tell him to duck. It can’t be Villa because Villa is an unstable warlord. Pick one of the others. Carranza. Who cares. Huerta would have sufficed, even when you accepted the idea that he was a mean drunk with more Indian blood in him than white. And don’t talk to me about Wilson. He’s a fool and a coward.”

  “Come now,” said Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles with stern serenity. “Come now.”

  “Zapata,” said Charles in an even but loud tone of voice.

  “Zapata!” cried Keogh. “Go down to Los Angeles and make a movie about him! He’s so romantic with his big dark eyes under that fabulous sombrero. I want one just like it. In fact, I have one just like it. Have him walk quietly into a saloon and run the camera in close to his face. Make the shot all mustachios and burning commitment. Make no genuine alliances with him, however. Spend nothing of value on him. He’ll go to pieces in no time. He’s a sensitive warlord. He will cry when things turn out badly. Interesting that you should find him compelling.”