by Gary Amdahl
“You spoke to Mahon,” said Owner. There was no incredulity, feigned or unfeigned, in his voice.
“Yes?” confirmed Owl querulously.
“Sixty,” repeated Jitney, not with incredulity or sarcasm but awed unbelief.
“That is,” said Owner, now with admiration but still cool, “an awfully fucking immense deal of change.”
“I TOLD YOU, YOU COCKSUCKERS!” shouted Owl in a friendly but nevertheless alarming way.
“Mahon is a decent chap,” said Owner. “He’s in town?”
“He is not,” said Owl. “He is in Washington conferring with the heads of a few other important unions.”
“And where is the money?”
“Pinkerton,” murmured Jitney, his gaze serenely focused outside the shop, on a trolley car on the far side of the intersection. “On the back step. I don’t know if he’s getting on or off. On. No. He’s getting off, he’s getting off and—”
“Quickly, then,” said Owner, moving slowly away and turning his back.
“It’s coming in an unusually circuitous fashion, and we need Farnsworth to receive it here in an unusually quiet corner,” said Jitney.
“No one knows where he is,” said Owl conversationally. “Is he in prison?” He laughed bitterly, and both Owner and Jitney let smiles pass over their faces.
“I’ll find him,” said Owner. “I’ll find Vera and Vera will find Little Billy Farnsworth, the only man among us who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”
Owl softened and saddened perceptibly. “It’s true. And I love Billy, I truly do. He’s good and he likes getting dirty. I rode with Eugene Debs,” he went on.
“Yes, yes,” said Owner, moving another step away and lighting a cigarette to cover his unacceptable nervousness.
Owl turned to Charles as if he’d been part of the conversation all along. “On the Red Special in 1908 and we got a solid million votes. One million American socialists. Debs and I will both be in prisons before the end of the war—but I intend to bring down United Railroad before they nail me.”
Father’s well-known hatred of URR may have had a great deal to do with the apparent ease in which Charles had become part of the general group—along with the nasty Sicilian boys—if not in the know. Or it may have had very little to do with it. No one seemed terribly interested in oaths and the cover of darkness. He had been in the shop two or three times, getting rid of his motorcycles . . . but had Vera been there all along, watching him, wondering if she might audition . . .?
Owner was counting money in the till but could not help turning and shouting with a great flashing smile, “SIXTY!”
“Mr. Minot!” Owner slammed the register shut and turned his attention to Charles, who bowed perceptibly but not dramatically.
“Are you here to give me the Merkel?”
“Yes, I am. And the Minerva.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Minot. Would you repeat what you just said, sir? Days and nights of internal combustion have weakened my ears as well as my eyes. My nerves are shot and I can hardly walk a straight line. Everything tastes of oil and my fingers are numb from the vibrations.”
“I say I am here to sell you the Merkel and the Minerva.”
“Ah, that’s what Oi t’ought you said.”
The men at the railing regarded Charles impassively, the Italian boys fell silent as if embarrassed. The men carrying crates stood outside smoking, and Mexican murmured to himself, apparently translating a story in the newspaper.
Charles had never looked at the photographs and advertisements papering the walls, but did so now. One caught his eye. Five men with their arms slung around each other, hanging on and sagging against each other, clowning and making faces. Rising massively behind them was the heavy lumber of the armature of a great bowl-shaped track in—he leaned closer—in Detroit. In huge white letters, ten feet high and nailed to the outermost studs, the sport’s chief attraction was spelled out: NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH. The man in the middle, upright, grinning, had either told a terrific joke or was the only sober member of the group. The other men were convulsed in hilarity, faces as blackened as if they were pretending to be a nigger minstrel banjo band, with wide, white, clean rings around their eyes where the goggles had been. Beneath the clean and sober man in the middle were the words “Daredevil Derkum and his friends are neck and neck with death—AND THEY USE OILZUM!” Derkum was a man well known in California racing, who was also a fireman on the lead engine of the Owl train that ran every night from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
“How’s your old man?” asked Owner.
“He’s fine, he’s fine, he . . .” Charles said, faltering a little in the face of all the apparent knowledge of his family strangers were ready to draw on—strangers and Vera. “He’s just back from Iceland.”
“Iceland!”
“Yes, as strange as that may sound: Iceland.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing! Fishing—for what sort of fish might one angle in Iceland? Let me guess, let me . . . grayling?”
“Umm, no, you’d think so, wouldn’t you, but interestingly enough, no, no grayling.”
“Trout, of course.”
“Browns, yes.”
“Nasty fish, the brown. Cannibal fish. That’s what I hear.”
“I think they prefer baitfish to their own, but sure, I guess that’s true to some extent,” he said with the return of his casual authority.
“German fish,” continued Owner. He winked.
“Oh yes, of course. German fish.”
“It’s in all the newspapers. A German fish and they are eating up all the good American brook trout. And they’re supposed to be inferior on the table.”
“Au bleu, with the right wine, they taste all right to me.”
There was a brief silence and then the place was roaring with laughter. When it subsided, Owner gave Charles a wry but gently consoling look. “Char,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking of earlier. The rare and mysterious arctic char.”
“Sure, lots of nice species of char. But it’s the salmon they went for.”
“Of course. Salmon. How could I forget? Salmon! So the fishing was good?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“No?”
“I mean, I haven’t heard.”
“But generally, the reputation of Iceland is . . .?”
“Good, yes, very good.”
“Why else go to Iceland, right?
“My father says it’s the most beautiful country in the world. Volcanoes with glaciers creaking around them. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds straight from the North Pole and you can stick your hand in a creek of nearly boiling water. They’re only just emerging from the Middle Ages, thanks ironically to the war in Europe.”
“But ironically too the war in Europe makes it a risky business to go steaming about in the northern Atlantic, does it not?”
Charles shrugged. “He likes to fish.”
“But you do not?” asked Owner. “Like to fish.”
“Oh no, I do, I do, I do very much, but I’m, uh, I’m, uh . . .” Charles faltered again, inexplicably. “I’m in a play and . . . you know. Vera too—”
“You’re an actor,” said Owner, a bit like a lawyer.
“Yes,” Charles admitted emphatically, maybe a bit testily. “Yes, I am. Several plays, actually. A season of them. In repertory.”
“And the shows must go on.”
“That’s what they tell me. Even if the theater is burned to the ground.”
“The Savoy is a beautiful building. We were relieved to hear the damage was not great and that repair will go quickly.”
“Yes. We found the money pretty easily too. Mother finds the money. She used to sing, but she prefers now just to find the money. The insurers feel now that the fire was not caused by a firework launched by, they think, some trolley drivers who were celebrating something about San Francisco’s role in the war that one of the city commissioners said,
or promised, or promised to say at some point in the near future. Or didn’t say. Promised not to say.”
“Not caused,” Owner repeated.
“That’s right: not caused. I’m not sure about any of the details. I should be, but I’m not. But it was late at night, after that . . . anarchist picnic . . . .”
Everyone in the room was suddenly uneasy. The results of the investigation had not yet been made public. Charles had forgotten that. This would be news to them: that they, or their friends, had done it. If in fact these men were actually anarchists. It was a leap, but they had the look and feel and sound of, well . . . anarchists, did they not? Which meant that it was to be understood as a blow against, Charles supposed, the aristocracy, or perhaps the aristocracy specifically involved in what was perceived as a patriotic theatrical production of a play called The American. The aristocracy specifically known as “the Minots.” Known more specifically in that room as “Charles Minot.” Father’s adventures in the punishment of graft and his hatred of URR were, the thinking was evidently to go, not good enough for the anarchists. Whatever Father may think, may wish and yearn to believe about his progressive Christian politics, it was too little too late: you get your ass ripped apart like all the rest of the rich people.
It was as preposterous a lie as they’d heard yet in the city, but still it gave them pause and made the room, the shop, the big happy family with its radical character actors ranged up along the mezzanine rail and its colorful young Italian criminals, all terribly quiet.
Charles thought what silenced them was the shadow of lies to come falling over their stage. His stage, their stage, everybody’s stage. The little old stage set about to come apart, once again, at the seams.
“And what is the name of the first show that must go on?” It was Owner’s shop and he would conduct them through a reasonable conversation that eased their vague fears.
“The American,” said Charles.
“Sounds patriotic!”
“Well, yes, it is and it isn’t. You see . . . Vera, I think, could tell you—”
“Fits the mood of the city, certainly.”
“Yes, that is certainly so.”
“Henry James’s The American? Or some other sort of American.”
“Henry James, right. Adapted it himself, I understand, from his novel.”
“He’s dead, you know.”
“No, I did not know that.”
“Couple of months ago.”
“I see, I see. That’s, well, that’s . . . too bad. I’m sorry to hear it. Did you, do you, like his novels . . .?” Charles couldn’t believe he was discussing literature with a daredevil, but pressed on, making a note to ask Sir Edwin if he knew about “his friend” James’s death. He was sure he did not, and would extol it as the man’s supreme fiction.
“Yes, I do,” said Owner judiciously. “And I don’t care who knows it. Once I learned to read I didn’t care how complicated things got. I think I’ve gotten to where I prefer them complicated. Simplicity is some kind of snake oil. Simplicity is, you know, like the story of the little theater that wasn’t damaged in a fire set off by an errant firework but by evil men who are not like us and who hate us and who hold human life in utter contempt. You?”
Somehow he knew he was back to the novels and stories of Henry James. “Yes. I think I’ve read most if not all of the New York edition.”
“And your theater is physically viable, is that right? Structurally sound?”
“Yes, that’s right, and we hope to open very nearly on schedule,” said Charles with once-again-regained composure and authority. “The American is in terrific shape, August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata is very difficult—do you know Strindberg? He was given an anti-Nobel a few years ago, just before he died.”
There was some clapping, whether in honor of the inventor of dynamite or of Strindberg it was hard to say.
“Difficult—” Charles began to say but could not repress the laughter that was going around the room, a strong suggestion that it was the inventor of dynamite who had been applauded, “—difficult I say to work on but very exciting, and Romeo and Juliet, well . . . there are a lot of lines to be memorized there, of course, but we think we’ll be ready with what our artist in residence calls a dream of the future.”
“Romeo and Juliet as a dream . . .?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of the future.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the phrase that keeps coming up in our . . . our talks. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt and Mercutio and the rest of them, are not causes for sadness and grief and weeping.”
“No?” Owner was amused but deferential.
“They are sacrifices in a glorious cause.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. They are . . . hastening the downfall of the corrupt . . . forms . . . of their fathers. Their poisonous ways and decadent tyrannies. When they are together and in love, they are actually . . . in the, uh . . . in the future. You can tell it’s the future because the lighting is different and we speak differently. The violence all takes place in the present. We use it as a kind of way to rend the fabric . . .” and here Charles faltered. He was tired of this faltering and could not understand it. Sooner walk into a burning room than subject oneself to the judgment of strangers who act like they know you.
The hidden Vera once again saw the icy clown just beneath his handsome features, the ironic lout just beneath his goodwill.
“Yes?”
“Of time.”
“Probably a little too sophisticated for me.”
Charles took a good breath and recovered himself. “I’m not sure that that is the word for it. Sir Edwin is a visionary and freely accepts ridicule on that count. There’s a good deal of entertaining sword fighting, in any case, and poetry.”
“‘Sir’ Edwin?” asked Owner.
“Yes. An English knight.” Charles chuckled falsely, grinning, to make up for it, with even greater falsity around the room. Because it sounded like an exit line in a scene that left the audience roaring with laughter, Charles decided to make for the big open doorway, at that moment a great archway of light.
“You’ll leave the Merkel with us, then?”
“Yes, and the Minerva!” Charles shouted, stunned that he’d forgotten why he’d come. He took a few uncertain steps back into the gloom. “Tell Vera I—”
“MINERVA?” shouted Owl. “WHAT THE FUCK IS A MINERVA?”
“Belgian make. Minerva. 1902.”
“What’s the kid talkin’ about?” Jitney asked Owl.
“HE WANTS TO SELL US A BELGIAN WAFFLE! YOU HUNGRY?”
“No interest in the Minerva, Mr. Minot,” said Owner. “You have to shut the engine off to change gears.”
Charles stopped then and turned and held up his hand as if he were departing a group of able and courageous men with whom he had accomplished something of sentimental as well as practical value. “THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE OF VALUE TO A COLLECTOR,” he fairly bellowed.
“NO COLLECTORS HERE, KID! ONLY DAREDEVILS!” Owl bellowed back.
“THANK YOU! THANK YOU ALL! YOU’VE BEEN A TERRIFIC AUDIENCE! PLEASE BE SO GOOD AS TO CONVEY MY GREETINGS TO VERA!”
“VERA WHO?” Owl redoubled his bellow.
The laughter in the shop continued until Charles was quite a long way down the sidewalk and out of earshot.
Vera watched all this from the other side of the curtain, holding it closed and revealing only the unnaturally white oval of her face, wanting only to play a game, hoping Charles would overcome his politeness and a profound and certain confusion and come running down the aisle again to find her. Yes: she wished it was a game. But if it was a game, what kind of game was it? Who would win and who would lose and, in the end, would they know why they had played? Her salon—at what passed for one without the structure and animation of money, at her salon des pauvres, somebody had nicknamed it and which had stuck, le Salon Romantique et Revolutionnaire, she preferred to call it, with pride that was maybe
a little defensive, a little guilt-ridden as she had always wanted to be part of a smart set and had just begun to learn French—there, yes, they knew all about it: Henry James would be taken at his word and escorted quite a bit further down the road, where his American would become not the fresh air in the moldy museum of Old World aristocratic privilege, bright and kind, resourceful and determined, but a ruthless destroyer of the weak, the sick, the ridiculous. Romeo and Juliet would be a savage and bloody fairy tale about utopia. Watching The Spook Sonata would be like taking a powerful narcotic that would set free the enslaved minds of its audience. They had heard these ideas proposed and articulated, and debated them with learned pleasure, like doctors in the amphitheater of a surgery. They were anarchists, so of course they were interested in all new theories of disease and cure, in plans for the real abolition of slavery, an understanding of true weakness, for the demolition of palaces and the deaths of tyrants. Still, she was uneasy. There was so much authority and obedience to authority in even the most charming and reckless of these speeches, so much discipline and sacrifice in even the daffiest of these aesthetics, that unspeakable atrocity seemed right around the corner. Petty despots would race up and down the high roads and the low roads like insane tinkers who’d wrested magical weapons from stupid sorcerers, or mountebanks playing the shell game and killing everybody who happened to win. Killing and killing and killing because even the rigged game could not be counted on, you had to kill them all, winners and losers alike, until you finally were killed yourself. No, she did not subscribe to endless killing. Therefore (she had to admit, because the continuity was as clear as day) she could not subscribe to the beginning of killing, either. She said as much to herself—later, of course, but not much later, to Charles—with a kind of gentle but false patience, knowing that she could scream and slap and break things that need not have been broken, and was, in her dreams, too often violent—even with loved ones, it troubled her to note morning after morning—hysterically and remorselessly merciless in her sleeping hatreds and vengeance.
