The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “Darkness,” said Charles, “is on the face of the waters.”

  The NPL agent narrowed his eyes.

  “I’m not sure that the farmer you idealize is anything but another kind of businessman,” suggested Charles.

  The NPL man said, “Let us talk for a moment about wheat grades.”

  “All right,” said Vera, licking the point of her pencil. “The less talk of murder the better, you ask me.”

  Again the man gave her the same dark look he’d just given Charles. He was confused, and angry because he didn’t think he was there to be confused. “There’s #1 Hard, #1 Northern, #2, #3, and #4. There’s also No Grade and Rejected. Have you got that? It’s pretty confusing. You’ve got to have a good hand with grain, a good eye, and a telephone number of another fellow with similar attributes and a like mind who will back you up when you are accused of downgrading at the elevator, he can confirm your grade instead of upgrading like he would normally. Everybody in the NPL has had that happen to them: you sell and it’s #2 or #3, but when it gets to Minneapolis, the train ride has miraculously transformed it into #1. Well, that’s just what a broker does, that’s what they tell me anyway, and we ought to keep our heads down and our mouths closed and let the man do his fucking job, but first tell me how it is we get docked for ‘impurities, dirt, and other seed’ in our wheat, have to pay the freight on this exceedingly heavy pile of impurity, only to learn later that these impurities have been screened out and sold as stock feed for twenty dollars a ton by the very folks who said it was worthless, and an inconvenience to them for which we should have to pay?”

  Vera and Charles smiled and shook their heads.

  “‘Darkness on the face of the waters’?” The man’s eyes were small and black beneath shaggy graying brows. “Kinda crack is that?”

  “Means the same thing as a smile and a nod,” Charles said evenly. “Don’t get your underwear in a bundle. It’s a good story and you tell it well, but it’s not like I haven’t heard it before. VERA HERE GREW UP IN A BUTTON FACTORY, YOU GODDAMN BONEHEAD!”

  The man merely glowered and sunk deeper in his chair. Vera apologized for Charles’s rude behavior. She felt sorry for the man, in truth, because it was believed he was playing fast and loose with NPL funds, and things were only getting faster and looser; he was an ideal target for Justice agents, easily turned when things finally got out of hand, and Vera had been asked to establish a relationship with him of simple goodwill and trust in the hope that he would not turn when the opportunity to do so came around. Some of the men she knew thought it was women’s work, and some thought it was shit work, but Vera liked it, and everybody recognized it was something she did naturally well. She said, somewhat deprecatingly, that she thought it “suited her personality,” and it reminded her of her duties at the Passaic Weekly, the job she’d found when they left Lawrence after the fiasco of the Children’s Crusade, and moved down to the even bigger strike in Paterson in 1912. That paper’s editor was now doing time in prison, and Vera believed she might lend some kind of attenuated moral support by practicing reportorial skills, talking to people, and taking notes on a little pad.

  She wanted only to leave San Francisco and never return, because to either stay or return would be to confront how little she mattered in the big fraudulent scheme of things as they were apparently playing out. She knew everybody from one end of the investigation to the other, but her associations were not deemed criminal or even of interest, and neither the team of prosecutors nor the team of defense lawyers had required her testimony. The only way such exclusion made sense was to see that the trials had their own special trajectories already plotted out, as if by artillery engineers, and these flights were taking place in their own special place, in their own special space and time, ironically free of the laws of space and time, in a kind of air-that-was-not-air, air so rarefied it was often—in effect, in a subtly theatrical effect that only occurred to the players and the observers deep in the backs of their minds and only when they were thinking unguardedly—nearly impossible to breathe.

  She could not keep her mind, her “mind” as she increasingly thought of it, a thing that could not be explained with words—or did she mean to put quote marks around “her,” as if that were the thing that could not be explained, owner and proprietor of an organ of meat, of pudding, designed to carry traces of suffering and horror balanced by traces of peace and pleasure, simply so that it could go on even if she could not—she could not keep away from vivid recreations in her brain of the theater bombing, the understudy who had died in her place—someone who had died for her because she was not available—the parade bombing and the murder of three of her friends and the framing of at least three others, and so she had decided she wanted to die. Understudy be damned: it was her job to die.

  But in the end she had been persuaded to go to the Wobblies in Chicago, hearing the repeated advice from friends who seemed so far away, and then so near, and then so far again, and coming to think that she ought to work again, slowly and steadily at something deemed to be of use by somebody who claimed to know, willing to do anything, but making clear a preference, without resort to emotional violence, for activity that would not result in bloodshed. The unhappiness of railroad people, short of bloodshed, would be an ideal goal, she said—any railroad and any people associated with any railroad—as they were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that URR, that thugs in the employ of Durwood Keogh or Keogh’s security chief, the marble-like mercenary Rudy Swanson, had not only helped frame Warren Farnsworth and Tom Moody for the murders and the bombings, but actually killed Jules Beveridge, Amado Fernández, and Lucille Brown, for no readily recognizable reason. It was possible too that they had organized and staged the bombing, rather than simply availing themselves of it. The Chicago Wobblies believed that worse things were happening, or were about to happen, in Minnesota, the flour capital of the universe, than anyplace else that came readily to mind, but Jules Beveridge, no more than a month before he was murdered, had met his old friend from Philadelphia days and the Point Breeze board track, a Swedish engineer, Stringberry, who was developing a new motorcycle with a Chicago businessman named Tom Peacock, and these men had unqualifiedly endorsed her. Why? Charles wanted simultaneously to know and not know. The possibility of decisive, consequential action seemed greater the greater the knowledge the actor possessed—until the actor thought about it a little longer and came to the conclusion that less knowledge made for purer acts. Greater knowledge could easily become a burden, an increasing weight that would slow and eventually stop an actor in his tracks. But purity . . .! Ruthlessness and horror surely rose up in the shadow of purity, did they not? Charles could see Father so clearly, eating breakfast, saying just that.

  But there was a kind of purity in Vera, something like purity, that partook nothing at all of ruthlessness, of certainty, hatred, violence. There was in fact something in Vera’s character as Charles had observed it—and that was an extremely rigorous distinction he was well aware of—that dismissed those elements entirely from sullied political ideas of purity—in fact purified it. He could, alas, only see its shape. Its nature was obscure.

  From Saint Paul, Charles had written to her in Chicago at least once a week. They were not exactly love letters, but contained evidence of what she was prepared to accept as a kind of energetic devotion to her well-being. It was foolish, she told herself, to pretend she didn’t care for this devotion. And she wondered too where the harm was, given that her days and the days of everybody she cared about were numbered, if she were not at least a little in love with Charles Minot, the millionaire playboy? She had wanted to kill herself in San Francisco, and what she was doing in Chicago did seem very much to be only the work the men didn’t want to do, work the men thought women therefore ought to do.

  The next week it began to snow. Vera, who was living in a room in a house, at 130 Virginia street, that Charles had found for her near the Saint Paul Cathedral and Father’s cousin’s castle-lik
e structure on Summit Avenue, cried out with delight and fond memories, while he, though he had seen snow, a good deal of it, in the mountains, was fascinated as only a boy from San Francisco could be. But it didn’t stop snowing until the new year had come. The average was nearly a foot a week. On a Thursday or a Friday or a Saturday—always, it seemed, at the end of a week—a blizzard would come howling down from Alberta, they were told, Alberta clippers, drop a foot of powdery dry snow, and depart for Chicago. The winds piled up immense drifts, and the below-zero air that followed like a swelling sea the crashing waves of the storm, froze the drifts solid as iron. People walked on them to the tops of their houses. To the west, on the Dakota borders, herds of cattle, sheltering in coulees, were buried alive. A train, too, was buried, near Minot, though no one died. Warren Farnsworth was tried and found guilty of the murders of Lucille Olivet Brown, Jules Beveridge, and Amado Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi—these in addition to the ten people killed in the Preparedness Day Parade bombing and the six in the theater bombing. He was sentenced to hang for the former, and life imprisonment for the latter—the idea being that he was a pipsqueak of a boy (he was twenty-two but looked sixteen) and a natural rat (he only, unfortunately, looked like one) who would likely tell investigators a great deal more about his anarchist and labor radical masters once he was in prison with certain death approaching. Tom Moody was found guilty, largely on the strength of the ball bearings and .31- and .32-caliber bullets found in his apartment—items similar but not identical to the shrapnel in both suitcase bombs—of masterminding the bombing and was sentenced to hang. His wife, Minnie, and Israel Minkowski were acquitted—largely, it was believed, because the public’s distaste for what was increasingly seen as shoddy prosecution was rising like bile in the back of the throat. A threatened indictment of Alexander Berkman, the most well known of the more than twenty suspects in the theater bombing, never materialized, never for any of them, for possibly the same reason. A great deal of perjury was reported in the newspapers, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the thriving Mexican expatriate community there, Amado’s brother, Julio, was found bound and gagged with a bullet hole drilled through his brain, and Vera began to wonder if it was the Fernández de Lizardi brothers who had been the killer’s targets; that Lucy had been killed out of obvious necessity, being in bed with Amado, Beveridge surprising the killer as the killer made his way up from the basement and Beveridge down to find his lover with his friend; and that the killer was not in any way connected with PG&E or URR detectives, but was a mercenary, perhaps associated with the Pinkertons—who certainly, according to the Chicago Wobblies, felt they had carte blanche from the Mexican-hating Wilson administration to act covertly, preemptively, and outside the law—in the employ of the psychotically unstable Mexican government of Huerta. And indeed, once the two brothers in exile had been assassinated, the third, in a Mexico City prison, was promptly executed. Then there was another big bombing, on Wall Street in New York. Italian anarchists were blamed, thirty people died, and it was only a prelude.

  Vera sobbed, mostly for Warren, whom she had loved, for what seemed like days and nights, then laughed for days and nights, and finally settled into a routine of sudden laughter and sudden weeping. To live was to suffer, she would say earnestly in between these fits: there was no getting around it, and she had always known it. Now perhaps she could articulate it for herself and stop worrying about it. Suffering was not merely central to life, it was essential. Suffering did not happen to life, it was life. She did not like to equate evil with suffering, or suffering with darkness, because evil was an effect of suffering, not a cause and because darkness was often a great solace—it was one of the reasons why she had always cherished a secret love of the theater—but the idea of a life as a point of light falling into darkness was the easiest way to put it. Life was a kind of ignorance of something real but insensible and unreachable—and how could one fail to be ignorant of that sort of reality! Well, however one managed it, one was not ignorant. One saw life for what it was, a kind of sleep, a drunkenness, an entanglement in the senses and emotions and consciousness, an entanglement in limbs that secreted a poison or a drug that numbed and addled and made one homesick . . . for the place or the condition or whatever you wanted to call it where people did not go to the theater to throw bombs on the stage, where the guilty did not put the innocent in prisons to rot or be hung, where children . . . oh, she could not bear to think of it. But it was where the moth would go to the light and not be destroyed, but rather become the fire.

  Charles traveled often that winter and was often delayed by snowfall, but never buried alive. Vera often traveled with him, sometimes on business of her own—she met regularly and frequently a speaker from the NPL named Daisy Gluek—sometimes not, and they went at each other vigorously on these trips, because sex was one of the only activities available to persons bound in suffering and drugged with visions of home, performing “the act” here, there, and everywhere, sometimes with mouths locked together, swallowing all sounds but a muffled hooting, other times crying out as if for salvation from a god neither believed in, Charles duck-walking with pants and long johns around his ankles, Vera climbing aboard as she might a train whistling its departure. They went for long, numbingly cold walks between blizzards that only seemed to refresh and invigorate them. They kissed each other’s cold red cheeks and panted hot moist air into each other’s mouth. Charles begged her to marry him, and she begged him to stop asking her.

  He went mainly to bakeries and the offices of commercial fishing operations, some dairies and bars, as well, as the state had put several food programs in motion that were perceived to be vulnerable to abuse by one radical group or another. One called for licensed agents of the state to catch rough fish—carp, dogfish, redhorse, mooneye, suckers, sheepshead, etc.—that would be marketed at state stores with a profit margin of no more than 3 percent, which meant both a steady supply of fish for strapped consumers at about half the usual market price, and a steady profit for the state—plowed, he believed and had tacitly confirmed, into the purchase of rifles and ammunition for a new “Home Guard.” Commercial fishermen felt pinched, however, and Charles’s job was to interview them, to measure their level of hostility, and listen carefully for tips about what that hostility might drive them to do. Milk producers were presented with a fixed price per quart that they could charge Twin Cities wholesalers, and told they must lay open their books.

  In the far north, where the temperature regularly dropped to thirty and even forty and once fifty below—“It’s no colder tonight,” he was told in the town of Tower, “at the Arctic Circle than it is right here!”—he interviewed saloonkeepers: though the region, due to “county option” and various Indian treaties, was virtually saloon-free, enormous amounts of liquor were nevertheless being shipped in—ostensibly to individual consumers—via a loophole.

  Vis-à-vis bread, the big millers were judged to be reasonable in their pricing, while small bakers were making out like Mexican banditos. These bakers protested while the millers clucked in feigned dismay. Charles interviewed bakers by the dozen. Many insisted the war effort was a hoax, but he winked and lifted the pen ostentatiously from his notebook for the length of these remarks.

  And it was, in those moments, that he began to understand what he was doing.

  He was heeding a secret, nascent impulse. He saw that he could act cleanly, without recourse to questions of personal prosperity. He saw that he could in effect trust himself, and that he should trust himself. He was not insane. He was not the aristocratic man of privilege gone nihilistic, not the practical Platonic republican driven into psychic exile by catastrophe and the emptiness of philosophy. Nor was he a man of peace, a soulful man: he was at war with the vastness of petty falsehood and needless suffering. He was no longer divided in himself, self against self, by fear and contempt of fear. He did not know how he had come to it, but come to it he had. He was not a radical, certainly not an anarchist,
at least as its advocates described it. He had no genuine interest in the rights of the workingman, in labor reform, in racial equality, in progressive politics.

  Or did he? He took it back: he had an interest, but not a personal interest in those things. He had no agenda to advance, put it that way, no cause to espouse, no principle to maintain, no belief to kill or die for. He had no wish to make people repent and therefore had no desire to put bullets in their heads. He was perhaps an anarchist in the way that Vera possibly was an anarchist: that is to say, she was not. Not really. If she had ever called herself one he had not heard it. They were not divided in their selves: that he could say. They were not afraid: that too he could say. No one is ruling? Then all are ruling. And if all are ruling—if all are letting all rule—then that rule “speaks the truth” because there’s no call for a deception; that rule is “just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, scornful of being scorned.” Oh yes, he had read Emerson, to be sure, but he had not come near an understanding of him: he seemed to think himself an idealist and immediately admit that idealists were especially subject to cant and pretension and lofty ineffectuality, that rather than having Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inhering in each other, Beauty was supreme. Charles had no interest in Beauty because, before Vera, it had seemed false. Father despised Emerson—despised New England, really, and everything it stood for—and so, he supposed, had he despised him as part of his intellectual inheritance. “Our virtue trips and totters!” He had said so himself! “It does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches to the zealot.” Like Plato it was always correct to praise or despise him, but something of a sin to understand him. Charles had come to want to understand these great men. And he came to understandings so quickly and surely that he was almost ashamed of his body, that thing that could be so quickly and easily replaced, so quickly and surely that he had to have been helped, by his strange friends, the daredevils. I learned how to do a thing without a wish for reward or a fear of consequences. It gave him enormous energy. He felt whole and uncomplicated. He felt he was part of an uncomplicated whole. He felt that when conditions were sufficient for manifestation, he would manifest, and when they were not, he would not. The universe had come together to make me. It expected nothing of him but to be. He was free. And it was precisely when he found himself lifting the pen from his notebook and in effect winking at the baker who declared the war effort to be a hoax—a declaration that I now knew was against the law, was seditious, and punishable by imprisonment if he was lucky and lynching if he was not—that he knew he was free. He smiled inwardly to think that he was a hero. That he had found a way to become a hero. He could do whatever small task presented itself to be done: instead of calculating reward and consequence, he could lift his pen from his notebook. He cared one day, one hour, about nothing beyond seeing to it that the baker not be harassed and tortured. The next minute, hour, day, he would perform another brief act that might forestall cowardice and cruelty. That was all. It was so simple, so clear, so fine.