The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  Charles paused over the breakdown of the grammar and noted too the breakdown of the handwriting: it had become sloppier but pressed deeper into the paper, and strokes that should have been graceful were jagged. He could feel his own hand cramping. There were smears and spills of ink now too, on this last page. He thought helplessly of something Strindberg had written, probably in his Paris diary, or his chemistry notes, or Inferno, or the Occult Diary . . .? Hands burned by chemicals, wounds into which was spilled salt, or rather coke dust. “He testified this solemn truth, by frenzy desolated, Nor man nor nature satisfies whom only God created.” That was not Strindberg, was it? No, that was somebody else. Who had nothing to do with Strindberg? Probably not. The blackened and cracked hands, burned and deformed, crusted over as if by a process of smelting with black dead blood . . . they will never be clean, my apparatus is insufficient, I need money! Oh, Father, I wanted to introduce you to Strindberg. I wanted you to put him next to Teddy so I could say, here is a man who lived a strenuous life that wasn’t handed to him on a silver platter, and here is a man who grieved what was lost, who saw that it could not be replaced, who believed in your God but who saw that life was an illusion.

  I have neither a cool head nor clean hands, Father. I wish you could forgive me. I never saw the need.

  “I sometimes find myself thinking he had to have been murdered,” Alexander continued. “But the terrible truth is that an old Stoic would certainly think twice but not shy away from taking the matter in his own hands. Clean hands. Cool head. The end.”

  Charles secured a bottle of morphine pills without much trouble, and when he and Vera had taken a dose, he told her about his father’s suicide. She said nothing, and they remained silent for several hours, thinking, in a deep, ceaselessly absorbing twilight that never changed, of the peace that passed all understanding: death.

  Mastering an urge toward immediate and pointless violence, or not so much mastering it as feeling it ebb back whence it had flowed, Charles watched an old couple approach Vera and Daisy.

  “Daisy!” the man shouted. “Daisy! Over here!” the woman shouted.

  Charles watched the three embrace, three small plain people holding each other by the shoulders, patting each other’s backs, and thought he saw in it a dignity of purpose he wanted for himself. Daisy seemed to know where she was going and what she was doing and why she was doing it, and it was fascinating to watch. It was the simplest or rather most ordinary of acts, but she was committed and persuasive and pulling it off so well he was sure she must have some sense of how porous her molecular structure was with all the other structures around her. Her act would seem to be false or superficial otherwise—accepted of course, as all such acts were, but accepted with that yawning indifference that marked all mediocre acting. He was quite sure he lacked—now that the change had come—this dignity—despite a hope, a wish to believe, to tell, and to act the story that he was becoming a good man—that everything beguiling and forceful in his character was there now only to hide that lack, and he found his face hot with embarrassment.

  There was something in her gaze; in his own—admitting that he perceived it from the other side of consciousness—nothing, just a lot of darting back and forth, reconnaissance of the audience and deep studies of the sky. And with that thought he looked up, saw that Daisy and her friends had gone, that the background of the picture had darkened perceptibly, as if it were a very old oil painting, but that the colors had become somehow richer for it. He wondered how much longer he would be able, be allowed, to play the fool—and recognized instantly what most identified him as a fool: this belief that he could choose a role, that he could pick and choose as it were amongst the great parts of history. Almost a year now had gone by and yet it seemed that a fraction of a second, the flash of a thought, could undo it all, could unwind the clock, could make these people milling about this train station in the middle of nowhere disappear in a cloud of smoke. He had been pretending to be someone else, but he didn’t know whom. I have not been convincing. I have been an object of derision. My duplicity has been effortless and yet I am very tired. I am too tired to sleep. Every room I enter becomes not merely a stage—that would be unremarkable—but the same stage I just tried to exit, which is impossible.

  Hillsboro was a town of a thousand people on the Goose River in North Dakota, ten miles from the Red River of the North and the Minnesota border. Its town hall was a brilliant, almost translucent white, with startling black doors, upon one of which was tacked a large white poster with large black lettering announcing an informative speech by a representative of the Nonpartisan League. Next to the hall was a three-story red-brick hotel, called the Wheat Growers. Vera too had watched Daisy as she was met by an old farmer and his wife, gaunt, dark-eyed, windburned people whose hands looked fantastically, almost grotesquely powerful. The man’s legs seemed like tree trunks and the woman’s dress seemed as if draped over iron. Signaling their recognition with sudden white grins that made their dark eyes flash blue, they greeted Daisy. The man shook her hand and the woman embraced her. They moved slowly but surely, their gestures strong and fluid, as if of a heavy viscosity.

  Vera looked away and the white hall was now pale red, the hotel orange. Between the setting sun and these few buildings stood nothing. Charles touched the small of her back. A man who had been lounging on the steps of the hall took a step toward them, getting their attention, staring openly at them. Then he furrowed his brow and lit a cigarette. Puffing, he nodded at them and moved off.

  “Another secret agent,” Charles said in a stage whisper. “Let him make the first move. Remember who you are?”

  “No, who am I?”

  “My wife. And you don’t believe in free love.”

  “Oh yes,” said Vera. “I am pretending to be delighted, but thinking, no, no, I can’t be two people at once. I get too confused. Something bad will happen.”

  “No: you do not have to be two people.”

  “Something bad will happen anyway.”

  “It’s impossible to be more than one person.”

  “Something bad will happen anyway.”

  “I fear that is merely your growing dependency on narcotics talking.”

  “Something bad will happen and the cause is irrelevant.”

  “When you’re high, the assumption that something bad will happen is intact and clear but you don’t care.”

  “That is a terribly dispiriting and counterproductive thing to say.”

  “When I first met you, you had a very different view of things that happened and why.”

  “Yes! It’s remarkable, isn’t it? I was very much in line with the aphorisms of your old buddy the Colonel!”

  “Roosevelt? How so.”

  “‘Get action. Do something. Be sane. Be somebody. Get action.’”

  “The action gets you. Something does you. It’s impossible not to be somebody. It’s insane to think otherwise.”

  Vera said nothing. Charles snorted.

  “‘Be sane.’ Jesus fucking Christ on a flatcar. The assassin Schrank was only doing what Teddy advised.”

  “Teddy’s voice was at least one of the voices he heard.”

  “Schrank was getting action and being somebody in the only way he could.”

  “I sometimes think that was why, at least part of why, the former president was apparently so unmoved by the bullet in his bone and the blood all over the place.”

  “I think you’re right. I don’t think he held grudges. He was moving too fast. I will give him that. I will give him more than that. But I won’t say he hasn’t got it bass-ackward where the self and the act are concerned.”

  “He’s not the thinker you are, Chick.”

  “I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “My father too,” said Charles, “was a very forgiving man.”

  “Not at the end, he wasn’t.”

  Vera spoke so softly Charles wasn’t sure
what she’d said, or even if she’d said anything. Maybe it had just been a sigh that wanted to be words.

  “I can’t forgive the bombers,” he said.

  “No,” said Vera.

  The sun shone across the flat wind-surging windless-falling land as if it were a simple world of clear light, black dirt, and green plants, of wheat growers and wheat and a little hotel where they could rest when they could not get home.

  “I have been—I am—scared to death,” Vera said, completing her thought.

  Charles began to suspect the presence of a force, a new kind of gravity, that had begun to draw things unto itself.

  Daisy spoke and Vera studied her critically, thinking her altogether wrong for the part. She was too funny for this dry routine. The subject was the “double profits” the millers were enjoying as they shipped grain to Liverpool and war-hungry England. She had a chart that showed the price spread between Duluth and Liverpool, the handling, insurance, ocean freight, and elevator costs, and the amount of the second cut of profit—and Vera, the true performer, thought she was reading her text. It was possible she was simply trying to appear calm and rational, but it was flat, nobody was being moved. Carefully Daisy began to suggest that the war was not a good war, that it was not the war that was being advertised at all. She made reference to a newspaper report that had German women being required by their government to bear children. And then she said that she believed American women would never let themselves be used as “brood sows for future wars.”

  Everybody in the hall felt the drop in pressure. Daisy was applauded bravely by a few people in the crowd, but Vera and Charles could see the needle of the barometer moving counterclockwise around the dial. And yet nothing happened.

  Charles’s question: Why had nothing happened? He didn’t mean “a dramatic arrest”—he meant “nothing.” The pressure dropped and that was that. Was somebody waiting for somebody else to do something else, something more? Did certain somebodies know less about who all the players were than Charles thought they did? Not likely, but possible. Another slim chance: even dead, Father’s power wasn’t entirely illusory, and he—and by guesswork extension, Daisy—was being handled with kid gloves. And re Father: Why had he not moved to have Charles removed? Was it possible he too had been biding his time—until suddenly he decided his time was up? Did he think Charles might do something politically, actionably, profitably heroic? Or had he—where had he been before he came to rest finally in San Francisco? In New York or London or . . .?—letting power slip through his fingers like sand? A genuinely good man cannot withstand the vicissitudes that come of power wielded—not forever, he can’t. Hadn’t Father been a genuinely good man? Charles found himself thinking that he had been, whatever that thought might be “worth.”

  Perhaps Charles’s removal was underway.

  The expected explosion—he paused over the word as it appeared and faded in his brain—over Daisy’s key phrases had failed to occur: was this like an actor forgetting his lines? Or was there a greater script than the actors realized. The force, the gravity, was similar if not identical to the force he felt onstage in ideal circumstances—or even less-than-ideal circumstances. The force he believed he felt. Perhaps in any but the most amateurish circumstances, when the force, if it was present at all, was reversed, repelling all the people and things in the space.

  Had he just equated bad acting with detonation, a supersonic exothermic front driving a shock wave through a medium that cannot withstand it?

  He had: there was a weird beauty and justice in it, somewhere, somehow . . . that nevertheless failed to address his certainty that some other kind—or simply degree?—of power was coming into being.

  He had felt the supersonic exothermic front driving the shock wave only as one feels the wave of ocean water after it has crashed on the beach, when it is all but spent and about to recede, back into that from which it had come, a tremendous but dying energy—lapsing, paradoxically, not into quiescence or something “lesser,” but into a greater energy. He had felt it twice, the waves each time strong enough to knock him down, but only because another body had taken more of the blow before it reached him, and he was quite sure he understood how it ripped a hole in one kind of reality, exposing another kind of less stable reality; and he had witnessed a far greater force, perhaps the greatest force in the universe, visible, apprehensible, for only as long as it took to cause everything he had before that point assumed to be the only reality to disappear; and he had seen in its wake an apparently equally relentless force recreate, rebuild, make visible once more what had disappeared. He had felt the impalpable, incomprehensible, so-called psychological gravity of two actors acting selflessly on a stage and drawing thereby the concentration of a hundred or two hundred “observers.” But what was happening here, now, was different.

  The next stops were Fargo and Moorhead, where nothing—it was preposterous now—other than angry shouting and angry applause in a cold wind under a low, dark, swiftly but barely perceptibly moving sky, like a dark turbulent river, also happened. Small groups of rough-looking men glowered and spat threateningly and told them to get out of town, as if they were in a play. Charles, imagining himself to be a person who could no longer be “troubled” in the ordinary sense, did not think he could be more troubled in the ordinary sense—which was even more troubling in the extraordinary sense he had reserved for himself and Vera. The bomb had exploded on his stage in San Francisco. Now, here, where gunfire was expected to erupt, where he had planned on it, according to a very real sort of script that he had not actually seen but which he believed with all his heart existed, where the explosion of a bomb had to be considered a strong possibility, seeing that improvised violence was the modus operandi everybody had tacitly agreed to, here there was only a group of bad actors in the shadows, representing “consequences” in a way that seemed only sordid, cowardly, contemptible.

  Get out of town?

  They did. They cut across the state, out of the wheat and into the woods, into Big Timber, to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where Wobbly strikes had been failing for a decade—failed very much in the way a man might enter a wood, walk strongly and confidently for a while, only to find at the first moment of doubt that he was lost.

  The two Wobblies who had in fact gone missing more than a month earlier were still missing.

  Several people had told them that Bemidji would be the big stop, that there would be trouble, and someone in Chicago had even gone so far as to counsel against Bemidji, against even getting off the train to stretch their legs. The question was: Who was the someone in Chicago—nominally from the IWW, but did they know that with working certainty?—and was he speaking out of genuine concern for their welfare, or was there worry that the NPL would have some kind of “success” in Bemidji? If so, who did not want NPL success in Bemidji. The MCPS certainly—but how, in this hypothetical scenario, had the MCPS managed to influence the Chicago Wobblies? The Chicago Wobblies were as pure a current as could be, even in the most turbulent stream.

  Were they not?

  Three telegrams awaited Charles at the Paul Bunyan Hotel.

  The first: DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH IWW.

  The second: DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH TROUBLEMAKERS CLAIMING ASSOCIATION WITH US.

  The third: YOU ARE OPERATING WITHOUT USUAL SANCTION. PLEASE EXPLAIN.

  The news that certain “watchdogs of loyalty” had become “junkyard dogs of loyalty” and were embarrassing and compromising the MCPS was of course not news. Disavowal of a relation between the MCPS and the IWW was something else that went without saying, making the saying, of course, profoundly suspicious. And while the whereabouts of the two missing Wobblies remained unknown, “a drifter” had been found dead. His identity and the circumstances of his end were not known. As for the lack of usual sanction: he had it. He had it in writing, in his briefcase, as was usual with sanction. If whoever had telegraphed him was under an impression to the contrary, it could mean one of
two things: sanction had been reconsidered and made to disappear, perhaps like the Wobblies but with the additional pretense of “never having existed in the first place,” or the divided house that the MCPS always had been, perforce—how could so many powerful men agree on any notion of safety, public or otherwise?—had become dangerously destabilized.

  The women wore dresses with flower prints, anticipating by days or perhaps weeks the actual blooming of spring, the men clean overalls, some with a tie and some without. Charles overheard one man defend his tie by stating the business here was every bit as solemn as the business of a Sunday morning and he would show it a like respect. Some men and women looked about themselves, eager to share their outrage, while some laughed and conversed. A few smoldered, moving awkwardly about with hatred and fear constricting their limbs and faces—lungs, hearts, stomachs too. The same man who’d defended his tie said, “I agree that times are bad, but I don’t care to be told how to do a thing, neither by the railroads nor by the socialists.” A line of men stood at the back of the hall, and Charles could not say if they were embarrassed to be there or had a darker purpose in mind. To his left he felt Vera stiffen; he turned and saw the man he’d seen at the Hillsboro town hall.