The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “Excuse me,” said the man, his face suddenly, without Charles having noticed the movement, very close to his own, smiling. “Are you one of Winter’s people?” He looked and acted like an overzealous salesman.

  “You betcha,” said Charles. “I am a man for all seasons.”

  The man cocked his head stupidly, and Charles crossed himself for no apparent reason. Then he nodded as if with unction. The man stepped back and looked at Charles, as if not terribly amused but willing to play along. Charles crossed himself again, with a hint of truculence, and nodded. Then he said he knew John Winter. He knew him better than the man knew his own daddy.

  “All right,” said the man. “Stay here and listen to what she says and then—”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job, bud,” Charles interrupted him.

  “Where’s your notebook, sport?” the man demanded in an angry whisper that caused spittle to form. “I’m going to get the sheriff. I’ve already got some folks lined up to press charges.”

  Charles had his little black notebook out and was flapping its cardboard covers at the man’s face like a yapping mouth. “You do that.”

  When the man went out the door, Daisy came in. She looked long and hard at Charles and Vera as she walked past them. She made her way to the front of the hall, mounted the platform, and moved behind the podium. After a moment, the quack and whine of voices settled, and she began her speech. She got through the “double profits” section and started in on the war. She mentioned the newspaper report dealing with the forced impregnation of German women, then repeated her belief that American women would never let themselves be used as brood sows for future wars, at which point three men and three women left their seats and departed the hall. The men at the back began to boo and heckle her. She continued to speak without seeming to notice, as the action seemed rather perfunctory, rehearsed as things are rehearsed in the early days of rehearsal—not menacing or even intrusive. When she was done and the audience was making for the doors, the sheriff and several deputies walked in, bowling people out of the way until they got to Daisy, who paled and stepped back. People still in the hall stopped in their tracks, and a few outside came back to crowd the doorway.

  “What is the charge?” asked Daisy weakly.

  “Sedition, you stupid cunt,” said the sheriff irritatedly. “Get with the program.”

  He tugged on her arm so violently that she lost her balance and would have fallen to the floor had the sheriff not been holding on to her, carrying her along like one would a stumbling toddler.

  Marched past Charles and Vera, she appeared to pull herself together and again looked straight and meaningfully—or was it imploringly?—at them.

  Charles’s knees and bladder immediately weakened. His face began to burn and his vision to blacken around the edges. Had he gotten himself into something, mainly because he could? I am an anarchist. I am a daredevil. You see? Excellent. Where is everybody going? I haven’t even—

  Then it got worse. He felt as if something long and sharp had punctured his stomach and was being driven upward through his lungs to his heart, which was about to explode. He felt as if this great incorporeal spear were hoisting him off his feet. Dancing a strange little dance to keep his balance, he felt absolutely certain that his new role was to draw a weapon and rescue Daisy, to warn the servants of evil back back back, and then to run off into the night and never be seen or heard from again.

  It was the heroic act that would link the lost past and the uncertain future, a great surge of blood in a flash of light that would reveal the great world, the good world, but which could only last seconds.

  And indeed by the time he reached the door, Daisy and her captors could no longer be seen, and he was blinking and swallowing in confusion and darkness—feeling not shame but something more absurd, like regret.

  “We should get the hell out of here,” said Charles.

  “Yes,” said Vera. “No.”

  “We should let what’s his name bail her out.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever runs the NPL.”

  “Townley.”

  “Townley. Where is Townley.”

  “Good question.”

  “Why have I never met Townley.”

  “He probably knows more about you than you know about yourself and decided he doesn’t want to meet you. I mean, in person, rather than in his head.”

  “We should let this son of a bitch Townley get Daisy out of jail and we should go to the south of France. Or we could go to a Greek island, one of the Cyclades. Or Skyros, rather, one of the Sporades, north Aegean. We could go to the Levant, to Alexandria, the real one, in Egypt. I think you’d like Alexandria, Vera. You speak five languages in the course of a short conversation on a street corner. Money and words feverishly exchanged night and day. Easier access to better drugs. Beirut, Smyrna. Or we could go to Japan, as Father counseled in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. Would you like to go to Japan, my darling? Study Zen and the Tao?”

  “But we have . . .”

  “We have what?”

  “Don’t we . . .?”

  “Don’t we what?”

  “Have a duty to stay here and see this through?”

  “DUTY!”

  “Yes. Don’t we?”

  “Did you say ‘duty’?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. We have no duty whatsoever.”

  “We do.”

  “Yes, all right: we do, but we won’t know what it was until after it’s over and done.”

  “We have a duty to see that the show goes on.”

  “The script may very well call for our exit stage left. It could call for that as easily and surely as anything else.”

  “No, because . . . because here . . .”

  “Here what.”

  “Here is where we are.”

  “We do not have to stay here.”

  “This is the stage. We can go offstage but offstage is still the stage.”

  But then Winter’s man had come back, and Charles had him by the arm and wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard the man shook and how loud he yelled. Charles was speaking, but he could not make himself out. He was simply bellowing incoherently, as if in pain.

  Vera separated them. “Something,” Charles said breathlessly, “is a little fucked up here. Wires get crossed or something?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” the man panted and fumed.

  “Somebody, ummm, tell you expressly to have her arrested?”

  The man laughed brutally. “Yeah, that’s right, somebody did!”

  Charles appeared to become angry. Strangely, he wasn’t. “Well, somebody told me expressly not to.”

  “TALK TO WINTER!”

  “I TALK TO MCGEE!”

  “YOU DON’T TALK TO MCGEE!”

  “I SURE AS HELL DO!”

  “IF YOU TALKED TO MCGEE YOU’D KNOW TO BE TALKING TO WINTER AND NOT MCGEE!”

  “I TALK TO MCGEE AND I KNOW NOT TO BE TALKING TO WINTER!”

  The man kept smiling and shook his head, a combination of gestures Charles had always found, for some reason, irritating and provocative. He could no longer say if he was angry or not: things were changing too quickly. He stepped forward too quickly, brought his head in too close to the other man’s, and actually tapped his forehead with his own.

  “There is a plot,” Charles cried, “she is part of a plot to do something, we don’t know what yet, throw a bomb or shoot someone, as part of, as part of a plot, I mean a demonstration connected to the streetcar strike in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.”

  There was a flare of wild hatred in the man’s eyes. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said, foaming.

  Charles bugged his own eyes out and darted his head forward, coming perilously close again to the man’s forehead. “WATCH HOW YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME THEN!” He felt entirely committed to the role: as if he had jumped off a cliff.

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t look at you!
What, are you crazy? ‘Don’t fucking look at me’—what the fuck are you talking about? I’ll fucking look at you however and whenever I feel like looking at you! And you know what else, you stupid fuck? THERE AIN’T ANY STREETCAR STRIKE!”

  “Fuck you,” said Vera, intervening. “Wise up.” She stepped back, smiled broadly, and shook her head in exaggerated swings. “Fuck you. You are an idiot. We will take care of this ourselves. Fuck you and good-bye.” She too had committed to a role. It took Charles completely by surprise but as a dedicated improvisateur, he was thrilled.

  “Fuck you too! What’s your fucking name anyway?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said fuck you.”

  “Fuck You? I thought so! Well, so long, Fuck You! Good luck, Fuck You!”

  The man continued his loud calls of farewell even though he was walking right next to Charles and Vera, matching pace and length of step like a clown. At the steps of the sheriff’s office, he stopped and slapped his head. “Oh wait, I get it. I get it, you’re fucking her.” He looked at Charles. He looked at Vera. “Both of you maybe?” The man looked again at Charles, who maintained his newfound unpredictability by knocking him flat.

  The other man went him one better, however, by leaping to his feet and disappearing inside the sheriff’s office. Charles waited a moment, looking with plaintive exasperation at Vera, then followed him in. At the desk, he shouldered aside the man he’d knocked down, clearly having a physical advantage now, and asked the deputy if he knew who Mr. Winter was.

  The man sputtered and the deputy nodded.

  “That’s good,” said Charles, “how about Mr. Minot and Mr. Roosevelt?”

  The deputy again nodded, now appearing somewhat nervous, as if he in fact did not know.

  Charles asked if Daisy Gluek was in a cell close enough to overhear a telephone conversation, and the deputy shook his head uncertainly. Charles then asked to use the phone. The candlestick was pushed across the desk, the deputy now seeming perhaps half-witted. Charles had a long list of emergency numbers, at each of which he learned that nobody of consequence was available. Finally he tried Winter’s White Bear Lake residence, where he spoke to the secretary or butler or spy and explained the situation to him.

  The secretary or butler or spy said, “There is no streetcar strike. I am told you should talk to Commissioner McGee if you are concerned.”

  “You’re right, there’s no streetcar strike right now,” Charles said patiently, but looking up to see the other man, who had finally recovered a sense of himself, feigning a chuckle and waggling his eyebrows at the deputy, who returned this merriment blankly, “but, you see, there will be. And it will be a more interesting strike than any you’ve seen yet. Pickets, speeches, the wearing of blue buttons and yellow buttons and the spitting upon of nickels? Forget about it! The Wobblies know we’re coming down on them and they want to go out, listen to me, this is what I’m out here in the middle of fucking nowhere doing, they want to go out literally with a bang, do you follow? I’m telling you I am actually learning something important out here, I’m not just winding up feebleminded vigilantes and watching them strut here and there until their fucking keys run down.”

  “There is nothing,” the secretary or butler or spy said some two hundred miles to the southeast, “to be done right now. Your position, Mr. Minot, is that Gluek should be allowed to continue her tour? In the hope that . . .?”

  “That’s right,” Charles said as if to a child, “yes, and can you tell me please why, if you wanted her arrested, nobody told me? Told us?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Well, okay, but that’s the kind of thing that really, you know, mitigates a guy’s effectiveness.”

  “I think you mean ‘vitiates.’”

  “Sorry, can’t hear you, Mr. Vi-shitty-ates.”

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason for it.”

  “Like what, for instance, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason for it.”

  “I’d like to hear it when you know what it is!”

  The secretary or butler or spy changed the tone of his voice. “Whole thing sounds fishy, Minot. Are you fucking this Gluek or something?”

  The sun was out but the wind was cold. Shadows of clouds shot across the land like high-speed whales. The smell of cattle and cattle shit came flying across the town as well, straight at the hotel. Charles came out onto the wide porch and immediately made a face, though there was no one near to appreciate it. He was in his shirtsleeves and the wind felt as if it were coming directly from the North Pole. He took another lungful of the pungent icy air and went back inside. Vera sat in an armchair with her head in her hands. When she heard Charles approach, she raised her head, but kept her hands on her face, so that only her eyes were visible: and they were red. She was not going to pieces, but had become very irritable. Charles sat in another chair, put his hands in his lap, and a look of chagrin on his face that seemed slightly lopsided, one eye larger than the other, lips compressed to a single pale red line that angled down from the larger-eyed side of his face.

  “Will you do me a favor?” Jules asked me from behind his hands.

  “Yes.”

  “Get me the fuck out of here.”

  “A two-bit spring, for sure.”

  She looked terribly tired, so tired and irritable that Charles could not help but feel uncomfortably superior to her. And yet it was quite true he was overexcited, out of control—still falling from the edge of the cliff. He was certain that his improvised deceptions, which he now saw as infantile, had run their course, were no longer necessary or useful. He was one step away from condemning himself wholly for what he was afraid was merely frivolous trifling with forces that were properly the domain of pure, ruthless, power-mad fools. Perhaps this was what had finally convinced Father further life was a ridiculous proposition. It could not have been the melodramatic seeing of the light that Al had apparently witnessed, the falling of the wool from Father’s eyes after a series of soul-searching conversations while logs crackled in the fireplace. Either Father had been a pure, ruthless, power-mad fool whose will had weakened unexpectedly, possibly because he spent so much energy maintaining a disguise as well as simple physical vigor, or he had indeed been “the good man” he had appeared to be all along, and could no longer tolerate what must, therefore, have been a life of tremendous defeat.

  There is an evil, he daydreamed, in our land, growing day by day, that will soon be as great an evil as the one over there, in the land of the other people, that we will fight.

  Perhaps greater. Over there: decay and aggression, falling and rising lines on a graph matching each other perfectly in their descent and ascent off the chart. Here: infantile greed and tyranny dressed up as the Straight Talkers of Main Street.

  Charles sat back in his chair. He flexed his fingers around the arms of the chair and his gaze softened. “I admire what we have done,” he said to Vera. His tone was rather flat and seemed to be undercutting what he was saying, but he went on. “It was bold and thrilling. I say to you, we are the greatest of lovers. Our minds and hearts are one in these Deeds of Propaganda in the Cause of Nothing.”

  “We are not acting in the Cause of Nothing.”

  “You can see it however you want to.”

  “The cause is ‘Life As It Is.’”

  “Could not have said it better myself!”

  “The cause is remaining calm as we stare horror in the face. But I am now compromised. I am crippled. I now prefer this easy way of acceptance that we get from the perfect pills in the little bottle that was slipped to us while we were distracted by the shouts, whistles, whispers of the bazaar. It is increasingly difficult to be calm without it. Soon it will be impossible. We will be neck and neck with death no matter how fast we run, no matter how sharply and suddenly we turn. And when we stop, panting, hysterical, it will still be there. We won’t be dead, we will be staring at its face and it will be staring back. Death will be calm!
But we won’t be.”

  “Old behaviors do not fit new experiences. The play is always new, always fresh. The actors are blown into the wings by supersonic exothermic fronts driving shock waves through media that cannot withstand them.”

  “Are we going to bail Daisy out or not?”

  “But the wisest course when you don’t know exactly who you are or what you’re actually doing, actually trying to accomplish, when you don’t know who knows, if anybody does, who you are, really, well, the thing is to lie low and keep a watch. Make notes. You’re improvising, you’re acting via reflex, and if I can’t help but smile in appreciation and, you know, fond remembrance of the good old days, I nevertheless have to point out that you are not in control. You are out of control. You have been out of control for six months and if you don’t calm down without the morphine you’re just going to be a spectator watching more of your friends die.”

  “Well, aren’t you the fine one to be talking!”

  “We will become merely intellectual anarchists for whom daring deeds of propaganda are perfectly precluded by the poetry of the poppy.”

  “Are we going to bail Daisy out or abandon her?”

  “Maybe it’s just yourself, maybe what you’re aiming for is just a closeness to it, a constancy. I shouldn’t say ‘you,’ when I clearly mean ‘we.’ Capitulation to the dream drugs, the sleep-givers—that would teach us a fucking lesson for sure. Are we ready for that, Vera? We’re pretending, we’re acting as if we’re in control, when what we really want is to be in control and then act.”