The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  He’d not altered his monotone until the penultimate word, which he snapped angrily.

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” he caught himself, feigning a chuckle.

  Vera sighed. It was almost a gasp. She was shaking.

  “It is true,” said Vera. “I can see that it is, but it’s pretty much going in one ear and out the other.

  Charles stood up and struck a fencing pose. He looked at Vera and he looked at the clerk at his desk. “Yes?” he asked and nodded when they did not. “He thrust and I parried. I turned his thrust and my parry into a thrust of my own. One fluid motion. Yes, I was acting reflexively. No, I was not out of control.”

  “Do you remember,” asked Vera, “that newspaper photograph of John outside the motordrome in Detroit?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “No, no, it was an advertisement for Oilzum maybe . . .? Daredevil Derkum? Paul Derkum? You never met him? NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH? These daredevils use Oilzum brand lubricants? And John had put a white cross over everybody’s head but his own?”

  Surprising himself, Charles stormed out of the lobby and headed for the Western Union office. Vera followed him, hugging herself as she crossed the street, making a face and blinking several times as the stench of the stockyard assailed her. She found Charles writing out a telegram. His billfold was next to him on the counter, and she picked it up, thinking he might have miniature pictures of his famous family in it. She asked if he did, but Charles, lost in thought, pen in mouth, didn’t answer. Then she found one. It was a reproduced painting, cut from a book, a portrait of a man in a white periwig. The man was a soldier; in whose army she could not say. When she looked up in inquiry, Charles was staring at her. She asked who the man was, and he dropped his gaze. Not sure that he’d heard her, she repeated herself. He held out his hand for the picture.

  “The older brother of my great-great-great grandmother,” he said, putting it back in the billfold.

  “So this is circa . . .?”

  “He was born in the Savoy in 1763.”

  “And what army is he—”

  “Piedmontese. The King of Sardinia. In 1790 he was arrested for dueling. Sentenced to forty-two days confinement in his house. He wrote a long poem that was very popular in royalist circles.”

  “Royalist.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was opposed to the—”

  “The French Revolution, that’s right.”

  Vera held out her hand. “May I see it again?” Charles hesitated, but produced it. “He looks like you, you think . . .?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Put a wig on me and it’s quite striking. He emigrated to Russia with the Russian general Suvorov, the man who forced the French to leave Turin. Fought Napoleon at Waterloo, served in Finland for a while, then gave up the military for a literary life, in Petersburg. Had a salon, actually. He once said, ‘I could no more have written that poem in my uniform than I could have fought a battle in my bathrobe.’”

  He ceased the speech abruptly, exhausted by it, and returned his attention to the telegram, tapping the point of the pen against the pad. “I don’t know why it’s taking the NPL so long to bail her out. Maybe they don’t have the money. Maybe that’s why she’s traveling alone. But I don’t care what the reason is. I’ll do it myself. What do you think of that, Vee?”

  He looked up from the note, angry, but suddenly, strangely, full of love.

  “I think,” she said, responding to the first concern, “that their finances are certainly disorganized. They likely cannot lay their hands on that kind of money, you know, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “May be tied up elsewhere.”

  “Well, I can, and that’s exactly what I’m—”

  “What do you want from her in exchange?”

  “—I’m going to, what? Nothing. I don’t want a thing from her. What a strange thing to ask me!”

  “I am only saying she is currency. Legal tender. She has been set up. The formal act of exchange is the arrest. I suspect the NPL sold her, probably with her knowledge and cooperation—she has one script and they have another and only the beginning and the end are the same, which is that select members of the NPL will escape the Justice Department’s, the FBI’s, Pinkerton’s big old roundup, whenever that happens. Which I’m sure Mr. Townley thinks, and Daisy probably thinks as well, is a good thing because it means they will be free to pursue their goals when the war ends. Their goal being the enlargement of the small businessman we know as the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, our ideal citizen, drenched in the vivid neoclassical colors of democratic, agrarian virtue, the bedrock of our country and of civilization, as painted by, say, David or Greuze. Sculpted heroically by Canova. Enlargement, I say, at the cost of a few farmers along the way, because they can’t all be titans, can they.”

  “So I should or should not bail her out.”

  “Again I ask you: What do you want from her in exchange?”

  “What do you want from her?”

  “Me? What do I have to do with it?”

  “Oh, Vera. I only want to do what you want to do. I don’t care about any of this anymore.”

  “Well, you spoiled little brat, you! I want you to care about this! We’re in danger of being flushed down the toilet by the dream-givers!”

  “Don’t get hysterical.”

  Faster than lightning, she slapped him.

  Charles began to speak, but stopped himself, actually putting his hand to his mouth.

  “I want to do what is right,” said Vera, breathing heavily but speaking softly.

  “‘It’s never wrong to do right.’ Pastor Tom said that once. Amelia corrected him: ‘Unless someone disagrees with you about what is right.’ And let us not forget Heraclitus in our mad rush to do what is right: ‘They vainly purify themselves with blood when they are defiled with blood, as though one who had stepped into mud were to wash with mud. He would seem mad if anyone saw him doing this.’”

  “I don’t want to run from consequences, Charles. That is not the kind of acting I signed up for.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “I have been associated for nearly ten years, since I was thirteen, in Willimantic, with men and women who are not going to escape the big old roundup of ‘seditious shitsuckers’ bright and early next year. You will make it possible for me to escape these consequences, to run away from the traitorous doings I have had a hand in for half of my life—and all you want in exchange is life-long devotion. You want me to run away with you to the other side of the world and leave the men and women I love all alone, to rot and die for my sins. You’ll what, publish my memoirs and hire expensive lawyers for me, first-class passage the minute it looks like I’m going to be railroaded, and all I have to do is pretend to be in love with you?”

  Charles laughed. “‘Pretend.’”

  “That’s right, pretend!”

  “What, do you think I can’t tell the difference?”

  “If you think that I—”

  “You are pretending not to be in love with me, Vera.”

  “Oh wait, I get it,” said Vera, as if comforting Charles. He ripped his message from the pad and moved to the window, a small arched opening from which slid a pair of hands. He bent slightly and saw the operator’s distant meshed face. “I get it,” repeated Vera. “What could be more daring, right? To thumb our nose at the government of the United States of America? At your father’s government?” She grabbed his arm and angrily shook it. “Right? Right?”

  Charles said nothing, waiting for the telegraph clerk to return.

  “I feel so sick,” said Vera. “You might as well know: I am afraid I am pregnant.”

  Where had she gone wrong? She had to have turned away, lost the path, because everything was wrong, day after day, just wrong enough for her to notice, for her not to be able to ignore it: nothing looked familiar. Charles had become like some strange pagan statue, a totem pole, and she had stared at him, couldn’t take her eyes o
ff him, honestly, while landscapes and skies and crowds swirled around them, out of focus, smeared with rich colors. She had appealed to him and he had responded in his strange pagan way. And now there was this.

  They went outside. It was warmer now, and the wind had shifted enough to take the stockyard stink out of it. They walked toward the jailhouse.

  “The cat,” Charles said, “is out of the bag now.”

  “Well, no, not quite,” said Vera.

  Charles couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Not a laughing matter,” said Vera, smiling in spite of herself.

  “Oh, but it is!” shouted Charles. “We have been given one of the biggest and greatest cues the world’s stage can offer!”

  Vera suddenly stopped smiling but said nothing.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” she asked Charles.

  “No idea! I’m just an actor! Do you know what’s going to happen?”

  Vera said nothing and remained neither smiling nor frowning, finding a neutrality naturally easy to come by and hold lightly.

  “I don’t think you can honestly say you do,” said Charles. “Neither of us knows a damn thing. Nobody does. I’m very excited, though, in spite of myself.”

  “I think your mother will come after me if she finds out. Your brothers and sister too. Maybe they’ve gotten used to the idea that you can’t be trusted to live in the center of things.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I really don’t. Not a clue.”

  “NEITHER DO I!”

  “‘At the center of things’?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “At any rate, the cat and the bag I was talking about are Daisy and the slammer. I am pretty sure if I bail her now, I will mess things up for more than one party, and our . . . how shall I say . . . our ‘effectiveness’ will be compromised to the point of—”

  “We never had anything remotely like effectiveness. The only question is, do we let her sit here in this jail now?”

  “We are assuming that she does not want to sit here in this jail now.”

  Vera began to speak but stopped herself.

  “And are we assuming, as we use those specific terms, that you will seek an abortion?”

  Again Vera began to speak but stopped herself.

  Outside the jail, she stopped and said she wouldn’t go in. When Charles insisted, citing Daisy’s almost certain despair—no matter what her intentions might be over the long haul toward a promised end—she thumped him repeatedly on his arms and chest and cried no no no no no. Because he’d been hit, twice now, violently, he looked, he supposed, like a little boy and she apologized, going through exaggerated motions of calming herself that in some way calmed her, minimally. She tried to describe what had happened to her when she’d visited Daisy earlier, the suspicion that she was slipping away from herself, that she had always been in danger of slipping away, and the fear that if she were to take Daisy’s place and be arrested and jailed just as Daisy had been, incarceration would rip every joint from its socket. “I wouldn’t be insane, but I would be alone. I wouldn’t have any arms or legs.”

  “I am familiar with the condition,” Charles said.

  “Of course you are,” she sighed. “What are you not familiar with?”

  And he gestured at the jailhouse, the hotel, the land empty of everything but the stunted trunks of second-growth popple, to the horizon, to the sky.

  They bailed a silent Daisy, for whom a car was waiting at the curb.

  Vera peered in and confirmed that it was Townley.

  “Odd couple indeed,” said Charles. “Their ways are strange to me.”

  And so they got high and traveled deeper into what had been the southernmost reaches of a white pine forest that had circled the globe, the aboriginal inhabitants of which had believed their doctors could fly over mountains and trees, to heaven and to hell: the three-tiered world. Charles, thinking that he might soon die, maybe in the next town, or the next time he got on a train, along the way somewhere, middle of nowhere, that his soul might drift out like smoke from the ponderous rocking car—which, he fantasized, would seem to be going only just fast enough to make possible the drift of smoke out an open window, as if the night, the darkness, were viscous. Vera snored lightly next to him, her face half muffled by a pillow. His eyes were closed but he was wide-awake. They had been musing, talking of the farmers they had seen, coming and going in their wagons, standing next to fences or in front of stores, talking so quietly you had to strain to hear them. He had wanted to align himself, somehow, with them, but as he rehearsed these scenes in anxious dopey idleness, he realized he could do no such thing. They had spent long years working with their hands, with black dirt and animals, with rotting vegetables and stinking guts and blue skies and howling blizzards. An even more stark difference: they were businessmen. The second they could be done with the guts and the dirt and the bad weather, they would be. He, on the other hand, was some kind of sliding entity, no fixed residence, no fixed character even, or so he mused, blaming himself obscurely for some psychological crime he could not grasp, but which had become some kind of gigantic thinking, moving thing in the wake of Father’s death. Perhaps one or two of the farmers secretly believed themselves to be that way too, some kind of double agent, an odd mingling of forces that could only, as to their nature and origin, be guessed at, the man only nominally “himself,” the person others took him to be, the source of wildest heartbreak and unbearable sorrow if one day he should become what he was afraid he was. If he and the giant were to become one. It was also possible he did not know himself and did not want to know himself, satisfied with the binding of his responsibilities and the way they shaped and filled him in. He had nothing like that, and he suspected it was what Vera wanted most from him. He had struggled free of them, his responsibilities, every one of them, in an eye-rolling panic he only just barely managed to conceal from the people around him, to find himself now able only to manufacture facsimiles, each one less and less convincing, arriving at last at the feeble conclusion that it was his duty to strike a blow for cheated working people, with some hideous spectacular act of violence. Oh yes, there were tyrants everywhere, left and right, and he was sick of them all. He returned again and again to the image of the Marble Man, Swanson, in San Francisco. There was a man he could kill. The only thing that had kept him from becoming a tyrant himself was the wheel of pain and relief, pain and morphine, that he found himself on. If I were strong, he told himself, I would surely be a monster. Vera, he thought. She had worked. She had spent her childhood negotiating a terrifying responsibility, nerve-wracked, a little more exhausted each day, a little more sick each day, a little more blind and deaf and dumb, and of course it had made her mad, of course it had made her crazy. What was she to do with her intelligence, her dreams, her heart, her mind? She’d had no recourse, she lived in a prison, and when she saw how she might be free, she let her mind go. The bitter but bracing wind of the present moment snatched it like a bonnet and it shot away over the trees. She looked up, first in dismay, then in delight, and raced after it. He loved her dearly. He leaned over to her and whispered that he wished never to leave her. I’ll teach you French and we will have a child together: surely you are free to go now, wherever you want to go, even if I cannot.

  On an island pedestal in the middle of the main road, surrounded by an oval of white picket, directly across from the station, stood two wooden statues, one ten feet high, of the famous lumberjack Paul Bunyan, and the other ten feet long, of Paul’s familiar, Babe the Blue Ox. The carvings were rude, rough, childlike, and they were painted garishly. Paul’s face was brilliant white, his eyes simple black dots in the middle of black rings, his mouth a thick red line in the shape of a sausage, inside which were blocky white teeth with straight black gaps between them. His beard was shoe-polish black and could not be distinguished from his hair. The squares of his red and black plaid shirt were in fact squar
e. Babe was a rich bright sky blue, and had a sign hung around his massive neck: WELCOME TO BRAINARD. Vera thought that the legendary lumberjack looked like a confused and alarmed transvestite. Whoever or whatever he was, he presided over the town, which was more than big enough to warrant an IWW hall, but that hall had never managed to remain operational for longer than a month. The violence that attended its opening and closings had become routine, but “the new laws” and the sanction of the MCPS, it was being said, were reinvigorating the form, perhaps even transforming it. They found the building where the last hall had been located, on a short street just off Main, of single-story store-fronts: it was not merely closed, but ransacked, nearly demolished; a part of it had evidently been burned. The door was missing, and that seemed, to Vera, the most profound evidence of disaster, more troubling even than the charred back room. The windows too were gone, shards like spikes in the sashes and muntins. IWW MEANS I WON’T WORK, a standard call when heckling a Wobbly speaker, was painted across a wall. But where they expected to see files and papers and books ripped up and strewn about and defecated upon, they found only the hardening residue of numerous defecations. The filing cabinets and desk drawers were empty, upended, and broken apart, but somebody had collected documents in a very thorough manner; certainly the collector had been a representative of the United States Department of Justice. Muddy boot prints were everywhere on the floor, two neatly and illustratively placed before one pile of shit, the biggest by far, prints slightly splayed in evidence of the man’s struggle for balance, a cigarette butt between them, as if the agent had been casually smoking, and very likely reading, while he symbolically moved his actual bowels. Probably written into the procedural manual, Charles thought: always defecate upon conclusion of search. Flies droned and worked carefully upon the shit. He turned to see Vera in a silent tableau with a tall, skinny man whose feet and hands extended many inches beyond cuffs, and who wore a bowler, Townley, he guessed, and Daisy.