The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “You have to get out of town,” said Daisy. “This is a town where they will murder you if you confuse them.”

  They departed swiftly in silence, as was their wont.

  Only to be replaced minutes later, as if they were on a schedule, by a tall heavy man made in the image of Paul Bunyan. He was standing on the threshold, and Vera knew then why the absence of the door had troubled her so: they were meant precisely to shield the occupants of a room from visions such as this.

  “What’s your name?” Charles demanded, a wealthy, privileged, influential young man, quick on the draw.

  The man looked surprised and spat an unintelligible answer.

  “Well, buddy, what the hell are you doing here?” Charles asked, perhaps friendly now, perhaps not.

  The man started several answers, but discarded them all. Charles had clearly struck the appropriate tone with this coward: authority. Vera walked up to him, close enough so that she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye. “Keep coming back to the salt lick, little deer,” she said sweetly, “some mean hunter-man gonna blow your ass off for sure!”

  The man spat and babbled again, wanting, it became clear after a while, to know what Vera meant.

  “We mean,” she said, “that the work is done here.”

  “I t’ought you vuss anudder Vobbly,” said the man.

  “No,” Charles said. He was actually a little taller than the big man, leaner and harder against the man’s questionable bulk, “Vee are not.” He replaced Vera in the man’s face, appearing, Vera thought, perhaps a little too truculent.

  “Kind of overdid it here,” said Charles, stepping in very close, like a fencer who has dropped his sword in arrogant disdain and come in to taunt. “Don’t you think, Slim?”

  He remembered the harmless fun of swordplay when the reins of rehearsal lay slack on the necks of the actors. His actors. His dead actors.

  The man made no reply. He was visibly confused, a look not lost on either Charles or Vera.

  “You the artiste?” Charles pointed at the shit and graffito. The man again chose not to reply.

  Charles took it as a provocation and sad, too loudly, “Hit the road.” When the man was out the door, he added, “You sonofabitch.”

  “You know what?” asked Vera. “I think we should get out of here.”

  “You don’t want to give the speech?” asked Charles. “I’ve been reading this NPL stuff until I can’t see straight, so I can ask the right questions during the informative Q and A afterward.

  “This isn’t wheat farming and railroads,” said Vera.

  “I know that.”

  “This is lumber.” Vera came up to him and touched his face. “And you need to settle down.”

  “Fucking castrate that shithead.”

  Vera laughed dismissively, shortly, bitterly.

  “Have you see Rejean?”

  “No, I have not, but that doesn’t surprise or trouble me. He’ll be here when we, you know, least expect but most need him. He’s a hero. Climactic scene. Nick of time.”

  “How can you think you know him so well?”

  “I’m an actor and so is he.”

  They walked up the street to the intersection with the street that would take them to Main. There they saw an NPL poster that was, inexplicably, not torn down. Someone had written CANCELLED across it. Vera had another poster rolled up under her arm, and she now unrolled it, holding it in place while Jules worked the old tack free and banged it back on the new poster with a rock. Then they stepped back and looked at it from a distance, as if curious about it and deciding whether or not to attend. There was some car traffic ahead of them, crossing Main, there and gone between the corner stores, there and gone, and a couple of horses hitched to wagons across the street at a dry goods store, but almost no one on the street. They looked for a diner and found one. Vera bobbed her head, looking for a menu in the window, which amused Charles. When they entered, she strode about as if she owned the place, which appeared to not amuse either the customers or the proprietor. Charles hung back while Vera appraised the ambience, gave the waitress a more or less friendly once-over, and examined the specials board, walking up quite close and squinting at it, while two or three customers stared openly at her. They sat down at a table by the window and ordered.

  “I am starving,” laughed Rosemary.

  “How are you otherwise?” asked Charles.

  “I’m starved,” she repeated. “That’s all I can tell you.” She stopped smiling in the sudden way that always alarmed him, but which also never failed to make him smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as if participating in a different conversation, turning from the window, and back to their abiding concern. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Every once in a while I think I get it, but I no sooner get it than I lose it.”

  Vera looked at her hands in her lap, folded prayerfully.

  “Maybe I am just a growing boy.”

  When the food came, Vera tried to smile at the waitress, but it went un-returned. “A sullen bunch. Sullen’s not the word, though. What do I mean?” she asked Charles, who shrugged. “There’s been a good deal of roughhousing going on around here, you can feel it in the air. Smell it. People seem jumpy or fed up or I don’t know what.”

  “Scared,” said Charles. “It’s really simple. I smell fear out there,” he waved, “and I smell my own fear.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” mused Vera. “Maybe not so much scared as bored and nervous.”

  “You have always been the more talented actor between us.”

  “Well, we know there’s been some violence. We know a number of deputies have been active. We know—”

  “Did you listen in on that guy’s telephone call? When we were waiting for Daisy to come out? The one who had her arrested? He kept referring to that guy from the NPL I talked to in Minneapolis. Not Townley, the slap-stick vaudeville star and wily financier. The other guy. I couldn’t make anything else out. Blah-blah-blah the guy’s name, blah-blah-blah the guy’s name, over and over like that. I don’t know what it means. But where is everybody? Where are the NPLers? Townely was talking like he would have the Brainard paper—what’s it called? The Daily Pecking Order?—in his pocket like he did half a dozen others. Where are your fellow Wobblies? Have they all gone missing? Murdered in the depths of the forest where if no one hears it, it didn’t happen? What does it mean?”

  Vera shrugged with goofy emphasis.

  “Means,” Charles said, “what everything else we know means: not much in the long run.”

  “I do want to give this little speech, you handsome man.”

  “You’re suddenly quite perky.”

  “I want to give a speech.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do, and I’m sure it would confuse lots of people whom we have been warned can’t bear confusion, but I’m tired of this. I’m really very tired.” Charles fixed Vera with a careful but intense look, then closed his eyes. “If you only knew how tired I am. But only God knows how tired I am.”

  “Okay,” said Vera, now suddenly cross again, “what are you tired of? I’m tired of you being tired. I’m feeling . . . playful now and I want to play.”

  Yes, thought Charles. There will come a time when all this will have been just . . . play.

  “A little food, even the thought of a little food, makes me feel so strong!”

  He turned with a show of polite interest toward her and made his answer.

  “Tired. Me. Of working so hard to be sure what we’re doing is good and not evil. If not good at least not evil. All that murk. Depending on the sketchy idea that honest play is all that is required of us, but never quite knowing what is honest. Because that is the nature of the stage. It changes everything. We think and we know but when we play, when we act, it changes. I am tired of fighting somebody else’s fight because I hate the people they are fighting or because I feel I understand particularly the lines they are reciting and consequently respond warmly, energeti
cally, convincingly—being at that crucial remove from the genuine, just remote enough to see too much of the picture. Spending my whole life resisting something that would have cost me nothing to subscribe to. If it was good I wanted to do, I could have done more good staying where I belonged.” He reached across the table and took both Vera’s hands in his own. He held her gaze but did not contest it. “Once you light a fuse and put a bomb under a PG&E tower, you’ve committed yourself to a lifetime of lighting fuses. I mean, where do you stop? Warren knew what he was doing. Tom knew what he was doing. Jules knew what he was doing. Where do you say, there, I’ve made my point, now I can go on. As soon as you think that, someone lights a bomb under your ass and kills all your friends.”

  “You can say you don’t care if you feel sure you’ve made your point,” said Vera, “anytime, and go on anytime. To France or Egypt or Lebanon or Japan or wherever.”

  Charles shook his head. It continued to tremble when he thought he was done with it. “If you think it’s good to blow up one tower or one newsroom, then why not all towers and all newsrooms? Why not the people who build the towers? And once you’ve made sure there aren’t going to be any more towers built, what’s next? Is it electricity you’ve got to stamp out? I just don’t see where it ends. Thus am I made weary.”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” said Vera. “That is one of the most ridiculous speeches I have ever heard.”

  “Don’t care,” said Charles. “Too tired to care.”

  “You don’t decide where it starts and stops. You are not the master of these things. No one is. And why are you all of a sudden talking about bombs as if you had one.”

  “I don’t know. I just wish I did have one. So I could use it for the climax.”

  Two immense men, jingling and thudding, appeared at their table. Vera looked up; Charles emphatically did not. The lesser of the two men stared at the greater, who in turn stared at Vera.

  “I give up,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “I am,” Charles said loudly, “an inspector of weights and measures. Who the fuck are you?”

  “My, my, my,” said the man. “Miss? Oh, Miss . . .?” Vera had looked away and would now not look up. “Can I have your attention here, please? All right, you don’t want to look at me anymore, I understand, your conscience is full of guilt and confusion and won’t allow it, so just listen then as I tell you that you won’t be giving your speech tonight, even with Young Master Weights and Measures. Don’t even squeak. At minimum you’ll be arrested. If you start acting the least little bit confusingly, you’re done.”

  “What do you mean ‘at minimum,’ asshole?” Charles asked. “Do you want me to call the Rough Riders in? I’ll do it, so help me God, I will.”

  The man stared calmly at him. “I simply must get to the bottom of who you are, Weights and Measures.” He spoke with the faintest of lisps and wore a big cowboy hat, which he touched in farewell, bowling his deputy out of the way as they departed.

  “We can just walk out of town and hope for a ride, or go sit it out at the station, take the next one that comes in, wherever it’s going. What do you think?” Charles looked at Vera, who wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t look up.

  When she finally did she looked surprised. “Your face is dark red!”

  “I can hardly see,” Charles gasped.

  “Calm down, calm down.”

  “I want to kill them,” he whispered, choking.

  “No, you can’t do that, you can’t even want that, calm down now.”

  They sat there breathing and after a while the food came. It seemed like a miracle and they ate greedily.

  “All I’m saying is that just because you once thought something was a good idea doesn’t mean you always have to think it’s a good idea.”

  Vera now chose to laugh. “You are getting old.”

  Charles got up and came around the table to her. “Maybe you ought to think about growing up. Listen to me. Did you not hear what I just said? My head is going to blow off my neck and I want to kill one or more of these assholes before it’s too late. Warren and Tom stink of dynamite, but so do I, Vera. And so do you, and so does anybody else who’s near enough, because dynamite stinks. It gets into your blood and your blood stinks and all you want to do is explode, and if you’re around later, pray to the sleep-givers.”

  “All right, all right, just . . . calm down, Charles, please.”

  Neither spoke for some minutes. Then Charles said that they should leave now but come back with money and men. Somehow the mention of “men” made them realize, just as the mention of “murder” made them realize that they could be murdered, that “men,” from the NPL or the IWW or the MCPS or wherever, a crack squad of socialist commandoes from the office of the mayor of Minneapolis, were long overdue. The mention of “missing men” and the echo of the mention of “murder” made them think that there had in fact been some killing already, perhaps a lot of it.

  Now was the time to see Rejean Houle and find out whose side he’d chosen for the day.

  They chose the train station, and that was where the big man found them. “No one seems to know who you are. I’ve spoken to a number of organizations, both fair and foul, and nobody claims you. So you either got someone big pulling for you, or someone big pulling against you. Or possibly someone big not giving a shit about you, if they ever did. I guess I should say that you’ve got both, which is why you are standing so still and nervous-like in my town. So I’m going to treat you like I treat all strangers, and tell you plainly you better get the hell out of here, and I mean now.”

  “I have documents, asshole,” Charles said.

  “Is that French for asshole documents? That would be wiping paper?”

  “I have documents from Teddy fucking Roosevelt. I—”

  “No, no, no, I don’t care who you are now. I just want you—”

  “Don’t show him the documents, honey,” said Vera. “He doesn’t deserve them. They’ll just confuse him. Let McGee and the MCPS deal with him later.” She laughed artificially but persuasively, and Charles helplessly admired it.

  “Okay,” chuckled the big man. “Show me ‘the documents.’”

  “No,” said Charles, “second thought, I don’t have to prove who I am to you, whoever you are, you big fat fucking asshole, or to anybody else. This is the United States of America, you goddamn thug. We’ve got plenty of money, we’re not vagrants. You can’t kill us. Even if you are confused.”

  Charles supposed that was when it became clear that he could.

  “And look,” said Vera, “look around you, you simpleton. Are we not at the train station?”

  “My, my, my,” said the big man. “Guess I’ll see you later.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “When are you people going to realize that we are making do here. We are facing up to the mysteries of life and the hard obstacles of making a living and we have nice little village here that you are interfering with. You are not making things better, see? You are making things worse.”

  When he was gone, Vera said she would wait to see if anyone from the NPL or, long shot, the IWW, showed up. If they did, she would try to give the speech; if they did not, she would not. Charles silently acquiesced, making a strong simple gesture with his head.

  Night fell. A man whose name Vera did not recognize, but who seemed not merely authoritative in his argument but concerned for her well-being too, had reached them via telephone at the hotel, to which they had returned as if in a traveling spotlight. He’d made it clear the NPL would have nothing to do with her as a stand-in for Daisy, who had been quickly rearrested and remained in jail as a flight risk, no bail allowed. They would in fact disavow her; and, as there was evidently no longer an IWW presence in the town, she would find herself in a pickle. He wanted to know what the hell the IWW was thinking of anyway. “If they are around somewhere, are they just looking for a fight? Like in the good old days? Because this isn’t the good old days anymore.”

  “I’m doing this o
n my own,” Vera said, mouthing her words exaggeratedly into the little megaphone atop the candlestick, the awkward artificiality of the act making her feel even more secretive, even deceitful, causing her to make exaggerated faces and use her hands more than she would have were she face to face with the man.

  “I don’t understand,” said the tiny squawky voice in its boiling ocean of static.

  “Nobody does,” said Vera. “That’s okay.” She smiled at the megaphone and hung the speaker in its cradle. It was hard to imagine herself as tiny and squawky in an ocean of boiling static, but she knew that it must have been so from the caller’s perspective.

  The men from the IWW hall, five of them, quietly appeared at the door of their hotel room. From a distance they passed for calm, serious men, but this illusion was quickly dispelled: they were in the late stages of crippling panic, either groggy with it as one would be when saturated by any chemical, dull and dopily indifferent to any kind of stimulation—a smile and a kind word as well as a threat or a loud noise—or bound by it so tightly they might have been in straitjackets, able to move only their eyes. Only one of them seemed able, or willing, to follow one thought with another, and he was dumbfounded: he could not understand the false affiliation with the MCPS—“It’s not false,” Charles said, “I am merely using it under false pretenses”—the purpose it served, nor their unwillingness to appeal to that organization immediately.

  “That would remove us from danger, possibly,” Charles said.

  “Well, why the hell don’t you do that?”

  “We sorta came up here to be in danger.”

  “Nobody here gives a damn about that!” the man shouted too loudly. “We’re already dead!”

  “Ditto that,” said Vera, who had been staring out a window at the tracks.

  “This is not our home!” cried one of the silent Wobblies. “The world is not our home, you can understand that when you’re left alone for a while. These, these people here . . . they’ve banded together so they can feel like this is their home. They’re not afraid.”