The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “Oh, they’re afraid,” Charles said.

  “Not like we are.”

  “We aren’t afraid,” said the first Wobbly to talk. “We’re dead. Nothing to be afraid of when you’re dead. I’ve learned that.”

  “If there has been a little doubt sown in the minds of the big men around here, then maybe they won’t act so recklessly,” Charles said. “They won’t act like such nasty bullies when all people are trying to do is feel at home for a while. Of course the happy functioning of the little village is in jeopardy. People they don’t even know are suffering so they can have a happy little village. I could excuse them if they didn’t act like they’d earned the right to their happy village. Of course I’m intruding. Intrusion is just as much a part of their happy little world as ignorance is. Doesn’t matter what they prefer.”

  Nevertheless he went downstairs and persuaded the clerk to let him place a call, slapping coins down as hard on the desk as he had done at the saloon some days in the distant past. He spoke for a very long time to someone he did not know, who could not or would not connect him to anybody he knew. He was told that his concern for his personal safety was noted with emphasis, that steps would be taken, and that he was not to worry. He could leave if he wanted to, or he could hang in there and see what happened next. He was working, wasn’t he, for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, and had something of a duty, did he not?

  Charles trudged up the steps to his room. Did he in fact want to be safe? Wasn’t it closer to the truth to say he wanted “revenge”? Against the greedy unprincipled arrogant assholes who had killed Father and all those poor players who were blown to pieces mid-strut, mid-fret, a beautiful, moving speech about what it meant to be human just beginning to flow in its strange and awful way from the brain to the vocal cords, the palate, the tongue, the teeth, the lips—most of all the oxygen-rich lungs? Which would soon be shredded and bubbling on the floor of the stage?

  “They’re going to have a parade tomorrow,” said the Wobbly who was most able to speak.

  “Oh dear,” said Vera.

  “I hate fucking parades,” said Charles. He looked up. “I mean, I always have. Regardless of any bombing.”

  “They’re going to kill us at the end of the parade,” said a man who hadn’t yet spoken.

  “Nobody’s going to kill anybody,” Charles said. “I work for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety.”

  “We’re going to go back to the hall,” said Vera, “and make it comfortable again, and we’re going to watch the parade go by. That’s all we have to do. Sit back and say, “There goes a parade.” If we can see it’s just a parade, then all we have to do is watch it. We don’t have to fight them, we don’t have to hate them, we don’t have to fear them.” Then perhaps she betrayed the coil of panic that had just begun to turn in her stomach, along with the swiftly growing, metamorphosing foetus. “Not one fucking little bit do we have to be afraid of these shit-sucking bullies.” She caught herself and pulled herself back. “There’s nothing they can take away from us. We give it all gladly because we are not afraid of anything.”

  Which of course was the moment they realized they were very afraid. The serene and undivided self was divided again. It took so little: some angry talk, some shoving and pushing, jail cells, phone calls that made both speaker and spoken-to feel as if the attenuation they felt was about to become terrifying, thoughts of killing and being killed . . . of course they felt they’d forced their way into a dangerous place thinking like the fools they truly were that a dangerous place was where they could best bring their serene and undivided self to bear. Images of the carnage in San Francisco played in loops in their imagination.

  Then, strangely, during the course of this communal, unspoken confession, the daredevils found themselves feeling serene and undivided again. Perhaps something truly good might after all be accomplished. By the fearless ones, the ones who refused the Devil admittance.

  They walked together to the hall and cleaned it up to the extent that they could. A fire was started in the Franklin stove that heated the two rooms, and bread and cheese were eaten around the stove. The town, counter to expectations, grew livelier. Someone came by and asked them what they were doing. Charles said he worked for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, which had come to the conclusion that a functioning IWW office was temporarily necessary. Wobblies, he said, had changed their minds and were all in favor of war now, so everybody had to work together. In this bubble he felt free and happy with these odd little lies. Gas lamps came on, a number of saloons did ominously brisk trade. A man with piercing blue eyes and a red puffy face sat down on a broken chair on the sidewalk outside the hall. Its one good leg wobbled, then snapped. The man held his quart bottle of whiskey high as he fell. Pushing the chair out of his way, he slid his back up against the storefront wall so that his head was visible at the bottom of the window. He sighed with pleasure, then began checking his pockets for something he did not find. Lurching to his feet, he dashed off, leaving the bottle on the sidewalk. Charles went outside, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve, and drank a long drink. Then he came in with the bottle and everyone drank from it. After a while, Vera got up with some difficulty and excused herself, saying she was tired. Charles’s happiness became bolder in its expression as he contemplated the cause of his true love’s fatigue, his sense of freedom more able to withstand attack. So much so that he welcomed it. He became quickly so bold and fierce in the defense of his bold serene freedom that he failed to note it when he slipped away from it again, when he realized that what he wanted was to stomp the shit out of the big man and his little men.

  Just like that is it lost. The small good act, the idea of it, the serene contentment and true freedom inhering in it, is lost in the roar of the fire. The brain becomes white hot. The servant of the brain can no longer see around the flames in his eyes. The inferno’s fuel is mistakenly assumed to be bravery when it is in fact fear. The Devil stands there as if he had been there all along. Vera pushed a bench against the wall in the back room and lay down on it.

  “‘I’m tired of you being tired,’” said Charles quietly. He was fixing himself. He continued to drink until the bottle was empty, the others quickly succumbing to the effect of alcohol on their shredded nerves. They assumed foetal positions in corners and were asleep instantly, in the way that people do whose nerves had taken more than they could stand.

  Charles stood at the big window.

  He went outside.

  It might have been a carnival scene he entered. Men women children, couples, young lovers, families strolled and gawked at the ordinary street life of their snug town after dark. For every drunk there was a child eating ice cream. Groups of children darted and toddled about. Gangs of boys huddled, some of them perhaps nearly as old as himself, but seeming freckled and stupid even as they took on the air of important men discussing investment opportunities—only to dissolve in loud sneering honks of laughter. It was hard to say what was going on; sometimes people would look at him with menacing hostility and sometimes they would not. He even thought he saw a few guilelessly friendly winks and smiles and waves. What he thought was a firecracker went off not too far away. Then another and another. Then as if in a dream a horse stepped heavily against him and he fell to his knees. He looked up in the garish darkness but saw only the great head of the horse dropping swiftly toward him, and he rolled away. He must have taken a blow to the head as well because he was dopey. Where was Amelia? he wondered. Why could she not control her horse? He got to his feet awkwardly and wondered for the length of time it takes lightning to strike what his sister—now that he knew she was not there—was doing at that moment. He ached for her, because surely she was lost. He felt very heavy, as if knowledge had been dropped like a millstone around his neck: the firecrackers he knew now were guns, and the parade had begun, in torchlight.

  He could see one of the Wobblies standing at the window, but now with a Winchester deer rifle, and he scr
ambled back into the hall, heart slamming in his throat.

  “People will kill you,” he told the man conversationally, “if you upset the kind of fear they’re used to with another, no matter how persuasively you speak of its guaranteed safety features.”

  All of the men had weapons; only Vera had disdained arming. The Wobbly at the window set the rifle down on a chair and went to whisper something to Vera. Charles took up the rifle, a .30-30 lever action exactly like one he’d grown up with on the ranch. They were easy to use and he was good at it, like he was good in all things. “Scholar,” he said, “soldier, statesman, musician, belletrist. And say, that’s funny: I say ‘musician,’ and I realize how badly I’ve let my musicianship lapse. I think I’ll begin to compose. Vera, do you remember, did you ever know, about those five strange notes I heard in the park that day before the earthquake? They were a question.”

  The shouting from the street was astonishingly loud, he thought, nearly deafening, and then he heard a clear sharp crack and turned to see one of the Wobblies in the midst of a comic walk across a kind of stage, then fall hilariously over.

  “We are not going to shoot anyone,” Vera was saying over and over and then she was screaming it through the open door and smashed windows. Bullets smashed glass and cracked through the walls.

  Rejean Houle walked in through the front door, backing Vera up step by step as he did so.

  He was aiming his revolver at her.

  He said, “My orders are first her, then you,” but when he fired, it was with a smaller pistol in the other hand and his target was one of the four remaining Wobblies, the one who had made the first and biggest mistake and stepped toward him.

  When Houle saw that he’d shot the Wobbly dead, he paused, as if irked. This was the second mistake: pausing as if he wanted to explain things to Charles and Vera. One of the three remaining Wobblies shot him. A man nobody knew came in through the front door, shot the Wobbly who’d just shot Houle, then backed out the door and disappeared.

  “I’ll go out there and surrender,” said one of the two remaining Wobblies, the one who’d done the talking in the hotel room, and out he went. As soon as he’d firmly placed his feet and raised his arms over his head, he was shot dead.

  It had happened that quickly. Charles found himself wishing, vividly and explicitly and with a kind of calm, that he could see the big man, the slightly less big man, and the man who looked like Paul Bunyan, because he felt he knew these men somehow, having seen them before, and therefore had relationships with them, accounts, so to speak, that he might now draw upon. But three different men standing in front of him turned as one, almost like dancehall girls, and set themselves upon him. He cried out that they had it all wrong, they had it all wrong, “No, no, no!” he wailed like an ordinary coward, but they got him down and beat him until he was quite thoroughly listless, incapable of reflexive violence, not to speak of philosophy, at which point they carried him—or rather supported him as if he were a fallen comrade who could walk but who didn’t care in the least where he was headed—to a railway car on an old siding around which weeds were growing. Inside the stinking black hole were five other men: three merchants with ties to the NPL who had only just been deposited there; and two Wobblies too weak and miserable to speak: they had been there for something like a month, so near and yet so far, when their friends had thought them flown or dead. Then Charles and the lone remaining Wobbly were rolled into the car, followed by a bruised and bleeding Vera. They lay there through the night and half of the next day. Reeling and nauseous in the glare and heat of noon, they were taken back to the intersection of the town’s main streets, where a gauntlet had been formed and a public spectacle was in progress. They were all tied with hands behind backs and led by leashes through the gauntlet, in which they were struck, mainly with leather knouts and canes, by otherwise thoroughly decent people, people, some of them, unused to beating so that their slaps were awkward and didn’t hurt us as much as they probably did them. They were called “niggers” and “Jews.” At the worst it was a whipping and a flaying rather than a clubbing. At the end of the gauntlet they came to an American flag and a table on which an open Bible fluttered its pages. This town was prepared for war.

  The flag billowed and collapsed, billowed and collapsed in the mild breeze. Charles could smell the mothballs in which it had been stored. The cover of the topmost Bible lifted slightly and fell closed again. “The goddamned Jew merchants” who had called “this plague of foreigners and radicals” down upon the town, were forced to kiss the flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then—he could not believe his weak squinting eyes, it was as if he were suddenly watching a touring company melodrama—kiss the hand of the big man and beg him—and through him, they were assured, the town—for mercy. When this was done, they were told that they had made atonement and that the town was pleased. They were asked to consider conversion to Christianity, given cheap little Bibles, then set free. The crowd began to move back to the railroad car, hounding the Jews back to their establishments along the way. Go on, go on, business as usual tomorrow, they were told laughingly. Charles wanted Father to catch a bit of this show sometime. At the railroad car, the two Wobblies were, in a surprise move, shot in the head. Those heads were then hacked off and placed on poles on either side of Paul Bunyan. As if they were giving a mighty god credit, he thought in the quiet little space he had found for himself in his mind, far from the organs of sight and sound and speech, the progenitors of action, the casus belli he half-felt he could never again trust, as if they were decorations for an important holiday. Which in effect they were.

  Then the big man said, “Now we come to the mysterious ones. The young man from a proud and prosperous family, who won’t defend his country, who merely pretends to be a person we all depend on in a time of war, is merely a coward. He shall therefore be tarred and feathered. The man, who insists on an identity we know to be false, who wishes to breed mystery and so confound and poison the minds of our citizens, he shall be castrated so as to make the fulfillment of his wish impossible. The woman, who was sworn she will not bear the children of fighting men and patriots, will nevertheless find herself full of their seed.”

  But someone was whispering in the big man’s ear and the big man was smiling, smiling, then frowning, then smiling, then waving off the rape and torture.

  Vera awoke on a couch in a gazebo. She had fallen into the kind of thick and troubling sleep that afternoons sometimes provide. Her head lay in Charles’s lap. He was reading Plato. Some tall red pines stood around the gazebo, and a two-track path led from the door past a stable and assorted red and white outbuildings. She rolled away and stood unsteadily, then pushed through the light screen door of the gazebo. Charles got up and followed her along the path until it came to a fence and a stile, near a large rock that bore a copper plaque eulogizing a beloved dog who had once romped happily there. Beyond the fence lay a meadow of foxtail barley and hawkweed, the reddish orange flowers like a great dusty glaze on the grass, nearly as far as they could see, to a distant woods arcing along the horizon, a tuft of dark-green but arid-looking trees. The light was harsh beyond the stand of pines, and they regretted leaving the shady cool gazebo. Remote from all tyrannies, Vera thought again, then said aloud, not particularly to Charles. It was somehow the phrase she had dragged up from sleep. “But not so remote that I . . . that I what? All solutions, she thought, as if reciting something she had dreamt, taken too far, become tyrannies. Good becomes evil, and not a necessary, therefore better, evil, but one as evil as the evil one set out to vanquish . . . clothed in suits of principle. Chain-principle,” she said giddily, as they made their way back to the gazebo, pulling the screen door open and hearing it bang behind them, hearing flies hit the screen and bounce away and hit it again, droning. “Conclusion? One must remain remote from all solutions as well.” Oh yes, yes, they had indeed suffered the horrors that had been threatened, but it had all been theater, the horror was the threat, a bit of melod
rama to scare and edify good citizens of Rome, Vera kept thinking, of Rome, good citizens of Rome, to promote right thinking by demonstrating the consequences of wrong thinking, and because realism was all the rage, Charles had only appeared to have had his balls cut off and burned with tar, Vera had only appeared to have been repeatedly raped—and those boys had authentically, Belasco-style, only appeared to have been shot in their heads. No one believed that the boys with bullets in their heads would repent—Charles had thumbed through Montaigne and come up with a lovely quotation—they were shot in their heads because it was the only way to make the rest of the act seem real. But Vera was confused: it did not seem real. Not at all. Decidedly unreal. And if the point was to scare and correct . . . there too she was confused, because she no longer had a good working understanding of what it meant to be frightened, or more to the point, how one acted when one was reasonably frightened. The obvious responses, to run away or to lash out, were all well and good, but how was one to choose? Was it supposed to be instinctive? Vera begged to differ: it was not. Where was home? And what was one to do if one had no home?

  It was not until his meeting with the silvery, vain, and wrathful Mr. Winter and the jovially triangular Mr. McGee that Charles was forced to accept and reconcile the kinds and degrees of various realities and realisms and acts and deceptions. Going into Winter’s sumptuous, dark private office in the Grain Exchange, he had assumed a number of fundamental premises: number one was that Winter and McGee but not the governor had known who Rejean Houle/Ray John Howell was long before Charles had known; and therefore, number two, knew that Charles’s association with such a man spoke not only of a scandalous lack of common sense in a rich young playboy whose father had—had had, once but no longer had, no longer could have, especially given the spectacular collapse of his family—big political plans, but a possible infirmity, a serious one, in his actual private, personal politics—if they could put it that way? They thought they could. It would have been hard for Winter not to see this as an immense opportunity, once his suspicions had been aroused, and the only way his suspicions would not have been aroused was if he had been too busy to do anything but accept at face value the candidate being pushed toward him: an immense opportunity to bring together railroading friends from the West with railroading friends from the Midwest. The third fundamental assumption was that while Winter knew a great deal, he could not be completely sure of what he knew, or rather, what to do with it, practically speaking: it was possible that he was sufficiently impressed by the presence, admittedly in the deep background of the now deceased, of William Minot (which perhaps implied vast forces of Roosevelt loyalists as well), to not want Charles and his Bolshevik whore seriously hurt, no matter the nature of their indiscretions and adventures; it was also possible, on the other end of the spectrum, that Winter had sworn allegiance to people who liked William Minot not one little bit—that it wasn’t just a matter of bringing friends together after all—and who—he made this fourth assumption and saw that it was in fact the primary assumption, the fundament of fundaments—would not blanch at the murders of innocent people to advance their cause. They had already done so! What he did not quite understand, and which Winter might also therefore be confused about, was what Charles really had to do with it, with anything. Was he simply a rogue element that had forced its way into play, because he was a rich boy, an idiot courtier, a gambling gentleman who felt he was entitled to interfere in any sort of life he happened across? Or had he been marked early on as the means by which a man who hated his father might hurt and hurt and hurt him? In the middle was a kind of no-man’s-land, or poker table, over which Winter and perforce McGee—whose hatred were political and not at all personal—would simply play out for Charles a good deal of rope. Charles was suddenly sure Winter had made some kind of deal with the URR men, but he had no idea what sort of deal, no understanding of its cost, no sense of how many rounds of consequence might be expected, and, finally, had seen no sign from Winter that he was committed to the deal. Maybe he had his own little plan. And what of Mighty McGee? Maybe McGee thought he could use Charles to gain advantage over the URR men, for some obscure but ruthlessly pure reason of his own. Charles had no idea. Really none at all. He was right to think that not wanting anything was a key to freedom, but very wrong to think he could walk through the Valley of Death and fear no evil just because he didn’t want anything. The power of other people’s desires could pick him up like a leaf in a tornado. Worse, most foolishly, most fatally, he had assumed he could trust himself to remain serenely indifferent. He had bought this idea from himself hook, line, and sinker. What he had wanted all along was an excuse to act violently, to punish people . . . to punish them for wanting things and being willing to . . . act violently to get them. To punish the people who kept from them what they wanted. Whatever kind of sad little trinket of self-delusion it might be.