The Daredevils (11 page)

His first impulse was to shout her name and run down the long aisle, take her in his arms and kiss her, but she seemed to be going away from him rather quickly—not running, but going further and further as if by rents of unconsciousness in his perception, and then suddenly she was gone. He let the curtain fall in alarm, strode backward into the display case
and banged it loudly, rattling the chromed fittings, the sparkling jets and needles, the red, white, and blue handlebar streamers, the glinting opaque glass and glistening black rubber of the goggles. He set his hands upon it and leaned over, as if to settle and dampen the jingling things and suggest a casual interest in the concentric piles of gears next to a typed and folded card listing ratios and prices. He assumed Vera would reappear, in the shop proper, shortly, and prepared a smile for the young woman's arrival, conscious that his instinct had failed him, that he had, no other way to put it, fled in the face of her appearance and disappearance. But she did not reappear. And what, after all, had she been doing there in the first place? After quite a long time, he moved stealthily back to the curtain and pulled it slowly away: Vera had her back to him, about halfway down the aisle. Still he could not call out to her: Was she really there? He let the curtain swing stiffly back in place.

Above and behind him, a door in one of the mezzanine cubbyholes was opened with a bang on its hinges and closed with an even louder bang. He craned about and looked up but no one appeared.

Vera was now standing in the doorway, holding the red curtain aside with one finger. She and Charles regarded each other in what seemed like a long silence. Then he greeted her brightly, pretending that if they did not exactly know each other very well, they had seen each other around, were a part of the big happy family that the shop really was, fancy meeting you here and so on. She raised her head slightly, narrowed her eyes, and smiled faintly. Sandy hair, a face somehow smooth and clear and weathered at the same time, and smooth, deep, clear black eyes, sculptured lips. She seemed neither to know Charles nor to care that she did not. And yet there was something of remembrance or premonition in her mild, indifferent scrutiny. Charles was more fascinated than confused. Fascination precluded confusion. She nodded almost imperceptibly—or was he merely imagining such a validation of his wounded, vaunted instinct—then suddenly brightened, laughed, and said that she worked there. She said “Just a sec,” and turned back into the narrow aisle and let the curtain once again fall. Had she been
lost in thought? Or had she been appraising Charles privately, or remembering their professional embraces and finding some genuine erotic content, and was just as startled to see him as he was to see her? Perhaps she was shy and manifested it with a kind of mystical hauteur. Perhaps she was drugged. Perhaps he was drugged. Indeed he felt somewhat high. Perhaps she had not been there at all. It was just barely possible, but possible nevertheless. Believing her to be, in that instant of embarrassment and redoubled desire,
the most beautiful woman he had ever seen,
he struggled to hold her image in his mind, but could not recall, a second later, a single feature. Sandy hair? Dark eyebrows? Flashing teeth? He moved like a puppet to the curtain and drew it back but she was nowhere to be seen.

He moved silently, with a kind of dreamlike dread and volition, down the aisle, calling out a greeting every few paces, until he reached the end, and retraced, silently, fully awake now for just that moment, his steps, parted the curtain yet again, and found the room noisily full of people, bustling about as if, yes, as if they were on a stage set: three colorfully distinct pairs of men coming one after another in a train through the big double doors with crated motorcycles, another man, a Mexican probably, a gentleman at a small table cluttered with newspapers against the far wall and the last window, which appeared to be pulsing now, faintly, with ore-bearing light, and four men again leaning over the gallery railing but not in shadow—at least three of them—this time, and laughing as if at a baseball game or in a saloon of the Gold Rush years. These four looked like rough and tough men—certainly not the hard but jolly mechanics—if not altogether desperados, and their laughter was clearly not the kind inspired by mirth or light-heartedness, but rather of defeat, despair, mockery, defiance. Still they appeared to have popped out of stage doors and were about to sing. One was a sleek and pink-faced gorilla with a luxurious head of hair, another had sunken cheeks and a monocle, the third had a round and close-shaven skull and a week's growth of beard, and the fourth hung back in the shadow of a pillar. There were a couple of young men too, boys, who were trying to look and act like customers
standing on either side of a yellow Beveridge Cyclone. They were younger than Charles, but not much, dirty and unnecessarily loud, boasting in an Italian dialect he could not make out. Beyond Rome, beyond Naples. Eboli perhaps. Sicilian. A lot of shu-shu-shushing. Sicilian. The truth was they offended him in some way he could not articulate. They looked like gang boys hoping for a chance to do something outrageously violent and useful. One of the men looking down at the shop from the mezzanine half-turned and let another man cross the trembling resounding gallery behind him. The man descended the stairs against the far wall of the shop, banging loudly on each step. He was owlish-looking, with large eyes that seemed nearly yellow behind his thick spectacles, and great shaggy brows shooting like black-veined bolts of lightning from the bridge of his equally remarkable nose to his bulging temples. He smelled strongly of whiskey and Charles faltered a bit before this predatory but teetering ferocity. He carried his hands before him, not quite balled in fists, as if wishing to grasp some invisible thing and tear it to shreds. Not appearing to notice Charles, the man left the shop, negotiated his way through a particularly dense crowd on the sidewalk, waited for a cable car, several Fords, and a horse-drawn wagon to pass, then crossed the street and entered, with exaggerated gestures of formality, into conversation with a jitney driver who was smoking a cigarette outside his little bus. The driver took an envelope from the owlish man and the two shook hands. Another man, wearing a bright red driving cap and a big black moustache, who Charles thought owned the shop joined the owlish man and the jitney driver, and after a moment they all crossed the street and entered the shop. The Owl stood center stage and announced that he had “spoken to the president,” and that said president had agreed to give him, Owl, it seemed, but possibly the others were included, sixty thousand dollars.

“You spoke to Mahon,” said Owner. There was no incredulity, feigned or unfeigned, in his voice.

“Yes?” confirmed Owl querulously.

“Sixty,” repeated Jitney, not with incredulity or sarcasm but awed unbelief.

“That is,” said Owner, now with admiration but still cool, “an awfully fucking immense deal of change.”

“I TOLD YOU, YOU COCKSUCKERS!” shouted Owl in a friendly but nevertheless alarming way.

“Mahon is a decent chap,” said Owner. “He's in town?”

“He is not,” said Owl. “He is in Washington conferring with the heads of a few other important unions.”

“And where is the money?”

“Pinkerton,” murmured Jitney, his gaze serenely focused outside the shop, on a trolley car on the far side of the intersection. “On the back step. I don't know if he's getting on or off. On. No. He's getting off, he's getting off and—”

“Quickly, then,” said Owner, moving slowly away and turning his back.

“It's coming in an unusually circuitous fashion, and we need Farnsworth to receive it here in an unusually quiet corner,” said Jitney.

“No one knows where he is,” said Owl conversationally. “Is he in prison?” He laughed bitterly, and both Owner and Jitney let smiles pass over their faces.

“I'll find him,” said Owner. “I'll find Vera and Vera will find Little Billy Farnsworth, the only man among us who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.”

Owl softened and saddened perceptibly. “It's true. And I love Billy, I truly do. He's good and he likes getting dirty. I rode with Eugene Debs,” he went on.

“Yes, yes,” said Owner, moving another step away and lighting a cigarette to cover his unacceptable nervousness.

Owl turned to Charles as if he'd been part of the conversation all along. “On the Red Special in 1908 and we got a solid million votes.
One million American socialists.
Debs and I will both be in prisons before the end of the war—but I intend to bring down United Railroad before they nail me.”

Father's well-known hatred of URR may have had a great deal to do with the apparent ease in which Charles had become part of the general group—along with the nasty Sicilian boys—if not in the know. Or it may
have had very little to do with it. No one seemed terribly interested in oaths and the cover of darkness. He had been in the shop two or three times, getting rid of his motorcycles . . . but had Vera been there all along, watching him, wondering if she might audition . . .?

Owner was counting money in the till but could not help turning and shouting with a great flashing smile,
“SIXTY!”

“Mr. Minot!” Owner slammed the register shut and turned his attention to Charles, who bowed perceptibly but not dramatically.

“Are you here to give me the Merkel?”

“Yes, I am. And the Minerva.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Minot. Would you repeat what you just said, sir? Days and nights of internal combustion have weakened my ears as well as my eyes. My nerves are shot and I can hardly walk a straight line. Everything tastes of oil and my fingers are numb from the vibrations.”

“I say I am here to sell you the Merkel and the Minerva.”

“Ah, that's what Oi t'ought you said.”

The men at the railing regarded Charles impassively, the Italian boys fell silent as if embarrassed. The men carrying crates stood outside smoking, and Mexican murmured to himself, apparently translating a story in the newspaper.

Charles had never looked at the photographs and advertisements papering the walls, but did so now. One caught his eye. Five men with their arms slung around each other, hanging on and sagging against each other, clowning and making faces. Rising massively behind them was the heavy lumber of the armature of a great bowl-shaped track in—he leaned closer—in Detroit. In huge white letters, ten feet high and nailed to the outermost studs, the sport's chief attraction was spelled out: NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH. The man in the middle, upright, grinning, had either told a terrific joke or was the only sober member of the group. The other men were convulsed in hilarity, faces as blackened as if they were pretending to be a nigger minstrel banjo band, with wide, white, clean rings around their eyes where the goggles had been. Beneath the clean and sober man in the middle were the words “Daredevil Derkum and his friends are neck and neck with
death—AND THEY USE OILZUM!” Derkum was a man well known in California racing, who was also a fireman on the lead engine of the Owl train that ran every night from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

“How's your old man?” asked Owner.

“He's fine, he's fine, he . . .” Charles said, faltering a little in the face of all the apparent knowledge of his family strangers were ready to draw on—strangers and Vera. “He's just back from Iceland.”

“Iceland!”

“Yes, as strange as that may sound: Iceland.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Fishing.”

“Fishing! Fishing—for what sort of fish might one angle in Iceland? Let me guess, let me . . . grayling?”

“Umm, no, you'd think so, wouldn't you, but interestingly enough, no, no grayling.”

“Trout, of course.”

“Browns, yes.”

“Nasty fish, the brown. Cannibal fish. That's what I hear.”

“I think they prefer baitfish to their own, but sure, I guess that's true to some extent,” he said with the return of his casual authority.

“
German fish
,” continued Owner. He winked.

“Oh yes, of course. German fish.”

“It's in all the newspapers. A German fish and they are eating up all the good American brook trout.
And
they're supposed to be inferior on the table.”

“Au bleu, with the right wine, they taste all right to me.”

There was a brief silence and then the place was roaring with laughter. When it subsided, Owner gave Charles a wry but gently consoling look. “Char,” he said. “That's what I was thinking of earlier. The rare and mysterious arctic char.”

“Sure, lots of nice species of char. But it's the salmon they went for.”

“Of course. Salmon. How could I forget? Salmon! So the fishing was good?”

“I couldn't say.”

“No?”

“I mean, I haven't heard.”

“But generally, the reputation of Iceland is . . .?”

“Good, yes, very good.”

“Why else go to Iceland, right?

“My father says it's the most beautiful country in the world. Volcanoes with glaciers creaking around them. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds straight from the North Pole and you can stick your hand in a creek of nearly boiling water. They're only just emerging from the Middle Ages, thanks ironically to the war in Europe.”

“But ironically too the war in Europe makes it a risky business to go steaming about in the northern Atlantic, does it not?”

Charles shrugged. “He likes to fish.”

“But you do not?” asked Owner. “Like to fish.”

“Oh no, I do, I do, I do very much, but I'm, uh, I'm, uh . . .” Charles faltered again, inexplicably. “I'm in a play and . . . you know. Vera too—”

“You're an
actor
,” said Owner, a bit like a lawyer.

“
Yes
,” Charles admitted emphatically, maybe a bit testily. “Yes, I am. Several plays, actually. A season of them. In repertory.”