The Daredevils (39 page)

“Al is busy trying to make the case to whoever will listen that innocent men are in prison and that the bombers—people he thinks, believes with all his heart, were trying first and foremost to kill his little brother—are walking around looking for the next opportunity. You can imagine how long he will remain viable in Sacramento.”

Vera began to weep loudly.

Charles paled frighteningly.

Father did not make his train. He had died while anxiously—everyone remarked the oddity of it—supervising the packing. Charles chose not to go to the funeral, which, because it was immediate and small and simple, he stood a good chance of missing anyway, even if he dropped everything and raced across the country. The show, he felt, must go on. He cabled Mother and told her that the show would go on willy-nilly. Nothing had been lost that could not be easily and swiftly replaced. He thought he finally understood how such a motto could be perceived as something other than cold and brutal.

He was, in other words, sorry that Father was dead, but was determined to not go to pieces over it.

They went north by northwest. As the train swayed and night fell past it and down—the darkness appearing to be wind-borne—a condition of dreamy
contentment swept gently over Charles, almost returning him to an unspoiled San Francisco, a moment of twilight from very early in his childhood.

It assuaged the featureless dread that slept in every moment, and the homesickness for that lost family, and the guilt, the mute guilt that would not describe to him what he was doing wrong. He had a list, but could get no answer, the guilt staring hotly at the drowsing dread, either fearful of its awakening, or impotently desirous of it.

But in that swoon he became quietly determined, as one can only become in sleep or near sleep, to banish the old soul and find a new one. What could be finer than to become a new person overnight? To stay fixed in a role too long was a kind of mental illness, was it not? It was likely now that he would enlist. The country was going to hell. He certainly wasn't going to lead men to certain death on its behalf, certainly would not die for it—no, not for
it,
not die
for
anything, but simply confront the Great Illusion in what had always been known as the Theater of War.

The dreaminess was interrupted—he thought the cause was some untoward motion of the rocking hurtling train that he could not immediately pinpoint—by swellings of unease, dread's eyes heavy-lidded but open, in which he was forced to wonder a little anxiously who he was, if no longer himself. Deep drifts of black-needled trees clustered blurrily, enveloped his view like a storm cloud, then burned off like fog, like a dream shredding itself into streamers of the real and the unreal, revealing what at first, in dark but overexposed flashes, seemed a flat and empty ocean of tallgrass. Towns were advanced upon like islands, mounds of earth humped up out of marshes and built upon strangely, with an air of tidal forces having been abrogated only for a short time . . . and stranger still, within that vast sea, lakes, the inverse of the mounded villages, benthic settlements as if the land of the towns had been quarried and the pits filled with water. On the map, unfolded carefully so as not to disturb the slowly spreading concentric circles waving out from his brain, and glimpsed in the flare and slow blackening of a long wooden match, were plotted these thousands of lakes, in shapes that could be repeated nowhere in nature and with names that could not have
been suggested by their shapes, only by private and unreadable histories. In the no-man's-land of the train at night, he recollected murmurs of science, lectures he'd audited at Berkeley, discussions between fiercely committed but quiet, articulate, idealistic men. What had they said? That these northern lakes, lying shallowly like mirrors on the face of the plain, had been formed when great blocks of ice, remnants of glaciers buried in outwashed alluvial dirt, had at long last melted? So that these lakes actually rose up from below, welled up rather than gathered?

And was this the old soul or the new soul whispering to him? He couldn't say, of course, and didn't really care as he drifted in and out of sleep. Great minds, great men: Father had endeavored mightily for him. Ah, it was somehow comforting to think in this way, of wise men and sound thinking, and a bountiful, loving father . . . but as he did he found himself wishing only that he might continue north in the dark and splendid smoking train until such a destination might be reached whereat it would be clear he was now safely beyond the world of actors, in an eternal north of the mind and infinite abode of nameless heroes. Yes, that was it, a place where the poor and the weak could smash, in stunning miracles of justice, heavenly light blazing all around them, angels attending horns blasting tribute, the wealthy and the powerful—then vanish into thin air, as evanescent as the power they thought to seize. Oligarchs and their dead-eyed spies. That's all it was, all it ever had been. Father was a fool, a powerful, kind, smart, loving fool, and so too were Alexander and Andrew bloody blinkered fools. So was Teddy “The Great Charlatan” Roosevelt, for that matter. At least Father and his brothers, and yes, sure, Roosevelt too had been, were still, kind and loving. Oligarchs and would-be oligarchs, kind and loving or not. Spies and traitors and those who had not yet had a good chance to betray or murder, kindly and lovingly or not.
Oh, I am forgetting my lines! Can't wake up, can't fall asleep, everyone expects me to know exactly what to do and when to do it, but I am lazy or cowardly or . . . or something has happened that prevents me from learning my lines, and now, now they will know, there will be terrible consequences because the lines are of Absolute
Importance no matter what you might think about the world or illusion of world you're living in. I'll stand there and the light will fall on me and I won't know what to say, I won't be able to fake it, and that's all I've ever done. I'll have to admit that I do not know what to do. My God, the wrath . . . they will hate me so terrifyingly. All these long, long lines of people whom I know I must know but do not, everything is on fire, metal is shrieking and bricks are bellowing and we have no past, no future
—
and yet here they are, demanding that I speak the speech, that I confess. They have drawn together again in the darkness, waited and waited and waited until they could find a seat and now all the seats are filled: I could have saved them. SAVED YOU FROM WHAT? I shout like an actor, a politician. But they remain silent and unmoving in the plush red seats. Their wrath makes them mute, just as their fear had in the old days . . . the little boy, Joe in the beginning but I never even knew the name of the second one, the Son of the Plumber Who Runs the Gas, opens the box of the limelight . . . we hear the sound approaching before it hits us, like a wave, sends us rolling and slowly, slowly tumbling, dancing silently upside down, and carries us out to sea.

The station was shuttered and damp looking. He stared at it through the greasy window, monochrome in the first light of day. The window smelled of hair tonic. Fellow travelers arose about him, webbed of orifice, petrified of tendon, organs sagging and leaking, tissues matted and discolored, cheeks ballooning with weariness, eyes red from fitful sleep—and prepared themselves for the day. Vera remained deeply asleep next to him.

He felt somehow that the train's motion through space had sucked him clean. He did indeed feel devoid of personality, of feature, and as he watched the gray lines of the platform seeming to assemble itself as if from out of a fog, he imagined himself a tiny hallucinating demon-naif. The wood of the platform, the flesh of his body—he could see right through it, chemicals pooling, drifting, breaking down. Vera had murmured in her sleep, as if they had been sharing a dream, the dream, and wanted to know who she
was, who she was becoming, and what she was to do. But it wasn't clear if she meant herself or some other woman entirely, and there was no peace in knowing that anyway, in knowing one's self, no peace in living according to principles . . . it was all just holding something at bay, and now he wondered if he hadn't given way, sometime in the infinite night, hadn't slipped free like a suffering anchorite, a Hindu, a Chinese sage.

He continued to stare at the platform and for a moment was convinced that he had slipped away, that he was dead.

Father was not dead.
He
was dead.

Then, like the flick of an electrical switch or a chemical reaction that had just passed into the realm of his perceptions, he saw his thoughts and his freedom as a prison and a nightmare, a slow, droning, uneasy, insanely peaceful purgatory, a limbo from which he was now being roughly shaken loose.

A young but weathered-looking man walked heavily past. He saw only his hands, knotty blocks of sun-darkened muscle, and took him to be a farmer. Charles turned away from him as the young farmer made his way to the front of the car, back to the smeared smoky window, and saw a young woman walk past on the platform. She carried a sack of what he guessed were potatoes over her near shoulder, obscuring her face.

Vera rose but could not quite straighten up. She put her hands to the small of her back and massaged herself. Charles got off the train and saw Vera walking past a window, only the top of her head visible until she turned to him, but apparently did not see him. He hobbled achily up and down the platform.

The air outside seemed composed in strata, dry upon moist upon dry, channels of cool air cutting through the warm, a confluence of sluggish gray rivers. The angles in the lightening sky seemed wrong. A curtain hung in pleats in the east, fabric worn to translucence, ragged across the horizon, black lines like dangling threads to the earth. Charles stood still, facing north, and watched the sky moving east. Turning south, his face clammy, his hands cool, it looked to be moving to the west. He rubbed his eyes and opened them on the woman with the heavy sack. She was crossing the street
on the other side of the station. Her clothes were suddenly bright against the dark sooty orange brick of the nearest building.

He followed her across the street and saw her enter an alley. Vera had silently joined him, and they walked to the mouth of the alley: it appeared to lead to a kind of inner court, as the immediate passage was dark, while the farther parts of it were lit up with the mineral colors of the sky. They waited a moment, then walked the length of the alley, the end of which was indeed a small courtyard. They glanced about for the woman—why, Charles didn't yet exactly know, still the demon-naif though his role as an agent of the MCPS was beginning to fizz in his hands and feet like returning blood—even called out a greeting, as if to an old friend, but saw nothing, heard nothing. Liquor in crates was stacked ten feet high around them, lining the walls, three or four crates deep. It was a lot of liquor, he thought, for a small town, but there was evidently no place else to get it: a wet town in a dry county surrounded by other dry counties. Local temperance gangs had complained—these rag-ends of thoughts dragged through his foggy memory—of the violence and despair the place attracted, its twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, the tremendous volume of its off-sale business, and its reputation as a gathering place for foreign radicals. The MCPS—but not Charles—had swung into action then, getting the court to limit the saloon's commerce to liquor consumed on the premises between nine in the morning and five in the evening. The proprietors had suggested that they lived and worked in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and would therefore conduct their business as if it were indeed their own.
If we leave the place unguarded,
they argued,
some goddamn teetotaler will burn it down.
They openly defied the ruling.

Charles became entangled in the phrase:
some goddamn teetotaler will burn it down,
and Vera remarked the vacancy of his face by snapping her fingers in front of it. He mumbled what he'd been thinking, and that he had never been able to sleep on trains, and that travel was deranging even in the best circumstances, then finished the thought: The sheriff, decried in the only state-approved newspaper in town—there had been two others but they had been shut down by a senator, or rather by his friends on the MCPS,
after editors of the newspapers under scrutiny had refused to stop running stories critical of the senator—as a “half-breed Finn,” said he would close the saloon only if he was absolutely forced to do so. The MCPS had decided to withhold judgment until they had taken sufficient counsel, heard from everybody, deliberated carefully and thoroughly, and allowed the saloonkeepers to dig themselves more deeply into their already dark and spacious graves.
We will let them fall asleep in this bed they have made for themselves up there,
Triangle McGee had informed him.
It's always much more effective to beat down a bedroom door, so to speak, and haul someone squealing out of dreamland and that nice quilted comforter their grandma made for 'em.

That was where things stood, or at least had stood. Things, it was assumed, were different now that there was an NPL speaker in town.

The saloon's back door was slightly ajar. Vera and Charles stood for a moment before it, heard voices inside, and walked in. It was quite dark. A single light hung low over a long table, and another over the bar, illuminating a man with his foot on the rail and a woman behind the bar with her arms folded. Rejean Houle stood in the darkness between the two cones of light. The two Wobblies who had come to Saint Paul to talk to Vera, Joe, and the older man whose name she had never learned sat at a table in darkness so deep they were nearly invisible.

“Morning!” Vera called out, over-brightly. The man and the woman looked over. “Are you open?”

They smiled, both man and woman, at the same time, and Vera took it as an encouragement. She walked toward them, smiling, Charles following.

“Just what I was wondering,” he said pleasantly.

“Who you all are,” said the man, “is the question.”