The Daredevils (41 page)

Once they got Charles outside, he wrenched himself free of Joe the Young Wobbly's grip and said, “Forgot to pay.” He went back inside and slammed a dollar on the bar, took the bottle, and stalked out.

A letter from Alexander was waiting for him at the Detroit Lakes Hotel.

“Dearest brother, this is the saddest moment of my life. I am sobbing my eyes out every time I try to write another word. I was able to speak by telephone to Andrew and Amelia and Tom and Gus and Tony. Or rather, spoke to Andrew, who spoke to the others, as I was unable to speak once I told him what had happened. The telephone is such a strange machine: I spoke calmly and coolly, like the diplomat I truly am, not believing it was Andrew on the other end, not believing, somehow, that
anyone
was really there, that it was some kind of trick. But when he started to talk, I could hear his confusion and anguish, I could hear my brother, and I broke down. Couldn't go on. Mother does not know, as everyone agrees that a telegram will not do in these wretched circumstances.”

Mother,
thought Charles,
most certainly knows. What in the world is Al going on about?

“Everywhere I go,” Alexander's letter continued, “everything I do, I think of him. I see him. I don't mean I see a ghost. I see with something other than my eyes. But I see. It's not memory, and it's not imagination, and it's not a ghost. I don't understand, dear brother, I just
do not understand.
I have lived a good life. I am a strong, capable, intelligent, resourceful, sympathetic man. And I became that man largely because that was the kind of man Father was. I never lose my temper but everyone knows that the metaphorical revolvers I wear strapped to my hips are loaded and if I draw them I shoot them and if I shoot them I hit what I'm aiming at. I learned that
from Father—and there! I managed that highly ironic statement not with tears but with laughter! Ha! I feel nearly as hysterical as Amelia! And let me tell you, Chick, I understand all that so-called hysteria that we heaped at poor Amelia's feet. She just saw all this sooner than we did. In your way too: you saw this coming. I spent a lot of time being angry at you and embarrassed by Amelia because you, I don't know, you didn't seem to think we had any right to be who we were, as a family, as people, as a particularly powerful and interesting group of people and as solid individuals. We are—we were—cool-headed and clean-handed people. We loved beauty and we understood the ugliness of politics. We loved God and worked to make the world a better place! We were Ideal Citizens! Why do I feel so ashamed when I write those words now? Why couldn't we take some pride in how handsome we looked in the trappings of wealth and power that God gave us and of which we were, merely and happily and always, the modest stewards? Why did we have to renounce ordinary human friendships—all of us, even you! Surely we had the right to the consciousness of our gifts, our capacities, our skills, our wills? You will forgive me, Chick old man, for going on like this, because this is something like the conversation Father and I were having the day before he was to get on the train to come to you—the night, rather. It was a conversation that went deep into the night, long after men like he and I should have been in bed, sleeping soundly. He was uncharacteristically ironic about his role as a Regenerator:
I shoveled Chinatown into the bay because the Chinese were nothing but garbage to me. I put a Jew in prison because Jews aren't Christians. When TR was shot in Michigan I gave not a thought to murder and the insanity that drives people to it but condemned labor unions instead. I imagined that if he'd been in California, Andrew would have been standing next to him and might have taken the bullet for him and I am the basest of hypocrites not simply because I blamed labor unions for this danger but because I knew, I have known all along, that Andrew could not have been easily and swiftly replaced. And if I make it to Minnesota I am going to beg Charles to do anything but go to the front because a war is no place for a Christian and I want him to live a long and happy life
.”

It was Wisconsin,
thought Charles,
not Michigan. Milwaukee.
Noting that he had neither initiated the thought nor welcomed it, and did not approve of its appearance in his mind once it had endured sufficiently to make a kind of stamp, a mere nitpicking correction in the middle of what was clearly the cry of a rent heart, he wondered if one's thoughts were ever truly one's own. If not, who's were they? What were they? And of what possible use to him when one fine day a thought might not just be tracer fire of action passed and action to come, but somehow truly matter?

“I of course,” continued Alexander's letter, “asked him why he said ‘if I make it to Minnesota,' and he said he was not feeling well. We had only one lamp burning in the little room so it was hard to see his face. He spoke of the Spring Park disaster and I couldn't see his face. He sounded as if that burden was lying very heavily on him—and of course you know that he never felt a burden to be heavy. Never. But I couldn't see his face. The lamplight was so weak and flickering that the shadows played tricks with me. He was uncharacteristically cold as well, all wrapped up in his chair with a blanket. He began to go on and uncharacteristically
on
about how guilty and wretched he felt about his ‘profligacy' during the hey-day of the Poodle Dog. He laughed loudly and bitterly about how he had thought that a man of power actually deserved that kind of pleasure, that kind of relief. After a while, a long while, he seemed to have emptied himself out. He sounded calm, maybe resigned to something he didn't like, but calm, empty in a good way. I said I would go get some fresh air. I wanted a very big drink, which I had, and went for a walk to the park. When I came back he was still sitting in his chair in the darkness but I could smell the gun smoke. I don't understand how it could have happened, in that place at that time. I left him very much himself, if exhausted, and returned to . . . nothing. He was gone. It doesn't seem real. His absence doesn't seem real. The world doesn't seem real without him. I disbelieve the world that doesn't have him in it. Even if I accept the facts—even if I hear Father saying what he always said and which I had no trouble ‘believing' or using as a creed—I don't believe it, I don't profess it. I don't know how I could ever have been so deluded as that.”

Charles paused over the breakdown of the grammar and noted too the breakdown of the handwriting: it had become sloppier but pressed deeper into the paper, and strokes that should have been graceful were jagged. He could feel his own hand cramping. There were smears and spills of ink now too, on this last page. He thought helplessly of something Strindberg had written, probably in his Paris diary, or his chemistry notes, or
Inferno,
or the
Occult Diary
. . .? Hands burned by chemicals, wounds into which was spilled salt, or rather coke dust. “He testified this solemn truth, by frenzy desolated, Nor man nor nature satisfies whom only God created.” That was not Strindberg, was it? No, that was somebody else. Who had nothing to do with Strindberg? Probably not. The blackened and cracked hands, burned and deformed, crusted over as if by a process of smelting with black dead blood . . . they will never be clean,
my apparatus is insufficient, I need money!
Oh, Father, I wanted to introduce you to Strindberg. I wanted you to put him next to Teddy so I could say, here is a man who lived a strenuous life that wasn't handed to him on a silver platter, and here is a man who grieved what was lost, who saw that it could not be replaced, who believed in your God but who saw that life was an illusion.

I have neither a cool head nor clean hands, Father. I wish you could forgive me. I never saw the need.

“I sometimes find myself thinking he had to have been murdered,” Alexander continued. “But the terrible truth is that an old Stoic would certainly think twice but not shy away from taking the matter in his own hands. Clean hands. Cool head. The end.”

Charles secured a bottle of morphine pills without much trouble, and when he and Vera had taken a dose, he told her about his father's suicide. She said nothing, and they remained silent for several hours, thinking, in a deep, ceaselessly absorbing twilight that never changed, of the peace that passed all understanding: death.

Mastering an urge toward immediate and pointless violence, or not so much mastering it as feeling it ebb back whence it had flowed, Charles watched an old couple approach Vera and Daisy.

“Daisy!” the man shouted. “Daisy! Over here!” the woman shouted.

Charles watched the three embrace, three small plain people holding each other by the shoulders, patting each other's backs, and thought he saw in it a dignity of purpose he wanted for himself. Daisy seemed to know where she was going and what she was doing and why she was doing it, and it was fascinating to watch. It was the simplest or rather most ordinary of acts, but she was committed and persuasive and pulling it off so well he was sure she must have some sense of how porous her molecular structure was with all the other structures around her. Her act would seem to be false or superficial otherwise—accepted of course, as all such acts were, but accepted with that yawning indifference that marked all mediocre acting. He was quite sure he lacked—now that the change had come—this dignity—despite a hope, a wish to believe, to tell, and to act the story that he was becoming a good man—that everything beguiling and forceful in his character was there now only to hide that lack, and he found his face hot with embarrassment.

There was something in her gaze; in his own—admitting that he perceived it from the other side of consciousness—nothing, just a lot of darting back and forth, reconnaissance of the audience and deep studies of the sky. And with that thought he looked up, saw that Daisy and her friends had gone, that the background of the picture had darkened perceptibly, as if it were a very old oil painting, but that the colors had become somehow richer for it. He wondered how much longer he would be able, be allowed, to play the fool—and recognized instantly what most identified him as a fool: this belief that he could choose a role, that he could pick and choose as it were amongst the great parts of history. Almost a year now had gone by and yet it seemed that a fraction of a second, the flash of a thought, could undo it all, could unwind the clock, could make these people milling about this train station in the middle of nowhere disappear in a cloud of smoke. He had been pretending to be someone else, but he didn't know whom.
I have not been convincing. I have been an object
of derision. My duplicity has been effortless and yet I am very tired. I am too tired to sleep. Every room I enter becomes not merely a stage
—
that would be unremarkable
—
but the same stage I just tried to exit, which is impossible.

Hillsboro was a town of a thousand people on the Goose River in North Dakota, ten miles from the Red River of the North and the Minnesota border. Its town hall was a brilliant, almost translucent white, with startling black doors, upon one of which was tacked a large white poster with large black lettering announcing an informative speech by a representative of the Nonpartisan League. Next to the hall was a three-story red-brick hotel, called the Wheat Growers. Vera too had watched Daisy as she was met by an old farmer and his wife, gaunt, dark-eyed, windburned people whose hands looked fantastically, almost grotesquely powerful. The man's legs seemed like tree trunks and the woman's dress seemed as if draped over iron. Signaling their recognition with sudden white grins that made their dark eyes flash blue, they greeted Daisy. The man shook her hand and the woman embraced her. They moved slowly but surely, their gestures strong and fluid, as if of a heavy viscosity.

Vera looked away and the white hall was now pale red, the hotel orange. Between the setting sun and these few buildings stood nothing. Charles touched the small of her back. A man who had been lounging on the steps of the hall took a step toward them, getting their attention, staring openly at them. Then he furrowed his brow and lit a cigarette. Puffing, he nodded at them and moved off.

“Another secret agent,” Charles said in a stage whisper. “Let him make the first move. Remember who you are?”

“No, who am I?”

“My wife. And you don't believe in free love.”

“Oh yes,” said Vera. “I am pretending to be delighted, but thinking, no, no, I can't be two people at once. I get too confused. Something bad will happen.”

“No: you do
not
have to be two people.”

“Something bad will happen anyway.”

“It's impossible to be more than one person.”

“Something bad will happen anyway.”

“I fear that is merely your growing dependency on narcotics talking.”

“Something bad will happen and the cause is irrelevant.”

“When you're high, the assumption that something bad will happen is intact and clear but you don't care.”

“That is a terribly dispiriting and counterproductive thing to say.”

“When I first met you, you had a very different view of things that happened and why.”

“Yes! It's remarkable, isn't it? I was very much in line with the aphorisms of your old buddy the Colonel!”

“Roosevelt? How so.”

“‘Get action. Do something. Be sane. Be somebody. Get action.'”

“The action gets you. Something does you. It's impossible
not
to be somebody. It's insane to think otherwise.”

Vera said nothing. Charles snorted.

“‘Be sane.' Jesus fucking Christ on a flatcar. The assassin Schrank was only doing what Teddy advised.”

“Teddy's voice was at least one of the voices he heard.”

“Schrank was getting action and being somebody in the only way he could.”

“I sometimes think that was why, at least part of why, the former president was apparently so unmoved by the bullet in his bone and the blood all over the place.”