The Daredevils (45 page)

On an island pedestal in the middle of the main road, surrounded by an oval of white picket, directly across from the station, stood two wooden statues, one ten feet high, of the famous lumberjack Paul Bunyan, and the other ten feet long, of Paul's familiar, Babe the Blue Ox. The carvings were rude, rough, childlike, and they were painted garishly. Paul's face was brilliant white, his eyes simple black dots in the middle of black rings, his mouth a thick red line in the shape of a sausage, inside which were blocky white teeth with straight black gaps between them. His beard was shoe-polish black and could not be distinguished from his hair. The squares of his red and black plaid shirt were in fact square. Babe was a rich bright sky blue, and had a sign hung around his massive neck: WELCOME TO BRAINARD. Vera thought that the legendary lumberjack looked like a confused and alarmed transvestite. Whoever or whatever he was, he presided over the town, which was more than big enough to warrant an IWW hall, but that hall had never managed to remain operational for longer than a month. The violence that attended its opening and closings had become routine, but “the new laws” and the sanction of the MCPS, it was being said, were reinvigorating the form, perhaps even transforming it. They found the building where the last hall had been located, on a short street just off Main, of single-story store-fronts:
it was not merely closed, but ransacked, nearly demolished; a part of it had evidently been burned. The door was missing, and that seemed, to Vera, the most profound evidence of disaster, more troubling even than the charred back room. The windows too were gone, shards like spikes in the sashes and muntins. IWW MEANS I WON'T WORK, a standard call when heckling a Wobbly speaker, was painted across a wall. But where they expected to see files and papers and books ripped up and strewn about and defecated upon, they found only the hardening residue of numerous defecations. The filing cabinets and desk drawers were empty, upended, and broken apart, but somebody had collected documents in a very thorough manner; certainly the collector had been a representative of the United States Department of Justice. Muddy boot prints were everywhere on the floor, two neatly and illustratively placed before one pile of shit, the biggest by far, prints slightly splayed in evidence of the man's struggle for balance, a cigarette butt between them, as if the agent had been casually smoking, and very likely reading, while he symbolically moved his actual bowels. Probably written into the procedural manual, Charles thought: always defecate upon conclusion of search. Flies droned and worked carefully upon the shit. He turned to see Vera in a silent tableau with a tall, skinny man whose feet and hands extended many inches beyond cuffs, and who wore a bowler, Townley, he guessed, and Daisy.

“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, energetically, 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.