The Daredevils (48 page)

“How's that?” Charles asked, smiling. He started to take off his clothes so he could show Winter his burn scars. Because all three men were suffering some kind of breakdown, Charles ended up naked, McGee talking on obliviously, Winter turned away in musical comedy disgust.

“You're not going to be the kind of leader who lets other people do all the dirty work, are you? You're not going to be that kind of fucking playboy progressive, are you? Your brother-in-law is a notable man of God: Are things going to be very prim and proper in the Minot White House? When you or your people finally get your ass in the war where it belongs, will that ass be lounging about on mounds of Louis XV bullshit, pouring tea for generals? Or will it be getting itself shot off in the trenches with the little people you apparently care so deeply for.”

“My God,” said Charles. “You are one glib mound of bullshit yourself.”

McGee roared at the insult with apparently genuine amusement.

But Charles had opened the sluice a bit too fully. “You're what, a kind of good-old-boy American version of a middle-ranking pea-brained Hapsburg
bureaucrat? Abusing the little people—shooting them in their fucking HEADS AND LICKING YOUR BOSS'S BOOTS?”

McGee took a long time to stop laughing, and did so by degrees. He then became briskly sincere. It was no doubt a calculated sincerity, but it worked, as Charles sat back in his chair and realized that not only was he ashamed of himself, not only was he hotheaded and losing focus—losing
everything,
losing everything again and again and again when he could see it, see peace and freedom so clearly—he was naked. Whoever had gotten shot in the head, for whatever reason, had simply vanished, as he knew all illusions eventually must, revealing only the deepest, most beautiful truth. Winter finally smiled at him, in a lovingly avuncular way. He said he understood that a place in the war was being prepared for him, and that Charles would be leaving soon. Whatever the nature of his duties might turn out to be, Winter was confident that they would be important duties, and that he would perform them in a way that would make all Americans proud. He even went so far as to say he hoped Charles would stay in touch, suggesting that the MCPS would be only too happy to make use of his patriotic valiance as they explained to members of Congress and so on, and yes, sure,
publicized,
one had to nowadays, in order to justify budgets and so on, their work on the home front.

“Do put your clothes back on, though, will you, please?”

McGee then cleared his throat and spoke much more quietly, with much more gravity. There was one last job Charles could do here, in the time he had left in the land of ten thousand lakes, a job that was actually quite dangerous, something only a daredevil political operative could take on, and certainly one that would be forbidden him as he rose to greater and greater power. It would be, McGee said candidly, his only real chance to indulge himself in the kind of hard, necessary work that most men—not just the lazy cheats who tried to ride other men's backs into cushy situations, but good, honest, practical men, scholars, soldiers, leaders!—tried assiduously to steer clear of, but which one of TR's boys would seek avidly. One needed clean hands and a cool head and an
unresentful
acceptance of the world for what it was. One needed a kind of indifference.

Charles looked up at this word, frightened, and Winter looked at him as if he had been reading Charles's mind all along and knew everything. Yes: one smart daredevil was called for, and a young man who was going to be president of the United States someday soon could not hope for even once chance to be a
real
daredevil. He would have to content himself, if that was how he wanted voters to see him, to merely act the part as his responsibilities grew exponentially every day he remained alive, as more and more people came to depend on his presence, as America became the mightiest nation on Earth.

He would also be able pluck his trollop from the net, and whatever fate might await her once she was entangled.

The opportunity Charles was presented with was clearly to hang himself: he was to organize and manage the planting and blowing of a small bomb at a rally of striking streetcar operators, similar in nature and scope to the Preparedness Day Parade bomb, in the lost city of San Francisco, but hopefully without any loss of life. It was the simplest kind of frame-up, maybe even one people were getting tired of—thus the wish to keep the bloodshed at minimum—in which the streetcar union would look like the usual bunch of mad foreign nihilists, and the owners of the line straightforwardly the good American businessmen they in fact were. But because it involved railroads in some way, and therefore the loathsome idiot Durwood Keogh—the Midwestern “railroad” Minots might as well have been Martian Minots for all they appeared to care, which was perhaps a snub to the high-living Western dandies—and because his troubling but profoundly real love of his late father was finding a kind of expression in the desire to harm “railroad people,” he thought he might turn, as it were, the bomb around. He knew that in any case he had to play along for a while longer, if only because he didn't understand everything that was at stake, everything that might be at stake. What he knew incontrovertibly to be at stake was the health and welfare of Vera and the foetus she was still somehow carrying.

Charles told Vera that he had taken his clothes off, and that while he was standing there naked, he smoked a cigarette that Winter had offered him. As the three men smoked they had conversed as if sincerely about Charles being the president of the United States. He told Vera that though he remembered it clearly, vividly, the way he had just described it, he did not think he could believe it. Vera, however, had no trouble believing that it had happened, and happened just like Charles said it had. She said she had to wonder at Charles's confusion and disbelief: Did he think he was in a play where there were rules and regulations about how people appeared and acted in reality? He readily admitted that he did not, but was nevertheless surprised that Winter and McGee did not, either.

“They don't care if you're naked or flayed or covered in tar and feathers or dressed up like Pierrot for a fancy ball!”

“And they sounded so bloody sincere about me being president! I had to wonder myself, if such a thing was possible! That they could create me and work me like that! When I know good and well that for all TR's faults, he would lead a revolution before he allowed something like that to happen! Those men are mad, aren't they, Vera? I have to ask. I mean, truly, clinically mad? As in, they ought to be in straitjackets in a hospital?”

“Yes, they are mad. Yes, they create reality.”

“Why did Rejean tell us he was going to shoot us, and then not do it?”

“I don't know.”

“Did Rejean perhaps actually shoot us?”

Vera stared at Charles with a kind of languid fear that brought goose bumps out on him and made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“Was his intention to shoot us, and he changed his mind at the last second?”

Vera said nothing, but looked away.

“Maybe he was talking to someone else but looking at us?”

“Maybe,” said Vera, “we'll never know.”

They were in a rented house on the other side of White Bear Lake from Commissioner Winter's monstrous folly, and walked from the white- and
gold-painted gazebo with fluttering flags of every other color to the shore. The two-bit spring had become lush and humid, balmy and four different shades of green: dark, earthy soil green; airy green that almost passed for blue; a saturated, dripping green; a startling fiery lime. The lake was still cold and a warm breeze was moving over it. There were clouds in the sky, just enough to soften the glittering of the water.

And yet it was not soft. The air was clammy and the light was sharp, like pinpricks into her sweaty eyes. To say she was tired was euphemistic to the point of falsity. She felt weak, so weak it was unpleasant to move at all, and stupid, so stupid she hated herself. These were unprecedented feelings and she would have found them frightening in their dreadful unfamiliarity had she had the strength and consequent desire to examine them. The thing, she believed, was still alive inside her, but once again she found she had no desire to contemplate it. She felt nothing. She did not want to talk to Charles. He was trying to compare life and death as he imagined it was being experienced on the Somme, for instance, with life and death as they were experiencing it. The death was methodical, he opined, and continuous and unremarkable to everyone observing the action, even the actors, whereas here the method was only just being discovered and explored, death happened unexpectedly, in clots that trailed off in streams and drips into the past. It was remarkable only insofar as it was largely unpredictable. He was remarkably tiresome and, even though she had no interest in being right, remarkably wrong: wrong to taxonomize it. She had always known how to act. She had always known how to be alive in that wholly mysterious “moment” between the past and the future, and all those things Charles had maundered on about—pretentiously or mock-pretentiously, she still did not know—in rehearsals she actually found corresponded with her truth, with her understanding of what it meant to be alive, what it had meant to be alive in
every
moment that she could remember having, a reality both transcendent and immanent that had been there before her birth and would be there after her death, a manifestation of which she was both the greatest instance and the greatest illusion. Death had existed only and as exactly as life had.
But then she had become weak. How had that happened? She had become weak and stupid and the deaths she had witnessed had been far more real in their screaming violence than anything she could have imagined possible, far more hideous, far more terrifying. Life was everything now, and death was now torture, a torture that would deprive a person only of the means by which to live. It was eternal horror. Death had been there in the friendliest and most natural way, making life possible, continuously and eternally possible—then had suddenly become what the poor human brain, with its insistence on paired contradictions, had always suspected it was: the opposite of life, nemesis, terrifying end of life and beginning of torture, unimaginable horror becoming relentlessly imaginable, and cosmic anomie. Death had become life. When she closed her eyes all she could see were scenes of violence and degradation; and when she opened them she could see nothing except a screen on which images were projected, the shadows on the wall of the cave . . . shadows in the shape of people, who were pointing at her and gesturing like they had on rehearsal, demonstrating and wishing to evoke laughter, derisive, bitter, mocking, hysterical, terrifying laughter. Death had destroyed the illusion of life.

It was the vision with which Charles had been vouchsafed in 1906, when his city had vanished.

She knew nothing of this vision, and he did not think to speak of it in direct terms.

Death was everywhere and everything. How could she not capitulate to it?

It was a kind of backyard grenade, a condensed milk can with a wooden handle extending from the top. The can was filled halfway with trinitrotoluene, into which a little blasting cap of mercury fulminate was set, trailing a five- or six-second length of fuse. Five or six seconds.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six—maybe, maybe not.

Seven? Eight? Nine? Ten? Who knew? Bombs could play dead. He had seen one do so. Only to leap onstage in a blaze of light and a blare of sound! TA-DA!
You gotta let me sing!
On top of the TNT was poured iron scraps, all the way to the top of the can. A hole was drilled in the top for the fuse, then soldered to the can. He put it in a lunchbox and waited, in Winter's—Winter's, not McGee's, the vain and arrogant man, not the ruthless mechanic—in Winter's disturbingly empty office, waited for a man to appear. When night had fallen and passed and dawn was breaking again, he telephoned the White Bear Lake house.

Winter apparently found it effortlessly easy to accept Charles's pose as workable: that he was a spoiled brat of a rich boy who wanted to cause trouble, be notorious and of consequence—that he was amoral and only interested in controlling powerful things. He also guessed that Winter was finding, apart from whatever he might gain by aiding and abetting the enemies of the California Progressives, the simple generic, schematic possibilities put into play irresistible: scion of wealthy do-gooder politico, secretly in the employ of nefarious foreign anarchist puppet masters, or not, double-crossing them by working for the state, or not, actually putting this playboy simpleton's hands on a bomb in the course of an insurrection and then calling in armed troops . . .! What could be more fun for a man who hated people and was afraid of life? And in any case, he could get no clear word from the rest of the MCPS or the Pinkertons or the Department of Justice. There was going to be a big roundup of Wobblies and anarchists and assorted other radicals, there would be long prison terms, there would be deportment—but what to do in the meantime? That was the question. Did one sit back and let the war take over for the duration? Or did one extend and expand one's efforts under cover of the war. Did one become less ruthless for the time being—or did one become even more ruthless? It all depended on what one hoped to get out of it.

“We'll get you a nice little bomb,” Winter had said, trying to sound like the gruff-but-jovial McGee, “to play with.”

“Already got it,” Charles had said.

“Well, goodness gracious!”

“I said I already got it.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time.” He was finding it difficult to maintain another man's tone.

“Well then. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Be careful with it! Don't move. I mean: Do you have it here now?”