Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

Keogh had just returned from a trip to Mexico with General “Black Jack” Pershing. They’d been sent to apprehend or kill the internationally infamous political celebrity and terrorist Pancho Villa, who had crossed, a couple of months earlier, the international border into the little adobe village of Columbus, New Mexico. There he had murdered a dozen and a half of the tiny town’s citizens, pillaged it, and burned it to the ground. Pershing and Keogh had failed in their mission and seemed almost forlornly stupid as they wandered about northern Mexico — at least from the vantage point of the northern capitals of the United States — but nobody blamed them, as that vast and primitive country seemed to have been expressly designed as a haven for barbarian villains.

So said Durwood Keogh anyway, leaning against his automobile in his jodhpurs and tapping one long strong flank with a crop. He made it look like the Minots had gathered around him, but it was he in fact who had approached them, affably, sportingly, generously. They all had bigger fish to fry, did they not?

It was preparedness for war in France that Keogh had taken up as his cause and duty upon his return to San Francisco. He had been named grand marshal of the Preparedness Day Parade, three months off yet, scheduled for mid-July to dovetail with Independence Day, but already a major and popular theme of civic discourse. German spies (a term synonymous with anarchists for more than a decade now) were said to be preparing too: to bomb the parade, kill paraders, and make a mockery of freedom and democracy. The attack on the Minot Theater — so went one highly controversial strand of public discourse — had merely been an exploratory jab.

Charles had never heard such an idea, but remained impassive and silent, as did Father. Were they suddenly playing some kind of poker? Mother, nearly under her breath, begged Keogh’s pardon, but Keogh ignored her.

They were going to blow the city to pieces.

Charles remained as he was, resisting the urge to say that cities were made to be blown to pieces, that in reality they were in a constant state of being blown to pieces and rebuilt, so what was Keogh’s beef?

Keogh had organized a volunteer cavalry troop — businessmen with time on their hands, fellow socialites, most of the polo team from the Burlingame Country Club — and got them immediately front and center in the public eye. There, it was stated proudly and unconditionally in all the best and most trusted newspapers that they would function as a deterrent to the mad, the craven, and the un-free. They might lunch at the Fairmont one day, conversing by way of exaggerated anecdotes about tactics, then be off to the beach or the Presidio. For security reasons, times and places were never officially announced, and Keogh often took his boys to a place other than the one to which he’d said they be going, sometimes in the company of a professional cavalry officer for drills, sometimes not. Spectators in the know (Amelia Minot Ruggles, for instance, who did in fact work twelve hours a day in various hospitals but managed to remain informed, discreet, sophisticated, and sympathetic) arrived punctually at even the most secret exercises, accompanied by reporters from William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner.

“Sanguinary feeling for an all-out war with Mexico is building, wouldn’t you agree, Minot?”

“Not at all.”

“No, of course not.” Why he had opened with reference to his failure, rather than the triumph to come, was mystifying — unless you understood he wanted a fight.

“How much money did you and Black Jack spend on your vacation down there? 130 million dollars is what we all heard.”

“You’ve got to spend money to make money. You know that very well, Bill! You know that better than most of us, I dare say! ‘The Regenerator!’ Why, your office supplies bill alone.! Genuine expense, Bill, don’t get me wrong! I’m not complaining even if some of that ink went on my indictment, which I have hanging in my office, did you know that? I say your office supplies bill alone could have bought you, where was it, Iceland? Lucky for you, you had that vacuum tube to the White House and a Moral President who didn’t think twice about using federal money to help his old friend buy, what was it you used to say, good dogs who do what they’re told? But listen, that’s all water under the bridge, forgiven and almost forgotten. We’re talking about now and we’re talking about Mexico : these people are the enemies of our country. You’re going to count beans in the face of racial degeneracy and unrepentant hatred?”

“The enemy is in the main amorphous, and where it has recognizable form — say a bandito generale, for example — the checklists for confirmation that he is indeed foe and not friend never quite tally up convincingly. Wilson can’t tell, and none of his men can, either. Some honest men think Villa should have, could have been, our friend. But we’re too busy tinkering with what we think are the mechanisms of the oldest civilization in this hemisphere, mechanisms so complicated they are useless to the Indians or whatever you call them when they’ve sold their white blood for a mess of potage.”

“I am impervious to your speeches, as you well know, Mr. Minot!”

“You can’t tinker with another country.”

This struck Charles as a rather flat contradiction of Father’s recently stated principles, but he said nothing, suspecting there was an important distinction to be made somewhere between the tinker and the purchase.

“Destroy it, then. Occupy it and do your ciphering afterward. Pick your man and tell him to duck. It can’t be Villa because Villa is an unstable warlord. Pick one of the others. Carranza. Who cares. Huerta would have sufficed, even when you accepted the idea that he was a mean drunk with more Indian blood in him than white. And don’t talk to me about Wilson. He’s a fool and a coward.”

“Come now,” said Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles with stern serenity. “Come now.”

“Zapata,” said Charles in an even but loud tone of voice.

“Zapata!” cried Keogh. “Go down to Los Angeles and make a movie about him! He’s so romantic with his big dark eyes under that fabulous sombrero. I want one just like it. In fact, I have one just like it. Have him walk quietly into a saloon and run the camera in close to his face. Make the shot all mustachios and burning commitment. Make no genuine alliances with him, however. Spend nothing of value on him. He’ll go to pieces in no time. He’s a sensitive warlord. He will cry when things turn out badly. Interesting that you should find him compelling.”

“This is stimulating, Captain Keogh, Colonel Keogh—” Charles admitted and paused “—or whatever the fuck you think you are, Generale Keogh, but the war in Europe, you must admit, you of all people, certainly now has priority. I mean, haven’t you got enough to do?”

Everybody but Father looked away.

“Two birds with one stone,” said Keogh. “Just have to figger mah tra- jec -toe-reez.”

They were then joined by Sir Edwin. He appeared to have been sleeping in his clothes, possibly for weeks now, on the floor of theater’s green room, and was quick to tell people how stupid and heartless he thought they would be when they criticized and mocked him for it, or even questioned him on the subject. It was a living thing, the theater, and he would no more leave it in its wounded condition than he would the bedside of a sick child. He spoke at first in French, for no good reason, soliciting views about the Stanley Steamer.

“It looks like one of those magnificent things one threshes wheat with and which one day reveals its true, dark, and misunderstood nature and kills all the unsuspecting farmers having lunch in its shade,” said Sir Edwin.