Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“That wasn’t so bad,” murmured Teddy, holding his false stomach before him as if it were disgusting. No one replied, cleansing themselves as quickly as they could and dressing for home or for nightlife — which was not, Charles mused from his terrible distance, out of the ordinary at all. And then they were gone. The hands and the manager made noise for a while and then they too were gone. He went back onstage. Where was Sir Edwin? He called out, softly. A single limelight blasted out of its box, illuminating like desert sunlight a section of the balcony, and he looked to see if one of the plumber’s sons was again experimenting with the gas, but he was nowhere in sight. Again the light, in the absence of any other, struck him as if possessed of sound, and in the slowly drifting dust of the audience’s departure, it appeared to billow. He had once, not long ago, dreamed he was sailing alone through the Golden Gate, and felt the wind, the famous wind, almost imperceptibly slacken. His telltales fluttered. When they fell limp against the sail, he perceived the event as ominous. He was as usual not overly concerned, certainly not frightened — he never was in life, he reminded himself, much less in dreams, no matter how dreadful or sorrowing — but remembered that the wind was something emphatically not under his power of control. It had nothing to do with his family’s wealth, but rather with the turning of the planet in space, and he could call as loudly as he liked for a certain level of performance in that strait, but the answer would always be the same: here is how the world works. He called out his first line to the empty theater: “That’s just what I wanted to see!” but the world had changed in some subtle way, the world was working itself without him, and he imagined Vera sitting at the back of the main floor, in the darkness under the balcony. “The telltales are fluttering! They’re drooping!” he called out, thinking that one consequence of this change — whatever else was happening, had happened, or would happen — was that he was completely in her power, as hypnotized as if she were a mad-bombing Svengali. If he had always seen himself in the world as somehow playing, he now saw himself in a dream that was darkening even as he watched it unfold around him, deepening in tone at the same time it became more vivid and fantastic: the little house orchestra executing a precisely controlled allargando, something out of Wagner, Das Rheingold, as the characters, people near and dear to him as well as strange and new, took on the costumes and gestures of the fairy tale, and as the footlights snickered and fizzed and went out one by one across the stage, became the unstrung puppets of their own fantastic shadows.

The theater’s marquis was dark but he could still see quite plainly CHARLES MINOT AS THE AMERICAN. He looked up and down the street: it was not a lively street and was deserted now, and dark. The wind was cold and he put on his leather jacket and began to walk to his automobile, the only vehicle left on the whole somber street. Turning to get one arm in, he saw a large white shape against the brick of the building. He stopped and looked at it: it almost seemed a basement window filled with light, a scrim, or some kind of magical portal. Then he saw it was a sign and had a long wooden stake attached to it. He went over to it and turned it over: CHARLES MINOT IS NO AMERICAN!!! Another behind it cried, SHAME ON YOU CHARLES MINOT!!!

The house declined steadily and visibly each night, which turned out, of course, to be a good thing. Father brushed it aside as a knee-jerk popular response against which there was no, never had been a, remedy. It was a little wave. Charles was not fooled: Father was visibly relieved, almost cheerful. The only question was, what kind of relief, what kind of good cheer was it? There were two distinct modes: either he felt he had gotten his way, or he knew something, something that only the rulers of the city could know, and was pleased that he did not have to be, as it were, patriarchal, judgmental, and dismissive about something he had always had little sympathy for in his son’s life — but what could the nature of such knowledge be? How could a play, that Father found trivial, matter politically, even when it was, if it was, the politics that happened around the Tree at the Center of the Universe, with its roots in corruption and decay and its flowers in heaven?

Before The American was canceled, and the openings of the theater’s other two shows indefinitely postponed, a bomb, contained in a small suitcase, was hurled, or more properly, dropped, from the balcony. It wasn’t clear if the bomber was trying for the stage or the audience, but the bomb killed actors and wounded musicians: Grandpa Garagiola, portly Teddy Blair, pretty Mary Girdle, Vera’s blossoming understudy Catherine White, community-minded newcomer Margaret Stensrud — who came off the stage into the wing with such force that she knocked Charles unconscious — and his friend Gene Woodcock were all blown to bits. Charles was broadly believed to be the bomber’s probable target. But he had been offstage — so briefly, an exit, a breath, an entrance — at the moment of the explosion. Had it been just bad timing? And if he was he the target, why was he the target? Because he was “the American”? An oligarch? An oligarch in the making? Was it simply a blow at the aristocracy as made manifest by the Minots and their theater and their disgusting play? Or was he the target because he had been associating, as the protest signs made clear, with anarchists. Was he perhaps not the target at all? Had an anarchist meant to scare the war-mongering general public? Or were the railroaders, working on a decade-old grievance with William Minot, simply doing what they did best: destroy — either good or evil, depending on your point of view. These possibilities, along with the indispensable frame-ups — railroad barons framing anarchists, anarchists framing railroad barons — merged and then, in an orgasmic release of spermy public rumor-mongering, was made manifest in what the Buddhists call “the ten thousand things,” an effectively infinite process of variations of the species conspiraciensus.

He was summoned to Fall River Mills, to the ranch, where everybody, including Amelia and Pastor Tom, his two older brothers and the women they were engaged to, his younger brothers and a platoon of their friends, were spending the summer. He had not wanted to seem to be fleeing the city, the horror, as his family had, and decided to stay for as long as he could stand it. He felt he could stand it forever with Vera, but her whereabouts, he was once again told, were unknown, and he saw he could not press his concern, not an inch. Two weeks later, on the day of the Preparedness Parade, dispirited and restless and confused, he went to the shop and found it full of new faces. Nobody could tell him where even someone as integral to the shop as Jules was, either. A mechanic who claimed to have done some work for him told him he thought they were going to watch the parade from a rooftop of a building on Market. He gave Charles the number, then asked him if he knew of anybody who wanted to buy rare old motorcycles.

“Like what, for instance?” asked Charles, sensing a joke in the offing.

The mechanic, pink lips reaching out from an oily face to close around the mouth of a bottle of beer: “Like an ’02 Triumph with a Belgian Minerva motor?”

Someone standing near said, “What’s that?”

The mechanic said, “This is the kid had a Belgian waffle he wanted to unload.”

“Minerva,” Charles said. “And my name is Minot.”

“A Belgian Minot and his name is Minerva.”

“Other way around,” Charles said.

“Whatever,” said the mechanic.