Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“We see each other once a week,” Vera told the Wobblies. “I am helping her with certain aspects of her autobiography.”

“We have entered into a kind of association with the Nonpartisan League,” said one of the Wobblies. They were just coming into individual focus for Vera. The speaker, whose name she had already forgotten, had thick wavy gray hair, bushy gray eyebrows, spectacles, and a bristling gray moustache. He looked a little, she thought, like Mark Twain, but had a deep somnolent voice, occasionally garbled with phlegm. An old man, probably older than he looked, but fit. The second man was much younger, younger even than herself — and suddenly she remembered him. His name was Joe and he had ridden around Los Angeles with Jules when they’d been tailing scabs and scab organizers and detectives and councilmen to their homes.

“Joe!” she shouted and got unsteadily to her feet. “I knew I should know you — can you forgive me?”

“It’s great to see you again, Vera,” said Joe. His eyes had filled with tears. They embraced, and because Vera was weak and high, she began to weep unconstrainedly, causing the emotional, young, and politically sincere Joe to shudder with a sob or two as well. When they released each other, they were grinning and brusquely wiping away tears. The older man appeared unmoved. Once Joe and Vera were again seated, he resumed his brief. They wanted Vera to join the speaking tour with Daisy, who had already gone west from the Twin Cities to the Dakota border, north through mostly wheat-farming communities, and was about to angle southeast through Big Timber.

“Is Big Timber a town.?” asked Vera, careful to seem to know nothing.

“We refer to the industry,” said the older man.

“Two of our boys up there have disappeared,” said Joe.

“‘Disappeared,’” Vera repeated. This she genuinely did not know.

“Two weeks, no word,” said Joe.

“And this is the tour Daisy has been, um, alluding to for.? She’s going on a speaking tour through. through. ”

“Big Timber, yes,” said the older man.

“Big Wheat and Big Timber,” said Vera, not only getting the hang of things but beginning to feel heavy with fear. She could hear her heart in her throat and she felt as if she might have trouble breathing and speaking. “Oh, I am dead already,” she thought, but apparently said aloud. “I was dead before this, but I am very, very dead if this is what I have come to. The delicate but virtuosic balance of immense forces was life, and awkward heaviness is death. Perhaps true death will be a condition of light and balance again, but dying is clumsy and sodden.”

“What would you say to be acting,” continued the older man, “as a kind of companion, and why not say it, bodyguard, for Miss Gluek.”

“I am not violent in the least,” said Vera.

“We understand that. No one who knows you could fail to feel sympathy for any aversion you might feel for. for violence. But perhaps you will do things other people are. afraid to do.”

“Yes,” said Joe. “That’s the main thing we wanted to say to you.”

“And if something should happen to Miss Gluek, you would be there. to take her place.”

“Ah,” said Vera. Did they know that that had been the plan, or were they suggesting it in all innocence?

“If something happens,” said the older man.

“When something happens,” said Joe.

“Something is going to happen.” Technically it was a question, but she posed it so flatly as to render it a prophecy.

“Yes,” said the older man. “When Miss Gluek says something about American women not being brood sows for war profiteers, she will be arrested.”

“I am afraid on her behalf,” said Vera, sounding oddly like an orator, “and I do not want to be arrested.”

“We made a good deal of progress in the last legislative session up there,” said the older man. “The eleventh-hour turnaround and the repressive bills were a blow we didn’t see coming, but we made friends. We were very impressive and we made a number of important friends. They are the kind of friends who may be instrumental in keeping some of us, if not all of us, out of prison. We don’t want to get our hopes up too high, as Justice is planning a very thorough sweep, but we have high hopes anyway, and see a clear opportunity in this moment to hurt some of the big people.”

Vera felt a fiery acid pump through her veins and then she felt clean and serene again. She felt objects around her withdraw ever so slightly and hold steady, and the nearness of the human beings who were speaking so softly and articulately to her. What was it that they said the old Indians used to say?

“‘Heaven is no place for a man,’” she said, again apparently out loud. “But something else. something else about dying. ”

“It’s a good day to die,” said Joe.

Vera stared at him with nearly overwhelming gratitude and love.

“Some of our new friends,” said the older man, “have been demanding that the reactionary and repressive forces running the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety open themselves up to participation by other limbs of the body politic, limbs representing citizens with just as much patriotic desire to fight the good fight against the German tyrant as the next bunch.”

“Who,” interrupted Vera, “are our friends this time around, exactly?”

“Socialists are very strong across the river in Minneapolis. The mayor is a socialist. And in Saint Paul we have some daredevils in the streetcar union leadership.”

“I interrupted you,” said Vera.

“The MCPS has scoffed at such proposals heretofore, likening our friends to traitors in waiting, collaborators, spies, and of course cowards. But as I suggested a bit ago, we made some inroads. Our friends are going to front a candidate of our choosing for a very crucial job: shadowing whomever the MCPS sends to follow you and Daisy. Shadowing in the British sense: the opposite number, not in the sense of a spy. No doubt there will be other shadows — at least one if not several, but our man will be what the MCPS will call ‘a friendly face.’ Someone to prevent violence, not to foment it. Our man will make himself available to the NPL speaker and anyone else in her company — the NPL is nearly bankrupt and we expect the party to be very small—”

“You and Daisy,” said Joe.

“—as a kind of liaison, more or less a neutral observer and cooling influence if anything gets out of hand or flares up. Our man will have to be interviewed by one of the MCPS’s tough guys, and he will have to be able to pass himself off as someone with Pinkerton-like capacity for deceit and violence but be something considerably more able intellectually than a thug. In the end, the idea is to keep the young ladies out not just of jail, but harm’s way. Any kind of harm that might crop up. To intervene and maybe get them the hell out of Dodge. Or at the very least to see that they are treated with ordinary legal safeguards. We want the IWW to look, for lack of a better word, electable. We want to show the MCPS up as thugs, not the other way around.” And Charles, upon hearing Vera’s recapitulation of the conversation, thought: WRETCH! Dost thou ask what thou hast done? Look back upon a dreadful misspent life, and ask thyself what thou hast not done! It was something out of Defoe, he thought, Robinson Crusoe most likely. He was being given a great gift. He could not quite sort it all out, but neither could Vera. He doubted anyone could, or would even care to. The thing was to be there and to act. He would do one last brave thing. And he could do it for Vera!

“I have been on services,” said Rejean Houle, “where I have been compelled to shoot, and I am chain lightning with a pistol. I do not intend or wish to pose as a killer, sir, but I think you realize that before this mess is over—”