Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“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.

When she finally did she looked surprised. “Your face is dark red!”

“I can hardly see,” Charles gasped.

“Calm down, calm down.”

“I want to kill them,” he whispered, choking.

“No, you can’t do that, you can’t even want that, calm down now.”

They sat there breathing and after a while the food came. It seemed like a miracle and they ate greedily.

“All I’m saying is that just because you once thought something was a good idea doesn’t mean you always have to think it’s a good idea.”

Vera now chose to laugh. “You are getting old.”

Charles got up and came around the table to her. “Maybe you ought to think about growing up. Listen to me. Did you not hear what I just said? My head is going to blow off my neck and I want to kill one or more of these assholes before it’s too late. Warren and Tom stink of dynamite, but so do I, Vera. And so do you, and so does anybody else who’s near enough, because dynamite stinks. It gets into your blood and your blood stinks and all you want to do is explode, and if you’re around later, pray to the sleep-givers.”

“All right, all right, just. calm down, Charles, please.”

Neither spoke for some minutes. Then Charles said that they should leave now but come back with money and men. Somehow the mention of “men” made them realize, just as the mention of “murder” made them realize that they could be murdered, that “men,” from the NPL or the IWW or the MCPS or wherever, a crack squad of socialist commandoes from the office of the mayor of Minneapolis, were long overdue. The mention of “missing men” and the echo of the mention of “murder” made them think that there had in fact been some killing already, perhaps a lot of it.