The Daredevils (10 page)

“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.

“It is not nearly so large as a threshing machine,” said Father reprovingly. “It is a toy compared to a threshing machine.”

“And yet how many times more powerful than a horse!” shouted Sir Edwin.

“It is,” Charles said, “slower than a horse, and ungainly. You might get around town just as easily in a threshing machine.”

Sir Edwin began to speak English and turned to the weather, which, though of course mild, was nearly unbearable for one as unwell and raggedly
worn as himself, who frankly admitted he had sacrificed his manly vitality for his art.

“Don't think I don't regret it,” said Sir Edwin.

“You regret it, do you?” asked Father.

“I do.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Lucky for me, I don't give a damn what you believe!” shouted Sir Edwin, loudly, more loudly, perhaps, than he'd thought he would. He was so tired he thought he might become delirious.

“You can't have it both ways,” said Father. He was amused by his wife's artist, his
son's
artist, for God's sake, but this amusement was mitigated by a general distaste for people who boiled over too easily, like spoiled horses, and who thought it was all right because they were thoroughbreds. He felt as well the strong man's increased desire to defeat a weaker man once that weaker man has displayed the weakness and its probable trajectory toward greater weakness—if he could use such a term, he did not like it at all, but how else might he put it—decreased vigor? Increased vulnerability? Fever? Nausea? Infantile impotence? Terror?

“Both ways? Describe, please, these two ways which are no longer mine.”

“Soulful visionary and virile man of consequential action.”

“I was encouraged in my youth, it is true, to think that the artist was like no man so much as a religious martyr, the practical consequence of which was the subtle but steady wasting of my resources and the silent but insidious ravaging of my health. But I am making up for it now with the
vivid, vital violence . . .
that only the mortally wounded . . .
apostate anchorite
is capable of.”

Sir Edwin was very pleased with his speech, but was not quite finished. Trembling with vengeful glee, he thrust his ace in Father's face: “And besides, I have your son to do my living for me.”

Father smiled patronizingly and shook his head. “You have no such thing,” he said in seemingly gentle reproof. “Charles is enrolled in your little kindergarten here of public performance, but will soon be moving on. He has real work in Minnesota in the fall. The Commission of Public Safety.”

“You won't,” asked Keogh, “be going ‘over there'?”

“He will be going over there by staying here. There is a formidable enemy here as well. I'm sure I don't have to tell you so.”

“Terrible news, however the situation stands, about your theater,” murmured Keogh. Something in his tone of voice, however muted and drawling it was, alarmed Charles and caused him to look directly into Keogh's eyes. The penetration was allowed for a moment. Keogh then smiled and turned to Amelia.

“We want,” he said, “to help in any way we can. Of course with money, but publically, morally, we want to do everything that can be done to help bring a patriotic show like
The American
to its rightful audience.

“They are saying now—” Amelia began.

“
Who
is saying now?” interrupted Mother. “Who is saying
what
now?”

“It was a small fire, I am told,” said Father. “Easily contained and causing little damage. Everything can be quickly and easily replaced.”

“That is excellent news,” said Keogh, smiling at one and all.

“A boy was killed,” said Charles.

“—that it was deliberately set,” Amelia continued, picking up the controversy of the earlier strand in the conversation left dangling. “The fire marshal believes a small explosive device was launched by a cadre of anarchists under cover of the fireworks display—that is to say, by one of them, a crack archer who used a window purposefully left open as his target. And yes, that a child was killed makes the investigation far more important than it might have been, Father.”

“I left the window open,” Charles said. “And the arrow came through a window that
wasn't
open.”

Father nodded, but nobody really cared very much about that sort of detail.

And so Charles sat on the blanket feeling weak and stupid and cold, shivering in the ridiculous details of a political melodrama he could only just barely stand imagining, while some of Captain Keogh's horsemen twits dug small holes out in the field and Amelia—to his great surprise on her
favorite horse, Jolly—barrel-raced around them. Drinking wine one glass after another, he dozed off, and woke to cheering. A horse and rider went thundering past, the rider hanging off one side of his mount and snatching something from the ground and hauling himself back upright in the saddle. There had been a strange sound and a spray of dirt. Another horse and rider appeared at the far end of the field. They galloped past and again the rider hung off low to the ground like an Indian, snatched something that made a small explosion, and rode off shaking his prize. “What are they doing?” he mumbled. Father shaded his eyes and looked down at him. He was insubstantial in the overpowering light. Charles repeated the question, sitting up dizzily and shading his eyes too.

“You know very well what they're doing,” said Father. “It's traditional amongst cavaliers,” he said. “An exercise in . . . in . . .”

“What is?” Charles asked, standing unsteadily. “What is an exercise in what?”

Charles looked over at Sir Edwin and told him that chickens had been buried up to their necks. Horsemen rode by and snapped their heads off.

“Ah,” said Sir Edwin.

“This isn't a war they're preparing for,” Charles went on equably, “it's a joke. It's pitiful, really.”

“If you can't enjoy the day, why don't you go home,” suggested Father. “And shave. You look like a bum. A drunken bum.”

Cheers from the far end of the field made their way down the field as another rider charged toward another chicken. People were shouting now and laughing. Charles could see heads turning up and down the field. He lay back down and closed his eyes to the sun, lids burning blood-red and luminous, brain hot in a cold head and reeling. He put his hands over his eyes just as Mother softly exclaimed that, oh, it was Amelia. And there she was, Charles's mad saint sister like an Amazon Godiva, long chestnut hair in streamers behind her, hanging low and bounding off Jolly's flank, his spotted coat brilliant in the intense sunlight, his great crazy head nodding rhythmically as he charged. Knowing it was a chicken buried there, he now saw
it, its ridiculous startled head straining upward, jerking left and right as it fought off both sleepiness and fear, and then gone, appearing before Charles and Sir Edwin dripping in Amelia's glove in much less time than Charles thought possible, Jolly reined up in front of the family, Amelia laughing hysterically, laughing and laughing and laughing, infectious but frightening, Mother and Reverend Ruggles both rising to steady her, laughing a little themselves too, helplessly, but wanting to calm her before something happened. But it was too late and Charles knew it. She flung the bloody scrap of chicken head at Sir Edwin. It landed on Charles's stomach. After a moment, he daintily plucked it up and laid it aside. Then he stood and removed his vest and listened to Amelia sputter and whinny, his little brothers shriek with pleasure, and Mother say to Father that that was it, that was enough, it was too much, we've got to get everybody out of here.

Later, at the house, Charles found himself standing rather forlornly with Mother and Father.

“Amelia wants to hurt me too,” said Father. “I don't understand why.”

“You've got no business lecturing Charles, then, William, now do you?”

“Charles and Amelia are two quite distinct matters,” said Father.

Mother spoke as soothingly as she always did, but took Father very much by surprise. The Spring Park Water Company scandal came and went, and for the moment, was among them. Father's eyes grew quite large and moist and he looked away from her. All around them, in other rooms, the family were hooting. Charles could hardly hear them, but he could see them, as plainly as if the house lights had gone up in the middle of a scene.

Early in the morning a few days later, because Father had made a strange, unlooked-for point of it, Charles decided to get rid of the last of his motorcycles: a Belgian Minerva and a big orange Flying Merkel out of Pottstown, a V-twin displacing sixty-one cubic inches. He entered a shop not far from the theater that appeared to be closed: no one was about and he could hear no sound coming from the back rooms, the mechanics' bays, nor the offices
along the little mezzanine gallery. Sunlight was slanting in through the three big but fly-specked and cobwebbed windows and the manufacturers' logos painted on them—the Indian, the Cyclone, the Thor—which in turn burned like brands on the oil-stained wood planks of the floor. At the far end of the display case, which glowed in the rare sunlight as if stuffed with diamonds and silver and gold, a grimy and tattered piece of red cloth hung over the narrow doorway that led to the parts bins. The sunlight struck it as a spotlight would a stage curtain, and he found himself staring expectantly at it. It was easy to imagine a kind of comical-nightmare auditorium behind the red curtain, a long and narrow corridor of a stage, an auditorium for puppets compared to the vast stage and wings and unknown world at his back, people perched high above him on the shelves, cackling and buzzing—poor people, because it was “the anarchy of poverty that delighted” him—waiting, waiting for the swollen, thunderous music of the final scene, waiting for the death of the beautiful young tragedienne, waiting for something they could not name, or perhaps only for Charles Minot, a person simply standing there, no particular lines to speak or props to hold, no marks on a carefully measured floor to hit with the grace and precision of a dancer. He edged his way around the display case and stood before the curtain. Something in the distant reaches of the cloudy sky happened and the light faded slightly, drawing swiftly back toward and then into the windows, then brightened again, flowing back across the room to the curtain, red to gray to red. He reached out and touched it, patted it, looked for the fold that might part it just a little, and the musicians in his mind uneasily awaited their cue. Then he clutched the soiled, limp fabric and threw it open.

Walking toward him, at the far end of an astonishingly long and narrow aisle of beetling shelves, was none other than his actress, Vera.