The Daredevils (25 page)

C
harles crossed from Saint Paul, where he lived, to Minneapolis on the Marshall Street Bridge. It was an unseasonably warm day in mid-November. The sky was low and shifting: gray-minded, he thought, irresolute. Was he? No. Susceptible to it? Yes. Perhaps. Spatters of rain the size of silver dollars appeared with loud cracks on the sidewalk, as if in prelude to a summer thunderstorm. He boarded a streetcar with a sense of portentous displacement in space and time—but of course he was among strangers in a strange place, about to commit strange acts—or rather, to commit himself to one single act of strangeness. That was to say—finally, he hoped—to act wholly outside himself. He wanted to appear as if he conformed to the idea everyone who saw him might have of him, and then . . . and then, well, yes, he hesitated even then, he didn't know what he meant, he didn't know what he meant.

He wanted somehow to act outside the natural corruption and degradation of his time. He was still Platonic enough to think one man's actions could momentarily halt the flow of perfection to chaos, could in some small momentary way harken back to the perfect forms, the perfect ideas, to God.
It would still be an act, I would still be an actor, Plato, if he knew I still saw myself as upon a stage, would condemn me, or at least insist I remain in my makeup, singing, imitating, ridiculous
—
to stay away at all costs from the world of the simple, the clear, the austere, the virtuous.

But he thought he had learned something from his friends, the so-called anarchists, and he wanted to know what it was like, what it might be
like, to feel the faintest tremor or breeze or falling of the shadow of what it might be like to live that way, with no dogma, no gods, no fear.

It was all he had ever professed, but now saw so clearly, so painfully, how his profession had been vitiated by dogma, by a god, by fear.

The car's driver wore a button he'd not seen before. It was yellow, had a number and a date on it, and a picture of a streetcar with the letters “AA of S” and “ERE of A.” He sat down behind the driver, leaned forward and asked what it all meant. Without turning his head, the driver replied, “Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railways Employees of America. Don't confuse this here yellow button with the blue one now. Them blue buttons are company buttons. They say ‘Trainmen's Cooperative Association' on 'em, but it's a darn lie. I'll tell you what some citizens do and you can do what you like. They see a blue button and they spit on the nickel before they hand it over.”

“I've got a red button myself,” Charles said.

The driver slowly turned around and gave him a look. “You what?”

Charles didn't think it was exactly with brotherhood that he spoke, but couldn't say for sure that it wasn't, either.

“Red button?” asked the driver.

“Card to tell the truth. You want to see it? IWW?”

The driver only continued to stare.

“Keep your eye on the road, friend.”

“Last man called me ‘friend,' friend, had his tongue ripped out.”

“What a strange world you live in, friend.”

It was a lie: he was no more a Wobbly than Mother was. He was closer at that moment, if such a thing could be measured with any accuracy, to wanting to be the president of the United States than a Wobbly, which was to say, not at all. But he wanted to appear for a moment as a Wobbly, and so he did. The driver turned away, and he spoke no further to him.

He got off at Nicollet, near the ballpark, and stood for a moment listening for the sounds of a game he realized only after a few long seconds he couldn't hear because a game could not be in progress so late in the year,
however wonderfully warm and ideal for baseball the weather might be. The rain came forth suddenly, in blowing sheets, with lightning in the now suddenly black western sky. He got a car north and noted the yellow button. Downtown he walked east, getting soaked but not minding it, to the Milwaukee Road depot and the Chamber of Commerce building, home of the globe-encircling Grain Exchange. He pushed through the doors and immediately got a good looking-over by people in the foyer. The roar of speculation broke and crashed, subsided in a kind of ominous hissing, gathered again, broke and crashed, broke and crashed, then built steadily into a roar that did not break. His thick hair was slicked in broad daggers about his skull, his shirt was plastered to his back, his trousers dark and heavy with rainwater, his feet squirming in clammy beds of stained leather.
Who's this?
everybody passing seemed to want to know. He ignored them and looked over a railed balustrade down into the big octagonal trading pit; then up at the huge French murals celebrating grain and its harvesters—so great on these vast paintings, he thought, and so obscure off them. He looked with some knowledge but not much interest at the giant quotation chalkboards and the tiny women on thin ladders and quaking scaffolds, covered like spinsters in dust, erasing figures and chalking new ones without surcease or visible complaint or difficulty or even, given that he couldn't make out their faces and made his judgments based on posture, care. They had a mark to make and could not know or care what marks were being made at that moment by others of their kind. That was how he imagined their lives anyhow. A group passed near him, a murmur against the roar. A man with a small megaphone walked at its head. “Designed by Misters Kees and Colburn, it is the largest primary wheat market, and the biggest cash grain market, in the world. It is the only commodities exchange offering futures in dark spring northern wheat and sunflower seeds. It is the . . .” and they were swallowed up, bullhorn and all. He mounted a broad marble stairway that led to the mezzanine, where the oceanic sound was much reduced. Halfway up the narrower stairs to the second floor, it was lost entirely. His legs felt heavy, bound by the damp cloth and leaden with anxiety, and where only minutes earlier he'd found the rain almost exhilarating
he was now nearly miserable, as miserable as he ever allowed himself to be, as unsure of himself as he had ever been, as nervous as if he were suffering Chinese water torture. By the ninth floor, the floor to which he'd been directed by Father's cousin's secretary, the blood was banging and clicking in his head and he was breathing in gasps. It was an eerie floor, where nothing seemed to have moved for years, and it amplified what he recognized as akin to stage fright. He found a men's room and retched in a stall. Once his wind and false but necessary sense of self was restored, he stared at himself in the mirror for a long while. No one came in while he conducted that silent, secret interrogation. He splashed cold water on his face, toweled off, ran a hand through his drying, thickening hair.

There was no glass in the door that bore the number he'd been given, and no one appeared in answer to his knock. He paused for a moment, put his hand carefully on the knob, turned it, pulled the door open, and entered the room.

Three men were arranged at the far end of a leather-topped table with green lamps on it. One man was at its head, the other two pushed away from the table in their leather chairs, fanned out and not quite facing him in perfect symmetry, as if they were posing for a photograph. Which of course they were: a photographer banged his tripod exiting another door to Charles's left, next to which he saw, as the door closed, a fifth man sitting on a plain wooden chair with a notebook on his lap, his lips pursed, looking back at Charles over the top of a pince-nez.

“Here's our young daredevil,” said one of the men at the table, a balding man with burning eyes. He stood up: his body was a large soft triangle. “You know he is because he just walked right in when nobody came to the door! Have a seat, Slick.” He smiled ambiguously, a vigorous, good-looking, intelligent-seeming man, Charles thought, but there was something in the way he held his head, thrust it, or in the way he pulled his lips back, widened his eyes . . .

The man at the head of the table, balding too but with larger features and a more expansive, athletic, unruffled, and almost kindly demeanor, looked
Charles frankly up and down. The third man, gray-haired and wearing luxuriant silver moustaches, did not look up from his neat stack of documents.

He thought of all the successful men he had known in his life, all the company men, the men of business and empire, of politics and religion—sound men, powerful men, strong men, overlords and overseers, aides, secretaries, footmen with enough influence to put a thousand men out of work with a wink, men who dressed the king and drank deep choking drafts of humiliation so that they might wear nice suits of clothes and eat real turtle soup. And he thought of the men who had no power and never would but who dressed and acted as if they did: there, certainly, was another kind of false acting, acting that revealed nothing but sordid pathetic fear, pitiful men lashing out with tiny scratching hands, making squeaky threats and running away, hunched over . . . surviving. And he thought of his brothers and their friends from Harvard, the neo-Benthamites, Utilitarians, the “new men” who saw politics as a science, business as a science, not as a means of managing the welfare of the country or distributing its wealth, as Father and his friends saw it or pretended to see it, but as a means of establishing and securing power, demonstrating over and over again their superiority with displays of dismissive affability, bored ignorance of everything but the spectacular wisdom that had landed them so much
loot.
And then there were the men in this room. Instantly he smelled their nauseating corrupt power and waited with dreamlike confidence that was not his own as one by one their hands rose from their laps to find a glass of water or a pen, and he could see and confirm his hallucinatory foreknowledge that, a la Strindberg, they were blackened with use, crusty with blood. These were operational men, men who liked, or perhaps even needed, craved, to go down to the pen to slaughter hogs. They were field generals, crazy men, he figured, and almost admirable for it, men who got up on horses if they were drunk or mad enough, and either dodged bullets and reaped the rewards of notoriety and a grateful country, or were shot down to die in the mud and shit like common slaves. This was a frontier state, he reminded himself. They were all barbarians. Subjugate, wander, forget. That was why Father had currency,
why he had respect and even in some quarters admiration: he lived in the Old West and the New West with equal conviction and consequentiality. Oh, he had all the power Father and Alexander and Andrew had, and more besides, at least potentially, because he saw what might be a way around dogma and God and fear, but he was not sound, not sound. Never really had been. Not in the way a pseudo-democratic oligarchic capitalist had to be.

Charles returned the careful, neutral regard of these three men, these three of the eight commissioners of Minnesota Public Safety, lawyers all, hard, practical, profoundly but carefully unprincipled men.

“A good deal of authority has been invested in us,” said the vain and stately man, still not looking up from his papers. “Mr. Minot, your . . . uncle? Cousin?”

“My father's cousin.”

“Whoever he is has no doubt alluded to our sanction.”

“Oh, surely you know who—they named a town after him in North Dakota!”

“You—what? Yes, oh yes, of course, just a—never mind that. You will need to know a little more about us. That is all I meant to say.”

“But not much more!” the triangular man shouted, laughing in apparent good humor.

“Mr. Minot is my father's cousin,” Charles repeated, hoping to draw the vain but shy man's gaze from his papers. “Not my uncle. He has a town named after him in western North Dakota.”

And that man did so. He was not shy, but so apparently full of undirected hate that it was distracting him entirely. “Is that so?” he said. “Yes, yes, of course, didn't I just say . . .?”

The affable-seeming man said, “We have prepared a report for the edification of our agents, and herewith present it to you.”

Charles was quite sure this man was the governor of the state. He knew the governor sat on the MCPS board but was surprised to see him here, now.

“Do you know,” said the triangular man, “we never thought to ask if you can read and write, Slick!”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said, “I can do all that.”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he chuckled. “The next president of the United States!”

“I can do all that and more besides,” he said, staring first at the triangular man, then at the hateful, vain man, then at the affable-seeming man, the governor.

“‘Do you know,'” mimicked that man, raising his eyebrows in reproach. “I don't see where the profit is, John, in making fun of our agents. Particularly—”

“Well,” said the triangular man, “I do, and that's enough, isn't it? Isn't that what we've been saying here, and agreeing to so tiresomely? My guess is Slick understands me. Slick? What say?”

He had been gesturing at Charles with his head and let one of those nods bring his face fully around to him. Charles took a moment, a stage moment, to smile, feeling it to be a great but necessary expense. “Sure I do,” he said brightly.

“See?” asked the triangular man mock-plaintively.

“His father,” said the affable man, “Theodore Roosevelt himself—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the triangular man. “Begging your pardon, Governor, begging your pardon, Mr. Minot, sir.”