The Daredevils (50 page)

Charles and Vera watched from the library steps through curtains of snow. Unable to make out features, they saw arms raised, hands waving and shaking, a little white face turned their way, then a black back as the speaker turned toward another part of his audience. There was a steady flow of torches from one side of the park to the other, great brilliant masses of them now, like bonfires, before the platforms, and dark masses of men floating like islands in a polar sea. A number of men had materialized around them. They stood with their hands shoved deep in their pockets, their faces tucked into collars like nesting birds.

“What a lot of shit this is.”

“Filthy cowards.”

“Lying, cheating, stealing, murdering sonsabitches. I guess they'll murder us too, if they feel like it.”

The steps were slippery with snow. They held the lunchbox closed and made their way across the park to the company platform. Speakers and company officials sat huddled around coal braziers while speaker after speaker said things like, “Now, you men, you listen to me because you know
I'm talking sense. This country is at war and we're asking you to set aside your grievances for the duration and pitch in like the good goddamn men we know you to be.”

And there was McGee, in the middle of one of the semicircles. His face looked dark and raw and red, bulging out from a fur cap, the flaps of which covered his ears and were tied under his chin, so that his side-whiskers curled out girlishly. But for the dark hatred on his chapped face, he might have been some strange overgrown baby girl. He was standing with the Ramsey County Sheriff. Charles and Vera drew near: “Do not buckle under!” McGee was shouting. “We do not want the extra policemen here!”

Charles had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Was McGee trying to defuse a disaster? Or was he trying to make a bigger one.

Better to be a good man than to darken the hills with your ponies, he thought. That was what Crazy Horse's father had said, or was said to have said—according to Father, who revered the wisdom almost as much as he did Montaigne's. Well, Charles thought, but what was a good man? How did one describe him, what did he do? Truth excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and is therefore not competent to punish in its name. Someone else had said that. According to Father.
I am all wrong, wrong wrong wrong, I am a dangerous fool, I have no idea what I am doing but I am flying into it like I am walking onto a stage. OH YES! I WAS BORN TO ACT! But no: If I attempt to punish McGee, then, as a proxy for other bad men, I will have to consider myself a bad man. Can I live with such a consideration? Very likely I can; many men evidently do. It was perhaps a basic human condition, badness. But more practically, could I withstand the counter-punishment of the state?
Did it not make more sense, as some revolutionaries held, to do the deed and then escape, to “lie close and keep yourself for another go”? To surrender when there was no other way out, claim the act and pay the price? Violence was innate to human nature: ACT! One could see it in the daily lives of the calmest, most reasonable people. One could see it in the happiest and most secure children. It came from having one part or feature or function of a
person, character, mind, opposed to another part or feature or function. It was there and that was all there was to it. It was the source of drama; the only question was one of expression, of art. The undivided self was the illusion! The undivided self—was shouting this aloud now? Vera was looking at him like she was listening and growing afraid of what she was hearing—the undivided self is the Pure Form, the Pure Idea, a Platonic Ideal, which is the source of our desire for it. We can only look back to it, worship it, and hold fast to our current stage of degeneration lest we degenerate further. It came from God and is steadily degenerating: soon we will no longer be able to recognize ourselves as human, and the world will end. These things go in cycles! Charles shouted to Vera. This isn't reality! This world! Our bodies! That's what Plato took from Pythagoras! You see? And from Parmenides he understood that REALITY, REAL REALITY, IS ETERNAL! ALL THE LITTLE CHANGES WE IGNITE AND ENDURE: PURE ILLUSION! STRONGER AND STRONGER ILLUSION THE LONGER WE SURVIVE! AND THEN THERE'S HERACLITUS! CAN YOU GUESS? THE SENSES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED! INTELLECT, DIVINE EDUCATION, ALONE CAN KEEP US SAFE FROM OUR ENEMIES AND WELL FED!

Some of the carmen were hooting in derision and throwing snowballs at the company speakers.

“Next,” Charles said, ceasing abruptly to philosophize, “they will build little igloo forts.”

A man came very close to them and whispered fiercely that they were to go to the other goddamn side of the park. They went straight across the park to the union platform, where they recognized men from the NPL, the IWW, and an attorney for the Equity Cooperative Exchange—all of whom would be arrested, that night or the next day—and the mayor of Minneapolis. “We are all patriotic men,” one of them was saying. “We love our country as we love our families, and that is precisely why the demand for a union is a good one, an honest one, a reasonable one, one that cannot be denied by men of equal conscience and patriotism.”

And as if a signal had been given (they supposed that one had), fist-fights began to break out here and there. They did not last long: blows were tentatively exchanged, and shoves and taunts, and then torches would arrive, the circle would be lit, and one combatant would disengage and disappear into the crowd. Then a streetcar stopped, its scab operator tossed from it and beaten. Carmen rallied around the car, and squads went off to stop other cars, beat other scabs. An order went round the perimeter for the soldiers to discharge two or three rounds into the air.

The crackling, rippling explosions went round the park like distant thunder, muffled by what was quickly becoming a blizzard. People could now be seen running up and down the streets radiating from the park, but the dark churning clots within the park only seemed to have grown in size and multiplied in number. It was Vera's vision of death made manifest! The fistfights had ceased to be punch-and-run; they were bloody now, melees instead of boxing rounds. Bricks and stones and clubs were being hurled at both platforms. Pieces of wood were lifted from the platforms and used as shields. Then thugs appeared on the union platform and all the speakers fled. One thug looked straight at Charles and Vera, hauled the podium above his head, and sent it crashing at their feet. Miraculously they did not move a muscle.

Charles thought that he could kill
that
man if he wished to and it made him implausibly immoveable and somber.
Oh, here is my lovely illusion of undividedness come to save me!

Vera had disappeared. Sidestepping fighters, ducking flying objects, and even like a halfback fending off men who tried to tackle him, Charles followed the man who'd thrown the podium at them across the park again to the company platform. There was Vera staring up at another man, who looked like a horrible statue. It was the San Francisco detective, the railroad specialist Rudy Swanson, and one of his soldiers, a red-haired man she was sure she had seen repeatedly in the Beveridge motorcycle shop, boasting that he was, what, that he was going to fix a big Ford headlight to his Excelsior . . .? And thereby make it easier to ride at night . . .? And eclipse Iron
Man's record run from San Diego to Yuma . . .? Yes, she could hear him speaking those words, see it all so clearly. She decided this was the man who had actually killed Lucy and John and Amado. As if conversing in a warm parlor, she said as much to Charles.

Charles snapped his fingers and shouted, “IT WAS YOU, WASN'T IT, YOU GREASY STUPID LITTLE SHITSUCKER?”

Because they were so clearly spiritually bound, tied more surely and lovingly than blood or money could have made them, he was not surprised to see McGee and Swanson together. Rather, he was relieved. Still: he had to admit he didn't know what was going on, who was arguing for what, what sort of consequence might ensue, what sorts of rewards might accrue.

Swanson's mouth was drawn down in a kind of pout, and he was blinking spasmodically, as if he were struggling not to cry. He looked anything but crazy or angry, but he snarled at them, at Vera and at Charles, out of that nearly impassive but blink-blink-blinking terrifying statue face that he was “going to start picking them off.” And he laughed. “Fucking cold out here, eh Minot?”

Charles climbed calmly but quickly up the front of the platform and came at Swanson, so casually that his intent was perceived as perfectly ambiguous. McGee stood where he was but Swanson backed up a step, then held his ground. When they were face to face, Swanson said, “Hey, you better light that fuse, mister.” Both Swanson and the red-haired man had guns in hands, dangling at their sides.

Charles jumped off the platform. Slipping in the snow, he went to his knees, clutching the lunchbox to his belly, inside his coat. Still on his knees, he craned just in time to see a brick flush against Swanson's face, as if an invisible hand were holding it there—and then Swanson was flat on his back and rolling from side to side. McGee had fled. Charles got to his feet. The red-haired man shot him once in his left thigh, and once more in the right, blowing the kneecap apart. He jumped off the platform, evidently ready to light the fuse and let Charles be the casualty.

Three other men appeared around them, one of them holding Vera lightly by the arm, as if he was going to help her up onto the platform.
“BLOW THAT THING NOW!” one bellowed. “LIGHT IT AND THROW IT IN THERE!” And he pointed into the dark raging park, at the swirling snow and the fires and the bloody faces looming into view and disappearing again. “WE ARE SUPPOSED TO GET OUT OF HERE NOW! THEY'RE GOING TO OPEN FIRE!” Another bomb went off and everybody went to their knees. It had been planted under the union platform, which had already been deserted. Now there was screaming and the park was emptying fast. Swanson and the red-haired man were gone. Charles tried to hold the bomb under his coat with hands that no longer felt like his own. His legs were off in some other Pythagorean place. His coat was ripped open and while one man held Vera in a bear hug, the other two held him down. One got hold of the lunchbox and opened it. Then he lit the fuse and all three men ran slipping and falling away. Charles croaked at Vera to run. He felt quiet and undivided and happy and free again, but she appeared unable, perhaps unwilling to do so, to leave him, it was very hard to see. Then, because it was not real, after all, he thought that was what she said, she took it from him and ran several steps as fast as she could away from him, then fell on top of it.

She might have been shot, he was never sure. There was a great soundless flash of brilliant glorious light that shot along the horizon and billowed upward to zenith carrying her everywhere at once. It blinded him for a moment and when he could see the dark shapes of the trees against the white snow and the fairy buildings soaring up into the night sky again, she was gone.