Hillsboro was a town of a thousand people on the Goose River in North Dakota, ten miles from the Red River of the North and the Minnesota border. Its town hall was a brilliant, almost translucent white, with startling black doors, upon one of which was tacked a large white poster with large black lettering announcing an informative speech by a representative of the Nonpartisan League. Next to the hall was a three-story red-brick hotel, called the Wheat Growers. Vera too had watched Daisy as she was met by an old farmer and his wife, gaunt, dark-eyed, windburned people whose hands looked fantastically, almost grotesquely powerful. The man’s legs seemed like tree trunks and the woman’s dress seemed as if draped over iron. Signaling their recognition with sudden white grins that made their dark eyes flash blue, they greeted Daisy. The man shook her hand and the woman embraced her. They moved slowly but surely, their gestures strong and fluid, as if of a heavy viscosity.
Vera looked away and the white hall was now pale red, the hotel orange. Between the setting sun and these few buildings stood nothing. Charles touched the small of her back. A man who had been lounging on the steps of the hall took a step toward them, getting their attention, staring openly at them. Then he furrowed his brow and lit a cigarette. Puffing, he nodded at them and moved off.
“Another secret agent,” Charles said in a stage whisper. “Let him make the first move. Remember who you are?”
“No, who am I?”
“My wife. And you don’t believe in free love.”
“Oh yes,” said Vera. “I am pretending to be delighted, but thinking, no, no, I can’t be two people at once. I get too confused. Something bad will happen.”
“No: you do not have to be two people.”
“Something bad will happen anyway.”
“It’s impossible to be more than one person.”
“Something bad will happen anyway.”
“I fear that is merely your growing dependency on narcotics talking.”
“Something bad will happen and the cause is irrelevant.”
“When you’re high, the assumption that something bad will happen is intact and clear but you don’t care.”
“That is a terribly dispiriting and counterproductive thing to say.”
“When I first met you, you had a very different view of things that happened and why.”
“Yes! It’s remarkable, isn’t it? I was very much in line with the aphorisms of your old buddy the Colonel!”
“Roosevelt? How so.”
“‘Get action. Do something. Be sane. Be somebody. Get action.’”
“The action gets you. Something does you. It’s impossible not to be somebody. It’s insane to think otherwise.”
Vera said nothing. Charles snorted.
“‘Be sane.’ Jesus fucking Christ on a flatcar. The assassin Schrank was only doing what Teddy advised.”
“Teddy’s voice was at least one of the voices he heard.”
“Schrank was getting action and being somebody in the only way he could.”
“I sometimes think that was why, at least part of why, the former president was apparently so unmoved by the bullet in his bone and the blood all over the place.”
“I think you’re right. I don’t think he held grudges. He was moving too fast. I will give him that. I will give him more than that. But I won’t say he hasn’t got it bass-ackward where the self and the act are concerned.”
“He’s not the thinker you are, Chick.”
“I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not.”
“I don’t know, either.”
“My father too,” said Charles, “was a very forgiving man.”
“Not at the end, he wasn’t.”
Vera spoke so softly Charles wasn’t sure what she’d said, or even if she’d said anything. Maybe it had just been a sigh that wanted to be words.
“I can’t forgive the bombers,” he said.
“No,” said Vera.
The sun shone across the flat wind-surging windless-falling land as if it were a simple world of clear light, black dirt, and green plants, of wheat growers and wheat and a little hotel where they could rest when they could not get home.
“I have been—I am—scared to death,” Vera said, completing her thought.
Charles began to suspect the presence of a force, a new kind of gravity, that had begun to draw things unto itself.
Daisy spoke and Vera studied her critically, thinking her altogether wrong for the part. She was too funny for this dry routine. The subject was the “double profits” the millers were enjoying as they shipped grain to Liverpool and war-hungry England. She had a chart that showed the price spread between Duluth and Liverpool, the handling, insurance, ocean freight, and elevator costs, and the amount of the second cut of profit — and Vera, the true performer, thought she was reading her text. It was possible she was simply trying to appear calm and rational, but it was flat, nobody was being moved. Carefully Daisy began to suggest that the war was not a good war, that it was not the war that was being advertised at all. She made reference to a newspaper report that had German women being required by their government to bear children. And then she said that she believed American women would never let themselves be used as “brood sows for future wars.”
Everybody in the hall felt the drop in pressure. Daisy was applauded bravely by a few people in the crowd, but Vera and Charles could see the needle of the barometer moving counterclockwise around the dial. And yet nothing happened.
Charles’s question: Why had nothing happened? He didn’t mean “a dramatic arrest”—he meant “nothing.” The pressure dropped and that was that. Was somebody waiting for somebody else to do something else, something more? Did certain somebodies know less about who all the players were than Charles thought they did? Not likely, but possible. Another slim chance: even dead, Father’s power wasn’t entirely illusory, and he — and by guesswork extension, Daisy — was being handled with kid gloves. And re Father: Why had he not moved to have Charles removed? Was it possible he too had been biding his time — until suddenly he decided his time was up? Did he think Charles might do something politically, actionably, profitably heroic? Or had he — where had he been before he came to rest finally in San Francisco? In New York or London or.? — letting power slip through his fingers like sand? A genuinely good man cannot withstand the vicissitudes that come of power wielded — not forever, he can’t. Hadn’t Father been a genuinely good man? Charles found himself thinking that he had been, whatever that thought might be “worth.”
Perhaps Charles’s removal was underway.
The expected explosion — he paused over the word as it appeared and faded in his brain — over Daisy’s key phrases had failed to occur: was this like an actor forgetting his lines? Or was there a greater script than the actors realized. The force, the gravity, was similar if not identical to the force he felt onstage in ideal circumstances — or even less-than-ideal circumstances. The force he believed he felt. Perhaps in any but the most amateurish circumstances, when the force, if it was present at all, was reversed, repelling all the people and things in the space.
Had he just equated bad acting with detonation, a supersonic exothermic front driving a shock wave through a medium that cannot withstand it?
He had: there was a weird beauty and justice in it, somewhere, somehow. that nevertheless failed to address his certainty that some other kind — or simply degree? — of power was coming into being.