He had felt the supersonic exothermic front driving the shock wave only as one feels the wave of ocean water after it has crashed on the beach, when it is all but spent and about to recede, back into that from which it had come, a tremendous but dying energy — lapsing, paradoxically, not into quiescence or something “lesser,” but into a greater energy. He had felt it twice, the waves each time strong enough to knock him down, but only because another body had taken more of the blow before it reached him, and he was quite sure he understood how it ripped a hole in one kind of reality, exposing another kind of less stable reality; and he had witnessed a far greater force, perhaps the greatest force in the universe, visible, apprehensible, for only as long as it took to cause everything he had before that point assumed to be the only reality to disappear; and he had seen in its wake an apparently equally relentless force recreate, rebuild, make visible once more what had disappeared. He had felt the impalpable, incomprehensible, so-called psychological gravity of two actors acting selflessly on a stage and drawing thereby the concentration of a hundred or two hundred “observers.” But what was happening here, now, was different.
The next stops were Fargo and Moorhead, where nothing — it was preposterous now — other than angry shouting and angry applause in a cold wind under a low, dark, swiftly but barely perceptibly moving sky, like a dark turbulent river, also happened. Small groups of rough-looking men glowered and spat threateningly and told them to get out of town, as if they were in a play. Charles, imagining himself to be a person who could no longer be “troubled” in the ordinary sense, did not think he could be more troubled in the ordinary sense — which was even more troubling in the extraordinary sense he had reserved for himself and Vera. The bomb had exploded on his stage in San Francisco. Now, here, where gunfire was expected to erupt, where he had planned on it, according to a very real sort of script that he had not actually seen but which he believed with all his heart existed, where the explosion of a bomb had to be considered a strong possibility, seeing that improvised violence was the modus operandi everybody had tacitly agreed to, here there was only a group of bad actors in the shadows, representing “consequences” in a way that seemed only sordid, cowardly, contemptible.
Get out of town?
They did. They cut across the state, out of the wheat and into the woods, into Big Timber, to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where Wobbly strikes had been failing for a decade — failed very much in the way a man might enter a wood, walk strongly and confidently for a while, only to find at the first moment of doubt that he was lost.
The two Wobblies who had in fact gone missing more than a month earlier were still missing.
Several people had told them that Bemidji would be the big stop, that there would be trouble, and someone in Chicago had even gone so far as to counsel against Bemidji, against even getting off the train to stretch their legs. The question was: Who was the someone in Chicago — nominally from the IWW, but did they know that with working certainty? — and was he speaking out of genuine concern for their welfare, or was there worry that the NPL would have some kind of “success” in Bemidji? If so, who did not want NPL success in Bemidji. The MCPS certainly — but how, in this hypothetical scenario, had the MCPS managed to influence the Chicago Wobblies? The Chicago Wobblies were as pure a current as could be, even in the most turbulent stream.
Were they not?
Three telegrams awaited Charles at the Paul Bunyan Hotel.
The first: DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH IWW.
The second: DISAVOW ANY CONNECTION WITH TROUBLEMAKERS CLAIMING ASSOCIATION WITH US.
The third: YOU ARE OPERATING WITHOUT USUAL SANCTION. PLEASE EXPLAIN.
The news that certain “watchdogs of loyalty” had become “junkyard dogs of loyalty” and were embarrassing and compromising the MCPS was of course not news. Disavowal of a relation between the MCPS and the IWW was something else that went without saying, making the saying, of course, profoundly suspicious. And while the whereabouts of the two missing Wobblies remained unknown, “a drifter” had been found dead. His identity and the circumstances of his end were not known. As for the lack of usual sanction: he had it. He had it in writing, in his briefcase, as was usual with sanction. If whoever had telegraphed him was under an impression to the contrary, it could mean one of two things: sanction had been reconsidered and made to disappear, perhaps like the Wobblies but with the additional pretense of “never having existed in the first place,” or the divided house that the MCPS always had been, perforce — how could so many powerful men agree on any notion of safety, public or otherwise? — had become dangerously destabilized.
The women wore dresses with flower prints, anticipating by days or perhaps weeks the actual blooming of spring, the men clean overalls, some with a tie and some without. Charles overheard one man defend his tie by stating the business here was every bit as solemn as the business of a Sunday morning and he would show it a like respect. Some men and women looked about themselves, eager to share their outrage, while some laughed and conversed. A few smoldered, moving awkwardly about with hatred and fear constricting their limbs and faces — lungs, hearts, stomachs too. The same man who’d defended his tie said, “I agree that times are bad, but I don’t care to be told how to do a thing, neither by the railroads nor by the socialists.” A line of men stood at the back of the hall, and Charles could not say if they were embarrassed to be there or had a darker purpose in mind. To his left he felt Vera stiffen; he turned and saw the man he’d seen at the Hillsboro town hall.
“Excuse me,” said the man, his face suddenly, without Charles having noticed the movement, very close to his own, smiling. “Are you one of Winter’s people?” He looked and acted like an overzealous salesman.
“You betcha,” said Charles. “I am a man for all seasons.”
The man cocked his head stupidly, and Charles crossed himself for no apparent reason. Then he nodded as if with unction. The man stepped back and looked at Charles, as if not terribly amused but willing to play along. Charles crossed himself again, with a hint of truculence, and nodded. Then he said he knew John Winter. He knew him better than the man knew his own daddy.
“All right,” said the man. “Stay here and listen to what she says and then—”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, bud,” Charles interrupted him.
“Where’s your notebook, sport?” the man demanded in an angry whisper that caused spittle to form. “I’m going to get the sheriff. I’ve already got some folks lined up to press charges.”
Charles had his little black notebook out and was flapping its cardboard covers at the man’s face like a yapping mouth. “You do that.”
When the man went out the door, Daisy came in. She looked long and hard at Charles and Vera as she walked past them. She made her way to the front of the hall, mounted the platform, and moved behind the podium. After a moment, the quack and whine of voices settled, and she began her speech. She got through the “double profits” section and started in on the war. She mentioned the newspaper report dealing with the forced impregnation of German women, then repeated her belief that American women would never let themselves be used as brood sows for future wars, at which point three men and three women left their seats and departed the hall. The men at the back began to boo and heckle her. She continued to speak without seeming to notice, as the action seemed rather perfunctory, rehearsed as things are rehearsed in the early days of rehearsal — not menacing or even intrusive. When she was done and the audience was making for the doors, the sheriff and several deputies walked in, bowling people out of the way until they got to Daisy, who paled and stepped back. People still in the hall stopped in their tracks, and a few outside came back to crowd the doorway.