by Les Weil
"Put it in neutral," Munson said. "Set the emergency."
The driver nodded.
"Now get down," Munson said, and the driver appeared, in bib overalls, a middleaged man astonished and bewildered.
"Move my car to the side of the road -park it, out of the way. Lock the doors and bring me the keys." The driver obeyed, and then Munson, without a backward glance, said,
"Get in the truck. You're going to drive me to New York City -Manhattan. You do have some dynamite in the back of this thing?"
"Jesus, mister. . . dynamite? I got two tons of dynamite back there. . . a whole week's supply--"
Munson touched the coil of fuse which he was carrying under his shirt, and the box of fuses which he had in the shirt pocket.
"Excellent," he said. "Let's go."
7
The rest was consequence.
The explosion occurred at a little after ten o'clock, while Munson was taking breakfast in a restaurant three blocks away.
Having parked the truck at the side entrance to (-) Madison Avenue, and armed the explosive with cap and fuse, he had dismissed the driver (who said, "Jesus, mister, Jesus, Jesus ..."); he touched a match to the fuse, and walked away; and no one looked at him -no one spoke.
In the restaurant, the noise of the explosion was formidable, and the walls and floor vibrated heavily; Munson's cup jiggled out of its saucer and spilled coffee onto his right knee.
Munson got up and went out into the street, where he saw people wandering feebly, with their faces turned upward, in a pulverous haze--
"It's the bomb," he heard someone say near him.
"The bomb. . . the Russians have dropped the bomb..." Someone knelt to pray, and in a little while many others were kneeling along the darkened street.
Munson sauntered on.
"God damn' Christians," he said aloud.
The police had lines out, by the time he arrived, so that he could not get nearer to the wreckage than a full block away, but he could see that he had done what he had set out to do. (-) Madison Avenue had tumbled into itself; indeed, the whole block was damaged, and over the ruins hung the dim keening of disaster. In the sky were fighter planes of the Air Force, leaving vapor trails.
At a nearby corner, soldiers were setting up a heavy machine gun, as an illiberal, metallic voice out of a loudspeaker called repeatedly for calm--
Satisfied (having seen a genuine ruin, like those he remembered from the war in Europe), Munson turned away, and set out for Connecticut, to retrieve the Hudson. He understood a danger in this enterprise, and he did not mind it.
He joined the crowds fleeing the city by catching a ride in a Plymouth headed north at a traffic light on Fifth Avenue. A scared insurance broker was on his way to his wife and children in Hartford; Munson smiled, and kept quiet.
By two o'clock, he was into Connecticut, and at four o'clock, having hitch-hiked several times, and walked a little more than three miles, he reached the Hudson.
It was intact, an old green car, and looked lonely and unprotected: Munson had a feeling for it, as for a member of his family.
He got in, and drove back to New York, the only car traveling in that direction; and once again, at his hotel (though not very hopefully this time), he began waiting for the police to arrest him.
They did not come. The next day he listened to radio news reports, read all the papers, and understood that the police would never come; for the Russians (and the American Communists) were being blamed for the atrocity, and the F.B.I. was preparing an announcement.
The chief witness (found in a daze, in Harlem) was one Virgil Whitaker, a truck driver for B. C. Benson Contractors, and he had given a detailed description of the man who had commandeered his truckload of dynamite.
The thief was tall, wore dark clothes, and had a foreign look -"he looked kind of like those Russians on the T.V."
The car he was driving was a foreign car -big and black (probably a Zis limousine, according to police experts, though they had not yet been able to determine whether there had been such a car in the country at the time of the outrage).
In the following week, the F.B.I. made some arrests, the New York police made several raids, and the New York National Guard (one regiment) was called up by the governor for guard duty in the city.
But no significant arrests were made, no indictments sought: the State Department made use of the occasion to deport three military attaches from the Russian legation in Washington, on a charge of espionage.
Munson, facing defeat at the end of a long summer, made one more effort to mark the great world with his signature: he sought out Tom Goad of Saltonstall House, and Tom Goad turned out to be the old man who had silenced the scandal at the funeral of William Oblong.
Without introducing himself, and fearing that he might be expelled at any moment, Munson confessed; he told his tale -that he had shot Bernard Wave, poisoned William Oblong, and dynamited the (-) block on Madison Avenue; and the old man was interested and charmed.
The interview lasted only a few minutes; another appointment was announced for Mister Goad; and there was nothing left for Munson but to return to California -and he was out of money. He had the Texaco credit card, and at most of the stations where he stopped, he was able to persuade the attendant to operate the vending machines for cheese crackers and Pepsi-Cola, and put the small sums required on the credit card bill as gasoline or oil.
And so he reached his home (a little hungry, finally), in that clear weather which comes just before school starts; and he was joyously received.
His children capered about him, for he was a novelty, and even his wife was pleased with him, as she always was for a time after he had been away.
"Did you have a nice trip, dear?" she asked.
"Oh, interesting," he said.
"And did you kill all the people you said you were going to kill?" She smiled at him, archly and sweetly, so that he remembered that he had always rather liked her; and she was pretty -she would do. . . "I saw some stuff in the papers about the Russians -wasn't that awful?- but I didn't see anything about old you . . . "
"I tried, hon'."
"But you were too kind, of course! That's what I thought. After all these years, I ought to know what you're really like."
"Yes, that's true," he said, and knew for a certainty that he had been defeated. "Well, I'm home, anyway." He entered the house, went to the bedroom, and put his .38 back in the dresser drawer; and then his attention moved to the typewriter, shrouded on its table at the inner wall--
"I'm going to give up writing, one of these days," he said.
The Duel
Edward Loomis
Written in a madhouse, by a sane man.
I like to think that in my good days my eyes were shiny, and my best faculties right there at the glittering; and I remember a time (1948 and 1949) of literary accomplishment. I am a novelist, out of luck recently; subjects have been tempting and evading me -in the good days my subjects extended to the limits of my mind, in an adequate light. I looked at things; I was a materialist committed to reason, and so perception was always near at hand. A moralist, I cared for conduct, wanting to improve it, and my leading principle was a rational hatred for religious establishments. I tolerated civilization, and I offered myself to the fact, as its critic.
I was a citizen of the genres. I wanted a tradition to think with, and I found it in the work of Flaubert, Turgenev, Conrad, Henry James. I wanted my figures to be relieved against a background that, as a proposition, would be restrained and just. I was a logician of the literary instincts -a formidable weight in the literary society that I knew; the society was there for me to bear against.
There were poets, and I was impatient with them, for they were easy on themselves; and there were several novelists, of whom the most flourishing was Warren Batzer, who was earning a sumptuous living from his work -his war novel had sold thirty thousand copies in 1950 (a book I hated). I of course had to support myself by teaching at t
he state college.
Batzer was an energetic, almost adventurous man; his name was indistinctly Jewish, and he masqueraded in it as a neutral spirit, above the social strife, and had no Jewish heroes. He was a Communist, perhaps; I believe he expected that when his writing desk no longer amused him, he would like to present himself at the barricade.
As a writer, he was an imitator who could seem clever; and the photographs on his dust-jackets looked belligerent, for he understood that the truth was something to scowl over. His masters were Farrell and Dreiser, he admired Walt Whitman, and he was a Romantic: the enterprise of his life was to make his self remarkable, so that its expression might be interesting no matter what it said. He drank, he tried dope, he was a successful lover (though he was married, and to a pleasant lady).
He was a believer, pedantic in his devotions to Freud and Marx: his characteristic intellectual attitude was a desperate groveling in the beaten tracks of the mind.
-- But he was a man, in his way. He held himself together; he worked, and got through his days. He was a figure, and thus he could be an antagonist for me. We were acquaintances and sometimes almost friends (when my courage was failing me). We saw each other often enough so that a clash was inevitable.
There happened a scene, at a party. His third novel was having a vogue; he had money to spend, and it made him presumptuous. He said, in a loud voice,
"In the next twenty years or so, my novels will carry the important meanings for this generation."
Of course I knew what those meanings were. Batzer was a dilettante anarchist; he hoped to destroy society, and meanwhile he would instruct us all in pleasure. . . . We could have an improved orgasm, and a place in the sun - we could listen to jazz in the daytime.
He was holding a martini glass in somebody's living room, and saying these things; his eyes were bright, and his wife's face was very pale, and her upper lip was trembling. She looked very lovely at that moment (a gentile girl named Susan, from Byrn Mawr, whom Batzer had seduced after a party in New York).
She looked honest and unhappy, while most of the people in the room were looking thoughtful, trying to understand; and suddenly I could not bear to be silent.
I got up, and said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute! Will you let me criticize you?"
"Why, certainly," Batzer said, waving his martini glass. "Old Charlie -"
"I'm serious," I said, and I was ready to fight, immediately.
"Say whatever you like, Charlie!"
"All right. I will. What I like is to curse you -- I mean to call up wrath. Be cursed! May your orgasm be triumphant, and barren your wife's womb! May you-"
"Charlie," Batzer said, and his face was white -his hand trembling.
"Listen," I said. "Before these people I challenge you to a duel -your principles against mine. I'm quite serious about this; you'll know where to find me; I'm a citizen of this city, with a family and a bank account. You go your way, and I'll go mine, and we'll see whose principles survive -we'll know who the winner is, when the time comes for judgment. Remember! One of us will die of this, before his time -Well ..."
"Charlie, you can't . . . I never fought a duel in my life!"
"But you'll fight this one. Or run from the field of honor ... you could do that-"
Then my wife reached me, and whispered something about our baby-sitter. She wanted me to leave the party, with her female sense for the remedy to a social difficulty, and I was willing to go (for I had seen a sticken look in Mrs. Batzer's face, and something like admiration for me, I was sure).
Batzer was standing motionless, and I thought he was trying to look both crucified and humorous . . . somewhere to my right a lady from Palo Alto had spilled her drink, and was fluttering a napkin over the spot on the carpet.
"My wife has reminded me that we've got to relieve the babysitter," I said. "Batzer, old man," and I pointed at him, "you can take this as part of the challenge, if you will . . ."
Then I took my wife's arm and left the room, and almost immediately began considering the possibilities in the duel I had started. I guessed at consequences, and it seemed clear that I had the advantage. My program was intended as a structure to a lifetime: I thought of myself as a student who might learn. I planned to stay fit and hope for good luck, and I meant to invite good luck by soberly conducting myself. I wanted a quiet life and a few genuine literary works.
Batzer's aim was to enlarge the petty moments of life; he was avid of transfiguring torments. His vanity proposed an image of itself as the artist broken upon the impossible; and he could often be observed in a posture of gloom.
I waited for him to do something foolish; but in fact he retired from the view -he went to ground, and I kept the field, in my pride.
You understand, I was a moralist of the practical, worldly sort -I was after justice; inevitably, I had a problem on my hands after my challenge, for Batzer's wife was a friend. I had known her for several years; she admired my work; and I knew the circumstances of her life -Batzer had for some time been keeping another establishment in the Western Addition, for a mulatto girl he had met at a party in North Beach.
My curse had been a considered one -I had intended to challenge Batzer's feckless hedonism (the barren womb!) ... and yet I could not escape the image of the wife, childless and isolated, in her brilliantly furnished apartment.
I took to visiting her there, and this was excessively bold; but I was feeling guilt -as if I had caused her life! A preposterous notion, it had power with me.
I got into a habit of stopping to see her after my classes; she gave me wine, or a drink, as we considered the topics of the day, and this is a banal story, though not without interest in its context. My morality was a little vague in the matter of sex; I had not come to a decision, and still have not --
I recall one afternoon perceiving that she wanted my embrace: until that day we had been scrupulously polite; her thoughts had been secret, and mine chaste.
Interest, that stirred invisibly in the morning's intentions, to bring me to her apartment in the afternoons, normally dwindled after I arrived. Our greetings were formulary, therefore tiring; often there was a difficulty in finding something to talk about.
A sense of duty then kept me civil, and kept her smiling, until her wine had wakened our faculties to a new aspect of an old concern; and then the talk was quick -
On this occasion, however, she said, almost carelessly, "I dreamed about you last night-"
I then imagined the nature of that dream, and wondered only about the form her idea of me had taken. In my teaching clothes? Or naked and comfortable in the bed beside her?
"And I dreamed about you -last week," I said; and it was true -she had been naked and lascivious. I got up, and greeted her. "Susan," I said, and looked at her, who had suddenly become formidable . . . .
I felt an obligation. What was I doing on my feet, stumbling on her carpet? Surely I was making a promise to her by so much clumsiness. I recalled my other duties; I felt a reluctance to be moved by anything outside myself, and this was normal with me.
Sullen and barbarous, I stood there for a moment, and then, not as yet meaning anything, I touched her shoulder, and all was well -the moralist embedded himself in the living moment!
We enjoyed each other, and that was no great matter, of course; but it happened that she got pregnant, and then I had a responsibility.
Powers were invoked which I could not stay: the will of society inclined itself toward me, and the minute deflection was blank and resistant as metal.
The facts are a matter of public record, in the proceedings of the courts that received the divorce actions. Susan (whom I persuaded not to have an abortion) instituted a suit for divorce against Batzer, who filed a counter-suit naming me as co-respondent; and the scandal reached the papers (even in New York and Los Angeles), for it was literary and academic.
I lost my job at the college on the grounds of moral turpitude.
"Haskell," the Dean said, "you know I would
n't give a damn if it were my decision. I hope I'm broadminded enough to -but several of the Regents have taken an interest in the affair..."
"And have they threatened you?" I asked.
"Of course not!" he said.
"Then why do you pay any attention to them?"
The Dean had no answer for that, though he continued talking. At last I said,
"You're afraid I'll write something that will embarrass you. Is that it?"
Then he grew angry, interestingly so; I had not thought him capable of it.
"All right," I said. "I'm on my way, I won't curse you -yet."
When I left, he was pale.
Then I lost my wife and family, too. There was more for my wife to consider than she could be comfortable with, when finally she got the newspapers spread out in front of her; she called in her mother and a brother, and they got a lawyer.
I was asked to leave the house, and I had to go. There was a terrible scene, for everyone behaved well, even the children. My daughter Christine clung to my knees until I picked her up; she then put her small, cool arms around my neck, and kissed me on the cheek. When I put her down, she did not protest -she kept silence, and she smiled.
My son Charles (Junior) presented his right hand for me to shake, and then he too wanted to kiss me.
The children had been told that I was going away on a very long business trip.
My wife said, "Charlie, be good. Don't be a damn fool out there." She was beginning to cry, and so she went inside. After a moment, she called softly to the children, and they leaned towsard her; they had lessons to do before supper.
"Goodbye," I said, and went down to my car. I was thinking that I did not want to go; and I was also thinking that they had no right to drive me away in this fashion.
Something like rage interrupted my grief -but what could I say? For once, I could not find words; and so I passed on, into a new life. I went to Susan, and we set up housekeeping; she bore a child, a boy, whom we named Paul, and we planned to get married when our divorces became final. I worked part-time as a laborer, and continued my writing -the words leaped on the page! -and it was during this time that I saw Batzer again.