by Mark Helprin
“What?”
He pointed at the ceiling, his eyes following heavy footsteps on the catwalk. He counted: “One, two . . . three,” he whispered, even if no one on the roof would have been able to hear him in his normal voice.
“What is it?”
“Three men,” he said, “have hesitated here.”
“Freddy?” Fredericka was about to ask a question she hadn’t yet entirely grasped when they both saw a head appear at the upper edge of the door. Though it was upside down, it was easy to read. The man had long black hair, he was unshaven, his neck was tattooed, and his eyes were like a hunter’s. After discovering them, he was pulled back up.
“Oh Freddy,” Fredericka said, sick with fear because of the cruelty in the man’s eyes.
“I think they’re going to attack us,” he said.
“How do you know?” she asked, hoping that Freddy would not be able to come up with a logical answer.
“No greeting. He surveyed us. It was as if he were shopping for food.”
“What are we going to do?”
Freddy was taking all things into account, too busy for the moment to answer.
“Since we’ve been here, we’ve seen no violence,” she said. “The country’s reputation for violence is much exaggerated, isn’t it?”
“We have no weapon other than the folding knife with the wooden handle. Get it out of your pack quickly but calmly. I don’t know what they may come up with.”
Her hands trembled as she undid the straps.
“Don’t worry. They’re not down yet, you have plenty of time, and they may be peaceful.”
A pair of legs appeared in the upper door, dangling. Then a man slithered down to position himself for a swing and a jump.
“Be calm, Fredericka.”
“I’ve never done this.”
“I’ll do it.”
She came to the clasp knife Freddy had taken from the dental office. Its walnut handle was oiled with time and cracked about the rivets, and the Henckels Solingen steel was as grey as nickel. The handle was five and a half inches long and the blade four inches. Freddy always measured any knife that came into his possession and examined it most carefully. He would then clean it and sharpen it, as he had this one, until it could cut silk in air. She handed it to him.
He opened it, shook it a bit, passed it from hand to hand, all while keeping an eye on the dangling legs, and then folded it and put it in his pocket.
“Oh God, Freddy,” Fredericka pleaded, “can’t we jump?”
“The train’s going too fast,” he said. The man swung to and fro, looking down, and when he saw his moment, let go. He hurtled in, crashed to the floor, and rolled. Then he stood, as if to protect himself, and stepped back. Freddy remained seated.
“Aren’t you going to get up?” Fredericka asked.
“Better this way.”
She was perplexed. It seemed senseless to stay on the floor while one’s attackers were on their feet. New legs appeared on either side. In a short time, two more men were in. They stood together, breathing rather hard and joyfully in light of the fact that they had yet to accomplish anything. Their clothes were piratical, they had universal convicts’ facial hair, tattoos, and bandannas. All that was missing to complete the picture was a good parrot.
“I can’t do anything,” Freddy said to Fredericka, as tranquilly as if they were discussing this over tea at the Connaught, “until they make their intentions clear. It wouldn’t be right to attack them without knowing what they want. They may be just farmworkers.”
“No,” Fredericka said.
The one in a blue bandanna looked alternately at Freddy and Fredericka, like a mouse who looks alternately at the trap and the cheese, and was finally overcome. He grabbed his groin and, popping his pelvis in imitation of copulation, began to strut toward Fredericka. This clarification of his intentions brought forth from the rest of them expressions that clarified theirs.
Freddy addressed them as if giving instructions to a driver: “If you intend to kill me, gang-rape my wife, and then kill her, you should jump off the train while you can.”
The one in the red bandanna reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew a black switchblade that he held ceremoniously in front of his face before he opened it with a shock to the air.
“That doesn’t make the knife any more lethal,” Freddy told Fredericka, like an instructor. “It’s to help them work themselves up. We, too, can work ourselves up.”
She nodded, too afraid to speak.
“First, remember that we are just. Then, that we are conquerors, and not to be conquered. For a thousand years and more we have steadily prevailed. The Vikings who came to our shores were more fearsome and frightening than this, and we dealt with them by raising good yeomen, who were not afraid, and who beat them back. I’m not afraid of a cruel face or Satanic hair, neither of which is a qualification for combat. Nor should you be. If you have to, fight like your ancestors.”
“My ancestors who were knights and generals were not women.”
“If women defend their children, they can fight magnificently well.”
“We have no children, Freddy.”
“We shall.”
“We shall,” Fredericka said, and to the shock of her husband and her would-be oppressors, was the first to charge. Tactically, it was a risk, but it worked, in that the pride of these men obliged them to be amused, and they tried not to handle her too roughly, so as to preserve her for the use they intended. She rammed blue-bandanna against the oaken walls of the freight car and was tiger-scratching him well enough that he was completely distracted.
The other two went for Freddy, who had remained on the floor, one leg almost stretched out and the other partially folded beneath him. Brandishing the knife, red-bandanna came forward expecting Freddy to move, which would have led to a natural placement of the blade. Like cats, knife fighters prefer moving targets. But Freddy stayed still, and red-bandanna, not knowing what to do, looked at no-bandanna and laughed nervously, as if to say, how can I slash him if he’s not moving? Then no-bandanna angrily took the knife and threw himself at Freddy, who caught the knife-hand at the wrist and pulled forward. In sitting, Freddy had a much lower centre of gravity than his assailant, who was on his feet and arched over. Staying low, Freddy pushed him rapidly toward the door, lurching this way and that to knock him off balance, and, after a second or two, tossed him out.
For a moment Freddy watched no-bandanna cartwheel into the airstream, the switchblade following its own trajectory after it was released from his hand. Then Freddy stood. He was a head taller than red-bandanna, who, now terrified, began to strike Freddy with karate blows he had copped from the movies. Freddy blocked each one until he had manoeuvred to a clear space. Then he seized red-bandanna’s arm and bent it back in contravention of the ordinary movement of the joint. Hoping to be released from this agony by being thrown from the train, red-bandanna moved, screaming, toward the south door. Freddy waited an instant for softer ground, and then ejected him with the same push that he customarily used to throw his royal cousins into swimming pools. Pivoting around, he saw blue-bandanna strike Fredericka on the face. Her hands blocked the next blows, but some were getting through, and she was going under.
Freddy ferociously pulled her tormentor aside and broke his jaw with a stunning blow from the right hand. With fury and clenched teeth, he was about to kill him when he realised that it was unnecessary. Seizing the man’s ear, he led him to the door and threw him out onto the prairie. It had all happened in about a minute.
“I’m sorry,” Freddy said to Fredericka, touching her face as she cried, rocking her back and forth. He surveyed her bruises and cuts, saying, “All this will heal. Don’t worry.”
“How do you know they haven’t got back on the train?” she asked.
“The train is going sixty miles an hour, and they didn’t land softly.”
“What if there are others?”
“There probably aren’t,
but, if there are, you know what to do. You were magnificent.”
“Oh,” she said modestly, “that just happened.”
“So did Trafalgar,” Freddy said, “and Waterloo.”
IN KNOT T-SPEAK, what Dewey called the “proposition” this signified that the word it preceded was desirable, of value, and of use to Dewey. The “proposition” that, however, denoted the opposite. Dewey never had to fire anyone. All he had to do was say, “Where is that advance man we hired in Cincinnati?” and Finney passed the word. If on the other hand Dewey were to say, “Who is this blonde in the press office?” Dot would run to her gastroenterologist. It was a primitive system, but it worked so well among those who knew him that he assumed everyone else knew what he was saying when he used differential “propositions,” even if not everyone did.
Shortly after his election to the Senate he had discovered that he no longer had to use verbs. He might say, “Cattle. Fat. Lots’a money. Good year. Farmers. Happy.” This Amerindian syntax suited him well, and the electorate had a sense of what it meant. But very few people knew the full range of Knottisms, such as that when he said, in answer to a town meeting question, “When I’m president, we’ll talk to that country,” he meant he would destroy it, or that if he said, “Dewey Knott will examine this bill,” the bill was certain to pass, because the industry that would profit had just, out of principle, donated several million dollars to the party in soft money that would nevertheless be channelled to Dewey’s campaign. Be-cause someone who seldom uses verbs has even less use for conjunctions, Dewey used that mainly as a demonstrative, which made Finney’s task in deciphering him easier. But Dewey was unpredictable.
On the campaign plane as they made their way back to Washington, Finney felt that he had reached a tranquil ledge of some sort. Down on earth the lights were coming up as the jet pushed east into rapidly falling darkness. Though he hadn’t slept in several days, he felt calm. Dot was in her cabin, with the door shut, in Byzantine conspiracy with nameless aides. Mushrom, rapidly going downhill even as the plane gained altitude, was sitting on a pile of luggage near the galley, a bottle of vodka held by its neck in his left fist as if he were choking a goose. Dewey was in his cabin, listening to be-bop music and reading a cake-decorating catalogue. Finney was wonderfully alone behind his own partition, with a drink on his left, six newspapers on his right, his shoes off, and his bleary eyes watching dim constellations, strings of lighted towns, and silent chains of moonlit mist floating like chimney smoke over the Alleghenies. It was quiet. He had merely three journalists on the line, one to whom he was actually talking and two who were for the moment only blinking red lights.
One was an investigative reporter who, with the tension of an assassin, was tracing rumours that in his youth Dewey had clubbed a seal. Finney said: “I know, I know, I know. That’s what they say. But I tell you, Roberto, I’ve seen him with seals. He loves seals. No guilt, no apprehension. This was before the rumour. He’s definitely pro-seal. . . . I did ask him, and he was vehement, vehement. I give you my word, there are no seals in Nebraska outside of zoos. Yes. Yes. No, I don’t expect you to stop seeking the truth. You should always seek the truth, but this is the truth. Senator Knott never clubbed a seal, has always been pro-seal, and as president will continue to be pro-seal. . . . That’s Canada, Roberto. We can’t promise to invade Canada to stop seal clubbing. What? Yes, I know they’re just Canadians, but we still can’t invade. Well what about the president? He’s president already, and we haven’t invaded Canada, have we? Can I say this off the record? We’re off the record, right? I have no idea if this is true or not, but a source I have who was a classmate of the vice president tells me that, when the vice president was in college, he made disparaging remarks about otters. I’d look into that if I were you. Yes. Yes. Even jokes. That’s right.”
While Finney was having this conversation, his end of which he could have held up in his sleep, he was reading editorials and analysing poll data. The second light was the Bhutan Register-Bee, calling for the fifteenth time about a one-on-one interview Dewey would never grant because no one in Bhutan voted in American presidential elections, and the Bhutanese community in the United States was, in Dewey terminology, not exactly the biggest enchilada on the tray. All Finney had to do was tell them gently that he didn’t think it would be possible, and, unlike American journalists, who would at that point inflict upon him a thousand ferret bites and make ten thousand threats, the Bhutanese would apologise profusely and hang up. The third light was a reporter for a woman’s magazine who wanted Dewey’s—specifically not Dot’s—recipe for fried chicken. The angle was that, because of “the new androgyny,” Dewey should have the recipes and Dot should do woodworking and subscribe to Field & Stream. By the time Finney had picked off the other two lights and taken Naomi Schreckstein’s fried-chicken call, he had finished his drink and was dreaming of living in Bhutan, with a deferential Bhutanese wife, on top of a mountain with views of half the world, and lots of heat and hot water.
“Naomi.” He hated her. “Yes, I did. I asked him. Do you want the fried chicken he makes at home for a romantic dinner with Dot, or the fried chicken he makes for large groups?” She asked for the romantic dinner. “He changes the recipe sometimes, but, basically, you take two and a half pounds of fryer parts, bind them up with twenty or thirty feet of titanium wire, and attach each end to a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-volt power source. Brush the trussed parts with single malt Scotch, shake a mixture of saffron and tapioca over it, plug in the wires, and, as it cooks, baste with Coca-Cola.” She had stopped typing. “Yes,” Finney told her, “I’m serious. He got the recipe from Justice Izzblind. Saffron, did I forget the saffron?” She typed the rest and went to file. Finney had a clear conscience, because this was, in fact, the way Dewey cooked fried chicken, and it was delicious, even if, as it was cooking, it tended to explode.
For a moment, all was quiet. No phones, no blinking lights except those of distant cities in the dark and planes speeding silently west; editorials finished; polls analysed; only the steady sound of engines thriving in air. In near silence high over eastern Kentucky—to the north, Cincinnati looked like a blazing star, and beyond it Cleveland was but a glow—Finney was at the same altitude as Bhutan. He was just about to rest when suddenly Dewey burst in.
“Where’s this Lachpoof guy?” he asked. “That Lachpoof guy . . . who the hell is he? What are we going to do about that guy? This guy’s crucial. He’s a pain. What a speech! He fixed my tooth. Is it what the voters want? I don’t want defeat to slip through my hands again. Whatever it takes. If it takes that guy. . . . Finney, find this Lachpoof.”
“That or this, Senator?”
“Doesn’t matter. Do we not know where he is?”
“You do?”
“What?”
“You know where he is?”
“No, where is he?”
“I don’t know,” said Finney. “Wait a minute.” He picked up the phone and called the intelligence agencies’ liaison at campaign headquarters in Washington (the candidates needed frequent briefings). “You know the Lachpoof guy, Dr Moofoomooach?”
Finney nodded to Dewey Knott. They knew. They read the papers. That’s how they did their job.
“Do we not know where he is?”
“No I don’t,” Dewey protested.
Finney put his hand over the mouthpiece. “No,” he said to Dewey, “Do we not . . . know where he is.”
“I toldya, I don’t have a clue.”
“Do we! Do we!”
“You’re drunk.”
“No, I’m not.”
“No, I’m Knott,” Dewey said, “and I don’t like it when you say my name like you’re calling a pig.”
“No, Senator, I said ‘Do we not,’ as in ‘Are we not?’ ”
A fierce look came over Dewey. He pointed his right pinkie threateningly at Finney, and said in a low growl so that the press in the back of the plane wouldn’t hear it, “It’s okay if, sometimes, when you
’re drunk, you push the limit with me, Finney. But, Finney, don’t ever, ever, screw around with my uncle. I get crazy, you know.”
“Your uncle, Senator?”
“I loved my uncle. Good man. I don’t care if I’m president or not, don’t insult my family.”
“You never told me about your uncle, sir. Who was he?”
“My uncle Arwe, my father’s older brother, an enzyme in the navy. Watch your tongue. I mean it.”
“I’m sorry.”
Only now did Finney remember a picture in Dewey’s office of a man at a Midwestern carnival, cotton candy in hand and a broad smile across his face. Once, Dewey had pointed to it and said, “Arwe Knott having fun.” Now Finney understood.
Dewey looked down rather sadly. “Can’t bring those days back—the China Station, Babe Ruth, no air-conditioning, Wild Root Creme Oil. Find him.”
“Arwe?”
“No, Lachpoof.”
“What if we can’t?”
“Then I lose the election. What am I supposed to do, go back to Siliphant? I’d rather kill myself.”
Dewey left. Never had Finney felt more for him. Dewey was not as insensate as he sometimes appeared: he suffered. Dewey ducked back in. “He’s a dentist, for Chrissake. Dentists are not counterfeiters, they leave tracks, big tracks, should be easy to find, get on it.”
IN LESS THAN TWO DAYS, Freddy and Fredericka were carried into the landscape of the Mountain West, which was sometimes a desolate moon-place and sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful. Even were you used to it, it kept opening up to you and pulling you in. It was as wide and bright as the sea, but you could walk across it, rise into the meadows of its mountains, and move forever in its sinuous riverbeds and across its high plains. It was so wide that it was virtually untouched, its settlements having little sense of permanence. None of its cities was anchored even half as much as Boston, Bath, or Marseilles. Though the water gushed upwelling or was piped and pumped, by instinct not a single living thing trusted that it would keep running. Thus everything was as ephemeral as the quick and disappointing rains, and except in the mountains that waylaid Pacific clouds, the land was too dry to have a long history or a permanent future. Still, it was beautiful, a transient paradise for transient souls, a place of little record and less contemplation, but of a present that burst forth like a river in sunlit leaps through the gorges its ancestors had prepared for flight.