by John Gardner
For half an hour she walked back and forth from the window to the attic door to the window, keeping herself in shape. She bent twenty times to touch her knees, put her hands behind her head and wagged her elbows back and forth, clapped her hands above her head until her arms were tired, then climbed up in bed and ate an apple and, at last, settled to her book. She’d been looking forward to it. She was close to the end, where you expected some excitement. And what did they give you? A long, boring chapter full of some queer irony, the whole thing preachy, preachy, preachy! Luckily, much of it was missing. She looked up from time to time in angry indignation, feeling cheated, fiddled with. “Oh!” she cried out once, clapping the book shut and half inclined to tear out more pages. She read on, in the end, only to find out how far these people would dare go.
14
THE TRIAL OF CAPTAIN FIST
Again the earth rumbled and a tremor went through the rocks. “It’s nothing,” said Mr. Nit. “—I think.”
Dancer stood on a table of rock near the entrance to the cave, with Captain Fist bound and gagged on his right, and all the people seated in front of him and to his left, a great, dark multitude watching and listening, though none of the Mexicans knew English. The barren basin of Lost Souls’ Rock was full of the deep red flicker of torches. Santisillia, the Indian, and the crew of the Indomitable sat in front, looking at neither Dancer nor the Captain.
“Brothers and sisters,” Dancer said, “we gathered together this day for the purpose of blasting this here Captain Fist. But first we gonna give him a fair trial and see if he’s guilty. Now I’m gonna tell you in the first place, since I’m the prosecution, I’ve had some experience with this man myself, and in my experience he’s a shit-eatin, motherfuckin, baby-killin, lady-rapin faggot.” He whirled to point at Fist. “He’s a lowborn unprincipled traitor against humanity, and a false ideal for youth, if you understan me. He’s a subhuman animal that stinks worsen shit or even hair burning. He’s murdered people and he’s buggered people, and all he is is putrefaction, and I mean he ain’t fit to commingle with even damn vermin, so we’re here to justice the dude.” He paused, chin lifted, dark glasses in his hand, his violent black eyes flashing. Abruptly, he pointed at Santisillia. “Firs witness!”
Santisillia stood up, smiling a little oddly, marijuana in his pipe.
“Raise your hand,” Dancer said. “You swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothin but the truth so help you God?”
Santisillia shrugged. “Man, who wants truth?”
“Truth and the whole truth,” Dancer said. “Start talkin.” He sat down, furious, watching like a wolf. The firelight turned his dark glasses red.
Santisillia turned toward the people and stood looking, shaking his head as if this couldn’t be happening. At last he spoke. He put on the stage accent like a ceremonial mask.
“I read in a book once, ‘Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.’”
He smoked and seemed to think about it, looking at the Captain.
“But what is a hero? If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could be no history of truths. And what is a saint? If there were one single eternally right religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. However well developed a man’s consciousness may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over his developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, even betraying the hidden power of cosmic directness. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a cast of Time’s net over Space.”
Dancer half rose, aiming the machine gun in Santisillia’s direction. “Hey, quit that. Lay down what he done.”
Santisillia nodded.
“I don’t mean that eternal truths don’t exist,” he said. “Every man possesses them—a thousand of them—to the extent that he exists and exercises the understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable fixtures—ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premises and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition …
There was a gap of several pages.
… influence. Captain “Fist is Lucifer himself, the ultimate revolutionary. Or worse.—Or better.—Depending on your point of view. He does not revolt in the name of good. He denies the system, rejects its laws, reduces its history to nothingness by a resounding Deus sum! Behold the true Son of Liberty! There are no laws but the laws of Captain Fist. There can be no just and lawful judgment but the judgment handed down by Captain Fist! Would you try a man by a system he never subscribed to, never believed in for a minute? How can you call a man guilty except by the laws he acknowledged and broke? Is a lion guilty? A scorpion? Killing is the work of animals. Why should I philosophize the bestiality of a certain society’s ‘justice’ into ‘reasonable’ law? Much that was criminal a hundred years ago is not criminal in the same society today. Much that is criminal today will be legal, I assure you, the day after tomorrow. God’s laws are not our laws.”
He stood as if awaiting an answer. At last, he took a puff from his pipe, shook his head, and sat down.
Dancer said, “What the fuck?” Then: “How come you on his side, you crazy Luther? Man, this is beautiful!”
He turned to the people angrily, as if Santisillia’s speech were entirely their fault.
“Listen! This Captain Fist shot me, understand? He blown up this here nitro-glycerin truck and they was peoples laid out like it was wartime, man, and Russians was throwing round atomic bombs. He wrecked our car one time, another time he sunk this boat we had. He got us arrested one time, and another time he come up and got us in a alley and beat us black and blue and made us go wif him, all except Dusky, because Dusky got away, like he always does, and Fist made us go help him bail out his mother-fucking boat. It’s beautiful, man! He makes people do his work and he makes ’em slave till their noses bleed, and if they die of it, man, he don’ give a damn purplegreen shit. Now you gonna tell me that ain’t against the law?
“Listen! People’s got hopes and aspirations, that’s only natural. And a man comes along and he stands in the way there, and he won’t let ’em get at their hopes and aspirations—well that ain’t natural. We all in this together, you understand? And this man sets himself up like God, you dig? and he says, ‘All you people here’s working for me, and you got no rights and privileges, dig? Because I’m God, Jack, and you people just human beings, worsen animals, right? and you’re all crazy slobberin sex maniacs and lazy good-for-nothings and you ain’t no better than dogshit.’ We gonna take that, brothers? You gonna say that’s the law? Now I want you people to get yourself together and make some sense. I’m gonna call my next witness.” He turned on Peter Wagner. “You!”
Peter Wagner looked grieved, faintly dopey, like a man roused out of sleep. He stretched his hands out helplessly. “Why don’t you just go ahead and shoot him?”
Dancer waited.
Peter Wagner stood up, silent, puffing at his pipe. The Mexicans all smiled, clapping, stomping their feet, encouraging him. He glanced at Dancer’s machine gun, then at Jane. “Very well,” he said. He put one hand on his hip and extended the other.
“Luther’s told you the Captain’s an existentialist,” he said, “a man who defines the whole universe by the fact that he happens to be in it. He’s told you the only laws the Captain knows are the ones he makes up. You all understand, of course, that we could fix that. Simple. We could all vote and make up a set of laws and demand that the Captain obey them or get out. In other words, we could start the whole process of civilization over. It’s an amusing idea.” He smiled, showing his teeth. He didn’t look amused. “That’s how the whole thing probably started in the first place—a bunch of outlaws in some prehistoric jungle or valley, bored to tears by always getting their stuff swiped, their children getting killed, certain people doing all the talking … But we’ve been through all that now, we understand the problem. Societies evolve. The freedom th
at law hands out is always yesterday’s freedom. Freedom for the few, or the freedom of a horse with blinders, otherwise called blinkers: he’s free to look straight ahead. The only real free state is the one governed, second by second, exactly as each man within it wants it to be governed that second. Which is impossible. So you and I, sensible people, have become anarchists. Outlaws. Or rather we have become, like everyone else, scoff-laws. You people more or …
Another gap.
… a world so feminized that revolutionaries with slogans of death and home-made atomic bombs are softly analyzed, generously understood. Imagine a whole planet of big-boobed girl Congressmen—”
“That’s enough!” Santisillia broke in. He was on his feet, angrily shaking his fist. “He’s crazy. His testimony’s useless. He’s got a woman thing.”
“That’s not true,” Peter Wagner shouted. “I’m presenting Captain Fist’s point of view.”
Dancer scratched his head. “Man, somebody got to present the other side.”
“I’m saying he hates women,” Peter Wagner said. “I’m saying he only had two choices, to turn on them and on everything that reminded him of them with rage and scorn, or accept them, be swallowed up like the rest of us in effeminate softness and confusion—give in to a world where ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst—’”
“I still say he’s got a woman thing,” Santisillia said.
“You’re crazy,” Peter Wagner shouted. “Women are my gods, my eternal torment. You, you got a theology thing!”
Dancer thought about it, scowling intensely. Finally he made his decision. “Sit down, you faggot.”
Peter Wagner sat down.
Mr. Nit’s testimony was short and to the point. “The whole thing is a matter of mechanics,” he said. He popped his knuckles, suffering from stage-fright. “The Captain was born ugly, which got him into fights, which left him uglier and uglier, by perceptible degrees. Finally he was so horrible he had to live by his wits. As a general proposition, it is safe to say that all causes and effects are physical, and that every so-called moral cause can eventually be factored to a willow switch or a pat on the cheek. This has been shown in laboratories. It is possible to teach the highest pitch of religious zeal to a war ant, or something indistinguishable from tender affection to a fruitfly. I might take, for example, the example of eels—”
“That won’t be necessary,” Dancer said. He pushed him away. “You all crazy. You’re God damn fuckheads!” He called Jane to the stand.
She said, after a moment’s hesitation, “Listen, Dancer, why don’t we simply ask Captain Fist if he’s guilty?” She asked it so innocently, so sweetly, her comic-book blue eyes so wide, that Dancer was stopped.
“That’s stupid,” he said without conviction. “You’re as crazy as they are! He’d just lie.”
“What’s the difference?” she said. “It’s his trial, after all. How would you feel if it was your trial, and they kept you tied up like that all the way through it and never even let you speak?”
“If that man goes and contempts this court—” Dancer said.
“Oh come on, Dance,” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder.
He glanced at the others. The Mexicans all smiled and clapped. He took a deep breath. His face squeezed.
“Somebody go take the gag off the motherfucking Captain and drag his ass over.”
Tears of perhaps gratitude rolled down the Captain’s cheeks.
The people stirred approvingly as Santisillia and Mr. Nit carried the Captain forward, bound hand and foot, tied up from end to end like a bundle of rags. The women whispered among themselves or hushed their crying babies. (As soon as his face had come out of the shadows, the babies had all begun to cry.) The men said nothing. They’d had dealings with him and regretted that he wasn’t in more pain. At last he was standing on the speaker’s rock, his bound hands clinging to the head of his cane, leaning on it slightly. His feet were so tightly tied together that he couldn’t move an inch. Santisillia threw more wood on the fire. It flared up, lighting the underside of Captain Fist’s jaw and his tumor-fat belly. The crowd fell silent.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Fist said, “I thank you for this opportunity.” His voice was a whisper, full of emotion. His whiskered, horrible face twitched and jerked as if the muscles were fish in a sack. Tears streamed down his cheeks, his shaggy eyebrows glistened with sweat. People hissed. He endured it in silence, with a pained, dignified smile, tears streaming down his cheeks and nose. At last the crowd was still again.
“I have been deeply moved by these men’s defense of me.” People booed. Again he waited.
“Excuse me,” he said, looking mournfully at Dancer, “might I get you to untie my feet? I like to pace when I talk. When I can’t pace I can’t think. Actually, it’s not fair, in a sense. It’s like asking a man to defend himself when he’s drunk.”
Dancer stood still, as if he hadn’t heard, but he was thinking about it. At last, with a ferocious jerk, he crossed to the Captain and, in the spirit of fair play, flipped his switchblade from his pocket, and cut the ropes that bound the foul old man from the waist to the feet. Then he went back to his place without a word and stood waiting, casually aiming the machine gun at Captain Fist’s head.
“Thank you,” Captain Fist said, a catch in his voice.
“I’ve been very interested in all that these gentlemen have said. They make me feel humble, that’s the truth. They make me feel I’m part of a great movement—the whole progress of man. They make me stop and think. I’m always grateful to a man for that. They’ve made me see this Vale of Tears from a whole new perspective.
“I’m not a formally educated man.” He simpered and bowed. “Almost the only philosophers I know are the ones I read in the Harvard Classics. But I will say this: the ones I know I know well, the way we know our dearest friends. They have been my constant companions, in dingy hotels, in jails, on the seven seas … They have been, I might say, among the closest friends I have.” He simpered and sniffed, deeply touched, then suddenly remembered that his legs were free and he could pace. He lifted one stiff leg, set it down, lurched over onto it, then did the same with the other. Soon he was more or less walking, jerking stiffly back and forth, keeping his balance with the cane.
“Among my favorite philosophers,” he said, simpering again, “is Jean Jacques Rousseau. A number of things these gentlemen have said have turned my mind to that great man’s writings—for example, his discourse on the question ‘Whether the Progress of the Sciences and of Letters Has Tended to Corrupt or to Elevate Morals,’ and also, for example, his ‘Discourse on Inequality.’ I should like, with your permission, to dedicate these few remarks of mine, this little apologia, to that great, high-minded philosopher to whom all of us here in America owe so much.”
He bowed his head, memorial. When he raised it he turned it slowly, mournfully, like a cannon turning on a battleship, to Dancer. “Would you mind if I had my right hand free?” he asked. “It’s so difficult to talk without gestures.”
Dancer sighed and shook his head, then went over and untied the Captain’s right hand. Jane brought him a glass of water.
“Thank you,” the Captain said.
“Let us reflect once again on the savage,” he said. He took a sip of water, put it down on the rock, and paced again.
“The body being the only instrument that savage man is acquainted with, he naturally employs it to different uses, of which ours, for want of practice, are incapable.” He nodded, thinking it over, seeing that it was so. “Had the savage a hatchet, would his hand so easily snap from an oak so stout a branch? Had he a sling, would his hand dart a stone so far? Or had he a ladder, would he run up, so nimbly, a tree? Give civilized man but time to collect his mechanisms, and no doubt he would be an overmatch for the savage. But if you care to see a contest even more unequal, place the two naked and unarmed one opposite the other—” He struck a pose: “—Nature against Art!
“An a
nimal is a mere machine, to which nature hath given senses to wind itself up and guard, to a degree, its life. The human machine is the same, with this difference, that nature alone works the workings of the animal, whereas man, as a free agent, has a share in his. One chooses by instinct, the other—I must here disagree with my friends—by an act of liberty; for which reason the beast cannot deviate from the rules that have been prescribed to it, even in cases where such deviation might prove useful. Thus a pigeon might starve near a fine, rare steak, or a cat beside a bowl of ripe cherries!
“Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or acquiesce. And it is surely in consciousness of this liberty that the spirituality of his soul chiefly arises: for natural philosophy explains, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the consciousness of this power, nothing can be discovered but acts outside the laws of mechanics. Let me add, for the benefit of my friend Mr. Nit, that even if all a man’s deeds are ultimately mechanical (as he so persuasively maintains), his consciousness that he might do otherwise, and his anxiety at being unable to do both, are sufficient signs of his liberty. I am as deeply impressed as is Mr. Nit (I presume) that the root pressure of a common tomato can throw a one-inch column of water a hundred and eighty-two feet straight up. But a man who did the same would be proud of it, or, in another situation, chagrined.