Against the Day (71 page)

   
He
shrugged. “Seen you do that, too.”

“My God you’re vile. What can I have
been thinking? For the first time, my eyes are open and you are truly revealed
to me—you and your whole insane country, which actually tore itself apart
for five years over this race of jungle throwbacks. Algernon, get us out of
here, please, and quickly.”

   
“See
you back at the hotel?”

“Ah, unlikely, I think. Your traps,
such as they are, will be somewhere down in the lobby.” And easy as that, she
was gone.

Reef lit a hempandtobacco cigarette
and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms
went on refashioning the night. After a bit, shrugging, he approached a smiling
young woman in an amazing plumed hat and asked her to dance. He could see the
onceover she was giving him, but it was still more attention in a second and a
half than he’d ever had from Ruperta.

When “Dope” and his crew took a
break, Reef asked him, “What was that everybody at your table was drinking? Can
I get you one?”

   
“Ramos
gin fizz. Get yourself one, too.”

   
The
bartender shook them up at length in a long silver shaker, to some

slow internal syncopation. When Reef brought the drinks back,
the table was deep in a discussion of Anarchist theory.

“Your own Benjamin Tucker wrote of
the Land League,” a young man was saying in an unmistakably Irish voice, “in
such glowing terms—the closest the world has ever come to perfect
Anarchist organization.”

   
“Were
the phrase not selfcontradictory,” commented “Dope” Breedlove.

“Yet I’ve noticed the same thing when
your band plays—the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared
the same brain.”

   
“Sure,”
agreed “Dope,” “but you can’t call that organization.”

   
“What
do you call it?”

   
“Jass.”

The
Irishman introduced himself to Reef as Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, a traveling
insurrectionist—though not, he was quick to add, a Fenian, an approach
that was fine as far as it went, though, it seemed to him, coming as he did
from a Land League family, his father and uncles on both sides having been
founding members, not nearly far enough.

   
“The
folks who invented boycotting,” Reef seemed to recall.

“And
a lovely technique it is, if you’re out in the countryside, Sligo and Tipperary
and whatnot. Drives the bloody Brits mental, besides now and then getting them
to stop their hateful savagery. But in the cities, now . . .” After a short
silence, Wolfe Tone appeared chirpily to rouse himself— “Thank heaven at
any rate for this great and good U.S.A., and all her profusion of pennies,
nickels, and dimes ever flowing, for without them we’d freeze and fail like the
potato in a season of deep frost.” He was just back from a tour of American
cities to raise money for the League, having been especially impressed with the
miners’ struggle in Colorado.

“I
was hoping while I was there I’d somehow get to meet the great Wild West
bombchucker known as the Kieselguhr Kid, but sadly he’d not been heard from for
some time.”

Reef,
not quite knowing how to reply but understanding that a shifty eye right now
would be a bad idea, sat silently looking the Irishman in the face, where he
thought for a moment he could detect the dawning of a certain light. Soon,
however, Wolfe Tone appeared to sink back into his preferred state, a black
broodfulness, which Reef eventually would come to recognize as a metaphorical
device whose tenor always somewhere included lethal hardware in the dark of
night.

   
“These
white folks sure is moody,” observed “Dope” Breedlove.

“And you fellows do smile a lot,”
Wolfe Tone shot back. “I can’t believe anyone can stay that happy.”

“Tonight,” said “Dope,” “it’s because
we just finished an engagement over on Rampart at the Red Onion,” a brief
eyeroll at this byword of peril throughout the musical brotherhood, “and we’re
all still alive to tell the tale. Besides not wishing to disappoint the many
Caucasian musiclovers who come in here expecting that certain dental gleam. Oh
yes suh, I
loves
them po’k chops!” he added in a louder voice, having
sensed the owner, now in earshot, on the prowl trying to get the Merry Coons
back to work.

When the band had resumed playing,
“Took you at first for another damned English idiot like the crowd you came in
here with,” said Wolfe Tone O’Rooney.

   
“She’s
booted me out,” Reef confided.

   
“Need
someplace to stay? Maybe not as highclass as you’re used to—”

“Neither was that Hotel St. Charles,
come to think of it.” Wolfe Tone was flopping at the Deux Espèces, a
Louisianastyle road ranch deep in the redlight district, filled with desperados
of one kind and another who were waiting, most of them, for ships to take them
out of the country.

   
“This
is Flaco, with whom you may find you share a passion.”

   
“He
means for chemistry,” said Flaco, with a knowing scowl.

Reef flashed a look at the Irishman,
who gestured at himself in wounded innocence.

“There’s a kind of a community,” said
Flaco, “and all the boys get to know each other after a while.”

   
“I’m
more like an apprentice,” Reef guessed.

“Right now everybody’s talking about
Europe. All the Powers are planning how best to move their troops around, and
you’d naturally think the railroad, but there’s these mountains everyplace,
slowing everything down, so that means tunnels. Suddenly now all over Europe
there’s tunnels big and small got to be blasted. Ever do any tunnel work?”

   
“Some,”
said Reef. “Maybe.”

   
“He’s—”
began Wolfe Tone.

   
“Yes,
Brother O’Rooney. I’m
. . .
?”

   
“Not
political the way we are, Flaco.”

“Don’t
know,” said Reef. “Then again, neither do you. Have to think about that.”

“All
of us,” said Wolfe Tone O’Rooney. With the same light in his eyes as last
night, when the subject of the Kieselguhr Kid came up.

It
was an old deception by now, natural as swallowing spit. Inside himself
somewhere, he shrugged. Resisted thinking back to Stray and Jesse.

·
    
·
    
·

“
We
look at
the
world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with
less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life
under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total
nonfreedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to
address the problem of the State is with counterDeath, also known as
Chemistry,” said Flaco.

He was a survivor of Anarchist
struggles in a number of places both sides of the Atlantic, notably Barcelona
in the ’90’s. Provoked by the bombing of the Teatro Lyceo during a performance
of Rossini’s opera
William Tell,
the police had rounded up not just
Anarchists but anybody who might be in any way opposed to the regime, or even
thinking about being. Thousands were arrested and sent “up the mountain” to the
fortress of Montjuich which crouched thuglike over the city as if having just
assaulted it, and when the dungeons there were full, prisoners were kept chained
in warships converted to prison ships, lying at anchor down in the harbor.

“Fucking Spanish police,” Flaco said.
“In Cataluña they are an occupying army. Any of the prisoners of ’93 who
weren’t Anarchists before going into Montjuich arrived rapidly at the heart of
the matter. It was like finding an old religion again, one we’d almost
forgotten. The State is evil, its divine right proceeds from Hell, Hell is
where we all went. Some came out of Montjuich broken, dying, without working
genitals, intimidated into silence. Whips and whitehot irons are certainly
effective for that. But all of us, even those who had voted and paid our taxes
like good bourgeoisie, came out hating the State. I include in that obscene
word the Church, the latifundios, the banks and corporations, of course.”

Everybody at the
Deux Espèces
was waiting
for his own particular outlawfriendly ship, of which there were several out on
the sealanes at any given moment. . . as if there had once been a joyous
mythical time of American Anarchism, now facing its last days after the
Anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated McKinley—everywhere it was run,
Anarchist, run, the nation allowing itself to lapse into another cycle of Red
Scare delusion as it had done back in the ’70s in reaction to the Paris
Commune. But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh
air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with
the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the
World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far
from the sealanes to be of use as a

coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits,
desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the
bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents—a
place promised them, not by God, which’d be asking too much of the average
Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include,
somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of
accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next.

Wolfe
Tone O’Rooney was headed to Mexico, where he hoped to track down a consignment
of “agricultural implements,” seemingly vanished in transit, intended for
Leagueconnected elements he didn’t describe too closely. Flaco was looking in
the paper every morning for word of the tramp steamer
Despedida,
bound
for the Mediterranean, where her ports of call likely would include Genoa, as
good a place as any to start looking for tunnel work. He had convinced Reef to
come along. They tended to congregate at a café down near Maman Tant Gras where
“Dope” Breedlove and his fellow jass musicians came by in the early mornings
after staying up all night playing in the smoke and river mists that came in
the doors and windows
. . . .
They sat
among the early market smells and ate beignets and drank chicory coffee and
argued about Bakunin and Kropotkin, remaining for the most part, Reef noticed,
easygoing no matter what disagreement might arise, because it was important not
to draw attention. It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.

One
afternoon Reef walked in on Wolfe Tone O’Rooney slicing a potato in half and
looking as guilty as if he were assembling a bomb. “Mysterious and multifold is
the Way of the Potato,” declared Wolfe Tone. He pressed the freshly exposed
surface against a document that was on the table, and came
аwау with a perfectly copied ink stamp, which he then
transferred to a passport he seemed to be in the process of forging.

   
“Your
ship’s in,” guessed Reef.

   
Wolfe
flourished the document. “Eusebio Gómez,
a sus órdenes.
”

The night before
Wolfe sailed, he, Reef, and Flaco
stood down by the river, drinking local beer out of bottles and watching the
fall of night, “weightless as a widow’s veil,” observed the young Irishman,
“and isn’t it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each
evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a
minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and
wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the
likes of us, don’t you see, for we’re only passing through, we’re already
ghosts.”