The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl

do.”
    â€œI don’t believe you.”
    â€œLucky for me, I don’t give a damn what you believe!” shouted Sir Edwin, loudly, more loudly, perhaps, than he’d thought he would. He was so tired he thought he might become delirious.
    â€œYou can’t have it both ways,” said Father. He was amused by his wife’s artist, his son’s artist, for God’s sake, but this amusement was mitigated by a general distaste for people who boiled over too easily, like spoiled horses, and who thought it was all right because they were thoroughbreds. He felt as well the strong man’s increased desire to defeat a weaker man once that weaker man has displayed the weakness and its probable trajectory toward greater weakness—if he could use such a term, he did not like it at all, but how else might he put it—decreased vigor? Increased vulnerability? Fever? Nausea? Infantile impotence? Terror?
    â€œBoth ways? Describe, please, these two ways which are no longer mine.”
    â€œSoulful visionary and virile man of consequential action.”
    â€œI was encouraged in my youth, it is true, to think that the artist was like no man so much as a religious martyr, the practical consequence of which was the subtle but steady wasting of my resources and the silent but insidious ravaging of my health. But I am making up for it now with the vivid, vital violence . . . that only the mortally wounded . . . apostate anchorite is capable of.”
    Sir Edwin was very pleased with his speech, but was not quite finished. Trembling with vengeful glee, he thrust his ace in Father’s face: “And besides, I have your son to do my living for me.”
    Father smiled patronizingly and shook his head. “You have no such thing,” he said in seemingly gentle reproof. “Charles is enrolled in your little kindergarten here of public performance, but will soon be moving on. He has real work in Minnesota in the fall. The Commission of Public Safety.”
    â€œYou won’t,” asked Keogh, “be going ‘over there’?”
    â€œHe will be going over there by staying here. There is a formidable enemy here as well. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you so.”
    â€œTerrible news, however the situation stands, about your theater,” murmured Keogh. Something in his tone of voice, however muted and drawling it was, alarmed Charles and caused him to look directly into Keogh’s eyes. The penetration was allowed for a moment. Keogh then smiled and turned to Amelia.
    â€œWe want,” he said, “to help in any way we can. Of course with money, but publically, morally, we want to do everything that can be done to help bring a patriotic show like The American to its rightful audience.
    â€œThey are saying now—” Amelia began.
    â€œ Who is saying now?” interrupted Mother. “Who is saying what now?”
    â€œIt was a small fire, I am told,” said Father. “Easily contained and causing little damage. Everything can be quickly and easily replaced.”
    â€œThat is excellent news,” said Keogh, smiling at one and all.
    â€œA boy was killed,” said Charles.
    â€œâ€”that it was deliberately set,” Amelia continued, picking up the controversy of the earlier strand in the conversation left dangling. “The fire marshal believes a small explosive device was launched by a cadre of anarchists under cover of the fireworks display—that is to say, by one of them, a crack archer who used a window purposefully left open as his target. And yes, that a child was killed makes the investigation far more important than it might have been, Father.”
    â€œI left the window open,” Charles said. “And the arrow came through a window that wasn’t open.”
    Father nodded, but nobody really cared very much about that sort of detail.
    And so Charles sat on the blanket feeling weak and stupid and cold,