Against the Day, Chapter Eighteen: One Death Special, Coming Up!

So we open with Scarsdale Vibe giving a speech to the Las Animas-Huerfano Delgation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.). Ha-ha. Not subtle, it is. Let me quote it at length:

So of course we use them. We harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. We will buy it all up, all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their pitiful communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? Who will care that men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything? Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and heighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun. (1000-1001)

As for these "who will care?" rhetorical questions, "He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore" (1001). Well, I'm sure that's not important. You know, one of the main things about capitalism that people will note is that the capitalists don't all have to be personally objectionable to be bad: they're propagating a fundamentally bad system, is the problem. Not in this book, though!  They are all both systemically and personally awful!

Anyway, he's going to Trinidad, a town in Colorado, when he meets a sinister figure on the train: "The sort of malignant presence that had brought him before to levels of fear he knew he could not emerge from with his will undamaged" (1001). Some sort of devil? We never quite learn. "I look forward to being one of the malevolent dead," (1002) he remarks to Foley. Well...ya may just get yer chance!

Coincidentally, Trinidad is where Frank and Ewball have gone. Solidarity:

The strikers were Greeks and Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Montenegrins and Italians. "Over in Europe," Ewball explained, "all busy killin each other over some snarled-up politics way beyond any easy understanding. But the minute they get here, before you can say 'Howdy,' they just drop all those ancient hatreds, drop 'em flat, and become brothers-in-arms, 'cause they recognize this right away for just what it is" (1002).

Well...it's a pretty story, but I must admit, I have my doubts. When I was writing my dissertation, I also included Upton Sinclair's King Coal and The Coal War, which take place in this exact milieu. And a point Sinclair makes at one point--and he would probably have better reason to know than Pynchon (assuming we're supposed to take Ewball's statement at face value) is that dividing workers by ethnicity was one of the main things that helped the owners maintain the upper hand. Well, could be some of both, I suppose.

Then too, maybe we shouldn't take Ewball entirely seriously: then he goes into this thing about, why would these people come here? They could make more money elsewhere. The only possible answer is "that some of them had to be already dead, casualties of the fighting in the Balkans" (1003). I mean, it may sound batty, but it does go along with this idea of the Trespassers as restless, vengeful ghosts, so who knows?

Frank and Ewball notice Foley in town, so assume that Vibe must be there too, and since they're there, they really ought to have a go at him. They flip a coin to decide who gets to do the deed, and Frank wins. Vibe is predictably arrogant: "even in a town full of murderous Anarchists who hated him worse than Rockefeller, Scarsdale has seen no need to walk around these streets heeled" (1006). When Frank is getting ready to shoot, he impatiently orders Foley to deal with the threat, but

"Jesus is Lord," cried Foley, and pulled the trigger, proceeding to empty all eight rounds into what, after the first, was a signed deal. As if come to his ancestral home after long and restless journeying, what had been Scarsdale Vibe settled facedown into the dirtied snow and ice of the street, into the smell of horses and horse droppings, to rest. (1006).

"Hope you fellows don't mind," he remarks to Frank and Ewball, "but it's payday today, and I've been in line years ahead of you." It's a little hard to suss out his motivations: earlier we were given to believe he was just annoyed because Vibe had started snubbing him and giving him shit work, but is there a moral aspect? And what about this sudden notion that Foley's some kind of Jesus freak? Hard to say. At any rate, that's the last we'll see of him. His future fate is unknown, though given that cops are coming, I doubt it's particularly non-violent.

So, Stray. She's at the colony where the Ludlow Massacre is going to take place later this year, helping out strikers, when her son, Jesse, appears on the scene--I guess he's a teenager now? And he's here to help, to the extent possible. This is interesting:

The Colorado militia were in fact giving light a bad name. Military wisdom had it that putting searchlights on the enemy allowed you to see them, while blinding them to you, giving you an inestimable edge both tactical and psychological. In the tents, darkness in that winter was sought like warmth or quiet. It came for many to seem like a form of compassion. (1008)

If you've been paying attention, this will definitely make you think of the business back in the Balkans about phosgene gas being code for light, which was said to produce exactly the effects described here. The connection between this stuff and the War is quite explicit.

Yeah, the "Death Special:"

This was a rumored and widely feared armored motorcar, with two Colt machine guns on it, mounted fore and aft, that the Baldwin-Felts "detective" agency had come up with for penetrating, controlling, and thinning down the size of ill-disposed crowds. It had already been through here, sweeping the colony with machine-gun fire, slashing up the canvas tents and killing some strikers. (1009)

When I first read this, I thought it was Pynchonian fantasy, but after reading The Coal War I learned that, nope, it was an absolutely real thing. Capitalists are really just cartoonishly evil on a scale that's difficult to process. Jesse and his friend Dunn meet the operators of this thing: "Pretending to have a friendly chat with potential targets of their Death Special was a level of evil neither boy had quite suspected in adults till now" (1010). Well, since Jesse is going to live at least into the 1980s to appear in Vineland, he will have plenty of chances to learn just how evil adults can be.

Frank finally meets up with Stray and Jesse, and it's obvious that she and Frank are into each other, though obviously this is not exactly the ideal time or place. The plan is to escape: it's the only thing to do at this point. I keep reading about this history and it keeps making me angrier, so let's speed through. Jesse is accosted by a threatening guardsman, and things look bad until: "I'm really fuckin tired. I'm hungry. Ain't none of us been paid since we come down this miserable place...Get your anarchist ass out of here...and if you people pray, pray I don't see it in the daylight." Then there's a very odd thing where he says "Name's Brice" (1015) and is gone. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!? It must mean SOMETHING, but this is definitely the only appearance of the name Brice in the novel (I did a search on the ereader version), and the name means nothing to me. Very odd.

Well, they get out. Frank and Stray kiss. The chapter concludes.