Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  DAYTON’S MARCH 1913 flood was also known as the “Great Flood.” There were earlier floods, but this one changed things. Dayton made the front page of the New York Times. Dayton’s downtown lay just south of the confluence of rivers where the first settlers landed. There was a levee to protect it, but the levee was too low.

  The Indians had warned them.

  Twenty feet of cold and coursing water. Horses swimming frantically in the current. Houses and railroad cars washed away. People scurrying to their second floors, to their attics, to their roofs. Gas lines breaking; explosions; fires.

  Before the water overtopped the levee, before dawn, John Patterson—the corporate paterfamilias/maniac who ran National Cash Register, his jail time postponed by an appeal—walked the south levee of the Miami and saw trouble. He summoned his executives to an emergency meeting at 6:45 a.m. The name of their company, he said, was to be temporarily changed from National Cash Register to Dayton Citizens’ Relief Association. The mission of this new company was to help out people who would soon be driven from their homes. His executives (you can imagine, Chad said) were startled. Glances around the table, bitten lips, a timid Sir, is that really our job? Isn’t the levee still holding? Patterson said, “This meeting was not called to discuss the issue.” He ordered his company to start making bread and soup in the company kitchens, to tap the company wells for drinking water, to send employees out to buy up clothing and staples, to build rowboats big enough to transport six people. “Start turning out the boats within an hour,” John Patterson said. He designated a company building to be the flood relief headquarters, with floors for a hospital, a maternity center, a dormitory, and a laundry.

  By 7 a.m., when the water first came over the levee, John Patterson’s meeting was over. Evacuation, food, and shelter: the man had planned it all. And it worked.

  “SON,” CHAD SAID. Howard looked back at him over the top of Chad’s car. “Tuck your shirt in.”

  Howard scowled and tucked. Fourteen, Chad thought. Three years older than this clown, and I married her.

  He didn’t lock his car (he never locked his car), but for a fraction of a second he visualized a clear shield flowing around it—radiant, protective—which Chad always thought of as bondad. Why he thought of a Spanish word instead of “goodwill” he didn’t know, but bondad was what he thought. He had never had a thing he owned stolen, not from his house or his car, and Chad believed this was because of bondad. He wished ill of no one, and in consequence no one hurt him.

  A good heart and a plan.

  Bondad, his old apartment mate in college had said. Sounds more like bonehead.

  There weren’t that many cars at today’s game. There weren’t that many cars in Dayton, period. Consort’s unreliability had made recharging cars a problem. And selling a car to ship to a more stable part of the country was a handy source of cash.

  “Maybe I’ll bring Leon to the next game,” Chad said as Howard trudged behind him.

  “Yeah, right,” Howard said. They both knew Howard’s brother had no interest.

  Chad had been coming to watch the Dragons play baseball all his life, dating back to Fifth-Third Field and a friendly dragon mascot named Heater. His parents had hired Heater for one of Chad’s birthday parties. Chad and his father had been part of the steady fan base that transformed the Dragons from Single A to Triple A baseball. Chad had had Dragon seats he called his own in three different stadiums, all in downtown Dayton.

  It was a hot evening, and there were empty seats around them. Chad scored the game on his perc. “You want to do this?” he suggested. “Picks up your interest in the game.” Howard shrugged. “Here,” Chad urged, passing his perc to his son, but Howard let the thing almost drop from his hand. Chad made an exasperated face and checked Howard’s response: his little eyes (Sharis’s eyes) glared back from under a thatch of hair. Howard’s hair didn’t so much grow from his head as sprout, reaching a critical height and then toppling over. The rest of his face was doughy and unformed, but his eyes gave some hope of intelligence.

  Chad didn’t know how he’d ended up with two such different sons. Howard was as lumpy as Leon was spiky. Chad fretted about both of them. He could imagine Howard spending his life oozing from one chair to the next, and Leon having to be grabbed by someone to sit down for a moment.

  “Look at the arm on that catcher,” Chad whistled.

  Maybe he should talk to Howard about his weight, set up a schedule of exercises for the two of them together.

  Howard said, “Can I get a hotdog?”

  He was much too big. Little Leon’s body was ropy, while Howard’s body didn’t have a single muscle visible. I wasn’t that big as a child, Chad thought.

  “If you’re truly hungry,” Chad said.

  The hotdog did make Howard happier. “Leon can’t eat hotdogs,” he said in satisfaction, because Leon’s front two teeth were missing. Howard scored two innings himself, noting that the Dragons’ pitcher always seemed to get behind on the counts. “I’m impressed you noticed that, Howard,” Chad said. “Now, let’s see if you can tell me what he’s throwing.”

  Chad was concentrating so hard on the pitches he didn’t notice the faint throbbing from the sky. Shadows were darkening the field before Chad looked up. “What the …” he said, and there they were, maybe twelve helicopters, painted shiny white and nearly silent, a dense formation over the field. Hot air stirred by the rotors, the smell of exhaust. A small American flag on each fender, like a tattooed side of a buttock. Chad glanced at the crowd around him: everyone was staring, mesmerized, into the air.

  Chad would think later: the shadow of a dark wing over the field.

  The pitcher stopped. He dropped his arms to his sides and craned his neck and looked up like everyone else. The baseball dribbled from his hand onto the mound, and although Chad thought fleetingly that the runners on second and third could legally break for home, no one on the field moved.

  Not again, Chad thought, thinking of Sharis’s stories of the Gridding.

  “Poison?” Chad had said. Sharis (fourteen-year-old Sharis!) was seated across the picnic table from him, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun, telling him about the Gridding. Chad’s brain had been blank, besotted, and then it was clicking as madly as a Geiger counter. “Your father mixed up poison for you?” Chad repeated, thinking he’d misheard.

  “Char!” Howard was whispering. “Oh man, char! This is the charrest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “They’re army helicopters. Hopi Hellions,” Chad said.

  “He always said the government was going to come for us,” Sharis told Chad. “That was his guaranteed way out.”

  “Where are they going?” said a man in front of them, turning around. “The Base?”

  The old air force base, which used to be a research facility, now housed troops from both the air force and the army. But the base was east, and these helicopters were pointed north. Chad said, “Maybe they’re headed up to the Grid?”

  “It’s the soldiers, honey. Just like Daddy said.” Her mother woke her up by leaning over her bed and blowing a strand of hair off her daughter’s forehead.

  “Am I dreaming?” Sharis (Cheryl) asked, but she knew she wasn’t because she was hungry. Except when she was sound asleep, she was always hungry.

  “It’s the middle of the night. Just like Daddy said.” Her mother’s uncombed hair stuck up from the back of her head.

  Sharis’s mother touched her cheek. “Just remember, honey, there’s never hunger in heaven.”

  “Is Howie up?”

  “Your father’s with him. Come on”—her mother coaxed Sharis to her feet.

  “Let me get my shoes.”

  “Cheryl Mae! You don’t need your shoes.”

  “But she let you get them, right?” Chad said. “And your robe?”

  Sharis walked into her closet, slipped on her shoes. She took her robe off the hanger. “They’re going house to house? The soldiers?”

  “Just li
ke he said.”

  They would all sit on the sofa in the living room. They each would have a wineglass, although the parents in the family didn’t drink. A festive occasion. The best glasses.

  The helicopters passed and still the pitcher stood frozen, the ball rolled to the edge of the pitching mound. The catcher walked up and talked to him, handed him the ball. The pitcher nodded. His next pitch hit the batter in the elbow. The batter fell to the ground writhing, holding up his elbow for the umpire. A lot of that was dramatics, but still.

  Howie, small and blinking, was huddled against the arm of the sofa. Sharis’s father was still standing, waiting for his wife and daughter. He held out his arms. Bastard, Chad always called him in his mind. Murderer.

  Through the chinks in the living room curtains Sharis could see lights; outside she heard the murmur of motors and voices. She’d imagined it noisier.

  “Let’s sit down,” her mother said.

  Her father sat next to Howie, then Sharis, then her mother. Her mother reached around and touched Howie’s hair with her fingers. “I love you, little buddy,” she said.

  “I don’t want to drink it,” Howie said.

  “Come on, Howie. It’s your favorite. Look at this”—the father sloshed the liquid—“grape.” The father stuck a finger in the liquid and held it out. “Lick it off my finger.”

  Chad looked to the bullpen and made out the Dragons’ manager pointing at a scrawny kid. Apparently this guy was supposed to take over on the pitcher’s mound. “Who’s that, Daddy?” Howard asked.

  Hard knocks at the front door. Sharis’s parents exchanged glances. “Hold him down,” her father said. Her mother lifted Howie from the cushion and placed him in her lap, her arms tight around him. Her father made a hole of Howie’s mouth and poured the purple liquid in.

  Chad couldn’t find the new pitcher’s number on the roster. That was the minors: players came and went. “Good God,” he said, looking closer at the kid. “He looks like he’s about fourteen.”

  “Come on, people,” a man’s voice said from the door. “All your neighbors are out here. We can’t wait forever.”

  Her mother swallowed the last of her own drink and gave Sharis an anguished glance. “Pick up your glass, honey.”

  “She didn’t say ‘Swallow it,’ did she?” Chad said to Sharis. “She planned for you to live.”

  “Come on, people. You won’t be hurt.”

  “Give me liberty or give me death,” her father whispered, downing his drink in one gulp—a line that made Sharis giggle because it was so corny.

  “Unto you, Lord, I commend my spirit!” That was her mother, surprisingly loud.

  “Come on, people!” There was a low babble of voices, then the buzz of a drill. Sharis stood, dropping her glass onto the table. She ran out through the kitchen to the back door, glancing back at her heap of family. Her glass had toppled, purple liquid spreading on the wood.

  “I know she wanted you to run away,” Chad told Sharis. “She had a plan for you.”

  “I wanted to live,” Sharis said. “I’m not insane.”

  “Koogie,” Howard said. That was a new word to Chad, but from Howard’s tone he took it as an affirmation.

  “Jesus,” Chad said after a few moments watching the new pitcher. “He can throw.”

  Everyone who attended that game remembered it, not just for the helicopters but for its other phenomenon: Joe Mateus pitching for the first time. Later, Mateus said the helicopters were an inspiration. He wanted to throw hard enough the pilots couldn’t see the ball. The attendance that evening was just over a thousand, although later maybe a hundred thousand people said they’d been there. Chad remembered it as the day he started locking his car, the night he realized bondad was not enough.

  true believers

  JOHN PATTERSON, DAYTON’S flood-time hero, made his fortune in cash registers. Cash registers are—think about it, Chad said—an open admission that money is a temptation and people steal. The early National Cash Register sales literature stated this fact quite freely. Why should a merchant spend big money on a machine to tally sales and issue receipts? So an employee couldn’t charge nothing. So an employee couldn’t slip a friend two dollars of change instead of one, or pocket a customer’s payment, or miscalculate a sale. So a customer couldn’t return a sales item and say he’d paid full price. The cash register business was founded on the propositions that employer and employee have inherently different interests, that transactions benefit from daylight, that money is a powerful lure. None of the cash register’s suppositions about human behavior is positive. It is, in its essence, a surveillance machine.

  The other invention associated with Dayton—Chad went on—is more uplifting. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the bottom half of four brothers; their father, with whom they lived his entire life, was a United Brethren bishop known for his devotion to his family and his obstinate, often divisive, theological convictions. Their mother died of TB before Wilbur and Orville reached adulthood, and Wilbur nursed her in her final days. Their sister, Katharine, who also lived with their father, was the rare woman of that time who sought and obtained a college degree. The Wright brothers were not college-educated; in fact, neither of them finished high school. They were bright enough—the family had hopes of sending Wilbur to Yale, and Orville in seventh grade won an award as the best math student in the city—but for years they bounced around, the sort of young people that in a higher social stratum might be labeled dilettantes. When Orville tried to date a young woman from a prominent local family, her mother said, “You stay away from that boy. He’s crazy.” As a youth, Wilbur, after a hockey injury, was laid up for years with heart palpitations, writing later, with some passion, of how a man can become “blue.” He worked as a clerk in a grocery store, as a printer, and briefly published a local newspaper. Eventually he and Orville opened (Chad winked at this moment, said, “this is the famous part”) a bicycle shop, where they built the bicycles they sold. The Wright Brothers were slight, neat, slim-hipped men—birdlike, you might say. They always wore business suits, Orville’s much nattier than his brother’s. Shy and awkward, they never courted or married. Wilbur wrote to a relative: “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are lacking in determination and push.”

  And yet. “For some years,” Wilbur wrote in 1900, “I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”

  “Afflicted,” Chad said. “Isn’t that an interesting word?”

  “EDUARDO, MI HOMBRE,” the man in the booth said. “You guiding the woman’s tour today?” Lila was the sole passenger in a truck entering the Grid, her car left behind in an underground garage. She had been iris-scanned, beamed by a materials detector, and patted down. She would be spending the night in a Grid guesthouse. She had been told to bring a change of clothes and toiletries, but no percs or phones were allowed. Her driver, Eduardo, had driven right up to the Grid barrier and through an archway that led to a checkpoint. Behind the checkpoint was a slightly shorter wall that was curved to block any outsiders’ view. There were soldiers with rifles on either side of the road; on the left, beside the checkpoint, a woman soldier seemed to be making time with the man in the booth.

  Eduardo had a definite accent, and Lila wondered where he’d come from. He was taking her, he said, to the guesthouse at Village 42. Other than that he’d said little. Perhaps his English was a problem.

  “Shut your mouth!” the female soldier cried to the man in the booth. She leaned into Eduardo’s truck and spoke directly at Lila. “Don’t let these mariachis give you a bad first impression.” Lila nodded awkwardly. “You been on the Grid before, darling?” the female soldier asked. Her hair beneath her hat was poufy and clearly took effort.

  Lila, stiffening, shook her head. She didn’t expect another woman, especially one younger than her, to call her darling.

  “You’ll love it,” the woman said. “Everyone loves it. Best place in the world.”

  This surprised Li
la speechless, and suddenly the checkpoint man was handing back her pass card, the gate was raising, the female soldier was waving, and Eduardo steered them right then left and there they were, two people in a truck with a wall behind them, looking out under a heat-hazed sky over 25 million agricultural acres that used to be part of Ohio.

  It was less flat than Lila expected. Oh, it was flat: flat and huge and green (although the acres of wheat had their golden look) but flat less like a plain than like a beach, with small rises and hillocks and ridges. There was a road straight in front of them going north and a crossroad that extended east and west, and Lila knew from her reading that ten miles north there’d be another crossroad, with another crossroad ten miles beyond that: not for nothing was the transformed landscape called the Grid.

  “We go north first,” Eduardo said. And suddenly, with the fields falling from the road around her, it wasn’t enough for Lila to be here, on the ground: she wanted to be in a plane above the landscape. She wondered at her own greediness, reminded herself she was lucky to be here at all. She sneaked a glance at the speedometer: eighty. Eduardo’s hand was relaxed on the steering wheel; he looked around the Grid with possessive nonchalance. “Corn’s good this year,” he said. And indeed, the corn plants were erupting from the ground like thousands of green fountains. Thousands? No, millions, and Lila, who in water was used to big numbers, felt almost humbled by the thought.

  “Wait a minute,” she said after fifteen or twenty silent minutes. “Can we stop and look?”

  He glanced at her, then halted the truck in the middle of the road. Lila almost objected, but of course no one else was coming, and if they did Eduardo’s truck could be spotted from miles away. “Look,” he said, waving his hand, and Lila got out and stood in the road.

  So this was the Grid. It was broad and not quite flat, and it was alive. Vegetatively, not humanly, alive. Lila’s forehead was slick with sweat. The Ohio sky had been transformed into a Big Sky. Every few miles there was a row of ten or twelve trees. She pointed at one of them and called out to Eduardo, “What?” “Windbreaks,” Eduardo called back from the truck, and this was understandable, although today was hot and still. In front of Lila and behind her, in fields as thick and lush as a giant’s carpet, was soy, the new American mainstay, usually processed into fake meat. Northeast, miles away, beyond acres of corn, buildings of a village shimmered on the horizon. They looked wavery and insubstantial in the heat. No cars.