The Third Rail

The curtain is about to go up on the third act of 'Partners.' The women have been sidelined, by voluntary withdrawl or exclusion for cause. Now it's just the fighting men, principally Kyle and Jimmy and their adversaries, but also Lt. Greg Lepsky, who has lurked in the background throughout the story and will become a fulcrum bidding for authority and power. Lepsky is not a naturally powerful individual, mature and worn, overweight, dull, cautious, and corrupt. In 1976, the entire Milwaukee police force was corrupt. Lepsky was senior enough to survive, provided that he played ball with the mob. He is nominally an ally, but diverted Jimmy into an endless series of 'good works' to keep Jimmy busy, distracted, and in danger.

In the third act, all bets are off, all assumptions and routine gone. Lepsky and the mob think that Jimmy is dead and that Kyle is indulging matrimonial bliss and sensible cowardice, making a new life for himself and a devoted young pregnant wife. Only one man in Milwaukee knows that Kyle and Jimmy are back, running dark, active only at night, about to unleash total hell after they were both murderously assaulted in separate incidents and in revenge for a car bomb years ago that left Jimmy's father a homebound cripple. The only man who knows that Kyle and Jimmy are back, armed with a submachine gun and a high-power hunting rifle, is an elderly servant. It would be obscene literary evil to expose a vulnerable servant to danger.

Jim is a wounded warrior, one arm in a sling, a smashed shoulder that will never heal, still wearing a bandage on his face to close a gaping tear from buckshot. It will not be restored by plastic surgery. Jim does not survive the third act. And that brings us to Kyle, the narrator and main character of 'Partners.' When Jimmy is killed, the balance of the story is Kyle's bizarre struggle to defeat the Milwaukee mob and its pawn Lt. Lepsky, who attempts to kill Kyle in the name of the law, to stop his homicidal threat to a fragile status quo.

I don't want to introduce any other element, for instance the FBI, who are investigating the Milwaukee mob in parallel, always have been throughout this gritty, twisted skein, unacknowledged and dramatically unimportant. It will take the feds another two years to indict the chief Cosa Nostra figures that Kyle and Jim come to town to kill. They will fail in that mission. Jim will be killed and Kyle will be forced to fight lesser capos and mob enforcers launched against him. There is a tooth grinding final crisis, followed by a denouement that resolves Kyle's status as a soldier of fortune defending his beloved partner, in life and in death's solemn honor.

That's the broad theme of 'Partners.' When men bond in wartime, there is no limit to what a partner must and will do to protect a brother in arms. If he falls, his body will not be left on the field of battle, and his valor must and will be avenged. In that respect, my novel explores no new ground. It is an old story of comradeship forged by unit cohesion that becomes total when it exists as an unbreakable bond between two operators working in tandem.

So much I already understand, but the third act is something more than its structure or story resolution, ratcheting up a thrilling climax as a technical matter. "I hate these slot machine people!" the comic duo in a celebrated Fitzgerald romp say to each other, speaking for all writers and all readers. The third act of my novel must have the feel and pace of a completely new story, unexpected and shocking, because mechanical action is NOT what the third act of 'Partners' is about. Whatever Lepsky and the mob do or fail to do has no significance, a foil to the greater story of men who love one another. We've seen them squabble and individually embrace the women that each one loves privately and separately. We know their failings and foibles as individuals. None of it matters in the third act. When men bond, it is an act of love that transcends time itself. It cannot be killed by mortal death, cannot be withdrawn for light or transient causes, and will withstand almost every temptation to walk away.

I had such loves many times for comrades who were my partners. I think of them every day, a silent element of who I am, an inextinguishable otherness that war forged. Some of my war experience was metaphorical and civilian, some was not. I had a partner who is no longer in my life, trust shattered by racial animus that neither of us wanted. Some of my partners are dead. More will soon be taken by advancing age. 'Partners' is a tribute to them, to the best of heterosexual male life, capable of loving and defending one another as brothers in spirit.

- Wolf DeVoon