And they did come and ask, although they didn’t hound him the way Lee had said they would. The men from the FBI asked a few simple questions, and Joe Bill gave them Lee’s answers, which seemed to be the answers they wanted, and they went away. And he told the Warren Commission, and they sent him away. And the reporters came, and Joe Bill said the same things to them. Over the years, people who were writing books about Oswald and the assassination would turn up, and they’d ask Joe Bill the same questions, and Joe Bill would tell them the same things, maybe a little more here and there, but he’d never say the big things, never ask his own questions: Why did Lee go to Russia, and for whom? Who supplied Lee with tiny cameras and contact information at Soviet embassies? How much of his life was an act, a game? How much was a story, and how much was real? What did Lee know in September 1959 about November 1963? He couldn’t possibly have known that he would assassinate a president who wasn’t even president yet. But he’d known something, certain as death.
And, of course, there was the biggest question of all. It was there, asking itself, the day his son was born and the day his first wife died. The day he awoke in the hospital bed after his heart attack, it was there. Every morning as he drove alone to work, on his pillow in whatever company house or roadside motel he slept in as he followed the dry holes and gushers of the west Texas oil industry, it was there. It’s been with him every day since and will be forever, and it’s the one question he has an answer for: What did you do about it, Joe Bill? And the answer is, nothing.
Joe Bill never has told his whole story. He’s slept and eaten and lived and loved with all his shaky knowledge and his shadowy questions in his own mind alone, all of this set against the one true fact he knows: that he’s failed, somehow. Failed Lee and America and himself and his children. He’s failed in part because it’s too difficult to keep it all straight in his head. All the information is confusing and confounding. There’s simply too much of it, with the books and the commission reports and the evidence and the documents. He’s failed in part because time has passed, and now the whole thing was a long time ago, and no one’s asking anymore. Mostly he’s failed because he knows the stories about the million-to-one accidents and sudden diseases and visits from strange men in the middle of the night. Every so often, he’ll go through a stretch of time, moving from place to place, when he feels he’s being followed, watched. His heart jumps every time the phone rings. He knows people are not who they seem, are more than they appear. He’s failed because he was, and is, afraid.
But one day he did tell a writer the story of his last night with Lee.
They were to dock in Le Havre the next morning, and Joe Bill was trying to iron his shirts. He wasn’t good at it—his mother had always taken care of that. And after watching him struggle with the task for a while, Lee stood up from the desk where he was now openly practicing his Russian and took the iron from Joe Bill. After a moment or two, he said, “I’m going to spend a couple days in France, and I need to know how to say something.”
Joe Bill figured he’d tell Lee how to ask for the bathroom or the restaurant, figured he’d also tell him that most people in France spoke English, especially the service workers, but Lee said to him, as he pulled a sleeve taut and moved the iron across it, “Tell me how to say, ‘I don’t understand.’”
“I don’t understand?”
“Yeah,” Lee said.
“You want to know how to say, ‘I don’t understand’?”
“Would you just tell me?” Lee said as he folded Joe Bill’s shirt and set it neatly in the open suitcase, before taking up another and stretching it across the board.
“‘I don’t understand’ is ‘Je ne comprend pas,’” Joe Bill said.
“Juh nuh comprenduh pas?”
“Je ne comprend pas.”
“Je ne comprend pas?”
“Je ne comprend pas.”
READY FOR SCHMELLING
My name is Perkins, and my story begins on a Monday. Just as I was about to leave my desk after another day at the international corporation where I am employed, I happened to glance out the window to see a man crawling across the parking lot. I watched him as he crawled—hands and knees, attaché handle in his teeth—from the front steps of the building all the way to the third row of cars, a good sixty yards or so, just like a baby in a blue business suit. When he got to his dark green Ford Taurus, the midlevel company car, he stood, took his attaché from his mouth, dusted himself off, got in and drove away in what I have to assume was the normal mode—seated, strapped in, ten-and-two—for a man of his age and station.
I had long ago quit wondering, or at least asking, about most of what went on at the IC. I started there three years ago—just after Marcie and I got married, just before my father died—and I had seen more than enough corporate and individual doltishness, weirdness, and outright stupidity to make me seriously question the veracity of the yearly financial reports, which show us as a major player in the IC world. I had witnessed fiscal irresponsibility and massive waste offset by arbitrary niggling and concealed by necromantic accounting. I had narrowly escaped involvement in churlish turf wars. I had seen grown men and women reduced to paranoid hysterics by such matters as their table assignment at the company picnic or having their name left off a memo concerning this month’s coffee fund. I had learned that the single most important task one can master in business is that of assigning blame, and I had seen the best of the best ply their trade with such a profound lack of conscience that it would be debilitating in normal life. I was even there the day last March when Terrence McNeil—who never learned the corollary to the Most Important Task, that one must diligently avoid blame—came by to show some of his former coworkers in Vendor Support the business end of his Winchester side-by-side. But I had never seen a man in a blue suit crawl across a parking lot before.
It wasn’t until after the man had driven away that I noticed the other workers on my floor standing at the window watching the same spectacle. I thought of calling someone over and saying . . . what, I don’t know . . . maybe, what the hell? But then, I had done a pretty good job of remaining unnoticed since my transfer to Contracts six months before, wasn’t even sure any of the others on the floor knew my name. I could envision calling to someone and having them look at me blankly—or worse, with alarm, the McNeil incident still fresh in our minds—then phone security, or worse, ask our manager who I was, and the jig would be up.
You see, I had no idea what I was doing in Contracts, no idea what my job was even supposed to be. I got hired in PR, then two and a half years later, I got a memo saying that my requested transfer to Contracts had come through. Contracts? I went to my supervisor, who was still up to her neck in blaming people for the McNeil business. She said it was a mistake but to go ahead and report to Contracts the next day and she’d get things straightened out. For the past six months I’ve sat at my desk for eight hours a day doing absolutely nothing. When a contract comes to my desk, I pretend to read it, sign it, and pass it on. I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, spend hours on the Internet, thumb-twiddle, navel-ponder.
And I got a raise, a nice one. And almost to the day of my transfer, the economy went south, or the news started talking about it going south, and all of a sudden I needed the money. I talked it over with Marcie, and since the whole country was laying off people left and right, we decided that I’d take the raise and stay there for as long as I could until I screwed up and they fired me, which, since the IC did not admit mistakes, usually meant a handsome severance package in return for the dismissed employee’s enduring silence.
So every morning I’d get to my desk and there’d be a stack of three or four contracts waiting there, and every evening I’d leave those same contracts in the outgoing mail. Easy as that.
So while I was interested in the strange man and his stranger method of perambulation, I felt it was best, given what I thought was a tenuous grasp on my frankly embarrassing income, to simply let the matter pass witho
ut comment. Apparently the others on my side of the floor felt the same, because no one said a word about it. They simply turned from the window and left for the day, moving silently out of the hallway and into the elevator.
When I got home to Marcie, I told her about the man and how he crawled across the parking lot. Marcie is a painter. Her work was just beginning to appear in some of the smaller local galleries. I told her she should paint that, get a mental image of what I was talking about, and paint the man crawling across the parking lot. I advanced the themes of abjection, endurance, possibly even protest. She said if she painted it, she wouldn’t show the man at all.
“But, Marcie,” I said. “That’s the whole thing about the painting.”
“Nope,” she said. “The whole thing about the painting is you.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” she said. “You. Standing there watching him.”
She started that very night.
The rest of the week passed without incident. Every day at a little before five, I would peer out the window, looking for the man to crawl across the parking lot, but he never did. I thought I caught a glimpse of him one day, walking normally, and I tried to follow him with my eyes all the way to his car, to see if it was the same man. But there were lots of men in blue suits and lots of dark green Ford Tauruses, so I wasn’t sure.
That Friday night when I got home from the office, Marcie was very glad to see me. She met me at the door and kissed me deeply, her arms around my neck and her tongue dabbing madly in my mouth. Before I could even get a word out, she was taking off her clothes, and then she took off mine, and we made love there on the living room floor. After, both of us still unclothed, she took my hand and led me to the spare bedroom that served as her studio. There on the easel was the sketch of the painting we had talked about. I was standing at the window in coat and tie, with a look on my face that was a mix of revulsion and pity and confusion and, I thought, just the barest hint of shame. I thought of mentioning to Marcie that revulsion and confusion were right on the money, and that pity was good—I should have felt pity somehow, I thought, and it made me feel a little bad that I hadn’t—but I had not been ashamed. Instead we got dressed and went out for drinks and a steak dinner, which is what we always did on Fridays after Marcie had a good week of work. When we got home, we made love again, this time on the floor in the studio, with me on top, a reversal of our earlier interlude. I rubbed my knees raw from bracing against the canvas drop cloths on the floor of the studio. I was a little drunk, but more than a little preoccupied as well. Every time I looked up from Marcie as I moved above her, I saw the sketch of me standing there in the window. It was really good; even I wasn’t sure what I was looking at anymore.
When I got to the IC Monday morning, there was something that seemed a bit out of drawing, off-kilter, something imperceptible that nonetheless made me want to fix it, like in school when the teacher would leave that one little scratch of chalk on the blackboard after she erased it; if you’re like me, your whole day was ruined. That little chalk mark would distract us to the edge of madness. The IC was like that on Monday morning, except I couldn’t find the chalk mark to erase. I looked for it, all the way in from the parking lot, up the concrete steps and through the huge glass doors, through the marble-floored lobby past the PR office where I used to work, up the elevator to seven, all the way to my desk by the back corner near the window, I looked for it, but was unable to locate the problem.
Everything seemed to be in order to the untrained eye: The people I saw every day were moving about in their everyday fashion; there was a stack of contracts on my desk awaiting my careful vetting; there was nothing different about the decor. Everything was as I had left it Friday, except that it wasn’t. It was as if something as implacable and yet imperceptible as a bump in the orbit of the Earth had nudged everything slightly aslant, and it was going to stay that way.
I tried to work through it, but all day my timing was just a bit off. Where before I had carefully observed my coworkers’ movements, and scheduled mine, to avoid even the most light-hearted banter, I was now running into them every time I left my desk: at the coffee machine, in the restroom, at the copier. There was one man in particular—call him Smith—who kept asking me, each time we met, how I was doing, as if I had somehow changed in the thirty minutes since I’d run into him last. Smith was an unsightly fellow, short and squat, a heavy sweater with a thinning blond comb-over, tiny black eyes that made him look sort of prurient behind his thick, black-plastic-framed glasses, a puffy dewlap above his collar. Fine, Smith, and you? I’d reply, and each time he answered the same.
And it wasn’t just Smith. The manager—a gray-haired, slump-shouldered man of sixty or so—seemed to be lurking around quite a bit that day. Remember, now, I’d never met this man, didn’t even know his name. I’d watch him walk to his car in the afternoons—I always tried to stay huddled in my cubicle until I was sure he’d left for the day. He parked in the first row, drove the more prestigious company car, the blue Lincoln, and his hunch-rolled stroll to his automobile was usually all I saw of him. Today he was wandering around seven like some kind of golem, never stopping to speak or even so much as look at anyone, his face an attitude of profound confusion. I tried to avoid his gaze, stayed crouched over the papers on my desk in what I hoped passed for intense concentration, and when he started to get too close, I’d skulk away to the bathroom, walking a little bent-kneed to stay below cubicle level. My evasive maneuvers were effective if belittling, and I made it through the end of the day, still employed, but no closer to finding that overlooked chalk mark.
Just as I was about to leave my desk—while watching the manager slumping along to his car, head down, feet like clay—I heard a sound from outside my cubicle. It was Smith, and he was, for some reason, saying, “Psst,” and peeking over the top of the partition.
“How’re you doing, Smith?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Another day.”
“Not quite yet,” Smith said.
“Smith,” I said, suddenly aware that he had to be standing on his tiptoes, “would you like to come into my cubicle?”
“Thanks,” he said, his head and neck—which were one piece—then the rest of him appearing from behind the partition. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said. “All done. So . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, no, no,” Smith said, then peered furtively back behind the partition. He turned back toward me, leaned in close, and, barely whispering, said, “Are you ready for Schmelling?”
The only thing I could think to say was, I don’t know, at which point Smith put his hands on my shoulders and whisked me from my chair. We moved together like dance partners toward the window, where we stopped and, lacking much space in the cubicle, stood very close. I could smell Smith next to me; just above his sweat were the odors of cigarette smoke and Brut aftershave. Up close, I could see that he had had a terrible acne problem, and had some sort of wen on his nose as well, up near the inner canthus of his left eye, causing his black frames to rest slightly crooked on what passed for the bridge of his pug nose. He was a thoroughly unattractive man, but I soon saw that something amazing was happening to his face. He was glowing, turning a healthy, sanguine scarlet, his eyes gleaming like tiny black pearls behind his glasses, his lips trembling in what can only be described—or at least I saw it this way, and still believe it true—as the paroxysms of rapture. I wanted to see what was exciting him so, but I was so transfixed by the bliss on his face I was unable to turn my attention. His breathing was coming a little heavier now, starting to fog the window in front of him. He made a quick, jerking motion with his right arm, grabbed his graying shirt sleeve in his palm and wiped away the condensation. It was then that he said, in a gasp and a squeal, “There he is.”
I looked out the window, down into the parking lot, where the man who had crawled to his car the previous Monday was this Monday doing a perfect phys. ed. crabwalk acr
oss the parking lot: his arms directly perpendicular to the ground, his knees bent at T-square-grade right angles, kicking forward on cue to propel himself to his car like some sort of Cossack dancer. Whereas the week before he carried his attaché case in his teeth, today it rested on his perfectly flat chest, at no point threatening to upend. When he got to the third row, to his dark green Ford Taurus, he bent his arms a bit, and then, all in one motion, sprung to his feet and caught the attaché between both hands. He pirouetted to face the building, raised the attaché above his head like a championship belt, and offered the slightest of bows. With that he turned again, unlocked his car, got in and drove away.
I stood and continued to stare out the window, having no idea at all what to make of this. Just as I was about to turn and ask Smith . . . what, I don’t know . . . he took an audibly deep breath and expelled that breath with, “God, I admire him.” He stood in reverie just a second more, then turned, patted me on the back and said, “Well, see you tomorrow.” And with that he was gone.
Maybe now would be the time, in a quick hundred words or so, to explain something to you, about me. I am a simple man, basically, in terms of how I view the world. I do not believe the world is a confusing place, so long as one does not unnecessarily complicate one’s view of it. I do not believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, angels, mysticism, magic, channeling, that there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll, or that 9-11 was an inside job. I do not believe that there are any underlying mysteries. I do not believe in looking either above or below the surface of things, because I think there’s more than enough on the surface to keep us occupied for the length of any one life, which, I believe, is all we get. I do not believe in God. I do not believe in heaven. I do not believe in hell. I believe that life is this world alone, is what we make of it, each to his own abilities and needs.
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 3