In the wee small hours of the morning, Lee woke with a start. The nightmares had returned, even as they did to Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. He sat up in bed, panicky.
Wait a minute. What did George say earlier? ‘We’ll have you covered.’ As with the team when I flew down to kill Castro.
Not just me. Two other gunmen as well.
That’s George’s ‘way’: The triple-shot. Then and now.
‘Shots fired.’ That’s what he said. Not ’shot.’ ’Shots‘!
What else? ‘The entire team’ will be rescued before anyone can get their hands on us. Of course. I was to be his pawn, but not George’s only one. There will be many.
Part of his great game-plan. Or so George thinks ...
*
On Thursday, November 21, Lee Harvey Oswald left work and met Wesley Frazier at five after five on Elm Street where that co-worker parked his car. Earlier, Lee had asked if he might drive up to Irving with him that evening. Frazier said ‘sure.’ That blue-collar worker had been surprised, however, as Lee never made the trip on a weekday. Only weekends. Except for the past one, when Lee mentioned he’d stay in Dallas, get stuff done.
“Anything special going on tonight, Lee?”
“Every time I see Marina is special.”
“That’s nice. I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Lee’s voice sounded so harsh Wes did not pursue the issue further. To his surprise, Lee, so eager to listen to hot hits on the radio and talk, talk, talk about work, sports, and TV shows and such, remained stonily silent.
“Hello, stranger,” Marina said caustically as Lee stepped out of the car, Frazier driving off. His wife had been watering the grass in front of the Paine home. She wore cut-off blue-jeans and a red shirt, knotted at the waist. Her hair was set in pigtails. Marina looked like the girl next door. No one would guess she’d recently given birth. Her trim figure had returned.
Everything I ever wanted, though of course, I did not realize I wanted that ...
“Hello, yourself.” He knew why Marina appeared disturbed. Up until a week earlier he had called her twice a day, during his lunch break from the pay phone, again in the evening after he returned to the rooming house. For ten days, she had not heard from him. Nor had he arrived the past Friday as usual.
“So, on Sunday night, I saw baby June playing with the phone. That gave me an idea. ‘Let’s call Daddy!’ I said. June giggled, seeming to understand. When the landlady answered I asked for you. She said ‘no one lives here by that name.’”
Cautiously, Lee stepped closer. “I’m sorry. I forgot to tell you. I’m registered there under my old alias, O.H. Lee.”
“So it’s as I feared? Starting your old foolishness again. The little boy who wants to play at being James Bond?”
“This isn’t what you think, Marina.” Desperately, Lee tried to approach her, hold his wife close. She turned, though not before he witnessed an ugly expression cross her face as Marina stepped inside. “Please believe me,” he called out, following.
“I made the mistake of believing you when you returned from Mexico. Remember? ‘It’ll never happen again, Marina. I swear!’”
Though she slammed the screen door behind her with terrible finality, Lee opened it and followed doggedly in her path. “I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.”
Scooping Rachel up from her crib, even as June came rushing out with a goofy ear to ear grin smeared across her little face, Marina swiveled around, eyes dark, unforgiving. “What movie are we living in now? Don’t expect me to guess. Tell me for once.”
“I told you: no more movies.”
“Yes, you did. You also said: Ozzie and Harriet now.”
“Yes! Exactly.”
She laughed to keep from crying. “Movies. TV. Lee, listen! Just once, couldn’t we live in the real world? As others do?”
“Yes. After tomorrow. And forever. If ...” His voice trailed off. His eyes fell to the floor.
“If,” Marina gasped, all at once sensing that something huge was happening here, “what?”
“If,” he continued with difficulty, “I’m still alive.”
*
“I’m afraid you won’t be able to watch the rest of the show,” Officer McDonald told Lee, still seated.
“What kind of a country do I live in, when a man can’t mind his own business and catch a movie?”
“I’ll need to have you stand, sir, while I search you.”
Suddenly, Lee threw a punch, sending the police officer down hard. Other officers rushed to reinforce their fallen colleague. McDonald leaped up, returning the punch.
“Oooooooh!” Oswald screeched, reaching into his pants and belt for the pistol he’d shoved there, bringing it up quickly.
“He’s got a gun!” someone shouted. People screamed. Some felt frozen in their seats. Others leaped up and ran. As they did, up there onscreen—though the house-lights were turned up, the film continued to run—Van Heflin and James MacArthur fired round after round at invading Japanese soldiers.
Moviegoers weren’t sure if the shots were real or pretend.
Kill ‘em all, guys. Mow ‘em down. Just like John Wayne in Back to Bataan. And, back in 1941, some real-life Americans taking on whoever was the enemy then. The faces change, the nationalities.
Always, though, there’s ‘The Enemy.’
If, today, for the first time, it comes from inside.
This is too much! So it ends, as it began, with a movie?
“Well, it’s all over now,” Lee cursed as they took him away.
EPILOGUE: AS I LAY DYING
(PART TWO)
“In his own mind, every man is great.”
—Sigmund Freud, 1921
“Doctor? We’re losing him. Fast!”
I hear the voice, as if from beyond some unimaginable object ... part wall ... part veil ... part mist ...a woman’s voice ... Not Marina, though ...
How I would love to hear Marina speak once more before—
... before I die. Of course, that’s what’s happening. Why didn’t I realize that at once? A few minutes ago, pain in my gut beyond comprehension. Now, that’s disappearing, bit by bit.
I thought maybe that meant they were saving me. It’s the opposite though, isn’t it?
I mean, this is it!
So what does it all add up to? Did I achieve anything?
Like that man in the French movie I saw several years ago ... my life’s desire ... to become immortal, then die.’
Well, I’ve achieved the latter part. Obviously! But ... as to the former ... will anyone remember me?
Or will dust be my destiny ... my final fate oblivion?
*
“If you leave this house tomorrow morning, Alik ... Ozzie ... Lee ... I know I will never see you again.”
In the darkness, between the sheets, Marina Oswald held her husband close. They’d just made love, total love, as they had that marvelous time when the two broke through all facades.
The night they became people rather than personas to one another. The most real experience either had ever known.
In or out of bed.
“Marina,” Lee said, kissing her gently, thrilled that last night they had achieved such a level of intimacy once more, “I can’t deny there is that possibility.”
“But your promise—”
“Try and understand. I meant what I said—”
“’That was then, this now.’”
“No, no, no. I said ‘forever.’ I did mean it.”
“So how can you—”
“I told you my dreams of greatness were gone. Any belief that there could be a political solution to the world’s problems? Over. That I might achieve it, with greater glory going to me? None of that interests me. As I said: You, June, Rachel.”
The first hint of dawn cracked through that spot where the window-shade almost touched down on the wood panel below it. “Yet in a matter of minutes, you’ll walk out on me.”
“It’s a matter
of principle. Not politics, not personal ambition. Those? Gone with the wind, as Marguerite would say.”
“You told me nothing was more important than ‘us.’”
Lee sat upright, like a coiled spring suddenly released. “I never said that. Never.”
“Something like it ...”
“In your mind! Yes, ‘Mama,’ I said that all the superficial things I hoped to achieve appear ridiculous to me now. But this is not one of those things. Can’t I make you see—”
“You have. You’ve made me see that, in the end, there is something more important than our marriage.”
Realizing that to continue was hopeless, Lee rose from the bed and began dressing. “That’s right. There is.”
“Fine,” she said anxiously. “Perhaps I can even accept that. Only you have to tell me what it is!”
“I can’t,” he replied, turning in the semi-darkness, the sun now steadily journeying upward in the sky outside.
“If I’m your wife, and I do mean what you say I do to you, you can tell me anything. Absolutely—”
“Anything but this.”
Lee stepped close, bringing his lips to Marina’s.
“And yet you must go.”
How to answer? There must be a line from a movie that would suffice. He tried so hard to recall ...
“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Didn’t John Wayne once say that once?”
“Oh, yes. In Hondo!”
Now, finally, it was my turn to say it. God, for one single moment in my life, it’s as if the Duke and I are one.
“Well, two can play that game, Alik. Lee. Ozzie. Whoever you are. So: ‘Kiss me once, as if it had to last forever.’”
Lee recognized the words but couldn’t place the film. Some chick-flick with Deborah Kerr, maybe. Still, he kissed her.
“Just like in the movies,” Marina sardonically commented as Lee completed that gesture and stepped back to the dresser. She heard a little clink but couldn’t guess what it might be.
“Yes,” Lee said, heading for the door. “Always remember: you were the great love of my life.”
My big exit scene ... and I played it brilliantly ...
The Paines hadn’t risen yet. Good! Pausing briefly in the kitchen, Lee helped himself to a stale cup of coffee left over from last night. Then he left the house proper, entering the garage through a side door. There, objects belonging to him and Marina were stored. Lee snapped on the light and glanced around.
Lee carried with him a long brown bag he had fitted together from packing papers at the Book Depository, stapling, gluing, taping them together into a single holster-shaped sack. He had brought this with him when he entered the previous night and, as conspicuous as this might have been, Lee’s intensity caused all present to overlook it. While Marina and Ruth fixed dinner, Lee had shoved his makeshift sack into the hall closet.
Now he brought this flimsy contraption alongside a large wooden box. In it were his rifle and telescopic sight. With the precision only a marine can administer, Lee swiftly broke the piece down, wrapping it in the paper shroud.
He left the building as Wes drove up. Lee slipped in beside the driver, simultaneously shoving his package into the back.
“What’s that?” Wes asked.
“Curtain rods,” Lee responded. “I’ll spend my weekend putting them up in my apartment. Give the place some color.”
“Good thinking.” Wes gunned the gas and they were off.
Unable to fall back to sleep, Marina pulled herself up out of bed and switched on the light. Immediately, she noticed Lee had dropped his wedding ring down in a cup on the dresser.
So this is how it ends, Marina later recalled thinking, the words not her own but that of a poet she once read and admired, not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot had, of course, been talking about the world. She, her relationship with her family. Their own little world.
Vaguely depressed, Marina wandered into the living room and switched on the TV, keeping the volume low so as not to bother anyone. It didn’t matter which channel she turned to. Each would be covering the arrival of the Kennedys all day long.
Here, at least, was something pleasant Marina could focus on to get Lee, and whatever it was he might be up to now, out of her mind. What a wonderful alternative: Camelot comes to Dallas.
What better way to escape her troubles than by watching a fantasy come true?
*
Wes Frazier parked two blocks away from the Book Depository in his regular spot. Somehow, though, things felt different. On most days when they shared the trip, he and Lee would walk over to the building together, chatting about anything at all, from what football team was on top to who would win the next election.
Not today. As Wes locked his car door, he glanced up to see Lee scurrying on ahead, carrying his oblong package, alone.
Maybe he had a fight with his wife? Sure, that’s it. No big deal or anything. Hey, that happens all the time ...
At eight sharp, when Roy Truly arrived, the boss man noticed Lee already hard at work. Truly’s top man darted about on the first floor from one huge cardboard carton to the next, marking off future shipments on his clipboard.
What a worker! Quite a guy, this Lee Oswald ...
The morning passed uneventfully, though for this special occasion Truly had set up an old black and white TV in the first-floor lunchroom. That way, during their breaks, employees could catch a glimpse of Air Force One whizzing in from Fort Worth, the First Couple disembarking, Governor Connolly and his wife greeting them, then the foursome stepping into the sleek Lincoln limousine, on their way to a gala lunch at the Trade Mart.
Lee joined three black workers, Bonnie Ray Williams, Harold ’Hank’ Norman, and James Earl Jarman, Jr., for a cup of coffee and a look-see at history in the making at 10:34.
This is the way it should be ... black and white together ... color doesn’t mean a thing. We’re just people, Americans all. That’s the way I want it and the way Kennedy does, too.
No one will stop him from achieving what Dr. Martin Luther King addressed when he announced: ‘I have a dream.’ Some dreams do come true. This one will.
JFK won’t die, at least not on my watch, though forces of immense power are gathering to achieve precisely that.
For my last public duty, I will save the day. Didn’t George once tell me Jack Kennedy would become the most important person in my life? Well, he was sure right about that!
If not, at least from our current perspective, in quite the way that he intended his statement ...
“There is nothing more stupid, Lee, then doing the same thing, time after time, always expecting a different result.”
Yes, Sergeant. You were right about that. Only now I’m doing the opposite of what I’ve always done before.
My own thing. The right thing. The final ‘thing’ ...
Then, back to Marina and the kids.
Or ... If God wills it ... I too will become immortal, then die. But what an honor that will be ...
To be recalled, down through the ages, as the man who gave his life to save Kennedy.
‘Finally made it, Ma! Top of the world!’
*
By 11:10 A.M. Lee had slipped off from the others, up to the sixth floor. Earlier that morning he had hidden his rifle among myriad cardboard cartons and similarly colored wrapping paper scattered all about. The entire area presented a terrible mess, one people would avoid. In addition to such usual storage materials, as well as books stacked high in gigantic piles, most of the floor had been torn up for repairs and restoration.
Five men had spent the morning laying down fresh plywood. They arrived shortly after Lee slipped in to conceal his weapon in a back area where they would not likely go.
Now, those workers broke for what Lee knew was going to be an early and long lunch. They’d watch the motorcade on the first floor, until the procession arrived out front. Then everyone would hurry to the windows o
r out the door to actually catch a glimpse of the celebrities in the flesh, so to speak.
Lee stepped into the corridor’s shadows, then entered the now deserted room. With the empty boxes haphazardly arranged alongside oblong piles of books, the scene looked like something out of a Twilight Zone episode on TV.
Da-da, da-da; da-da, da-da.
So this is why George instructed me to shoot from the sixth floor. Somehow, some way, he—the puppet-master as well as chess champ—arranged for such work to be done at this juncture in time so there would be no one around but me.
Fine. I’m here. If only to turn the tables on him.
Swiftly Lee reassembled his rifle and headed for the open window. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were lining the streets below. All joyously awaiting their brief glimpse of greatness. Also, as Lee alone grasped, out there somewhere were a pair of deadly assassins, possibly together, more likely in separate enclaves, planning to shoot the president, assuming Lee would fire the third shot from here.
He had to out-fox them, get one, then the other in his sights; knock ‘em out before they had a chance to fire.
It wouldn’t be easy.
He could achieve victory if not a single split second were wasted as Lee raised the rifle to his chin.
Lee couldn’t imagine anything that might cause him to hesitate, as he had with that fascistic general back in Dallas.
He had missed then. There was no margin for error now.
Too much depended on his being prepared ...
Lee ran through a litany of things in his mind that might give him pause, and could imagine none of them interfering here.
George, Rosselli, any of them ... To save the president?
I’ll put a bullet right between each man's eyes. Yes, I’m human. There are those things that could cost me a moment, destroy my plan.
But I can’t imagine anything that could interfere today.
The motorcade moved at what now seemed a snail’s pace in the direction of Dealey Plaza. Lee scanned the entire area with eyes that had once observed the skies through radar devices and thanks to hours of such study had become keen as an eagle’s.
So many nice folks, waving and cheering. Eyewitnesses to history. Yet somewhere, out there, in the midst of them ...
Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald Page 43