by Don DeLillo
“Keep them absolutely secure and ready.”
“What is the subject of this meeting? Because I have to know there’s complete trust between us. ”
“You do know. Take my word. Or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t make me feel I’m getting too old for certain operations. This is my trade. There’s only one subject for people like us.”
Paint flakes on the desktop and floor, steel cabinets covered in dust. Inside the cabinets were Banister’s intelligence records. He kept files on people who volunteered for the anti-Castro groups in the area. He kept microfilmed records of left-wing activity in Louisiana. He had the names of known communists. He had material supplied by the FBI on Castro agents and sympathizers. Mackey had seen handbooks on guerrilla tactics, back issues of a racist magazine Guy published. There were files on other organizations renting space at 544 Camp, past and present, including the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an alliance of anti-Castro groups put together by the CIA with Banister’s help.
“People like us,” he said to Mackey, “we have this dilemma we have to face. Serious men deprived of an outlet. Once we’re pushed out, how do we retire to a chair on the lawn? Everyday lawful pursuits don’t meet our special requirements.” He laughed happily. “For twenty-some-odd years in the Bureau I lived in a special society that pretty much satisfied the most serious things in my nature. Secrets to trade and keep, certain dangers, an opportunity to function in tight spots, wave a gun in people’s faces. That’s a charmed society. If you’ve got criminal tendencies, and I’m not saying this is true of you or me, one of the places to make your mark is law enforcement.” A short happy laugh. “How much of my manhood is watery puke? That’s what I want to know. I was involved in the Dillinger case, earliest days of my career. Public enemy number one. Famous finish, got him coming out of a movie house in Chicago, sweltering night, the Biograph. I was with the Office of Naval Intelligence in the war, just like young Jack Kennedy.” He took a swallow. “Spy work, undercover work, we invent a society where it’s always wartime. The law has a little give.”
He set the mug of bourbon to one side and ran his hand over the newspapers and files to find his cigarettes.
“In John Birch,” he said, “we have a hundred thousand members. Way out of hand. Then there’s General Ted Walker going on tour with the Reverend Billy James Hargis, coast to coast, in ten-gallon hats. The Minutemen are leaner, move close to the ground. But there’s a fervor I don’t trust. They’re waiting for the Day. They’ve got their ammo clips hidden in the garage and they know the Day is fast approaching. They get their politics all mixed up with the second coming of Christ. I respect your methods, T-Jay. You want a unit that’s small, tight and mobile. None of these bullshit mailing lists. You don’t want theory and debate. Just impact. Two or three men to do serious things.”
David Ferrie walked in wearing an undersized panama hat and a turtleneck shirt with a drooping collar. To Mackey, who’d met him once before, he had a look of sad apology, like a man who’d betrayed a public trust. (Banister claimed he was a defrocked priest.) He moved in a languid glide, loafers slapping.
He said to Banister, “Shouldn’t be drinking this time of day.”
“What do we have in the storeroom?”
Ferrie glanced at T-Jay.
“Some old, old Springfields. Thirty-aught-six. I mean old. We have M-1s, a whole raft of Yugoslav Mausers with markings stamped in Russian if that impresses you. We have some M-4s out by Lacombe. I burnt off a magazine only yesterday. ”
“Where do we keep our scopes?” Banister said.
“Most of the scopes and mounts are out at the camp. We have some extra-long target scopes stored here. Of course it depends on what you want to shoot. Hairy big game like Fidel, you want a wide field of view because he’s always in motion. The fact is I used to admire Dr. Castro, secretly. A brief moment only. I wanted to fight by his side.”
His voice was whispered, incredulous; something about the curious paths of his own life caused him endless surprise. The face itself was disbelieving, the stark pasted brows looped high over his pale eyes. Nothing he said could be separated from the eerie facts of his appearance, least of all, apparently, by Ferrie himself.
“Where would you park a light plane below the border?” Mackey said. “Figure you’re leaving home in a hurry.”
“I’d point her right on down to Matamoros. Below Brownsville. There’s a field there. You want to go deeper into Mexico, you can play hopscotch on dry lakes. Avoid populated areas entirely.”
“No offense. How old are you?”
“Forty-five. Perfect astronaut age. I’m the dark scary side of John Glenn. Great health except for the cancer eating at my brain.”
“You’ll die violently,” Banister said.
“I want to believe it.”
“A nacho stuck in your throat.”
“I speak Spanish,” Ferrie said, amazed to hear it.
He went into the small room behind the office, where Delphine Roberts was compiling one of the lists that someone in the firm was always gathering material for. Delphine was Banister’s secretary and research aide, a nailed-down American, middle-aged, with airy spraywork hair.
“These are supposed to be runless stockings,” she said.
“Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That’s the nature of existence.”
“I know. You studied philosophy where was it.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
“I’m back on Metrecal.”
“But you’re a wisp, Delphine.”
He turned on the little TV.
“Why do you think a Negro would want to be a communist?” she said, running a finger down the list. “Isn’t it enough for them being colored? Why would they want a communistic tinge added on?”
“Are you saying why be greedy?”
“I’m saying don’t they have enough trouble. Besides, if you’re colored, you can’t be anything else.”
She worked at a Formica desk by the window. A cardboard shirt support was taped over a hole in the screen.
“I priced a bomb shelter last week,” Ferrie told her.
“It’s not the bombs coming out of the sky I worry about. The missile crisis came and went. It’s the troops that will just appear one quiet morning, armies landing on the beaches, paratroops dropping through the clouds. Guy received a report that the Red Chinese are massing troops in Baja California. ”
“I have private torments, Delphine. They require something larger than an army.”
They were watching As the World Turns. Ferrie sat in a folding chair with his legs crossed. He took off his hat and placed it on his right kneecap.
“I say to myself, I wonder why Delphine comes to this rat-trap office every day. A woman like her. With a background and so forth. A real pretty house on Coliseum Street. Social niceties, let’s say. The DAR.”
“This is the real work of the nation. What could I accomplish in the City Council or some ladies’ group? Guy Banister is the vanguard of what is going on in this country, so far as actually making an impact. Recruiting, training, collecting information. I feel like this is a contribution I can make that I couldn’t do in the normal ways, through committee work and so forth.”
She glanced at Ferrie’s faded red toupee, an object that resembled some windblown piece of street debris. She looked at the sloped forehead, the somewhat Roman profile, eagle-beaked, oddly impressive despite the man’s overgrown ears, the clownish aspects of his appearance. In fact she’d seen the profile before she ever met Ferrie. There was a mug shot in Banister’s files. It commemorated two arrests in 1961, in Jefferson Parish, for what were officially described as crimes against nature.
They watched TV.
“Dave, what do you believe in?”
“Everything. My own death most of all.”
“Do you wish for it?”
“I feel it. I’m a walking sandwich board for cancer.”
“But yo
u talk about it so readily.”
“What choice do I have?” he said.
On the screen two women commenced a dialogue in slow and measured movements, over coffee, with solemn pauses for hurt and angry looks. Delphine went back to her work, trying to listen past the TV set to the voices in the next room, the remote and private drone that fixed the limits of her afternoons.
“Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera?” Ferrie said absently. “Because our lives are a vivid situation.”
Delphine fell forward in bawdy laughter. Her upper body shot toward the desk, hands gripping the edges to steady her. She sat there rocking, a great and spacious amusement. David Ferrie was surprised. He didn’t know he’d said something funny. He thought the remark was melancholy, sadly philosophical, a throwaway line for an aimless afternoon. Not that this was the first time Delphine had reacted so broadly to something he said. She considered his mildest comic remarks automatically outrageous. She had two kinds of laughter. Lewd and bawdy and abandoned, the required worldly response to Ferrie’s sexual status, her sense of a kind of anal lore that informed the sources of his humor. Softer laughter for Banister, throaty, knowing, wanting to be led, rustling with complicities, little whispery places in her voice, a laughter you could not hear without knowing they were lovers.
“It’s not just Kennedy himself,” Banister was saying on the other side of the door. “It’s what people see in him. It’s the glowing picture we keep getting. He actually glows in most of his photographs. We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurry to be great? He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He’s trying to engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on me just to look at him. Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with Castro? What kind of back channel does he have working with the Soviets? He touches a phone and worlds shake. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he’s nothing.”
Banister paused until Mackey’s eyes shifted to meet his.
“I believe deeply there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or necessity or anything you like. What, do you sense in the air? That’s all I’m saying, T-Jay. Is there something riding in the air that you feel on your body, prickling your skin like warm sweat? Drink up, drink up. We’ll have one more.”
What passes in a glance.
That night Mackey sat in a small room across the street from a surgical-supply firm and two or three house trailers. Odds against a cool breeze about a thousand to one. The trailers were set in enclosures heaped with debris and guarded by bad-tempered dogs.
He sat by the window, in the dark, applying a pale lotion to the mosquito bites scattered across his ankles and the backs of his hands. It was going to be tough trying to sleep in this heat, without a fan, these little buzzing mothers closing in.
The rooming house was in an area where homes and junkyards seemed to spawn each other. A rooster crowed every morning, amazing, only blocks from major thoroughfares.
Every room has a music of its own. He found himself listening intently at times, in strange rooms, after the traffic died, for some disturbance of tone, a nuance or flaw in the texture.
Getting weapons from Banister was less risky in the long run and a hell of a lot easier, short-term, than stealing them from the Farm. This was the covert training site the CIA operated in south-eastern Virginia, five hundred wooded acres known to the outside world as a military base called Camp Peary. Mackey instructed trainees in light weapons there, college grads eager for careers in clandestine work. This was the Agency’s way of letting him know where he stood for refusing to sign a letter of reprimand. He lived about ten miles off-post but during periods of special exercises he shared quarters with another instructor in an old wooden barracks partitioned into double rooms. They wore army fatigues and played brooding games of gin rummy, listening to dull rumbles from the sabotage site.
He poured the lotion on his fingers, then rubbed his fingers lightly over the bites. The bites continued to sting.
Everywhere he went, mosquitoes. He’d trained rebels in Sumatra and the commando units of CIA client armies in a number of piss-hole places. But he was not Agency for life. He could wait for them to drop him or beat them to it. He’d seen too many evasions and betrayals, fighting men encouraged and then abandoned for political reasons. They didn’t call it the Company for nothing. It was set up to obscure the deeper responsibilities, the calls of blood trust that have to be answered. This was the only war story he knew, the only one there was or could be, and it always ended the same way, men stranded in the smoke of remote meditations.
He felt the heat beating in, midnight vibrations, the sirens down Canal, the growl of some solo drunk. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He clenched his right fist. The tattoo bird was an eagle, circa 1958, etched in a dark shop on one of Havana’s esquinas del pecado, sin comers, where he was providing security in an Agency endeavor to supply funds to the movement of the rebel Fidel Castro, three years before the invasion.
Every room has a music that tells you things if you know how to listen.
Good men died because the administration delayed, pondering options to the end. To Mackey, aboard the CIA’s lead ship, an old landing-craft carrier situated fifteen miles from Blue Beach, the operation began to resemble something surreal. As information became available, with data flowing across the radar screens and over the radios, with signals bounced off the clouds by a destroyer’s twenty-four-inch lights, it seemed to him that something was running out of control. There was strange and flawed material out there, a deep distance full of illusions, deceptions, eerie perspectives.
The same ship used two different names.
Radio Swan, located on a tiny guano island, was broadcasting meaningless codes to pressure the Fidelist armed forces into mass defections. “The boy is in the yellow house.” “The one-eyed fish are biting.” All night the lonely babble sounded.
The seaweed in reconnaissance photos turned out to be coral reef that interfered with the landings.
Planes flew with insignia painted out and when pilots were finally allowed to reconnoiter inland they had to use Esso road maps to find their way.
Navy jets meant to link up with B-26s from Nicaragua arrived too early, or too late, because somebody mixed up the time zones.
Two ammunition ships appeared on radar, heading full-speed in the wrong direction, ignoring radio messages to return.
The DCI, Allen Dulles, was spending the weekend in Puerto Rico, delivering a speech to a civic group on the subject “The Communist Businessman Abroad.”
There was a ten-minute mutiny on Mackey’s ship.
“The sky is swollen with dark clouds.” “The hawk swoops at dawn.”
The second air strike, finally, was canceled.
He knew Everett believed the failure was more complex than one scrubbed mission. A general misery of ideas and means. But Mackey insisted on a clear and simple reading. You can’t surrender your rage and shame to these endless complications.
He had a wife somewhere. This was a complication to think back on. Two years of study, postwar, mining and metallurgy, with a wife to encourage him. He could barely picture her face. Paled and ballooned by drink. She was a paramilitary wife by then. She liked the movies. She liked to sit with her ass dipped down into the opening between the seat and the backrest, her feet up on the raised edge of the seat front, ba
lanced like a serious toy, as the bullets flew. She had pretty hair, he seemed to recall, and drank in a methodical way, as if to forestall any complaint that she was out of control.
The scouting party came ashore before midnight. Mackey was the only American in the rubber raft and he wasn’t supposed to be there. The raft skidded up the beach and one man vaulted into the water and ran alongside, scooping dense sand with both hands and muttering a prayer. They began marking the beach with landing lights for the troops waiting beyond the breakers in ancient pitching LCIs and born-again freighters. The place wasn’t exactly deserted. Some people sat outside a bodega above the beach, old men talking. One of the scouts, wearing black trunks and a black sweatshirt, face smeared with galley soot, walked over to chat with them, carrying an automatic rifle. T-Jay wasn’t armed. He couldn’t be sure whether this was his way of letting the men know his role here was limited or whether he was feeling indestructible tonight. The sea tang was bracing. He saw an old Chevy near the bodega and got his chief scout Raymo to request the keys from one of the patrons as a gesture of welcome from those about to be liberated. He wanted to find out if the local militia camp was where the intelligence briefers said it was. The car was a ’49 model with a picture pasted to the dashboard of a Cuban ballplayer in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap and shirt. They were an eighth of a mile down the stony road when a jeep appeared in the high beams, two heads bobbing in silhouette. T-Jay eased the car diagonally across the road. Raymo was out the door, saying something into the bursts from his submachine gun. Every other round was a tracer. Heat and light. When the magazine was empty, two dead militiamen sat in the vehicle, mouths open, the upholstery smoking. Raymo stood looking, his squat body immensely still. He was barefoot, in ridiculous checkered shorts, like a vacationing Minnesotan, a cartridge belt slung below his belly. They heard pistol fire from the beach and drove to the bodega in reverse. Someone said a scout had shot one of the old men over a careless remark. Near the body a cluster of people stood arguing. T-Jay walked down to the beach. Frogmen were in, helping rig the marker lights. He had his radioman tell the lead ship to send the brigade commanders ashore, send the troops ashore, get the goddamn thing going. Back near the road he saw a woman standing outside a straw hut, swatting the air around her. They were very near Zapata swamp, famous for mosquitoes.