by Don DeLillo
I sometimes am confused. We are dealing with tragedies of speech, tragedies of the human body. There are forces we can’t comprehend.
He put out one cigarette, lit another. He got tired early now. It was a lingering effect of Operation Midnight Ride, the series of one-night stands in Louisville, Nashville, Amarillo, his journey to arouse the heartland, to get them to listen, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc., and he was still recovering. Beatniks came to picket, the most godawful bunch of Castro look-alikes anybody ever saw.
It is time to go down and liquidate the scourge which has descended on the island of Cuba.
It tired him and got to him, plain wore him out. Those deadly hotel rooms where he was never more totally alone and bare of comfort. I sometimes am confused and lost, ready to give in to lonely despair, tired of shuffling and dodging what I know and feel. Think of those uncombed boys in baggy jeans, sign-carriers, who shout dirty words into the night. They are soft beneath the drifting Cuban hair. Hotels. This is where the switch takes place, where he is a stranger who mind-wanders into the midst of the other side, only following what he’s always felt.
Some people think a nigra is a sunburnt white.
He had a better time when he was running in the Texas primary. The crowds were rollicking. They were chanting and singing crowds, hopeful people, not the worn souls, of Midnight Ride. He scratched out numbers, added up tax dollars, but what he thought about were flags waving in halls across the whole damn state, the draped bunting, the clear American voices calling out a song.
Put on your Pro Blue bonnet
With the Lone Star upon it
And we’ll put Ted Walker on the way
Was that a firecracker? He turned to the window, standing in the same motion, but slowly, giving the matter some thought. Kids throwing firecrackers around? Did we put the screen back in? The screen was in, he saw, and the window was shut. All the windows were shut because the air conditioner was on. He moved out of the light and something caught his eye. There was a hole in the wall about the size of a half-dollar. He was trying to get it straight. He looked at the window again and the glass had radial streaks in it near the crosspiece of the wooden frame. He moved farther out of the light. His cigarette burning in the ashtray. He went upstairs and got his revolver. He came down quickly. He went out the back door and stood in the dimness with the gun, stood looking, dead still, feeling the heat like a wall of air. Then he went back inside and called the police. That’s when he noticed bits of glass and wood in the hair on his right forearm, just below the rolled-up sleeve, and there were grainy fragments mixed in, bright as sand, a residue he believed were slivers of the copper jacket of a high-velocity bullet.
He was not half surprised. They have been plotting for a long time, every element in the Control Apparatus, planning and scheming carefully to keep Walker quiet. This is what shooting people does.
He got a pair of tweezers, sat in his easy chair and began picking metal out of his arm while he waited for the police to arrive.
Marina was worried about Lee. In the morning he told her he’d lost his job. He blamed it on the FBI. He said they’d probably come around the shop and asked questions about him. Now he was late coming home. Coming home from what? He said he had typing class but the class ended at a quarter. past seven, three hours ago, and besides it was a Wednesday and there was no class on Wednesday.
He wanted her to go back to the USSR. He could not support a wife and child in America. He made her write to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Would they pay for the return of a Russian citizen and her baby girl?
She was pregnant again, which is the way destiny sometimes intervenes.
At least they had a balcony where June could crawl around in the fresh air. When they separated, after Fort Worth, she stayed with half a dozen different families, some nights with this one, then over to that one. It was beating on her nerves, all that moving around. One night Lee stayed with her in one of the Russian homes. There was a full refrigerator and an electric can opener. Two telephones. They made love with the TV on.
He told the landlady on Elsbeth Street she was a Czech.
He hit her once in front of people because the zipper on the side of her skirt was partly open. In front of people.
Holland was unbelievably clean. It was her dream country, with trim houses and spotless little children.
There were bargain stores in Oak Cliff. She went in out of the heat and walked the aisles. She went to shoe stores and stores called army-navy. She bought this, rejected that, mentally, walking the narrow aisles.
Maybe they would all go back to Russia, although she didn’t want to. Maybe they would move to New Orleans. He was talking about New Orleans, his hometown, a port city like Archangel, where she grew up.
He did most of the housework and gave her breakfast in bed on Sunday. She was shameless when it came to sleeping late. People gave her things and he insulted them.
He took the bus to a place called the Field of Love, where he practiced shooting his rifle. They argued about this. He hit her and she threw something at him and he hit her again with a closed hand, making her bleed from the nose.
We buy groceries on Tuesday.
It was one more misfortune on her head, this lost job of his. But the pattern of a life can’t be seen in fleeting days or weeks. Maybe it was their destiny to live in a port city, to feel the sea breeze and glimpse the tender promise ahead.
He’d never been so late. Something told her to look in his study. She found a note in Russian on the small table he used as a desk. There were eleven points listed by number, with certain words underlined.
She read quickly, in a blur.
He told her not to worry about the rent. He’d paid the rent on the second. He’d paid the water and gas. He told her to send newspaper clippings (if there was anything about him in the papers) to the Soviet embassy. He said the embassy would come to her aid once they knew everything. He said the Red Cross would help her. He told her money was due from work. Go to the bank and cash the check. He asked her to hold on to his personal papers. But throw out his clothes or give them away.
Number eleven was, If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge we always cross when we go downtown.
She stood a moment in the small room. Then she moved softly to the kitchen, where she folded the note and hid it in a Russian volume called The Book of Useful Advice.
Lee was back at the Gulf station drinking another Coke, his shirt sticking to him. He edged closer to the office, where a radio was playing. He figured it wouldn’t take long before a report came in. Every time a song ended and someone on the radio started to speak, he moved a little closer to the office door, listening for urgent words, for shot, dead, dying, that excitement riding high in the chest when there is news of important violence. Both weapons were in the car, with the green slicker, about three miles away by now, somewhere in the West Dallas ghetto. He’d get them in a day or two, or when it was safe.
He took a deep swallow, then let the bottle dangle between his index and middle fingers. Things were slow. Two men in grease suits talked inside the office. The room was brightly lit, with stacked cans of motor oil, a sexy wall calendar. Lee moved closer. He tried to look like an idler on some weedy edge of town.
Late. The cars stopped coming. There was nothing on the radio but rock ’n’ roll. He finished the Coke, put the bottle in the case of empties and walked home in the head-splitting heat.
George de Mohrenschildt listened to the car radio, changing stations often. He was trying to get some fresh news on the Walker affair. The attempt fascinated him. Evidently it was the nearest of misses. The bullet changed course when it nicked the window frame. The police weren’t saying much else. It was frustrating. He was hungry for developments. He didn’t want the episode to slip into oblivion.
He drove the Galaxie convertible into Oak Cliff. Next to him on the seat was a big pink rabbit for Baby June.
He hadn’t
seen Lee for some time. Lee undoubtedly felt used and badly handled and abandoned. All the sad words in the beggar’s dictionary. But it was his own fault. All he had to do was talk to Collings, man to man. George half admired his resistance. There was a purity of sorts. But it was boring too.
There was a new abandonment in the works. George was going to Haiti and he knew Lee would feel that the one man who took an interest in him was scramming out the door. George wanted to open up the country of Haiti. He knew the number-one banker there, which meant many things were possible. Oil surveying, resorts, holding companies. There was also a weapons shipment in the works, deep deep in the dark. Front companies were rising out of desk drawers. There were numbered bank accounts, untraceable ship charters. A fellow at the Pentagon wanted George to help provide cover for an anti-Castro operation centered in Haiti.
He found Neely Street. He thought about people spending their lives in a place like this. Lee sat in this hole reading obscure economics, mumbo-jumbo theory of the left. It was sad, interesting, boring, stupid. It was also infuriating. It hadn’t occurred to George that seeing where Lee and Marina lived would make him angry. There was something serious and unsettling about this kind of squalor. Everything was rickety, makeshift, slanting. Everything slanted. It was repellent, not much better than a slum in Port-au-Prince, and George realized he could never again be amused by Lee, by the boy with the odd past and the out-of-place manner.
Marina and Lee came to the door. George said to Lee in his biggest voice, “So my friend. How come you missed that son of a bitch?”
He waited for the sure laugh. But they retreated to the living room. There was a shrinking in the air. Obviously the joke was not so funny in this household.
He handed over the Easter bunny and told them he was going to Haiti, long-term business, let’s keep in touch.
He watched Lee’s face change. He felt bad about that. He was leaving the boy without someone to go to with his ideas and his troubles. Marina went to the kitchen to make tea and George talked in her general direction about his vision of Haiti. Hotels, casinos, hydroelectric plants, food-processing plants. Lee sat on the sofa. His peculiar smile appeared, the little smirk that made George think of a comedian in a silent film with the screen going dark around his head.
“So someone finally smiles. It’s a very delayed reaction. I walk in the door with a joke, no one makes a sound. I think I’m in the valley of lost souls. Now I see a smile peeping out. What is so amusing? Please. Inform me.”
“I sent you a picture,” Lee said.
“What picture?”
“It’s the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn’t understand before.”
“Sounds mysterious,” George said.
“Maybe he sees the truth about someone.”
Driving home George thought about the heavy schedule of appointments he had in New York and Washington, preparing the way for various aspects of the Haitian venture. He had the Bureau of Mines, Lehman Trading, Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the Pentagon, the ICA, the CIA. The last in fact was strictly social, lunch with an old Agency friend, Larry Parmenter, a Bay of Pigs character but otherwise decent and amusing, a chap who knew his wines.
He sat at his desk opening and reading three days of mail. He came to the envelope addressed by Lee Oswald. Just a snapshot inside. It showed Lee dressed in black, holding a rifle in one hand, some newspapers in the other. Am I interested or bored, thought George. He looked at the reverse side. It was inscribed To my friend George from Lee Oswald.
George checked the postmark on the envelope. April 9. One day before the attempt on General Walker.
He looked at the second inscription. This was in Russian, clearly in Marina’s handwriting and evidently written without Lee’s knowledge, sneaked in before he sealed and mailed the envelope—a private message from the wife of the poseur to the sophisticated older friend.
Hunter of fascists—ha ha ha!!!
6 September
Wayne Elko sat at the window of a shotgun shack in the bayous west of New Orleans. There was no glass in the windows, just dusty plastic stripping, and he looked at three blurry men taking target practice in a mixed stand of cypress and willow.
There were other shacks in the area, here and there, used by weekenders who came out frogging and crawfishing.
Early mist. The gunfire sounded small and distant, little pop-gun compressions in the heavy air.
David Ferrie, a magnetic presence, a humorous master of games, was shooting at tin cans with a .22.
The swag-belly Cuban, Raymo, had a modified Winchester he liked to break down and reassemble, running a patch through the bore, sandpapering the stock.
The third man, named Leon, worked the bolt on an ancient carbine; sighted, fired, worked the bolt.
This was a new and hastily assembled camp, Ferrie explained, which is why the lack of creature comforts. The regular setup was at Lacombe, nearer New Orleans, where a number of anti-Castro factions had trained in guerrilla tactics until federal agents raided, grabbing a huge store of dynamite and bomb casings. This project would be kept small and restricted. Speak to no one. Respect the environment. Wait for the moment.
Wayne thought these were rules that verged on mystical.
He knew they weren’t here just to fire weapons. T-Jay wanted them sequestered. Raymo and Wayne especially. The business was sorting itself out and he wanted his shooters wrapped tight, where he could find them.
Wayne stood outside wearing Levis, his bare chest pale and veined. He was growing his hair down over his neck, a rat’s tail he painstakingly braided. He went barefoot over the moist ground. There was a storm hanging close, a stillness. and metallic light, pressure building. The bird noise was fretful and spooked.
Frank Vásquez was back in the Everglades spying on Alpha 66.
The others stood talking by a fallen tree. Wayne wore a hunting knife in a leather sheath clipped to his belt, just for the general look of it. Ferrie smiled at the sight of his bare feet.
“Here is a man who has no fear.”
“I never understand about people and snakes,” Wayne said. “Like what harm do they intend? They never touch me. I’ve had incidents with snakes where they never touch me.”
“It’s not they touch you,” Raymo said. “It’s stepping on them. Not seeing where you step.”
“Copperhead,” Leon said.
“I have the primitive fear,” Ferrie said. “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there.”
He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff. His car was parked on a dirt road about half a mile downstream and the skiff was the only way in and out.
They took turns firing at a silhouette target that was the one-time property of the FBI. Then they went up to the long shack for something to eat.
The first drops of rain hit the sheeting, well spaced and heavy. They sat around the table and talked about jobs, odd jobs, seasonal jobs. Wayne told them about his pool-skimming days in California. Leon described a radio plant somewhere, lathes and grinding machines, floor awash in oil, the workers’ hands stained black. Raymo talked about the hands of cane-cutters, seamed with cuts, sticky and black from the juice.
This was the first time Wayne had heard Leon say more than two words. He didn’t know where Leon fit in, except it was obvious he was some kind of special component with his own little twist or spin. He came and he went, carrying the Italian carbine. The others seemed to leave some space around him, like he was holy or diseased.
They talked about prisons they’d been in.
“I used to believe the great thing of Castro was the time he spent in prison,” Raymo said. “He went to prison in Cuba and Mexico both. I used to say this is the man’s honor and strength. He comes out of prison with authority if
he is sent there for his beliefs. It is completely different in Castro’s own prisons. We came out of La Cabana with anger and disgust. We were the worms of the CIA.”
“They sent me to prison in the military,” Leon said.
“What for?”
“Politics. Just like Fidel. I spent a night in jail in New Orleans a month ago. Politics.”
“I sat in a lockup for three days,” Wayne said. “Our launch was intercepted about ten minutes out of the Keys. Violating the neutrality act. It was T-Jay that got us out. He fixed it somehow. The charges were dropped nicey-nicey.”
Raymo said, “Castro spent fourteen months in an isolation cell. He read Karl Marx. He read every Russian. He told us he read twelve hours a day. He read in the dark. Always studying, always analyzing. Years later I saw the executions of men who fought by his side in the mountains.”
“It’s clear in history,” Leon said, “that a man has to go to prison for his beliefs. It’s a necessary stage in the evolution of any movement that cuts against the system. Eventually he merges his beliefs in the actual struggle.”
“I thought about it a lot,” Raymo said, “and I’ll tell you my beliefs. I believed in the United States of America. The country that could do no wrong. It was bigger than anything, bigger than God. With the great U.S. behind us, how could we lose? They told us, they told us, they promise, they repeat and repeat. We have the full backing of the military. We went to the beaches thinking they would support us with air, with navy. Impossible we could lose. We are backed by the great U.S. What happens? We find ourselves in the swamps, lost and hungry, we are eating tree bark by this time, and the radio is saying, ‘Attention, brigade, the owl is hooting in the barn.’ ”
He looked from one face to the other, laughing.
“ ‘Tomorrow, my brothers, the crippled child climbs the hill’ ”
They were all laughing.