Libra (50 page)

All these books. Books stacked ten cartons high. Cartons stamped Books. Stamped Ten Rolling Readers. Stacked higher than the tall windows. The cartons are a size you have to wrestle. When you open a fresh carton you get the fragrance of paper, of book pages and binding. It floods you with memories of school.

He liked carrying a clipboard. The clipboard made him feel this was a half-decent way to earn a dollar. He didn’t have to listen to crazy-ass machines. There was no dirt or grease on the job. Just dust rising when the men ran to the elevators in the afternoon, three or four men pounding across the old wood floors to begin the race down—sunny dust forming among the books.

 

 

Lee sat in the dining room at the Paine house, wondering where the women had sneaked off to. Then Marina and Ruth walked in carrying a cake and singing “Happy Birthday.” He was taken by surprise. It was a shock. He laughed and cried. Twenty-four.

He stayed over that night, a Friday, and the next evening he sat on the floor watching a double feature on TV, with Marina curled up next to him, her head in his lap.

The first movie was
Suddenly.
Frank Sinatra is a combat veteran who comes to a small town and takes over a house that overlooks the railroad depot. He is here to assassinate the President. Lee felt a stillness around him. He had an eerie sense he was being watched for his reaction. The President is scheduled to arrive by train later in the day. He is going fishing in a river in the mountains. Lee could tell the movie was made in the fifties from the cars and hairstyles, which meant the President was Eisenhower, although no one said his name. He felt connected to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission. Marina was asleep. They were running a message through the night into his skin. Frank Sinatra sets up a high-powered rifle in the window and waits for the train to arrive. Lee knew he would fail. It was, in the end, a movie. They had to fix it so he failed and died.

Then he watched
We Were Strangers.
John Garfield is an American revolutionary in Cuba in the 1930s. He plots to assassinate the dictator and blow up his entire Cabinet. Lee knew this was the period of the iron rule of Machado, known as the President of a Thousand Murders. The streets were dark. The house was dark except for the flickering screen. An old scratchy film that carried his dreams. Perfection of rage, perfection of control, the fantasy of night. John Garfield and his recruits dig a tunnel under a cemetery. Lee felt he was in the middle of his own movie. They were running this thing just for him. He didn’t have to make. the picture come and go. It happened on its own in the shaky light, with a strand of hair trembling in a corner of the frame. John Garfield dies a hero. He has to die. This is what feeds a revolution.

Lee sat there after the movie ended, with loud late-night commercials coming one after another, fast-talking men demonstrating blenders, demonstrating miracle shampoo, and Marina next to him, asleep, softly breathing.

It wasn’t only the movies that made him feel a strangeness in the air. It was the time of year. October was his birthday. It was the month he enlisted in the Marines. He shot himself in the arm, in Japan, in October. October and November were times of decision and grave event. He arrived in Russia in October. It was the month he tried to kill himself. He’d last seen his mother one year ago October. October was the missile crisis. Marina left him and returned last November. November was the month he’d decided with Dupard to take a shot at General Walker. He’d last seen his brother Robert in November.

Brothers named Robert.

He got Marina settled in bed, then sat next to her and murmured serious baby talk to help her fall asleep again. He felt the power of her stillness, a woman’s ardor and trust, and of the child she carried. He would start saving right away for a washing machine and car. They’d get an apartment with a balcony, their own furniture for a change, modern pieces, sleek and clean. These are standard ways to stop being lonely.

 

 

The landlady let him keep a jar of preserves and some milk in a comer of the fridge. He sat with the other roomers about half an hour a week, watching TV was all. He never spoke to them or raised his eyes to see them clearly. They were gray figures in old chairs, total nobodies. He was registered as O. H. Lee.

The rooming house was in an area of Oak Cliff that he knew well. The Gulf station where he’d rendezvoused with Dupard was across the street. The speed wash, now called Reno’s, was half a block away. He went into the speed wash but Bobby didn’t work there anymore. The place in daylight was home turf to half a dozen women and their scruffy kids. The children ate and played. The Coke machines sent bottles clunking into the slot.

His room was eight by twelve. Bed, dresser, clothes closet. He spent hours there reading the Militant and the Worker. One night he took the 22 bus back downtown. He walked the streets, looking into bars. He walked all the way down South Akard and stood outside Gene’s Music Bar. Two men brushed past him, entering, and he followed them in. He stood near the door. The place was crowded. There were hard benches along the walls, rough-hewn benches. He could easily clear the room with an AR-15, which is what they use to guard the President, firing full auto. The idea was to stand here as long as he could without being noticed, just to watch, to see how queers work out their arrangements.

Somebody said, “It’s none of my business
but .
”

He tried to pick out a person he might want to talk to, an understanding type. He drew some glances, then straight-out looks. It was either go to the bar and order something or walk out the door. He decided this was a visit just to see. He could come back with a surer sense of things, not feeling so watchful and odd. Hidell means don’t tell. He went out into the cool air, where he realized he was sweating. When he got to the rooming house he read every word of the week-old Militant. He also read between the lines. You can tell when they want you to do something on behalf of the struggle. They run a message buried in the text.

 

 

Three days after Rachel was born he went to a rally at Memorial Auditorium. The main speaker was Edwin A. Walker. Lee stood at the rear of the hall, watching people come in. The secret he carried with him made him feel untouchable. He was the one, the man who’d fired the shot that barely missed. It was a secret and a power. And he was standing right here, among them, among the Birchers and States Righters, wearing his . 38 under a zipper jacket.

Crowd of about a thousand. Walker stood up there in his tall Stetson and moaned and groaned about the United Nations. Clap clap. The UN was an active element in the worldwide communist conspiracy. Clap clap. Lee slipped into a seat about midway down the aisle. He felt the smallness and rancor of these people. They needed to knock someone to the ground and stomp him for fifteen minutes. Feel better now? Walker went on about something called the Real Control Apparatus. He spoke in a clumsy way that engaged nothing, compelled nothing. There was a Lone Star standard on one side of him, a Confederate flag on the other. Lee moved farther down the aisle, stooped over so he wouldn’t block anyone’s view, and found a seat near the stage. Walker was a tired man. His face was like some actor’s made up to show fatigue and aging. Lee saw a picture of a bright-red splotch on Walker’s shirtfront just below the heart.

Outside the hall people crowded around the general, trying to touch him, show him their faces. He moved slowly to a waiting car. Lee pushed through the crowd. People thrust their faces into Walker’s line of sight. They called to him and reached across bodies. Lee caught the general’s eye and smiled as if to say, Bet you don’t know who I am. Untouchable. He had his hand inside the jacket, gripping the stock of the .38, just to do it, to get this close and show how simple, how strangely easy it is to make your existence felt. He saw a picture of the crowd breaking apart, crying out as they scattered, No, no, no, and Walker on the pavement, hatless now, a front-page photo in the Morning News.

He took the bus to his rooming house. He sat on the bed, holding the revolver. Shooting Walker was a dead-end now. He had no means to get to Cuba. They probably wouldn’t take him even if he shot the man and managed to escape. History was closed to Edwin Walker. He put the gun in a dresser drawer. He went to the kitchen and drank some milk, standing in the dark.

What would he have to give Fidel before they let him live happily in little Cuba?

 

 

He sat at the wheel of Ruth Paine’s station wagon. Dust blew across the gravel surface of the huge parking lot. It was Sunday and the lot was empty.

Ruth Paine was tall and slender, a long-jawed woman in her thirties with wavy doll’s hair and librarian’s glasses. She turned in her seat, looking straight back.

“Slow, slow, slow,” she said. “Take it very slow.”

He went in reverse for thirty yards, then hit the brake too hard, jolting them both. They sat looking out at the windswept lot.

“Did you tell him where I live?”

“I don’t know where you live,” she said. “It wasn’t until he asked that I realized I didn’t know. Even Marina doesn’t know. Put it in forward and we’ll do some turns.”

“Did he say how he found you? How he knew Marina is staying with you?”

“He seemed a very reasonable man. I don’t think he’ll cause you any trouble at work. He said he wouldn’t do that and I believe him.”

“He knows where I work?”

“I told him. I didn’t see what else I could do. They’re the government, Lee.”

He stared through the windshield.

“Put it in forward. Drive toward that litter basket. Then make a left around it.”

He remembered now. He’d left a forwarding address at the post office in New Orleans before he went to Mexico City. Ruth Paine’s address. But why are they looking for him? Because they know he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. They have him on film. They have recordings of his voice. What is it called, electronic eavesdropping?

“Ease up on the accelerator,” Ruth said.

A broadsheet was fastened around the litter basket. THE VATICAN IS THE WHORE OF REVELATION. He made the turn nicely and straightened out.

“He wanted to know about anyone visiting or calling. I told him your social contact at the Paine house consisted mainly of dialing the number that says what time it is. He thought that was fairly funny.”

If the Feebees could find him, so could Guy Banister. Whatever the Feebees knew, Banister could find out. A whole Sunday paper scattered in the wind, pages skipping past. He brought the car to a stop and stared through the windshield.

Ruth Paine said softly, “Let’s try it in reverse one more time.”

 

 

He saw something in the Morning News about JFK coming to Dallas. A noon luncheon. November 21 or 22. He barely scanned the story. He barely ran his eyes over the surface of the words. It was a bright cool day. He saw a shopping cart roll slowly out of an alley.

 

 

Marina slipped out of the house during the FBI man’s second visit there. She walked around and around his car, trying to figure out what make it was. She couldn’t read the raised metal lettering but she did memorize the license number, as Lee had ordered, and wrote it on a slip of paper when she got back to the house, getting one digit wrong.

Lee wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, using Ruth Paine’s typewriter. He had to type the letter several times and had trouble with the envelope as well, getting the address and return address mixed up and leaving out numbers and whole words. But it was worthwhile to see the sentences emerge so clear and solid with the authority his handwriting could not convey. He complained about the notorious FBI. He tried to tell the embassy between the lines that he was known to the KGB. He asked about Soviet entry visas and announced the birth of his daughter. He blamed Mexico City on the Cubans.

Then he wrote a note to the FBI man and took it on his lunch hour to the local office of the Bureau, where he handed it to a receptionist and walked out. He understood the agent’s name to be Hardy and this is the single word he wrote on the envelope. He did not sign or date the note. The note said he was tired of the FBI bothering his wife and if they didn’t stop he would take action. It also said he was affiliated with the New Orleans FBI, including being assigned an official code number, and that could be verified.

He practiced parking on the weekend with Ruth.

The nosebleeds started again.

He played with little Rachel, who had dimples just like Papa. It was David Ferrie who’d told him months before that dimples were a mark of the Libran.

 

 

Nicholas Branch has a sound tape made in Miami nine days before the President was due to appear in that city. The conversation on the tape was secretly recorded by one William Somersett, a police informer. The man talking to Somersett is Joseph A. Milteer, a member of the Congress of Freedom and the White Citizens Council of Atlanta.