Libra (57 page)

He called his sister Eileen in Chicago and sobbed.

He called KLIF and asked for the Weird Beard.

“Tell you the truth,” Jack said, “I never know what you’re talking about on the air but I listen in whenever. Your voice has a little quality of being reassuring in it.”

“Personality radio. It’s the coming thing, Jack.”

“Plus when do I see a beard in Dallas?”

“I’m the only one.”

“Russ, you’re a good guy so I called with a question I want to ask.”

“Sure, Jack.”

“Who’s this Earl Warren?”

“Earl Warren. Are we talking this is blues or rock ’n’ roll? There was an Earlene (Big Sister) Warren sang on the West Coast for a while.”

“No, Earl Warren, from the Impeachment signs. The red, white and blue signboards.”

“Impeach Earl Warren.”

“That’s the one.”

“He’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Jack. Of the United States.”

“The events have got me bollixed up.”

“Who can blame you?”

“It’s the worst thing ever in our city.”

“One little man comes along and turns everything upside down. And we’ll get the blame for him.”

“Don’t say his name,” Jack said. “It has an effect of making me worse in my mind. Like I’m watching a dog playing in the dirt with my liver.”

 

 

Saturday afternoon. Lee Oswald sat in a small glass enclosure with a phone on a shelf to his right. The door across the room opened. Here she came moving toward him, bandy-legged, dry-eyed, jowly, hair pure white now, long and white and shining. She sat on the other side of the partition. She looked at him carefully, taking him in, absorbing. They picked up the phones.

“Did they hurt you, honey?” she said.

She went on to tell him how she heard the news on the car radio and turned around and went home and called the Star-Telegram and asked them to take her to Dallas in a press car. Then she was interviewed by two FBI men, both named Brown. She told them for the security of the country she wanted it kept perfectly quiet that her son Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States from Russia with money furnished by the State Department. This was news to the Browns and they were pop-eyed.

“They’re taping this, Mother.”

“I know. We’ll be careful what we say. I told them I haven’t seen my son in a year. ‘But you are the mother, Mrs. Oswald.’ I told them I’ve been doing live-ins as a nurse and they didn’t tell me where they’d moved to. ‘But you are the mother, you are the mother.’ I told them I didn’t even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news every minute on the radio.”

These men, Brown, were looking for suspects in every direction. Magazine people were keeping the family in a room at the Adolphus Hotel. It was kept extremely hush hush. They were whisked from place to place with precautions. All of them. The accused mother, the brother, the Russian wife, the two little babies. Accompanied by approximately eighteen to twenty men who were suspicious of them and of each other. These were FBI, Secret Service and Life magazine. There was a man continually taking pictures. And Marguerite rolled her stockings down and he took that picture too, of the mother rolling her hose after a day that made history.

“Things were done without my consent,” she told Lee. “But I’m checking every quote I make to them and if there are mistakes coming out, I’ll know it is all stacked up against us, going back to Russia. ”

The babies had diarrhea in their hotel surroundings and there were diapers strung across the room from wall to wall. A president had to die before she could learn she was a grandmother again.

 

 

When Marina went into the room to talk to Lee she didn’t know the police had found prints of the photographs she’d taken in the backyard on Neely Street. They were with Lee’s belongings in Ruth Paine’s garage. Marina had found two prints herself, overlooked by the police, in little June’s baby book. The pictures with the fateful rifle. The gun in one hand, then the other.

She had both pictures folded inside her shoe.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said into the phone. “You have friends to help you.”

It was painful seeing him in this state. Not just the bruises and scratches. This was a man who appears in a dream, a distorted figure in some darkness outside ordinary night.

She thought of the mild face of the boy she’d married, the unexpected American who asked her to dance. The face was almost plump then, rosy with cold, and the hair neatly parted, the clothes pressed. He was even cleaner than she was, very clean coming to bed, clean in every habit.

Then the worker in Texas and Louisiana, sometimes grease-spattered, losing weight, losing hair, dog-weary, suffering nosebleeds in his sleep, refusing to change his clothes.

Now this vision, this man with a beak nose and dark eyes, one brow swollen, clothes too big for him. This specter with gray skin. She looked at the lumpy Adam’s apple, the prominent nose. His cheeks were sunk under the bones, leaving this nose, this bird beak.

He had to be guilty, she thought, to look so bad.

He told her not to cry. His voice was gentle and sad. He told her they were taping every word.

So she could not tell him about the pictures in her shoe. Or about the other thing she’d discovered after the police had left last night. This was his wedding ring in a demitasse cup on the bedroom bureau. He’d left it behind with the money, early Friday morning.

The money, the photographs, the wedding ring.

Three times he’d asked her to live with him in Dallas. She said no, no, no.

He told her now to buy shoes for June. Don’t worry, he said. And kiss the babies for me.

The guards got him out of the chair and he walked backwards to the door, watching her until he was gone.

Home, Aunt Valya would be putting up sauerkraut, polishing copper, busy with the usual things, going with Uncle Ilya to visit the Andrianovs, a life without sudden turns and interruptions, and waiting for the first heavy snows.

She didn’t even know about the policeman. She didn’t know about Governor Connally. No one told her until later in the day that Lee was accused of wounding one of them and cold-bloodedly killing the other.

 

 

They led him back to the cell. He took off his clothes and gave them to the guard. He ate a lunch of beans, boiled potatoes and some kind of meat.

Nothing about this place bewildered him or set him to wondering what would happen next. The reporters did not surprise him, uproar in the halls. The lawmen asked the obvious questions and even when he failed to anticipate what they’d ask, it was still everyday obvious stuff. The cell was the same room he’d known all his life. Sitting in his underwear on a wooden bunk. A sink with a dripping tap. Nothing new here. He was ready to take it day by day, growing into the role as it developed. He didn’t fear a thing. There was strength for him here. Everything about this place and situation was set up to make him stronger.

Even his appetite was back. This was the first meal he could really dig into. There was coffee in a mug. He drank it slowly. He thought. He listened to the guards talk softly in the narrow hall.

There was a third way he could play it. He could tell them he was the lone gunman. He did it on his own, the only one. It was the culmination of a life of struggle. He did it to protest the anti-Castro aims of the government, to advance the Marxist cause into the heart of the American empire. He had no help. It was his plan, his weapon. Three shots. All struck home. He was an expert shot with a rifle.

 

 

Saturday night. David Ferrie was driving in circles through the city of Galveston, Texas. His monkey fur was askew on his head. His mind had reached the stage of hysteroid extremes.

When the President was shot he was in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, where Carmine Latta’s tax evasion case was being decided in the old man’s favor.

When Leon was picked up by the police he was in his apartment packing for the trip to Galveston. He had his old Eastern captain’s hat, gold-braided, that he was putting in an overnight bag. He heard the capture on the radio.

This was cause for panic. He gave in to it at once. Ferrie believed panic was an animal action of the body to ensure that the species survives. It was far older than logic. He kept on packing, only faster, and hurried down to his car.

He drove in circles around New Orleans for hours, listening to news reports. Then he filled the tank and headed west through a black storm, one of those sky bursts full of slanting coastal fury, and seven hours later he was in Houston.

He drove in circles around Houston. At 4:30 A.M. he checked into a place called the Alamotel. He was in no mood for patriotic puns. He spoke Spanish to the desk clerk, went to his room and made a series of calls to people in New Orleans, friends, lovers, clergy. He sought comfort in these calls and spoke Spanish even to those who didn’t know a word.

He was afraid Leon would give the police his name.

He was afraid Leon would be killed.

He was afraid Leon, alive or dead, had his library card in his wallet. He seemed to recall letting Leon use his card once.

In the morning he bought newspapers and coffee and sat in the car listening to the radio. He felt his life trembling on the edge of the news reporter’s tongue. He drove to a skating rink and made more calls. Banister wouldn’t talk to him. Latta was at a sit-down. He called teenage boys he’d taught to fly. The skating-rink organ produced a sound that made him think of total death. He went out to the car.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you’re ready. It’s a terror. It’s a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We’ve set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We’ve set it loose. We’ve opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn’t want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.

He drove in circles around Galveston. The plane was probably still at the airport. He thought he might fly it out of here, a Piper Aztec, and make the escape to Mexico without the assassin. It didn’t seem the least bit crazy. It seemed a ritual suited to the event.

The event was total death. Only a ritual could save him from succumbing.

He checked into a place called the Driftwood Motel. He spoke Spanish on the phone.

What was he doing in Galveston? Wasn’t he here to fly the plane? The idea of flight had drawn him. He was a flyer, a master of the element of air. He was prepared to submit to death if it came at the end of a flight across the shining gulf, on some scoured brown flat in Mexico, remote, in fierce heat, with mountains trembling in the haze. These were the rules he insisted on. Mexico is a place where they understand the dignity of rules for dying.

He reached Banister on the phone. Guy told him something was in the works, a chancy plan, a long shot. David Ferrie decided to get a good night’s sleep and head back to New Orleans in the morning.

 

 

There were wreaths and flower clusters arrayed on the lawns of Dealey Plaza, marks of sadness and farewell, and Jack Ruby drove through the streets at midnight, soaking up atmosphere and emotion. He looped through the plaza half a dozen times. He drove past seven or eight clubs to see who was open. It made him angry in that patriotic way of clenching your jaw tight when you see your fellow citizens profiteering from the heartbreak of others, conniving to be the only ones open on a weekend of national pain. All day he’d watched TV at various points in his circuit of downtown Dallas. This death was everywhere. Pictures of the grieving family. Re-enactments at the scene of the murder. This was an event that had the possibility of being bigger in history than Jesus, he thought. So much impact and reaction. It was almost as though they were re-enacting the crucifixion of Jesus. God help the Jews. Empty soda bottles rolled around his feet.

He drove home and started pulling things out of the refrigerator to eat. He felt a compulsion to stuff the body against despair. He wanted to handle food, to cook it and smell it, watch animal blood spurting in the pan. Take back muscle and blood. Take back gristle. He needed chewy meat and seltzer water fizzing in his teeth. It adds a little reserve to my strength of will.

He spent ten minutes making a sandwich but didn’t have the heart to eat it. He went into the living room and picked up a newspaper to make sure his ads looked okay—the notices that his clubs were closed. George was hulked on the sofa in Jack’s old robe, a beer can sweating in his hand.

Jack called his brother Earl in Detroit.

He called his sister Eva here in Dallas to talk for the third or fourth time about what happened. Eva began to weep. She was totally broken up. He handed the phone to George because he wanted his roommate to hear his sister weep. It was a broken hacking sob. Authentic. Jack and Eva wept and George stood with the phone planted on the left side of his head, looking impressed.

Jack went to bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. Every time a truck passed on Thornton Freeway it made a noise like paper ripping. The phone rang and he went into the living room and picked it up. He listened about twenty seconds. Then he put on his clothes and drove to the Carousel.

He went up the narrow stairs and turned on the lights. The dogs started barking in the back room. He sat in his office running his hand through his hair. He needed a scalp treatment fast.

He heard the footsteps. Then Jack Karlinsky walked into the office. He looked a little tired. He wore an open-collar shirt and his neck was stretched and ridged. He looked old at this hour, unprepared. He brushed some dog hair off the sofa and sat down.