Libra (31 page)

“Something odd lately? I don’t know.”

“What?” he said.

“Suzanne? Although it’s probably nothing.”

“It’s not like you.”

“Worry over nothing.”

“She’s all right. She’s fine. She’s a healthy child.”

“With a morbid streak.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Lately she seems.”

“What?”

“She’s always going off with Missy Tyler. They practically hide from me at times. I don’t know, it’s just, I think she’s so preoccupied lately, so inner, and I wonder if there’s something unhealthy there.”

“Missy’s the skinny little redhead.”

“Adopted. They hide in corners and whisper solemnly. There’s a kind of mood that descends whenever Missy’s here. Very sort of haunted-house. Awestruck. Something walks the halls. I get the feeling it’s me. I’m a very suspicious presence in this house. The girls hush up when they hear me coming.”

“They have their own world. She’s dreamy,” he said.

“She listens to a Dallas disc jockey named the Weird Beard.”

“What does he play?”

“It’s not what he plays. He plays top forty. It’s what he says between records.”

“Example.”

“Impossible to duplicate. He just like, here I am, on and on. It’s a completely other language. But she is fixed to the radio.”

“Inka dinka dink.”

“I know. It’s not like me. Most of my worrying makes sense.”

“She read to me for forty minutes nonstop and it was remarkable, remarkable.”

“ ‘Please, Daddy, I want to read some more.’ ”

“Are you handling plutonium with those gloves?”

“ ‘Daddy, Daddy, please.’ ”

He went upstairs, moving slowly in his light and silent way. Miami has an impact, a resonance. City of exiles, unhealed wounds. The President wants a motorcade because the polls show he is losing popularity by the minute. Appear among the multitudes in his long blue Lincoln, men on motorcycles to trim the crowds, men in sunglasses dangling from the sides of the follow-up car. Lancer stands to wave. It is necessary to wing a bystander or Secret Service man in order to validate our credentials. This is how we show them it is real. Plots. The ancients shared in nature by echoing the violence of a windstorm or thunder squall. To share in nature is the oldest human trick. A thought for bedtime.

The watering can was gritty metal with an ugly snub spout.

He found Suzanne awake when he looked inside. There was a cloth-and-vinyl toy at the end of the bed, a football player they’d named Willie Wonder, with padded shoulders and polished chino pants. Win turned the key at Willie’s back and sent him on a broken-field run the length of the bed. He broadcast the run in an urgent voice, described missed tackles and downfield blocks, added the roar of the crowd, became the official who signaled touchdown when the toy spun backwards into a pillow. Suzanne showed a pleasure that seemed to start at her feet and creep up her body and into her eyes, making them large and bright.

If he could only keep surprising her, she would have a reason to love him forever.

 

 

Mackey drove across a drawbridge over the Miami River. The tires wailed on the iron grid. A white sloop moved upriver in the dark, a little mystery of grace and stealth. Two blocks south of the bridge he saw the first
Volveremos
bumper sticker. Empty streets. His hands sticking to the wheel.

He parked on a sidestreet and walked around the comer to a vast car lot. It took him ten minutes to find Wayne Elko stupidly sprawled in the back seat of a red Impala. The top was down and Wayne was gazing into the night.

“How did I get in here so easy?”

“T-Jay.”

“You’re the watchman, I hear.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“I drove nearly a thousand miles just to see you, Wayne.”

“I about gave you up.”

Mackey leaned against the car and looked off toward the street as if the sight of the bedraggled Wayne Elko, in bare feet, with clothes and other possessions strewn about, was a little too bleak to take in right now.

“I saw Raymo and what’s-his-name. I spent time with them training in the Glades, man. There is Alpha 66 people infesting the Glades. We trained with them a little bit. I never turned my back except to pee.”

“Alpha won’t bother us. I have long-time contacts in Alpha.”

“Are you Agency, T-Jay, or what?”

“Not no more, Bubba. Sold my peewee trailer for small change and here I am. What do they call us, retirees?”

“We train with real shit weapons.”

“Weapons are coming.”

“The stars are fucking fantastic. I love the Glades for the clear nights. It’s a whole other world out there. See those hawks zoom. I wouldn’t mind going out again. My back’s messed up from sleeping in the car.”

“We have a friendly source of funds will come through for you soon. ”

“When I was with Interpen, we had hotel and casino money.”

“We have a fellow in New Orleans.”

Mackey didn’t trust Guy Banister. Guy was past it now, a once able man who’d grown fierce and unsteady in his hatreds. He was delivering money and weapons but would not support the operation blindly. Mackey would have to tell him who the target was or else invent a target. Either way he risked betrayal. Guy was deep in causes and affiliations. He had influence in a dozen directions. It was not reasonable to expect a man like that to sit and watch the event unfold. He’d want to take an active hand. He’d set loose forces that would threaten the self-contained system Mackey wanted to create.

He didn’t trust Wayne Elko. Not that Wayne would knowingly turn. It was a question of temperament, unpredictability. Wayne had a gift for the celebrated fuck-up. He also had a nature that went violent in a flash. There was something a little viperish about him. He drawled and rambled and looked sleepy-eyed, stroking his lean jaw, then suddenly took offense. He was a man who took offense in a serious way. Scraggly and lank. Those ripe eyes bulging. An idea of himself as born to the warrior class. Mackey was sure he could get Wayne to do just about anything he wanted, just so long as it challenged his sense of limits.

“We did a certain amount of small arms in the Glades,” he said to T-Jay now. “They had me using a pistol on a stationary target. I’m making the mental leap this is what you told them you want.”

Wayne’s assignment wouldn’t take him anywhere near President Jack. He would be working strictly short-range. It was a matter of fitting the man to the nature of the task. He was the intimate killer type.

She wore shorts like any housewife in America. She thought she was in a dream at first, walking on the street in bare legs, with her hair cut short, looking in shopwindows. She saw things you could not buy in Russia if you had unlimited wealth, if you had money spilling out of your closets. She knew she hadn’t lived in the world long enough to make comparisons, and Russia suffered terribly in the war, but it was impossible to see all this furniture, these racks and racks of clothing without being struck by amazement.

They had very little money, practically no money. But Marina was happy just to walk the aisles of the Safeway near Robert’s house. The packages of frozen food. The colors and abundance.

Lee got angry one night, coming back from a day of looking for work. He told her she was becoming an American in record-breaking time.

They were like people anywhere, people starting life a second time. If they quarreled it was only because he had a different nature in America and that was the only way he could love.

Neon was a revelation, those gay lights in windows and over movie marquees.

One evening they walked past a department store, just out strolling, and Marina looked at a television set in the window and saw the most remarkable thing, something so strange she had to stop and stare, grab hard at Lee. It was the world gone inside out. There they were gaping back at themselves from the TV screen. She was on television. Lee was on television, standing next to her, holding Junie in his arms. Marina looked at them in life, then looked at the screen. She saw Lee hoist the baby on his shoulder, with people passing in the background. She turned and looked at the people, checking to see if they were the same as the ones in the window. They had to be the same but she was compelled to look. She didn’t know anything like this could ever happen. She walked out of the picture and then came back. She looked at Lee and June in the window, then turned to see them on the sidewalk. She kept looking from the window to the sidewalk. She kept walking out of the picture and coming back. She was amazed every time she saw herself return.

 

 

Lee stood in front of Robert’s house and watched his mother approach. She looked shorter, rounder, her hair gone gray and worn in a bun. She was working as a practical nurse and showed up in uniform, all white, with dark-rimmed glasses and the little bent hat that nurses wear. It was the official uniform of motherhood and she looked like the angel of terror and memory sweeping down from the sky.

She embraced him crying. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She searched for her lost son in the tapered jaw and thinning hair. All this love and pain confused him. This blood depth of feeling. He felt a struggling pity and regret.

She was writing a book, she said, about his defection.

One day they were living with Robert, the next day with his mother. He didn’t know how it happened. She took an apartment large enough for all of them, although she had to sleep in the living room. It was like growing up with her all over again, the bed in the living room, and one night they stayed up late, mother and son, after Marina and the baby were asleep.

“She doesn’t look somehow Russian to me.”

“She is Russian, Mother.”

“Well I think she is beautiful.”

“She admires you. She says the place is so clean and neat. She likes your soft hair, she says. But no book, Mother.”

“I went to see President Kennedy. I have done my research. I had a lot of extenuating circumstances because of your defection.”

“Mother, you are not going to write a book.”

“It is my life as I was forced to live it because of not knowing if you were alive or dead. I can write what’s mine, Lee.”

“She has relatives there that would be jeopardized.”

“Jeopardized. But you have given a public stenographer ten dollars to type pages for your own book.”

“That is a different book.”

“It is Russia and the evils of that system.”

“It is a different book. ‘The Kollective.’ It deals with living conditions and working conditions. I will change people’s names to protect them. Don’t think we don’t appreciate that you have bought clothes for the baby and that you’re cooking and feeding us, so forth.”

“It was the ten dollars I gave you that you gave that woman for the typing.”

“It is a book of observations, Mother. I owe money to the State Department for getting me home. Robert paid our airfare from New York. I am only looking for ways to pay back my debts.”

“I have a right to my book,” she said. “The President was not available at that time but I spoke to figures in the government during a snowstorm who made promises that they would look into the matter. ”

“It is only an article, not a book. I am having notes typed for an article. It is so many pages.”

“How many pages did she type?”

“Ten pages. That’s all I had money for.”

“A dollar a page I call a rooking.”

“I smuggled those notes next to my skin right out of Russia.”

“Marina watched a daytime movie with Gregory Peck with me sitting right here and she knew Gregory Peck.”

“So what, he is well known everywhere.”

“We have to use the dictionary to talk.”

“Little by little she’ll get the hang.”

“I think she knows more than she’s letting on,” his mother said.

He found a job as a sheet-metal worker, drudge and grime and long hours and low pay. They left his mother’s and moved to their own place, one-half of a matchstick bungalow, furnished, across the street from a truck lot and loading docks. This was the shipping and receiving entrance of a huge Montgomery Ward operation. Marina went to the retail store. She walked the aisles. She told Lee about the cool smooth musical interior.

All the homes on their street were bungalows. Everybody called it Mercedes Street. The lease for the apartment said Mercedes Street. Lee’s map of Fort Worth said Mercedes Street. But the sign on a pole at the comer said Mercedes Avenue.

He sat on the concrete steps out front, next to a baby yucca, reading Russian magazines.

His mother came with a high chair. She came with dishes. Lee told her he didn’t want anyone’s charity. She came with a parakeet in a cage. It was the same bird in the same cage he had given her in New Orleans when he worked as a messenger.

It is the shadow of his prior life that keeps appearing.

“No more,” he told Marina. “You keep the door closed.”

“How can I do that to your mother? She is kind to us.”

“Keep the door closed. Or she’ll move in on us. Absolutely keep her out. She comes with a camera to take pictures of our baby.”

“She is the grandmother.”

“It is the first phase to moving in.”

“It is a picture, Alek.”

“This is how she insinuates. This is conniving her way into our house.”

“You don’t want her coming around but at the same time you try to take advantage of her at every chance.”

“That’s what mothers are for.”

“This is a cruel thing.”

“I’m only kidding and don’t call me Alek anymore. This is not Alek country. June is not Junka. People will think you don’t know your own family by their right names.”

“It doesn’t sound like kidding when you raise your voice to her.”