Libra (37 page)

He took the elevator to three, holding the carton with the food and drinks, thinking that if he doesn’t do something soon he will be running a business out of his pants pockets forever, if they let him run it at all, if they don’t turn him into a nothing person completely. He got off the elevator and went down the corridor to the juvenile bureau. He felt blood seeping into his shoe. But just seeing these men in uniform, clean shaven, he wanted to say it is the proudest feeling of my life being a friend of the police in the most pro-American city anywhere in the world.

His rabbi told him many times, “Don’t be so emotional.”

Lee Oswald sat in Sleight’s Speed Wash at midnight, waiting for his clothes to dry and reading H. G. Wells. One other customer was in the place, an obese and scary-looking man who wore slippers cut open near the front to give his swollen feet some room. The air had a sour reek. Lee was slumped over volume one of The Out
line
of History, biting the skin of his thumb, the book spread open in his lap.

He was living apart, off and on, from Marina and Baby June.

The night attendant came around, a lanky Negro saying in a kind of singsong, “Closing time, closing time, y’all go home.” He carried somebody’s sheets in a red mesh basket.

The other customer got up and went to a dryer to collect his things. Lee sat reading, folded over the book, chewing a knuckle now. The customer hobbled out.

About three minutes passed. The dryer with Lee’s clothes stopped running. He sat with his head in the book. He knew the attendant was shooting him a very level look from fifteen feet. He turned a page and read toward the end of the chapter, which was at the bottom of the facing page. He read slowly, concentrating hard to get the meaning, the small raw truth inside those syllables.

“Hey, Jim. You are wearing me thin, okay.”

The Greeks and the Persians. He looked up. The attendant had a droopy lower lip, a rust-tone complexion with a spatter of freckles across the cheekbones, those dangling hands, and Lee thought Japan before he was able to supply a name or set of circumstances. In an instant he knew. This was Bobby Dupard, his cellmate in the brig in Atsugi.

It took him a while to get Dupard to remember who he was. Bobby stared hard, taking in Oswald’s hair, receding on the left side, where the part was; taking in the haggard look, the three-day stubble, the shirt with a popped seam near the collar; taking in a lot actually, four years plus of manhood and exile and hard times. Ozzie the Rabbit. Remembrance entered Dupard’s face in a complicated way.

“What it is, I don’t look real close at whites no more. So it takes me a while to pin down the individual I’m basically talking to.”

They didn’t talk about Japan. They talked about West Dallas, where Bobby lived with his sister and her three small kids in a project of hundreds of buildings stretched in barracks formation between the Trinity River and Singleton Boulevard. They called it a housing park. Fenced in, isolated from the city, with ripped-out plumbing set on the mud lawns. Bobby worked at the speed wash from seven to midnight six days a week. Twice a week he took a course in mechanical drawing at Crozier Technical High School downtown. Sometimes he worked a noon-to-four shift as a mixer in a bakery, a fill-in for the sick and the missing. He went home in clothes dusted white. His mother was dead now. His father lived in another part of the project. Bobby wasn’t sure where. From the 52 bus he saw his old man all the time sitting in front of an auto-wrecker service sipping malt liquor from a can. Big Cat brand. Bobby knew his father would not recognize him if he walked over and said hello. His father would talk to him the same way he talked to everyone, explaining his conversations with the Lord.

That was West Dallas. Smoke from the lead smelter. Staccato lives.

Bobby had a trace of wispy chin hair now. His eyes had lost their quicksilver fear. He looked at Lee from an angle, cool and fixed, with a slow nod of the head to measure remarks.

Lee explained that he was living underground. He’d left his last job without a word. He’d disappeared from his last address. He had a post-office box. His brother didn’t know what part of Dallas he was in. His mother thought he was still in Fort Worth. His wife was living with friends of hers due to misunderstandings. He was working for a graphic-arts firm. He didn’t explain the occasional classified nature of the work. He said nothing about Marion Collings. Collings, through George de Mohrenschildt, was pressing him for details of his contacts with the security apparatus in the USSR. He was avoiding Collings. He was avoiding the postal authorities. He was hiding from the Feebees. He was using false addresses on every form he filled out. He was making posters after hours on the job and sending them to the Socialist Workers Party. He had a spy camera stashed in a seabag at the bottom of his closet.

He didn’t explain about Marina and how much he missed her and needed her and how it made him angry, knowing this, trying to fight this off, another sneaking awareness he could not fight off.

Forget Japan. Bobby talked about the South, about the police dogs and fire-bombings, the integration of Ole Miss. It was a daily event just about, the TV footage of segregationist rage, crowds of Negro marchers bending to the charge of riot police, toppled in sudden clusters. Demonstrators smashed in the face, hit with rocks. Someone falls, those white boys move in kicking. Cops gripping those billy clubs, one hand at each end, twisting hard. Look at their eyes. Look at those firemen come jumping off the trucks. They turn on those hoses and it’s like a wrath from out of hell that sends everybody spinning.

All over the project there were makeshift barbecue pits, fifty-five-gallon oil drums cut in half horizontally and set belly-down on metal legs—smoke rising, hoses shooting water on TV.

The clothes tumbled in a dozen Loadstar dryers.

Bobby said, “I believe the whole system works to make the black man humble down. Follow the penny hustle, drink the cheap wine. This is what they got planned out for us. I’ll tell you where I’m at, Ozzie. When I read crime news in the paper, I look at the names to figure out was the perpetrator black or white. Some names just black. I check them over close. I say, Go brother. Say, Do it to them. Because what edge do we have asides hating?”

He said, “I’m not looking to wear the white man out with my ability to suffer.”

He said, “I’m trying to learn a trade to keep me sane.”

They stayed in the speed wash talking until 2:00 A.M. Two nights later they talked again while Bobby loaded machines and folded clothes for the drop-off customers. The next day Lee punched out a little early and met Bobby downtown outside his drafting class and they took a bus to the Oak Cliff section, where the speed wash was located and where Lee was living in an area of rooming houses and rusted car hulks sitting in long weeds. They shared a box of donuts and talked some more. Later that night Lee walked six blocks to the speed wash from his flat on Elsbeth Street and they talked until closing time, talked politics and race and Cuba while the machines turned and the night stragglers threw fistfuls of clothes into the churning soap.

Next day they had an idea. Let’s put a bullet in General Walker’s head.

 

 

Marina stood arm-rocking little June. He’d cleaned the place for her return. He was happy to see her. He took the baby and spoke his fake Japanese, wagging his head. It made them all laugh.

He began to study bus schedules. The Preston Hollow bus, the 36, stopped a block and a half from the general’s house. He walked past the house, which was set back from the street and very near to Turtle Creek, a lushness of cottonwoods and elms, a deep quiet. Just walking down the street made him feel untouchable. He memorized the license-plate number of a car at the head of the driveway and wrote it in his notebook. He kept a notebook of travel times, distances and other observations.

She asked him if he would teach her English now.

He sent $29.95 to Seaport Traders for a 38-caliber revolver with a shortened barrel. It was made by Smith & Wesson and known as the two-inch Commando. He used the name A. J. Hidell on the order form and entered his address as Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.

The next day he went to typing class. It was his first day there and he sat in the last row, talked to no one, studied the keyboard on his machine. It was like Chinese. He inserted paper, placed his fingers on the keys, trying to understand why the letters were positioned the way they were. It was a picture of his humiliation. Nine dollars to enroll. George had told him if he could type he’d get a better job someday.

It was the very end of January in ’63.

 

 

He stood in the darkroom with another trainee, Dale Fitzke, a cripple. Dale wore a high shoe. He walked in a kind of tick-tock motion and had a soft clean face, incredibly smooth, that made him look about twelve years old.

They stood shoulder to shoulder by the developing trays. People moved in and out, squeezing behind them. There were dim red lights that made the room look radioactive.

“What kind of person are you?” Dale said. “I am sort of weird in my family. They have finally stopped expecting great things.”

“What do they expect?”

“They are holding their breath, sexually. What do you like best about the darkroom? It’s the way my room used to look when I had a fever. Childhood fevers were the best times. I had tremendous high fevers. What kind of feeling do you get about this company?”

“I like it here. The work is interesting by comparison to some.”

“Because I get the feeling these various and sundry tasks are not the only things going on around here. For example. Do you want to hear an example?”

“Like what?” Lee said.

“They told me to stay away from the worktables in the typesetting area. Not allowed. No lookee.”

“You can look. No one will stop you. I look all the time.”

“So do I,” Dale said with a jump in his voice. “I’ll tell you what I see if you tell me what you see.”

“They have lists of names for the Army Map Service.”

“What kinds of names?”

“Place names.”

“That’s what I see too. They set the names in type on three-inch strips of paper.”

“Some of the names are in Cyrillic letters. Which I know in Russian. For maps of Soviet targets.”

They were both whispering.

“I’ll tell you what I overheard,” Dale said, “if you promise not to tell anyone. The maps are made from photographs. The photographs are the really secret things. They come from U-2s.”

The light was an eerie neon rouge.

“Isn’t that a neat thing to know? I love being in a position where I can exchange fascinating stuff with someone. Like you tell me, I tell you. U-2s. When I first heard this stuff, around Eisenhower, I thought they were saying you-toos, like there’s me-too and you-too.”

It was a Saturday and they were getting time and a half Lee put in for Saturdays whenever possible because he knew this job was doomed the minute Marion Collings gave the word.

“Do you like the people here?” Dale said. “I saw you with that Russian magazine you were reading. There’s been a little comment. The people here are friendly up to a point. Not that it matters to me, what anyone reads. Do you remember what it was like, being under the blankets, sweating, as a kid? A fever is a secret thing. It’s like falling down a hole where no one can follow but there’s no terror or pain because you don’t even feel like yourself. I love huddling in sweat.”

“I had an ear operation when I was little. I still remember the dreams after they put on the mask.”

“I had
four
operations! I
loved
going under!”

Dale was gesturing in the glow, with fluid dripping off his hands into the tray.

“What kind of mind do you have, Lee? One day I heard my mother say, ‘He’ll never be brilliant, Tom.’ She was talking to Tom, my brother. I have used that sentence at dinner a hundred thousand times. ”

The mysterious U-2. It followed him from Japan to Russia and now it was here in Dallas. He remembered how it came to earth, sweet-falling, almost feathery, dependent on winds, sailing on winds. That was how it seemed. And the pilot’s voice coming down to them in fragments, with the growl and fuzz of a blown speaker. He heard that voice sometimes on the edge of a shaky sleep.

Dale Fitzke said, “I’ll listen for things, you listen for things. Then we’ll meet here and talk some more.”

 

 

His typing class was at Crozier, the same school where Dupard was taking a course, and they met in an empty classroom whenever they could work out the timing. They talked strategy and philosophy, waiting for the gun to arrive in the mail.

Bobby said, “You think it’s some coincidence this Walker come to live in Dallas? Get off, man. He is here because the fury and the hate is here. This is the city he made up in his mind.”

“Did you see today’s paper? He’s going out of town on a speaking tour. Twenty-nine cities. He won’t be back till April.”

“What’s he doing, the kill-a-nigger tour?”

“Operation Midnight Ride. The dangers of communism here and abroad. It’s going to be pure Cuba. He loves to hit at Cuba. If we have to wait till April, let’s make it worthwhile. We get him on the seventeenth. The second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs.”

“Who is the shooter?”

“I am,” Oswald said.

“You sure about that. ”

“I am the one that does it.”

“If it’s the seventeenth, I have to see if there’s class.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a question do I want to cut class.”

“I will need an accomplice, Bobby. This is not just walk in and shoot him. The house is located in such a way. There’s an alley. We may need a car.”

“I can get a car. I can always borrow a car. I don’t know about dependable running. Just so we put him on the ground. That man got to taste some blood.”