Libra

  “I smell a fish, to quote a maxim,” Brenda said.

  The disturbance, whatever it was, grew louder. You feel these things in the walls. Brenda put on her robe and went to the end of the hall and looked out. Between the bar and the entranceway there was a flurry of bodies and arms, maybe four guys including Jack who were physically propelling a man who looked like he combed his hair with firecrackers. It now developed that Jack wanted to throw the man down the stairs. The others were trying to prevent this as extreme. Brenda waited until the odd-job boy lost his place in the moving knot of people and came off to the side, shaking a hand that may have been bitten.

  “What is it?” Brenda said.

  “This guy like grab-assed one of the waitresses. You know, felt her going by.”

  “Do we kill people for this?”

  “You know Jack when it comes to abusing the girls. He about Hipped sky-high.”

  Jack wrestled the man away from the others and the two of them went quick-walking down the narrow stairs, actually out of control, banging off the handrail, almost pitching forward to the street.

  The bar crowd went after, hurrying down single-file and loud. Brenda took a deep drag on the cigarette and went back to finish her talk.

  Out on the street Jack knocked the guy down. He went after him with his feet, kicking in a fastidious way as if trying to shake dog matter off his shoe. The guy skittered away and ran down the street, breaking through a line of people in front of the club next door, where an amateur strip night was going on. Jack went after him, followed by five or six others from the Carousel. The man was much faster but turned halfway down the block and was ready to fight. It made no sense to anyone and only got Jack madder. Jack charged into him swinging. The sheer bulk and force of the attack knocked the guy down. Jack kicked at him twice and the guy grabbed Jack’s ankle and twisted him down to the pavement in slow motion. Then he started crawling toward a parking sign. Jack was on his knees and grabbed the guy’s leg to keep him from reaching the signpost. Someone from the bar crowd tried to break Jack’s grip, speaking soothingly to Jack. The guy kept struggling toward the sign. This was the clear meaning of what was going on. If he could only reach the sign. Two men from the bar crowd broke the fighters apart but Jack got in two kicks at the guy’s ribs. The guy stood up, eyes averted. His pants were somehow unbuckled. Jack punched him hard in the head over the shoulders of the men between them and the guy walked out in the middle of the street and stood there, making the cars go around him. He fixed his clothes. He stood out there in traffic. He would not look at the men on the sidewalk, their chests pumping from the run and scuffle.

  Jack went back down the street. When he reached the line of people outside the other club, he started shaking hands and giving out cards with the Carousel name and hours. Then he got into his white Olds and drove off to clear his head.

  Jack’s car was a movable slum. His dogs had chewed up the seat covers and mats. They’d eaten the stuffing inside the rear seat, exposing the springs. There were paw marks on the windows. There were eight empty liquor cartons tilted and wedged across the rear seat. He had jars of diet food rolling across the floor when he stopped or turned. He had a couple of hundred dollars on top of the dashboard, folded in butcher wrap stained with lamb-chop blood. There were extra Preludins in the glove compartment plus a bathing cap, a number of unpaid tickets, a number of address books, some loose condoms, a set of brass knuckles and a TV Guide.

  He tuned in KLIF, looking for a disc jockey called the Weird Beard. He needed a familiar voice to calm him down.

  He drove around downtown Dallas. It happens a few times where I have to pummel one of these guys who causes trouble in the club. Once they get you cowered to that extent, you are physically doomed. He felt his jacket for the 38, which was tucked into a Merchants State Bank moneybag along with three thousand dollars in recent receipts tightly rolled in pink rubber bands.

  It was the talk with Jack Karlinsky that probably got him inflamed with the guy who put his hand on what’s-her-name. He had to get the money. He had no other source. There were debts and harassments in every direction. Even with forty thousand dollars in his hands tomorrow, the problems were not solved. He had to get the business built up. He had this union thing with the girls. He had an extortionist of long standing on the West Coast who’d already turned down his request for a loan and now Karlinsky was leaning the same way.

  So the jacket is mohair. You should have bought two. One to shit on; one to cover it up.

  He had a deal going where you put a token in a machine and it washes your car. His brother Sam sold one of his two washaterias and was looking with interest at this machine. It would never happen but it could. He’d tried different things with different brothers, from selling salt and pepper shakers to nice-looking busts of FDR. He sold costume jewelry, sewing machine attachments and cures for arthritis from Chicago to San Francisco.

  Thirty years with a fishbone in her throat.

  Weird Beard said, “I know what you think. You think I’m making it up. I’m not making it up. If it gets from me to you, it’s true. We are for real, kids. And this is the question I want to leave with you tonight. Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them. This narrow little radio band is a route to the troot. I’m not making it up. There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true. We need this little private alley where we can meet. Because this is Big D, which stands for Don’t be Dissimilar. Am I coming in all right? Is my signal clear? We’re the sneaky little secret they’re trying to uncover. Do you think I’m making it up? I’m not making it up. Weird Beard says, Eat your cereal with a fork. Do your homework in the dark. And trust your radio before you trust your mother.”

  Jack had no idea what the guy was saying. He squeezed a Preludin down his throat. It takes away your procrastination about what you want to do next.

  He drove to the Ritz Delicatessen and parked outside. He opened the trunk and threw in the moneybag with the gun and heavy cash so he wouldn’t forget to do it later. The trunk was a little overflowing with barbells, weights, a summer suit, a can of paint, a roll of toilet paper, dog toys and dog biscuits, a holster for his gun, a golf shoe with a dollar bill in it and about a hundred glossies of Randi Ryder that he’d brought back from New Orleans. You might as well call it my life because it’s not any neater at home.

  He walked into the Ritz and ordered everything with extra mustard and extra mayonnaise, a dozen sandwiches. Roast beef, corned beef, sliced turkey, tongue, dill pickles, cole slaw, relish, potato salad, black-cheny soda, ginger ale, etc. He told the man to give these sandwiches special handling because they were going to police headquarters.

  He got back in the car. These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door. This is a homicidal town. Barn. He had to remember to go back to the club later to get his dachshund Sheba and clear the register and grab his hat. He didn’t like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although he doubted it.

  He drove to the Police and Courts Building, feeling a sharp sting in his left knee and hiking up his pants leg as he drove. A nice ripe gash. A street fight takes up your attention to the point where you don’t know you’re bleeding for an hour. He drove with his left pants leg raised above the knee. No responsible party would finance him because he gave away drinks to nobodies and brought in people and dogs off the street. He got out of the car, lowered his pants leg and went into the old part of the building, walking between the tall columns.

  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 forev
er, 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.”

  In Dallas

  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 Outline 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.”