Libra

  It was an anger that Marina did not try to soothe or wish away because she believed in her heart it was correct.

  She pushed the stroller past some shops with large signs out front. She sounded the words in her mind. Washateria. One-hour Martinizing. She saw fewer people as they strayed a little north, a little east.

  She wondered how many women had visions and dreams of the President. What must it be like to know you are the object of a thousand longings? It’s as though he floats over the landscape at night, entering dreams and fantasies, entering the act of love between husbands and wives. He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina’s bed. There were times when she waited for him, actually listened late at night for a few words of a speech or a news conference recorded earlier in the day, waited for the, voice of the President, the radio on a table near the bed.

  They had matching scars on the arm, Marina and Lee.

  This was the basic question that didn’t leave her day or night. Would he force her to go back to Russia?

  She said to him, “A gloomy spirit rules the house.” “I am not receiving happiness,” she said.

  He talked to June about little Cuba. Do you love little Cuba? Do you have sympathy for Uncle Fidel? There was a photograph of Castro on the wall ,that he’d clipped from a Soviet magazine. What do you think of Uncle Fidel? Do you love and support little Cuba?

  She thought of the President sometimes, in pictures taken near the sea, while Lee was making love to her.

  He kept after her to write to the Soviet embassy in Washington, teary-eyed letters, requesting visas, requesting travel expenses. She knew he was confused about the future.

  She was a blind kitten who always returned to the person who caressed her, no matter if he also treated her cruelly.

  She took Junie out of the stroller now and let her walk alongside. Junie didn’t like to walk holding anyone’s hand.. She walked along on her own, endless joy and endless toil.

  Sitting on the porch at 2:00 A.M. with the rifle across his lap.

  They walked down many quiet streets. The houses were old and silent and some had cast-iron galleries and white columns. There was no one else around. The afternoon was heavy and still. She stood on a corner and saw cars going through an intersection about seven blocks away but nothing moved nearby and she wondered if this might be an area closed to normal activity during certain times of day. One-hour Martinizing. They passed homes with carved entrances, with magnolias out front and straight-standing palms. She tried to take Junie’s hand. The heat became oppressive. They passed a house with double galleries and she could see frescoes through the living-room window. She put June back in the stroller, forced her in, stuffed her back in. Then she turned in the direction she thought led home, walking quickly now, no longer looking at the graceful, old and silent homes.

  She thought carefully in English, Where are all the people?

  Bateman told him about a group called the Cuban Student Directorate. It was run out of a clothing store a few doors down from the Habana Bar. Confidential Source S-172 walked in one day and talked to a guy named Carlos, about thirty years old, shiny-haired, wearing dark glasses.

  He brought along his old Marine Corps training manual to sort of indicate who he was and where he stood. Inside of a minute they were talking about bridges, blowing up bridges, laying powder charges, making homemade explosives, homemade guns.

  Carlos, however, did not seem eager to tell him how he might enter the anti-Castro struggle. He wouldn’t accept Lee’s offer to join the organization, wouldn’t even accept a cash contribution. He was wary of infiltrators. He said it straight out. This was a sensitive time.

  They had a nice talk anyway. Lee left his training manual behind as a gesture of good will and said he’d come back soon. They shook hands at the door.

  What happens? Four days later Lee is on Canal Street wearing his Viva Fidel sign and handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Along comes Carlos with two friends. Lee watches Carlos do a double-take from out of the archives.

  He approached in an attitude of menace, taking off his glasses. Lee crossed his arms on his chest and smiled. He didn’t want to fight with Carlos. He liked him. Carlos had that Latin quality of being easy to like.

  “Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”

  He stood there with his arms crossed, smiling nicely. A small crowd collected, backing Lee toward the entrance of a Walgreen’s. One of the men with Carlos grabbed some handbills out of Lee’s fist and threw them in the air. This caused some scuffling on the fringe. Then a police car rolled up and then another one and soon they were all walking across the sandy parking lot of the first-district station house on North Rampart.

  Lee demanded to see Agent Bateman of the FBI.

  Half an hour later Bateman walked into the interview room, hands held out, palms showing, a certain rigid set to his features.

  Lee said, “They want to know how many members in my Fair Play chapter.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Fine. But why ,bring me into it?”

  “Because what are they liable to do if I don’t show I’m linked to law enforcement?”

  “It is only disturbing the peace. So-called creating a scene.”

  “Well get me out.”

  “I can’t get you out.”

  “This wasn’t the deal. Getting me arrested.”

  “You got yourself arrested. And if I get you out, it exposes everything. Giving them my name is bad enough. Did they ask why you wanted to see me?”

  “They asked about Karl Marx. I told them the real Karl Marx was a socialist, not a communist.”

  “I am deeply disappointed, Lee.”

  “Well I couldn’t just let them bury me. I have a wife and baby. ”

  “One night is all you’ll lose.”

  “I had to show there’s someone who knows who I am. A figure of authority.”

  “It is only disturbing the peace. Tell them as little as possible. Let them think you’re just a hometown boy with political ideals.”

  “I told them I’m a Lutheran.”

  “First-rate,” Bateman said, nice and nasty.

  They photographed him front, profile and full figure and then took prints of his fingers and palms. They told him to drop his pants and bend over. Later he sat in a holding cell seeing himself as he would appear in the mug shots, dignified and balding. He listened to the drunks and hysterics. They brought more men in as the night progressed. A howler and a dancer. They brought in a Negro with an aluminum-foil hat, a little religious cap made of Reynolds Wrap, with trinkets dangling from the sides.

  Trotsky took his name from a jailer in Odessa and carried it into the pages of a thousand books.

  It was Lee who told Marina that Mrs. Kennedy’s baby had died during the night. A boy, born prematurely, with respiratory problems. Marina stood by the window crying. It hit her with the force of something she’d feared all along without letting it surface. Thirty-nine hours of life for the President’s son. She cried for the Kennedys and also for herself and for Lee. How could she grieve for Mrs. Kennedy’s baby and not think about the child she carried in her own womb? This was the future and it was marked.

  Lee went to court. The first thing he noticed was that the room was separated into white and colored. He sat square in the middle of the colored section, waiting for his case to be called. Then he pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine. He shook hands with Carlos and walked out the door.

  You see, none of this really mattered. What mattered was collecting the experiences, documenting the experienes, saving it all for the eyes of Cuban officials. What is it called, dossier?

  There was a camera crew from WDSU waiting outside the courtroom and they shot some footage of Lee H. Oswald for the evening news.

  Four days later he was back on the street handing out leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart.

  The day
after that he went on the radio to talk about Cuba and the world.

  Bill Stuckey, the host of Latin Listening Post, was expecting a folk-singer type with a beard and sooty fingernails. Oswald was neat and clean, in.a white shirt and a tie, and carried a looseleaf notebook under his arm.

  They sat in the studio, with an engineer to record the interview, and Stuckey began right away, introducing Oswald as the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

  Lee said, “Yes, as secretary, I am responsible for the keeping of the records and the protection of the members’ names so that undue publicity or attention will not be drawn to them, as they do not desire it.”

  He said, “Certainly it is obvious to me, having been educated in New Orleans and having been instilled with the ideals of democracy and objectiveness, that Cuba and the right of Cubans to self-determination is more or less self-evident.”

  He said, “You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not to be suppressed.”

  Stuckey listened to him talk about the United Fruit Company, the CIA, collectivization, the feudal dictatorship of Nicaragua, movements of national liberation. Thirty-seven minutes in all, which Stuckey was compelled to reduce to four and a half for his five-minute show, and this was a shame because Oswald’s presentation was intelligent and clear and his way of leaping out of difficult comers extremely deft.

  Stuckey invited Secretary Oswald out for a beer when the interview was over. Then he sent a copy of the tape to the FBI.

  That’s how it went, that’s the kind of summer it was. One day he was going after roaches with a pancake flipper, mashing them flat—one of those soft plastic flippers that are always on sale. He’d lost his job. They fired him because he didn’t do the work, which seemed reasonable enough. Storms shaking the city. They shot Medgar Evers dead in Jackson, Miss., a field secretary of the NAACP. Later they would dynamite the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, four Negro girls killed, twenty-three injured. One day he was hunting down roaches in his kitchen, unshaved, wearing clothes he hadn’t changed in a week. The next day found him in a gawky Russian suit and narrow tie, with his looseleaf notebook at his side, engaged in radio debate on Conversation Carte Blanche, another public-affairs show on WDSU. This time they’d checked up beforehand and had questions ready about Russia and his defection, catching him by surprise. Working the bolt on the Mannlicher. Cleaning the Mannlicher. They had plans for him, whoever they were. Heat lightning at night. It was easy to believe they’d been watching him for years, working things around him, knowing the time would come.

  A man, a madman, whatever he was, shadow-boxed outside the toilets at the Habana.

  Ferrie didn’t seem to know sometimes whether a story was funny or sad. He told Lee about the time he tried to perfect a tiny flare device equipped with a timer. He wanted to make thousands of these devices and attach them to the bodies of mice. He wanted to parachute the mice into Cuban cane fields. He was driven by the image of fifty thousand mice scattering through the sugar cane as the timers ignited the flares. He wanted to be the Hannibal of the mouse world, he said, and seemed dejected by the failure of the plan.

  “During the revolution,” Lee said, “Castro made it a point to burn his own family’s cane fields.”

  “Listen to me. This Walker business is strictly in the past. You ought to forget him. A dead General Walker means nothing to Fidel. He is old hat. He is day-old shit. No one listens to Walker anymore. Your missed bullet finished him more surely than a clean hit. It left him, hanging in the twilight. He is an embarrassment. He carries the stigma of having been shot at and missed.”

  “How do you know I want to try again?”

  “Leon, do we actually have to speak the words? Don’t we know when a death is passing in the air? They’re beginning to crowd you. Banister says they’re serious men. They’ve been in your apartment.”

  “I know. I had a feeling.”

  “You sensed it. See? Nobody has to say anything. The scales will simply tip and then we’ll know.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they’ve been shaping all along. You’re a quirk of history. You’re a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There’s a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We’re deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane. It’s almost a romance, a flirtation. I look for it, Leon. I chase it discreetly.”

  The shadow-boxer was on another level now, making the slowest of moves, working out the mathematics. He stood in place, head down, and dragged his arms across his upper body, finding resistance, a retarding force, like someone gesturing in space.

  “Your man Kennedy has a little romance of his own with the idea of death. Men preoccupied with courage have their dark dreams. Jack’s a little death-haunted all right, but not pathologically, not creepy-crawly like me. Poetic. That’s your Jack.”

  “He’s not my Jack,” Lee said.

  “He knows the course. He’s been close to dying several times. A brother killed in action. A sister killed in a plane crash. A baby dead. A Catholic. A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear. Skelly Bone Pete. We used to stay out of certain alleyways, certain dark streets. That’s where he was waiting with his wino breath and stinky underwear. Specialized in kids.”

  One of the bar girls stood by the juke box swaying, a West Texas woman who looked sandblasted, with bleached-out hair and skin, little gold lashes. Ferrie waved her over. He took a black bow tie out of his pocket and gave it to her. She clipped it to Lee’s shirt collar. They thought that was pretty cute. Her name was Linda Frenchette and she held her hands up to her face and flexed her thumbs, snapping Lee’s picture.

  “He doesn’t like to smoke or drink,” Ferrie said. “He never says dirty words. We want to be nice to him.”

  “Nice for a price,” she said.

  “You get the front end. I get the back end. Like bumper cars,” Ferrie said.

  They thought that was cute too.

  They all got into Ferrie’s Rambler and drove up Magazine. The theme of the ride was “Taking Lee Home.” Linda Frenchette sat in the back seat. She had tequila in a wineglass and clapped a hand over the top of the glass every time the car stopped short. She found a TV lunchbox on the seat with cartoon figures painted on the surface and some hand-rolled cigarettes inside. Ferrie took one and lighted it while Lee steered from the passenger seat. Hashish, said Cap’n Dave. They rolled up the windows and let the heavy scent collect, strong and rooted. Ferrie passed the stick around. A pudgy little thing tapered at both ends. They were taking Lee home.

  They parked in front of a nice-looking house with a two-story porch, a couple of doors up from Lee. He’d used their garbage can several times. Linda lighted up another stick. They passed it round and round. It was 3:00 A.M. and with the windows up and the smoke collecting, there was very little world out there. They gave Lee instructions on smoking the dope. They argued about it, fiercely. He was smoking just to smoke. Then Ferrie recited the history of hashish, lighting up another stick, which took forever. Everything moved through time. The heat in the car was getting hard to take and the smoke seared Lee’s throat. Linda dipped her tongue in tequila and softly licked his ear. They were in a place where a heartbeat took time.

  “This is one of those times I don’t know if I’m doing it or remembering it,” she said.

  “Doing what?” Ferrie said.

/>   “In other words am I home in bed thinking about this or is the whole thing happening right now?”

  “What whole thing?” Ferrie said.

  His voice was far away. He rolled down his window to let the smoke out. Lee looked straight ahead. Bright ashes tumbled down his shirtfront. He realized Linda was reaching over the seat back. She groped, is the only word, at his belt buckle and fly.

  “I’m hoping dear Jesus I’m at home. Because the idea that I have to get there yet is too much razzle to imagine.”

  Lee let Ferrie open his pants. Then Linda had his cock jumping in her fist and was hanging way over the seat back with her mouth open wide, sounding a comic growl.

  Lee looked straight ahead. He heard Linda breathing through her nose. She changed her position, hitting her head on the jutting ashtray. He tried to recall the name of a girl he wanted to date once, plaid-skirted, when he was dating age.

  Then Ferrie’s voice began to reach him in weighted time, moving slowly, one word, another, deeply shaped, like ads for epic movies, those 3-D letters stretched across a bible desert.

  “They’ve been watching you a long time, Leon. Think about them. Who are they? What do they want? I’m with them but I’m also with you. There are things they aren’t telling us. This is always the case. There’s always more to it. Something we don’t know about. Truth isn’t what we know or feel. It’s the thing that waits just beyond. We share a consciousness, like tonight. The hashish makes us Turks. We share a homeland and a spirit. What Linda says is true. You’re at home, in bed now, remembering.”

  Then he reached across the dangling woman to straighten Lee’s bow tie.

  Marina had a standing invitation to stay with her friend Ruth Paine in Dallas. Ruth Paine would be a big help when the new baby came. She knew some of the Dallas émigrés and wanted to improve her Russian, which gave Marina a chance to return the favor.