by Don DeLillo
The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
Marguerite browned flour in a heavy-bottomed pan. They watched each other eat. She was always right there, hands busy, eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses. He could see the strain and aging in her face, the flesh going taut at the hairline, and he felt something between pity and contempt. They watched TV in the next room. Miniature willow baskets hung on the wall. Her skull was showing through.
“Lillian says I spoil you to a T. You think you own me, she says.”
“I’m your son. You have to do what I want.”
“I admit this, which I shouldn’t say a word, but your brothers were a burden on my back. They demanded attention which it was not humanly possible to give. This is where the human element comes in. When I think of all the tragedies. Your daddy felt a pain in his arm, out mowing. The next thing I know.”
“They’re in the service to get away from you.”
“When I think of being a grandparent who is denied affection. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. I took you to Godchaux’s in a stroller.”
Ever since he could remember, they’d shared cramped spaces. It was the basic Oswald memory. He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death’s-head teeth. He knew what she would say, saw the gestures before she made them.
“I am entitled to better.”
“So am I. I’m the one. I have rights,” he said.
He helped her hang half-moon wall shelves. He would find a communist cell and become a member. This was a city with a hundred kinds of foreigners and ideas and influences. There were people who ran ads in the paper to seek favors of a patron saint. There were people who wore berets, who did not speak ten words of English. Down at the docks he saw oppressed workers unloading ninety-pound banana stems from Honduras. He would find a cell, be given tasks to prove himself.
“Lillian expects endless thanks. She lives off thank-yous and you’re-welcomes.”
“She thinks we’re one jump up from handouts in the street.”
“She thinks we’re beholden,” Marguerite said. “I was a popular child. I am willing to stand on the facts.”
They’d lived with her sister Lillian on French Street. They took an apartment on St. Mary Street, eventually moving to a cheaper apartment in the same building. Then they moved to the Quarter.
He is a quiet and studious boy who demands his meals, like any boy.
“The Claveries were poor but not unhappy. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. Just because she let us stay a few weeks, I know what she says behind my back. They talk and make up stories, which I am not surprised. They have hidden reasons they aren’t telling for how they feel. They say I fly off too quick on the handle. I just can’t get along, so-called. They never say it could be they’re the ones at fault. They’re the ones you can’t reason with. She says I take one little word and make a difference, out of it, which stands between us until we see each other on the street when it’s ‘Oh hello, how are you, come see us real soon.’ ”
“She thinks because she gives me money to rent a bike.”
They lived in a three-story building in an alley that opened onto Canal Street, the dodging bodies and shopwindows glaring hot. The building had arched entranceways with decorative crests. That’s what Marguerite liked most. It was otherwise a sad show. Lee had the bedroom, she took the studio couch.
In St. Louis Cemetery Number One he sees an old Negro snoring in his stocking feet, body propped against one of the oven vaults, the sun beating down on smashed amber glass.
They watched each other eat. He practiced chess moves at the kitchen table. She described houses and yards and furniture way back to the early decades of the century, in New Orleans, where she was raised, a happy child. He knew these things were important. He did not deny the value of what she said or the power of the images she carried with her. These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self, and he let her voice fall through a hole in the air.
He sees a tough-looking Mexican or whatever he is suddenly strike a female pose outside a bar, getting a laugh from his friends.
He had his one-volume encyclopedia of the world, which his aunt Lillian said he read like a boy’s novel of the sea. Kinetic energy. Grand Coulee Dam. He would join a communist cell. They would talk theory into the night. They would give him tasks to perform, night missions that required intelligence and stealth. He would wear dark clothes, cross rooftops in the rain.
How many people know a killdeer is a bird?
He got a letter from his brother Robert, his full brother, who was still in the Marines. He took a page out of his spiral notebook and replied at once, mainly answering questions. He liked his brother but was certain Robert didn’t know who he was. It was the age-old family mystery. You don’t know who I am. Robert was named for their father, Robert E. Lee Oswald. That’s where his own name came from, Lee. His father was at the end of the Lakeview line, turning to chalk.
“I took you to Godchaux’s to see the flag, the two of us. The war was on and we lived on Pauline Street and they hung a seven-story flag right down the front of Godchaux’s, where I bought my light-gray suit which I am wearing in the photo with Mr. Ekdahl, which is shortly after our marriage. A seven-story American flag. This is when you caused a flurry with Mrs. Roach, throwing an iron toy.”
He wanted to write a story about one of the people at the library for the blind. That was the only way to imagine their world.
Marguerite had blue eyes and dark lashes. She was a sales clerk and cashier, working near the hosiery shop she’d managed, about a dozen years earlier, on Canal Street, before they fired her. She could not add or subtract was the stated reason. Marguerite knew better, felt the vibrations, heard the whispers of nasty attitude, of grudge against the world, which wasn’t as bad as the time she was fired from Lerner’s in New York because they said she did not use deodorant. This was not true because she used a roll-on every day and if it didn’t work the way it said on TV, why should she be singled out as a social misfit? New York was not behind the times in strange smells.
He did his homework at the kitchen table, questions only morons would want to answer. She woke him up for school by clapping her hands in the doorway, insistently, the fingers of one hand tapping the palm of the other. Something in him turned to murder at the sight of her, sometimes, in the street, coming toward him unexpectedly. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock. The voice called out from the kitchen, the toilet flushed. He knew the inflections and the pauses, knew what she would say, word for word, before she spoke. She tapped her hands in the doorway. Rise and shine.
“It is evident,” he read, “that the definition of capital-value invested in labor-power as circulating capital is a secondary one, obliterating its specific difference in the process of production.”
He tried to talk politics with Robert Sproul’s sister, mainly to say something. They played chess on a closed porch at the Sproul house. Robert sat nearby doing a term paper on the history of air power.
She was a year older than Lee, soft-skinned, blond, with a serious mouth. He had a feeling she tried not to look too pretty. There were girls like that, hiding behind a surface of neatness and reserve.
“Eisenhower gets off too easy,” Lee was saying, “and I can give you a good example.”
“I don’t think you can but go a
head.”
“It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They’re the ones responsible.”
“Well that’s just you’re daydreaming.”
“Well no I’m not.”
“There was a trial unless I’m sadly mistaken,” she said.
“Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution.”
“Like a movie, I suppose?”
“Do you know who the Rosenbergs are, even?”
“I just said there was a trial.”
“But the hidden factors, the things that don’t get out.”
She gave him a tight look. She was just the right height. Not too tall. He liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails. There was a mother or father moving around inside the house.
“I read all about the Rosenbergs when I was in New York,” he said. “They were railroaded to the chair. The idea was to make all communists look like traitors. Ike could have done something.”
“He did do something. He played golf,” Robert said.
“Now Senator Eastland’s coming to New Orleans. You know why, don’t you?”
“He’s looking for you,” Robert said. “He can’t figure out how a boy in the Civil Air Patrol.”
“He’s looking for reds under the beds,” Lee said.
“He’s wondering how a clean-cut boy.”
“The main thing is in communism that workers don’t produce profits for the system.”
“He’s looking at your cute smile and he’s just real upset. A teenage communist in the CAP.”
Lee half enjoyed the ribbing. He looked at Robert’s sister to get her reaction but her eyes were on the board. Well brought up. He saw her at the library. She was on the pep squad at school, the girl at the far end who went more or less unnoticed.
“What if they did spy? It’s only because they believed communism is the best system. It’s the system that doesn’t exploit, so then you’re strapped in the chair.”
Lee was aware that the parent, whichever one it was, had moved to the edge of the open doorway. The parent was standing there, on the other side of the wall, listening.
“If you look at the name Trotsky in Russian, it looks totally different,” he said to Robert Sproul’s sister. “Plus here’s something nobody knows. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Stalin means man of iron.”
“Man of steel,” Robert said.
“Same thing.”
“Dumb bunny.”
“The whole thing is they lie to us about Russia. Russia is not what they say. In New York the communists don’t hide. They’re out on the street.”
“Quick, Henry, the Flit,” Robert said.
“First you produce profits for the system that exploits you.”
“Kill it before it spreads.”
“Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.”
“Well that’s neither here nor there,” the sister said.
“Where is it?” he asked her.
It was the father who appeared in the doorway, a tall man with a plaid blanket folded over one arm. He seemed to be looking for a horse. He spoke of homework and errands, he mumbled obscurely about family matters. The sister’s relief was easy to see. It could be felt and measured. She slipped past her father arid melted serenely into the dim interior.
The father walked with Lee to the front door and opened it as wide as it would go. They did not speak to each other. Lee walked home through the Quarter past hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a newsreel.
He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. He let classmates read the titles if they were curious, just to see their silly faces crinkle up, but he didn’t show the books to his mother. The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. Trotsky’s name was Bronstein. He would need a secret name. He would join a cell located in the old buildings near the docks. They would talk theory into the night. But they would act as well. Organize and agitate. He would move through the city in the rain, wearing dark clothes. It was just a question of finding a cell. There was no question they were here. Senator Eastland made it clear on TV. Underground reds in N’yorlenz.
In the meantime he read his brother’s Marine Corps manual, to prepare for the day when he’d enlist.
There were two kids at school, in particular, before he quit, who called him Yankee all the time. Trailing him down the halls, calling across the lunchroom. He smiled and was ready to fight but they never made a realistic move.
The names on the order blanks excited him. Lisbon, Manila, Hong Kong. But soon the routine took hold and he realized the ships and cargoes and destinations had nothing to do with him. He was a runner. He carried paper to other forwarding companies and steamship lines or across the street to the U.S. Custom House, which looked like a temple of money, massive and gray, with tall granite columns. He was supposed to look eager and bright. People seemed to depend on his cheerfulness. The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile. He disappeared for hours at the movies. Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual.
He memorized the use of deadly force. He studied principles of close order drill and the use of ribbons and badges. He made unauthorized phone calls to Robert Sproul to read hair-raising passages about bayonet fighting. The whirl, the slash, the butt stroke. There was no end of things to quote from the manual. The book had been written just for him. He read deeply in the rules, impressed by the strictness and precision, by the stream of awesome details, weird, niggling, perfect.
Robert Sproul knew about a gun for sale, a bolt-action .22, a varmint gun, or we’ll plink tin cans, and they went on Lee’s lunch hour to a cheap hotel above the business district, among muffler shops and discount furniture, in the January chill. The lobby was like a passageway to a toilet. The rooms were on the second floor, above a boarded-up store with a sign reading Formal Rentals. Robert had the seller’s room number but not his name. Supposedly he was an acquaintance of David Ferrie, an airline pilot and instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. Ferrie had commanded the unit Robert and Lee were enrolled in that summer, although Lee had attended only three sessions, just long enough to get the uniform.
The boys were surprised when Captain Ferrie himself opened the door. A man in his late thirties, sad-faced, friendly, standing in the doorway in a bathrobe and a pair of argyle socks reaching to his knees. He waved them into the room, looking carefully at Lee. The shades were drawn. There were clothes everywhere, Chinese food spilling out of white cartons, some bills and coins on the floor. The room stood in a kind of stupor, a time zone of its own.
“Boys, how nice. I was told to expect visitors. Alfredo is selling his gun, I understand. He claims he killed a man with that gun. Some gringo millionaire. Every Latin has killed a gringo in his daydreams. These are temporary quarters, you understand. Your flying ace is between assignments.”
Ferrie sat in an armchair amid strewn clothing. Robert loo
ked quickly at Lee. A strangulated grimace.
“Now let’s see,” Ferrie said. “Robert I know from our classes in the Eastern hangar at Lakefront. It seems a hundred years ago. But who’s the shy one with the neat part in his hair?”
“I went a few times,” Lee said, “but then I stopped.”
“But you were there. I thought so. I was sure of it. In your uniform. A uniform makes all the difference. I know my boys. I never forget a cadet. Do you know Dennis Rumsey? Dennis is a cadet. He comes here after school. Do you know Warren Van Zandt, the fat boy? Warren’s daddy has lung cancer bad.”
“What about the rifle?” Robert said.
“It’s around here somewhere. A Marlin bolt-action .22. It’s clip-fed and you can have it real cheap because the firing pin’s broken. Easy to fix. Take it to a welder, bang bang bang.”
“Nobody mentioned broken,” Robert said.
“They never do.”
“Well I don’t know, sir.”
“Neither do I.”
“If the rifle can’t be fired as is.”
“He’ll weld an extension, bang bang.”
“But this would mean an inconvenience.”
“The pleasure may be worth it. Do you know guns? Guns are an interest of mine.”
Robert shot a glance like let’s get out of here. Something in the far corner seemed to be alive. Lee took a few steps in that direction. He was aware that some kind of well-intentioned look was pasted to his face, a smile not connected to things. There was a cage on the dresser with white mice running around inside.
He turned to Ferrie and said, “Mice.”
“Isn’t life fantastic?”
