by Don DeLillo
“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.
In Fort Worth
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 pa
y. 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.”
“You have to learn American kidding. It’s how we talk to each other.”
“All your life she worked very hard.”
“She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka.”
“I know this. It’s very obvious to me.”
“Very obvious is only half the story.”
“What’s the other half?”
He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.
A man spoke to him from the other side of the screen door. Lee looked at his bloated face peering in above the set of credentials he held under his chin. Freitag, Donald. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dark eyes and five o’clock shadow. They agreed to talk in his car.
There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.
“What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union,” Agent Freitag said. “And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about.”
“So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it.”
“That’s correct.”
“I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry.”
“You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor.”
“Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces.”
“Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?”
“I don’t wish to relive the past. I just went.”
“That’s a long way to just go.”
“I don’t have to explain.”
“Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
“No.”
Agent Mooney took notes.
“Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?”
“No. Who told you where to find me?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“But who told you?”
“We talked to your brother.”
“He told you where I live.”
“That’s correct,” Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.
“Am I being put under surveillance?”
“Would I tell you if you were?”
“Because I was watched in Russia.”
“I thought everyone was watched in Russia.”
Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.,
“My wife is holding dinner,” Lee said.
“How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don’t let people out just by asking.”
“I made no arrangements with them to do anything.”
They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.
“What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact.”
“You’re saying let you know.”
“We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist.”
“I want to know if I’m being recruited as an informer.”
“We are asking cooperation.”
“So if someone contacts me.”
“That’s right.”
“I will inform the Bureau.”
“That’s correct.”
Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag’s name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent’s name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.
Marina called him in to dinner.
He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Aimenians. It was an evening with the émigré colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas—Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.
Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps of paper, brown bag paper, and they are giving her dental work and stockings. Everything is measured in money. They spend their lives collecting material things and call it politics.
He watched them shake hands and embrace. They complained to Marina that he did not give them a human hello. They thought he was a Soviet spy. Anyone back from Russia who did not share their beliefs was a spy for the Soviet. Their beliefs were Cadillacs and air conditioners.
They gave him shirts which he returned.
A few of them came to his house now and then to take Marina to the dentist or supermarket. Show her how to shop. Here is the baby food. Here is the Swiss cheese. He kept his library books on a small table near the door where they would have to notice as they entered and left. There were books on Lenin and Trotsky plus the Militant and the Worker. Show them who he is. They didn’t want to hear what he had to say about Russia unless it was bad. They closed in on the bad.
George came and sat next to him. The only one he could talk to was George de Mohr
enschildt. A tall man, warm-spirited and assured, with a relish for conversation and a voice that surrounds you like a calm day.
“You know, Lee, you have told me practically nothing about Minsk.”
“It’s not an interesting place.”
“It’s interesting to me, you know, because I lived there as a child. My father was a marshal of nobility of Minsk Province in the czarist days. Not that I cling to this nonsense. But I am Baltic nobility, which some of my wives adored.”
“Minsk, we had to get on line sometimes to buy vegetables.”
“You prefer Texas?”
“I don’t prefer Texas. Marina prefers Texas.”
“Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It’s the city that proves that God is really dead. Look at these people, wonderful people actually, most of them, but they come by choice to this bleak empty right-wing milieu. It’s the local politics they find so congenial. Anticommunist this, anticommunist that. All right they have suffered, some of them, in one way or another, sometimes horribly. You know how I feel about Marxism. I will tell you frankly the word Marxism is very boring to me. It is very hard for me to find a word or subject more boring than this. But you and I know the Soviet Union is a going concern. We accept this and accept the realities. To the old guard there is no such place. It doesn’t exist. A blank on the map.”
George was in his fifties, still dark-haired, broad across the chest, an oil geologist or engineer, something like that. Lee liked to switch from English to Russian and back again, talking to George. He could take the older man’s kidding and teasing and even his advice. George gave advice without making you feel he wanted a week of thank-yous.
“Marina says you have written some notes or something about Minsk. Something, I don’t know what she said, impressions of the city.”
“Everything I learned at the radio plant plus the whole structure of how they work and live.”
A woman picked up June and made the same noises that Marina’s relatives used to make, shaking the baby and gabbling at her.
