by Don DeLillo
“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.”
“They have a phrase they use in Russian for assassinations that involve blood being spilled. Mokrie dela. Which is wet affairs. Like the ice pick they used on Trotsky.”
“Just so we do it to him,” Bobby said.
They moved to Neely Street, nearby, another furnished apartment, two rooms in a frame house with a concrete porch and a balcony with sagging posts. They could put out flowerpots and pretend it’s Minsk. There was a small additional room, the size of a walk-in closet, where Lee could work on his notebook and keep his correspondence and other writings.
They moved their belongings in Junie’s stroller. They made six or seven trips, dishes, baby things, letters from Russia. Lee made the last trip alone, pushing the stroller west on Neely wearing most of the clothes he owned, to save another trip.
The little room could be entered from the living room and from the staircase outside their flat. Both doors could be locked from inside. It was like an airtight compartment, part of the building but also separate from it. He called the room his study. He squeezed a lamp table and chair in there and set to work on his notes for the death of the general.
He began taking photographs of Walker’s house. He had a box camera he carried in a paper bag on the bus back and forth. He photographed the lattice fence behind the house, the alleyway that extended from the parking lot of the Mormon church to Avondale Street. He took some pictures of the railroad tracks where he could hide the gun if necessary.
There is a world inside the world.
He made detailed notes on the location of windows at the rear of the house. He studied maps of Dallas. He put the finishing touches on the false documents he’d made after hours at work. When the Hidell gun arrived at the post office, he’d have Hidell identification to claim the package. He did the typing for the documents on his machine at school.
He felt good about having Dupard behind him. Downtrodden. Dupard was the force of history, the show of a solid front against the far-right surge.
He used Hidell again, March 12, sending a money order for $21.45 to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago for a 6.5-millimeter Italian military rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, equipped with a four-power scope.
The rain fell on empty streets.
What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions.
He went to a gun shop and bought an ammunition clip that would fit the Mannlicher, so he could fire up to seven rounds before reloading.
Rain-slick streets. He walked to the speed wash and talked excitedly with Dupard about the logic of a long-range shot, given the layout of the house and grounds. Then he let himself back into the study and no one even knew he’d been gone.
He stood barefoot in the living room in his pajamas, working the bolt. He jerked the handle, brought the bolt rearward, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, drove it forward, jerking the handle down. He turned toward the mirror over the sofa. He jerked the bolt handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward, jerking the handle down.
Marina was out at the store. Junie sat in the high chair near the window, rolling a marble back and forth across the tray.
There was a yard behind the house, a small dirt enclosure with a couple of forsythia shrubs. A clothesline ran parallel to the back fence and Marina stood there hanging diapers. The ground-floor tenants were away.
Ten minutes passed. Lee came down the exterior wooden steps. He carried the rifle in one hand, a couple of magazines in the other. He wore a black pullover shirt, short-sleeve, and a pair of dark chinos. The revolver was snug on his hip.
Marina watched him set the rifle against the stairway and climb back up. He returned seconds later with his box camera, an Imperial Reflex he’d bought cheap in Japan.
“Why do you want to do this?” she said. “If we are seen by a neighbor. ”
“It’s for Junie, to remember me by.”
“Does she want her father in a picture with guns? I don’t know how to take a picture.”
“You hold the camera at your waist.”
“I’ve never taken a picture in my life.”
“No matter wha
t. I want you to keep a print for my little girl.”
“Dressed all black. It’s foolish, Lee. Who are you hunting with that gun? The forces of evil? I want to laugh. It’s stupid. It impresses no one. It’s pure and simple show.”
He posed in a corner of the yard, the rifle in his right hand, muzzle up, butt end pressing on his waist, just inches from the holstered .38. The magazines, the Militant and the Worker, were in his left hand, fanned like playing cards.
She snapped the shutter.
He posed one more time, the rifle in his left hand now, the magazines held under his chin with the word Militant visible above the fold, his shadow trailing to the wooden gate and his thin smile carried forward by light and time into the frame of official memory.
Lee stood in a comer of the Gulf station on North Beckley, eight-thirty sharp, the stink of gasoline hanging low in the night. It was ninety-nine degrees. It was record-breaking heat for this date. He had a military slicker draped over his left shoulder and held a half-finished Coke in his right hand, drawn from the machine nearby, just as a reason to be here.
He kept his eye on a tan Ford turning slowly into the station and coming to a stop near the service area. It looked like a 1950 model, thereabouts. He watched Dupard get out and stand by the open door, peering. Bobby wore light-blue coveralls and a little round cap, with the words American Bakery embroidered across his shirtfront and a heavy dusting of flour on his face and clothes, whiting his eyebrows and the backs of his hands.
Lee walked toward the car, his left arm stiff beneath the slicker, the rifle held parallel to his body with the butt wedged in his armpit. They did not speak until the car was on the street, headed north, the rifle on the floor behind the seat.
“But how come, Bobby?”
“What?”
“You’re in work clothes.”
“I had a chance to make some overtime, which I’m forced to accept it if I’m not doing no laundry tonight.”
“Am I keeping you from the laundry? Is that what this is all about?”
“I’m just saying. The chance came up. I squeezed in four extra hours.”
“You can be identified. This is not a night you want to stand out.”
“Nobody sees shit. We go in quick and dark. Where’s the handgun?”
Lee took the 38 out of his belt and put it on the seat between them.
“Did you get the bullets?” he said.
“Totally,” Dupard said. “I got fifteen bullets I bought right off the street from some school kid. They’re like two different-make bullets but they’re .38 specials, so I don’t foresee no problem.”
“I don’t foresee using them. It’s just in case.”
At the first red light Bobby swung out the cylinder of the gun and took six cartridges from the breast pocket of his uniform. He inserted them in the chambers.
“I’ll tell you a good sign,” Lee said. “I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it’s fate.”
“What did you tell her about tonight?”
“She thinks I’m at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day. ”
“I dread getting fired, man.”
“They said my work wasn’t exact. It had to happen. Just like tonight has to happen. They’ll know about this in Havana. Before midnight the news will reach Fidel.”
They crossed the Trinity River on the Commerce Street viaduct.
“What I seen, that rifle looks like war surplus. How do you know it shoots?”
“I wrapped it in my raincoat and took it on the Love Field bus. Then I went down to the river bottom out west of the freeway where there’s an area that people test-fire their guns. It’s like a war in ordinary daylight.”
“That sling, that strap, like it comes off a tenor sax.”
“It fits all right. Everything works. Everything fits. I planned this thing with care. I had to go to six gun shops before I found ammo for this type carbine.”
“It’s bearing on my mind that the general has to die.”
“I hit him the first shot,” Lee said softly.
“I need to stop feeling bad all the time.”
“It’s a clear shot to every window.”
“I want him on the ground.”
“Less than forty yards,” Lee said.
“For Mississippi, for John Birch, for the KKK, for every fucking thing. ”
Bobby looked a little smoky-eyed. They were quiet for a while. The heat came washing through the windows. They headed up Stemmons to Oak Lawn Avenue.
Lee said, “We turn left off Avondale into an alley that runs about two hundred and fifty feet to a church parking lot. We go slow. I get out near the end of the alley. You keep going and turn right into the church driveway. There’ll be a service in progress. You’re like a latecoming Mormon. You stop and wait. Cut your lights. I aim the rifle through the lattice fence at the back of Walker’s house. I have a clear line of fire. You sit and wait. I see a picture of him now. He likes a well-lighted house. He sits in his study at night.”
He had a thirty-nine-week subscription to Time. He imagined the backyard photograph in Time. The Castro partisan with his guns and subversive journals. He imagined the cover of Time, a picture seen across the socialist world. The man who shot the fascist general. A friend of the revolution.
“They’ll appreciate in Havana that we did it April seventeen,” Lee said. “Two years to the day. The invasion was the thing that produced a General Walker, more than any other event.”
They turned onto Avondale. He realized Bobby was staring, eyebrows white with flour.
“Seventeen. What seventeen?” Dupard said.
“It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”
“This here is April ten.”
Ted Walker was at the desk in his office, a fifty-three-year-old bachelor who looks like anybody’s next-door neighbor, tallish, with jutting brows, flesh going a little slack in the jaw and neck, body slightly stooped, the neighbor who is stern with children, doing his taxes now.
It is the biggest joke in America. General Walker does his taxes.
He was used to talking about himself in the third person. He talked to the press about the Walker case, the attempts to silence Walker. It is only natural, his sense of a public self, when you consider the close and pulsating attention he received in the local press where he ran neck and neck last October with the Cuban missile crisis. It was President Jack who said about the Morning News, “I’m sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon rolls around.”
The aging ladies love their Ted. They are the last true believers. He mutters the poem of their missing lives.
A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He sat with his back to the window, totaling figures on a scratch pad, taxes, doing his taxes, like any fool and dupe of the Real Control Apparatus. Letters from the true believers were stacked in a basket to his right. The Christian Crusade women, the John Birch men, the semiretired, the wrathful, the betrayed, the ones who keep coming up empty. They had intimate knowledge of the Control Apparatus. It wasn’t just politics from afar. It wasn’t just the deals of the sellout specialists and soft-liners, the weak sisters, the no-win policymakers. The Apparatus paralyzed not only our armed forces but our individual lives, frustrating every normal American ambition, infiltrating our minds and bodies with fluoridation, with the creeping fever of trade unions and the left-wing press and the income tax, every modern sickness that saps the nation’s will to resist the enemy advance.
The Red Chinese are massing below the California border. There are confirmed reports.
This is the man, ladies and gentlemen, who climbed the base of the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss., to rally thousands against the integration of the university. The man who so-called led an insurrection, wearing his proud gray Stetson. Oh it was something. Four hundred federal marshals, five hundred state and local police, helicopters, jeeps, fire eng
ines, three thousand National Guardsmen, tear gas blowing through the streets, burning cars, rocks flying everywhere, and birdshot, and sniper fire, two men dead, countless wounded, a couple of hundred arrested, military trucks full of regular army, sixteen thousand combat troops massed against a few thousand students and country boys and patriots of the South, and here is the object and source and cause of the whole thing, one gloomy nigger with a hanky in his face to keep the tear gas from making him cry.
Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.
That’s the main thing Ted actually said. Like a Boy Scout saga, a couple of days in the wholesome outdoors.
To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it that he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.
In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
But he didn’t say these things. He mumbled and groaned in the crowded room, then punched a reporter in the face.
