Libra - Don Delillo [101]
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.
Lancer is going to Miami.
Mary Frances moved past the doorway. Then she ran water in the kitchen. He heard her looking for something on the back stairway. He heard the kitchen radio. He waited for her to pass by the porch window with the watering can. It was an old metal can, gray and dented, and he waited to hear her walk across the porch. He listened carefully. She was still in the kitchen. That was all right. As long as he knew where she was. She had to be close and he had to know where she was. Those were the two inner rules.
He heard an old familiar voice on the kitchen radio, some voice from the old days of radio, couldn’t quite recall the man’s name, but famous and familiar, with laughter in the background, and he sat very still as if to draw out the moment, struck by the complex emotion carried on a voice from another era, tender and shattering, a three-line joke that brings back everything.
He turned another page.
There was no date set for the President’s trip. But it is definitely going to happen, said Parmenter. He wants to go to Florida because the state voted Republican in 1960 and because the whole South is pissing blood over his civil-rights program. Cape Canaveral, Tampa, Miami. There’ll be a motorcade in Miami.
Mary Frances was in the doorway wearing rubber gloves, a scrub brush in her hand.
“Something odd lately? I don’t know.”
“What?” he said.
“Suzanne? Although it’s probably nothing.”
“It’s not like you.”
“Worry over nothing.”
“She’s all right. She’s fine. She’s a healthy child.”
“With a morbid streak.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Lately she seems.”
“What?”
“She’s always going off with Missy Tyler. They practically hide from me at times. I don’t know, it’s just, I think she’s so preoccupied lately, so inner, and I wonder if there’s something unhealthy there.”
“Missy’s the skinny little redhead.”
“Adopted. They hide in corners and whisper solemnly. There’s a kind of mood that descends whenever Missy’s here. Very sort of haunted-house. Awestruck. Something walks the halls. I get the feeling it’s me. I’m a very suspicious presence in this house. The girls hush up when they hear me coming.”
“They have their own world. She’s dreamy,” he said.
“She listens to a Dallas disc jockey named the Weird Beard.”
“What does he play?”
“It’s not what he plays. He plays top forty. It’s what he says between records.”
“Example.”
“Impossible to duplicate. He just like, here I am, on and on. It’s a completely other language. But she is fixed to the radio.”
“Inka dinka dink.”
“I know. It’s not like me. Most of my worrying makes sense.”
“She read to me for forty minutes nonstop and it was remarkable, remarkable.”
“ ‘Please, Daddy, I want to read some more.’ ”
“Are you handling plutonium with those gloves?”
“ ‘Daddy, Daddy, please.’ ”
He went upstairs, moving slowly in his light and silent way. Miami has an impact, a resonance. City of exiles, unhealed wounds. The President wants a motorcade because the polls show he is losing popularity by the minute. Appear among the multitudes in his long blue Lincoln,