Libra - Don Delillo [114]
“What am I supposed to tell him?” Lynette said.
“Doesn’t make the slightest little difference. This is just Jack.”
Jack Ruby came in off Commerce Street, paunchy, balding, bearish in the chest and shoulders, fifty-two years old, carrying three thousand dollars in cash, a loaded revolver, a vial of Preludins and a summons from small-claims court for passing a bad check in a department store.
He walked into the dressing room.
“Quiet,” he told Brenda. “I want to hear this.”
They listened to Life Line on the radio. It was a commentary on heroism and how it has fallen into disuse.
Jack sat at the second mirror, his head lowered for maximum listening.
The announcer said, “In America, not so long ago, thirty-five bright young university students in a history class were asked to identify Guadalcanal. Less than one-third of them had ever heard of it. Three thousand years of military history tell no story more splendid than the blazing heroism on Guadalcanal, every bit of it American, as truly American as the log-cabin frontier and the open range. But nobody hears it now. United Nations Day gets a hundred times the publicity.”
Jack was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and white silk tie, and he carried the snap-brim fedora that put him into focus, gave him sharpness and direction, like a detective on assignment.
“I love this stuff,” he said. “I get welled up something tremendous when they talk about our country. You should have seen me when FDR died, when they announced on the radio, I was in uniform crying like a baby. Where is this Randi Ryder of mine?”
“Taking a pee.”
“Is she torrid or what? I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid they’ll take my license.”
“This is striptease,” Brenda said.
“She was a big draw on Bourbon Street. But this is, I don’t know, they might think she goes too far, popping her G-string like that.”
“She is after publicity, Jack.”
“I could make her wear a different little doohickey there.”
“She would snap it and pop it whatever.”
“Dallas draws the line at pussy hair. She could get me closed down.”
“She is awful young to me.”
“That’s part of the draw. The competition’s breathing down my back.”
“Is that why you’re paying her more than us?”
Jack leaned away, incredulous.
“Do I know this?” he said. “When did this come out?”
“You are paying Lynette like double.”
“Brenda, I swear this sounds like something I never heard of. I am claiming I am nowhere on this.”
“You pay extra, then you complain she’ll close you down.”
“I give her the margin so she’ll draw. I need the draw very bad.”
“You have this big thing built up in your mind that the competition is trying to put you out of business. They’re just the competition, making a living like the rest of us.”
“Fuck you, Brenda, okay.”
“Same back, Mr. Ruby.”
“I’m only the owner of this establishment and I have to sit here.”
“That is exactly right.”
“I have to listen.”
“They have nothing better to do than get Jack. When Jack is the biggest conniver and sharpie of all.”
“Hand me a Kleenex,” he said.
“I also have to say. Now that I’m started. You’re always off somewhere in your mind. Carrying on your own conversation. You don’t listen to people.”
“You don’t know how deep they’re digging me.”
“That’s why there is all this yelling all night long in this place.”
“I have my dogs and I.”
“Which you’re very welcome.”
“You should know my early life, Brenda, which I’m still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there.”
“Well this is just a woman and a mother.”
“So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that’s the least of it. I’m just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don’t care anymore what they did to each other or to me.