Libra - Don Delillo [127]
“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