Libra - Don Delillo [129]
Put on your Pro Blue bonnet
With the Lone Star upon it
And we’ll put Ted Walker on the way
Was that a firecracker? He turned to the window, standing in the same motion, but slowly, giving the matter some thought. Kids throwing firecrackers around? Did we put the screen back in? The screen was in, he saw, and the window was shut. All the windows were shut because the air conditioner was on. He moved out of the light and something caught his eye. There was a hole in the wall about the size of a half-dollar. He was trying to get it straight. He looked at the window again and the glass had radial streaks in it near the crosspiece of the wooden frame. He moved farther out of the light. His cigarette burning in the ashtray. He went upstairs and got his revolver. He came down quickly. He went out the back door and stood in the dimness with the gun, stood looking, dead still, feeling the heat like a wall of air. Then he went back inside and called the police. That’s when he noticed bits of glass and wood in the hair on his right forearm, just below the rolled-up sleeve, and there were grainy fragments mixed in, bright as sand, a residue he believed were slivers of the copper jacket of a high-velocity bullet.
He was not half surprised. They have been plotting for a long time, every element in the Control Apparatus, planning and scheming carefully to keep Walker quiet. This is what shooting people does.
He got a pair of tweezers, sat in his easy chair and began picking metal out of his arm while he waited for the police to arrive.
Marina was worried about Lee. In the morning he told her he’d lost his job. He blamed it on the FBI. He said they’d probably come around the shop and asked questions about him. Now he was late coming home. Coming home from what? He said he had typing class but the class ended at a quarter. past seven, three hours ago, and besides it was a Wednesday and there was no class on Wednesday.
He wanted her to go back to the USSR. He could not support a wife and child in America. He made her write to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Would they pay for the return of a Russian citizen and her baby girl?
She was pregnant again, which is the way destiny sometimes intervenes.
At least they had a balcony where June could crawl around in the fresh air. When they separated, after Fort Worth, she stayed with half a dozen different families, some nights with this one, then over to that one. It was beating on her nerves, all that moving around. One night Lee stayed with her in one of the Russian homes. There was a full refrigerator and an electric can opener. Two telephones. They made love with the TV on.
He told the landlady on Elsbeth Street she was a Czech.
He hit her once in front of people because the zipper on the side of her skirt was partly open. In front of people.
Holland was unbelievably clean. It was her dream country, with trim houses and spotless little children.
There were bargain stores in Oak Cliff. She went in out of the heat and walked the aisles. She went to shoe stores and stores called army-navy. She bought this, rejected that, mentally, walking the narrow aisles.
Maybe they would all go back to Russia, although she didn’t want to. Maybe they would move to New Orleans. He was talking about New Orleans, his hometown, a port city like Archangel, where she grew up.
He did most of the housework and gave her breakfast in bed on Sunday. She was shameless when it came to sleeping late. People gave her things and he insulted them.
He took the bus to a place called the Field of Love, where he practiced shooting his rifle. They argued about this. He hit her and she threw something at him and he hit her again with a closed hand, making her bleed from the nose.
We buy groceries on Tuesday.
It was one more misfortune on her head, this lost job of his. But the pattern of a life can’t be seen in fleeting days or weeks. Maybe it was their destiny to live in a port city, to feel the sea breeze and glimpse the tender