Libra - Don Delillo [132]
Wayne stood outside wearing Levis, his bare chest pale and veined. He was growing his hair down over his neck, a rat’s tail he painstakingly braided. He went barefoot over the moist ground. There was a storm hanging close, a stillness. and metallic light, pressure building. The bird noise was fretful and spooked.
Frank Vásquez was back in the Everglades spying on Alpha 66.
The others stood talking by a fallen tree. Wayne wore a hunting knife in a leather sheath clipped to his belt, just for the general look of it. Ferrie smiled at the sight of his bare feet.
“Here is a man who has no fear.”
“I never understand about people and snakes,” Wayne said. “Like what harm do they intend? They never touch me. I’ve had incidents with snakes where they never touch me.”
“It’s not they touch you,” Raymo said. “It’s stepping on them. Not seeing where you step.”
“Copperhead,” Leon said.
“I have the primitive fear,” Ferrie said. “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there.”
He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff. His car was parked on a dirt road about half a mile downstream and the skiff was the only way in and out.
They took turns firing at a silhouette target that was the one-time property of the FBI. Then they went up to the long shack for something to eat.
The first drops of rain hit the sheeting, well spaced and heavy. They sat around the table and talked about jobs, odd jobs, seasonal jobs. Wayne told them about his pool-skimming days in California. Leon described a radio plant somewhere, lathes and grinding machines, floor awash in oil, the workers’ hands stained black. Raymo talked about the hands of cane-cutters, seamed with cuts, sticky and black from the juice.
This was the first time Wayne had heard Leon say more than two words. He didn’t know where Leon fit in, except it was obvious he was some kind of special component with his own little twist or spin. He came and he went, carrying the Italian carbine. The others seemed to leave some space around him, like he was holy or diseased.
They talked about prisons they’d been in.
“I used to believe the great thing of Castro was the time he spent in prison,” Raymo said. “He went to prison in Cuba and Mexico both. I used to say this is the man’s honor and strength. He comes out of prison with authority if he is sent there for his beliefs. It is completely different in Castro’s own prisons. We came out of La Cabana with anger and disgust. We were the worms of the CIA.”
“They sent me to prison in the military,” Leon said.
“What for?”
“Politics. Just like Fidel. I spent a night in jail in New Orleans a month ago. Politics.”
“I sat in a lockup for three days,” Wayne said. “Our launch was intercepted about ten minutes out of the Keys. Violating the neutrality act. It was T-Jay that got us out. He fixed it somehow. The charges were dropped nicey-nicey.”
Raymo said, “Castro spent fourteen months in an isolation cell. He read Karl Marx. He read every Russian. He told us he read twelve hours a day. He read in the dark. Always studying, always analyzing. Years later I saw the executions of men who fought by his side in the mountains.”
“It’s clear in history,” Leon said, “that a man has to go to prison for his beliefs. It’s a necessary stage in the evolution of any movement that cuts against the system. Eventually he merges his beliefs in the actual struggle.”
“I thought about it a lot,” Raymo said, “and I’ll tell you my beliefs. I believed in the United States of America. The country that could do no wrong. It was bigger than anything, bigger than God. With the great U.S. behind us, how could we lose? They told us, they told us, they promise, they repeat and repeat. We have the full backing of the military. We went to