Libra - Don Delillo [138]
His own car was parked next to Raymo’s. It was a three-hour drive to New Orleans, where he would talk to Banister about Alpha 66. Let everyone know. Let everyone tell everyone.
Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami façade.
In New Orleans
The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father’s grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian’s every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.
A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.
In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.
Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.
Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn’t exist and companies that did, although he’d never worked for them.
An interviewer noted on a card: Suit. Tie. Polite.
Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee’s half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.
Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn’t afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people’s containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.
She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor’s driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and drive-ways.
“I am sitting here thinking he doesn’t love me anymore.”
“Papa loves his wife and child.”
“He thinks I am binding him like a rope or chain. His attitude is I bind him. He has the high-flying world of his ideas. If only he didn’t have a wife to hold him back, how perfect everything would be. ”
“We’re here to start over,” he said.
“I am thinking he wants me to go back to Russia. This is what he means by starting over.”
“Russia is one idea. I’ve also been working on the idea I could hijack a plane, take a plane and go to Cuba and then you’ll come with June to live there.”
“First you shoot at a man.”
“We may not be finished with him.”
“I am finished with him.”
“There’s a travel ban to Cuba.”
“And you are finished with him. Leaving me a note.”
“Little Cuba needs trained soldiers and advisers.”
“Scaring me to death. Now you want to steal an airplane. Who will fly it?”
“Stupid. The pilot. I kidnap it, I hijack it. It’s a flight to Miami and I take my revolver and go in the flight cabin. It’s called the flight cabin. ”
“Who is stupid? Which one of us?”
“My snub-nose revolver. My two-inch Commando.”
She had to laugh at that.
“I stick up the plane and tell them to drop me in Havana.”
They both laughed. They took turns drinking the warm soda pop. Then he went around with the spray can squirting roaches. Marina stood in the doorway watching. They had roaches in large numbers, really extraordinary numbers. She told him he would never