Libra - Don Delillo [149]
A man, a madman, whatever he was, shadow-boxed outside the toilets at the Habana.
Ferrie didn’t seem to know sometimes whether a story was funny or sad. He told Lee about the time he tried to perfect a tiny flare device equipped with a timer. He wanted to make thousands of these devices and attach them to the bodies of mice. He wanted to parachute the mice into Cuban cane fields. He was driven by the image of fifty thousand mice scattering through the sugar cane as the timers ignited the flares. He wanted to be the Hannibal of the mouse world, he said, and seemed dejected by the failure of the plan.
“During the revolution,” Lee said, “Castro made it a point to burn his own family’s cane fields.”
“Listen to me. This Walker business is strictly in the past. You ought to forget him. A dead General Walker means nothing to Fidel. He is old hat. He is day-old shit. No one listens to Walker anymore. Your missed bullet finished him more surely than a clean hit. It left him, hanging in the twilight. He is an embarrassment. He carries the stigma of having been shot at and missed.”
“How do you know I want to try again?”
“Leon, do we actually have to speak the words? Don’t we know when a death is passing in the air? They’re beginning to crowd you. Banister says they’re serious men. They’ve been in your apartment.”
“I know. I had a feeling.”
“You sensed it. See? Nobody has to say anything. The scales will simply tip and then we’ll know.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they’ve been shaping all along. You’re a quirk of history. You’re a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There’s a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We’re deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane. It’s almost a romance, a flirtation. I look for it, Leon. I chase it discreetly.”
The shadow-boxer was on another level now, making the slowest of moves, working out the mathematics. He stood in place, head down, and dragged his arms across his upper body, finding resistance, a retarding force, like someone gesturing in space.
“Your man Kennedy has a little romance of his own with the idea of death. Men preoccupied with courage have their dark dreams. Jack’s a little death-haunted all right, but not pathologically, not creepy-crawly like me. Poetic. That’s your Jack.”
“He’s not my Jack,” Lee said.
“He knows the course. He’s been close to dying several times. A brother killed in action. A sister killed in a plane crash. A baby dead. A Catholic. A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear. Skelly Bone Pete. We used to stay out of certain alleyways, certain dark streets. That’s where he was waiting with his wino breath and stinky underwear. Specialized in kids.”
One of the bar girls stood by the juke box swaying, a West Texas woman who looked sandblasted, with bleached-out hair and skin, little gold lashes. Ferrie waved her over. He took a black bow tie out of his pocket and gave it to her. She clipped it to Lee’s shirt collar. They thought that