Libra - Don Delillo [162]
Win walked past the doorway with a knife in his hand.
She pushed the vacuum cleaner back into the living room. It was a five-year-old Hoover with a receptacle unit shaped like a space satellite. Funny, she thought, how she could vacuum back and forth in front of Suzanne and the girl never complained. The girl looked right through her. The girl heard the cartoon voices through the noise of the Hoover.
After dinner Win went down to the basement to investigate a noise. He watched himself come down the plank stairs, head tilted slightly, fingers of the right hand extended. Houses make noises, Mary Frances said. He smelled turpentine and understood how you could become hooked on the smell of turpentine, give yourself up to it, volatile, sticky, piney, your whole life centered on spirits of turpentine. Mary Frances told him that houses shift and settle all the time.
Thanks. But there is sometimes more to it.
He went back up to the living room and sat with her, listening to the radio. She liked the revivalist preachers, men of a certain creepy eloquence.
“Don’t you feel well?” he said.
“I’m all right.”
“I want you to be well.”
“I’m all right.”
“Because it would be devastating if you weren’t well. That mustn’t happen, understand? I actually couldn’t bear it.”
She had a Sears catalogue on her lap. She’d used catalogues to shop when they were posted to remote areas. ISOLATION TROPIC. He wondered what the hell had happened to Mackey.
“Don’t be so solemn,” she said.
“Don’t you like being fussed after?”
“Not the way you do it. ”
“The housewife who never has time for herself. Doesn’t she relish a little attention?”
“Not the way you do it. Looking so stricken. It chills my blood.”
He laughed. They heard Suzanne walk through the kitchen singing a rhyme popular with local kids. Mackey had eluded all attempts by Parmenter to trace him. What did it mean? Larry said he probably just walked off. Doesn’t want to do it. Wants to change careers. It’s over. We tried.
“Beans, beans, the musical fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot.”
Parmenter himself was in Buenos Aires getting a preview of his new job. This is the future of the Agency, he said to Everett. Keeping track of world currencies. Moving and hiding money. Building reserves of money. Financing vast operations with complex networks of money.
Lancer is coming to Texas.
“Did you notice the casual tone?” Mary Frances said.
“It’s a kids’ jingle. What sort of tone?”
“No but the way she sort of rehearsed the casualness. So we wouldn’t know we were supposed to hear.”
“It was casual because it was casual.”
“Where’s the steak knife you were using to scrape paint? We keep losing knives.”
Premonition. The story about the President’s trip was in the Record-Chronicle a week ago. A brief tour of Texas in November, after his swing through Florida. Stops at Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas. Buried inside the paper. Three or four lines that only a person with a compelling interest in the President’s whereabouts might take note of. Win thought it was eerie that President Jack would be headed in this general direction. The plot coming to the plotter. Assuming he made it past Miami. Because Parmenter might be wrong. Something might still be in force, some movement, a driving logic.
“I can’t find the paint scraper,” he said.
“Just leave the knives alone.”
“There’s something about a paint scraper. You know it’s there. You’re looking right at it. But you can’t quite pick it out of the background. Let’s face it, the background is vast and confusing.”
He wanted a way out of guilt and fear. He was not strong enough to survive the damage this operation might cause if it developed a second life. He half yearned to be found out. It would be a deliverance in a way to be confronted, polygraphed, forced to tell the truth. He believed in the truth. He feared and welcomed the chance to be polygraphed. The Office of Security had models designed to fit in suitcases. You could be fluttered in your home. They would arrive