Libra - Don Delillo [179]
Pigeons flared past.
Raymo eased the gun barrel out over the fence. He set his feet firmly on the bumper. His left forearm, bracing the weapon, was wedged between the tops of two pickets. He tilted his head to the stock. He waited, sighting through the scope.
On the grass a woman saw the limousine emerge from behind a freeway sign with the President clutching at his throat. She heard a sharp noise, like a backfiring car, and realized it was the second noise she’d heard. She thought she saw a man throw a boy to the grass and fall on top of him. She didn’t really hear the first noise until she heard the second. A girl ran waving toward the limousine. The noise cracked and flattened, washing across the plaza. This wasn’t making sense at all.
There was so much clarity Lee could watch himself in the huge room of stacked cartons, scattered books, old brick walls, bare light bulbs, a small figure in a corner, partly hidden. He fired off a second shot.
He saw the Governor, who was turned right, begin to look the other way, then double up suddenly. A startle reaction. He knew this was called a startle reaction, from gun magazines.
He turned up the handle, drew the bolt back, then drove it forward.
Stand by a moment please.
Okay, he fired early the first time, hitting the President below the head, near the neck area somewhere. It was a foolishness he could dismiss on a certain level. Okay, he missed the President with the second shot and hit Connally. But the car was still sitting there, barely moving. He saw the First Lady lean toward the President, who was slumped down now. A man stood applauding at the edge of the telescopic frame.
Lee jerked the handle down and aimed. He heard the second spent shell roll across the floor.
There were roses on the seat between Jack and Jackie. The car’s interior was a nice light blue. The man was so close he could have spoken to them. He stood at curbside applauding. A woman called out to the car, “Hey we want to take your picture.” The President looked extremely puzzled, head leaning left. The man stood applauding, already deep in chaos, looking at crumpled bodies, a sense of guns coming out.
Put me on, Bill. Put me on.
Bobby W. Hargis, riding escort, left rear, knew he was hearing gunfire. There was a woman taking a picture and another woman about twenty feet behind her taking the same picture, only with the first woman in it. He couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from, two shots, but knew someone was hit in the car. A man threw his kid to the ground and fell on him. That’s a vet, Hargis had time to think, with the Governor, Connally, kind of sliding down in the jump seat and his wife taking him in, gathering the man in. Hargis turned right just after noticing a girl in a pretty coat running across the lawn toward the President’s car. He turned his body right, keeping the motorcycle headed west on Elm, and then the blood and matter, the unforgettable thing, the sleet of bone and blood and tissue struck him in the face. He thought he’d been shot. The stuff hit him like a spray of buckshot and he heard it ping and spatter on his helmet. People were down on the grass. He kept his mouth closed tight so the fluid would not ooze in.
In the jump seat John was crumpled up. Nellie Connally pulled him over into her arms. She put her head down over his head. She was pretending she was him. They were both alive or both dead. They could not be one and one. Then the third shot sent stuff just everywhere. Tissue, bone fragments, tissue in pale wads, watery mess, tissue, blood, brain matter all over them.
She heard Jackie say, “They’ve killed my husband.”
It could have been Nellie’s own voice, someone speaking for her. She thought John was dead. Then he moved just slightly and she thought at the same time that Jackie was out of the car, gone off the end of the car, but now was somehow back. John moved in her arms. They were one heart pumping.
We are hit. Lancer is hit. Get us to Parkland fast.
The car picked up speed and everything went rushing past. Nellie