Libra - Don Delillo [199]
Ramón Benítez, the man on the grassy knoll, is seen in a photograph taken in April 1971 at the dedication of the eternal flame in Cuban Memorial Plaza on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami. An urn containing the flame rests on a twelve-foot column. Five plaques list the names of the fallen—los mdrtires de la brigada de asalto. The Curator forwards vague reports that Benitez, using another name, drove a taxi for some years in Union City, New Jersey. Otherwise, nothing.
Also present in the crowd that day, caught in photographs, is Antonio Veciana, the founder of Alpha 66. Eight and a half years later he will be shot and wounded in Miami. This will happen after publication of the House select committee’s report on assassinations—a report that includes Veciana’s allegation that Lee Oswald met with a member of U.S. intelligence in Dallas some time before November 22. No arrests in the case.
Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, the stripper to whom Jack Ruby wired money, is found hanging by her toreador pants in a holding cell in Oklahoma City, June 1965, after an arrest on charges of soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. Ruled a suicide.
Two days later, Bobby Renaldo Dupard is shot to death during a holdup at Ray’s Hardware in West Dallas, where he was employed as assistant manager. Branch immediately connects the name of the store with one of those useless clinging facts that keep him awake at night. This is where Jack Ruby, in 1960, bought the gun he used to kill Oswald.
Jack Leon Ruby dies of cancer in January 1967 while awaiting retrial for the murder of Oswald. In his time in prison he attempts suicide by ramming the cell wall with his head and by trying to jam his finger in a light socket while standing in a puddle of water.
He tells Chief Justice Earl Warren at the commission hearings that he has been used for a purpose, that he wants to tell the truth and then leave this world. But first they have to take him to Washington. He will tell the truth to President Johnson.
He lives in a cell in an isolated area of the county jail, a small square room with a toilet bowl and a mattress on the floor. A guard reads the Bible to him. Jack believes this man has a listening device in his clothes. They safely store away all his incriminating remarks and then erase all the remarks that prove his crime was unpremeditated, a spasm of personal conscience.
When he is feeling totally morose, a nothing person, he rereads the telegrams he received in the first days after the shooting. HOO-RAY FOR YOU JACK. YOU ARE A HERO MR. RUBY. WE LOVE YOUR GUTS AND COURAGE. YOU KILLED THE SNAKE. YOU DESERVE A MEDAL NOT A JAIL CELL. I KISS YOUR FEET BORN IN HUNGARY LOVE. Then he remembers the guilty verdict, the death penalty, the reversal on flimsy technicalities. He knows that Dallas wants him dead and gone just like Oswald. He knows that people regard all the shootings of that weekend as flashes of a single incandescent homicide and this is the crime they are saying Jack has committed. He is worried that he has been miscast. He runs across the room and butts his head.
He wears white jail coveralls and scribbles notes when his lawyers come to the interview room, where the walls are bugged. He insists on taking a lie-detector test because the sincerity and authenticity of the truth are precious qualities to Americans. “It seems as you get further into something,” he scribbles on a pad, “even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow, brainwashes you, that you are weak in what you want to tell the truth about.” Authorities arrange a polygraph exam in July 1964. Results are inconclusive.
He begins to hear voices. He hears one of his brothers screaming as people set him on fire outside the county jail.
He believes all his brothers and sisters will be killed because of what he did.
He believes people are distorting his