Libra - Don Delillo [23]
This man is strange even to himself.
“What about the rifle?” Lee said. “Maybe I’ll buy it. How much does he want for it?”
“He wants twenty-five dollars. But you give me fifteen. Because it’s you, fifteen. You’re one of my cadets. I look out for my boys. You wear a uniform, it makes all the difference. Look at me. I put on my captain’s jacket, all this bleary shit just falls away. I become a captain for Eastern. I talk like a captain. I instill confidence in anxious travelers. I actually fly the goddamn plane.”
He knows he’s strange but can’t help it.
“If I decide I’ll buy it, how do I get it home?”
“How do you get it home is easy. You take it and wrap it in a blanket. You use that blanket right there. The hotel won’t mind.”
Added to everything else was the fact that he’d actually have the rifle. He’d emerge with the rifle. He’d be able to say he’d transported a rifle in a stolen blanket through the city of New Orleans. Ferrie watched the mice in the cage, made whistling sounds. All this built seamlessly into Lee’s narration to Robert Sproul, the future inside the present, the little cartoon at the heart of events.
“The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprende? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.”
“If we can find the .22 and wrap it up,” Lee said, “I should probably be getting back.”
“It’ll be Carnival soon,” David Ferrie told him. “Farewell, flesh.”
He shouts for his meals. He hollers. I will be downstairs visiting with Myrtle Evans and we will hear him calling for his mother and I will jump right up and get upstairs to cook him his meal, like any boy.
Nobody knew what he knew. The whirl of time, the true life inside him. This was his leverage, his only control. He watched his mother browning flour, her hands rising sticky-white from the heavy-bottomed pan. He ran messages to steamship lines. He lay near sleep, falling into reverie, the powerful world of Oswald-hero, guns flashing in the dark. The reverie of control, perfection of rage, perfection of desire, the fantasy of night, rain-slick streets, the heightened shadows of men in dark coats, like men on movie posters. The dark had a power. The rain fell on empty streets. Always the men appeared, their long shadows bent behind them, then the rifle in his hands, the clip-fed Marlin, the idea of shooting for the gut, to draw out the dying.
There is a world inside the world. Stalin’s party name was Koba. He would devise a secret name, find a cell in the buildings near the docks. He memorized a license number, the color and make of car. He checked out a book that contained police pictures of revolutionaries. Police picture, Trotsky, age nineteen. Police picture, Lenin, full face and profile. Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick, ordinary citizen, member of the Communist Party, undercover agent for the FBI. She tapped her fingers on the palm of her hand. Rise and shine.
He saw a guy sitting backwards on a motorcycle, smoking a cigarette and looking into space, with tattoos running down one arm to the back of his hand.
The reverie of the girl in the plaid skirt. She lies back across the bed, her feet touching the floor. Brown-and-white saddle shoes, white socks, white blouse, the plaid skirt arranged four inches above the knees. The reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, perfection of control, her pale legs slightly parted, arms at her sides, eyes closed. He makes the picture come and go. It is what he knows about her, how he controls her, alone at night, watching