Chapter 20 #3
“I will,” I told her. “If things get bad enough, I will step in.”
That was a promise I meant to keep, although not on Marina’s behalf.
8
The day after Sadie’s Boxing Day dinner, there was a note from Oswald in my mailbox, although it was signed A. Hidell. This alias was in Al’s notes. The A stood for Alek, Marina’s pet name for him during their Minsk days.
The communication didn’t disturb me, since everyone on the street seemed to have gotten one just like it.
The flyers had been printed on hot-pink paper (probably filched from Oswald’s current place of employment), and I saw a dozen or more flapping up the gutters.
The residents of Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood were not known for putting litter in its place.
PROTEST CHANNEL 9 FASCISM!
HOME OF SEGREGATIONIST BILLY JAMES HARGIS!
PROTEST FASCIST EX-GENERAL EDWIN WALKER!
During the Thursday night telemcast of the Billy James Hargis so-called “Cristian Crusade,” Channel 9 will give are-time to GENERAL EDWIN WALKER, a right-wing fascist who has encouraged JFK to invade the peaceful peoples of Cuba and who has formented anti-black, anti-integration “HATE-SPEAK” all over the south.
(If you have doubts about the accuracy of this information, check the “TV Guide.”) These two men stand for everythig we fouht against in WWII, and their Fascist RAVINGS have no place on the are-waves.
EDWIN WALKER was one of the WHITE SUPREMACISTS who tried to bar JAMES MERDITH from attending “OLE MISS.” If you love America, protest the free are-time given to men who pretch HATE and VIOLENCE.
Write a letter! Better still, come to Channel 9 on Dec. 27 and “sit in!”
A. Hidell
President of Hands Off Cuba
Dallas–Fort Worth Branch
I briefly pondered the misspellings, then folded the flyer and put it in the box where I kept my manuscripts.
If there was a protest at the station, it wasn’t reported in the Slimes Herald the day after the Hargis-Walker “telemcast.” I doubt that anyone turned up, including Lee himself.
I certainly didn’t, but I tuned in to Channel 9 on Thursday night, anxious to see the man Lee—probably Lee—was soon going to try to kill.
At first it was just Hargis, sitting behind an office-set desk and pretending to scribble important notes while a canned choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was a fattish fellow with a lot of plastered-back black hair.
As the choir faded out, he put down his pen, looked into the camera, and said: “Welcome to the Christian Crusade, neighbors. I come with good news—Jesus loves you. Yes he does, every last one of you. Won’t you join me in prayer? ”
Hargis bent the Almighty’s ear for at least ten minutes.
He covered the usual stuff, thanking God for the chance to spread the gospel and instructing Him to bless those who’d sent in love-offerings.
Then he got down to business, asking God to arm His Chosen People with the sword and buckler of righteousness so we could defeat communism, which had reared its ugly head just ninety miles off the shores of Florida.
He asked God to grant President Kennedy the wisdom (which Hargis, being closer to the Big Guy, already possessed) to go in there and root out the tares of godlessness.
He also demanded that God put an end to the growing communist threat on American college campuses—folk music seemed to have something to do with it, but Hargis kind of lost the thread on that part.
He finished by thanking God for his guest tonight, the hero of Anzio and the Chosin Reservoir, General Edwin A. Walker.
Walker appeared not in uniform but in a khaki suit that closely resembled one.
The creases in his pants looked sharp enough to shave with.
His stony face reminded me of the cowboy actor Randolph Scott.
He shook Hargis’s hand and they talked about communism, which was rife not just on the college campuses, but in the halls of Congress and the scientific community as well.
They touched on fluoridation. Then they schmoozed about Cuba, which Walker called “the cancer of the Caribbean.”
I could see why Walker had failed so badly in his run for the Texas governorship the year before.
At the front of a high school class he would have put the kids to sleep even in period one, when they were freshest. But Hargis moved him along smoothly, interjecting “Praise Jesus!” and “God’s witness, brother!
” whenever things got a little sticky. They discussed an upcoming barnstorm crusade through the South called Operation Midnight Ride, and then Hargis invited Walker to clear the air concerning “certain scurrilous charges of segregationism that have surfaced in the New York press and elsewhere.”
Walker finally forgot he was on television and came to life. “You know that’s nothing but a truckload of commie propaganda.”
“I know it!” Hargis exclaimed. “And God wants you to tell it, brother.”
“I spent my life in the U.S. Army, and I’ll be a soldier in my heart until the day I die.
” (If Lee had his way, that would be in roughly three months.) “As a soldier, I always did my duty. When President Eisenhower ordered me to Little Rock during the civil disturbances of 1957—this had to do with the forced integration of Central High School, as you know—I did my duty. But Billy, I am also a soldier of God—”
“A Christian soldier! Praise Jesus!”
“—and as a Christian, I know that forced integration is just flat-out wrong. It’s Constitution-wrong, states rights–wrong, and Bible-wrong.”
“Tell it,” Hargis said, and wiped a tear from his cheek. Or maybe it was sweat that had oozed through his makeup.
“Do I hate the Negro race? Those who say that—and those who worked to drive me from the military service I loved—are liars and communists. You know better, the men I served with know better, and God knows better.” He leaned forward in the guest’s chair.
“Do you think the Negro teachers in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and the great state of Texas want integration? They do not. They see it as a slap in the face to their own skills and hard work. Do you think that Negro students want to go to school with whites naturally better equipped for readin, writin, and rithmetic? Do you think real Americans want the sort of race mongrelization that will result from this sort of mingling?”
“Of course they don’t! Praaaiiise Jesus!”
I thought about the sign I’d seen in North Carolina, the one pointing to a path bordered with poison ivy. COLORED, it had said. Walker didn’t deserve killing, but he could certainly do with a brisk shaking. I’d give anyone a big old praise Jesus on that one.
My attention had wandered, but something Walker was now saying brought it back in a hurry.
“It was God, not General Edwin Walker, who ordained the Negro position in His world when He gave them a different skin color and a different set of talents. More athletic talents. What does the Bible tell us about this difference, and why the Negro race has been cursed to so much pain and travail? We only have to look at the ninth chapter of Genesis, Billy.”
“Praise God for His Holy Word.”
Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court.
“ ‘And Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told them who stood without.’ But Shem and Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know you know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old Bible-learning we got at our mothers’ knees—”
“Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”
“Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been going on, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa—’ ”
I snapped the TV off.
9
What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think of a tee-shirt Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our marriage.
There was a fiercely grinning pirate on the front, with this message below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
Plenty of beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter.
We in the neighborhood heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain.
Nobody did anything, and that included me.
Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition.
All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time.
I would verify that Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business.
Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do.
With the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.
Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair.
They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something.
Marina laughed, nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.
I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about this development, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. But I cared.
The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.