Chapter 21 #2
One overcast March afternoon, about two hours after Marina and Ruth had departed, Lee and George de Mohrenschildt showed up in de Mohrenschildt’s car.
Lee got out carrying a brown paper sack with a sombrero and PEPINO’S BEST MEXICAN printed on the side.
De Mohrenschildt had a six-pack of Dos Equis.
They went up the outside staircase, talking and laughing.
I grabbed the earphones, heart pumping. At first there was nothing, but then one of them turned on the lamp.
After that I might have been in the room with them, an unseen third.
Please don’t conspire to kill Walker, I thought. Please don’t make my job harder than it already is.
“Pardon the mess,” Lee said. “She doesn’t do anything much these days but sleep, watch TV, and talk about that woman she’s giving lessons to.”
De Mohrenschildt spoke for awhile about some oil leases he was trying to get hold of in Haiti, and spoke harshly of the repressive Duvalier regime. “At the end of the day, trucks drive through the marketplace and pick up the dead. Many of them are children who’ve starved to death.”
“Castro and the Front will put an end to that,” Lee said grimly.
“May providence hasten the day.” There was the clink of bottles, probably to toast the idea of providence hastening the day. “How is work, Comrade? And how is it you’re not there this afternoon?”
He wasn’t there, Lee said, because he wanted to be here.
Simple as that. He’d just punched out and walked away.
“What can they do about it? I’m the best damn photoprint technician ole Bobby Stovall’s got, and he knows it.
The foreman, his name is (I couldn’t make it out—Graff?
Grafe?) says ‘Quit trying to play labor organizer, Lee.’ You know what I do?
I laugh and say ‘Okay, svinoyeb,’ and walk away.
He’s a pig’s dick, and ever’one knows it. ”
Still, it was clear Lee liked his job, although he complained about the paternalistic attitude, and how seniority counted for more than talent. At one point he said, “You know, in Minsk, on a level playing field, I’d be running the place in a year.”
“I know you would, my son—it’s completely evident.”
Playing him up. Winding him up. I was sure of it. I didn’t like it.
“Did you see the paper this morning?” Lee asked.
“I saw nothing but telegrams and memos this morning. Why do you think I’m here, if not to get away from my desk?”
“Walker did it,” Lee said. “He joined up with Hargis’s crusade—or maybe it’s Walker’s crusade and Hargis joined up.
I cain’t tell. That fucking Midnight Ride thing, anyway.
Those two ninnies are going to tour the whole South, telling people that the N-double-A-C-P’s a communist front.
They’ll set integration and voting rights back twenty years. ”
“Sure! And fomenting hate. How long before the massacres start?”
“Or until someone shoots Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King!”
“Of course King will be shot,” de Mohrenschildt said, almost laughing. I was standing up, my hands pressing the earphones tight to the sides of my head, sweat trickling down my face. This was dangerous ground, indeed—the very edge of conspiracy. “It’s only a matter of time.”
One of them used the church key on another bottle of Mexican beer, and Lee said, “Someone should stop those two bastards.”
“You’re wrong to call our General Walker a ninny,” de Mohrenschildt said in a lecturely tone.
“Hargis, yes, okay. Hargis is a joke. What I hear is that he is—like so many of his ilk—a man of twisted sexual appetites, willing to diddle a little girl’s cunt in the morning and a little boy’s asshole in the afternoon. ”
“Man, that’s sick!” Lee’s voice broke like an adolescent’s on the last word. Then he laughed.
“But Walker, ah, there’s a very different kettle of shrimp. He’s high in the John Birch Society—”
“Those Jew-hating fascists!”
“—and I can see a day, not long hence, when he may run it. Once he has the confidence and approval of the other right-wing nut groups, he may even run for office again… but this time not for governor of Texas. I suspect he has his sights aimed higher. The Senate? Perhaps. Even the White House?”
“That could never happen.” But Lee sounded unsure.
“It’s unlikely to happen,” de Mohrenschildt corrected. “But never underestimate the American bourgeoisie’s capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism. Or the power of television. Without TV, Kennedy would never have beaten Nixon.”
“Kennedy and his iron fist,” Lee said. His approval of the current president seemed to have gone the way of blue suede shoes. “He won’t never rest as long as Fidel’s shitting in Batista’s commode.”
“And never underestimate the terror white America feels at the idea of a society in which racial equality has become the law of the land.”
“Nigger, nigger, nigger, beaner, beaner, beaner!” Lee burst out, with a rage so great it was nearly anguish. “That’s all I hear at work!”
“I’m sure. When the Morning News says ‘the great state of Texas,’ what they mean is ‘the hate state of Texas.’ And people listen!
For a man like Walker—a war hero like Walker—a buffoon like Hargis is nothing but a stepping-stone.
The way von Hindenberg was a stepping-stone for Hitler.
With the right public relations people to smooth him out, Walker could go far.
Do you know what I think? That the man who knocked off General Edwin Racist America Walker would be doing society a favor. ”
I dropped heavily into a chair beside the table where the little tape recorder sat, its reels spinning.
“If you really believe—” Lee began, and then there was a loud buzz that made me snatch the headphones off.
There were no cries of alarm or outrage from upstairs, no swift movement of feet, so—unless they were very good at covering up on the spur of the moment—I thought I could assume the lamp bug hadn’t been discovered.
I put the headphones back on. Nothing. I tried the distance mike, standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the ceiling.
With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt’s occasional replies, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
My ear in the Oswald apartment had gone deaf.
The past is obdurate.
After another ten minutes of conversation—maybe about politics, maybe about the annoying nature of wives, maybe about newly hatching plans to kill General Edwin Walker—de Mohrenschildt bounded down the outside stairs and drove away.
Lee’s footfalls crossed above my head—clump, clud, clump.
I followed them into my bedroom and trained the distance mike on the place where they stopped.
Nothing… nothing… then the faint but unmistakable sound of snoring.
When Ruth Paine dropped off Marina and June two hours later, he was still sleeping the sleep of Dos Equis.
Marina didn’t wake him. I wouldn’t have woken the bad-tempered little sonofabitch, either.
6
Oswald began to miss a lot more work after that day.
If Marina knew, she didn’t care. Maybe she didn’t even notice.
She was absorbed with her new friend Ruth.
The beatings had abated a little, not because morale had improved, but because Lee was out almost as frequently as she was.
He often took his camera. Thanks to Al’s notes, I knew where he was going and what he was doing.
One day after he’d left for the bus stop, I jumped into my car and drove to Oak Lawn Avenue.
I wanted to beat Lee’s crosstown bus, and I did.
Handily. There was plenty of slant-style parking on both sides of Oak Lawn, but my red gull-wing Chevy was distinctive, and I didn’t want to risk Lee seeing it.
I put it around the corner on Wycliff Avenue, in the parking lot of an Alpha Beta grocery.
Then I strolled down to Turtle Creek Boulevard.
The houses there were neo-haciendas with arches and stucco siding.
There were palm-lined drives, big lawns, even a fountain or two.
In front of 4011, a trim man (who bore a striking resemblance to the cowboy actor Randolph Scott) was at work with a push mower. Edwin Walker saw me looking at him and struck a curt half-salute from the side of his brow. I returned the gesture. Lee Oswald’s target resumed mowing and I moved on.
7
The streets making up the Dallas block I was interested in were Turtle Creek Boulevard (where the general lived), Wycliff Avenue (where I’d parked), Avondale Avenue (which was where I went after returning Walker’s wave), and Oak Lawn, a street of small businesses that ran directly behind the general’s house.
Oak Lawn was the one I was most interested in, because it was going to be Lee’s line of approach and route of escape on the night of April 10.
I stood in front of Texas Shoes & Boots, the collar of my denim jacket raised and my hands stuffed in my pockets.
About three minutes after I took up this position, the bus stopped at the corner of Oak Lawn and Wycliff.
Two women with cloth shopping bags got off immediately when the doors flopped open.
Then Lee descended to the sidewalk. He carried a brown paper bag, like a workman’s lunchsack.
There was a big stone church on the corner.
Lee sauntered over to the iron railing running in front of it, read the noticeboard, took a small notepad out of his hip pocket, and jotted something down.
After that he headed in my direction, tucking the notebook into his pocket as he walked.
I hadn’t expected that. Al had believed Lee was going to stash his rifle near the railroad tracks on the other side of Oak Lawn Avenue, a good half a mile away.
But maybe the notes were wrong, because Lee didn’t even glance in that direction.
He was seventy or eighty yards away, and closing in fast on my position.