He posed in a corner of the yard, the rifle in his right hand, muzzle up, butt end pressing on his waist, just inches from the bolstered. 38. The magazines, the Militant and the Worker, were in his left hand, fanned like playing cards.
She snapped the shutter,
He posed one more time, the rifle in his left hand now, the magazines held under his chin with the word Militant visible above the fold, his shadow trailing to the wooden gate and his thin smile carried forward by light and time into the frame of official memory.
Lee stood in a corner of the Gulf station on North Beckley, eight-thirty sharp, the stink of gasoline hanging low in the night. It was ninety-nine degrees. It was record-breaking heat for this date. He had a military slicker draped over his left shoulder and held a half-finished Coke in his right hand, drawn from the machine nearby, just as a reason to be here.
He kept his eye on a tan Ford turning slowly into the station and coming to a stop near the service area. It looked like a 1950 model, thereabouts. He watched Dupard get out and stand by the open door, peering. Bobby wore light-blue coveralls and a little round cap, with the words American Bakery embroidered across his shirtfront and a heavy dusting of flour on his face and clothes, whiting his eyebrows and the backs of his hands.
Lee walked toward the car, his left arm stiff beneath the slicker, the rifle held parallel to his body with the butt wedged in his armpit. They did not speak until the car was on the street, headed north, the rifle on the floor behind the seat.
"But how come, Bobby?"
"What?"
"You're in work clothes."
"I had a chance to make some overtime, which I'm forced to accept it if I'm not doing no laundry tonight."
"Am I keeping you from the laundry? Is that what this is all about?"
"I'm just saying. The chance came up. I squeezed in four extra hours."
"You can be identified. This is not a night you want to stand out."
"Nobody sees shit. We go in quick and dark. Where's the handgun?"
Lee took the. 38 out of his belt and put it on the seat between them.
"Did you get the bullets?" he said.
"Totally," Dupard said. "I got fifteen bullets I bought right off the street from some school kid. They're like two different-make bullets but they're.38 specials, so I don't foresee no problem."
"I don't foresee using them. It's just in case."
At the first red light Bobby swung out the cylinder of the gun and took six cartridges from the breast pocket of his uniform. He inserted them in the chambers.
"I'll tell you a good sign," Lee said. "I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it's fate."
"What did you tell her about tonight?"
"She thinks I'm at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day."
"I dread getting fired, man."
"They said my work wasn't exact. It had to happen. Just like tonight has to happen. They'll know about this in Havana. Before midnight the news will reach Fidel."
They crossed the Trinity River on the Commerce Street viaduct.
"What I seen, that rifle looks like war surplus. How do you know it shoots?"
"I wrapped it in my raincoat and took it on the Love Field bus. Then I went down to the river bottom out west of the freeway where there's an area that people test-fire their guns. It's like a war in ordinary daylight."
"That sling, that strap, like it comes off a tenor sax."
"It fits all right. Everything works. Everything fits. I planned this thing with care. I had to go to six gun shops before I found ammo for this type carbine."
"It's bearing on my mind that the general has to die."
"I hit him the first shot," Lee said softly.
"I need to stop feeling bad all the time."
"It's a clear shot to every window."
"I want him on the ground."
"Less than forty yards," Lee said.
"For Mississippi, for John Birch, for the KKK, for every fucking thing."
Bobby looked a little smoky-eyed. They were quiet for a while. The heat came washing through the windows. They headed up Stemmons to Oak Lawn Avenue.
Lee said, "We turn left off Avondale into an alley that runs about two hundred and fifty feet to a church parking lot. We go slow. I get out near the end of the alley. You keep going and turn right into the church driveway. There'll be a service in progress. You're like a latecoming Mormon. You stop and wait. Cut your lights. I aim the rifle through the lattice fence at the back of Walker's house. I have a clear line of fire. You sit and wait. I see a picture of him now. He likes a well-lighted house. He sits in his study at night."
He had a thirty-nine-week subscription to Time. He imagined the backyard photograph in Time. The Castro partisan with his guns and subversive journals. He imagined the cover of Time, a picture seen across the socialist world. The man who shot the fascist general. A friend of the revolution.
"They'll appreciate in Havana that we did it April seventeen," Lee said. "Two years to the day. The invasion was the thing that produced a General Walker, more than any other event."
They turned onto Avondale. He realized Bobby was staring, eyebrows white with flour.
"Seventeen. What seventeen?" Dupard said.
"It's Wednesday, isn't it?"
"This here is April ten."
Ted Walker was at the desk in his office, a fifty-three-year-old bachelor who looks like anybody's next-door neighbor, tallish, with jutting brows, flesh going a little slack in the jaw and neck, body slightly stooped, the neighbor who is stern with children, doing his taxes now.
It is the biggest joke in America. General Walker does his taxes.
He was used to talking about himself in the third person. He talked to the press about the Walker case, the attempts to silence Walker. It is only natural, his sense of a public self, when you consider the close and pulsating attention he received in the local press where he ran neck and neck last October with the Cuban missile crisis. It was President Jack who said about the Morning News, "I'm sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon rolls around."
The aging ladies love their Ted. They are the last true believers. He mutters the poem of their missing lives.
A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He sat with his back to the window, totaling figures on a scratch pad, taxes, doing his taxes, like any fool and dupe of the Real Control Apparatus. Letters from the true believers were stacked in a basket to his right. The Christian Crusade women, the John Birch men, the semiretired, the wrathful, the betrayed, the ones who keep coming up empty. They had intimate knowledge of the Control Apparatus. It wasn't just politics from afar. It wasn't just the deals of the sellout specialists and soft-liners, the weak sisters, the no-win policymakers. The Apparatus paralyzed not only our armed forces but our individual lives, frustrating every normal American ambition, infiltrating our minds and bodies with fluoridation, with the creeping fever of trade unions and the left-wing press and the income tax, every modern sickness that saps the nation's will to resist the enemy advance.
The Red Chinese are massing below the California border. There are confirmed reports.
This is the man, ladies and gentlemen, who climbed the base of the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss., to rally thousands against the integration of the university. The man who SO-called led an insurrection, wearing his proud gray Stetson. Oh it was something. Four hundred federal marshals, five hundred state and local police, helicopters, jeeps, fire engines, three thousand National Guardsmen, tear gas blowing through the streets, burning cars, rocks flying everywhere, and birdshot, and sniper fire, two men dead, countless wounded, a couple of hundred arrested, military trucks full of regular army, sixteen thousand combat troops massed against a few thousand students and country boys and patriots of the South, and here is the object and source and cause of the whole thing, one gloomy nigger with a hanky in his face to keep the tear gas from making him cry.