Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.
That's the main thing Ted actually said. Like a Boy Scout saga, a couple of days in the wholesome outdoors.
To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it that he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.
In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name. We can't measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can't uncover. This doesn't mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
But he didn't say these things. He mumbled and groaned in the crowded room, then punched a reporter in the face.
I sometimes am confused. We are dealing with tragedies of speech, tragedies of the human body. There are forces we can't comprehend.
He put out one cigarette, lit another. He got tired early now. It was a lingering effect of Operation Midnight Ride, the series of one-night stands in Louisville, Nashville, Amarillo, his journey to arouse the heartland, to get them to listen, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc., and he was still recovering. Beatniks came to picket, the most godawful bunch of Castro look-alikes anybody ever saw.
It is time to go down and liquidate the scourge which has descended on the island of Cuba.
It tired him and got to him, plain wore him out. Those deadly hotel rooms where he was never more totally alone and bare of comfort. I sometimes am confused and lost, ready to give in to lonely despair, tired of shuffling and dodging what I know and feel. Think of those uncombed boys in baggy jeans, sign-carriers, who shout dirty words into the night. They are soft beneath the drifting Cuban hair. Hotels. This is where the switch takes place, where he is a stranger who mind-wanders into the midst of the other side, only following what he's always felt.
Some people think a nigra is a sunburnt white.
He had a better time when he was running in the Texas primary. The crowds were rollicking. They were chanting and singing crowds, hopeful people, not the worn souls of Midnight Ride. He scratched out numbers, added up tax dollars, but what he thought about were flags waving in halls across the whole damn state, the draped bunting, the clear American voices calling out a song.
Put on your Pro Blue bonnet
With the Lone Star upon it
And we'll put Ted Walker on the way
Was that a firecracker? He turned to the window, standing in the same motion, but slowly, giving the matter some thought. Kids throwing firecrackers around? Did we put the screen back in? The screen was in, he saw, and the window was shut. All the windows were shut because the air conditioner was on. He moved out of the light and something caught his eye. There was a hole in the wall about the size of a half-dollar. He was trying to get it straight. He looked at the window again and the glass had radial streaks in it near the crosspiece of the wooden frame. He moved farther out of the light. His cigarette burning in the ashtray. He went upstairs and got his revolver. He came down quickly. He went out the back door and stood in the dimness with the gun, stood looking, dead still, feeling the heat like a wall of air. Then he went back inside and called the police. That's when he noticed bits of glass and wood in the hair on his right forearm, just below the rolled-up sleeve, and there were grainy fragments mixed in, bright as sand, a residue he believed were slivers of the copper jacket of a high-velocity bullet.
He was not half surprised. They have been plotting for a long time, every element in the Control Apparatus, planning and scheming carefully to keep Walker quiet. This is what shooting people does.
He got a pair of tweezers, sat in his easy chair and began picking metal out of his arm while he waited for the police to arrive.
Marina was worried about Lee. In the morning he told her he'd lost his job. He blamed it on the FBI. He said they'd probably come around the shop and asked questions about him. Now he was late coming home. Coming home from what? He said he had typing class but the class ended at a quarter past seven, three hours ago, and besides it was a Wednesday and there was no class on Wednesday.
He wanted her to go back to the USSR. He could not support a wife and child in America. He made her write to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Would they pay for the return of a Russian citizen and her baby girl?
She was pregnant again, which is the way destiny sometimes intervenes.
At least they had a balcony where June could crawl around in the fresh air. When they separated, after Fort Worth, she stayed with half a dozen different families, some nights with this one, then over to that one. It was beating on her nerves, all that moving around. One night Lee stayed with her in one of the Russian homes. There was a full refrigerator and an electric can opener. Two telephones. They made love with the TV on.
He told the landlady on Elsbeth Street she was a Czech.
He hit her once in front of people because the zipper on the side of her skirt was partly open. In front of people.
Holland was unbelievably clean. It was her dream country, with trim houses and spotless little children.
There were bargain stores in Oak Cliff. She went in out of the heat and walked the aisles. She went to shoe stores and stores called army-navy. She bought this, rejected that, mentally, walking the narrow aisles.
Maybe they would all go back to Russia, although she didn't want to. Maybe they would move to New Orleans. He was talking about New Orleans, his hometown, a port city like Archangel, where she grew up.
He did most of the housework and gave her breakfast in bed on Sunday. She was shameless when it came to sleeping late. People gave her things and he insulted them.
He took the bus to a place called the Field of Love, where he practiced shooting his rifle. They argued about this. He hit her and she threw something at him and he hit her again with a closed hand, making her bleed from the nose.
We buy groceries on Tuesday.
It was one more misfortune on her head, this lost job of his. But the pattern of a life can't be seen in fleeting days or weeks. Maybe it was their destiny to live in a port city, to feel the sea breeze and glimpse the tender promise ahead.
He'd never been so late. Something told her to look in his study. She found a note in Russian on the small table he used as a desk. There were eleven points listed by number, with certain words underlined.
She read quickly, in a blur.
He told her not to worry about the rent. He'd paid the rent on the second. He'd paid the water and gas. He told her to send newspaper clippings (if there was anything about him in the papers) to the Soviet embassy. He said the embassy would come to her aid once they knew everything. He said the Red Cross would help her. He told her money was due from work. Go to the bank and cash the check. He asked her to hold on to his personal papers. But throw out his clothes or give them away.