Frank thought of the mountains, the dense green cover, smoke rolling down from the heights, vanishing at a certain altitude, rolling down. The rain was total. They lived in camouflaged barracks and sometimes in mud and he thought about the idea he was fighting for. Full dignity for the people of Cuba. Justice for the hungry and forgotten. He knew from the first day he would not remain. He was not a rebel in body or spirit. He had an ordinary nature.
His mother, the author of his days, welcomed him back with a sad laugh.
Frank taught grades one to six, often at the same time, in a school at the edge of the company town. The company was United
Fruit and he had two brothers who were foremen in the cane fields and lived with their wives and kids, each family in a ten-by-ten room in a row often rooms built back to back with ten other rooms,, all set in one long building constructed on five-foot stilts. The cane-cutters and their families lived under the building in squat hovels made of cardboard and sacking.
One could not help noticing that the American executives of La United lived in well-staffed and graceful homes on streets lined with coconut palms. Frank blamed the government, not the company. He expected his brothers to get out of the fields and become skilled workers in the vast mill. La United was not blind to the notion of ambition. From mill workers they could advance to office staff or engineering. They could get two rooms each in a house on a street that was lighted at night. Americans respected those who worked efficiently, who got things done. A man could conceivably get ahead.
Then the rebels came, his former comrades, to burn the cane fields. This was consistent with Cuban history. Whoever rises in revolt, the first thing they do is burn the sugar cane. It is a statement about economic dependence and foreign control. Frank watched the fields burn and knew there were communists behind it. He'd feared this all along. There's more to it, there's something we don't know about. The fires cut and jumped through the canebrakes. The private police of La United were long gone.
In Havana he stood in line with hundreds of others at the curbside outside the U.S. embassy, waiting to apply for a visa. And now he was on the road near the Louisiana border, driving into thunderheads.
On his fourth day with Castro he shot a government scout, aiming through a telescopic sight. It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.
Frank knew what Alpha was planning to do. He thought and he thought and it had to be that. Once he learned the President was going to Miami, there was nothing else to believe.
His brothers also fled Castro, later, dangerously, floating to Key West on an oil-drum raft. They went back in boats as well, one killed in the fighting on the beaches, one captured and taken to the fortress prison, where he was allowed to die quietly of starvation, his form of public prayer, a demonstration against the beatings and executions.
Fervent men, exiles, fighters against communism took off from the Keys in Cessnas and Piper Comanches to drop incendiary devices on the sugar cane of Cuba. The fields were burning again.
Here on the road in the Deep South he saw something that showed how strangely and completely a hatred for this President reached into certain parts of the culture, into daily lives. During the first long day of driving he'd wandered into Georgia by mistake and passed a drive-in theater where they were showing a movie about young Kennedy the war hero. It was called PT 109 and under the title on the signboard there was a special incentive: See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.
It scared him all right, the signs he saw on the road in the U.S. Here was Louisiana in heavy rain. He would tell T-Jay everything he'd seen and heard with Alpha 66 in the Glades. The conclusion wasn't hard to draw, that Kennedy was the object of the mission.
Something in his heart longed for this murder, even though he knew it was a sin.
The Curator sends autopsy photos of Oswald. Nicholas Branch feels obliged to study them, although he doesn't know what he can possibly learn here. There are the open eyes, the large wound in the left side, the two ridges of heavy stitching that meet beneath the clavicle and descend in one line to the genital area, forming the letter Y. The left eye is swiveled toward the camera, watching.
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model "dressed" like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
The Curator sends FBI memos concerning the President's brain, which has been missing from the National Archives for over twenty years.
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.
He doesn't know why they are sending him this particular grisly material after all these years. Shattered bone and horror. That's all it means to him. There is nothing to understand, no insights to be had from these pictures and statistics, from this melancholy bullet with its nose leveled and spread like a penny left on trolley tracks. (How old he is.) The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone."
They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."
They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot."
How can Branch forget the contradictions and discrepancies? These are the soul of the wayward tale. One of the first documents he examined was the medical report on Pfc. Oswald's self-inflicted gunshot wound. In one sentence the weapon is described as 45-caliber. In the next sentence it is 22-caliber. Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.
Oswald's eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud. Branch has support for all these propositions in eyewitness testimony and commission exhibits.
Oswald even looks like different people from one photograph to the next. He is solid, frail, thin-lipped, broad-featured, extroverted, shy and bank-clerkish, all, with the columned neck of a fullback. He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero. In another photo he sits in profile with a group of fellow Marines on a rattan mat under palm trees. Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him.