None of which remotely interested twenty-four year old Lee Harvey Oswald as he and the his tall, brooding companion stood behind the picket fence staring down past the sign Fort Worth Turnpike Keep Right which partially obscured his view beneath the railway bridge. His unwelcome sidekick was looking up at the seven storey Texas School Book Depository building, one of the hundred foot or more high structures delineating the south, east and north sides of the plaza.
During the week Oswald worked in the book depository and was thus irritatingly familiar with his surroundings. Another source of his irritation was that his older ‘friend’ seemed to be a mine of information about the nondescript block in which he clerked and hefted boxes of books all day long five days a week.
A lot of things about Galen Cheney were beginning to get on Lee Harvey Oswald’s nerves as he stood atop the grassy knoll looking disinterestedly across the plaza. He assumed Galen Cheney was an alias; who the fuck was called ‘Galen Cheney’? The man was infuriatingly inscrutable, and he had a knack of disappearing into thin air for days and suddenly reappeared without warning. There would be a telephone call, or he would be waiting at the next street corner; it was like being stalked by some frigging born again Apache!
Nobody at the Texas School Book Repository knew as much about the goddammed place as Oswald knew, courtesy of the tall man.
His place of work was located at 411 Elm Street on the corner of Elm and North Houston Streets and stood on the site of at least two earlier buildings. ‘At least’ two earlier buildings because the two buildings that anybody knew about were built on land owned until the 1870s by one John Neely Bryan, one of the city fathers of Dallas, who legend had it, had erected a cabin somewhere within the footprint of the modern plaza. Bryan had died in 1877 and a man called Maxime Guillot had run a wagon shop on the book depository site in the 1880s. In 1894 the Rock Island Plow Company had acquired the land and in 1898 thrown up a five storey office. Burned down after a lightning strike in 1901 and rebuilt the following year it was this building, raised to seven storeys and re-modelled in something called the Commercial Romanesque Style which in 1937 had passed into the hands of the Carraway Byrd Corporation when the Southern Rock Island Plow Company went broke. Subsequently, on 4th July 1939 the property was purchased outright by Detroit born David Harold ‘Dry Hole’ Byrd, a wealthy Texan oil mogul and the cousin of the famous explorer Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd who had named Antarctica's Harold Byrd Mountains for him. Byrd had leased the building to the grocery wholesaler between 1940 and 1961, by which time it was generally known as the ‘Sexton Building’. It was only after ‘Sexton Foods’ relocated to a new facility at 650 Regal Row that the block was taken over by the state of Texas and re-designated the Texas School Book Repository.
At the time of the October War the extensive refurbishment of the building — including the partitioning of the first four floors and the installation of air conditioning and an elevator — had only recently been completed, and the repository had only just ‘opened for business’.
“How do you know there’ll be any kind of shot from anywhere in the plaza?” He asked lowly, scanning from right to left. “I heard the President went everywhere in bullet proof limos?”
There was nobody within fifty feet of the two men.
Nobody to overhear what they said.
Notwithstanding, Lee Harvey Oswald suddenly found himself looking into the tall man’s cold grey blue flinty eyes from a distance of two inches. The other man’s hands were crushing the lapels of his jacket, holding him very nearly off the ground.
“Shut up, you little shit!”
The younger man thought Galen Cheney was going to kill him.
“What’s your problem, kid?” Cheney growled, spittle spotting Oswald’s cheek. He pushed the smaller man away and released his grip as if he had realized he was soiling his hands. “Don’t you want to get something right in miserable life?”
Oswald staggered back several steps; only the wooden picket fence of the low rise overlooking the highway driving under the triple underpass brought him to a shuddering halt.
He bristled with wounded pride.
A voice in his head warned him to keep his lips sealed.
“Don’t try thinking, son,” Galen Cheney grunted, straightening his coat, shrugging his shoulders, “trust me, from what I’ve seen thinking ain’t your strong suit.”
The tall man resumed his meticulous scrutiny of the plaza, ignoring Oswald as if he had ceased to exist.
The younger man had trained as a rifleman; he knew about ranges, deflections, what cartridges to employ, the best angles, lines of sight and corrections, all of that shit. He had told the old man the best shot was from the sixth or seventh floor of the Texas School Book Repository. Although, now that he was standing on the knoll overlooking the entrance to the triple underpass he recognized that there was a much easier shot from closer to ground level, he was having second thoughts. The problem was that he could hardly set up a sniper’s nest anywhere near where he was standing in plain sight.
Several minutes later Galen Cheney turned on his heel and walked away.
Oswald scurried to keep up.
Neither man spoke until they were driving out of downtown Dallas towards Irving. The sun was low on the horizon, glaring off the road and Cheney had donned dark glasses behind the wheel.
“We won’t know until the day whether the President will be in an armoured limousine,” he declared phlegmatically. “Or even if his route will pass through Dealey Plaza. The Secret Service always scouts at least three alternative routes; all we know for sure is that the ‘publically announced’ route may include the plaza. However, if the President’s motorcade comes this way we will have a plan. If he goes another way then there will be another day of reckoning. These things are in the hands of the Lord. He will be our judge in these things.”
“So what? We’re still going with the first plan?”
The man at the wheel sniffed a vaguely derisory snort.
“No. Not unless you improve your scores on the range in the next couple of days.”
“I’m a fucking marksman!” Oswald complained angrily.
“Some days,” Galen Cheney conceded grudgingly. “Other days you’re a disgrace to the uniform you once wore, son.” The way he said it indicated unambiguously that he actually thought Oswald was a disgrace to his old Marine Corps uniform most days.
Lee Harvey Oswald did what he always did when he was stung by a real or an imagined slight; he sulked, brooding about the injustice of a world that was incapable of seeing him for the remarkable, gifted human being that he truly was. His lust for revenge against all those who had put him down, all his old Marine Corps ‘buddies’ who had mocked his lack of stature and slight build by calling him Ozzie Rabbit after the cartoon character, or Oswaldskovich simply because he tried to explain Marxist dialectic to the brainless chumps never dulled. He would have his revenge one day. Soon, he hoped.