And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.
"Son-of-a-bitch," he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better-omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it: I know something you don't know. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee's frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday afternoon's TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as "Frank Sullivan."
This is serious, Peter Jackson was thinking; Joe Malik wasn't on a paranoid trip at all. The noncommittal expressions of Muldoon and Goodman did not deceive him at all-he had long ago learned the black art of surviving in a white world, which is the art of reading not what is on a face but what is behind the face. The cops were worried and excited, like any hunters on the track of something both large and dangerous. Joe was right about the assassination plot, and his disappearance and the bombing were part of it. And that meant George Dorn was in danger, too, and Peter liked George even if he was a snotty kid in some ways and an annoying ass-kisser about the race thing like most young white radicals. Mad Dog, Texas, Peter thought: that sure sounds like a bad place to be in trouble.
(Almost fifty years before, a habitual bank robber named Harry Pierpont approached a young convict in Michigan City Prison and asked him, "Do you think there might be a true religion?")
But why is George Dorn screaming while Saul Goodman is reading the memos? Hold on for another jump, and this one is a shocker. Saul is no longer human; he's a pig. All cops are pigs. Everything you've ever believed is probably a lie. The world is a dark, sinister, mysterious and totally frightening place. Can you digest all that quickly? Then, walk into the mind of George Dorn for the second time, five hours before the explosion at Confrontation (four hours before, on the clock) and suck on the joint, suck hard and hold it down. ("One o'clock… two o'clock… three o'clock… ROCK!"). You are sprawled on a crummy bed in a rundown hotel, and a neon light outside is flashing pink and blue patterns into your room. Exhale slowly, feel the hit of the weed and see if the wallpaper looks any brighter yet, any less Unintentional Low Camp. It's hot, Texas-dry hot, and you push your long hair back from your forehead and haul out your diary, George Dorn, because reading over what you wrote last sometimes helps you to learn what you're really getting into. As the neon splotches the page with pink and blue, read this:
April 23
How do we know whether the universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can't say that the universe is getting bigger in relation to anything outside it, because there isn't any outside for it to relate to. There isn't any outside. But if the universe doesn't have an out-side, then it goes on forever. Yeah, but, its inside doesn't go on forever. How do you know it doesn't, shithead? You're just playing with words, man.
–No I'm not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one
There was a knock at the door.
The Fear came over George. Whenever he was high, the least little detail wrong in his world would bring the Fear, irresistible, uncontrollable. He held his breath, not to contain the smoke in his lungs, but because terror had paralyzed the muscles in his chest. He dropped the little notebook in which he wrote his thoughts daily and clutched at his penis, a habitual gesture in moments of panic. The hand holding the roach drifted, automatically, over the hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which lay beside him on the bed, and he dropped the half-inch twist of paper and marijuana on top of the plastic Baggie full of green grains. Instantly a brown smoldering dime-sized hole opened up on the bag, and the pot near the coal started to smoke.
"Stupid," said George, as his thumb stabbed the smoking coal to crush it, and he drew back his lips in a grim-ace of pain.
A short fat man walked into the room, Law Officer written in every mean line of his crafty little face. George shrank back and started to close ItCan't Happen Here; like lightning, three stiff, concrete-hard fingers drove into his forearm. He screamed and the book jumped out of his hand, spilling pot all over the bedspread.
"Don't touch that," said the fat man. "An officer will be in to gather it up for evidence. I went easy with that karate punch. Otherwise you'd be nursing a compound fracture of the left arm in Mad Dog County Jail tonight, and no right-thinking doctor likely to have a mind to come out and treat you."
"You got a warrant?" George tried to sound defiant.
"Oh, you think you have cojones." The fat man's breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. "Rabbit cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your heart to speak of warrants. Next you'll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union." He pulled aside the jacket of an iridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when Heartbreak Hotel was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a.45 automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. "That is all the law I need when dealing with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or you won't have nothing to grab onto next time one of us pigs as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison." He seemed immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner's characters. George thought:
It is forbidden to dream again; We maim our joys or hide them; Horses are made of chromium steel And little fat men shall ride them.
He said, "You can't hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states. This law is archaic and absurd."
"Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna's troops losing all fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And don't ask to talk to a lawyer, neither."
"Can I ask who you are?"
"I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County."
"And I'm Tiny Tim," said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you're too goddamn high. And he went right on and said, "Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this godforsaken part of the country. It wasn't telepathy that told you I had pot on me."
Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. "Oh, but it was. It was telepathy. Now just what made you think it wasn't telepathy brung me here?" He laughed, seized George's arm in a grip of iron, and pushed him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And I must admit that was more or less the case; there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.