“Do I hate the Negro race? Those who say that—and those who worked to drive me from the military service I loved—are liars and communists. You know better, the men I served with know better, andGodknows better.” He leaned forward in the guest’schair. “Do you think theNegroteachers in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and the great state of Texas want integration? They do not. They see it as a slap in the face to their own skills and hard work. Do you think thatNegrostudents want to go to school with whites naturally better equipped for readin, writin, and rithmetic? Do you think real Americans want the sort of race mongrelization that will result from this sort of mingling?”
“Of course they don’t!Praaaiiise Jesus!”
I thought about the sign I’d seen in North Carolina, the one pointing to a path bordered with poison ivy.COLORED, it had said. Walker didn’t deserve killing, but he could certainly do with a brisk shaking. I’d giveanyonea big oldpraise Jesuson that one.
My attention had wandered, but something Walker was now saying brought it back in a hurry.
“It was God, not General Edwin Walker, who ordained the Negro position in His world when He gave them a different skin color and a different set of talents. Moreathletictalents. What does the Bible tell us about this difference, and why the Negro race has been cursed to so much pain and travail? We only have to look at the ninth chapter of Genesis, Billy.”
“Praise God for His Holy Word.”
Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court. “?‘And Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told them who stood without.’ But Shem and Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know you know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old Bible-learning we got at our mothers’ knees—”
“Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”
“Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been going on, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa—’?”
I snapped the TV off.
9
What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think of a tee-shirt Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our marriage. There was a fiercely grinning pirate on the front, with this message below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. Plenty of beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter. We in the neighborhood heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain. Nobody did anything, and that included me.
Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business. Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do. With thei’s dotted and thet’s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.
Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair. They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed, nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.
I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing aboutthisdevelopment, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. ButIcared.
The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.
CHAPTER 21
1
The Oswalds became my upstairs neighbors on March 2, 1963. They hand-carried their possessions, mostly in liquor store cartons, from the crumbling brick box on Elsbeth Street. Soon the wheels of the little Japanese tape recorder were turning on a regular basis, but mostly I listened in with the earphones. That way the conversations upstairs were normal instead of slowed down, but of course I couldn’t understand much of it, anyway.
The week after the Oswalds moved into their new digs, I visited one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue to buy a gun. The first revolver the pawnbroker showed me was the same Colt .38 model I’d bought in Derry.
“This is excellent pertection against muggers n home-breakers,” the pawnbroker said. “Dead accurate up to twenty yards.”
“Fifteen,” I said. “I heard fifteen.”
The pawnie raised his eyebrows. “Okay, say fifteen. Anyone stupid enough—”
—to try mugging me out of my cash is going to be a lot closer than that, that’s how the pitch goes.
“—to brace you is gonna be in at close quarters, so what do you say?”
My first impulse, just to break that sense of chiming but slightly discordant harmony was to tell him I wanted something else, maybe a .45, but breaking the harmony might be a bad idea.Who knew? What Ididknow was that the .38 I’d bought in Derry had done the job.
“How much?”
“Let you have it for twelve.”
That was two dollars more than I’d paid in Derry, but of course that had been four and a half years ago. Adjusting for inflation, twelve seemed about right. I told him to add a box of bullets and he had a deal.
When the broker saw me putting the gun and the ammo in the briefcase I’d brought along for that purpose, he said, “Why don’t you let me sell you a holster, son? You don’t sound like you’re from around here and you probably don’t know, but you c’n carry legal in Texas, no permit needed if you don’t have a felony record. You got a felony record?”
