“Tea’s fine. I’ve got something here in my pocket that’ll get it up on its feet.” I could almost see him wink.
Marina and Jeanne lapsed into Russian. Lee and de Mohrenschildt—their heavier footfalls unmistakable—started toward the kitchen area, where I knew I’d lose them. The women were standing close to the lamp, and their voices would cover the conversation of the men.
Then Jeanne, in English: “Oh my goodness, is that agun?”
Everything stopped, including—so it felt—my heart.
Marina laughed. It was a tinkling little cocktail-party laugh,hahaha,artificial as hell. “He lose job, we have no money, and this crazy person buy rifle. I say, ‘Put in closet, you crazy eediot, so it don’t upset my pregnance.’?”
“I wanted to do some target-shooting, that’s all,” Lee said. “I was pretty good in the Marines. Never shot Maggie’s Drawers a single time.”
Another silence. It seemed to go on forever. Then de Mohrenschildt’s big hail-fellow laugh boomed out. “Come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter! How’d you miss him, Lee?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“General Walker, boy! Someone almost splattered his Negro-hating brains all over his office wall at that house of his on Turtle Creek. You mean you didn’t know?”
“I haven’t been reading the papers just lately.”
“Oh?” Jeanne said. “Don’t I see theTimes Heraldover there on that stool?”
“I mean I don’t read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages and the want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves.”
“So you weren’t the one who took that potshot, huh?” de Mohrenschildt asked.
Teasing him.Baitinghim.
The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last Wednesday night… or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren’t there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man, my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.
“You think I’d be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover looking over my shoulder?” Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.
“Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee,” Jeanne said in a placating voice. “Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than the closet for that rifle of yours.”
Marina replied to this in Russian, but I’d glimpsed the baby in the side yard from time to time and knew what she was saying—that June was walking already.
“Junie will enjoy the nice present,” Lee said, “but we don’t celebrate Easter. We’re atheists.”
Maybehewas, but according to Al’s notes, Marina—with the help of her admirer, George Bouhe—had had June secretly baptized right around the time of the Missile Crisis.
“So are we,” de Mohrenschildt said. “That’s why we celebrate the Easter Bunny!” He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-deafened me.
They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne said, “We’ll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed.”
“No, no, we were up,” Lee said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
George said, “We’ll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club. We’ll organize the waiters into a collective!”
“Sure, sure.” They were moving toward the door now.
De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more than a few words. They might have beenget it back.Orgot your back,although I didn’t think that was common slang in the sixties.
When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As inwhen did you get the rifle back?
I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.
I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor.What did you say, George? What did you say there at the end? Was itwhen did you get it back?Was itcheer up, things aren’t so black?Was itdon’t let this set you back?Or something else entirely?
At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired three times and didn’t hit a single target.
