Libra (7 page)

“Now Senator Eastland’s coming to New Orleans. You know why, don’t you?”

“He’s looking for you,” Robert said. “He can’t figure out how a boy in the Civil Air Patrol.”

“He’s looking for reds under the beds,” Lee said.

“He’s wondering how a clean-cut boy.”

“The main thing is in communism that workers don’t produce profits for the system.”

“He’s looking at your cute smile and he’s just real upset. A teenage communist in the CAP.”

Lee half enjoyed the ribbing. He looked at Robert’s sister to get her reaction but her eyes were on the board. Well brought up. He saw her at the library. She was on the pep squad at school, the girl at the far end who went more or less unnoticed.

“What if they did spy? It’s only because they believed communism is the best system. It’s the system that doesn’t exploit, so then you’re strapped in the chair.”

Lee was aware that the parent, whichever one it was, had moved to the edge of the open doorway. The parent was standing there, on the other side of the wall, listening.

“If you look at the name Trotsky in Russian, it looks totally different,” he said to Robert Sproul’s sister. “Plus here’s something nobody knows. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Stalin means man of iron.”

“Man of steel,” Robert said.

“Same thing.”

“Dumb bunny.”

“The whole thing is they lie to us about Russia. Russia is not what they say. In New York the communists don’t hide. They’re out on the street.”

“Quick, Henry, the Flit,” Robert said.

“First you produce profits for the system that exploits you.”

“Kill it before it spreads.”

“Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.”

“Well that’s neither here nor there,” the sister said.

“Where is it?” he asked her.

It was the father who appeared in the doorway, a tall man with a plaid blanket folded over one arm. He seemed to be looking for a horse. He spoke of homework and errands, he mumbled obscurely about family matters. The sister’s relief was easy to see. It could be felt and measured. She slipped past her father arid melted serenely into the dim interior.

The father walked with Lee to the front door and opened it as wide as it would go. They did not speak to each other. Lee walked home through the Quarter past hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a newsreel.

He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. He let classmates read the titles if they were curious, just to see their silly faces crinkle up, but he didn’t show the books to his mother. The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. Trotsky’s name was Bronstein. He would need a secret name. He would join a cell located in the old buildings near the docks. They would talk theory into the night. But they would act as well. Organize and agitate. He would move through the city in the rain, wearing dark clothes. It was just a question of finding a cell. There was no question they were here. Senator Eastland made it clear on TV. Underground reds in N’yorlenz.

In the meantime he read his brother’s Marine Corps manual, to prepare for the day when he’d enlist.

 

 

There were two kids at school, in particular, before he quit, who called him Yankee all the time. Trailing him down the halls, calling across the lunchroom. He smiled and was ready to fight but they never made a realistic move.

 

 

The names on the order blanks excited him. Lisbon, Manila, Hong Kong. But soon the routine took hold and he realized the ships and cargoes and destinations had nothing to do with him. He was a runner. He carried paper to other forwarding companies and steamship lines or across the street to the U.S. Custom House, which looked like a temple of money, massive and gray, with tall granite columns. He was supposed to look eager and bright. People seemed to depend on his cheerfulness. The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile. He disappeared for hours at the movies. Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual.

He memorized the use of deadly force. He studied principles of close order drill and the use of ribbons and badges. He made unauthorized phone calls to Robert Sproul to read hair-raising passages about bayonet fighting. The whirl, the slash, the butt stroke. There was no end of things to quote from the manual. The book had been written just for him. He read deeply in the rules, impressed by the strictness and precision, by the stream of awesome details, weird, niggling, perfect.

Robert Sproul knew about a gun for sale, a bolt-action .22, a varmint gun, or we’ll plink tin cans, and they went on Lee’s lunch hour to a cheap hotel above the business district, among muffler shops and discount furniture, in the January chill. The lobby was like a passageway to a toilet. The rooms were on the second floor, above a boarded-up store with a sign reading Formal Rentals. Robert had the seller’s room number but not his name. Supposedly he was an acquaintance of David Ferrie, an airline pilot and instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. Ferrie had commanded the unit Robert and Lee were enrolled in that summer, although Lee had attended only three sessions, just long enough to get the uniform.

The boys were surprised when Captain Ferrie himself opened the door. A man in his late thirties, sad-faced, friendly, standing in the doorway in a bathrobe and a pair of argyle socks reaching to his knees. He waved them into the room, looking carefully at Lee. The shades were drawn. There were clothes everywhere, Chinese food spilling out of white cartons, some bills and coins on the floor. The room stood in a kind of stupor, a time zone of its own.

“Boys, how nice. I was told to expect visitors. Alfredo is selling his gun, I understand. He claims he killed a man with that gun. Some gringo millionaire. Every Latin has killed a gringo in his daydreams. These are temporary quarters, you understand. Your flying ace is between assignments.”

Ferrie sat in an armchair amid strewn clothing. Robert looked quickly at Lee. A strangulated grimace.

“Now let’s see,” Ferrie said. “Robert I know from our classes in the Eastern hangar at Lakefront. It seems a hundred years ago. But who’s the shy one with the neat part in his hair?”

“I went a few times,” Lee said, “but then I stopped.”

“But you were there. I thought so. I was sure of it. In your uniform. A uniform makes all the difference. I know my boys. I never forget a cadet. Do you know Dennis Rumsey? Dennis is a cadet. He comes here after school. Do you know Warren Van Zandt, the fat boy? Warren’s daddy has lung cancer bad.”

“What about the rifle?” Robert said.

“It’s around here somewhere. A Marlin bolt-action .22. It’s clip-fed and you can have it real cheap because the firing pin’s broken. Easy to fix. Take it to a welder, bang bang bang.”

“Nobody mentioned broken,” Robert said.

“They never do.”

“Well I don’t know, sir.”

“Neither do I.”

“If the rifle can’t be fired as is.”

“He’ll weld an extension, bang bang.”

“But this would mean an inconvenience.”

“The pleasure may be worth it. Do you know guns? Guns are an interest of mine.”

Robert shot a glance like let’s get out of here. Something in the far corner seemed to be alive. Lee took a few steps in that direction. He was aware that some kind of well-intentioned look was pasted to his face, a smile not connected to things. There was a cage on the dresser with white mice running around inside.

He turned to Ferrie and said, “Mice.”

“Isn’t life fantastic?”

“What are they for?”

“Research. Here we are it’s eleven years after the war, a new era, an age of hope, and we’re no closer to ending the cancer plague than a thousand years ago. I’ve studied diseases all my life. Even as a boy I allotted my time. I knew what cancer was long before I heard the word. What’s your name?”

“Lee.”

“Allot your time, Lee.”

Robert Sproul edged toward the door.

“Captain Ferrie, I think actually, sir.”

“What?”

“I have to get going. I guess I’ll take a rain check on the gun purchase. ”

“I’ve studied patterns of coincidence,” Ferrie said to Lee. “Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect. I studied geopolitics at Baldwin-Wallace before it was called geopolitics.”

“Lee, are you coming?”

Lee wanted to leave but found himself just standing there grinning stupidly at Robert, who made a dumb face back at him and walked out, sort of tiptoed out. Maybe Lee thought it wasn’t nice to leave abruptly. But in that case Robert was the one who should have stayed. He was the honor student, well brought up, who lived in a house with a closed porch amid azaleas, oaks and palms.

“Tell me about yourself,” Ferrie said. “First, ignore the mess. The mess belongs mainly to Alfonso, Alfredo, whatever he’s called. Anywhere he settles, even for a minute, you sense an air of criminal intent. Works on a tug out of Port Sulphur. A job that wouldn’t interest a boy with intelligent eyes like yours. Tell me about your eyes.

Ferrie was deep in the armchair. At this angle, in the uncertain light, he resembled an eighty-year-old man, wide-eyed with fear. He was totally remote. Lee’s sense of things was that he was one step ahead for having stayed, that Robert had bailed out too soon, that this business was too rich to be missed, and for the rest of his time here he experienced what was happening and at the same moment, although slightly apart, recounted it all for Robert. He had a little vision of himself. He saw himself narrating the story to Robert Sproul, relishing his own broad manner of description even as the moment was unfolding in the present, in the larger scheme, arms going like crazy, an animated cartoon, and he felt slightly superior in the telling. He’d stayed for the whole thing. What could be more squeamish and chicken-hearted than leaving too soon, thinking safety-first, home to your perfect family and plaid blanket, and then the thing turns out okay.

“If you allot your time, you can accomplish fantastic things. I learned Latin when I was your age. I stayed indoors and learned a dead language, for fear of being
noticed
out there, made to pay for being who I was.”

He forgets I’m here.

“Cleveland,” he said, making it sound like a lost civilization. “My father was a cop. I’m constantly haunted by the thought of cops, government cops, Feebees—the FBI. They’re on you like the plague. Once you’re in the files, they never leave you alone. They stick to you like cancer. Eternal.”

This man is strange even to himself.

“What about the rifle?” Lee said. “Maybe I’ll buy it. How much does he want for it?”

“He wants twenty-five dollars. But you give me fifteen. Because it’s you, fifteen. You’re one of my cadets. I look out for my boys. You wear a uniform, it makes all the difference. Look at me. I put on my captain’s jacket, all this bleary shit just falls away. I become a captain for Eastern. I talk like a captain. I instill confidence in anxious travelers. I actually fly the goddamn plane.”

He knows he’s strange but can’t help it.

“If I decide I’ll buy it, how do I get it home?”

“How do you get it home is easy. You take it and wrap it in a blanket. You use that blanket right there. The hotel won’t mind.”

Added to everything else was the fact that he’d actually have the rifle. He’d emerge with the rifle. He’d be able to say he’d transported a rifle in a stolen blanket through the city of New Orleans. Ferrie watched the mice in the cage, made whistling sounds. All this built seamlessly into Lee’s narration to Robert Sproul, the future inside the present, the little cartoon at the heart of events.

“The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it.
Comprende?
Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.”