She took the hint. I sat stirring the remains of my salad into an orange soup of French dressing and watched. Here came a man and woman with a baby, but the kid was almost a toddler, too old to be June. The passengers passed the restaurant, chattering with the friends and relatives who had come to pick them up. I saw a young man in an Army uniform pat his girlfriend’s bottom. She laughed, slapped his hand, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him.
For five minutes or so the terminal was almost full. Then the crowd began to thin out. There was no sign of the Oswalds. A wild certainty came to me: they weren’t on the plane. I hadn’t just traveled back in time, I had bounced into some sort of parallel universe. Maybe the Yellow Card Man had been meant to stop something like that from happening, but the Yellow Card Man was dead, and I was off the hook. No Oswald? Fine, no mission. Kennedy was going to die in some other version of America, but not in this one. I could catch up with Sadie and live happily ever after.
The thought had no more than crossed my mind when I saw my target for the first time. Robert and Lee were side by side, talking animatedly. Lee was swinging what was either an oversized attache case or a small satchel. Robert had a pink suitcase with rounded corners that looked like something out of Barbie’s closet. Vada and Marina came along behind. Vada had taken one of two patchwork cloth bags; Marina had the other slung over her shoulder. She was also carrying June, now four months old, in her arms and laboring to keep up. Robert and Vada’s two kids flanked her, looking at her with open curiosity.
Vada called to the men and they stopped almost in front of the restaurant. Robert grinned and took Marina’s carry-bag. Lee’s expression was. amused? Knowing? Maybe both. The tiniest suggestion of a smile dimpled the corners of his mouth. His nondescript hair was neatly combed. He was, in fact, the perfect A. J. Squared Away in his pressed white shirt, khakis, and shined shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had just completed a journey halfway around the world; there wasn’t a wrinkle on him and not a trace of beard-shadow on his cheeks. He was just twenty-two years old, and looked younger — like one of the teenagers in my last American Lit class.
So did Marina, who wouldn’t be old enough to buy a legal drink for another month. She was exhausted, bewildered, and staring at everything. She was also beautiful, with clouds of dark hair and upturned, somehow rueful blue eyes.
June’s arms and legs were swaddled in cloth diapers. Even her neck was wrapped in something, and although she wasn’t crying, her face was red and sweaty. Lee took the baby. Marina smiled her gratitude, and when her lips parted, I saw that one of her teeth was missing. The others were discolored, one of them almost black. The contrast with her creamy skin and gorgeous eyes was jarring.
Oswald leaned close to her and said something that wiped the smile off her face. She looked up at him warily. He said something else, poking her shoulder with one finger as he did so. I remembered Al’s story, and wondered if Oswald was saying the same thing to his wife now:
But no. it was the swaddling that had upset him. He tore it away — first from the arms, then the legs — and flung the diapers at Marina, who caught them clumsily. Then she looked around to see if they were being watched.
Vada came back and touched Lee’s arm. He paid no attention to her, just unwrapped the makeshift cotton scarf from around baby June’s neck and flung
Robert joined them and gave his brother a friendly punch on the shoulder. The terminal had almost entirely cleared out now — the last of the deplaning passengers had passed the Oswald family — and I heard what he said clearly. “Give her a break, she just got here. She doesn’t even know where here is yet.”
“Look at this kid,” Lee said, and raised June for inspection. At that, she finally began to cry. “She’s got her wrapped up like a damn Egyptian mummy. Because that’s the way they do it back home. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
She tried to smile, the way people do when they know the joke is on them, but not why. I thought fleetingly of Lennie, in
“USA!” he said, and kissed her again. “USA, Rina! Land of the free and home of the turds!”
Her smile became radiant. He began to speak to her in Russian, handing back the baby as he did so. He put his arm around her waist as she soothed June. She was still smiling as they left my field of vision, and shifted the baby to her shoulder so she could take his hand.
I went home — if I could call Mercedes Street home — and tried to take a nap. I couldn’t get under, so I lay there with my hands behind my head, listening to the uneasy street noises and speaking with Al Templeton. This was a thing I found myself doing quite often, now that I was on my own. For a dead man, he always had a lot to say.
“I was stupid to come Fort Worth,” I told him. “If I try to hook up that bug to the tape recorder, someone’s apt to see me. Oswald himself might see me, and that would change everything. He’s already paranoid, you said so in your notes. He knew the KGB and MVD were watching him in Minsk, and he’s going to be afraid that the FBI and the CIA are watching him here. And the FBI actually
“Yes, you’ll have to be careful,” Al agreed. “It won’t be easy, but I trust you, buddy. it’s why I called you in the first place.”
“I don’t even want to get near him. Just seeing him in the airport gave me a class-A case of the willies.”
“I know you don’t, but you’ll have to. As someone who spent damn near his whole life cooking meals, I can tell you that no omelet was ever made without breaking eggs. And it would be a mistake to overestimate this guy. He’s no super-criminal. Also, he’s going to be distracted, mostly by his batshit mother. How good is he going to be at anything for awhile except shouting at his wife and knocking her around when he gets too pissed off for shouting to be enough?”
“I think he cares for her, Al. At least a little, and maybe a lot. in spite of the shouting.”
“Yeah, and it’s guys like him who are most likely to fuck up their women. Look at Frank Dunning. You just take care of your business, buddy.”
“And what am I going to get if I do manage to hook up that bug? Tape recordings of arguments? Arguments in
“You don’t need to decode the man’s family life. it’s George de Mohrenschildt you need to find out about. You have to make sure de Mohrenschildt isn’t involved in the attempt on General Walker. Once you accomplish that, the window of uncertainty closes. And look on the bright side. if Oswald catches you spying on him, his future actions might change in a
“Do you really believe that?”
“No. Actually I don’t.”
“Neither do I. The past is obdurate. it doesn’t want to be changed.”
He said, “Buddy, now you’re cooking. ”
“With gas,” I heard myself muttering. “Now I’m cooking with gas.”
I opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep after all. Late light was coming in through the drawn curtains. Somewhere not far away, on Davenport Street in Fort Worth, the Oswald brothers and their wives would be sitting down to dinner — Lee’s first meal back on his old stomping grounds.
Outside my own little bit of Fort Worth, I could hear a skip-rope chant. it sounded very familiar. I got up, went through my dim living room (furnished with two thrift-shop easy chairs but nothing else), and twitched back one of the drapes an inch or so. Those drapes had been my very first installation. I wanted to see; I didn’t want to be seen.
2703 was still deserted, with the FOR RENT sign double-tacked to the railing of the rickety porch, but the lawn wasn’t deserted. There, two girls were twirling a jump rope while a third stutter-stepped in and out. Of course they weren’t the girls I’d seen on Kossuth Street in Derry — these three, dressed in patched and faded jeans instead of crisp new shorts, looked runty and underfed — but the chant was the same, only now with Texas accents.
“Charlie Chaplin went to
