Everyone thought
All eight men were disconnected for a minute.
When the car wheels were properly on the road again, Horn lit up a cigarette. In between slow puffs he cracked a few jokes about his naiveness. About everyone else?s bad nerves.
Potty Lynch eventually turned sideways and started to give him his good, blue-eyed donkey advice. Lynch had ridden in cars with the Kennedys, he said.
?Jimmie, listen to me.? He was Pat O?Brien incarnate. ?See, the ball?s in our court. See, we?re experienced in this incredibly miserable shit. We have to watch out for you. Because
be able to watch out for yourself.?
This Boston posturing only served to set Horn off again. Maybe it was because Lynch?s attitude was so know- it-all.
?What?s this
? Jimmie Horn asked in the habitually sweet-sounding voice. ?Do you have a frog in your pocket?? he toyed with the veteran. ?What?s this
stuff, Jap?
won?t mind telling me??
Jap Quarry only laughed. ?This man?s trying to be your friend, don?t you see,? he said without turning to the back. ?Besides, the whole affair?s going to be too big to start bringing your own personal feelings in. Join the Horn team, man.?
Horn looked around and deadpanned the secret service man. ?I?m ? uh ? James Lee Horn,? he said, ?and I?m running for United States Senator. I?m awful glad to meet you.?
The secret serviceman had a surprisingly human laugh. ?I?m not a Tennessee resident,? he cracked.
Santo Massimino finally turned around. He lowered tinted sunglasses onto a large, pocked nose. ?Very, very nice speech back there,? he grinned. ?You?re very good.?
Horn smiled softly. He patted his haircut.
As the limousine waited quietly under a red light at West End Avenue, a motorcycle escort swept up on both sides. The cycles stopped extremely close, idling within an arm?s length of the car.
Silent
and
signs were exchanged back and forth through the windows. Sirens wailed, then wailed again at a higher pitch. The small motorcade ran all the other traffic lights to midtown and Roger Miller.
As they reached Tenth Street a green and white Country Squire shot up alongside of them. Jimmie Horn looked out, frowned, then smiled into the lens of a hand-held Arriflex movie camera.
Noon. The air-raid siren had begun to blend into each Nashville afternoon. Oona Quinn walked down a quiet shady street outside of Dudley Field. Her mind was a blank. Seeing Horn in the flesh, watching him deliver his speech inside the stadium had panicked her. She wanted to talk to Berryman, but she didn?t know where to find him until 3:15.
Less than a mile away, Thomas Berryman was standing in an open field with his arms outstretched. Listening to the grass grow.
He was thinking that it was the experience of peyote that had taught him to relax, and conversely had probably started Ben Toy on his road to going crazy. He was remembering different things about Toy as he watched a coven of Catholic nuns and some school-age lovers counting the front steps of Centennial Park?s ludicrous Parthenon.
Berryman?s eyes parted company with the dull sheep, and traveled with the dark ladies.
They walked the great stone walls to an edge, then stood still, as though they?d come to the very end of a gangplank. They seemed to be praying for the world?s leapers. Praying for them, or trying to understand them.
Berryman had taken a light downer, and he was calm enough to feel a falling body float, even swim. Talking to himself he said:
Basically, he was on autopilot now.
He was carrying a transistor radio and he begrudgingly tuned in a bulletin about the parade and rally at the football stadium. It was reported that Horn and his family had already been taken downtown. It was speculated that extra security precautions were being taken around Horn.
Berryman switched on music and walked around kicking kickweed, blowing blo-balls, talking to the different people who pleased his sense of composition in the park. This relaxing was a ritual with him. It was necessary.
When he left the park he was as cool as he could have hoped to be.
Oona Quinn, meanwhile, was hiring a city cab to take her out to the junction of Kingsbridge Highway and Fullerton Avenue. That was where the Farmer?s Market was; it was where Jimmie Horn was going to make his next public appearance; and it was where Berryman had asked her to meet him.
From 2:10 on she sat in the Lums restaurant at the Market Plaza. She was wearing a J.C. Penney pantsuit that blended very nicely into the crowd. Then, at 2:30, Oona Quinn decided to telephone her father.
?I think one of the evil things you?ll find on television,? Quarry said to me one slow afternoon after the shooting, ?is this practice of showing news films of the so-called violent events. They?re like circuses on television. Like some
