“You speak Russian?”
“No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway.”
“You saw him other times?”
“Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick.” He grinned. “There’s no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn’t eat it. It’s a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor, got a diagnosis I could have made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century. Basically, there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.”
He leaned forward.
“You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind of kid who throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he joined the Marines—to be like his brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby—he’d lived in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans to New York City. He had big ideas and couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to them. He was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that pissy, prissy little smile of his. Do you know what William Manchester called him?”
“No.” I didn’t even know who William Manchester was.
“A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the conspiracy theories that bloomed in the aftermath of the assassination… and after Oswald himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know that, right?”
“Of course,” I said, a little annoyed. “A guy named Jack Ruby did it.” But given the holes in my knowledge I’d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a right to wonder.
“Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale and Oswald—the wretched waif—on the other, it didn’t balance. No way did it balance. If you wanted to give Kennedy’s death some meaning, you’d have to add something heavier. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Like the Mafia did it—Carlos Marcello ordered the hit. Or the KGB did it. Or Castro, to get back at the CIA for trying to load him up with poison cigars. There are people to this day who believe Lyndon Johnson did it so he could be president. But in the end…” Al shook his head. “It was almost certainly Oswald. You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor, haven’t you?”
It was nice to know something for sure. “It’s a basic truism sometimes known as the law of parsimony. ‘All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ So why didn’t you kill him when he wasn’t on the street with his wife and kid? You were a Marine, too. When you knew how sick you were, why didn’t you just kill the little motherfucker yourself?”
“Because being ninety-five percent sure isn’t a hundred. Because, shithead or not, he was a family man. Because after he was arrested, Oswald said he was a patsy and I wanted to be sure he was lying. I don’t think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight. I had no intention of waiting until November twenty-second and then stopping him at the Texas School Book Depository, though—that would have been cutting it way too fine, for one big reason I’ll have to tell you about.”
His eyes no longer looked so bright, and the lines on his face were deepening again. I was scared by how shallow his reserves of strength had become.
“I’ve written all this stuff down. I want you to read it. Actually, I want you to cram like a bastard. Look on top of the TV, buddy. Would you do that?” He gave me a tired smile and added, “I got my sittin-britches on.”
It was a thick blue notebook. The price stamped on the paper cover was twenty-five cents. The brand was foreign to me. “What’s Kresge’s?”
“The department store chain now known as Kmart. Never mind what’s on the cover, just pay attention to what’s inside. It’s an Oswald timeline, plus all the evidence piled up against him… which you don’t really have to read if you take me up on this, because you’re going to stop the little weasel in April of 1963, over half a year before Kennedy comes to Dallas.”
“Why April?”
“Because that’s when somebody tried to kill General Edwin Walker… only he wasn’t a general anymore by then. He got cashiered in 1961, by JFK himself. General Eddie was handing out segregationist literature to his troops and ordering them to read the stuff.”
“It was Oswald who tried to shoot him?”
“That’s what you need to make sure of. Same rifle, no doubt about that, ballistics proved it. I was waiting to see him take the shot. I could afford not to interfere, because that time Oswald missed. The bullet deflected off the wood strip in the middle of Walker’s kitchen window. Not much, but just enough. The bullet literally parted his hair and flying wood splinters from the munting cut his arm a little. That was his only wound. I won’t say the man deserved to die—very few men are evil enough to deserve being shot from ambush—but I would have traded Walker for Kennedy any day of the week.”
I paid little attention to that last. I was thumbing through Al’s Oswald Book, page after page of closely written notes. They were completely legible at the beginning, less so toward the end. The last few pages were the scrawls of a very sick man. I snapped
the cover closed and said, “If you could confirm that Oswald was the shooter in the General Walker attempt, that would have settled your doubts?”
“Yes. I needed to make sure he’s capable of doing it. Ozzie’s a bad man, Jake—what people back in ’58 call a louse—but beating on your wife and keeping her a virtual prisoner because she doesn’t speak the language don’t justify murder. And something else. Even if I hadn’t come down with the big C, I knew I might not get another chance to make it right if I killed Oswald and someone else shot the president anyway. By the time a man’s in his sixties, he’s pretty much off the warranty, if you see what I mean.”
“Would it have to be killing? Couldn’t you just… I don’t know… frame him for something?”
“Maybe, but by then I was sick. I don’t know if I could have done it even if I was well. On the whole it seemed simpler to just end him, once I was sure. Like swatting a wasp before it can sting you.”
I was quiet, thinking. The clock on the wall said ten-thirty. Al had opened the conversation by saying he’d be good to go until midnight, but I only had to look at him to know that had been wildly optimistic.
I took his glass and mine out to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them in the dish drainer. It felt like there was a tornado funnel behind my forehead. Instead of cows and fenceposts and scraps of paper, what it was sucking up and spinning around were names: Lee Oswald, Bobby Oswald, Marina Oswald, Edwin Walker, Fred Hampton, Patty Hearst. There were bright acronyms in that whirl, too, circling like chrome hood ornaments ripped off luxury cars: JFK, RFK, MLK, SLA. The cyclone even had a sound, two Russian words spoken over and over again in a flat Southern drawclass="underline" pokhoda, cyka.
Walk, bitch.
5
“How long have I got to decide?” I asked.
“Not long. The diner goes at the end of the month. I talked to a lawyer about buying some more time—tying them up in a suit, or something—but he wasn’t hopeful. Ever seen a sign in a furniture store saying LOST OUR LEASE, EVERYTHING MUST GO?”
“Sure.”
“Nine cases out of ten that’s just sales-pitch bullshit, but this is the tenth case. And I’m not talking about some discount dollar store bumping to get in, I’m talking about Bean’s, and when it comes to Maine retail, L.L. Bean is the biggest ape in the jungle. Come July first, the diner’s gone like Enron. But that isn’t the big thing. By July first, I might be gone. I could catch a cold and be dead of pneumonia in three days. I could have a heart attack or a stroke. Or I could kill myself with these damn OxyContin pills by accident. The visiting nurse who comes in asks me every day if I’m being careful not to exceed the dosage, and I am careful, but I can see she’s still worried she’ll walk in some morning and find me dead, probably because I got stoned and lost count. Plus the pills inhibit respiration, and my lungs are shot. On top of all that, I’ve lost a lot of weight.”