"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."
"If we can find the.22 and wrap it up," Lee said, "I should probably be getting back."
"It'll be Carnival soon," David Ferrie told him. "Farewell, flesh."
He shouts for his meals. He hollers. I will be downstairs visiting with Myrtle Evans and we will hear him calling for his mother and I will jump right up and get upstairs to cook him his meal, like any boy.
Nobody knew what he knew. The whirl of time, the true life inside him. This was his leverage, his only control. He watched his mother browning flour, her hands rising sticky-white from the heavy-bottomed pan. He ran messages to steamship lines. He lay near sleep, falling into reverie, the powerful world of Oswald-hero, guns flashing in the dark. The reverie of control, perfection of rage, perfection of desire, the fantasy of night, rain-slick streets, the heightened shadows of men in dark coats, like men on movie posters. The dark had a power. The rain fell on empty streets. Always the men appeared, their long shadows bent behind them, then the rifle in his hands, the clip-fed Marlin, the idea of shooting for the gut, to draw out the dying.
There is a world inside the world. Stalin's party name was Koba. He would devise a secret name, find a cell in the buildings near the docks. He memorized a license number, the color and make of car. He checked out a book that contained police pictures of revolutionaries. Police picture, Trotsky, age nineteen. Police picture, Lenin, full face and profile. Richard Carlson as Herb Phil-brick, ordinary citizen, member of the Communist Party, undercover agent for the FBI. She tapped her fingers on the palm of her hand. Rise and shine.
He saw a guy sitting backwards on a motorcycle, smoking a cigarette and looking into space, with tattoos running down one arm to the back of his hand.
The reverie of the girl in the plaid skirt. She lies back across the bed, her feet touching the floor. Brown-and-white saddle shoes, white socks, white blouse, the plaid skirt arranged four inches above the knees. The reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, perfection of control, her pale legs slightly parted, arms at her sides, eyes closed. He makes the picture come and go. It is what he knows about her, how he controls her, alone at night, watching her motionless on the bed, above the rain-slick streets. She is just the right height, thin-lipped, shy, stupid. He watches but is not there.
A dozen movies say the gut-shot man takes a long time dying.
Her hands rising sticky-white. She browned the flour in some fat until it was dark and muddy, the color she wanted her gravy to be. She added meat juices, onions, spices. They ate at the kitchen table. The sound of her mouth chewing the food. The noises in the street. She was always there, watching him, measuring their destiny in her mind. He had two existences, his own and the one she maintained for him. He couldn't get the.22 to fire. He showed it to a car mechanic, who kept it five weeks without looking at it. They had words over that. He was not afraid to stand up for his rights. In the end he sold the gun for ten dollars to Robert Oswald, who'd been mustered out of the Marines and who was always ready to do a favor, with or without acknowledgment, for his kid brother Lee.
Marguerite sat on the sofa watching TV.
It griped him to move to New York, which we traveled all the way in that 1948 Dodge, but that's where John Edward was stationed with his wife and baby and we are a family that has never been able to stay together. There are some women in this position who ignore history. But Lee has traveled with me and Mr. Ekdahl and he has traveled alone on a train from Fort Worth to New Orleans when he was eleven years old to visit my sister, a distance of some five hundred and twenty-five miles. Now, about does he live a healthy American life? I would answer as such, your honor, that there are many fine and well-to-do citizens living all around us but that the French Quarter has its vagrants and others. There are certain type bars, including we live over a pool hall, and there is business and gambling on the street. I would also state prostitutes by the galore. But in defense of a mother's position, he missed only nine days in his last term at Beauregard when I was working at Kreeger's, 800 and something Canal Street. His future and his dream is the United States Marines, which we bickered back and forth because he used a false affidavit to join but failed at this time. It is only a question of getting to age seventeen, although he has already left school, which he says is for good. This is a boy who grins while they are beating him up and waits for national news on TV. As far as his mother's place in his heart, he has worked as a messenger and office boy and bought me a thirty-five-dollar coat with his first pay and who gives over money to his mother for room and board and bought me a parakeet in a cage that came with a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. It is a question of adjusting, your honor, and he will make the effort every time. I cannot say enough how hard it is to raise boys without a father. I was sitting pretty in our American slang, managing Princess Hosiery, when Mr. Ekdahl proposed in the car. I made him wait a year and he was a Harvard man. I have always seemed to make a home against the odds. I have often been complimented on my appearance and my little bright touches here and there and now I am thinking we will go to Texas again to be with his brother Robert, to be a family again, in Fort Worth, so this boy can be with his brother. And I don't want to hear how I call the movers all the time. The point of our century is people move. I am a mother of three who sold needles and thread and yarn in her own shop in the front room of the house on Bartholomew Street, a frame house with a backyard, when Lee was a baby in a crib. I was a popular child, your honor. I was raised by a father with five other children to be happy and patriotic. I have made my best effort to raise my boy in this manner, regardless. Whatever is said by them, and they are at it all the time, he knows who has been his main support from the moment I took him home from the Old French Hospital on Orleans Avenue. I am not the looming mother of a boy's bad dreams.