"Are you saying why be greedy?"
"I'm saying don't they have enough trouble. Besides, if you're colored, you can't be anything else."
She worked at a Formica desk by the window. A cardboard shirt support was taped over a hole in the screen.
"I priced a bomb shelter last week," Ferrie told her.
"It's not the bombs coming out of the sky I worry about. The missile crisis came and went. It's the troops that will just appear one quiet morning, armies landing on the beaches, paratroops dropping through the clouds. Guy received a report that the Red Chinese are massing troops in Baja California."
"I have private torments, Delphine. They require something larger than an army."
They were watching As the World Turns. Ferrie sat in a folding chair with his legs crossed. He took off his hat and placed it on his right kneecap.
"I say to myself, I wonder why Delphine comes to this rat-trap office every day. A woman like her. With a background and so forth. A real pretty house on Coliseum Street. Social niceties, let's say. The DAR."
"This is the real work of the nation. What could I accomplish in the City Council or some ladies' group? Guy Banister is the vanguard of what is going on in this country, so far as actually making an impact. Recruiting, training, collecting information. I feel like this is a contribution I can make that I couldn't do in the normal ways, through committee work and so forth."
She glanced at Ferrie's faded red toupee, an object that resembled some windblown piece of street debris. She looked at the sloped forehead, the somewhat Roman profile, eagle-beaked, oddly impressive despite the man's overgrown ears, the clownish aspects of his appearance. In fact she'd seen the profile before she ever met Ferrie. There was a mug shot in Banister's files. It commemorated two arrests in 1961, in Jefferson Parish, for what were officially described as crimes against nature.
They watched TV.
"Dave, what do you believe in?"
"Everything. My own death most of all."
"Do you wish for it?"
"I feel it. I'm a walking sandwich board for cancer."
"But you talk about it so readily."
"What choice do I have?" he said.
On the screen two women commenced a dialogue in slow and measured movements, over coffee, with solemn pauses for hurt and angry looks. Delphine went back to her work, trying to listen past the TV set to the voices in the next room, the remote and private drone that fixed the limits of her afternoons.
"Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera?" Ferrie said absently. "Because our lives are a vivid situation."
Delphine fell forward in bawdy laughter. Her upper body shot toward the desk, hands gripping the edges to steady her. She sat there rocking, a great and spacious amusement. David Ferrie was surprised. He didn't know he'd said something funny. He thought the remark was melancholy, sadly philosophical, a throwaway line for an aimless afternoon. Not that this was the first time Delphine had reacted so broadly to something he said. She considered his mildest comic remarks automatically outrageous. She had two kinds of laughter. Lewd and bawdy and abandoned, the required worldly response to Ferrie's sexual status, her sense of a kind of anal lore that informed the sources of his humor. Softer laughter for Banister, throaty, knowing, wanting to be led, rustling with complicities, little whispery places in her voice, a laughter you could not hear without knowing they were lovers.
"It's not just Kennedy himself," Banister was saying on the other side of the door. "It's what people see in him. It's the glowing picture we keep getting. He actually glows in most of his photographs. We're supposed to believe he's the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurry to be great? He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He's trying to engineer a shift. We're not smart enough for him. We're not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on me just to look at him. Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it's the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What's he plotting with Castro? What kind of back channel does he have working with the Soviets? He touches a phone and worlds shake. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he's nothing."
Banister paused until Mackey's eyes shifted to meet his.
"I believe deeply there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or necessity or anything you like. What do you sense in the air? That's all I'm saying, T-Jay. Is there something riding in the air that you feel on your body, prickling your skin like warm sweat? Drink up, drink up. We'll have one more."
What passes in a glance.
That night Mackey sat in a small room across the street from a surgical-supply firm and two or three house trailers. Odds against a cool breeze about a thousand to one. The trailers were set in enclosures heaped with debris and guarded by bad-tempered dogs.
He sat by the window, in the dark, applying a pale lotion to the mosquito bites scattered across his ankles and the backs of his hands. It was going to be tough trying to sleep in this heat, without a fan, these little buzzing mothers closing in.
The rooming house was in an area where homes and junkyards seemed to spawn each other. A rooster crowed every morning, amazing, only blocks from major thoroughfares.
Every room has a music of its own. He found himself listening intently at times, in strange rooms, after the traffic died, for some disturbance of tone, a nuance or flaw in the texture.
Getting weapons from Banister was less risky in the long run and a hell of a lot easier, short-term, than stealing them from the Farm. This was the covert training site the CIA operated in southeastern Virginia, five hundred wooded acres known to the outside world as a military base called Camp Peary. Mackey instructed trainees in light weapons there, college grads eager for careers in clandestine work. This was the Agency's way of letting him know where he stood for refusing to sign a letter of reprimand. He lived about ten miles off-post but during periods of special exercises he shared quarters with another instructor in an old wooden barracks partitioned into double rooms. They wore army fatigues and played brooding games of gin rummy, listening to dull rumbles from the sabotage site.
He poured the lotion on his fingers, then rubbed his fingers lightly over the bites. The bites continued to sting.
Everywhere he went, mosquitoes. He'd trained rebels in Sumatra and the commando units of CIA client armies in a number of piss-hole places. But he was not Agency for life. He could wait for them to drop him or beat them to it. He'd seen too many evasions and betrayals, fighting men encouraged and then abandoned for political reasons. They didn't call it the Company for nothing. It was set up to obscure the deeper responsibilities, the calls of blood trust that have to be answered. This was the only war story he knew, the only one there was or could be, and it always ended the same way, men stranded in the smoke of remote meditations.
He felt the heat beating in, midnight vibrations, the sirens down Canal, the growl of some solo drunk. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He clenched his right fist. The tattoo bird was an eagle, circa 1958, etched in a dark shop on one of Havana's esquinas del
pecado, sin corners, where he was providing security in an Agency endeavor to supply funds to the movement of the rebel Fidel Castro, three years before the invasion.