They stood pissing in a field in a light rain.
Wayne took the wheel with the first ruddled light breaking behind them. Radio off and windows shut now. Frank asleep in the rear seat and moaning through his crowded teeth.
"I'm still absorbing this thing," Wayne said, looking across at Raymo. "You read science fiction?"
"Fucking crazy, Wayne?"
"There's a quality I used to feel before a night jump. Like is this actually happening?"
"We're talking this is real."
"I know it's real."
"First they cancel Chicago right out. Then they do Miami without the motorcade. They know it's real."
Wayne kept studying Raymo, occasionally darting a look at the road. The car was tight and quiet, beautifully behaved.
"Like we're racing across the night," he said, mock-hysterical.
"They're paying some nice money. Think of you're doing a day's work."
"Like we're hand-picked men on the biggest mission of our lives."
They passed a convoy of military vehicles. After a while Raymo gestured toward the back seat and said, "There's something cross my mind."
"What?"
"I'm thinking I ought to put him down."
"What? Your dog?"
"He lost all coordination. He tries to get up, he can't keep his paws from sliding out."
"When the nervous system goes."
"I hate to take him to the box. They gas them in a box."
"You don't want gas."
"I hate the idea they use gas."
"Some things you know what has to be done."
"I had this dog since before Gir6n."
"But you don't have the heart."
"You hate to be the one."
"I'm stopping first chance," Wayne said.
He studied Raymo's face, which showed nothing, and five miles farther on he took an exit for a regional airport.
He had his hunting knife wrapped in a couple of sweaters in his khaki poke.
He stopped on the grassy border of a long straight road that ran alongside a chain-link fence with barbed wire canted at the top. He got out and waited while Raymo eased the big dog onto the grass. Silhouettes of hangars and small planes. Raymo got in the car and drove fifty yards and stopped. The dog stood by the side of the road. Wayne approached from the rear, standing over the animal, straddling it. Stars still out. He grabbed the dog's scruff and lifted hard. The front paws paddled air and Wayne moved his knife-hand under the dog's jaw. He growled, cutting the animal's throat. Then he let go with the left hand. The dog fell flat and hard, lying between Wayne's feet, blood running. He growled at it again and walked to the car, holding the bloody knife high. He wanted Raymo to see it, just as a sign, a gesture that had no meaning you could put into words.
He was able to sleep now. They all slept for a brief time in the late morning. Hours later in the dark they picked up the first pulse of Dallas on the radio, a scratch and rustle at the edge of the band, and they listened to an eerie voice ride across the long night.
"Tell you something, dear hearts, Big D is ner-vus tonight. Getting real close to the time. Notice how people saying scaaaary things. Feel night come rushing down. Don't y'all sense it around you? Danger in the air. You can see it in the streets. Billboards. Bumper stickers. Handbills. They're saying awful things about Our leaders. I'm walking down the street this morning and there's a
zigzag thing painted on a storewindow and it hits me all at once like it's a swastika. Do you think I'm making it up? I'm not making it up. Let me pass a thought through the ozone just to get your clock unwound. How do we know it's really him that's coming to town? Don't you know the rumors he travels with a dozen look-alikes when he goes into no man's land? Just to disorient the enemy. So maybe we're getting Jack Seven or Jack Ten. Or all of them at once in different locales. I can understand the need, myself. Or might be I'm just receptive to other people's fantasies. Some things are true. Some are truer than true. Oh the air is swollen. Did you ever feel a tension like right now? You know what Dallas is like, don't you, in the universal scheme? We're like everywhere. Or we're like everywhere wants to be. Dress alike, talk alike, think alike. We're a model for the country. I'm not making it up. But the little itchy thing is seeping out. Don't you feel it oozing to the surface? People say he's riding Caroline's tricycle into town. Not tough enough to lead us to Armageddon. All the ancient terrors of the night. We're looking right at it. We know it's here. We feel it's here. It has to happen. Something strange and dark and dreamsome. Weird Beard says, Night is rushing down over Big D."
Raymo, Wayne and Frank had never been to Dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean.
Wednesday. Lee walked out of the rooming house and went up the street to a diner where he had breakfast most mornings. He checked the license plates on cars parked along North Beckley, looking for Agent Hardy's number.
They'd get their own furniture, modern pieces, and a washing machine for Marina.
He had eggs over light. He ate with a folded-up newspaper under his left elbow. The noise and talk fell around him. He kept his head close to the page, reading the fourth or fifth story in the last week about a Yale professor of political science arrested in the Soviet Union as a spy. Arrested outside the Metropole Hotel, one of the places Lee had stayed. Arrested and then released. The story was really about him. Everything he heard and saw and read these days was really about him. They were running messages into his skin.
He walked to the bus stop, checking license plates along the way. A coppertone Mercury eased alongside and moved at Lee's pace down the street. It had those smoked-over windows. He was prepared to give his name as O. H. Lee and tell them nothing else. He knew his rights. He had his guaranteed rights. He would not stand for harassment.
The window slid down and David Ferrie rested an elbow on the door, then turned to look at him.
Lee said, "I can't be late for work."
They drove to the Book Depository. Lee interrupted the talk several times to give directions, concerned that they'd miss a turn.
"Been reading the papers?" Ferrie said. "I understand they've had a story every couple of days. First he's coming. Then he's having lunch at the Trade Mart. Then there's a motorcade looping through the downtown area. Then yesterday's papers, both papers, which I saw myself. A street-by-street outline of the motorcade route. Har-wood to Main. Main to Houston. Houston to Elm. Down Elm to Stemmons Freeway. I thought to myself, Old Leon's looking at this. What's he feeling right now? What were you feeling, Leon? It must have been an incredible moment. Like a vision in the sky. Must have froze your blood."
"I'm only aware five cities, two days. He'll be here a couple of hours."
"They know where you live and they know where you work."
"I didn't see yesterday's paper as a matter of fact."
"Of course you saw it. It said the President's passing under your fucking window. The fucking building faces Elm Street, doesn't it? You spend most of the day on the sixth floor, don't you? His car is coming along Houston right straight at you. Then dipping away down Elm. Moving slowly and grandly past, The one place in the world where Lee Oswald works. The one time of day when he sits alone in a window and eats his lunch. There's no such thing as coincidence. We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen."
Ferrie was pink-faced, nearly shouting. Lee gave a direction to turn left. Ferrie gripped the steering wheel hard.
"You see what this means. How it shows what you've got to do. We didn't arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don't have that kind of reach or power. There's something else that's generating this event. A pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history. I think you've had it backwards all this time. You wanted to enter history. Wrong approach, Leon. What you really want is out. Get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level."