11/22/63 полностью

Lee talked about Russia. He was long-winded and pompous. I wasn’t very interested in his rap about how the Communist bureaucracy had hijacked all the country’s wonderful prewar socialist ideals (he passed over Stalin’s Great Purge in the thirties). Nor was I interested in his judgment that Nikita Khrushchev was an idiot; you could hear the same idle bullshit about American leaders in any barbershop or shoeshine parlor right here. Oswald might be going to change the course of history in a mere fourteen months, but he was a bore.

What interested me was the way de Mohrenschildt listened. He did it as the world’s more charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker’s face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet. This might have been the first time in his life that Lee had been listened to in such a way.

“There’s only one hope for socialism that I see,” Lee finished, “and that’s Cuba. There the revolution is still pure. I hope to go there one day. I may become a citizen.”

De Mohrenschildt nodded gravely. “You could do far worse. I have been, many times, before the current administration made it difficult to travel there. It is a beautiful country… and now, thanks to Fidel, it’s a beautiful country that belongs to the people who live there.”

“I know it.” Lee’s face was shining.

“But!” De Mohrenschildt raised a lecturely finger. “If you believe the American capitalists will let Fidel, Raul, and Che work their magic without interference, you’re living in a dream-world. Already the wheels are turning. You know this fellow Walker?”

My ears pricked up.

“Edwin Walker? The general who got fired?” Lee said it fard.

“The very one.”

“I know him. Lives in Dallas. Ran for governor and got his ass kicked. Then he goes over to Miss’sippi to stand with Ross Barnett when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. He’s just another segregationist little Hitler.”

“A racist, certainly, but for him the segregationist cause and the Klan bobos are just a blind. He sees the push for Negro rights as a club to beat at the socialist principles that so haunt him and his ilk. James Meredith? A communist! The N-double-A-C-P? A front! SNCC? Black on top, red inside!”

“Sure,” Lee said, “it’s how they work.”

I couldn’t tell if de Mohrenschildt was actually invested in the things he was saying or if he was just winding Lee up for the hell of it. “And what do the Walkers and the Barnetts and the capering revivalist preachers like Billy Graham and Billy James Hargis see as the beating heart of this evil nigger-loving communist monster? Russia!”

“I know it.”

“And where do they see the grasping hand of communism just ninety miles from the shores of the United States? Cuba! Walker no longer wears the uniform, but his best friend does. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

Lee shook his head. His eyes never left de Mohrenschildt’s face.

“Curtis LeMay. Another racist who sees communists behind every bush. What do Walker and LeMay insist that Kennedy do? Bomb Cuba! Then invade Cuba! Then make Cuba the fifty-first state! Their humiliation at the Bay of Pigs has only made them more determined!” De Mohrenschildt made his own exclamation marks by pounding his fist on his thigh. “Men like LeMay and Walker are far more dangerous than the Rand bitch, and not because they have guns. Because they have followers.”

“I know the danger,” Lee said. “I’ve started organizing a Hands Off Cuba group here in Fort Worth. I’ve got a dozen people interested already.”

That was bold. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing Lee had been organizing in Fort Worth was a passel of aluminum screen doors, plus the backyard clothes-whirligig on the few occasions when Marina could persuade him to hang the baby’s diapers on it.

“You’d better work fast,” de Mohrenschildt said grimly. “Cuba’s a billboard for revolution. When the suffering people of Nicaragua and Haiti and the Dominican Republic look at Cuba, they see a peaceful agrarian socialist society where the dictator has been overturned and the secret police have been sent packing, sometimes with their truncheons stuck up their fat asses!”

Lee squalled laughter.

“They see the great sugar plantations and the slave-labor farms of United Fruit turned over to the farmers. They see Standard Oil sent packing. They see the casinos, all run by the Lansky Mob—”

“I know it,” Lee said.

“—shut down. The donkey-shows have stopped, my friend, and the women who used to sell their bodies… and their daughters’ bodies — have found honest work again. A peon who would have died in the streets under the pig Batista can now go to a hospital and be treated like a man. And why? Because under Fidel, the doctor and the peon stand as equals!”

“I know it,” Lee said. It was his default position.