Don DeLillo - Libra

The second air strike, finally, was canceled.

He knew Everett believed the failure was more complex than one scrubbed mission. A general misery of ideas and means. But Mackey insisted on a clear and simple reading. You can't surrender your rage and shame to these endless complications.

He had a wife somewhere. This was a complication to think back on. Two years of study, postwar, mining and metallurgy, with a wife to encourage him. He could barely picture her face. Paled and ballooned by drink. She was a paramilitary wife by then. She liked the movies. She liked to sit with her ass dipped down into the opening between the seat and the backrest, her feet up on the raised edge of the seat front, balanced like a serious toy, as the bullets flew. She had pretty hair, he seemed to recall, and drank in a methodical way, as if to forestall any complaint that she was out of control.

The scouting party came ashore before midnight. Mackey was the only American in the rubber raft and he wasn't supposed to be there. The raft skidded up the beach and one man vaulted into the water and ran alongside, scooping dense sand with both hands and muttering a prayer. They began marking the beach with landing lights for the troops waiting beyond the breakers in ancient pitching LCIs and born-again freighters. The place wasn't exactly deserted. Some people sat outside a bodega above the beach, old men talking. One of the scouts, wearing black trunks and a black sweatshirt, face smeared with galley soot, walked over to chat with them, carrying an automatic rifle. T-}ay wasn't armed. He couldn't be sure whether this was his way of letting the men know his role here was limited or whether he was feeling indestructible tonight. The sea tang was bracing. He saw an old Chevy near the bodega and got his chief scout Raymo to request the keys from one of the patrons as a gesture of welcome from those about to be liberated. He wanted to find out if the local militia camp was where the intelligence briefers said it was. The car was a '49 model with a picture pasted to the dashboard of a Cuban ballplayer in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap and shirt. They were an eighth of a mile down the stony road when a jeep appeared in the high beams, two heads bobbing in silhouette. T-Jay eased the car diagonally across the road. Raymo was out the door, saying something into the bursts from his submachine gun. Every other round was a tracer. Heat and light. When the magazine was empty, two dead militiamen sat in the vehicle, mouths open, the upholstery smoking. Raymo stood looking, his squat body immensely still. He was barefoot, in ridiculous checkered shorts, like a vacationing Min-nesotan, a cartridge belt slung below his belly. They heard pistol fire from the beach and drove to the bodega in reverse. Someone said a scout had shot one of the old men over a careless remark. Near the body a cluster of people stood arguing. T-Jay walked down to the beach. Frogmen were in, helping rig the marker lights. He had his radioman tell the lead ship to send the brigade commanders ashore, send the troops ashore, get the goddamn thing going. Back near the road he saw a woman standing outside a straw hut, swatting the air around her. They were very near Zapata swamp, famous for mosquitoes.

He read the sign across the street. Discount on Lab Coats. There were voices around the corner, the particular ragged laughter of people leaving a bar. At daybreak the rooster would crow, the dogs would bark, like some tin-shack village in the Caribbean.

The memory was a series of still images, a film broken down to components. He couldn't quite make it continuous. He saw Raymo heaving open the car door, a stutter motion, each segment leaving a blur behind. The bursts from the surplus Thompson were the first shots fired at the Bay of Pigs. This made Raymo a figure of respect among his fellow prisoners during the twenty months they would spend in the fortress of La Cabana listening to rifle reports from the moat, where the executions took place, each crisp volley followed by a precise echo, an afterclap, as the prisoners thought about the dog that lived in the moat, lapping up blood.

Finally the taxi stopped outside.

He went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his hands, trying to ease the sting where the lotion had failed. He'd contracted malaria during his Indonesian stint and felt the effects now and then, a sense that his body was a swamp. He went to the door and waited.

His wife cut him once, swinging a knife across the kitchen table and catching the left side of his jaw, after a night of who knows what. He never thought of her by name. He thought of her being somewhere very vague, in a room with curtains, never moving from the chair. This is what happens to loved ones who go away. We make them sit in a room forever.

The woman came in, wearing a hard tan, her skin smoked and cracked. She said she was Rhonda. She had heavy dark makeup that made him think of nights at the shore and gonorrhea.

"Casal said be nice to you."

"What do you think he meant by that?"

She smiled and unzipped her skirt. Casal was the bartender at the Habana, a waterfront dive that catered to merchant seamen, Cubans with a grudge and other floating bodies on the tide.

All night it sounded across the water. "Listen, my brothers, to the roar of the white typhoon." It was the grimmest, most godawfu! thing, to be ashamed of your country.

Win Everett was in pajamas looking at a two-day-old copy of the Daily Lass-O, the student newspaper at TWU. There were contests for yell leaders and twirlers. A nationwide search was under way for a typical coed. He sat in an armchair in a corner of the bedroom. He learned from the paper that the school's original name was the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences. He skipped the piece on JFK.

The phone rang downstairs. He heard Mary Frances walk into the kitchen and pick up the receiver. She came to the foot of the stairs and he dropped the newspaper, waiting to hear her call his name.

She watched him come down the stairs, looking nearly weightless in his pajamas, that softness of step he'd developed only lately, as if to show someone watching that he'd taken the path of self-effacement. They touched lightly as he moved past and she knew it meant they would make love on the fresh sheets with the window open and the smell of rain and dripping leaves still in the air.

Parmenter calling from a public booth. Win could hear traffic noises, excited air. He watched Mary Frances start upstairs, her hand leaving the carved newel and slipping along the handrail, barely touching.

"How do we proceed?"

"The phone is secure. They're not interested in me anymore. Besides, I've cleaned it."

A brief laugh. "You know how to do that?"

"I tinker in the basement," Win said.

"Do you know a man named George de Mohrenschildt?"

"No."

"Does odd jobs for Domestic Contacts. I find out he's also hooked to Army Intelligence. Cuba via Haiti. He's on the way to Haiti. It probably involves an arms deal. George comes across pro-Castro. I believe this is a genuine attachment. He thinks we've behaved rather badly. But the fact is, if my information is correct, he's working against Castro interests, or will be as soon as he gets to Haiti. In any case George doesn't concern us directly. He has a young friend, a kid he debriefed on behalf of the Agency. A defector who repented, more or less, after two years plus in the USSR. I got George to tell me his name and I've done some checking. There's a 201 file on the kid dating to December 1960."

"Did SR Division insert him?"

"The way we fake our own files, who knows for sure? There's no clear sign we put him into Russia. That's all I can tell you except for this. He spent some of his service time at a closed base in Japan. Atsugi. He was a radarman. Had access to data concerning U-2 flights. A nice house-present to give the Soviets when he went over. He married a Russian girl. Decided he wanted to come home. The young marrieds settled in Dallas, met George, spent evenings with the local Emigre's, reminiscing. One night about two and a half weeks ago, according to George, our young man fired a shot into the night, aimed at the infamous head of Major General Edwin A. Walker, U.S. Army, resigned."