"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

2 July

David Ferrie drove the Rambler south past chemical plants where waste gas flared yellow and red. Farther on he saw oystermen's shacks in the windy distances, set on stilts above the marsh grass. He reached a place called Wading Point, the country retreat of Carmine Latta. He went past the Dead End sign, past the No Trespassing sign, waved to three men conferring on a lawn, then turned onto a dirt road. Men were always conferring at Wading Point. He'd see them clustered at the door of one of the outbuildings or seated in a car on a rutted lane, four large men crowded into some nephew's VW, absorbed in serious talk.

The hunched bearing, the repetitive gestures, the set jaws and fixed regard, the economy of the group, the formal air of exclusion, bodies leaning inward toward a center.

Ferrie understood the gestalt of serious talks. He'd studied psychology through the mail with Italian masters. This was long before Eastern Airlines fired him for moral turpitude and for making false claims about a medical background. As if a degree could solve the riddle of Comrade Cancer. They took away his uniform for good.

He drove to an old lodge in the swampy bottoms where Carmine liked to relax with the boys. Four of the boys were roasting a goat on a spit outside the lodge, which was weathered past the point of rustic charm, with swallows' nests mud-stuck to the eaves. Ferrie parked in the shade and went inside. The white-haired man, bright-eyed, veined, ancient, was sitting on a sofa, drink in hand. He was frail and spotted, with the drawn and thievish look of a figure in a ducal portrait. There were times, entering his presence, when Ferrie experienced a deferential awe so complete that he found himself becoming part of the other man's consciousness, seeing the world, the room, the dynamics of power as Carmine Latta saw them.

Carmine ran the slots. Carmine had prostitutes from here to Bossier City, a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost. There were casinos, betting parlors, drug traffic. Carmine had a third of the Cuban dope before Castro. Now he had a shrimp fleet making deliveries from Central America. There was. a billion dollars a year in total business. Carmine had motels, banks, juke boxes, vending machines, shipbuilding, oil leasing, sightseeing buses. There were state officials drinking bourbon sours in his box at the racetrack. The story was he funneled half a million cash to the Nixon campaign in September 1960. What the boys call a tremendous envelope.

"My friend David W. Ferrie. What's the W. for?"

"Wet my whistle," Ferrie said.

Carmine laughed and pointed at the liquor cabinet. The third man in the room was Tony Astorina, driver and bodyguard, occasional courier, known as Tony Push for obscure reasons. He and Carmine were reminiscing grimly about the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was an obsessive topic of conversation wherever Carmine settled for ten minutes. Carmine had grudges. Ferrie could see the Bobby Kennedy grudge come to life in his eyes, a determined rage, but fine and precise, carefully formed, as if the lean old face held a delicate secret within it, one last and solemn calculation.

"So what I'm saying," Astorina said, "the whole thing goes back to Cuba. You look at everything today, the Justice Department, the pressure they're putting. If the boys took out Castro when they were supposed to, we wouldn't have a situation like this here."

"That's half true," Carmine said. "We would have leeway, with Cuba back in the firm. The value of Cuba, you use it to relieve pressure on the mainland. But the fact is nobody ever gave the Castro matter their full attention. We weren't very sincere."

They all laughed at that.

"Removing Castro was strictly a CIA daydream. The boys in Florida just strung them along. They were looking to keep the prosecutors off their back. They could always claim they were serving their country. And it worked. The CIA backed them up constantly."

"I still say everything goes back to Cuba."

"All right. But we're realistic people. We don't do tricks with mirrors and false bottoms. The styles don't match."

Ferrie wasn't surprised to hear them talking about delicate subjects in his presence. He did research on legal matters for Carmine and knew a great deal about his holdings and operations. He also knew the answers to some touchy questions.

Why did Carmine hate Bobby Kennedy in such a personal way, right down to the sound of his crackling Boston voice?

In early 1961 Carmine walks out of his modest house outside New Orleans and sees he is being followed by FBI. They tail his car,.eat lunch at an adjoining table, photograph his movements to and from his office, above a movie theater in Gretna. It is the beginning of a campaign of total relentless surveillance carried out at the direction of the Attorney General. In March they go to Las Vegas with him, take his picture in hotels and casinos, come back with him, camp outside his house, photograph his family, the neighbors, the mailman, the boy who delivers groceries. In April they go to church with his wife and his niece, play with his great-granddaughter in a supermarket and shoot movies of his sister's funeral. It is Carmine's personal Bay of Pigs, coinciding in time with the better-publicized one. Although there is public ruckus here as well. Sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine. There are traffic jams, skirmishes with the boys. It goes on for close to a year. These men are in his face day and night. It is the systematic humiliation of a senior citizen in front of his family, his neighbors and his business associates. And that little Bobby son of a bitch is calling every shot.

Carmine said, "The CIA comes up with exotic poisons one after another. They all end up in the toilets of South Florida."

"But if we want to clip this Castro," Tony said.

"The word is feasible or not feasible. We don't go on fools' errands." He stared at the glass in his hand. "Then there's the other theory why Castro's still alive. One of our people in Florida made a deal with him."

Tony Astorina stood against the wall across the room. Ferrie saw in him the ruins of a certain kind of grace. He was one of those nervy sharp-dressing kids who wake up at age forty, ruefully handsome, with a wife, three babies and a liver condition, the adolescent luck and charm lost in mounting body fat. He'd worked his way from the floor of the gaming room at the Riviera in Havana. Ferrie thought he'd probably built some corpses in order to be standing where he was now.

Tony said, "Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks ago I dream I'm swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I'm on Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence. "

"We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper," Ferrie said. "You're a gambler. You get a feeling about a horse, a poker hand. There's a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome. Sometimes we tap in. We see it, we know. I used to run into Jack Ruby now and then. What was he doing in New Orleans?"

"Shopping for dancers. There's a girl at the Sho-Bar he's salivating. "

"I was making leaflet runs in a light plane out of the Keys. A little while after Castro came in. I saw Ruby in Miami once or twice."

"Stop-offs," Tony said.

"He was running cash or arms or something."

"He was buying people out of Cuban jails."

Ferrie was drinking scotch and soda, same as Carmine. He was watching Carmine. They shook their glasses simultaneously, rattling the cubes. The old man's hands were long and thin. His ears were tufted with snowy hair. Ferrie smelled the roasting goat.

Tony Push said, "I remember I seen a picture six, seven months ago in a magazine. Anti-aircraft guns outside the Riviera. Dug in right in the street. Which comes a long way from what we had there. A whole city to pluck like a fruit."

"A whole country," Carmine said.

"It was fucking paradise, Havana, then. The casino was gold-leaf walls. I mean beautiful. We had beautiful chandeliers, women in diamonds and mink stoles. The dealers wore tuxedos. We had greeters at the door in tuxedos. Twenty-five thousand for a casino license, which is the steal of all time, plus twenty percent of the profits. Batista gets his envelope, everybody's happy. We let the Cubans turn the wheel. We did the blackjack and craps. What's it called, brocade, the fucking drapes. I like to see a room where the dealers wear a tux. Plus there's action all over town. Your cockfights, your jai alai. At the track you play roulette between races. I mean tell me where it went."

"Kennedy should have blown it up when he had the chance," Ferrie said.

"You blow up Cuba, you get the Russians."

"I've got my rubber bedsheets all ready. An eternity of canned food. I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It's a government funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit."

Carmine rocked on the sofa. The ice cubes rattled. Ferrie knew he could make Carmine laugh just about any time he wanted. He always knew the moment, always sensed the approach to take. This was because he shared the man's perceptions.

"One thing, I have to say it," Tony said. "I don't bear no feeling against the President one way or the other. It's this rat fink Bobby that's pushing too hard. I say all right. They have their job, we have ours. But he's making it like some personal program. He crosses the line."

"They both cross the line," Carmine said. "The President crossed the line when he put out the word he wanted Castro dead. Let me tell you something."

"What?"

"I want to tell you a little thing you should always remember. If somebody's giving you trouble, again, again, again, again, somebody with ambitions, somebody with a greed for territory, the first thing you consider is go right to the top."

"In other words you take action at the highest level."

"That's where they're letting it get out of hand."

"In other words you bypass."

"You clean out the number one position."

"In other words you arrange it so there's a new man at the top who gets the message and makes a change in the policy."

"You cut off the head, the tail doesn't wag."

David Ferrie loved a proverb. He loved the feeling of being swept into another man's aura. A power aura like Carmine's was a special state of awakening. The man was like a fairy-tale pope, able to look at you and change your life, say a word and change your life. Ferrie had devised a theology based on militant anticommu-nism. He was a sometime master of hypnotism. He studied languages, studied political theory, knew diseases intimately, had official records of his skill as a pilot. All this paled in the presence of a man like Carmine Latta.

Carmine had a battle column of lawyers with millions ready to spend against repeated government attacks. He had men working on conspiracy to defraud, obstruction of justice, perjury, a thousand pain-in-the-ass details. Carmine had Ferrie doing research on tax liens. He had state officials and bank presidents making personal pleas on his behalf. Carmine and the boys were the state's biggest industry. Carmine had finance companies, gas stations, truck dealerships, taxi fleets, bars, restaurants, housing subdivisions. Carmine had a man who washed his pocket money in Ivory liquid to keep it germ-free.

Now Ferrie followed Tony Astorina down a hall flanked by simple bedrooms. On the floor of the last room stood a tall canvas bag laced at the top. Ferrie could see the square bulges the stacks of money made. A gift from Carmine to the cause. Guy Banister saw to it that exile leaders knew who was providing cash for arms and ammunition. It was Latta's bid for gambling concessions after Castro fell.

Back in the living room Ferrie said, "I'll take it straight to Camp Street, Carmine. They'll be very happy, very grateful. All through the movement."

"We all look forward to the day," Carmine said softly. "We only want what's ours."

Ferrie believed there was a genius in the man. Carmine was born in the mid 1880s to an Italian father and Persian mother, at sea, under the sign of Taurus. This was a powerful blend of elements. Ferrie admired Taureans. They were generous people, steadfast and tolerant, with a gift for empire.

He carried the duffel bag to the car. He waved to the boys and drove out to the main road. Astrology is the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs.

Raymo furled the blue bandanna and tied it around the neck of his German shepherd. Stinking hot today. He had a room in a little stucco house bristling with TV antennas. It was not far from the stone house on Northwest Seventh Street where Castro had lived when he was in Miami, raising money, finding men for the revolution. Raymo stroked the animal's head, muttered into the silky ear. Then he put on the leash and followed the dog down the stairs.

He went south toward Calle Ocho, the main drag of Little Havana. Dogs ran up to fences to yap at Capitan. A lot of killer dogs, a lot of cars with hood ornaments that were the only things worth saving. Old cars sinking into the tar. Dogs skidding sideways along the fences barking in the brilliant heat. Capitan plodded on, old and remote.

Raymo turned left on Calle Ocho. He walked past the jewelry shops, every bakery window with a pink-and-white wedding cake. A hundred men were crowded into a little corner park, playing dominoes and cards. Still plenty of time. He bought some fruit, stopped to talk to someone every half-block. It was busy on the street. Men stood in clusters, women moved from shop to shop. How the hell could you know, in an all-Cuban place, who were the spies for Fidel?

Up on Flagler Street, Wayne Elko slouched past the stumpy palms. He wore jump boots stained white by salt water and thought about stopping for a cerveza Schlitz. Not smart, Wayne. He'd been wandering Florida for nearly two weeks trying to find T-Jay. Spent three days as roustabout and barker with the Jerry Lepke Ten-in-One Carnival. They had a sword box, a ladder of swords, a fire-eater, a two-headed baby show and a snake girl with braces on her teeth. Called a dozen people he knew from the movement. Finally in Miami he received a message at Elliot Bernstein Chevrolet, where the assistant sales manager was an anti-Castro guerrilla who let him sleep in a used Impala.

Be on time, Wayne. He walked down to Calle Ocho and saw the man he was looking for, Ramon Benftez, standing at the designated corner with a doddering beast. He knew Raymo slightly from the days long gone when exiles used to practice close-order drill on front lawns, watched by sleepy children.

They shook hands, etc.

Wayne said to himself, Some tough hombre. Raymo led him a block and a half south. The Cuban facade faded into a version of suburban America. Sunny little stucco homes with postcard lawns. They went into a one-story house. The radio played in a back room. They came out a side entrance and sat at a wooden table in a small concrete enclosure with a statue of St. Barbara standing in the middle.

"This is Frank's house," Raymo said.

Hairy arms. One of those thick-bodied types you can't reach with the usual persuasion. There are only two or three things in the world he ever thinks about and he's made up his mind about each one. Wayne didn't know who Frank was.

"So there's still activity," he said. "There's this friend of mine who works in a Chevy dealership. He makes napalm in his basement with gasoline and baby soap. I sleep in a car in the lot. I'm the unofficial watchman."

"What T-Jay wants is just, like you stick around a couple of days."

"I've been looking for him."

"He's a pretty busy guy," Raymo said unconvincingly.

The dog lay throbbing in the shade.

Frank Vasquez showed up with a wife, two kids and some food. The wife and kids took a peek at the visitor. Wayne waited for someone to say, "Mi casa es suya." He got a little charge from the Old World graces. But they slipped back inside, leaving his smile hanging like a rag on a stick.

The three men ate a meal in the humming midday heat. Wayne could find out nothing of substance from the two Cubans. The smaller the talk, the clearer it became that something serious was in the works. The meal was so entrenched in seriousness, in that grave Latin manner and tact, that Wayne was outright convinced this was no mission to harass the Cuban coast as he'd done so many times with the boardinghouse commandos.

He told Raymo and Frank about the operations he'd been involved in. Many fabulous snafus. Squalls, Cuban gunboats, pursuit by police launches. He described how T-Jay had appeared out of nowhere-they didn't even know if he was Agency or not-to give them special training in weapons and night fighting. They needed every little extra they could get.

With Interpen, Wayne was still in the high-scream tempo of his paratroop days. He was rounding out his youth. The business at hand gave every sign of being very different. A dark and somber plan. Just look at Frank Vasquez. Sad-eyed, long-faced, earnest, with little to say outside of what his family had suffered, which he narrated tersely, like a documentary of a war a hundred years ago. It hit Wayne Elko with a flash and roar that this was like Seven Samurai. In which free-lance warriors are selected one at a time to carry out a dangerous mission. In which men outside society are called on to save a helpless people from destruction. Swinging those two-handed swords.

Win Everett sat in his office on the empty campus of Texas Woman's University. All that heat and light made him grateful for the gloom of the basement nook. Here he worked patiently on his bitterness, honing and refining. It was something he returned to periodically as if to some legend of his youth, a golden moment on a football field or frozen pond, some enterprise of such flawless proportions that he could forget it only at the risk of deep-reaching loss.

The office was a place to come to when Mary Frances and Suzanne were not at home. He didn't mind being alone here. It was a place to sit and think, searching for a grim justice in the very recollection of what they'd done to him-a place to refine and purify, to hone his sense of the past. The fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. When the room grew warm he took off his jacket, folded it neatly lengthwise, then over double, and dropped it softly on a cabinet.

It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot.

T-Jay had picked the lock at 4907 Magazine Street in New Orleans. This became necessary when he learned there was no sample of the subject's handwriting at Guy Banister Associates. The files contained a single document, his job application, filled out in block letters and unsigned.

Lee H. Oswald was real all right. What Mackey learned about him in a brief tour of his apartment made Everett feel displaced. It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he'd been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.

He already knew about the weapons. Mackey confirmed the

weapons. A 38-caliber revolver. A bolt-action rifle with telescopic sight.

He knew about the leaflets. Oswald was handing out leaflets in the street. The headline was "Hands Off Cuba!"

There was Oswald's correspondence with the national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

There was socialist literature strewn about. Speeches by Fidel Castro. A booklet with a Castro quotation on the cover: "The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought." Copies of the Militant and the Worker. A booklet, The Coming American Revolution. Another, Ideology and Revolution, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Books and pamphlets in Russian. Flash cards with Cyrillic characters. A stamp album. A twelve-page handwritten journal with the title "Historic Diary."

There was correspondence with the Socialist Workers Party.

A novel, The Idiot, in Russian.

There was a pamphlet titled The Crime Against Cuba. On the inside back cover Mackey found a stamped address: 544 Camp St.

There was a draft card in the name Lee H. Oswald. There was a.draft card in the name Alek James Hidell.

There was a passport issued to Lee H. Oswald. A vaccination certificate stamped Dr. A. J. Hideel. A certificate of service, U.S. Marines, for Alek James Hidell.

There were forms filled out in the names Osborne, Leslie Oswald, Aleksei Oswald.

There was a membership card, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New Orleans chapter. Lee H. Oswald is the member. A. J. Hidell is the chapter president. The signatures, according to Mackey, were not in the same hand.

A magazine photo of Castro was fixed to a wall with Scotch tape.

There was the room itself. Mackey had found most of these materials in a kind of storeroom off the living room. Small, dark, shabby, a desperate place, the gunman's perfect hutch, with roaches on display along the baseboards.

Everett had wanted only a handwriting sample, a photograph. With these he could begin to construct the illustrated history of his subject, starting with a false name. He'd looked forward to thinking up a name, just the right name, just the spoken texture of a drifter's time on earth.

Oswald had names. He had his own names. He had variations of names. He had forged documents. Why was Everett playing in his basement with scissors and paste? Oswald had his own copying method, his own implements of forgery. Mackey said he'd used a camera, an opaque pigment, retouched negatives, a typewriter, a rubber stamping kit.

He called the work sloppy. But Everett was not inclined to fault the boy on technicalities (Hidell, Hideel). The question was a larger one, obviously. What was he doing with all that fabricated paper, with a Minox camera buried at the back of a closet?

Everett flung both arms out briefly to free his shirt from his damp skin. He searched the room for cigarettes. It seemed there were more questions than actions these past days, and more bitterness than questions. The thing about bitterness is that you can work on it, purify the anguish and the rancor. It is an experience that holds out promise of perfection.

Lancer is back from Berlin.

It was coming back down to pure rancor, to this business of honing and refining. It was this business of how much they'd reduced his sense of worth. It was a question of measurement. It was a question of what they'd done to him. It was this business of sitting in his office in the Old Main and working on his rage.

The last thing Mackey saw, leaving the apartment, was a James Bond novel on a table by the door.

Nicholas Branch has unpublished state documents, polygraph reports, Dictabelt recordings from the police radio net on November 22. He has photo enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, bibliographies, letters, rumors, mirages, dreams. This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony, of voices droning in hearing rooms in old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul of human utterance. It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language.

Documents. There is Jack Ruby's mother's dental chart, dated January 15, 1938. There is a microphotograph of three strands of Lee H. Oswald's pubic hair. Elsewhere (everything in the Warren Report is elsewhere) there is a detailed description of this hair. It is smooth, not knobby. The scales are medium-size. The root area is rather clear of pigment.

Branch doesn't know how to approach this kind of data. He wants to believe the hair belongs in the record. It is vital to his sense of responsible obsession that everything in his room warrants careful study. Everything belongs, everything adheres, the mutter of obscure witnesses, the photos of illegible documents and odd sad personal debris, things gathered up at a dying-old shoes, pajama tops, letters from Russia. It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia where people feel real pain. This is the Joycean Book of America, remember-the novel in which nothing is left out.

Branch has long since forgiven the Warren Report for its failures. It is too valuable a document of human heartbreak and muddle to be scorned or dismissed. The twenty-six volumes haunt him. Men and women surface in FBI memos, are tracked for several pages, then disappear-waitresses, prostitutes, mind readers, motel managers, owners of rifle ranges. Their stories hang in time, spare, perfect in their way, unfinished. richard rhoads and james WOODARD got drunk one night and woodard said that he and jack would run some guns to Cuba. james woodard had a shotgun, a rifle and possibly one hand gun. He said that jack had a lot more guns than he did. dolores stated that she did not see any guns in jack's possession. She stated that he had several boxes and trunks in his garage and isabel claimed they contained her furs, which had been ruined by mold, due to the high humidity in the area.

Photographs. Many are overexposed, light-blasted, with a faded quality beyond their age, suggesting things barely glimpsed despite the simple nature of the objects and the spare captions. Curtain rods found on shelf in garage of Ruth Paine. There they are. The picture shows no more or less. But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped here. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?

This sadness has him fixed to his chair, staring. He feels the souls of empty places, finds himself returning again and again to the pictures of the second-floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository. Rooms, garages, streets were emptied out for the making of official pictures. Empty forever now, stuck in some picture limbo. He feels the souls of those who were there and left. He feels sadness in objects, in warehouse cartons and blood-soaked clothes. He breathes in loneliness. He feels the dead in his room.

W. Guy Banister, former special agent of the FBI, collector of anticommunist intelligence, is found dead in his home in New Orleans in June 1964, his monogrammed. 357 Magnum in a drawer by the bed. Ruled a heart attack.

Frank Vasquez, the former schoolteacher who fought for and against Castro, is found dead in front of El Mundo Bestway, a supermarket on West Flagler Street in Miami, August 1966, shot three times in the head. Reports of a factional dispute among anti-Castro groups in the area. Reports of an argument in a social club earlier in the evening. No arrests in the case.

Ten years later, to the day, also in Miami, police find the decomposing body of John Roselli, born Filippo Sacco, an underworld figure who'd recently testified before a Senate committee investigating CIA-Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro. The body is floating in an oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay, legs sawed off. No arrests in the case.

Branch sits staring.

The Agency is paying him at the GS level he'd reached at retirement, with periodic cost-of-living increases. They paid for the room he has added to his house, this room, the room of documents, of faded photographs. They paid to fireproof the room. They paid for the desktop computer he uses to scan biographical data. Branch is ill at ease billing them for office supplies and often submits a figure lower than the amount he has spent.

He eats most of his meals in the room, clearing a space on the desk, reading as he eats. He falls asleep in the chair, wakes up startled, afraid for a moment to move. Paper everywhere.

They sat in wooden bleachers in the early evening watching the old men play Softball. The players wore short-sleeve white shirts, long white pants and dark bow ties, with baseball caps and white sneakers. It was the bow ties that made Raymo happy. He thought the ties were fantastic, a perfect yanqui touch.

Frank sat one row above him and slightly to the side, drinking an orangeade. He said, "I still think of the mountains."

"You still think of the mountains. Look at the first baseman. I bet anything he's seventy-five. He still does a dance around the bag."

But Raymo thought of the mountains too. He was with Castro in the movement of the 26th of July, the starved army of beards. Fidel was some kind of magical figure then. There was no doubt he carried a force, a myth. Tall, strong, long-haired, dripping filth; mixing theory and raw talk, appearing everywhere, explaining everything, asking questions of soldiers, peasants, even children. He made the revolution something people felt on their bodies. The ideas, the whistling words, they throbbed in all the senses. He was like Jesus in boots, preaching everywhere he went, withholding his identity from the campesinos until the time was dramatically right.

Frank said, "It was miserable because of the sickness and hunger, the rain. But also because I was never sure of my reasons. When I think of the mountains it's mainly my own confusion I recall. I was pulled in two directions. This made it hard for me."

It was true. Frank was always a bit of a gusano, with a sneaking admiration for Batista. Now they were all gusanos, anti-Castro worms, in the language of the left. But Frank was always half a worm, half a batistiano, even fighting for Fidel.

Castro liked to recall the earliest days of the insurrection, before Frank and Raymo went into the Sierra Maestra. Twelve men with eleven rifles. Raymo knows today it was not the 26th of July alone that overthrew the regime. From the first minute, Castro was inventing a convenient history of the revolution to advance his grab for power, to become the Maximum Leader.

The third baseman went into a crouch and bowed his arms wide. The old guy at the plate sent the ball on a line to left center and his teammates watched, half rising from the bench. The sun was in the palms behind the right-field fence.

Frank said, "I think of the mountains more than ever now."

"Because you're stupid, man."

"But I don't think of the invasion at all."

"Who wants to think about either one? Besides you were shipwrecked."

"Run aground. But still our confidence was unshaken."

"Stupid to the end. From the beach I saw the stern begin to sink."

"We still had hope," Frank said seriously.

"No wonder you think of the mountains. In the mountains we won."

Frank handed him the orange drink with a couple of swigs left. They watched the old men make a double play, more serious and alert than boys, mechanically correct at seventy, in bow ties. They recalled how Fidel used baseball terms when he talked about operations. We'll get them in a rundown. We'll shut the bastards out. They went down the steps and walked to the car. Capitin was sprawled in the back seat like a stolen coat.

Raymo drove his buddy home. Sure, Frank thinks of the mountains all the time. He spent twenty-three days in the mountains. He moaned every day for twenty-three days and when he finished his rosary of complaints he went back to teaching school. Teaching the children of men who cut cane for the sugar bosses, children who cleaned and packed cane without pay.

The building where Raymo lived was between the Miami River and the Orange Bowl. He parked the car, took the dog to the hydrant, then went inside. Stinking hot. The first thing he heard was the groan of traffic over the suspension bridge at Northwest Twelfth Avenue. It was a sound raised slightly above the natural tone of the world, the sound of someone thinking, alone in a room.

The troops of the regime were afraid of the Cordillera. The mountains meant death to them. For Raymo there wasn't a chance in a million that he could die. He was untouchable in the Sierra, fat and rank, even during the last major offensive with repeated waves of napalm scorching the land and air. They were all untouchable in their minds. This was the point of being rebels.

He lay on the bed thinking.

The march to Havana took something like five days. They were greeted with the awe that heroes earn in books. Purify the country was the cry. Raymo watched a number of executions. These were the rapists and torture masters of the regime, drivers of nails into skulls. They were kindly asked to stand at the edge of a knee-deep ditch. They all ended differently, fell sideways, fell backwards, an arm flung wide, an arm tucked in, but all taken unawares, dying deeply surprised.

Then the communists appeared, entering the unions and rural committees. Castro gave them legal status. There were MiGs in crates waiting for Cuban pilots to learn how to fly them. Think in collective terms was the cry. The individual must disappear.

He talked about one revolution and gave us another. Certain areas were off-limits to Cubans. There were Russian and Czech technicians, Russian construction crews everywhere you looked. On highways, at night, students working against the new regime spotted flatbed trucks carrying long objects, canvas-shrouded, of a certain configuration. The joke was that palm trees were being sold on the black market. The cargo was the SA-2, the first of the Soviet missiles to reach Cuba. They were here to defend the heavens against high-altitude spy planes.

By this time Raymo was in La Cabana prison, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. Yes, like that, the bearded hero is a worm. The yard was flanked by ancient storerooms and magazines, barrel-vaulted galleries now used as cells, and he shared one of these with former Castro guerrillas and Batista officers, with workers, radicals, union officials, student leaders, men who'd been tortured by the old regime and the new one, a perfect Cuban stew. The far end of his cell faced the moat, where executions took place. He waited for John F. Kennedy to get him out.

Some nights they'd hear ten executions. Once Raymo saw a slender man standing in the spotlight in front of the sandbags. He wore white shoes, a dark shirt and lariat tie, a nice-looking panama hat. They were in such a hurry to execute him they didn't even give him a set of prison grays, much less a hearing or trial. Raymo watched the hat go sailing off his head when they shot him. It went straight up in the air like a cartoon hat. The individual must disappear.

Another car hit the iron grillwork at the center of the bridge and that low groan went up.

He wanted to believe he was out of prison. A one-time fighter in the Sierra and Playa Giron, he was reduced to listening to endless arguments between Castro and Kennedy, arguments that determine where he lives, what he eats, who he talks to. In Oriente he was a skilled worker, a mechanic in a nickel-mining operation, American-owned, and this is where he learned about the movement of the 26th of July from students who spoke convincingly of wide injustice. Now he stands on ladders picking fruit and waiting for the maximum leaders to tell him where he goes next. They carry such a stain of greatness, both these men with their visions and heroic bearing. Each takes a turn as the other's shadow, his haunted dream. One buys what the other sells. Eleven hundred veterans of the assault brigade were released from prison after the U.S. paid fifty-three million dollars to the Castro government. Raymo stood on a sideline stripe in the Orange Bowl, three blocks from this stinking bed, and heard the renewed pledges, the second wave of emptiness. Six months had passed since then. He did not believe he'd been freed from anything. Training in the wild grass of the Everglades. This was the only time he felt free.

The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man's head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you've seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured.