himself, communism. That’s it.”
Joe Bill tried to nod, but his lip quivered. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t cried since he was a child, had never had a reason to, and he didn’t have one now, and yet he felt his cheeks tighten and his mouth dry up, and he fought, with all he had, the need to wipe his eyes. And then the tears started, and that night on the boat would be the last time he would cry until that terrible afternoon four years later when he next saw Lee Harvey Oswald, on television, being led away in cuffs and screaming, “I’m just a patsy!” while reporters bumped his bruised and beaten face with microphones. Two days after that, he saw Lee shot to death in the basement of the Dallas Police Department by Jack Ruby, and the tears came again, right in front of his fellow airmen in the rec room at Bergstrom, Joe Bill only hearing over and over again what Lee had said to him that night on board the Marion Lykes: “It’s like this, Joe Bill. Remember the story from your Good Book about Peter, and how he denied Jesus three times? Well, pal, I ain’t Jesus, and you need to deny me as many times as they ask.”
And they did come and ask, although they didn’t hound him the way Lee had said they would. The men from the FBI asked a few simple questions, and Joe Bill gave them Lee’s answers, which seemed to be the answers they wanted, and they went away. And he told the Warren Commission, and they sent him away. And the reporters came, and Joe Bill said the same things to them. Over the years, people who were writing books about Oswald and the assassination would turn up, and they’d ask Joe Bill the same questions, and Joe Bill would tell them the same things, maybe a little more here and there, but he’d never say the big things, never ask his own questions: Why did Lee go to Russia, and for whom? Who supplied Lee with tiny cameras and contact information at Soviet embassies? How much of his life was an act, a game? How much was a story, and how much was real? What did Lee know in September 1959 about November 1963? He couldn’t possibly have known that he would assassinate a president who wasn’t even president yet. But he’d known something, certain as death.
And, of course, there was the biggest question of all. It was there, asking itself, the day his son was born and the day his first wife died. The day he awoke in the hospital bed after his heart attack, it was there. Every morning as he drove alone to work, on his pillow in whatever company house or roadside motel he slept in as he followed the dry holes and gushers of the west Texas oil industry, it was there. It’s been with him every day since and will be forever, and it’s the one question he has an answer for: What did you do about it, Joe Bill? And the answer is, nothing.
Joe Bill never has told his whole story. He’s slept and eaten and lived and loved with all his shaky knowledge and his shadowy questions in his own mind alone, all of this set against the one true fact he knows: that he’s failed, somehow. Failed Lee and America and himself and his children. He’s failed in part because it’s too difficult to keep it all straight in his head. All the information is confusing and confounding. There’s simply too much of it, with the books and the commission reports and the evidence and the documents. He’s failed in part because time has passed, and now the whole thing was a long time ago, and no one’s asking anymore. Mostly he’s failed because he knows the stories about the million-to-one accidents and sudden diseases and visits from strange men in the middle of the night. Every so often, he’ll go through a stretch of time, moving from place to place, when he feels he’s being followed, watched. His heart jumps every time the phone rings. He knows people are not who they seem, are more than they appear. He’s failed because he was, and is, afraid.
But one day he did tell a writer the story of his last night with Lee.
They were to dock in Le Havre the next morning, and Joe Bill was trying to iron his shirts. He wasn’t good at it—his mother had always taken care of that. And after watching him struggle with the task for a while, Lee stood up from the desk where he was now openly practicing his Russian and took the iron from Joe Bill. After a moment or two, he said, “I’m going to spend a couple days in France, and I need to know how to say something.”
Joe Bill figured he’d tell Lee how to ask for the bathroom or the restaurant, figured he’d also tell him that most people in France spoke English, especially the service workers, but Lee said to him, as he pulled a sleeve taut and moved the iron across it, “Tell me how to say, ‘I don’t understand.’”
“I don’t understand?”
“Yeah,” Lee said.
“You want to know how to say, ‘I don’t understand’?”
“Would you just tell me?” Lee said as he folded Joe Bill’s shirt and set it neatly in the open suitcase, before taking up another and stretching it across the board.
“‘I don’t understand’ is ‘Je ne comprend pas,’” Joe Bill said.
“Juh nuh comprenduh pas?”
“Je ne comprend pas.”
“Je ne comprend pas?”
“Je ne comprend pas.”
My name is Perkins, and my story begins on a Monday. Just as I was about to leave my desk after another day at the international corporation where I am employed, I happened to glance out the window to see a man crawling across the parking lot. I watched him as he crawled—hands and knees, attaché handle in his teeth—from the front steps of the building all the way to the third row of cars, a good sixty yards or so, just like a baby in a blue business suit. When he got to his dark green Ford Taurus, the midlevel company car, he stood, took his attaché from his mouth, dusted himself off, got in and drove away in what I have to assume was the normal mode—seated, strapped in, ten-and-two—for a man of his age and station.
I had long ago quit wondering, or at least asking, about most of what went on at the IC. I started there three years ago—just after Marcie and I got married, just before my father died—and I had seen more than enough corporate and individual doltishness, weirdness, and outright stupidity to make me seriously question the veracity of the yearly financial reports, which show us as a major player in the IC world. I had witnessed fiscal irresponsibility and massive waste offset by arbitrary niggling and concealed by necromantic accounting. I had narrowly escaped involvement in churlish turf wars. I had seen grown men and women reduced to paranoid hysterics by such matters as their table assignment at the company picnic or having their name left off a memo concerning this month’s coffee fund. I had learned that the single most important task one can master in business is that of assigning blame, and I had seen the best of the best ply their trade with such a profound lack of conscience that it would be debilitating in normal life. I was even there the day last March when Terrence McNeil—who never learned the corollary to the Most Important Task, that one must diligently avoid blame—came by to show some of his former coworkers in Vendor Support the business end of his Winchester side-by-side. But I had never seen a man in a blue suit crawl across a parking lot before.
It wasn’t until after the man had driven away that I noticed the other workers on my floor standing at the window watching the same spectacle. I thought of calling someone over and saying . . . what, I don’t know . . . maybe, what the hell? But then, I had done a pretty good job of remaining unnoticed since my transfer to Contracts six months before, wasn’t even sure any of the others on the floor knew my name. I could envision calling to someone and having them look at me blankly—or worse, with alarm, the McNeil incident still fresh in our minds—then phone security, or worse, ask our manager who I was, and the jig would be up.
You see, I had no idea what I was doing in Contracts, no idea what my job was even supposed to be. I got hired
