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You’d put your foot on it and crush it.
9
I had a plan of my own for the years between August of 1960 and April of 1963. I’d keep my eye on
Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldn’t interfere. Because of the butterfly effect, I
couldn’t afford to. If there’s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don’t
know what it is. Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in
kindergarten, I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the
arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy,
I tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald—let alone trying to warn him off a
crime which he had not yet even conceived—I would be giving away my only advantage. The butterfly
would spread its wings, and Oswald’s course would change.
Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby,
big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones that would save the man who was now the
junior senator from Massachusetts. But I didn’t believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In 1962,
according to one of Al’s scribbled marginal notes, Kennedy was going to be in Houston, at Rice
University, making a speech about going to the moon. Open auditorium, no bullet-pr’f podium, Al had
written. Houston was less than three hundred miles from Dallas. What if Oswald decided to shoot the
president there?
Or suppose Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy? What if I scared him out of Dallas
and back to New Orleans and Kennedy still died, the victim of some crazy Mafia or CIA plot? Would
I have courage enough to go back through the rabbit-hole and start all over? Save the Dunning family
again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? I had already given nearly two years to this mission. Would I be
willing to invest five more, with the outcome as uncertain as ever?
Better not to have to find out.
Better to make sure.
On my way to Texas from New Orleans, I had decided the best way to monitor Oswald without
getting in his way would be to live in Dallas while he was in the sister city of Fort Worth, then
relocate to Fort Worth when Oswald moved his family to Dallas. The idea had the virtue of
simplicity, but it wouldn’t work. I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book
Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was—like Nietzsche’s abyss—looking
back at me.
I spent August and September of that presidential election year driving the Sunliner around Dallas,
apartment-hunting (even after all this time sorely missing my GPS unit and frequently stopping to
ask for directions). Nothing seemed right. At first I thought that was about the apartments
themselves. Then, as I began to get a better sense of the city, I realized it was about me.
The simple truth was that I didn’t like Dallas, and eight weeks of hard study was enough to make
me believe there was a lot not to like. The Times Herald (which many Dallas-ites routinely called the
Slimes Herald ) was a tiresome juggernaut of nickel boosterism. The Morning News might wax lyrical,
talking about how Dallas and Houston were “in a race to the heavens,” but the skyscrapers of which
the editorial spoke were an island of architectural blah surrounded by rings of what I came to think of
as The Great American Flatcult. The newspapers ignored the slum neighborhoods where the divisions
along racial lines were just beginning to melt a little. Further out were endless middle-class housing
developments, mostly owned by veterans of World War II and Korea. The vets had wives who spent
their days Pledging the furniture and Maytagging the clothes. Most had 2.5 children. The teenagers