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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.
De Mohrenschildt leaped from the couch and began to pace around the new playpen. “Do you think
Kennedy and his Irish cabal will let that billboard stand? That lighthouse, flashing its message of
hope?”