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Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court. “‘And Noah drank of the
wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told them who
stood without.’ But Shem and Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know
you know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old Bible-learning we got at
our mothers’ knees—”
“Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”
“Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been going on, he
said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa
—’”
I snapped the TV off.
9
What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think of a tee-shirt
Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our marriage. There was a fiercely grinning
pirate on the front, with this message below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL
MORALE IMPROVES. Plenty of beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter. We in the
neighborhood heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain.
Nobody did anything, and that included me.
Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night
Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was
for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that
Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business. Oswald acting
alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do.
With the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and
shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.
Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the
apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and
the Elsa Lanchester hair. They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed,
nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.
I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth
hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about this development, either because he didn’t know or
didn’t care. But I cared.
The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.