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down at the backs—that he didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, but when you
looked in his face, you knew that didn’t matter. Not to him, it didn’t. He thought he was a big deal.”
Al considered briefly, then shook his head.
“No, I take that back. He knew he was a big deal. It was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the
world to catch up on that. So there he is, in my face—choking distance, and don’t think the idea
didn’t cross my mind—”
“Why didn’t you? Or just cut to the chase and shoot him?”
“In front of his wife and baby? Could you do that, Jake?”
I didn’t have to consider it for long. “Guess not.”
“Me either. I had other reasons, too. One of them was an aversion to state prison . . . or the electric
chair. We were out on the street, remember.”
“Ah.”
“Ah is right. He still had that little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and
prissy, both at the same time. He’s wearing that smile in just about every photograph anybody ever
took of him. He’s wearing it in the Dallas police station after they arrested him for killing the
president and a motor patrolman who happened to cross his path when he was trying to get away. He
says to me, ‘What are you looking at, sir?’ I say ‘Nothing, buddy.’ And he says, ‘Then mind your
beeswax.’
“Marina was waiting for him maybe twenty feet down the sidewalk, trying to soothe the baby back
to sleep. It was hotter than hell that day, but she was wearing a kerchief over her hair, the way lots of
European women do back then. He went to her and grabbed her elbow—like a cop instead of her
husband—and says, ‘Pokhoda! Pokhoda!’ Walk, walk. She said something to him, maybe asking if he’d
carry the baby for awhile. That’s my guess, anyway. But he just pushed her away and said, ‘Pokhoda,
cyka!’ Walk, bitch. She did. They went off down toward the bus stop. And that was it.”
“You speak Russian?”
“No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway.”
“You saw him other times?”
“Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick.” He grinned. “There’s no Texas barbecue as
good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn’t eat it. It’s a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor,
got a diagnosis I could have made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century.
Basically, there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be
famous.”
He leaned forward.
“You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind of kid who
throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he joined the Marines—to be like his
brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby—he’d lived in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans
to New York City. He had big ideas and couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to them. He
was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that pissy, prissy little smile of his. Do you know what
William Manchester called him?”
“No.” I didn’t even know who William Manchester was.
“A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the conspiracy theories that bloomed in the
aftermath of the assassination . . . and after Oswald himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know
that, right?”
“Of course,” I said, a little annoyed. “A guy named Jack Ruby did it.” But given the holes in my
knowledge I’d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a right to wonder.
“Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale and Oswald—the
wretched waif—on the other, it didn’t balance. No way did it balance. If you wanted to give