“It is, Lee,” Joe Bill said.
“Well, you caught me, huh? I study Russian. I guess that makes me a suspect now.”
“No,” Joe Bill said. “I think it’s very impressive.”
“Well, I’m glad for that, Joe Bill. I sure did want to impress you. That’s the most important thing in the world, isn’t it? For underlings to impress their betters. That’s what makes the world go ’round, right? That’s what keeps the machine turning. Be a good boy and I’ll throw you a bone.”
“Lee, I don’t think I’m your better.”
“You think you’re everyone’s better,” Lee said now, slapping the journal shut and moving toward Joe Bill, who took a few steps back. “You’re so young and so smart. A little too smart, aren’t you? Want to be a big man, but you’re always playing games. You think I don’t know about your game?” Lee was standing right in front of Joe Bill now, pointing at him, nearly poking him with his finger.
“What are you talking about?”
“The way you listen to everyone all the time. You think I don’t know you speak French? I can tell by the way your ears prick up when the officers are talking at dinner. And you’re not just getting a word or two here and there. You speak good French. I’ve watched you listening to the crew. They probably know, too. You’re not exactly subtle about it.”
Joe Bill could feel himself moving ever closer to the door of the cabin as Lee continued to advance. He wanted to disappear. Joe Bill had sneaked around like some sort of spy the entire time he’d been on board, and for no reason at all other than to make himself feel superior—like a mysterious, grownup man, with his school-taught French and his smarts and his damn cigarettes, which he wanted now very badly. They were in the pocket of the overcoat that he’d thrown carelessly over the top bunk, another thoughtless invasion of Lee’s privacy and space. And as he stood there and looked at it all, not just all he’d done that night but all he’d done the entire trip, although Joe Bill was not physically afraid of the smaller man, he wished he could take a beating for it, and he thought he knew how to make it happen.
“I also saw the other things,” he said. Lee stopped pointing and stood back from him, quiet for a moment.
“What other things?”
“The thing about renouncing your citizenship,” Joe Bill said. “The signatures. The little camera. All of it.” He relaxed himself completely to take the first blow. But it didn’t come.
Instead Lee turned and went to the bunks. He took Joe Bill’s overcoat from the top bunk and folded it neatly on Joe Bill’s bottom bunk. He then pulled himself up onto the top bunk and sat cross-legged facing the desk. “Sit down,” he said.
When Joe Bill didn’t move, Lee pointed to the overturned chair and said again, “Sit down.”
Joe Bill moved slowly toward the chair, picked it upright, and sat there. Lee sat very still and looked down at him from the top bunk.
“This is important, Joe Bill, so I want you to listen to me, okay? This is the most important thing you’re ever going to hear in your life.”
Joe Bill nodded.
“There is a very good chance that there’ll come a day, maybe soon, maybe not, but it’s coming, when you’re not going to want to have had anything to do with me. People may come and ask you about me, about how we spent this time together on the ship for France, and what do you remember about me, what kind of person was I? And they’ll hound you about this.”
Lee stopped talking for a moment and brought his hands in front of him and crossed them there. Joe Bill, looking up at Lee, began to feel the strangest moving sensation in his chest, and for a moment he couldn’t place its familiarity. But as Lee leaned in a little to speak again, as he took a deep breath, Joe Bill knew it was, of all things, the urge to cry.
“Now, this is the important part. You’re not going to be able to say you never knew me. But you’re definitely not going to want to tell them you read my journal or that you knew anything else about me. The camera, for example. You never saw the camera, understand? The thing to say is that I was strange, and quiet, and that when I did talk, I was spouting off about communism. Got it? Maybe you can even say I didn’t believe in God, but no more. Because if you do, Joe Bill, you’ll regret it. They’ll destroy you. And you’ve got a good life to go lead, so don’t mess this up. Strange, quiet, kept to 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