“What happened to the sweet little exotic dancer from Babe’s?”
“She’s tired. Her bumps don’t want to grind anymore.”
“Suit yourself.” He fluffed his pillow and rolled onto his side, his back to her.
“Well, maybe for another fifty…” she said.
“Forget it. Turn out the light.”
Shelia switched off the lamp and went to the bathroom and showered. Barnhill was asleep when she returned, so she dressed quickly and picked up the blue raincoat and the umbrella and her handbag and tiptoed into the hall, pulling the door softly closed behind her.
She didn’t like to wake up with them.
LUIS
The man on the mattress beside Luis was lying on his back and snoring. Luis wanted to wake him up, but he was afraid. The man had arrived only that day, and Luis didn’t know his name, and Luis was too young to wake up an older man he didn’t know. Luis was seventeen, and he remembered how tired he had been when he arrived in this place six months before. The man beside him was probably tireder than he had been. He looked old. Maybe forty-five. He had a wife and many children at home, no doubt. If he had come from the interior, he had missed them a long time already. Even if he had come from a border state, as Luis had, he already had missed them a long time. The journey was hard and tiring, and the farther north you came, the more you missed your family and home and village, as poor as all of them were. He missed his own village in Tamaulipas, even now that he had been in Dallas for six months and had a job and friends.
It was the fear that made it bad. It was worse than the work, the fear of the Border Patrol in its khaki uniforms swooping into the workplaces and taking the people away. Many of the people who had come to the house where Luis lay on the mattress had already been taken away, some of them just a week or two after they finished the hard journey. It would have been better for them if they had never started. But it was a chance you took. And if you could avoid the Border Patrol long enough, it was worth the work and the fear and the risk to go to the Western Union office every week and send money home. It made you something in your village.
And something besides the money was going to make Luis something. In the morning, when he rose from the mattress where he lay, he would see the president of the United States. At least he hoped he would see him. He would be working in the kitchen while the president was having his lunch. And Jackie. Jack y Jackie. Even the people in his village knew of them, in a village where nobody important, not even a Mexican of importance, had ever come. Maybe Jack would speak of the Alliance for Progress. La Alianza para al Progreso. The great partnership between the Gringos and Mexico that would take the poverty away from his village and let him go home and work in his village just as he was working here, without the Gringo bosses and the fear of the Border Patrol. That would be a great thing.
He would write a letter home. He would write the first letter home that he had written since he crossed the Rio Grande, and the priest would read it to his mother and father and his sisters. He would tell of Jack y Jackie coming to the Dallas Trade Mart to have lunch, and he would say that he shook hands with them, even if he hadn’t, and that they said nice things to him, even if they hadn’t, and that he had served their table, although he knew he wouldn’t. And he would say that the president spoke of La Alianza para el Progreso, even if he didn’t, and that life was going to be better in Tamaulipas. That’s what he would do. And even the priest would be impressed. Luis would be something. And that is what he had learned since he had come to Texas—that everyone could be something, if they worked hard and learned English and were lucky and the Border Patrol didn’t take them away.
The Fifth Hour
LUTHER
THE CLOCK STRUCK ITS SINGLE NOTE for the half-hour. Colonel Luther Byrd didn’t have to guess which hour it was half-past. For as long as he could remember, he had awakened every morning at 4:30, and for eighteen of those years he had awakened to the same single note of the same clock. He retired every night at 11:00 sharp and went immediately to sleep, hearing none of the clock’s chimes except the single note for 4:30. It was strange and amusing that he had never heard the chimes for 2:00 or 2:30 or 3:00 or 3:30 but always heard 4:30.
The clock was from a house on the Rhine, and it was in that house, in 1945, that he first heard it strike 4:30 and knew that he had to have it. The woman who owned it, and in whose house and bed he was, didn’t want to sell it to him. It had been in her family for a long time, she said, and wasn’t a valuable clock. She was sure the American captain could find a more beautiful, more valuable clock elsewhere for less than he was offering for hers. But when he told her he was taking the clock whether she took the money or not, she accepted the twenty-dollar bill that he offered her. Now the clock sat on the antique walnut table in Colonel Byrd’s living room, below the Nazi flag in its huge glassed frame on the wall. And Colonel Byrd never heard it strike 4:30 without remembering the first time he had heard it and the woman and the house on the Rhine and the war.
It was good that the United States had won the war, of course. If a country is going to fight a war, it ought to fight to win. But Colonel Byrd believed in 1945, and still believed, that he and his comrades-in-arms had been engaged against the wrong enemy. Maybe Hitler and the Nazis had been a little extreme in their methods, but they had done a damn good job of containing the Communist threat, which couldn’t be said of anyone since. Roosevelt. Truman. Eisenhower, the bastard who let the Russians take Berlin. And Kennedy. Kennedy, who had forced Colonel Luther A. Byrd to give up his command and retire at fifty-five simply because he had called his men to attention at each dawn to instruct them on the evils of communism. Whose side was Kennedy on? Luther Byrd knew. It was there in the leaflet.
Colonel Byrd slipped his feet into the fleece-lined slippers beside his bed and wrapped himself in his brown silk robe. He went into the living room in the dark and switched on the reading lamp beside his chair and picked up a leaflet from the small stack on the table where the clock was. He sat down in the chair and propped his feet on the leather ottoman and studied the paper. The quality of the printing wasn’t good. The pictures, the full-face and profile of the traitor, would have reproduced better if he could have provided glossy prints to the printer. And the expressions on Kennedy’s face weren’t as evil as he would have liked. But it was a rush job, and, anyway, its message was clear. WANTED FOR TREASON. There was no mistaking the meaning of that. Even Caroline and John-John could figure out what that meant. Maybe even Jackie.
How many of the leaflets had his people distributed that day? Not all of them, he hoped. There should be some left to distribute along the route of the motorcade. The reporters should get some. The White House press corps would pounce on that. It would make the wire services and maybe the networks. The world would know that not everyone in Dallas was in love with Jack and Jackie. Maybe the Citizens Council and the newspaper and the half-assed public-relations people were willing to let principle fly out the window for a day, but the friends of Luther Byrd weren’t. There were still enough patriots left to expose the so-called president for the commie-loving papist turncoat that he was.
Kennedy would see the newspaper ad, whether he saw the leaflet or not. The White House crowd couldn’t resist the newspapers. They would want to read about themselves, and they would see the ad. The ad would let them know they weren’t fooling everybody. The ad would cram the message up their asses.
Colonel Byrd crossed the living room and slid open the glass door to the balcony, as he did every morning when the clock struck 4:30. The view from his balcony, on the fifteenth floor of the only high-rise apartment building in Dallas, was the best in the city. Below him, the empty pavement of Turtle Creek Boulevard glistened under the streetlights, and on the horizon, the skyscrapers were ablaze with lights.
Two years