Читать книгу Fri Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2019 - Bryan Woolley - Страница 24

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 ago, only a few months after his disgrace, Colonel Byrd had decided to make Dallas his home. The people who welcomed and entertained him bragged that there was no reason for a city to be where Dallas was; there was no seacoast, no large lake, no navigable river, no pass through the mountains, no scenic vista, no natural resource except the flat, fertile prairie itself. The city was where it was, his hosts told him, because a man named John Neely Bryan had decided to build a town here and had been glib enough to persuade others to buy land from him and join him. Others had followed and built more, until the prairie was important only as a place on which to build. Money itself, and the smart movement and placement of it, had become the fount of still more money, and the buildings to house the money and the paper work concerning it continually grew larger, until they dwarfed the other structures of the city. The banks and insurance companies ruled the blazing skyline, and two more towers, even taller than the rest, were under construction. Colonel Byrd could see their few lights along their bare girders shining with the rest, hinting of the grandeur to come.

The people of Dallas were proud of themselves, because they owed nothing to Nature, nothing to God, and, most empathetically, nothing to the federal government. That pride was the reason Colonel Byrd had chosen the city as his home after years of wandering and persecution in the service of his country. Like the original Creator, the Dallas people had built their city out of nothing. They had created their world in their own image and had gone to great lengths to keep it free of blemishes and the influence of coloreds and commies and labor unions. Only important people made important decisions here, which was as the founding fathers had intended the whole country to be.

Colonel Byrd wasn’t one of the decision makers of Dallas yet, but he would be someday. There were many here who shared his values, who recognized the danger that the country was in, who were alarmed by the steady destruction by the termites at work inside the timbers of the Republic, and Dallas didn’t lack the will to fight. There were right-thinking people here, and he had found a remarkable number of them in such a short time. His organization of them into an effective political unit was progressing nicely. Many of them, especially the women, worshipped him. And why not? Wasn’t he a hero? Hadn’t he served his country well, even ignoring the will of his so-called superiors when they tried to turn him from his duty as he saw it? The time would come when Dallas would invite him to the inner sanctum of the decision makers, and he would be ready. Dallas, the city built on guts and daring and nothing else, would become his headquarters for a great crusade. Dallas would be to Luther Byrd what Geneva had been to John Calvin. The center from which the true gospel of Americanism would spread.

Colonel Byrd realized that he was standing at attention. And why not? His thoughts were honorable, and it was an honorable cause on which he has embarked, more honorable than fighting the Germans had been, more honorable than defeating a country that had meant no harm to right-thinking people, more honorable, certainly, than getting fired for having beliefs and acting on them.

Fired. That’s what the Jew-dominated eastern newspapers had said. How the pinkos had crowed over that. How smug they were in their belief that Luther Byrd had been muzzled at last, that the Paul Revere of the modern age had been shut up. He felt more honorable, cleaner, purer, standing at attention in his silk robe in the damp night air of Dallas than he ever had genuflecting to the will of the Pentagon and the White House. He regretted only that Hannah wasn’t with him on his balcony, that he couldn’t speak his thoughts aloud to her and hear her quiet agreement. They had killed her. Their persecution of him had weakened her heart. She couldn’t bear to see what they were doing to him, and seventeen days after his humiliation, she died. Poor Hannah. Poor, poor Hannah. He had tried to tell her he wasn’t through, that he would go on fighting and would finally win, but she never really believed. Not really. If she had believed, she would be standing beside him now, listening to his thoughts and admiring the beautiful Dallas skyline.

The traffic light down on Turtle Creek, going idiotically through its sequence of signals—green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red—sending its orders to no one, controlling nothing, was what his life in the army had become. A sequence of futile signals, useless warnings to no one. He was glad to be out of it. Maybe he could use the traffic-light image in one of his pamphlets or speeches. The red could signify the Reds, and the yellow—what? The cowards? The yellowbellies who merely cautioned but commanded nothing, controlled nothing? Well, it would take some thought. It could be effective, though, thought through and printed in color.

Maybe he should get out his uniform and wear it tomorrow. The map in the evening paper indicated that the motorcade would move down this very street, through this very intersection. He would have his flag flying from the balcony, upside down as usual, sending its message of distress to those who knew enough to know what an upside-down flag meant. The men in the motorcade would know. Kennedy would know. Johnson would know. The Secret Service would know. They would look. They couldn’t help looking. What if he were standing beside the flag in full dress, at attention? Would they know who he was? Would they recognize Colonel Luther A. Byrd, whom they had tried to disgrace? A dignified protest. The press boys would see it and use it, especially if they saw it was Luther Byrd sending a message. Would they know? The Secret Service would know. They would know where Luther Byrd was when Kennedy came to Dallas. But would they tell the press?

The clock struck five. Colonel Byrd always heard it strike five, the time for the security check. He stepped inside and slid the heavy glass door closed and locked it. He reached between the wall and the back of the sofa and got the length of the pipe that he always slid into the groove in which the door slid, to keep it from opening if the enemy somehow got to the balcony and picked the lock. He drew the drapes over the glass and moved to the heavy, solid wooden door he had installed to the hallway and checked the three deadbolt locks. All secure. He opened the drawer of the little antique chest beside the door and lifted out the heavy army Colt .45 automatic. Yes, the clip was full, and a round was in the chamber. The Luger in the bathroom was loaded, too. He tucked it back under the towel on top of the toilet tank, then pissed and washed his hands and brushed his teeth again. He picked up the pair of military hairbrushes beside the sink and ran them through his silver hair and snapped to attention in front of the mirror, admiring the contrast of the gray eyes and the leathery skin, kept brown in secret by a sunlamp, approving the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the lack of flab, the sternest of the thin mouth. He turned off the light and returned to the bedroom and opened the drawer of the nightstand. The .45 there was ready, too, as he knew it would be. He laid his robe carefully across the end of the bed and set the slippers on the floor.

If he decided to wear the uniform, he must be careful that Kennedy couldn’t interpret it as a sign of respect. Maybe a black armband…

Two hours before dawn, the first ones arrived. They leaned against the storefronts, smoking, trying to stay out of the rain. They were union men, Ralph Yarborough men, stopping by to see the president before they went to work. As the parking lot slowly filled, they joked with each other, joked with the cop in the yellow slicker on the bay horse, whistled at the young secretaries holding umbrellas.

“You think he’ll show up in this rain?” one of them said.

“Hell, yes,” his friend replied.

In the Will Rogers Suite, Lady Bird Johnson was dressing for the day. She was dreading Dallas, and her hands were trembling.