Jack had no idea what the guy was saying. He squeezed a

Preludin down his throat. It takes away your procrastination about what you want to do next.

He drove to the Ritz Delicatessen and parked outside. He opened the trunk and threw in the moneybag with the gun and heavy cash so he wouldn't forget to do it later. The trunk was a little overflowing with barbells, weights, a summer suit, a can of paint, a roll of toilet paper, dog toys and dog biscuits, a holster for his gun, a golf shoe with a dollar bill in it and about a hundred glossies of Randi Ryder that he'd brought back from New Orleans. You might as well call it my life because it's not any neater at home.

He walked into the Ritz and ordered everything with extra mustard and extra mayonnaise, a dozen sandwiches. Roast beef, corned beef, sliced turkey, tongue, dill pickles, cole slaw, relish, potato salad, black-cherry soda, ginger ale, etc. He told the man to give these sandwiches special handling because they were going to police headquarters.

He got back in the car. These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door. This is a homicidal town. Bam. He had to remember to go back to the club later to get his dachshund Sheba and clear the register and grab his hat. He didn't like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although he doubted it.

He drove to the Police and Courts Building, feeling a sharp sting in his left knee and hiking up his pants leg as he drove. A nice ripe gash. A street fight takes up your attention to the point where you don't know you're bleeding for an hour. He drove with his left pants leg raised above the knee. No responsible party would finance him because he gave away drinks to nobodies and brought in people and dogs off the street. He got out of the car, lowered his pants leg and went into the old part of the building, walking between the tall columns.

He took the elevator to three, holding the carton with the food and drinks, thinking that if he doesn't do something soon he will be running a business out of his pants pockets forever, if they let him run it at all, if they don't turn him into a nothing person completely. He got off the elevator and went down the corridor to the juvenile bureau. He felt blood seeping into his shoe. But just seeing these men in uniform, clean shaven, he wanted to say it is the proudest feeling of my life being a friend of the police in the most pro-American city anywhere in the world.

His rabbi told him many times, "Don't be so emotional."

In Dallas

Lee Oswald sat in Sleight's Speed Wash at midnight, waiting for his clothes to dry and reading H. G. Wells. One other customer was in the place, an obese and scary-looking man who wore slippers cut open near the front to give his swollen feet some room. The air had a sour reek. Lee was slumped over volume one of The Outline of History, biting the skin of his thumb, the book spread open in his lap.

He was living apart, off and on, from Marina and Baby June.

The night attendant came around, a lanky Negro saying in a kind of singsong, "Closing time, closing time, y'all go home." He carried somebody's sheets in a red mesh basket.

The other customer got up and went to a dryer to collect his things. Lee sat reading, folded over the book, chewing a knuckle now. The customer hobbled out.

About three minutes passed. The dryer with Lee's clothes stopped running. He sat with his head in the book. He knew the attendant was shooting him a very level look from fifteen feet. He turned a page and read toward the end of the chapter, which was at the bottom of the facing page. He read slowly, concentrating hard to get the meaning, the small raw truth inside those syllables.

"Hey, Jim. You are wearing me thin, okay."

The Greeks and the Persians. He looked up. The attendant had a droopy lower lip, a rust-tone complexion with a spatter of freckles across the cheekbones, those dangling hands, and Lee thought Japan before he was able to supply a name or set of circumstances. In an instant he knew. This was Bobby Dupard, his cellmate in the brig in Atsugi.

It took him a while to get Dupard to remember who he was. Bobby stared hard, taking in Oswald's hair, receding on the left side, where the part was; taking in the haggard look, the three-day stubble, the shirt with a popped seam near the collar; taking in a lot actually, four years plus of manhood and exile and hard times. Ozzie the Rabbit. Remembrance entered Dupard's face in a complicated way.

"What it is, I don't look real close at whites no more. So it takes me a while to pin down the individual I'm basically talking to."

They didn't talk about Japan. They talked about West Dallas, where Bobby lived with his sister and her three small kids in a project of hundreds of buildings stretched in barracks formation between the Trinity River and Singleton Boulevard. They called it a housing park. Fenced in, isolated from the city, with ripped-out plumbing set on the mud lawns. Bobby worked at the speed wash from seven to midnight six days a week. Twice a week he took a course in mechanical drawing at Crozier Technical High School downtown. Sometimes he worked a noon-to-four shift as a mixer in a bakery, a fill-in for the sick and the missing. He went home in clothes dusted white. His mother was dead now. His father lived in another part of the project. Bobby wasn't sure where. From the 52 bus he saw his old man all the time sitting in front of an auto-wrecker service sipping malt liquor from a can. Big Cat brand. Bobby knew his father would not recognize him if he walked over and said hello. His father would talk to him the same way he talked to everyone, explaining his conversations with the Lord.

That was West Dallas. Smoke from the lead smelter. Staccato lives.

Bobby had a trace of wispy chin hair now. His eyes had lost their quicksilver fear. He looked at Lee from an angle, cool and fixed, with a slow nod of the head to measure remarks.

Lee explained that he was living underground. He'd left his last job without a word. He'd disappeared from his last address. He had a post-office box. His brother didn't know what part of Dallas he was in. His mother thought he was still in Fort Worth. His wife was living with friends of hers due to misunderstandings. He was working for a graphic-arts firm. He didn't explain the occasional classified nature of the work. He said nothing about Marion Col-lings. Collings, through George de Mohrenschildt, was pressing him for details of his contacts with the security apparatus in the USSR. He was avoiding Collings. He was avoiding the postal authorities. He was hiding from the Feebees. He was using false addresses on every form he filled out. He was making posters after hours on the job and sending them to the Socialist Workers Party. He had a spy camera stashed in a seabag at the bottom of his closet.

He didn't explain about Marina and how much he missed her and needed her and how it made him angry, knowing this, trying to fight this off, another sneaking awareness he could not fight off.

Forget Japan. Bobby talked about the South, about the police dogs and fire-bombings, the integration of Ole Miss. It was a daily event just about, the TV footage of segregationist rage, crowds of Negro marchers bending to the charge of riot police, toppled in sudden clusters. Demonstrators smashed in the face, hit with rocks. Someone falls, those white boys move in kicking. Cops gripping those billy clubs, one hand at each end, twisting hard. Look at their eyes. Look at those firemen come jumping off the trucks. They turn on those hoses and it's like a wrath from out of hell that sends everybody spinning.