"I dread getting fired, man."

"They said my work wasn't exact. It had to happen. Just like tonight has to happen. They'll know about this in Havana. Before midnight the news will reach Fidel."

They crossed the Trinity River on the Commerce Street viaduct.

"What I seen, that rifle looks like war surplus. How do you know it shoots?"

"I wrapped it in my raincoat and took it on the Love Field bus. Then I went down to the river bottom out west of the freeway where there's an area that people test-fire their guns. It's like a war in ordinary daylight."

"That sling, that strap, like it comes off a tenor sax."

"It fits all right. Everything works. Everything fits. I planned this thing with care. I had to go to six gun shops before I found ammo for this type carbine."

"It's bearing on my mind that the general has to die."

"I hit him the first shot," Lee said softly.

"I need to stop feeling bad all the time."

"It's a clear shot to every window."

"I want him on the ground."

"Less than forty yards," Lee said.

"For Mississippi, for John Birch, for the KKK, for every fucking thing."

Bobby looked a little smoky-eyed. They were quiet for a while. The heat came washing through the windows. They headed up Stemmons to Oak Lawn Avenue.

Lee said, "We turn left off Avondale into an alley that runs about two hundred and fifty feet to a church parking lot. We go slow. I get out near the end of the alley. You keep going and turn right into the church driveway. There'll be a service in progress. You're like a latecoming Mormon. You stop and wait. Cut your lights. I aim the rifle through the lattice fence at the back of Walker's house. I have a clear line of fire. You sit and wait. I see a picture of him now. He likes a well-lighted house. He sits in his study at night."

He had a thirty-nine-week subscription to Time. He imagined the backyard photograph in Time. The Castro partisan with his guns and subversive journals. He imagined the cover of Time, a picture seen across the socialist world. The man who shot the fascist general. A friend of the revolution.

"They'll appreciate in Havana that we did it April seventeen," Lee said. "Two years to the day. The invasion was the thing that produced a General Walker, more than any other event."

They turned onto Avondale. He realized Bobby was staring, eyebrows white with flour.

"Seventeen. What seventeen?" Dupard said.

"It's Wednesday, isn't it?"

"This here is April ten."

Ted Walker was at the desk in his office, a fifty-three-year-old bachelor who looks like anybody's next-door neighbor, tallish, with jutting brows, flesh going a little slack in the jaw and neck, body slightly stooped, the neighbor who is stern with children, doing his taxes now.

It is the biggest joke in America. General Walker does his taxes.

He was used to talking about himself in the third person. He talked to the press about the Walker case, the attempts to silence Walker. It is only natural, his sense of a public self, when you consider the close and pulsating attention he received in the local press where he ran neck and neck last October with the Cuban missile crisis. It was President Jack who said about the Morning News, "I'm sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon rolls around."

The aging ladies love their Ted. They are the last true believers. He mutters the poem of their missing lives.

A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He sat with his back to the window, totaling figures on a scratch pad, taxes, doing his taxes, like any fool and dupe of the Real Control Apparatus. Letters from the true believers were stacked in a basket to his right. The Christian Crusade women, the John Birch men, the semiretired, the wrathful, the betrayed, the ones who keep coming up empty. They had intimate knowledge of the Control Apparatus. It wasn't just politics from afar. It wasn't just the deals of the sellout specialists and soft-liners, the weak sisters, the no-win policymakers. The Apparatus paralyzed not only our armed forces but our individual lives, frustrating every normal American ambition, infiltrating our minds and bodies with fluoridation, with the creeping fever of trade unions and the left-wing press and the income tax, every modern sickness that saps the nation's will to resist the enemy advance.

The Red Chinese are massing below the California border. There are confirmed reports.

This is the man, ladies and gentlemen, who climbed the base of the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss., to rally thousands against the integration of the university. The man who SO-called led an insurrection, wearing his proud gray Stetson. Oh it was something. Four hundred federal marshals, five hundred state and local police, helicopters, jeeps, fire engines, three thousand National Guardsmen, tear gas blowing through the streets, burning cars, rocks flying everywhere, and birdshot, and sniper fire, two men dead, countless wounded, a couple of hundred arrested, military trucks full of regular army, sixteen thousand combat troops massed against a few thousand students and country boys and patriots of the South, and here is the object and source and cause of the whole thing, one gloomy nigger with a hanky in his face to keep the tear gas from making him cry.

Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.

That's the main thing Ted actually said. Like a Boy Scout saga, a couple of days in the wholesome outdoors.

To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it that he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.

In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name. We can't measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can't uncover. This doesn't mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.

But he didn't say these things. He mumbled and groaned in the crowded room, then punched a reporter in the face.

I sometimes am confused. We are dealing with tragedies of speech, tragedies of the human body. There are forces we can't comprehend.

He put out one cigarette, lit another. He got tired early now. It was a lingering effect of Operation Midnight Ride, the series of one-night stands in Louisville, Nashville, Amarillo, his journey to arouse the heartland, to get them to listen, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc., and he was still recovering. Beatniks came to picket, the most godawful bunch of Castro look-alikes anybody ever saw.

It is time to go down and liquidate the scourge which has descended on the island of Cuba.

It tired him and got to him, plain wore him out. Those deadly hotel rooms where he was never more totally alone and bare of comfort. I sometimes am confused and lost, ready to give in to lonely despair, tired of shuffling and dodging what I know and feel. Think of those uncombed boys in baggy jeans, sign-carriers, who shout dirty words into the night. They are soft beneath the drifting Cuban hair. Hotels. This is where the switch takes place, where he is a stranger who mind-wanders into the midst of the other side, only following what he's always felt.