Frank knew what Alpha was planning to do. He thought and he thought and it had to be that. Once he learned the President was going to Miami, there was nothing else to believe.
His brothers also fled Castro, later, dangerously, floating to Key West on an oil-drum raft. They went back in boats as well, one killed in the fighting on the beaches, one captured and taken to the fortress prison, where he was allowed to die quietly of starvation, his form of public prayer, a demonstration against the beatings and executions.
Fervent men, exiles, fighters against communism took off from the Keys in Cessnas and Piper Comanches to drop incendiary devices on the sugar cane of Cuba. The fields were burning again.
Here on the road in the Deep South he saw something that showed how strangely and completely a hatred for this President reached into certain parts of the culture, into daily lives. During the first long day of driving he'd wandered into Georgia by mistake and passed a drive-in theater where they were showing a movie about young Kennedy the war hero. It was called PT 109 and under the title on the signboard there was a special incentive: See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.
It scared him all right, the signs he saw on the road in the U.S. Here was Louisiana in heavy rain. He would tell T-Jay everything he'd seen and heard with Alpha 66 in the Glades. The conclusion wasn't hard to draw, that Kennedy was the object of the mission.
Something in his heart longed for this murder, even though he knew it was a sin.
The Curator sends autopsy photos of Oswald. Nicholas Branch feels obliged to study them, although he doesn't know what he can possibly learn here. There are the open eyes, the large wound in the left side, the two ridges of heavy stitching that meet beneath the clavicle and descend in one line to the genital area, forming the letter Y. The left eye is swiveled toward the camera, watching.
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model "dressed" like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
The Curator sends FBI memos concerning the President's brain, which has been missing from the National Archives for over twenty years.
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.
He doesn't know why they are sending him this particular grisly material after all these years. Shattered bone and horror. That's all it means to him. There is nothing to understand, no insights to be had from these pictures and statistics, from this melancholy bullet with its nose leveled and spread like a penny left on trolley tracks. (How old he is.) The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone."
They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."
They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot."
How can Branch forget the contradictions and discrepancies? These are the soul of the wayward tale. One of the first documents he examined was the medical report on Pfc. Oswald's self-inflicted gunshot wound. In one sentence the weapon is described as 45-caliber. In the next sentence it is 22-caliber. Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.
Oswald's eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud. Branch has support for all these propositions in eyewitness testimony and commission exhibits.
Oswald even looks like different people from one photograph to the next. He is solid, frail, thin-lipped, broad-featured, extroverted, shy and bank-clerkish, all, with the columned neck of a fullback. He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero. In another photo he sits in profile with a group of fellow Marines on a rattan mat under palm trees. Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him.
The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions-eye color, weapons caliber-these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President's body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? The multiple Oswald reappears. Isn't that him in a photograph of a crowd of people on the front steps of the Book Depository just as the shooting begins? A startling likeness, Branch concedes. He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
Every name takes him on a map tour of the Dallas labyrinth.
Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein. He adopted the middle name Leon to honor the memory of a friend, Leon Cooke, shot to death in a labor dispute.
There are several versions of George de Mohrenschildt's name. He sometimes used the alias Philip Harbin.
Carmine Latta was born Carmelo Rosario Lattanzi.
Walter Everett used the cover name Thomas R. Stainback during his years in clandestine work.
Lee Oswald used about a dozen names including the backward-running O. H. Lee and the peculiar D. F. Drictal. He employed the latter in the blank space for Witness when he filled out an order form for the revolver he purchased through the mail. Branch has toiled over the inner structure of D. F. Drictal for many an hour. He feels like a child with alphabet blocks, trying to make a pretty word, and he has managed to find fragments of the names Fidel, Castro, Oswald and Dupard. It may be that D. F. Drictal is the strained merging of written and living characters, of words and politics, a witness to the decision to assassinate General Walker. Branch wonders whether Oswald registered the fact that the general's first name and middle initial match those of Edwin A. Ekdahl, young Lee's stepfather for a time and the man Marguerite Oswald never stopped blaming.