Free Libra by Don DeLillo

Quarter has its vagrants and others. There are certain type bars, including we live over a pool hall, and there is business and gambling on the street. I would also state prostitutes by the galore. But in defense of a mother’s position, he missed only nine days in his last term at Beauregard when I was working at Kreeger’s, 800 and something Canal Street. His future and his dream is the United States Marines, which we bickered back and forth because he used a false affidavit to join but failed at this time. It is only a question of getting to age seventeen, although he has already left school, which he says is for good. This is a boy who grins while they are beating him up and waits for national news on TV. As far as his mother’s place in his heart, he has worked as a messenger and office boy and bought me a thirty-five-dollar coat with his first pay and who gives over money to his mother for room and board and bought me a parakeet in a cage that came with a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. It is a question of adjusting, your honor, and he will make the effort every time. I cannot say enough how hard it is to raise boys without a father. I was sitting pretty in our American slang, managing Princess Hosiery, when Mr. Ekdahl proposed in the car. I made him wait a year and he was a Harvard man. I have always seemed to make a home against the odds. I have often been complimented on my appearance and my little bright touches here and there and now I am thinking we will go to Texas again to be with his brother Robert, to be a family again, in Fort Worth, so this boy can be with his brother. And I don’t want to hear how I call the movers all the time. The point of our century is people move. I am a mother of three who sold needles and thread and yarn in her own shop in the front room of the house on Bartholomew Street, a frame house with a backyard, when Lee was a baby in a crib. I was a popular child, your honor. I was raised by a father with five other children to be happy and patriotic. I have made my best effort to raise my boy in this manner, regardless. Whatever is said by them, and they are at it all the time, he knows who has been his main support from the moment I took him home from the Old French Hospital on Orleans Avenue. I am not the looming mother of a boy’s bad dreams.
    George Gobel appeared on the screen, stubby, crewcut, with a wholesome smirk, right hand raised to the middle of his forehead in some kind of antic fraternal small-town salute.
    Lee was in his room reading about the conversion of surplus value into capital, following the text with his index finger, word by word by word.

26 April
    Pocket litter. Win Everett was at work devising a general shape, a life. He would script a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper, the contents of a wallet. Parmenter would contrive to get document blanks from the Records Branch. Mackey would, find a model for the character Everett was in the process of creating. They wanted a name, a face, a bodily frame they might use to extend their fiction into the world. Everett had decided he wanted one figure to be slightly more visible than the others, a man the investigation might center on, someone who would be trailed and possibly apprehended. Three or four shooters would vanish completely, leaving scant traces of their affiliation. Spanish-speaking men, Mexican, Panamanian, trained specifically for this mission in Cuba. Then one other figure, one slightly clearer image, perhaps abandoned in his sniper’s perch to find his own way out, to be trailed, found, possibly killed by the Secret Service, FBI or local police. Whatever protocol demands. This kind of man, a marksman, near anonymous, with minimal known history, the kind of man who surfaces in murky places, disappears, is arrested for some violent act, is released to drift again, to surface, to disappear. Mackey would