Free Libra by Don DeLillo Page A

find this man for Everett. They needed fingerprints, a handwriting sample, a photograph. Mackey would find the other shooters as well. We don’t hit the President. We miss him. We want a spectacular miss.
    Win sat alone on the porch. There was a glass of lemonade on a wicker table. Plants stood in tubs and window boxes, in terracotta pots on the steps. The brick walk was bordered in monkey grass. He waited for Mary Frances.
    Of all the cities where the attempt might be made, Miami was the clear choice. Hundreds of exile factions lived there, conspired and squabbled, waited for another chance— movimientos, juntas, uniones. Win imagined how word would flash through the area, through all his old exile haunts, La Moderne Hotel, the offices of the Frente leadership. Miami had a resonance, an ardor. It was a city of open wounds, of explosive politics and feelings. This very inflammability, this Cuban heat and light, made him determined to keep the plan a secret from anti-Castro leaders.
    Kennedy had been in Miami four months earlier to accept the brigade flag from survivors of the invasion, many just ransomed from Cuban prisons. This was the necessary cleansing of emotions. The failure was now openly acknowledged, commemorated before forty thousand people in a football stadium, all the repressed material sent in reconverted waves into Televisionland, where Everett had sat watching. He respected the President for going to Miami. He was surprised and touched when the President’s wife spoke Spanish to brigade members. But the ceremony had not renewed the cause, the forceful devotion to a free Havana. He saw it now as pure public relations, the kind of gleaming imagery that marked every move the administration made.
    The car pulled up and he went down the steps to help Mary Frances take the groceries inside. He gripped the heavy bags. A wind sprang from the east, an idea of rain, sudden, pervading the air. He saw himself go inside, a fellow on a quiet street doing ordinary things, unafraid of being watched.
    He stood in the pantry and she handed things in to him. The bulb had blown and he stood in the dimness putting objects on shelves. The faintly musty smell, the coolness of the small room, the familiar labels on jars and cans made him feel like an ancient and tired child, someone allowed to relive the simplest, the deepest times, moments that left a scar on the heart—not an evidence of some detailed pain but only of time itself, systemic, heavy with loss. He tried to register the idea of the burnt-out bulb so he wouldn’t forget to replace it. He heard a shaking in the sky and thought of thunderstorms when he was a boy growing up in the country, the boy who tried not to seem smarter than his older brothers, seeing the light change, the landscape become serious, solemn. Everything ran with fear. It leapt out of the air into things and into children. Those smoky storms approaching. He used to stand in the pantry counting to fifty because that’s when the thunder would stop.
    “I have to pick up Suzanne.”
    “I’ll finish this, he said.
    “Don’t you have a class?”
    “Canceled.”
    “I want to stop at Penney’s for a couple of things.”
    “We should all stop at Penney’s.”
    “No but just some things I’ve been meaning to get. We won’t be long.”
    “Penney’s is home to us all.”
    “The light bulbs are stacked in the back stairway.”
    “She reads my mind. She remembers for me.”
    “I won’t be long,” she said.
    Parmenter would tell him in advance if there were plans for JFK to return to Miami. Sooner or later the President would venture out with his train of attendants, protectors, handshakers and hacks, a city, a street where he’d be vulnerable. Everett was willing to wait a year for Miami. The message would be clearest there, a long-range attempt, high-angled, telescopic, without the pointless human mess some madman would create, walking out of a crowd with the family handgun.
    He followed