After we killed the President, I took the car with Sandy Delacroix and Anthony Avara down from Dallas destined for San Antonio, took us curling around those Mediterranean hills dressed in the autocratic gold and tangerine of a Texas autumn afternoon that, by then, was just about choosing to put down its sun, was tapping out its spark on the rim of a horizon fairly struck with the bashful surplus of the day, a day, might as well add, beautifully conquered. She was taking off her little crown, I thought, taking it off her falls and floods of hair, doing so with such appeasement as we turned through the hills and aimed south, taking it off with such grace and that rare, happy expectation of a full and easy sleep ahead, a refreshment for her body. She was loosing herself of all those articles which in the night become like nooses. She was slipping into the evening naked enough, with the burn of a wind’s chill on her skin and that rawness – not of any shames, to be sure – slapped like honey on her cheeks. We were turning the hills easily and coming down into the valley, with a far-off, sublime ridge striking a bright line across the windows like the hammer of a fallen god crashed upon the hot anvil of earth’s crust, hanging out there in the east and drinking up the guts of the day, the cool hard face burning in the death of yet another day, in the death of yet another king – really, in the glory of that somber murdered king. Who’d been the last one? Wasn’t it McKinley? We all hadn’t thought much about that kind of thing – precedent, history, legacy, I mean – before we pulled our triggers and got our barrels hot in Dallas. We only acted. But now old Jack seemed well-mixed into the story, dried solid already, elevated in bloody hard sheets into some new lore we’d fashioned from rare and ancient fabrics passed down. We’d done Jack this favor then, gilded him his handsome death mask. Now take McKinley. Had he been done any favor such as what we did for Jack? No, I thought, as we rumbled down into our final beam south with the first star breaking over the east. McKinley’s death was an immediate historical necessity, his death was demanded by the powerful destiny of T.R. who was robed, massaged, limber and oiled in his corner. McKinley didn’t know, or else couldn’t help knowing, that picking up that bright and wild sword pushed onto him the benevolent fury that doomed him. I’m not saying anyone had anything to do with a positive plan to uproot McKinley in favor of T.R. – such a job is just so highly improbable. That some amalgam of men with any mass of power, with any talent of elite organization to kill a President, might make its long play for Teddy. No, it was T.R.’s personal force, his steaming inevitability, that pushed the universe and all its functionaries and actors into something it had no method of keeping a lid on, even if resistance were an act the universe could opt for. It fell to its law, a magnetic field that sank all objects toward this bottom number, the digits that spelled McKinley’s eventual removal – whether by an anarchist or some other foe sickened by corporate profits, who really cared? Could T.R. have ever been President without the death of McKinley? So, McKinley was a kind of opportunistic and unwitting John the Baptist, if I may use that deadened metaphor, smilingly trimming a path for his opposite which he thought was for himself, embarked in fact upon the earth to do only this clean, gentlemanly act at the end of his otherwise replete life, cast in the original plans only to ascend within the noted parameters and clear a neat, sure road, leaving little else behind him for his own memory, even less now, but the name affixed to a windswept mountain somewhere treacherous, a sad, lost little legacy. Jack, it seems to me, is different. His death has meaning – in itself, without the impulse for any others. Everything in that unfailing Texas void assured me, everything assured in the old cruel land that offered us only its most pleasant remarks through the seal of the car windows, a land which raised up its hailing hand to the strong powerful hum of an engine that carried us safely through like honored passengers on a hostile planet, that watching monster of nature confided to us wordlessly the very destiny we had, by certain mortal mechanisms and forces, enacted, as her own knights, when Jack came swinging idly around the hairpin turn. Everything in it shored up our spines, promoted us in Jack’s death to his death, joined us in his service. What we did, we must have done for Jack, it seemed – not Lyndon nor Giancana nor Trafficante nor Dick Nixon, nor any other. And the way we heard Lee went down made it all the more elegant to us, wouldn’t you say? Made the air drift all the more sweetly, made our smiles come all easier, filled our limbs with that light languid power known only to a certain criminal breed, to which Lee might have thought he belonged until he was taken alive at the theater. A theater, so wonderful a place for the capture of an assassin, an ingenious flourish for which he or his designer should be thunderously applauded, for which these very hills should stand amazed. Wasn’t it inside Ford Theater where Lincoln was shot? Wasn’t it outside a theater where Dillinger was gunned down and his blood ran in the scatter of lights? And it was in the Theater of Pompey where the resenting senators finally filled Gaius Julius Caesar with their daggers. Is this not the way fate tips its hat, flies its wink, puts out the light and passes through the door? As for us, the three of us who helped transfigure Jack, we would pass on through the strong coming night to San Antonio. And under that city’s starry invitation, we might find us a place to hear some saloon piano, which is what we all settled for. Then, after a night of sweat lost and ankles turned despite the national tragedy, we’d hurl whatever remained of us into the sleepy harbor of some low motel, some place with its eyes left only half open, and make beautiful corpses of ourselves in the hug of its sheets. That’s the idea.
— Bryan Rouleau is a fiction writer from New England. Bryan’s first ancestor in the new world sailed from Normandy. At Three Rivers, in Canada, his wife and children were slaughtered by natives. He married again and had more children. Happy Thanksgiving @BPRouleau