Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.
1
“—last gunslinger,” Andrew said.
He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
“I beg pardon?”
“Oh, it was just some column in the paper,” Andrew said. “I dunno who wrote it. I didn’t notice. One of those political fellas. Prob’ly you’d know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected—”
She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn’t stop, wasn’t responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing—cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources （among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes）—but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.
“But I didn’t cry when that son of a bitch—pardon my French, Miz Holmes—when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn’t cried since, and it’s been—what, two months?”
Three months and two days, she thought.
“Something like that, I guess.”
Andrew nodded. “Then I read this column—in The Daily News, it mighta been—yesterday, about how Johnson’s probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won’t be the same. The guy said America had seen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger.”
“I don’t think John Kennedy was that at all,” Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accustomed to hearing （which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince）， it was because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase—America has seen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger—that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue—John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that was more in the Goldwater line—but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.
“Well, the guy said there would be no shortage of shooters in the world,” Andrew went on, regarding her nervously in the rear-view mirror. “He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti—”
“Duvalier,” she said. “Papa Doc.”
“Yeah, him, and Diem—”
“The Diem brothers are dead.”
“Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that’s all. He said he would draw, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talking don’t do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it’s foaming at the mouth you have to shoot it.”
His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively.
“Besides, it was just some column I read.”
The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenue now, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac emblem on the end of the hood cutting the frigid February air.
“Yes,” Odetta said mildly, and Andrew’s eyes relaxed a trifle. “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand.”
You are a liar, a voice spoke up in her mind. This was a voice she heard quite often. She had even named it. It was the voice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree completely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God’s sake don’t lie to yourself, woman.