Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring Read Online Free Page B

keeping up. Meanwhile, I’m getting zero cooperation from Barbara. The marriage is vegetating. I was in Norfolk and the family was in Charleston, where we owned a small bar, so I’m running down to Charleston every weekend and Barbara is the pits. At this point, she is a problem drinker. God, I can see her now, a cigarette in one hand and a fucking glass in the other with her legs crossed at the end of this stinking line of bar stools.
    “Sex between us is stopping and I mean stopping fast. There is no intimacy. I know that she is having an affair with someone. I don’t know who, but I know. A husband always knows. A wife knows too. Your wife knows what you do and you know what she does without asking. You just know such things. You can sense them. I’m not the kind of person who would confront someone. If I walked in the house and caught my wife in bed with some guy, I would have backed out the door and laughed at the fucking dummies. I’m not the kind who would shoot them, that’s for sure. I’m not saying it didn’t bother me. Sure, it did, she was my wife, but I would have overlooked it. I didn’t know at the time that it was my own goddamn brother who was screwing her. If I had figured it out I would have confronted him.”
    John paused and then grinned. “I would have said, ‘Hey Art, I know you’re fucking Barbara. Goddamn, I thought you had better taste.’ “
    He laughed and watched to see if I smiled. I did and then he said, “That’s not really true. I was just trying to be funny, but this wasn’t a funny situation. The truth was that my life sucked, really sucked.”
    Suddenly, it seemed as if John had become exhausted and a great burden had been placed on his shoulders. His speech slowed.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “that’s when I began to feel like I was back in the same hole that I had come from. I had an alcoholic father, and I saw the horrors of that and I promised myself that I would never be an alcoholic because I knew how destructive they were to the family and I didn’t want to submit my kids to that bullshit, This is where the depression happened. Every chance that I got, I was trying to find some way to generate enough money to keep the bar going and Barbara wouldn’t let up. . . . Nag, nag, nag. Yack, yack, yack. Where is the money coming from?
    “I had a trailer behind the bar, sixty feet by twelve feet. It was the biggest you could get, so she wasn’t living bad, but really strange things started happening. The kids were running wild. Things were out of control.
    “It got to be too much. I was sitting in my goddamn room in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] in Norfolk, this shitty little room that the Navy gave me, and I was cleaning my pistol.
    “It’s hard to explain, it’s irritating really because I’m a very rational person. You will find that out about me the more we talk. But I just couldn’t handle another argument with Barbara. I was off submarines, which I missed, and I was stuck working on a desk and I really missed submarines, I mean, God I loved submarine duty, and Barbara had become a nagging bitch and a fucking alcoholic. I kept thinking, ‘How can this be happening? How can my life be so screwed up?’ I had a small insurance policy, ten-thousand-dollar whole life, I think, maybe more, but it was enough to payoff the bar debts and keep the place going for a while and I kept thinking about that money and how killing myself would get Barbara off my back too. It would have been more logical to divorce the bitch. I mean, the wife that I married at twenty was not the same person at thirty. I mean, I never would have considered even dating her if we’d met when we were both thirty.
    “So I took the gun, the .38, I think, and I loaded the piece, I’m sure it was the .38, and I was in my room at the BOQ and I said, ‘Screw it,’ and I chambered a round and put that son-of-a-bitch up to my head, and I held it there and a few tears ran and I just