Wayfaring Stranger

  “What’s the ‘real deal’?” I said to Wiseheart.

  “You don’t rattle. You refinanced yourself, and you’re back in the game. I admire that.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “Come on up to the highway with me. I want your advice about something.”

  “You need to explain how you know about my financial situation.”

  “You think a blabbermouth like Lloyd Fincher can keep a confidence? Wake up.”

  “What do you want advice about?”

  “It’s not about business.”

  “Will you answer my question, sir?”

  He looked sideways and blew out his breath. “It’s personal as it gets. Call it a spiritual problem.”

  “I’m probably not your guy.”

  “Then to hell with you.”

  “Say again?”

  “You don’t understand English?”

  “I want to make sure I heard you right before I knock you down.”

  He smiled, pointing his finger at me, as though tapping on the air. “See what I’m saying? You’ve got moxie, bud.”

  WE DROVE IN his truck to a ramshackle roadhouse set back in a grove of live oaks and slash pines not far from the edge of a vast swamp. The sky had darkened, and the air smelled of ozone and brass and fish that had died from the explosive charges set off underwater by a seismic rig. The roadhouse was attached to a six-room motel that had already turned on the neon tubing that ran along the eaves. A gleaming purple Lincoln Continental, with whitewalls and wire wheels, was parked in front of the last room on the road.

  “Is that your vehicle?” I asked.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Has anyone told you this is a hot-pillow joint?”

  “I like to check in on the folk and see what they’re up to.”

  “The folk?” I said.

  He was laughing. “You’re the perfect straight man,” he said.

  The roadhouse was almost empty. We sat at a table in front of the window fan and ordered a plate of boudin and two bottles of Dr. Nut. Wiseheart watched the waitress walk away from the table. “Is this place really a cathouse?”

  “That’s its reputation.”

  “What an irony. You know what I want your advice about?”

  “No clue.”

  “You ever stray?”

  “From what?”

  “You know what.”

  “My marriage vows?”

  “Boy, you’re fast as lightning.”

  “That’s why you got me here? I can’t believe this.”

  “My wife has multiple mental problems. I won’t go into detail. Put it this way: Her father liked little girls. One night he decided to drive himself and his wife off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean. Since the night her parents died, my wife has been an ice cube.”

  I was trying to signal the waitress to bring the check.

  “I say something wrong?” Wiseheart asked.

  The shadows of the fan blades were rippling across his face. The impropriety of speaking about his marital problems to someone he hardly knew seemed totally lost on him. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I got into a sexual relationship with another man’s wife,” he said. “I don’t feel good about it. I’ve had a dalliance here and there, but not with a married woman.”

  “Then get out of it.”

  “Hell hath no fury,” he said.

  “What do you want from me?”

  He folded his hands on the table and looked out the window at the swamp and the thunderheads building in the south and the wind straightening the moss in the trees. “I just wondered what you thought of me.”

  “Why should you care about my opinion?”

  “I know your war record. You were at Omaha Beach and the Bulge. You heard the story about the Nip trainer I shot down at the expense of my squadron leader?”

  I looked away from him.

  “I had four kills. The trainer gave me five and the status of an ace. All I saw was the rising sun on the fuselage. I thought it was a Zero. I didn’t realize my mistake until I was down on the deck. I took out the trainer anyway. When it caught fire, I saw the pilot’s face. He looked like he was seventeen. When I climbed back upstairs, it was too late to help Captain Levy.”

  “You thought you were protecting him. As far as the Japanese trainee is concerned, maybe he would have flown a kamikaze into the side of an American battleship.”

  “Not everybody thinks that way.”

  “They weren’t there. They’ve never paid any dues. They have no idea how you think when other people are trying to kill you. What if the trainer had been a Zero and gotten on your leader’s tail?”

  “You’re a good guy, Holland.”

  “There’s nothing exceptional about me. Regarding that other matter, my advice is to bail out.”

  “Which matter is that?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh, the marital question. I don’t know about that. She’s quite a gal.”

  “I’m done on this.”

  He beamed. “I nailed you again. That’s three times. I have to invite you to one of our poker games. God, you’re fun.”

  I’ve always subscribed to the notion that we can never really know the soul of another. I didn’t know whether Roy Wiseheart was tormented by his conscience or his ego. Maybe a little of both. Or was he simply a manipulator? I went to the bar and paid our check. When I returned to the table, he was staring out the window at the rain dimpling the water in the swamp. “Know why I stay at a place like this?” he asked.

  “No, you’re a mystery man.”

  “My room doesn’t have a phone. Nobody knows who I am. I fish at sunset and sunrise for big-mouth bass. I caught an eight-pounder right by that clump of flooded gum trees.”

  “I need to get back to the line,” I said.

  “They’re going to get you.”

  “That’s the second time in less than a week someone has delivered me a vague warning. Who are they?”

  “Take your choice.”

  “Why am I a threat to anyone?”

  “You’re a water walker. Guys like you cause trouble. You’re not a team player. Wait till you meet some of the Saudis. Some of them should be forced to wear full-body condoms.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “They’ll crush you and Pine. They’ll bankrupt your family and turn you against each other, they’ll take away your home, they’ll ruin your name. They can make a speed bump out of a guy without breaking a sweat.”

  “My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and kicked him in the face and locked him in jail,” I said. “I put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s automobile, with Clyde and Bonnie Parker and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend inside. I was sixteen. What do you think of that?”

  He didn’t answer my question. Maybe with the rain tinking on the fan blades, he couldn’t hear everything I said, or maybe he was unimpressed by the rural and violent world in which I had grown up.

  We walked outside just as the rain cut loose. Then a strange event occurred that made me realize Roy Wiseheart would never be a quick study. A bolt of lightning struck a cypress tree not twenty yards from us, splintering the trunk, cooking the leaves, boiling the water around the roots, filling the air with a thunderous clap that was like someone slapping the flats of his hands on my eardrums. Mud and water and the detritus of the tree showered down on our heads. Wiseheart never moved. He stared at the smoke and flame rising from the base of the tree, his expression composed. “Incoming,” he said. “Told you. We’re on the wrong side of things, Holland.”

  I wanted to get a lot of distance between me and Roy Wiseheart.

  ONE MONTH LATER, the right-of-way flooded and we had to shut down the line for five days and return
to Houston. On a fine summer evening, I drove to Hershel’s home on Hawthorne Street to talk over an offshore pipeline south of Lake Charles. I caught Hershel and Linda Gail unawares, in the midst of moving. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Into our new home,” Linda Gail replied. “In River Oaks.”

  I looked at Hershel. He grinned and glanced away.

  “River Oaks?” I said.

  “Is something wrong with that?” Linda Gail said.

  The dead-end street where they were living was beautiful, lined with bungalows and two-story brick houses and green lawns and shade trees. On the other side of the cul-de-sac were a canebrake and a huge pasture with live oaks in it that must have been two hundred years old. Beyond the pasture, against a salmon sky, you could see the neon-striped tower of a theater called the Alabama. The ambiance was a fusion of the pastoral and the urban South, in the best possible way. “Why would you want to leave?” I asked.

  That was a mistake.

  “Maybe it’s none of your business, Mr. Weldon Avery Holland,” she said.

  “He’s just kidding, Linda Gail,” Hershel said. “Tell him what we’re doing. He has a misunderstanding.”

  “I don’t see any misunderstanding at all,” she said. “We’re moving into an elegant neighborhood. Are you suggesting we don’t belong there, Weldon?”

  “I like the bungalow y’all have, that’s all. This street puts me in mind of Norman Rockwell. There’s a watermelon stand just yonder on Westheimer, under those live oaks. There’s a firehouse on up the street, and an ice cream parlor and a grocery that has all its produce and fruit out on the porch. I always liked this part of Houston.”

  “Well, I’m sure The Saturday Evening Post would love your endorsement,” she said. “If it will make you feel better, we are not buying the house in River Oaks. It is being lent to us by Jack Valentine. He’s the documentary director who arranged my screen test at Castle Productions.”

  “It’s a rent-with-option-to-buy deal, Weldon,” Hershel said.

  “I need to talk with you about laying some pipe in Calcasieu Parish,” I said.

  “Do y’all have to do that now?” Linda Gail said.

  “Yeah, we do, Linda Gail,” I said.

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Please be candid in your response, too. Where would you be without Hershel’s welding machines?”

  “Sweetheart, don’t be saying something like that,” Hershel said.

  “I would appreciate your not telling me what to say and what not to say,” she replied.

  I should have left. But business was business, and principle was principle. “How about I buy y’all some ice cream?” I said.

  “I’ll be in the house, packing,” she said. “Jack will be here in twenty minutes with the van. Try to be of some help, would you, please, Hershel?”

  She went into the house, a brick one-story bungalow covered with English ivy, and flowerbeds filled with roses and blue and pink hydrangeas. Hershel got into the car with me. I didn’t start the engine. “This won’t take long,” I said. “We can probably get the contract for that well going in the south of Calcasieu Parish. We can also get in on the drilling.”

  “I don’t know, Weldon. We got burned pretty bad at New Roads.”

  “I’ve talked to the geologist. I went to school with him. I trust him. He says the odds are one in three we’ll punch into a dome.”

  “You call it.”

  “Nope. Dixie Belle is a partnership.”

  “I’m not thinking too clear right now. I thought this house in River Oaks might make Linda Gail happy. But nothing makes her happy. She’s always mad about something.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “What do you reckon it might be?”

  I shook my head and didn’t reply.

  “We went to the public pool, and she told me to wear canvas shoes till I got in the water. I asked if she didn’t like being seen in public with a man missing three of his toes. She said she was concerned for the children at the pool.”

  I looked through the windshield at a rainbow that seemed to dip into the pasture. Clouds that resembled lavender horsetails were scattered against the sun’s afterglow. What a perfect evening, I thought, wondering why we often substitute pain for the fruits of heaven and earth. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the level of injury in Hershel’s eyes was one I’ll never forget. “You should have received the Silver Star instead of me,” I said. “You’re the best line sergeant I ever knew, and one of the best human beings.”

  “Maybe she was telling the truth. Kids get shocked easily. My right foot looks like the flipper on a seal.”

  “You want to go in on the well?”

  “Hell yeah, I do,” he replied. He patted his hands up and down on his knees. “Weldon?”

  “What is it?”

  I knew what was coming. I wanted to get out of the automobile and begin walking back to the Heights before he said it. But I was trapped in my car with no way to exit the situation. I could see the neon-lit tower of the movie theater against the paleness of the sky, like a beacon telling us of the promise that awaited us in America’s Babylon by the sea. “You think Linda Gail is having an affair?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t have any way of knowing something like that,” I said. “I recommend getting those thoughts out of your head.”

  A few minutes later, the documentary-maker named Jack Valentine arrived with a moving van and three workmen, and the Pines began moving their furniture out of the bungalow on Hawthorne in preparation for their new life in a sprawling oak-canopied green arbor across town, one where moat and castle were norms and even moth and rust and decay were given short shrift.

  THE HARDEST AND dirtiest work in the oil patch is done by the crews who cut right-of-ways and build board roads in swampy terrain. Imagine walking in a flooded woods dense with mosquitoes in hundred-degree heat, hacking your way through air vines and cypress and gum and willow trees, always watching for a cottonmouth moccasin that might drop from a branch on your neck or sink its fangs in your wrist when you reach down to move a log. Your boots are encased in mud up to the ankles; your clothes are sopping with sweat; gnats get in your nose and mouth; leeches attach themselves to your calves; your eyes burn. If you drink all the water in the canteen, you’re out of luck. Your face feels poached, out of round from all the mosquito bites. The air smells of humus and carrion and water grown stagnant inside the mud; there is a rawness to it that is like the odor of birth or fish roe or leakage from a sewer line. Through the trees, you can see waves smacking against a sandbar out on the bay, but there is no wind inside the woods, no breath of fresh air, no movement of any kind, and the hottest part of the day is ahead.

  We were cutting a right-of-way through the southern tip of Calcasieu Parish when an old yellow school bus with Texas plates lumbered along the levee and stopped just above a dry spot that our brush gang and board road crew were using as a staging area. A man dressed in a cowboy shirt and straw hat and khaki pants stuffed inside rubber boots swung off the bus and approached me, the string and tab of a Bull Durham tobacco sack hanging out of his shirt pocket. The bus was packed from stem to stern with dark-skinned Mexicans. Not one of them got up from his seat to stretch or get a drink from the water can or relieve himself in the bushes.

  “Well, we made it,” the man said, extending his hand. “Tell me where you want them at.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I got thirty-two men waiting to clear brush and lay board road.”

  “Not for me, you don’t.”

  “You’re with Dixie Belle?”

  “I’m half owner. Somebody gave you a bum lead. We’ve got our own people.”

  One of his eyes was watery and had no color and kept blinking, like an injured moth. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and press
ed the moisture out of it. “We drove all the way from San Antone. I think you’re mixed up.”

  “No, I’m not the one with the problem. You’ve got the wrong address.”

  “Hang on. I’ve got the paperwork on the bus.”

  “Don’t bother. Obviously, a mistake was made. But that’s it. This conversation is over.”

  “Sir, don’t turn your back on me. Sir? Sir, did you hear me?”

  I turned around. The men on the bus were all looking at me through the windows. “Who do you work for?”

  “Minuteman, Incorporated.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. But you need to leave now. I’m sorry about your men. There’s a campground outside Lake Charles where they can shower and rest up.”

  “You think we’re just gonna drive off?”

  “Unless you want the mosquitoes to start eating on you.”

  I walked away. A couple of minutes later, I heard him start up the bus and clank the transmission into gear. “What was that about?” Hershel said.

  I told him.

  “How did he get our name? How’d he know where we were?” he said.

  “You got me.”

  “He’s out of San Antonio?”

  “Yeah, same place Lloyd Fincher lives,” I replied.

  That night the phone rang in my motel room. I hoped the call was from Rosita. It wasn’t. “What the hell is going on over there, Weldon?” Fincher said.

  “How you doin’, Major?” I said.

  “Not very well. I just heard from a labor office we use. Minuteman is their name.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “From your wife. You told the crew leader to get lost?”

  “No, I told him he’d made a mistake.”

  “You didn’t get my message that these guys were headed over there?”

  “No, I didn’t. When did you become an executive with our company?”

  “Maybe you don’t quite understand the nature of our arrangement. Our loan agreement guarantees us one percent of Dixie Belle’s profits as long as the contract is in effect.”