Wayfaring Stranger

  I could feel a vibration through the soles of my shoes, then the pipes on the wellhead began to sweat in drops that were as big and bright and wet to the touch as a bucket full of silver coins lifted from a sunken galleon. Every connector pipe was as cold as an ice tray fresh out of a freezer. The driller dipped a board into a can of turpentine and lit it and touched the burning end to a flare line that immediately erupted in flames reaching a hundred feet into the sky.

  The confined eruption of oil and natural gas and salt water and sand through the wellhead created a level of pressure and structural conflict not unlike an ocean channeled through the neck of a beer bottle. The molecular composition of the steel rigging seemed to stiffen against the sky. A hammer fell from somewhere in the rigging, clanging through the spars as loudly as a cathedral bell, but no one paid any attention, even when the hammer bounced off the roof of the doghouse.

  “Wahoo!” Hershel said, jumping up and down on the deck. “Wahoo!” He began singing the lyrics from a song I’d heard beer-joint bands play for years: “ ‘Ten days on, five days off, I guess my blood is crude oil now. I reckon I’ll never lose them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.’ Lord God in heaven, we’re rich, Weldon!” Then he shouted again: “Wahoo!”

  He wasn’t through. He stood on his hands and walked across the deck.

  “Did you ever see a happier man?” Rosita said.

  “Never,” I replied.

  “The private detective killed in the hit-and-run?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t let his evil live beyond the grave,” she said.

  THE WEEKS FOLLOWING the completion of the rig were grand. We paid down our debt to Lloyd Fincher’s insurance company and started up another pipeline in Victoria, Texas, and one in Lottie, Louisiana. Linda Gail and Hershel painted their humble house in River Oaks, and she applied for admission in the River Oaks Country Club. Rosita and I went back to Grandfather’s ranch and planted a windbreak of poplar trees on the north side of the house, and bought my mother an automobile and hired a man to teach her how to drive. We celebrated Grandfather’s ninetieth birthday with a three-layer cake that had white icing and pink candles. Among his friends at the party were old men who had been drovers on the Goodnight-Loving and the Chisholm Trail, and twins who had gone up Kettle Hill with Fighting Joe Wheeler.

  I did not know how to tell Grandfather or my mother about my father’s death. My mother was not stable and never would be. My father and Grandfather had never gotten along. My father was also a Holland, but a distant cousin, one who Grandfather claimed was a woods colt and not a legitimate member of the family. He had resented my father’s drinking and blamed it for my mother’s mental and emotional problems. For many years, Grandfather had been a master at transferring his guilt onto others. But I felt he had come to accept responsibility for his wayward life and for neglecting his children, and I didn’t want to open old wounds by telling him or my mother that my father had found work but hadn’t cared enough about his family to send money home or tell us where he was.

  Or maybe I couldn’t face the fact that my father’s first love was alcohol and that everything else, even his son, was secondary.

  I tried. Right after Grandfather’s birthday party, he and I were sitting on the porch in the sunset, our newly planted poplars green and stiffening in the breeze, the underbelly of the rain clouds as red as a forge. He was drinking his coffee from the saucer.

  I told him what I had learned of my father’s fate from McFey. He didn’t speak for a long time. “It was him in the photographs? You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I’d like to get the people who caused the accident. I’d like to get the ones who covered it up.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You feel he betrayed you?”

  “I don’t know if ‘betrayed’ is the right word.”

  “He couldn’t call y’all collect and tell you he was okay and coming home directly? That’s not betrayal?”

  “Yes, sir, I wondered why he didn’t do those things.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get the chance. There’d be no reason for him not to contact you. His grievance wasn’t against you and your mother. It was against me. What’s the name of the company he was working for?”

  “I don’t know. The private detective was killed by a hit-and-run driver the day after I met him.”

  “That’s pretty convenient for somebody, isn’t it?” he said.

  “I’d say so.”

  “You cain’t do what you’re thinking.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “Same thing you did when you put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s stolen automobile.”

  “McFey knew all about that. He was a guard in Eastham Pen.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, Satchel Ass? String the phone out here and bring me my address book.”

  “Would you not call me that awful name?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I went inside the house and brought out the telephone on a long cord. I also brought him the black notebook by which he kept in contact with his shrinking army of old friends. Then I went out in the vegetable garden and began hoeing weeds out of the rows, the sun melting inside its own heat on the earth’s rim. When I went back on the porch, Grandfather was wearing his spectacles, looking at the piece of notepaper he had written on and torn from his book.

  “One friend of mine knew McFey at Eastham,” he said. “He says McFey was a harsh shepherd and made life as miserable as possible for Clyde Barrow. Barrow may have been raped at Eastham. Maybe repeatedly. A former Ranger told me McFey went to work for the Coronado Oil Company.”

  “Coronado is owned by the Wiseheart family,” I said.

  “Well, McFey got himself fired for padding his expense account.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Two or three years back.”

  “That coincides with what Roy Wiseheart told me.”

  “According to my friend, McFey was always bragging on his access to rich people.” Grandfather looked again at the page he had torn from his notebook. “He did chores for Clara Wiseheart. That’s Roy Wiseheart’s wife, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” I said, feeling my face constrict. “What kind of chores?”

  “That’s what I asked. Know what my friend said? ‘When you work for somebody whose family owns a quarter of a billion dollars, you do whatever they tell you.’”

  “That’s what the Wisehearts are worth?” I said.

  “You got it wrong. Her family is the one with the big money. Roy Wiseheart married up.”

  I sat down on the steps. It had been a wet summer, and the pastures and the low-lying hills were still green. The last of the sunlight was glinting like a red diamond at the bottom of the sky, and hundreds of Angus were silhouetted in its afterglow. Grandfather maintained that our land had been soaked in blood, first by Indians, then by Spaniards, then by Mexicans and white colonists, then by Rangers who virtually exterminated the Indian population after Texas gained its independence in 1836. I picked up a piece of dried mud from the step and tossed it out on the flagstones. “Blood and excrement,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s our contribution to the earth.”

  Grandfather removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “You feel your friend Wiseheart took you on a snipe hunt?”

  “That’s close.”

  “It doesn’t change what you are. The shame is on him. Those people aren’t worth spitting on, Weldon. The Hollands are better than that bunch any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I’ll tell you something else, too. Since you were a little boy, I knew you’d be the one to shine.”

  I went into the house and got a carton of peach ice cream that Rosita had brought home that afternoon. I brought out two bowls a
nd two spoons, and Grandfather and I ate the entire carton, down to the bottom, under the porch light, while stars fell from the sky.

  LINDA GAIL PINE had hand-dropped invitations to her lawn party through the mail slots of her neighbors’ homes, up one side of the street and down the other. Many of the neighbors were people she had never met. For these, she had written a special note at the bottom: “Let’s not be strangers.” To some, in order to vary her language, she wrote an extra note: “We’ve heard so many good things about you. Bring children if you like.”

  She rented lawn furniture and strung bunting from the eaves of her house to the overhang of live oaks that grew in the neighbor’s yard. She hired a catering service and set up a bar under the gas lamp by the back fence and made sure the two bartenders arrived wearing white jackets and red bow ties and razor-creased black trousers, because that was what the bartenders had been wearing at a garden party she attended in the Hollywood Hills.

  That morning she and Hershel had received a letter from River Oaks Country Club, telling them their application for membership had been rejected. She dropped the letter in front of him on the dining room table. “What did you put on the application form?” she asked.

  “Our income for last year. That’s what they seemed most interested in. I guess it wasn’t enough.”

  “What about all the equipment you have? What about the oil well you just brought in? That’s not enough?”

  “They’re snobs, hon. We’re working people.”

  “I’m an actress and going back to a film location in three days. You’re the founding executive of a national company. How dare they write us a letter like this?”

  “To hell with them.”

  “I’m going to make them eat their words. They’re not going to treat us like this, Hershel.”

  The lawn party was to begin at five P.M. Rosita and I drove up at five-fifteen. There were no cars parked in front; the only car in the driveway was Hershel’s black Cadillac. We walked around the side of the house. Linda Gail was rearranging chairs in the backyard, her face pinched with anger. Next door a bunch of teenagers were diving in a swimming pool that glowed with a smoky green aura from the underwater lighting. She walked into the bamboo that grew along the fence and snapped her fingers at the swimmers. “Please tell the adult members of the household that I’m sorry they cannot attend our party,” she said. “Also tell them the noisy behavior of their ill-mannered children is not appreciated.”

  “This is going to be awful,” Rosita whispered.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied. “Talk to her. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Probably firing in the well.”

  I went inside and used the phone in the bedroom. The wallpaper and bedclothes and padded furniture were a blend of pale blue and pink and silver that reminded me of a child’s nursery. I dialed Roy Wiseheart’s home number.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “I need to clear up something,” I said.

  “Holland?”

  “I’ve been told that Harlan McFey was an employee of your wife.”

  “Oh, McFey again. Use your judgment, partner. Why would my wife have anything to do with a man like that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask her, if that will make you feel better. Maybe he worked for one of her family’s companies. You know how many people they employ?”

  “You said you had no connection to him. Were you lying to me?”

  “No, but I’ll tell you what. The next time I see you, I might just punch you in the nose.”

  “Save the martial rhetoric. Just answer yes or no. Did you lie to me?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you get an invitation to Linda Gail’s lawn party this evening?”

  “If she sent one, I never saw it.”

  “Oh, she sent it, all right. You would have been at the top of her list.”

  “Well, I didn’t get it, or at least I didn’t see it. So how about giving it a rest?”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Talking to you, which I wish I wasn’t doing. Give me the address. Remind me in the future not to answer my telephone on Saturday afternoon.”

  I told him where the house was. Then I said, “You have a lot of friends here’bouts. I bet they’d love to come over.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’ve got faith in you. You can do it. Make us proud.”

  He hung up. At 6:05 his Rolls-Royce pulled into the Pines’ driveway; his wife was not with him. Four couples from the neighborhood arrived; then others, people who drove modest automobiles. In the next hour, I met a golf pro, an accountant, a stockbroker, a social secretary, a cattleman, an Episcopalian minister, a female tennis champion, and an amphibian charter pilot who wore a patch over one eye. All of them seemed overjoyed to be invited to the home of a Hollywood actress who was a friend of Roy Wiseheart’s. Linda Gail was ecstatic. From across the yard, Wiseheart toasted me with his champagne glass.

  I couldn’t help but feel a great sense of kinship and warmth toward him. Random acts of charity define few of us, and seeing them in a man of his background made me think that the possibilities of goodness are at work in everyone, even those with whom we associate an avaricious and profligate ethos. Then I saw his eyes shift from me to Linda Gail. She was wearing a sundress, her shoulders smooth and tan and muscular, the tips of her dark brown hair burned almost blond, her breasts and hips tight against her dress when she reached up to retie a strip of bunting to the gas lamp.

  I had no doubt that something unexpected happened inside Roy Wiseheart. Maybe it was because he had acted in a charitable way toward her and he now saw her in a different light, or maybe he was entering that time in a man’s life when he falsely perceives his youth slipping away. The look on his face did not involve lust or desire; nor was it one of acquisitional need. I think he saw Linda Gail Pine as a rebellious and petulant and vain girl who needed a protector and was nothing like the women he had ever courted or slept with. She was also brazen, the kind who would incur a thousand cuts to prevail over an adversary. And she was very good to look at, with her countrywoman’s breasts and the childlike joy in her eyes.

  There was only one problem with Linda Gail: She was married. I walked across the St. Augustine grass and placed my hand on Wise­heart’s arm. I could feel the body heat trapped under his sport shirt. “Thanks for doing what you did,” I said.

  “Nothing to it,” he replied.

  “Hershel is my closest friend.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “I’d like for you to be the same,” I said.

  He turned so I would have to take my hand from his arm. His face was no more than six inches from mine. To this day, I don’t believe I have ever looked into a pair of more intelligent and perceptive eyes, nor had I ever met a man who was more aware of nuance than he. “I’d like that,” he replied.

  I gazed at the wire fence and bamboo that separated Hershel and Linda Gail’s property from the next-door neighbor’s. “Did you ever live in a neighborhood that didn’t have fences?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I guess setting boundaries is what civilization is all about. We set boundaries, and then we have to live within them. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  He was drinking a Scotch and soda. He rattled the ice cubes in the glass and watched Linda Gail carry a huge tray of baked Alaska from the kitchen to a serving table. “I never gave it much thought,” he replied. “Did you ever see a creamier dessert? I get hungry looking at it.”

  Chapter

  14

  ROY WISEHEART CALLED me at home Monday morning. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” he said. “Just don’t lay your damn recriminations on me later.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.


  “Evidently, your friend Hershel has gone back to the job site in Louisiana. In the meantime, his wife has gotten herself into serious trouble nobody needs. The police called me from the River Oaks substation on Westheimer. I also got a call from the manager at the country club. We’ve got about thirty minutes before she’s packed off to the city lockup. You don’t want to think about the women in the downtown jail on Monday morning. Got all that?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have another run at it. Take notes if you like,” he said.

  Linda Gail had dressed in a pink suit with a narrow-waist coat and a skirt wrapped tightly around the hips, and a pink pillbox hat with a black feather in the band, and ankle-strap patent-leather black shoes, and white gloves that went to the elbow, not unlike Clara Wiseheart’s. She had gotten in her waxed black Cadillac and driven to the River Oaks Country Club, where she walked directly into the manager’s office and asked, “Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with?”

  While two security personnel stood outside the door, Linda Gail was assured that her application for membership would be reviewed, that all consideration would be given to her, that no bias or insult was intended by the letter of rejection.

  “I think you’re under a misimpression,” she said. “I didn’t come here to negotiate with you. You’ve already indicated what you think of us. I would just like you to be a little more specific. Are we not cultured enough for you? Do you not like the wax job on my automobile? Should we work on our diction? What exactly is it that puts your nose so high in the air?”

  The manager, who used a feigned British accent that came and went with the occasion, was beginning to lose his composure. “Frankly, our membership is based primarily on income, Mrs. Pine. Most of our members are millionaires. You’re not.”

  “You’re correct. I’m merely a film star and have never owned a string of filling stations,” she said, rising from her chair. “If you haven’t heard of Castle Productions, you will. We will be filing suit against you and your ersatz accent and your dump of a country club for slander and besmirching my name and my professional reputation. By the way, there’s dandruff on your collar.”