Wayfaring Stranger

  “Not me. Not with you. I know better.”

  “Yeah?” His eyes were a piercing blue and reminded me in their intensity of the warning light I used to see in Grandfather’s. “Have a drink with us.”

  “My wife is waiting on me.”

  “Go get her,” he said.

  “Can’t do it.”

  “No, you need to sit down and have a drink.”

  I shook my head.

  “Virginia says I’m full of shit,” he said. “Is that what you’re saying? I’m full of shit?”

  “It’s an honor to meet both of you,” I said. “Miss Virginia, you have the same shade of hair as Bonnie Parker.”

  Her mouth opened. “That hag who smoked cigars?”

  “She wasn’t like that. I knew her. She was my first love. I was sixteen. I put a .44 round through the back window of her automobile. Clyde Barrow was driving.”

  “I’ve got to get to know this guy,” Siegel said. “Go find your wife. We’ll get us a table.”

  “What I told you about the fellow in yonder is straight up. He did a serious wrong to a friend of mine. That’s why I knocked his tooth out. I hope y’all enjoy your stay in Houston. I’m sure I’ll see you on another occasion.”

  Jack Valentine opened the restroom door, a wadded-up paper towel pressed to the corner of his mouth. He stared stupefied into Bugsy Siegel’s face.

  “Get back inside the john,” Siegel said, pushing him in the chest. “I’ve got some movie ideas I want to talk over with you.”

  ONE WEEK LATER, I was back on the pipeline in Louisiana, down by Grand Isle, deep in bayou country. A singular phenomenon that occurs on a pipeline has always intrigued me and made me wonder not only about the molecular structure of steel but the physical composition of the universe. It has also made me wonder if atoms are more akin to living tissue than inert matter. When the pipe joint is welded, it rests on wood skids that elevate the pipe three or four feet from the ground. As the tack and hot-pass welding crews move down the line, they create a long snakelike creature, sometimes with a thirty-six-inch girth, that weighs thousands of tons, resting all day and night on the skids, right next to the trench dug by the ditching machine. The pipe, which is black and wrapped with a heavy protective coating of tarpaper, absorbs heat during the day and cools during the night. At about eight-thirty A.M., when the day begins to warm, the pipe will jump forward, like a snake shedding its skin, toppling the skids as far as the eye can see. The same constriction and expansion occurs in winter, although sometimes not as dramatically.

  The illusionary nature of steel doesn’t stop there. The welded pipe is put into the ground by a side boom, which lifts it in the air and lowers it into the bottom of the trench. When the pipe is swung over the trench, it bends like soft licorice. Seconds later, down in the trench, it resumes the rigidity that characterized it before it was hoisted.

  Watching this take place in the early-morning hours, in a swamp that was probably like the genetic soup from which we originated, made me wonder if the laws of physics were all they were stacked up to be. But speculation on the nature of creation is a luxury reserved for scholars. The rest of us have to deal with one another and ferret our way through the snares and pitfalls that we create for our fellow man. If I doubted that lesson, I was about to relearn it.

  This particular morning it was cold enough to wear a canvas coat and gloves. Fog was rolling off the bay and lay three feet deep on the ground, as white and thick as newly picked cotton; the segments of pipe on the skids were beaded with drops of moisture as big as half dollars. Two men parked a Plymouth on the right-of-way and walked toward me, the fog puffing around their knees. I had no doubt they were lawmen, although I didn’t know what kind. One was short, one was tall. The short one was overweight and wore a windbreaker and a rain hat and had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. “Are you Mr. Holland?” he said.

  They had walked directly from their car and had passed several members of the crew without asking where they might find me. “Do I know you?” I said.

  They opened their badge holders and gave their names, but I didn’t catch them. “You’re feds?” I said.

  “Thought you might be able to help us out,” the tall one said. His face was lean, hollow-cheeked, as though some of the bone had been removed. One eyebrow was scarred, as if a piece of string had been drawn through it. He wore shined tan shoes speckled with mud. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

  “Not unless you want to sit on the pipe and get your trousers dirty,” I replied.

  He had an eight-by-ten envelope in his hand. He took out a photograph and handed it to me. “Are these friends of yours?”

  “No.”

  “But you know them?”

  “I know who they are. I ran into them by accident.”

  “You know that’s Ben Siegel and Virginia Hill?”

  “I bumped into them at a hotel opening in Houston. Literally. They asked me to have a drink with them. I turned down the offer. What’s this about?”

  “Benny is a pretty crazy guy,” said the man in the rain hat. He lit his cigarette and took it out of his mouth. “You punched out a guy in the crapper?”

  “Must be a slow day at your office,” I said.

  “Humor us and answer the question, please.”

  “If a guy named Jack Valentine says I knocked his tooth out in a hotel restroom, he’s probably telling you the truth,” I said. “What else would you like to know?”

  “Your wife’s application for admission to the United States contains perjured statements,” the tall man said. “The marriage certificate you provided is not a legitimate one.”

  “You’re saying she’s here illegally?”

  “I didn’t say that. An immigration officer might,” the man in the rain hat said.

  “The certificate is signed by a priest,” I said. “The marriage is recorded in the Hotel de Ville in Paris.”

  “Immigration says the good reverend is a defrocked drunk,” the tall man said. “You have another problem. You didn’t get permission to marry from your commanding officer.”

  “I think you need to talk to Major Lloyd Fincher about that. He lives in San Antonio. I’ll give you his number. Were you all following me or Siegel when you took this photo?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” said the man in the rain hat.

  “That’s what I thought. So why is my wife a problem for you?”

  “She didn’t mention to you that she’s a member of the Communist Party?”

  “That’s because she’s not.”

  “Her whole family was,” he said. “She’s related to Rosa Luxemburg. They don’t come any redder than Red Rosa Luxemburg.”

  “You’re full of it, bub.”

  “I wouldn’t take that attitude,” the tall man said. “Your wartime service is being reexamined. There’s speculation that you were actually a deserter. You and Eddie Slovik didn’t take off on your own, did you?”

  I could feel my right hand opening and closing at my side. Slovik was the only American soldier shot for desertion during World War II. I looked at the whiteness of the fog at the base of the trees, the bright sheen on the trunks, the water dripping off the canopy. I thought of Tiger tanks smashing through a medieval forest, the tree trunks snapping like matchsticks. “I’d like to know the basis of your statements about me and my wife.”

  “The only witness to your flight from the Ardennes Forest was Sergeant Hershel Pine. It’s funny that you two ended up business partners in the States. It’s coincidental that he gave you a partnership in his welding business, a guy with a degree in history and no experience in engineering?”

  “I think I’m going to get back to work now,” I said. “There might be some coffee up there in the welding truck. Help yourselves.” I walked away.

  “Does your wife belong to a cell here?” said the man in t
he rain hat.

  “A what?”

  “You have a hearing problem?”

  “You keep your lying mouth off my wife.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  I walked toward both of them, my palms tingling. I could see Hershel strolling along the edge of the trench, a shovel propped across his shoulders, his arms spread on the handle. He smiled as the sunlight broke on the tops of the trees. I cleared my throat and leaned to one side and spat. “That’s my sergeant coming. He lost half his foot walking out of the Ardennes. Show him some respect. Regarding me and my wife, do your worst. We’re not afraid of you.”

  THAT NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. Rosita lay inside my arms in our double bed at the motor court, her eyes closed, her breath rising and falling on my chest. The neon sign in front glowed in a red blush through the window shade, and I could hear the sound of the surf in the distance and the dripping of the rain on the camellia bushes outside. I had not told Rosita of my encounter with the federal agents. I finally drifted off to sleep, then woke with a start, the way you do when you dream about a doorbell ringing or the klatch of a Bouncing Betty when a man steps on it.

  I sat up on the side of the bed, staring at the red glow on the shade.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I told her about the feds and everything they had said.

  “Do they want to talk with me?” she said.

  “They’re out to harass us. Nothing we say will change their agenda.”

  “Why do they care about us?”

  “They don’t. They’re just carrying out somebody’s orders. I suspect Dalton Wiseheart made some phone calls. It’s the way he operates. Grandfather warned me about him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That guys like Wiseheart aren’t political. They’re just mean.”

  She sat beside me and put her hand inside my thigh. “No pasarán,” she said.

  “You got it, kid,” I said.

  She took my hand in hers. “What do you think they’ll do now?”

  “Maybe they’ll go away.”

  “You know better.”

  “They’ll try to separate us. They’ll smear our names.”

  “All because we offended that old man on the balcony?”

  “Bullies create object lessons,” I said. “If we weren’t the target, it would be somebody else.”

  She stood up and took off her nightgown in front of the window shade, her body silhouetted against the red glow of the motel sign.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman on earth,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  “Helen of Troy might have been a contender, but I think you’ve got her beat.”

  She knelt behind me on the mattress and squeezed my head against her chest and kissed my hair and ran her hands down the sides of my face. “Oh, Weldon,” she said.

  The register in her voice had changed. I felt her tears on the back of my neck. “What’s wrong, kid?”

  “I don’t deserve a man like you.”

  “Never say that, not under any circumstances.”

  “Your goodness fills my life. You fill me with light when you’re inside me.”

  “It’s the other way around. I’d only be half a person without you. You’re my sister and lover and wife and mother and daughter and all good things that women are. No one could ever take your place. There’s a glow on your skin. You smell like flowers in the morning. I have romantic dreams about you every night of my life.”

  She folded her arms across my chest, her mouth against my ear. I could feel her heart beating, her breath on my cheek. I got up from the bed and undressed and lay down beside her. I kissed her stomach and her breasts and her mouth. “I’ll never let anyone hurt us,” I said.

  “It’s you they want to destroy, not me. They’ll go through me to get to you, but I’m of little interest to them. Be careful of Roy.”

  “He’s probably a womanizer, but I don’t think he’s an evil man.”

  “The men who murdered my family were baptized Christians. No one ever called them evil, not until people saw what they had done. Shakespeare said the Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman.”

  “Did you hear a sound outside?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “It must be the wind.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said. “Even if it’s something else, we don’t care.”

  We made love the way friends and kindred spirits do, rather than husband and wife or lovers. Rosita was my navigator and conscience and the source of my strength. She was my Ruth, my Esther, my Jewish warrior queen out of the Old Testament. She smelled like the ocean when she made love. Her skin was warm and cool at the same time, her hair fragrant with an odor like night-blooming flowers, her legs long and strong and warm against mine, her mouth wet against my ear.

  When we reached that heart-twisting moment that is like no other experience on earth, I felt released from all my problems, as though I were gliding through a starry galaxy that trailed into infinity. I was determined that I would never allow anyone to harm my heroic Jewish wife, who I believed was descended from the House of Jesse.

  At four A.M. I heard someone tip over a tin bucket in the driveway. I peeked through the edge of the window shade and saw a man in a hooded raincoat standing five feet from my automobile, looking straight at me.

  I slipped on my khakis and my half-topped boots and went outside, my Luger in my right hand. The driveway was empty, the night still except for the water ticking in the trees. Only three blocks away, under a full moon, I could see the Gulf of Mexico and the alluvial flow of yellow mud from the mouth of the Mississippi channeling its way along the coastline, waves crashing in a ropy froth on a barrier island that a dredge boat was hauling away for construction material.

  The man by my automobile had disappeared. Had he placed an explosive charge under my car? Or slashed my tires? Or played the role of voyeur and watched my wife and me during sexual congress?

  This is how it will go, I thought. They’ll wage a war of gradual attrition that is the equivalent of death in the Iron Maiden. Their resources will be suspicion and anxiety and inculcation of self-doubt and feelings of personal violation. Like the blindfolded man being broken on the wheel, we will never know where the next blow is coming from. And the men behind all this will do it with a phone call they’ll forget about two minutes after they hang up.

  “I think you’re still out there, within earshot,” I said. “I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance. Think what I’ll do to you.”

  There was no answer except the wind blowing in the trees, shaking hundreds of raindrops on a pond that glistened in the dark.

  Chapter

  16

  THE NEXT EVENING Hershel knocked on my motel door. He had a six-carton of Jax in one hand and a greasy brown paper bag in the other. He was smiling awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Is Rosita here?” he said.

  “She went to buy groceries in Golden Meadow,” I said.

  “I didn’t see the car and thought you might like to have some beer and cracklings with me.”

  “Sure, I would. Come in.”

  “In the fall we always made cracklings and boudin and had people over to eat on the gallery,” he said. “You ever do that?”

  “Yeah, my grandfather was big on barbecues. We had some fine times.”

  I knew something else was on his mind. I guess for Hershel I would always be the lieutenant, the man who had pulled him from a collapsed foxhole and could do no wrong.

  “Did something happen today?” I asked.

  “Linda Gail called from Houston. She was pretty upset. It’s this guy Jack Valentine. Remember him? We got our house in River Oaks through Jack.”

  “I remember him well.”

  “He told Linda Gail this crazy
story. He says you attacked him at the hotel opening Lloyd Fincher took y’all to.”

  “I wouldn’t phrase it that way.”

  “He also says you turned Bugsy Siegel loose on him.”

  “That last part is pretty accurate.”

  “You didn’t punch Jack in the mouth?”

  “I flattened him.”

  His eyes went away from mine. “What for?”

  “He got out of line.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “What difference does it make? He’s coarse and vulgar and treats other people like they have the same frame of reference he does.”

  “He says he told a joke in the restroom, and for no reason you blindsided him.”

  “He told me Roy Wiseheart kept a hotel room for his trysts. I didn’t want to hear any more of his ugly stories about other people. He kept at it, and I lost control. It was a foolish thing to do.”

  “You poleaxed a guy over something he said about Roy Wise­heart?”

  “I’m a little foggy on what happened, Hershel. I don’t handle alcohol well.”

  “This doesn’t sound like you. You handle your liquor just fine.”

  “Valentine is a bum. Let it go.”

  “Is he the guy?”

  “What do you mean by ‘the guy’?”

  “The guy sleeping with Linda Gail.”

  “He was half in the bag. He made a loose remark. I’m not even sure what it was. I hit him. If I had it to do over, I’d walk away and not pay him any mind.”

  “He said something about Linda Gail?”

  “Ask Valentine.”

  “You’re my friend, Weldon. I’m asking you.”

  “A man like that has no credibility. Why should we care what he says or doesn’t say?”

  I took the beer opener out of his hand and snapped a cap off a Jax and drank.

  “What did he say about her?”

  My blood was throbbing in my wrists. “He said he slept with her. He said it happened on the same day he filmed her on the front porch of the general store.”

  I saw the lump in his throat and the color draining from his cheeks. “You weren’t going to tell me? You were going to let me walk around not knowing while this kind of thing was going on behind my back?”