Wayfaring Stranger

  “I considered the matter closed.”

  “You believed him, or you would have told me he was spreading lies about her.”

  “Don’t let a guy like this hurt you, Hershel. Two federal agents accused Rosita of being a Communist. You think I believe them? You think I’m going to empower J. Edgar Hoover’s errand boys?”

  “You’re saying he was just drunk and shooting off his mouth?”

  “I don’t know. Give Linda Gail a chance. Talk with her. And stay away from Valentine.”

  “You know what would happen to a guy like that where I grew up?”

  “Yeah, I do. And I don’t agree with it.”

  “At the least, he’d get the skin taken off his back.”

  I wasn’t getting anywhere. Hershel had gone into a mind-set I had known all my life. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that no one could understand the United States without understanding the graves of Shiloh. The penchant for vigilantism and the slaying of our brothers went all the way back to the colonial era. I had no doubt the hot coals out of which we forged our country were still glowing in the breast of my friend Hershel Pine. I could see his confusion growing in the silence, his forehead knitting.

  “People make mistakes,” I said. “Too much to drink, wrong situation and wrong people, a decision made in anger after a domestic fight, who knows what? A person makes one bad choice at an intersection and spends a lifetime grieving over it.”

  “You’re saying forgive Linda Gail?”

  “I’m saying we should have the willingness to forgive. That’s ninety percent of the battle. You’re not even sure she did something wrong.”

  He sat down at the writing desk. His forearm lay across the bag of cracklings he had brought. He seemed to have forgotten where he was or why he had come to my room.

  I opened another bottle of Jax and pushed it in front of him. He watched the foam run over the lip and down the neck, without picking up the bottle. “She was too young to get married,” he said. “I’m seven years older than she is. I came home a cripple. That’s a lot for a girl in her teens to deal with. Maybe that’s the way I should look at it.”

  I hoped one day Benny Siegel would run into Jack Valentine again and put a bullet in him. I looked through the window at the Gulf. The western sky was aflame, seagulls hovering like sketch marks above the surf. “There’s Rosita,” I said. “Why don’t the three of us have a seafood dinner at the café?”

  “You meant what you said?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

  “That maybe all this is smoke. That Valentine was drunk and trying to mess us up.”

  “Yeah, it could be that simple,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said, and took a deep breath, like a man stepping out of a bathysphere. “Okay. Right. I get myself wrapped in a knot sometimes. I’m glad I talked with you.”

  I prayed silently that our conversation about Linda Gail was over. I also prayed that I would not have to tell him another lie.

  “You wouldn’t lead me on, would you?” he said. “Everything you told me is on the level?”

  “I don’t know the truth about anything,” I said. “You and I were spared at the Ardennes. Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe we’ll see the reason down the track. That’s the way I look at it.”

  Before he could speak again, I went outside and helped Rosita unload the automobile.

  Later that night I got my notebook out of my suitcase and wrote down a line I remembered from the Book of Psalms: For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.

  Then I added my own words: Lord, deliver up poor Hershel, because some very bad people are fixing to eat him alive.

  GRANDFATHER WAS AILING, and Rosita and I flew back home to see him. He had reached a stage that elderly men enter when they see specters, sometimes those of old friends, beckoning to them from a shady copse or a roadside cemetery overgrown with mesquite and blown with dust and tumbleweed. His pale eyes seemed distracted, his attention drawn by voices or the sounds of cattle moving in large numbers across a river that had turned bloodred in the sunset, sounds that no one else heard. He slept with his Colt 1860 Army revolver, five chambers loaded, the hammer resting on the sixth chamber, which was empty.

  My mother asked him why he needed his revolver.

  “So I’ll be ready for him when he comes,” he replied.

  “Ready for whom?” she said.

  “Death.”

  His ankles and feet were so swollen that he had to wear extralarge rubber boots resembling the ones Frankenstein’s monster wore in the movies. Our family doctor forbade him to get on a horse, or to drink whiskey or smoke a cigar or pipe, or to ingest sugar in any form.

  For Grandfather, that meant he should fire up his pipe right after breakfast, have a bowl of homemade ice cream incised with a half dozen Oreo cookies for lunch, drink a glass of straight whiskey by three P.M., and saddle and get on his horse.

  “You have to stay off him, Big Bud,” my mother said. My mother called him by his nickname, I think, because she could not bring herself to accept him as her father. But how could I judge her and her siblings when I could not forgive my own father for abandoning his family? I felt sorry for Grandfather. I believed he was truly contrite. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in his contrition.

  “You don’t need your horse. I drive an automobile and can take you wherever you want,” my mother said.

  “Emma Jean, go fix yourself a pork chop sandwich or a bowl of grits with a big piece of ham hock,” he replied. “Pour some redeye gravy on top. Try to gain some weight, or tie a rock to your ankle. You’re skin and bones. A puff of wind would blow you off the planet.”

  “I have the fragility of a dandelion?”

  “That cuts to it.”

  “You’re not going to talk to me like that, Big Bud.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I’m going out the door and ride my horse,” he said.

  Some might say Grandfather’s stubbornness about his horse was motivated by denial of his physical infirmities. They saw only the outside of Grandfather. When he rode into the woods, his rubber-booted feet wedged so tightly in the stirrups that sometimes he had to pull his right foot out of the boot to dismount, he was not simply resisting the earth’s gravitational pull. He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes and motorized vehicles and telephone wires and radios that surrounded him now. In his way, I think he had already taken leave of us.

  The woods in late autumn had become his private sun-dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church. In the columns of light filtering through the canopy, he may have seen the ghosts of John Wesley Hardin and Bill Dalton and Quanah Parker. The saloon girls might have been there, too, most of them as small as Orientals, wearing dresses as tight as sealskin. There was a free lunch on a bar, a faro table, a rotating wheel with numbers on it, men who wore bowler hats and carried derringers under their sleeves, vaqueros and cowboys with coiled lariats hanging from the shoulder, bowie knives on the belt, some wearing wide-brim tall-crown hats that cost a week’s wage.

  They didn’t care if he wore a badge or not. They were all cut out of the same fabric, or they wouldn’t have chosen to live and die and be buried in a godforsaken landscape where their grave markers would soon be gone. Susanna Dickinson, the only white adult survivor of the Alamo, was in the cathedral, too. Grandfather knew her when she lived in Austin; she had told him what really happened inside the walls on the last day of the siege: the Mexican soldiers who were so numerous coming over the walls they fired into one another; the drunk Texas soldier who hid in the rubble and begged and was executed; the stench of the bodies piled like cordwood and burned.

  Grandfather’s stor
ies were wonderful. He said the horns of the cattle glowed with electricity when a storm was in the offing. With the first pop of lightning, the herd would stampede and flow like a brown river through the ravines and dry washes of the Arbuckle Mountains, trampling wagons and tents into splintered wood and strips of canvas.

  I don’t think he rode into the woods in anticipation of his death. I think he went there in preparation for his return to an era that, for him, had always existed just the other side of the horizon. Others watching him ride along the river’s edge saw an old man who was not willing to let winter have its way. I think Grandfather did not see the woods or the river but had already begun his journey on an infinite plain, one unmarked by fences or human structures, one whose mesas and buttes and dead volcanoes and ancient riverbeds antedated the arrival of man and even the dinosaurs. For the first time in his life, he no longer carried the thick gold pocket watch he had bought in Mexico City in 1910.

  The snake was a diamondback, the kind of rattler that usually hid in rocks and sunned itself on hillsides and wasn’t drawn to dank woods piled with autumn leaves. Just as Grandfather’s horse stepped across a log, the diamondback made a sound like seeds rattling inside a dried poppy husk, then popped Grandfather’s horse on the fetlock. The horse crashed through the trees and brush and raked Grandfather out of the saddle on an oak limb.

  We found him by flashlight two hours later. He had been stirrup-drug twenty yards across hard ground. His eyes were closed, his face spotted with drops of mud that looked like insects. I could not feel a pulse in his throat; I placed my ear against his chest. His skin was as cold as marble. Then he moved. “Is that you, Weldon?” he whispered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were always my son rather than my grandson. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Is that your mother behind you?”

  “Yes, sir, she’s right here.”

  “You don’t look anything like a dandelion, Emma Jean,” he said. “I just cain’t keep my mouth shut sometimes. You cut a fine figure. You always did.”

  He came back from the hospital the next day with a diagnosis of a concussion and three broken ribs. We made a bed for him on the front porch so he could be outside during the day and visit with friends who dropped by; we also brought the mail and newspaper and his encyclopedias to him. I went to town and bought six Mexican dinners to go, although there were only four of us. That’s because Grandfather could eat more Mexican food than any man I knew. I sat on the porch with him and watched him eat a tamale soaked in frijoles wrapped with two flour tortillas, and chase it with a glass of buttermilk. “Where are the pralines?” he asked.

  “The doctor says no sugar. He says if he catches you on your horse again, he’s going to shoot the horse, then you.”

  “Telling a ninety-year-old not to eat sugar is like telling a death-row inmate to beware of uncooked pork.”

  “Some people are trying to bushwhack me, Grandfather,” I said.

  “What kind of people?”

  “The kind you warned me about.”

  “Those big oilmen?”

  “That’s the bunch. I think Dalton Wiseheart might be involved.”

  He looked at the dirt road that led into our property and the crows perched on our fences and the trees in the woods that were becoming more skeletal with each sunset. “I don’t think you could pick a worse enemy. How in God’s name did you get mixed up with a bucket of pig shit like that?”

  “I think somebody is trying to break up my business partner’s marriage. And I think somebody has turned the feds loose on Rosita.”

  “Can you prove any of this?”

  “No, sir.”

  He put his empty plate on a chair and sat up on his pillows. He was wearing his beat-up Stetson, his shirt unbuttoned on his hairless chest. “Draw a line in the sand. But don’t tell anybody where it is. Don’t let your feelings show. Don’t let others know you’ve been hurt. No matter what they do, don’t react until they come over the line. Then you drop them in their tracks.”

  “It’s 1947, Grandfather.”

  “It certainly is,” he said.

  I waited for him to go on. But he didn’t. A few minutes later, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. After sunset I turned on the porch light and covered him with a blanket. At ten P.M. I woke him and took him inside and helped him into his bedroom. As he sat on the side of his bed, he looked dazed and unsure where he was. I got his pajamas out of the dresser drawer.

  “I dreamed we were at the county fair,” he said. “You and me and Emma Jean and your father. It was 1925. You were seven years old. You were afraid when I put you on the carousel. So I got on it with you.”

  “I remember that,” I said.

  “We rode it together, didn’t we?” he said.

  “Yes, sir, we surely did,” I replied.

  “I’m proud of you, Satch,” he said.

  I TRIED TO GET information from the Houston Police Department about the hit-and-run death of Harlan McFey. The detective I spoke with wore a vest without a coat and polished needle-nosed boots and a delicate silver chain that held his necktie in place. He had Indian-black hair that was neatly clipped and shiny with oil. He had put aside a magazine when I entered his office. The windows were open, a hot wind blowing from the street, a fan rattling on the wall. He looked from me to his magazine and back to me. He poked his tongue into his cheek. “I haven’t figured out why you’re here,” he said. “You were an acquaintance of the deceased, not a member of the family?”

  “No, I’m not a member of McFey’s family. No, I would not call myself an acquaintance.”

  “So what would you call yourself?”

  “Someone he wanted to blackmail or extort.”

  “Blackmail about what?”

  “Any lie he could think up.”

  “Please explain to me why you’re concerned over the manner of his death.”

  “McFey had been in the employ of Dalton Wiseheart.”

  He laughed. “The oilman who does business on the veranda of the Rice Hotel? That’s who you’re trying to tie the tin can on?”

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “No, I don’t.” He opened a folder on his desk. “McFey came out of a bar and was crossing the street to his car. A truck hit him and kept going. There was one witness: a Mexican kid who shines shoes in the beer joints on the north side. He didn’t get a plate number, and he couldn’t describe the truck except to say it didn’t have its lights on.”

  “Does the last detail seem significant?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily. It was twilight.” He closed the folder and tilted back in his swivel chair.

  “I have a feeling this isn’t going anywhere.”

  He laced his fingers behind his head. “If you find out anything, let us know.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “A feeble attempt at one. You’ve got an attitude, and it’s not helping your cause. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, I think you’ve found the right line of work.”

  AFTER I LEFT the police department, I started to drive back to the Heights. It was Friday, and I had been working at home, with no plans of returning to the job site in Louisiana for another week. I had gotten nowhere in my attempt to find out whom McFey had been working for, or where my father had died. I stopped at a drugstore and called Roy Wiseheart’s house. His wife told me he was at a boxing gym downtown.

  “Roy is a boxer?” I said.

  She hung up.

  I suppose I should not have gotten more involved with him than I already was. But so far, he was the only conduit I had into the mystery surrounding my father’s death. Second, I wanted to believe he was not having an affair with Linda Gail. Or maybe I’d learn they’d made a brief mistake and had put it behind them. It happens. The world doesn’t end. Hadn’t
I told Hershel as much?

  The gym was in a borderline neighborhood between the business district and a decayed residential area that was mostly black and Mexican. I saw Roy on the far side of the gym. He was wearing a pair of scarlet Everlast trunks and a sweat-streaked jersey, the sleeves scissored off at the armpits. He was hitting a speed bag with such precision and force that the bag was a black blur, the rat-a-tat-tat rebound like a machine gun.

  “How’d you know I was here?” he said.

  “Your wife.”

  “I’m surprised she’d admit I was here. I’ve got some extra gym clothes in the car. You want to work out?”

  “I need another favor. I tried to get some information from the Houston Police Department on McFey’s death. I hit a dead end.”

  He began unwrapping the leather bands on his gloves. “Nobody is going to help you with McFey, Weldon. He was disposable, a wad of soiled Kleenex. Who knows, maybe he was working for himself. Watch this.” Using his bare fists, he hit the heavy bag with a combination of punches that sent it spinning on its suspension chain. “Hang around. I’m about to go three rounds with this fellow who was supposed to be the middleweight champion of Huntsville Prison.”

  “Did your father tell you Rosita and I went to see him at the Rice Hotel?”

  “No, he didn’t. My father and I were never close. You know who my brother was?”

  “No.”

  “He was a fighter pilot in Europe. He had nine kills when a couple of Messerschmitts nailed him. He’s buried in Germany. My father always felt the wrong son came back home.”

  I lowered my eyes, my hand on the chain of the heavy bag. His confessional tone made me trust him less. I looked up at him. “Are you on the square, Roy?”

  “Regarding what?”

  “My friend Hershel.”

  “You think I’m milking through his fence?”

  “Jack Valentine said you keep a fuck pad.”

  “I’m disappointed to hear you use language like that.”