Wayfaring Stranger

  “You’re right,” she said.

  She went through it with her eyes closed, her senses dead, her face slanted away from the hardness in his jaw. Minutes later, she felt him rise from her and his weight lift off the bed. She kept her eyes closed and turned toward the wall and pulled the sheet up to her shoulder. She heard the blender flare to life, the grinding noise as invasive as a dentist’s drill. He sat down next to her. “I made you an orange frappé,” he said.

  “Put it on the nightstand, would you?”

  “You weren’t quite with it tonight.”

  “Thanks. A girl loves hearing she’s a bad lay.”

  “I wondered if it was because of something I said or did.”

  She felt for his hand and squeezed it but did not look at him. “You’re fine.”

  “Then tell me what it is.”

  “It’s a funny feeling I have. Like things are coming apart. Like birds are all flying from a tree. The way they do at sunset.”

  She heard him set down the glass he was holding. His hand was ice-cold when he touched her shoulder.

  “Do you want me to call the hotel physician?” he asked.

  “I’m not sick. I just feel strange. We start production in Mexico in five days.”

  “I thought you were making a movie about the French Resistance.”

  “There’re flashbacks in it. About the Spanish Civil War. The male lead is based on André Malraux.”

  “I just don’t follow you, Linda Gail. I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “I’ll be playing in scenes about the Spanish Civil War. I’m the lover of an aviator fighting for the Republic.”

  He turned her on her back so she was forced to look into his face. He was wearing a blue robe; his hair was combed and shone like bronze in the subdued light of the apartment. His expression was full of pity. “I’ve heard that everyone at Warner Brothers is delighted to have you on board.”

  “I told some newspapermen on the train that I didn’t know Weldon Holland’s wife. No, that wasn’t how I put it. I told them I didn’t associate with her. I said if I knew she was a Communist, I’d report her.”

  “She isn’t a Communist, so what does it matter?”

  “I lied. I think they wanted me to. Then they could treat me like I was dirt.”

  “Give me their names.”

  She sat up, the sheet gathered in front of her. “I have to get into the shower. Turn around, please.”

  “Is Jack Valentine involved in this? He’s been telling people you got him fired.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “I know that. But somebody should have taught Jack Valentine a lesson a long time ago.”

  “I have to go into the bathroom. Look the other way.”

  “You’re my girl, Linda Gail. Do you think you have to act shy? Why are you doing all this?”

  “Hershel knows I’m cheating on him. I don’t know what’s going to happen, that’s why. You don’t know the kind of world we come from.”

  “The way I see it, a cuckold invites his fate.”

  She got up, the sheet wrapped around her, and started toward the bathroom.

  “People break their vows for a reason,” Roy said. “None of this is your fault. It’s not mine and it’s not your husband’s. It just the way it is. Come back to bed.”

  She stood in the center of the room, the sheet trailing off her body. The rug was tan and thick and soft under her bare feet, the glassware and bottles behind the bar sparkling. The curtains on the French doors were gauzy and rose-tinted and transparent, filtering the light but preserving the view for the occupants, who were located so high in the sky that their privacy could never be violated. “You want me to come back to bed?” she said. “That’s what’s on your mind? A more successful go-round?”

  “I could make love to you five times a day, Linda Gail. It’s an honor to be with a woman like you.”

  “I don’t think it’s an honor at all,” she replied. “I think we’re all cheap goods.”

  She walked to the French doors that opened onto the balcony, seventeen stories above the swimming pool shaped like a four-leaf clover. Clutching the sheet to her chest with one hand, she depressed the brass lever on the door with the other.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “I’m doing nothing at all.”

  She stepped out on the balcony and let the sheet fall from her body. She raised her arms straight out from her sides and stood on her tiptoes, her head tilting back, her eyes closed. She could feel the wind in her hair, her nipples hardening, the pores of her skin opening in the warm air. Across the boulevard, the oil wells were clanking up and down, the rhythm not unlike the sounds created by copulation upon a noisy mattress spring. She stepped up on a footstool beneath the retaining wall, then on a table, as gracefully as a woman ascending a winding staircase, and with one push she was up on the wall, the evening star winking conspiratorially at her.

  For just a moment she thought she heard multitudes of people crying out in alarm, yelling at her, reassuring her that she was loved. She leaned forward, the night air sweet with the smell of flowers and chlorine, the promise of eternal summer sealing her eyes, quieting her heart, anointing her brow.

  That’s when she felt Roy grab her with both hands and pull her off the wall and carry her as he would a child back into the apartment.

  “How do you like your girlie now, Roy?” she said. “Do you still like your little cutie-pie from Bogalusa, Louisiana? Tell me, Roy. Tell me.”

  Chapter

  21

  OUR ATTORNEY AND Rosita and I met with the probation officer Miss Lemunyon in her office at city hall at eighty-thirty A.M. the day after she told us Rosita might be rearrested for bail violation. Then she said she had to confer with her supervisor and left us in her windowless office for almost a half hour. Our attorney, Tom Breemer, told us that, in reality, Rosita had not violated the terms of her bail by temporarily leaving the state. The charges against her were misdemeanors that could be kicked up to felonious status, depending on what the prosecutor wanted to do, but nonetheless misdemeanors. Technically, we were in the clear. Then Tom added, “Unfortunately, these guys can elevate the ‘resisting’ charge to a felony, and you can spend weeks or months in jail proving you’re right.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” I said.

  “You want my honest opinion?” Tom said. He wore a clip-on bow tie and a seersucker suit and looked like a high school civics teacher.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The arresting officer deserves a bullet in the mouth. Maybe that would have happened to him in your grandfather’s time. It’s not going to happen now. You provoked Dalton Wiseheart. This is the consequence. We plea out and hope that Wiseheart contracts bubonic plague. No, don’t argue about it, Weldon. Count your blessings.”

  “I don’t buy that,” I said.

  “You know why people say justice is blind? It’s because it’s blind,” he said.

  The door opened and Miss Lemunyon came in and sat rigidly behind her desk. “You can go,” she said.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “No, that is not it,” she said. “You have a court appearance in three weeks. One other development you might note: The Immigration and Naturalization Service has taken an interest in your whereabouts and your behavior, Mrs. Holland. Our office is at their disposal. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Yes, I think I do,” Rosita replied.

  “You’re certain of that, are you?” Miss Lemunyon said.

  “I won’t knowingly cause you any more difficulty,” Rosita said.

  “I believe we’re done here,” Tom said, rising from his chair. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  Miss Lemunyon didn’t reply. Her face contained a dry, colorless
heat of a kind you associate with people for whom personal humiliation has been a way of life. These are the worst people imaginable to have as enemies. As we left the building, I felt something else needed to be said. It has always been my conviction that nothing is ever lost by appealing to reason in others. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You tried. I knew that’s what Grandfather would say, at least when he wasn’t loading a gun in preparation to shoot someone. I put Rosita in the automobile and went back inside the building. I tapped on the frosted glass inset in Miss Lemunyon’s door. “Come in,” she said.

  “I’ll make this brief,” I said. “I think you’re probably a good judge of character. Officer Slakely molested my wife. He’s poor white trash and a liar and a coward. What he did to my wife, he’s done to other women. Don’t let him use you.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. I noticed for the first time there were no cuticles on her nails and that the sides of her fingers on her right hand were yellowed by nicotine. Her mouth worked without sound; then there was a dry click in her throat and the words finally came out, thick and ropy and barely audible. “How dare you speak to me like that,” she said.

  MY MOTHER WAS no longer able to adequately care for Grandfather, so Rosita and I brought him to Houston and put him in a back bedroom where he could see the esplanade and the baseball diamond and the trees and picnic shelters in the park. Grandfather didn’t do well in the city. To him, sirens, traffic noises, the drone of airplanes, the quarreling of neighbors, and solicitors knocking on the door were acts of theft. I thought that, like many elderly people, he might retaliate by making life hard for others, but that proved not to be the case. Grandfather was a study in contradiction and unpredictability. He had killed a number of men, but he was not a killer. He could be visceral and coarse, but under it all he was a kind man. Rather than publicly rinse his sins, as many others were fond of doing, he wrote off his early years as “lively times.” I loved Grandfather; it was a pleasure to have him in our home.

  I didn’t want to burden him with our troubles. He was a good reader of people, though, and I didn’t fool him long. “I heard y’all talking. Those same oil people are out to get you, are they?” he said when I spread a quilt over him and turned on the electric fan.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s a long and dreary business, Grandfather. We’ll just have to see it through.”

  “Tell me anyway. It’s not like my schedule is overly crowded.”

  So I did.

  “Suffering God, Satch, it sounds like they’ve tried everything except give you anthrax.”

  “They can do whatever they want. We’ll do it right back.”

  “It’s not always that easy. You trust Roy Wiseheart?”

  “He’s got sand, I’ll say that.”

  “So did John Wesley Hardin. He was also a bucket of shit.”

  “Roy’s not like his father. I think there’s more than one person living inside him.”

  “I bet one of them is a coral snake.”

  I didn’t reply. The sky was dark, and the bedroom was brightly lit by an overhead light. Grandfather’s face looked soft and pink against the pillow, his thick hair a tangle of gray and white. Even in his nineties, he was a big and powerful man and not to be taken for granted. “Don’t get slickered,” he said.

  “By whom?”

  “I know your thoughts before you have them, Weldon. You’re fond of Wiseheart. You both went to war. Like you, he was brave. But when push comes to shove, he’ll stick with his own kind. It won’t be because of love, either. It’ll be about money.”

  “Your revolver is sticking out from under your pillow,” I said.

  “I saw some of Pancho Villa’s boys outside the window last night. I’d hate for one of them to get the drop on me.”

  I looked over my shoulder and back at him.

  “Been on any snipe hunts lately?” he said, his chest shaking with silent laughter.

  BY THE TIME Linda Gail arrived on location in Mexico, she had done her best to forget what had occurred on the penthouse balcony of the Shamrock Hotel, seventeen stories in the sky. She wouldn’t have really gone through with it, she told herself. She’d had too much to drink. If something hadn’t happened, it was not meant to happen, and hence could not happen.

  Liar, a voice said.

  She saw herself plummeting past the rows of hotel windows, spread-eagled, naked, upside down. Oddly, the image disturbed her not because of the fate she had almost imposed upon herself but because of the grotesque and unseemly fashion in which she would have been remembered.

  She determined she would no longer think about what could have happened. This was Mexico. This was now. Somehow she would find a way out of her problems. Who would have believed where she was today compared with one year ago?

  The location was the most beautiful stretch of terrain she had ever seen, the topography and seasons out of kilter in a way that convinced her a remarkable change was about to take place in her life. The mountains were purple in the distance, the grass long and yellow in the fields, and the earth the color of rust where it had been plowed, the irrigation ditches brimming with water that looked like coffee-stained milk. On the long slope that led up to a dead volcano were orchards of walnut and avocado trees, and at sunset the Indians built fires in the shadows and roasted ears of corn in the coals like people from an ancient time.

  The set was meant to replicate a Republican airstrip in Andalusia in 1936, complete with biplanes that had Vickers machine guns mounted on the fuselages. But to Linda Gail this enormous, fertile valley, containing livestock and tall palms with trunks that were as smooth as elephant hide, and clumps of banana plants and orchards bursting with bloodred peaches, had nothing to do with modern times. The mountains and the warm, dense air and the great freshwater lake nearby where Indians fished from boats made out of reeds convinced her she was standing in a legendary place that had been transported from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. If that was true, or even a possibility, it could mean that mankind was being given a second chance. And if mankind could have a second chance, why couldn’t she?

  Roy Wiseheart had shown up on the set out of nowhere, driving a British lorry, wearing an Australian flop hat and khaki shorts and a hunter’s jacket with cloth loops for bullets, a scoped rifle jiggling in a rack behind his head. When he braked to a stop next to her, outside an airplane hangar, a cloud of dust floating across her and the crew and the other actors, she tried to pretend she wasn’t angry that he was irritating everyone on the set at her expense. She glanced at the director. His name was Jerry Fallon. He had the leanness of a lizard, and his skin was just as rough. He removed his sunglasses and hung one of the arm pieces from his lip and stared at her and Roy, his nostrils dilating.

  “What are you doing, Roy?” Linda Gail whispered.

  “Seeing what you’re up to,” he said, getting down from the lorry. “I’m a co-producer now. Didn’t Jerry tell you?”

  “No.”

  “I want to keep an eye on my investment. You look outstanding. You see those World War I crates over there? One of them is mine. I’m going to take it up.”

  Her face was burning. She lowered her eyes. “I need to talk to you.”

  “About that little episode? Don’t give second life to the shadows of the heart.”

  “Roy, I’m working now.”

  “Time for lunch, everybody!” he shouted. “Is that okay with you, Jerry?”

  “No, you’re a bloody nuisance, you fucking sod,” the director said.

  “Thank you,” Roy said. “Come on, Linda Gail. I made up a picnic basket. Don’t worry about Jerry. I was his wingman in the South Pacific. He’s a Digger but a swell fellow. Right, you malignant wog?”

  “Take a break, everyone. Be back at one,” Jerry said. “Linda Gail?”


  “Yes?” she said.

  “I have high hopes for this next scene,” he said. “We want it right. You with me, love?”

  “Yes, I’m with you. I understand.”

  “Do you?” he replied.

  Why had Roy done this to her? He drove them to an adobe ranch house at the base of the volcano. The bougainvillea reached to the roof; the latticework over the walkways was interwoven with wisteria that had just gone into bloom. “Whose place is this?” she asked.

  “An absentee landowner. He rented it to me.”

  “Did you arrange this role for me?”

  “I don’t have that kind of power. Regardless of what people think, it doesn’t work that way out here. You got it on your own hook.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Let’s go inside. I’ve missed you terribly.” He shut off the engine. “God, you’re lovely.”

  “I have to work this afternoon,” she said. “You heard what Jerry said. What are you doing to me?”

  “To you?”

  “I never know what to believe. I think maybe my whole career was bought and paid for. You made me look like a fool in front of the whole cast and crew. How did you suddenly become a producer of the film? You’re on a first-name basis with my director. You seem to orchestrate everything you come near. You’re everywhere and nowhere.”

  “I was on a first-name basis with famous actresses when I was ten years old. Sometime I’ll tell you the names of some my father slept with.”

  “Did you buy me this role or not?”

  “Let me tell you a story about Jack Warner. He once said, ‘I’ve got the best scriptwriter in Hollywood, and I’ve got him for peanuts.’ He was talking about William Faulkner. You know who else he said that about? You. In light of what you’re going to make for him, he considers your salary peanuts.”

  “I don’t believe you, number one. Number two, what if I said I want out of our situation?”

  “You’d hurt me beyond repair. But if that’s your choice, I’d honor it. Is that your choice, Linda Gail?”