Wayfaring Stranger

“The bastard lived. The story says it may have been a robbery. No suspects.” He perched one thigh on the corner of the desk and gazed down at me. “Still water runs the deepest.”

  “You’re talking about me?”

  “I said you were heck on wheels.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “You know what I dream about every third night? Going down on the deck so I could get my fifth kill.”

  “Go out to the navy hospital. Talk to the psychiatrist. Join a church or start a new religion. Why do you have to keep telling me about it?”

  “Because you’re a rich man, Weldon. You’re rich because your nightmares are about the deeds of others, not your own. There’re no regrets in your life. How many men can say that?”

  Chapter

  28

  OUR LIVES SEEMED to be unraveling, not unlike a spool of movie film across a floor. I went into Grandfather’s bedroom and closed the door behind me. I could hear Snowball fixing lunch in the kitchen.

  “Home a bit early, aren’t you?” Grandfather said. He was in a rocking chair by the window, smoking his pipe, wearing a flannel shirt and his boots and Stetson, the window opened high, even though the weather was cold and the heat was escaping the room. The woman next door, who was young and strong and had large breasts and upper arms the size of hams, was hanging wash.

  I pushed the window down. “Have you thought about finding a lady friend your own age?” I said.

  “Who wants a ninety-year-old lady friend?” he replied.

  I sat on his bed. He made his own bed every morning. The quilt was always pulled tight, the pillow puffed and squared away. Outside, the sun was bright on the trees and lawn and the shoulders and blond hair of the woman shaking out her damp clothes from a basket and fastening them to the clothesline with wooden pins. “I think I went across the wrong Rubicon,” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “I caught up with Hubert Slakely,” I said.

  “Not in his office or on a street? Caught up with him in a more serious fashion?”

  “He was in a trailer out by the San Jacinto River. He had a young girl with him. She was a runaway. He’d left his mark on her.”

  Grandfather’s gaze was focused out the window but not on the woman. “What’d you use?”

  “An Indian trade ax.”

  “That sounds like it’d do the trick.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Too bad. Did he draw down on you?”

  I nodded. Then I said, “How did you know?”

  “You wouldn’t have hit him otherwise. It’s not in you. You think it is, but it’s not. Why aren’t the police here now?”

  “I had a bandanna over my face. I didn’t speak. I took the girl to the bus depot.”

  “I’d say case closed.”

  “I flat tore him apart, Grandfather. I tried to kill him.”

  “If you’d tried to kill him, he’d be dead. You’ll never make an assassin, Satch, so stop pretending you are. You need to stop fretting yourself over a waste of oxygen like Slakely. The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”

  Grandfather should have been an exorcist.

  “There’s another matter on my mind,” I said.

  “The day hasn’t come when there wasn’t.”

  “Did you ever see specters or illusions? I mean really see them?”

  “Like pools of heat on the horizon?” he said.

  “Remember the stolen car Bonnie and Clyde were driving, the one I shot into? It was a 1932 Confederate. I’ve seen it. Not once but twice.”

  “There’re probably a lot of them around. I think you need to turn off your brain for a while and discontinue this line of thought.”

  “I saw it in a gas station just before my former commanding officer gave me the key to his hunting camp. I saw it at the camp, too, before the vigilantes took away Rosita. Four people were in it. They looked like cardboard cutouts. They didn’t look alive.”

  He never took his eyes off the yard. “I see spirits with regularity these days. They’re on the edge of the shade just yonder. If you turn real quick, you’ll see them, too. I don’t like to dwell too much upon this sort of thing.” He got up stiffly from the rocker and took off his Stetson and sailed it crown-down onto the bed, a lock of his white hair falling across his eye, like a little boy’s.

  “You see them out there now?” I asked.

  “Don’t pay me any mind or listen to anything I say. Let’s see what Snowball has fixed for lunch.”

  LINDA GAIL HEARD something drop through the mail slot and hit hard on the floor. It was a cardboard mailer with no return address. Inside was a brown envelope that contained individual head shots of four women. All of the women were Caucasian and wearing smocks; their mouths were open, their hair in disarray, their eyes locked in a private vision of despair they could never share with others, their heads tilted as though there were no reason to hold them erect. A typed note in the envelope read: “Medical science is doing wonders for disturbed people these days. We hope your friend is better.”

  She drove to Roy’s office and went inside. “Tell Mr. Wiseheart that Linda Gail is here, please,” she said to the receptionist.

  “He’s on the phone right now. He might be a while,” the receptionist said.

  “No, he won’t,” she replied.

  Before the receptionist could reply, Linda Gail brushed past and shut Roy’s door behind her. She turned the envelope over and sprinkled the photos and the typed note on his desk. “Check this out,” she said.

  He was holding the phone receiver to his ear. “I’ll call you back, Senator,” he said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Where’d you get these?”

  “From the mailman. Read the note.”

  “Who are these women?”

  “Would you read the note, please?”

  He picked it up from the desk blotter, his eyebrows bronze-tinted in a ray of sunlight shining through the window. There was hardly a line in his skin.

  “They were lobotomized,” she said. “They’re vegetables. I called the reference librarian and got some information about the procedure. A steel probe is shoved under the eyelid into the brain.”

  “How do you know they were lobotomized?”

  “I don’t. Maybe they went through electroshock. What difference does it make? This is something that belongs in the Middle Ages.”

  “Does Weldon know about this?” he asked.

  “I’m going to his house now. I’d like you to go with me.”

  She waited. This was the moment, she thought. All he had to say was Let me get my coat.

  “No, I don’t believe I should do that. Weldon was here earlier. He knows I’m doing everything I can to help Rosita. What neither of you understands is the political position she has put other people in. I was talking to a United States senator when you came in.”

  She looked at him dumbly. “You won’t go with me to Weldon’s house? That’s going to disrupt your day?”

  “Did you hear me?” he said. “We have to deal with reality, not the way things should be. Fairly or not, she’s been tagged a Communist. No politician, particularly in the state of Texas, is going to risk his career for someone accused of being a member of the Communist Party.”

  “Which United States senator were you talking to?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone can help Rosita.”

  “You’re the bottom of the barrel, Roy.”

  “You’re angry, so say what you wish. But you’re wrong.”

  “I think I’ve figured you out,” she said. “You want to be a hero. But your heroic deeds have to be public. There has to be a trade-off. You won’t take risks unless there’s personal gain.”

  Her words seemed to have no effect on him. “The
se photos and this note are the work of a miserably unhappy human being. The people who want to destroy Weldon are a far more serious group. They have ice water in their veins. When they decide to act, you’ll know it. They don’t send a warning.”

  “What’s your idea of serious? What do you call locking up an innocent and perfectly sound woman in an asylum?”

  “The people I’m referring to are capable of killing the president of the United States. I’ve heard them talk about it.”

  “I don’t believe anything you say.”

  “Your innocence is your great virtue, Linda Gail. I knew that when I first met you. I knew it would prevail over your ambition and your temporary lapses into the temptations of celebrity. That’s why I fell in love with you. That’s what Jack Valentine recognized in you when you walked out on the porch of that country store. Jack was a swine, but he knew a winner when he saw one.”

  “On a train, two newsmen asked if I knew that Rosita was a Communist. I said I would report her if I thought that. What do you think of me now?”

  “You break my heart, that’s what I think of you.”

  He sat down behind his desk and stared at the photographs, breathing audibly through his nose, his thumbs pressed into his temples. Then he gathered the photos and the note and pushed them back into the mailer and handed it to her. “I talked to my father about helping Rosita. He walked out of the room. Do you know whom I actually have influence with? Hollywood people. And that’s because most of them aren’t that bright. The other bunch are Frankie Carbo’s friends. Everybody does business with them, but I’m the only one who’ll have dinner with them.”

  At that moment Linda Gail realized she would probably go through many changes, even dramatic transformations, on her journey toward the grave. The laws of mutability were not unlike the wind blowing on a weather vane, and in all probability they would take their toll on her or reward her in ways she never anticipated. Her career would fail or succeed; age would steal her looks but perhaps give her a degree of wisdom; she might divorce and remarry, or stay with Hershel, or live out her life as a single woman. One day she might enjoy enormous wealth, the kind that was the envy of every person she had grown up with. But there was one thing she was absolutely sure of: She would never be entirely free of Roy Wiseheart or understand how she had slept securely in the arms of a man who was more wraith than flesh and blood. Nor would she get over her lover’s greatest tragedy—his total ignorance of how much joy he could have given others. So who had been the greater loser? She didn’t want to answer that question.

  IT’S FAIR TO say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable. Hershel was sitting in the passenger seat of the Cadillac when Linda Gail turned in to our driveway. I went outside to greet them. He rolled down his window. “How you doin’, Loot?” he said.

  I knew the purpose of their visit would not be a cheerful one. It was hard to put a good hat on our situation. I also knew that the odyssey we had begun in the immediate aftermath of the war was approaching its conclusion. They followed me into the living room and showed me the photographs and the typed note Linda Gail had gotten in the mail. “Who do you think sent these?” I said.

  “I showed them to Roy. He said they came from someone who was miserably unhappy,” Linda Gail replied.

  “Such as his wife?” I said.

  Hershel had not taken off his coat and was looking out the front window. It was a grand gold-and-green winter day, the kind that makes you remember the Deep South with fondness. “You didn’t gather your pecans this fall,” he said.

  “Didn’t have time,” I said.

  “Remember in the Ardennes when I was fussing about Steinberg? You know, about him being a Jew and getting the heebie-jeebies on patrol?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “You remember it, Weldon. You told me to knock it off. Then you asked me what my folks did at Christmastime. I told you we picked pecans on the gallery and my mother baked a fruitcake and my daddy made eggnog with red whiskey in it, not moonshine, and we went squirrel hunting with a colored man who worked on shares with us. I remember it just like it happened yesterday.”

  I smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “The pecan and oak trees in your yard look just like they do in Louisiana this time of year,” he said. “They have a soft quality, like in an old postcard. It’s like going back to when we were kids, isn’t that right, Linda Gail?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “Don’t be looking at those photographs,” he said. “They’re meant to hurt us. Don’t give these people any more satisfaction.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said, and put the photos and note back in the mailer.

  “Would you mind if I go out there and gather up some of your pecans?” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  That’s what the three of us did. I got a quart of eggnog out of the icebox, and we sat on the porch steps in the sun and cracked the pecans with a pair of pliers and picked the meat out of the shells and ate it, and passed the eggnog back and forth, drinking from the carton, ignoring the fact we were adults and that William Blake’s tiger still prowled the earth and that somewhere on the edges of the park or the neighborhood or the city limits or the country’s borders, thieves waited to break in and steal.

  “What do you want me to do with the photos and the note, Weldon?” Linda Gail said.

  “Burn them,” I replied.

  After they left, I went back to the county psychiatric ward where Rosita was being held and was told she had been transferred to the hospital at Wichita Falls.

  When I returned home, I went into Grandfather’s bedroom. “I’ll have to be gone for a few days,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  I told him.

  “They perform lobotomies there?” he said.

  “It’s the asylum where my mother probably would have undergone electroshock treatment if we hadn’t gotten her back.” I saw a painful flicker in his eyes.

  “What are you doing with that Luger?” he said.

  “I haven’t thought it through.”

  “Take me up there with you. Maybe they’ll listen to an old man. It’s the only advantage that comes with age. You can yell at people and they cain’t do anything about it.”

  We both knew the folly of his words and the level of hopelessness they represented.

  I CALLED A RURAL air service in Tomball and hired a pilot to fly me to Wichita Falls. I was almost out the door with my suitcase, one that contained clothes for both me and Rosita, when I saw Roy Wise­heart’s metallic gray Packard coming down the street. I set down the suitcase inside the door so he couldn’t see it, and waited for him under the porch light. The night was cold and black, the stars a snowy shower across the sky.

  I was filled with conflict as I watched Roy turn in to the drive. I would be justified if I rebuffed him. I was tired of his rhetoric and his Byronic affectations and his self-manufactured aura of martyrdom. I wondered if he had any idea of the damage he had done to Hershel; if he had any idea how much Hershel loved Linda Gail. I wondered if he had any idea how courageous and humble and decent a man Hershel Pine was. I wondered if Roy ever thought about anyone except Roy.

  I stepped down off the porch and met him in the middle of the yard.

  “You headed out somewhere?” he said. He was holding a package the size and shape of a cardboard mailer, wrapped with black satin paper and silver ribbon.

  “Rosita has been moved to the asylum at Wichita Falls. I think your friends want to physically destroy her brain.”

  “These are not my friends, bud.”

  “You come out of the same background, you belong to the same clubs, you went to the same schools. You make a religion out of denying any connection with the world that ha
s given you everything you have. The reality is, you’re one of their acolytes.”

  “That hurts me deeply.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll survive.”

  “I came to ask a favor. Please give this to Linda Gail when she’s alone. It’s my way of saying good-bye. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over her.”

  “What is it?”

  “Bunny Berigan’s recording of ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’ She loved this song.”

  “Your wife told me you gave that record to her.”

  “I’m surprised she remembered.”

  “I’ll say good night to you now, Roy. I wish you well. I don’t think I’ll be in contact with you again.”

  “You’re disappointed in me?”

  “Who am I to judge?” I replied.

  Typical of Roy, he didn’t let go easily. He walked to the porch and leaned the gift for Linda Gail against the bottom step. “You’re a heck of a guy, Weldon. Make them wince,” he said.

  “That last part is your father’s mantra.”

  “Sometimes the old man gets it right,” he replied. “By the way, in case you didn’t read it in the paper, Lloyd Fincher died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. It’s a great loss. Half the hookers in San Antonio will be out of work.”

  LINDA GAIL ALWAYS loved books and did well academically. Even after skipping ninth grade, she was placed in the high school honors program. Her favorite treat during the summer was the visit of the old WPA bread truck/bookmobile to her rural neighborhood, where many of the parents were barely literate and her peers spent their spare time shooting songbirds with air rifles or making what they called “nigger shooters” from willow forks and strips of inner tube. Her favorite books were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings. Rarely did she get to read books like those in Honors English. In her sophomore English class, the students memorized and recited long passages from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Evangeline.” Linda Gail made up for her lack of interest in the material by outdoing everyone in the class. While others barely got through a recitation in front of the class, Linda Gail memorized twice the number of lines and kept going until the teacher had to stop her, out of fairness to the student who was supposed to follow her, whose recitation Linda Gail was making redundant.