Wayfaring Stranger

  “What are we going to do with the car?” she asked.

  “Rent a garage. We’ll return for it later or hire someone to deliver it to Houston.”

  “Sounds easy.”

  “Hubert Slakely burned to death in his trailer. Grandfather told me last night.”

  She was chewing a tiny piece of toast in her cheek, her eyes focused on the red Spanish-tile roof of the depot. She waited until the piece of toast seemed to dissolve in her mouth, her gaze never leaving the train station. “How did the fire start?”

  “The paper said an electrical short.”

  She let her eyes drift onto mine.

  “You don’t believe that?” I said.

  “I think bad people earn their fate. The form it comes in doesn’t matter.”

  “You don’t believe it was an accident?” I said.

  “Was Lloyd Fincher’s death a suicide?” she said. “Was that private detective’s death a hit-and-run? I don’t care how any of them died. I’m glad they’re dead.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll be in Union Station in Los Angeles,” I said. “Wait till you see it. It’s beautiful. It looks like a Roman villa.”

  She was smiling.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “Who else would see ancient Rome in the middle of Los Angeles?”

  “Any student of history,” I replied.

  She looked up at me and winked, just as she had the day I found her deep inside Nazi Germany.

  Two motorcycle cops came in and removed their caps and sat at the counter. They were wearing leather jackets and knee-high polished boots and jodhpurs with stripes down the legs. Their faces looked tight and blistered, the skin around their eyes leached of color from the goggles they wore on the highway. One of them blew on his hands. Before I could turn away, our eyes met in the mirror.

  I looked straight ahead, then out the window, and tried not to scratch my forehead, which is what a person does when he wants to hide his face. I felt I had stepped onto a stage. I cursed myself under my breath for my carelessness in looking at the cops and for my phone call to Grandfather. I started to say something to Rosita. She was eating silently, her face lowered. “I saw them,” she whispered.

  “We’re in no hurry. We have no cares.”

  “We’ll be fine, Weldon,” she said, not looking up.

  I drank my cup empty and raised it to catch the waitress’s attention. I kept my gaze off the cops, but I could feel one of them looking at me in the mirror. I feigned a yawn. “I’m going to the washroom,” I said. “Don’t ask for the check.”

  She nodded and smiled as though I had said something pleasant.

  I washed my hands and combed my hair, so I would look like I’d taken my time in the men’s room. When I came back to the booth, I hoped the cops would be occupied with their breakfast or talking with the waitress. They were waiting on their food; the closest one was still looking at me in the mirror. The waitress put the check on our table.

  “Stay here,” I said to Rosita. “Don’t get up for any reason.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Paying the check.”

  I walked toward the cashier, putting on my hat, glancing casually at the check, pausing when I was abreast of the cops. “Excuse me, we’re headed east through Clayton and Texline. Do y’all know if there’s much black ice up that way?”

  “In the shady spots, maybe,” said the cop who had been looking at me. “Where you headed?”

  “Big D.”

  “You should have smooth sailing.”

  “Somebody told me Clayton is where Black Jack Ketchum was hanged.”

  “If you stop in Clayton, go to the Hotel Eklund. They have pictures of the execution on the wall.”

  “I don’t remember exactly what his crime was.”

  “You name it, he did it. A general bad guy.”

  “I hear there’s a famous restaurant there.”

  “It’s in the Eklund,” he said. “You’re from Dallas?”

  “No, I grew up in southwest Texas. Thanks for your help.”

  He said nothing in reply. I paid the check and went back to our booth and placed a tip under my plate. Then Rosita and I walked side by side down the line of counter stools, past the cops. Neither turned around or seemed to take notice of us in the mirror. They were both smoking cigarettes, sipping from their coffee, tipping their ashes in the saucer. The waitress was bending over to get some water glasses from a shelf, her skirt stretched across her shapely rump. The cops looked into space; they did not speak to each other. Nor did they look at the woman.

  Rosita and I walked down the street, past the depot, the wind so cold there was no difference between it and a flame.

  “What do you think?” Rosita asked.

  “We stepped on a land mine.”

  WE WENT THROUGH the side door of a grocery store and filled a sack with bread and sliced meat and cheese and canned goods and soda pop. From a window, I saw one of the cops come out of the café with his helmet and goggles on. A cruiser pulled into the parking lot. The motorcycle cop talked to the driver, leaning down to the window, the tailpipe of the cruiser puffing smoke. Then the cruiser drove out of view, and the motorcycle cop went back into the café. What did it all mean? I couldn’t be sure.

  Rosita and I walked as briskly as we could to the motor court. My eyes were watering; my face felt blistered from the wind. The room seemed to crawl with static electricity. If I touched a metal surface, a spark jumped from my fingers. I looked out the side of the curtain. The street and the two-lane highway were empty, newspaper swirling in a vortex next to a knocked-over garbage can.

  “What do you want to do?” Rosita said.

  “Get out of town.”

  “Where?”

  It was hard to think. If we went south, we would drive into sparsely populated badlands where our level of visibility would be maximized and our ability to change our route reduced to nil. Driving east into the Texas Panhandle would put us in the bull’s-eye again. Taos was a viable option, located down a winding road among wooded mountains, but it was full of artists and writers and bohemians, the kind of people who take note of everything they see and hear. The best choice—the only one, in my opinion—was to get out of New Mexico and into Colorado.

  “We’re a half hour from Trinidad,” I said. “We’ll be out of sight and out of mind. We can go into the San Juan or Sangre de Cristo Mountains or keep going into Denver. They’ll never find us in Denver.”

  “But they’ll find us somewhere,” Rosita said.

  “Time’s on our side.”

  “I want to talk to Linda Gail. I want to get a message to Roy Wiseheart and his wife,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “It doesn’t matter at this point,” she said. “Call them collect. Or would you rather I do it?”

  I picked up the phone. “What’s the message?”

  “Tell Linda Gail that if we live through this, I’m going to kill Roy and Clara Wiseheart.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Look at what they’ve done to us.”

  Her attitude was hard to argue with. Clara and her father-in-law, Dalton Wiseheart, seemed to nurse their anti-Semitism like a poisonous orchid, and one or both of them was responsible for the grief we had been through. But prejudice took second place to their lust for money and power. I made the call, although not for the reason Rosita thought.

  Linda Gail answered the phone and accepted the charges.

  “I’ll make this quick,” I said. “Our meter may be running out. If something happens to me, the company goes to Hershel. That’s in my will. The will also states that my mother and grandfather are to be cared for for the rest of their lives. If you see Roy, tell him I hope he has a good life. If you ever see Dalton Wiseheart, tell him he
failed. Tell him that in the House of Jesse, he wouldn’t be allowed to clean a chamber pot.”

  “He failed at what?”

  “Destroying me and my wife.”

  “I don’t think you know what’s going on here,” she said. “Clara Wiseheart came to our house in a rage. Her friends in the DAR won’t take her calls. Her picture has been in the newspaper twice, once with her mouth hanging open. Roy went to the airport last night and left town for parts unknown. She thought he went to Los Angeles with me. Spit was flying off her lips while she was yelling at me in the driveway. The neighbors enjoyed the show tremendously.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Where do you think Roy went?”

  “You and Hershel take care of each other. Take care of Grandfather, too. He’s not as tough as he lets on.”

  “This sounds like a deathbed statement. What’s happening? Where are you?”

  “We’re better than any of them. Remember that, Linda Gail,” I said.

  When I hung up, Rosita was sitting in a wooden chair by the window. “You don’t like to leave threatening messages for people like the Wisehearts?”

  “Grandfather faced down Wes Hardin and the Dalton gang. I asked him how he did it. He said, ‘You don’t say a word. You fill their ears with your silence. The only voice they’ll hear will be their own fear.’”

  “I meant what I said about not going back.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  “There were times in the camp when I wished I had killed myself. If they had put me in the whorehouse, I would have done it. Even after the SS deserted the camp, I didn’t want to live anymore. Not with the memories I had. Not until I met you.”

  “I was a poor catch.”

  “They’re not going to take me alive, Weldon.”

  As I looked into her eyes, I wondered if Bonnie Parker had thought the same thing on the blacktop parish road outside Arcadia, Louisiana. There was nothing more I could say. Sometimes death is preferable to life. Only a fool, or someone who has never seen suffering on an unimaginable scale, would say otherwise.

  “We have to go,” Rosita said. “Snow is blowing at the top of the Pass.”

  It was true. The sun was shining, but high up the grade, one of the steepest in the Rockies, snow crystals were whirling among the rocks and pine boughs like spun glass. Rosita backed out the car while I carried our suitcase and bag of groceries outside. We went through the intersection at the edge of town, and in under thirty seconds, we were climbing the incline toward the heavens, the bottom of the canyon dropping into shadow behind us. I reached under the seat and pulled out the Luger and set it by my thigh.

  TOWARD THE TOP of the grade, I saw an old mining town surrounded by piles of rust-colored slag. The streets were made of crushed rock. On one of them was a white stucco church with a small tower that I thought might have been an eighteenth-century Spanish mission. Then I remembered the story. After the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the Rockefeller family built churches throughout the West to rehabilitate the reputation of their patriarch. The site of the massacre was midway between Trinidad and Pueblo. To me, the white stucco building among the slag heaps told a story that probably few were interested in: an armored personnel carrier firing into striking miners, the burning of their tents, the asphyxiation of eleven children and two women in an earthen pit. Americans did this to other Americans. To me, it seemed a shameful business. But that’s not why I mention this instance of egregious cruelty. I felt that somehow Rosita and I were entering the past, stepping into the roles of people who had already lived their lives and were watching us replicate them.

  Most of the streets in Trinidad were brick, the buildings constructed of heavy gray stones, the city spread across a broad knoll at the bottom of mountains that soared straight into the sky, more like buttes than mountains. I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps roadblocks or the Colorado state police. I guess everyone believes during a time of duress that the rest of the world is focused on his or her problems. According to Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year, those afflicted by the Black Death wandered the cobblestone streets of London in 1665 shouting out their sins to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. The shutters of every house and cottage and apartment were slammed shut on their cries.

  I pulled into a filling station and asked the attendant to change the oil in our car, primarily to get the Confederate out of view. Rosita and I walked to the public library and talked to the reference lady about the history of the city, all the time glancing out the windows for anything unusual on the streets or the highway. To the north was a huge cattle auction barn and, behind it, pastureland that was still green. The wind had died, and snowflakes were drifting down in the sunshine from a mountain that resembled a vertically serrated steel-blue skyscraper with no windows. I could not have imagined a more peaceful urban setting.

  “Are you visiting?” the librarian asked. Her reading glasses hung from a velvet ribbon around her neck.

  “We thought we might look around,” I replied. “Is it very difficult to drive out in the San Juan Mountains?”

  “It can be. Up high, at least,” she said. “This time of year you have to be careful. The bad passes are Wolf Creek and Monarch. You’re not going there, are you?”

  “No, we’re casual tourists,” I said. “We’re not looking for anything very adventurous.”

  “Nothing exciting happens around here,” she said. “Maybe you should spend some time with us. If you like horse racing, summer is a much better time.”

  “Thank you for the information,” I said.

  “I hope I haven’t misled you.”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “I said nothing exciting happens around here. Maybe it’s better you not pick up any hitchhikers today.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “A deputy sheriff was in the café earlier. He said something about a kidnapper on the loose.”

  “Someone who kidnapped a child?” I said.

  “I didn’t quite get it all.” The librarian put her reading glasses back on. “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

  We went outside. Nothing of substance had changed in the streets. There was no police presence that I could see. But the day was not the same. The air smelled of tar and burned food and dust from a train yard; it had the dry smell of unending winter. The light was harsher, colder. The green pastures were dimmed by snow blowing down from the mountains. I saw cracks in the sidewalk and the asphalt that I hadn’t noticed earlier. The nineteenth-century buildings resembled prison houses and asylums rather than Victorian homes. A grayish-green twin-engine plane crossed the sky directly overhead, its color reminiscent of the camouflage paint on a German fighter-bomber. I wondered if doors were slamming all around us, as they had slammed on the afflicted in the time of Defoe.

  “Where are we going?” Rosita asked.

  “To get the car,” I replied, my voice sharper than it should have been.

  “I mean after that.”

  “There’s a town up the road called Walsenburg. We can take a train there. We’ll leave the car behind.”

  She put her arm in mine. “Keep looking straight ahead,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a police car on the corner,” she replied.

  We waited until the traffic light turned green, then crossed the street and stood in front of a hardware store so we could use the display window as a mirror. The police cruiser went through the intersection and turned at the corner, then drove slowly up a hill toward a stone building that looked like a courthouse or a city hall. The driver seemed to be looking on both sides of the street.

  “We’re getting on the road,” I said.

  I paid the filling station attendant for the oil change and for fueling the car. “You headed north?” he said.

  “No, we’re staying in to
wn. What’s up north?”

  “A front is moving in. Warm air rises up from the plateau in New Mexico and hits the cold air, and we get dump-truck loads of snow dropped on us. We can have bright, sunny weather, and in ten minutes the sky can turn black as midnight.”

  “Glad we’re staying in town,” I said.

  We drove out of the business district and onto the highway, past the auction barn, into a buffeting wind, into uncertainty of every kind. I stayed in second gear, the accelerator to the floor, until the transmission was screaming.

  It’s hard to describe the feeling I had. It was one of those moments when mortality becomes real. It wasn’t like the war. War gives you choices, not of the best kind, certainly, but choices just the same, or at least the illusion of them. When mortality steals upon you in an improbable fashion, in a totally innocuous environment, you know it’s real because it’s not supposed to be there. It’s not a crossroads; it’s a cul-de-sac.

  When I was fifteen, I went to visit my uncle Cody on his ranch in the Gunnison Valley. The train trip was a splendid adventure for a boy my age, particularly during the privation of the Great Depression. My mother fixed me a bag of fried chicken, and my father gave me a dollar watch so I could get myself up before my four A.M. arrival in Walsenburg, where my uncle was meeting me at the station. When my father gave me the watch, he said, “It’s probably good for only one trip, but it’ll do you.”

  He was right. The day after I arrived in Colorado, the spring broke. The dollar watch had served its purpose and was no longer of any value. That’s how I felt as we sped up the highway into hail clicking on the windshield and glistening like glass on the asphalt. Perhaps our race was almost done, and this was the way our denouement had been written. Perhaps the Fates never intended me to survive Saint-Lô or the Ardennes and I had escaped my destiny by accident. Or maybe Rosita wasn’t supposed to leave the camp where I found her; maybe both of us had interfered in a design that was much larger than we were.