Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (11 page)

“Before the war, we were still laying natural gas pipe bolted together at the joint, Lieutenant,” Hershel said. “I’ve got seventeen of these German arc welding machines located. It’s just a matter of transporting them into the country. I got a deal on a fleet of army-surplus flatbeds, too.”

“It’s Weldon,” I said.

“Yes, sir. I can get us German steel that we can use as center cutters on our own ditching machines. The next step is obtaining patents for the modifications on the arc welders. Sir, you have no idea how big this can be.”

I nodded. “There’s a hurdle we haven’t gotten to yet, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir. A big one. We need thirty, maybe forty thousand dollars to get out of the chute.” He looked straight ahead, his face tight.

Rosita was standing between us, gazing at the designs of the welding machines. “Who are the people selling you the machines?”

“Krauts,” he said.

“Were they members of the Nazi Party?” she said.

He kept his eyes on the table. “They could have been. I didn’t ask. For me, the war is over, Miss Rosita.”

“I’ve got an uncle who’s a wildcatter,” I said.

I heard Grandfather work his way into the room on his walking canes. “Satchel, did you sustain an appreciable amount of brain damage while you were over there?” he said.

W
E ATE DINNER
late that night, and Rosita said little at the table. Upstairs, she put on her nightgown and lay down on the mattress and turned on the bed lamp. It was ceramic, its white glaze painted with green and purple flowers. She touched the flowers with the tips of her fingers.

“Is something bothering you?” I asked.

“Those machines have blood on them.”

“They’re just machines. They’re neither good nor bad.”

“You’ve given up your plans to enter graduate school, haven’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“You have the soul of a poet,” she said. “You’d be a wonderful teacher.”

“The GI Bill pays eighty-five dollars a month for a married man. Can you imagine living in New York on that?”

“We can move to Austin. You can attend the state university.”

“Hershel and I are going to see my uncle Cody tomorrow afternoon. I want you to come with us.”

“You don’t need me for this.”

“I want you to understand my family. Some of them have led violent lives. I’m not like them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love and admire them. Uncle Cody left home when he was twelve years old and became a vagabond. In a freight car outside St. Louis, he offered to share his food with two drifters. They thanked him by taking his food and trying to rape him. He killed both of them with a pocketknife. In New York, he was a bodyguard for Owney Madden, the man who owned the Cotton Club. Today he’s a wealthy oilman. I’m going to ask him what he thinks of Hershel’s plans.”

“Why are you telling me all these things?”

“I’m not sure, Rosita. My family is different. We were never spectators.”

She turned on her side, her back to me, her hip rounded under the sheet. Her shoulders were white and as cool and smooth to the touch as marble.

“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.

“You don’t realize the gift you have.”

She reached out and clicked off the lamp.

C
ODY HOLLAND’S RANCH,
one of several he owned, was a long drive, almost to the Gulf of Mexico, a spot he’d obviously chosen to create the home and the life he had never enjoyed as a boy. It was almost dark when we passed Goliad, the site of the execution of 350 Texas soldiers under the command of James Fannin on Palm Sunday, 1836. A winter storm was building in the south as we pulled up to a brightly lit diner on the highway, within sight of Matagorda Island. The palm fronds down by the beach were whipping in the wind against a black sky that rippled with electricity.

My uncle had not invited us to his home. He was an untrusting man, unpredictable, sentimental, often controlling and quick to anger. He was also feared. Oddly, though, I had never felt uncomfortable around him. I think I saw the orphan in his eyes, because like my mother, Cody was one of the children Grandfather had let founder by the wayside.

Rosita and I and Hershel and my uncle sat in a cigarette-burned red vinyl booth in back and drank long-necked Jax beer and avoided talking business until after we had finished eating. Hershel’s level of ill ease was palpable. His face had an oily shine; he constantly touched at his mouth with a folded paper napkin and rubbed his neck, as though he wore a serf’s collar. “Is the fishing right good down here?” he said.

“Speckled trout and gafftop catfish, mostly,” Cody said. He was built like a door. His hair was wavy and black, silver in places; he looked directly into people’s faces whether they were offended or not.

“I’d like to get in on that,” Hershel said. He stared down at the steak gravy and blood and pink-edged remnants of the T-bone on his plate, unable to think of anything else to say.

The waitress put the check on the edge of the table. It stayed there, absorbing the wet rings left by our beer bottles.

“What’s this pipeline venture you’ve got in mind?” Cody asked.

In the background, somebody dropped a nickel into the jukebox. Harry Choate’s famous recording of “La Jolie Blon” began playing.

“I’ve got a way to put pipe in the ground that will stay there a hundred years without a leak,” Hershel said. “I’m talking about the same weld that held the King Tiger tank together. I was doing both tack and hot-pass welds when I was sixteen years old, Mr. Holland. It’s something I always had a talent for.”

“Is that a fact?” Cody said.

“Yes, sir, you can take it to the bank,” Hershel said.

There was a pause. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Hershel’s passion was that of a true believer, in the same way that the Puritans saw work as a virtue and idleness as sin and failure as a preview of perdition. Hershel had probably never heard of Cotton Mather, but in a large crowd, one quickly would have recognized the other.

While Hershel talked, Cody wrote on a paper napkin. Then he shook a Lucky Strike out of a pack and lit it, looking at the figures on the napkin, without offering a cigarette to anyone else. “What’s your feeling about all this, Miss Rosita?” he asked.

“How about not addressing me as though I’m a character in
Gone With the Wind
?” she replied.

Cody removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “You seem like an intelligent woman. I want to know what you think.”

“I think Hershel is a good man. I think you’re fortunate that he’s come to you rather than to someone else.”

“I didn’t get that.”

“You’re rude and you’re arrogant, Mr. Holland. You radiate a sense of self-satisfaction that’s hard to take.”

Cody tipped the ashes from his cigarette on the side of his plate. I took the dinner check from the table and put it in my pocket.

“Give me that,” Cody said.

Rosita, what have you done?
I thought.

“This is the way I see it,” Cody said, placing the napkin he had doodled on in front of Hershel and me. “Thirty to forty thousand won’t cut it. You’ll need bulldozers and side booms, and you want to buy them, not rent them. At the least, you’ll need seventy thousand dollars. I’ll lend it to you at four percent interest. I’ll need eighty percent of that to be guaranteed by collateral. Since you don’t have any, you’ll have to factor me in as a fifty-one-percent partner. I don’t know if that suits y’all or not.”

“I might have to study on that, Uncle Cody.”

“You don’t want a relative as your partner? You just want to borrow his money?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“You know who’s funding the major drilling around here now?” he said. “It’s not the banks; it’s insurance companies. Talk to those sons of bitches.”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that language in front of my wife,” I said.

He tapped the ashes off his cigarette again, his expression neutral. He looked out the window. “I wouldn’t want to get caught on the highway in that storm.”

“Grandfather said if we went to the bank, he’d put up the ranch as collateral. Except the ranch just isn’t worth the kind of money we need.”

Cody put out his cigarette on his plate. Waves were capping out on Matagorda Bay, exploding in geysers of foam against a jetty that looked like a long black spinal cord protruding from the water. “He said he’d do that?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” I replied.

“Tell him it’s not necessary.”

“What isn’t?” I asked.

“He doesn’t need to put up the ranch. Not with the bank, not with me. I don’t need a percentage of your company, either.”

“Do we got us a deal, Mr. Holland?” Hershel said.

“You deaf, son?” Cody said. He got up from the booth and placed three ten-dollar bills by the cash register and walked out into the rain. He turned around and looked at us, the rain clicking on his hat. “Y’all want to come up to the house?”

A
T SUNRISE THE
next morning, I fired up the woodstove in the kitchen and began cooking a large breakfast for everyone. Grandfather was the first to come downstairs, sitting down heavily at the breakfast table, his chin razor-nicked, a piece of bloody toilet paper stuck to it. I poured him a cup of coffee and placed the cup on a saucer and set the saucer and cup in front of him. He poured coffee into the saucer and blew on it, then drank from the saucer. I had told him late the previous night of the agreement we had struck with Uncle Cody. Grandfather had said nothing in reply.

“You want a pork chop or ham with your eggs, Grandfather?” I asked.

“Whatever you’re fixing.”

“You’re the one who has to eat it.”

“How’s Cody doing?”

“He sure has a pretty home.”

“You got to see it?”

“He invited us over after we had supper with him. No one can call him ordinary.”

“Cody doesn’t forgive. He harbors resentments. I stole his childhood, Satch, just like I did your mother’s.”

“I don’t think they see it that way,” I lied.

“I want you to listen to me about the oil people you’re fixing to involve yourself with. Give them the chance, they’ll tear you boys up. They might be from Texas, but they’re not our kind of people. They’ll wave every flag they can get their hands on and tell you they’re patriots. Don’t be taken in. They’re not political. They’re just downright mean.”

Chapter

8

S
PRING CAME EARLY
in 1946, the year that arguably marked the inception of the New American Empire, and with it came the development of our company, which Hershel insisted on naming the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company. We underbid two contractors in Louisiana, and by April we were cutting a right-of-way through wooded areas north of the Atchafalaya Basin. The night before the first weld was made on our first pipe joint, we celebrated by going to a Cajun dance hall in Opelousas.

It was hot and smoky inside the hall, ventilated by two huge window fans, the dance floor crowded, the walls scrolled with neon beer signs. Through a serving window, I could see three black men French-frying potatoes in chicken fat, their skin glistening with sweat. Hershel danced with his wife, Linda Gail, then asked Rosita to dance, and I was left alone at the table with Linda Gail. She had a small gap between her front teeth and the solid physique and round face of a farm girl; her auburn hair was full of curls that looked like springs, her eyes as serene and one-dimensional as a cloudless sky. Nonetheless, she was a pretty girl and, I suspected, more intelligent than she seemed at first glance. “Have you ever been to River Oaks?” she asked.

“In Houston?”

“That’s the only River Oaks I know of. Did you ever live there?”

“No, I grew up in the country, far west of there.”

“I can’t imagine anybody having that much money, can you?”

“I guess some people have it and some don’t.”

“Hershel thinks the world of you.”

“He’s pretty hard to beat himself,” I replied.

“He gets impressed too easily. That’s how people take advantage of him.”

A black man put a tray of French fries on the table. She picked up one and put it in her mouth and watched the black man walk away. “Do you think they wash their hands?”

I looked at her awkwardly.

She laughed. “Got you. You need to develop a sense of humor. Nobody in a place like this washes their hands. Oh, look, thank God, the band is taking a break. I thought my ears were going to start bleeding. You’d think they’d try to learn English, at least enough to sing a song. Will you order me a whiskey sour? I’m going to drop a nickel in the jukebox. Jesus, it’s hot. A person could make a fortune selling deodorant in this place.”

She walked away, pulling her blouse off her skin with the tips of her fingers and shaking it to cool herself. There were four men drinking beer at a table not far from the jukebox. Linda Gail positioned herself in front of the jukebox and read the song titles while she smoothed her dress against her hips with the heels of her hands. One of the men at the table got up and stood behind her. He wore a soiled dress shirt and a beat-up fedora and was unshaved and had a long face and narrow shoulders. Linda Gail propped one arm on top of the jukebox and leaned down, as though examining the selections more closely, the orange and green and red glow of the plastic casing marbling the tops of her breasts.

“This is quite a place,” Hershel said when he and Rosita returned to the table. “Where’s Linda Gail?”

I could see the tall man looking down at Linda Gail’s breasts, his three friends at the table enjoying the show. “I think she went to the ladies’ room,” I said.

“I guess we have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” Hershel said. “Y’all had enough for tonight?”

“Linda Gail said she wanted a whiskey sour.”

“She likes mixed drinks, all right. Growing up in the Assemblies of God has a way of doing that to you.”

I saw Linda Gail turn from the jukebox and head back toward us. “Let’s have one more round, then go,” I said.

I have always believed that women have a much more accurate sense about other women than we do. I think the same is true of men: We know things about our own kind that women do not. The things we know are not good, either. There are feral creatures among our gender, throwbacks to an earlier time, and as a man, you know this as soon as you are in their proximity. For that reason I have never subscribed to the notion that we all descend from the same tree. There are gatherers and there are hunters. The inclination of the latter is always in their eyes.