Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (12 page)

The waitress brought us another round. Linda Gail sipped her drink, her eyes roving around the dance hall. “Hershel promised to take me to Mexico City to see a bullfight,” she said. “But here we sit.”

Hershel scraped his thumbnail on the label of his beer bottle. “We’ll be going there directly. You’ll see,” he said.

She lifted her gaze toward the ceiling, as though barely able to suppress her exasperation. She looked at Rosita. “Do they have bullfights where you come from?”

“Yes, in Spain there are many bullfights. But I’ve never seen one,” Rosita said.

“Why not?”

“I guess I never had the opportunity.”

“You think they’re cruel?” Linda Gail said. Without waiting for a reply, she said, “If I was a bull, I’d rather die that way than be ground into hamburger. Well, Mexico City awaits us, if we can get out of this mud hole. I thought Bogalusa was bad.”

Hershel drained his beer glass. “Let’s hit the road. I’m going to officially burn the first stringer-bead rod at 0800. Watch out, Standard Oil. Here comes the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company.”

I saw the man in the fedora approaching our table. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoos on his forearms. We had made a serious mistake in granting Linda Gail’s request for one more whiskey sour. “Howdy,” he said.

I looked up into his face. It was furrowed and grainy and as brown as a tobacco leaf, his eyes playful. Hershel’s back faced him. “How you doin’?” I said.

“Are y’all visiting?” he asked.

“No, we’re not,” I replied.

One of the buttons on his shirt was missing, and I could see the flatness of his stomach and a black swatch of his chest hair. There was a soapy yellow cast in his shirt, as though it had been washed in a lavatory.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he said.

“We will,” I said.

“I’m from here’bouts,” he said.

“I had that sense,” I said.

Hershel turned his head and looked up at the tall man, then back at me, his gaze locked on mine.

“Well, let’s get on it,” I said. I stood up and pulled back Rosita’s chair. I could feel the tall man’s eyes peeling off the side of my face.

“You don’t have to run,” he said. “The band is gonna be playing three more hours. You ought to have some more of those taters cooked in chicken fat. They oil you up.”

“You know how it is when everything is early to bed and early to rise,” Linda Gail said, fixing her dress.

I wasn’t sure if she was mocking him or us.

“I hope you’re not rushing off because of me,” he said. “I just wanted to say howdy. People say howdy to visitors where y’all come from, don’t they?”

“Yeah, we do. Then we say adios,” I said.

We went outside into the coolness of the night, under a canopy of stars. Out in the darkness were piney woods, and dirt roads lined with live oak trees and thousands of acres of green sugarcane, and a gigantic swampland that smelled of spawning fish and drilling rigs that leaked natural gas like soda bubbles.

“I know that guy,” Hershel whispered as we walked toward the car.

I started to look over my shoulder.

“Don’t turn around,” Hershel said. “He and his friends are behind us. He was the guy on the bus when you picked me up in Kerrville.”

“Are you sure?”

“I remember his tattoos. He’s got a naked woman on his left forearm.”

“Hold up there!” the tall man said.

We put Rosita and Linda Gail in the car and closed the doors. The tall man and his friends were walking toward us, crunching across the gravel. “I just wanted to tell you something,” he said to Hershel. He put a cigarette in his mouth and cupped the flame of a Zippo around it. He snapped the Zippo shut with his thumb, his face disappearing into shadow again. “I was scoping out your lady by the jukebox. You’ve got yourself a real nice piece of tail there.”

I heard Hershel step forward. I put my hand on his wrist and held it tight. “This is St. Landry Parish,” I said to the tall man, although my words were really addressed to Hershel. “It’s a corrupt place. The cops protect the whorehouses and the gambling joints. You wouldn’t start trouble with us if you weren’t operating with permission. Go back and tell the guy who sent you here it didn’t work. Don’t misunderstand the gesture, either. Stay away from us.”

“You’re pretty clever,” he said. “Except you’re all wrong. I used to see that girl in the car around Bogalusa. She was anybody’s punch. I never tried it, but I heard she could buck you to the ceiling. You boys enjoy yourself.”

I stepped in front of Hershel.

I
T WASN’T EASY
to get him into the car and away from the man who obviously wanted to engage us in a situation we couldn’t win. But finally, he listened to me, probably because in his mind I was still his commanding officer. A thunderstorm broke on our way to the motor court, drumming so loudly on the car that we couldn’t talk. In the rearview mirror, I could see Linda Gail staring out the window into the darkness, lost in thought. I wondered if she was thinking about the mansions in the River Oaks section of Houston or about a matador saluting her with the ears and tail of the bull that had been sacrificed in her honor. I wondered if she was indeed a dissolute country girl from Bogalusa. But as we all learn in our misspent excursions down the wrong highway, profligacy and innocence tend to be bedfellows. I think that Linda Gail belonged to the vast hordes who believed in what we call the American dream, a fantasy somehow linked to the magical world of Hollywood and the waves crashing on the rocks at sunset along the beaches of Santa Barbara.

Back at the motor court, I realized Rosita had been more upset by our confrontation in the parking lot than I had expected. I walked down to the office and got a Coca-Cola and a container of chipped ice and went back to the room and poured a glass for her and put an aspirin in her palm.“Who was he?” she asked.

“Who cares? If I hadn’t stopped Hershel, he would have spilled that guy’s guts on the gravel.”

“Hershel says this man was following him.”

“Hershel gets emotional and doesn’t always see the world correctly.”

She sat down by the window and pulled back the curtain and looked at the rain dancing on the motor court’s driveway. “I saw men like that march through Andalusia with their tassels bouncing on their hats. They were merciless. They all had the same lean and hungry look, the kind a wolf would have. I believe Hershel.”

“Time to go to sleep, kid,” I said. “We’re the good guys. The good guys always win.”

We went to sleep with our heads on the same pillow, our brows touching. I woke at three
A.M.
and saw her sitting at the window again, flashes of lightning reflecting off her face. “Did something wake you?” I asked.

“It was only the wind swinging the sign in front of the office,” she said. “It was a rainy night like this when the Gestapo raided the apartment building where we were living. We thought we were safe because of the rain. The Gestapo would not leave their collaborator mistresses to go out in the rain in order to arrest a bunch of pitiful, frightened Jews, would they?”

“Don’t talk about it, Rosita.”

“I was there,” she said. “I will always talk about it. I will talk about it until my mouth is stopped with dirt.”

I lay back down and closed my eyes and tried to lose myself inside the drumroll of the storm on the roof and the rain gutters spouting into the driveway, flowing like a river into the street, the surface of the water crosshatched with pine needles and green leaves and camellia petals, as though the earth were attempting to cleanse itself of the attrition caused by those who were supposedly its stewards.

I
T WAS COLD
the next morning when Hershel and I drove out to the right-of-way we had cut through the heart of the forest. The trees were dripping, a band of light the color of yellow ivory trapped on the horizon under thunderheads that sealed the sky like the lid on a skillet. Our pipe had been dropped in segments along an open trench as far as the eye could see. There was no sound in the forest except the dripping of the trees and occasionally a dirt clod rolling into the rainwater at the bottom of the ditch.

Then our crew began to arrive. Most wore long-sleeved shirts to protect their skin from the mosquitoes. Most were gypsies by choice and the kind of men you meet on the edges of an empire in the making. They were brave and stoic by nature, and never complained of the conditions or the risks they took, and considered time in the military part of the ordinary ebb and flow of their lives. They were also incurably improvident, obsessed about matters concerning women and race, often went by their initials, and never used last names. They worked seventy-hour weeks as a matter of course and looked upon a conventional job in an industrial plant as little more than a vacation.

Hershel turned around his cap, put on a welder’s mask, and clipped a stringer-bead rod into the electrode holder of a rebuilt Nazi welding machine. Then he knelt down by a pipe joint and began a tack weld on the first of two hundred joints we would complete that day, the ball of reddish-yellow flame working its way around the circumference of the pipe. When he stood up and lifted the shield off his face, he was grinning so widely that I could have counted his teeth. “We just do’ed it, Loot,” he said. “Great God Almighty, we have done do’ed it.”

The weeks and months that followed were marked by no incidents of significance. I was surprised by how easily everything went. In reality, the rules on a pipeline or an oil rig are draconian and simple and cultural in nature rather than legalistic: If you show up late, you’re fired; if you show up drunk, you’re fired; if you sass the crew boss, you’re fired; if you screw up a weld, you’re fired; if you’re fried or wired or hungover and tired, you’re fired. We didn’t have to let one man go. We had no trouble with the union and no accidents on the job. Compared to life in the army, the work was a breeze. Rosita flew back to the ranch and visited me on the weekends at the motor court in Opelousas.

I rarely saw Linda Gail. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Regardless, I didn’t ask Hershel about her and decided to forget about the marital problems of others and about the implications of our encounter with the tall man in the parking lot. The Dixie Belle Pipeline Company was a success, and our profit margin on our first contract was far more than I had anticipated. We were receiving calls from Houston and Dallas about pipelines that would run from Oklahoma to the refineries of Texas City down on the Gulf. We were already talking with two drilling companies about laying undersea pipe for wells being drilled offshore.

Hershel bought a Cadillac convertible. Rosita and I went marlin fishing in the Yucatán. We swam in the mornings with dolphins in water that was as clear as green Jell-O, the coral reefs waving with gossamer fans, the sand white and striped with the torpedo-shaped shadows of lemon sharks that swam harmlessly past us.

It was wonderful to be with Rosita in a country where people cooked fish over open fires at sunrise on the beach. It was time to let the war and the slave camps and the burned cities of Europe slip into memory. We were in the springtime of our lives; the world had survived and was still a place of tropical rain forests and flowers floating on waves along our shores and sunsets that were like a metaphysical representation of the Passion of Christ. America had entered a new era; for good or bad, we were the new pilgrims, our gaze fixed on not one but two hemispheres.

We opened an office in Houston and bought an oil field supply yard in Beaumont. A national business magazine did a feature on our welding machines. Then a very improbable event occurred in our lives: We were invited to have lunch at the River Oaks Country Club with Roy Wiseheart.

It was October, and we were living in a rented two-story home that had been built in the 1880s in the Heights section of Houston. The house had a wide, columned porch and a big yard and flowerbeds and shade trees; it was located on a street divided by an esplanade and lined with Victorian homes similar to ours. It was a fine place to live, and I wish I could go back in time and freeze-frame that fateful afternoon when I returned home from the office and picked up the afternoon newspaper from the lawn and tucked it under my arm before going into the house. The light was golden in the trees, the smell of the chrysanthemums as heavy as gas in the cooling of the day; across the street, two boys were throwing a football back and forth. It was a portrait of traditional America that may have been a fiction, but if so, it was a marvelous one. Then I walked through the living room and into the kitchen, and Rosita told me of Wiseheart’s phone call.

“You’re sure that’s the name he gave you?”

“No, I made it up, Weldon.”

“Sorry.”

She handed me a slip of paper. “I wrote it down. The number is at the bottom. Do you know him?”

“Not personally. He invited Linda Gail and Hershel, too?”

“He said he was inviting you and me and ‘Mr. Pine and his wife.’ I told him I didn’t know if you were going to be in town Saturday. Would you answer my question, please? Who is he?”

“One of the richest men in the United States. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of what?”

“You know,
it,
” I said.

Chapter

9

F
IVE MINUTES LATER,
I came out of the den and went into the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“You talked to Mr. Wiseheart?”

“Briefly.”

“Would you stop whatever it is you’re doing?”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re really frustrating to talk to. You turned down his invitation?”

“I told him we were tied up. We always color-match our socks on Saturday. It’s high priority. I think he understood.”

“Why is this man such an ogre to you?”

“He’s known as an anti-Semite and an all-around son of a bitch.” I removed the top from a pot on the stove and looked inside it.

“You’re turning down the invitation because of me?”

“We don’t need guys like Wiseheart in our lives,” I said. “Let’s eat on the screen porch. It’s a fine evening.”