Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (14 page)

“That’s a terrible story.”

“Maybe he thought he was protecting his leader. But my friend said Wiseheart had four kills and needed a fifth in order to be an ace.”

“What’s the expression your grandfather is always using?”

“Don’t borrow trouble.”

“Good words to remember. Let’s go upstairs.”

The house had a big attic fan. When we shut all the windows except the one in our bedroom and turned on the fan, the entire house creaked, and within minutes our bedroom was airy and cool. There was a magnolia tree in full bloom outside our window, and I could hear raindrops ticking on the leaves. Rosita undressed with her back to me, then got under the sheet.

“You’re still shy with me,” I said.

“That’s what you think, buster.”

“You’ve been watching too many American movies,” I said.

She looked into my face. “Did you have a bad dream last night?”

“I dreamed about Hershel. He was buried alive and I couldn’t pull him loose from the ground.”

“Are you worried about him?”

“I’m worried about his wife.”

“She’s not a bad girl.”

“She’s easily used. Most Southerners are. We give power to the worst among us.”

Rosita turned off the light on the nightstand and pulled the sheet off her. “Come here,” she said.

“When did you start giving orders?”

“Just now.”

“Bad idea,” I said. I got up from the bed and took a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll let you know.”

I went downstairs in my pajamas and into the backyard and cut a huge yellow rose from a bush and went back upstairs and sat on the side of the bed and laid the rose on her stomach.

“Why did you do that?”

“I felt like it,” I said. Then I kissed her on the mouth and forehead and on each of her eyes.

She rested her hand on the back of my neck and gazed into my face. “You’re an honorable and brave man, Weldon. For that reason you’ll always be feared and rejected by the world.”

“I don’t think the world is particularly interested in people like me.”

“Hershel isn’t educated, but he understands the goodness in you. It’s not the kind of goodness that people acquire. It’s of a kind that certain people are born with. Hershel will always remain loyal to you. His vulnerability lies in his belief that people with education and money are better than he is. He doesn’t understand that he’s the same good man you are.”

“You’re pretty smart.”

She lifted a lock of my hair from my eye and pushed it back over my forehead. “People will try to use your goodness against you,” she said. “I made you accept the invitation to the country club. I was foolish. Regardless of what Wiseheart told you, I saw the look in his wife’s eyes. It was iniquitous. We never should have had contact with either of them.”

“We won’t be seeing them again.”

“They want what you have. They may never use it, but they need to own it. They cannot allow others to think their power is limited.”

I picked the rose up from her stomach and put it in her hair. I kissed her stomach. “I love you,” I said.

Then I kissed her all over, and when she tried to get up and hold me, I pressed her back down on the bed and entered her, her eyes closing and her mouth opening. I heard the trees moving in the wind outside, brushing wetly against the eaves of the house. I felt her hands kneading the small of my back, running up and down my ribs, her breath on my cheek, her tongue on my neck, her thighs like long golden carp. Her climax was gradual, like a swell building in the ocean, then cascading onto a beach, and seconds later sliding back into the surf, only to crest again and again and again, as steady as the movements of the tide, a tiny cry leaving her throat each time she pressed her stomach into mine.

To make love with Rosita Lowenstein was to enter a Petrarchan sonnet. I told her she was probably the only woman in the world who made love in iambic pentameter, and the Lowenstein sonnet always ended with a rhyming couplet, one that left me weak and breathless. To make love with Rosita was not a sexual act; it was a sacrament.

After she fell asleep, I went downstairs with my notebook and wrote these words:
Lose the entire world if you have to, drive your car off a cliff, gamble away a fortune in Vegas, single-handedly invade the Soviet Union, but never let go of Rosita Lowenstein. Never, never, never.

N
EW YEAR’S DAY
of 1947 seemed like the beginning of another celebratory season. Hershel had always said he could not only smell money but he broke into a sweat when he was about to make it. I had come to believe him. Hershel sweated and the money rolled in. One offshore drilling rig after another punched into a pay sand, and the gas flares burning far out on the horizon gave witness to the birth of a new secular religion. We had arrived, and the technological reach of our nation knew no bounds. The bejeweled refineries along the Texas coast, smoking like an outer-space facility inside the great American night, were not a blight but a continuation of Walt Whitman’s ode to American promise. The displacement of an emerald-green swampland of sawgrass and cypress and gum trees was forgotten in the sacrifice that had to be made for the greater good.

The brothels of Port Arthur, Texas City, and Galveston never closed. A bottle of cold beer, served in an illegal gambling joint on the beach, was twenty cents. A paper plate full of boiled shrimp was thirty-five. And we were part of it all. A dance orchestra played under the stars on the amusement pier that extended into Galveston Bay, the waves bursting against the pilings beneath our feet. We flew to Fort Lauderdale and hit quinellas and even the daily double at the racetrack as a matter of course.

We became like the Las Vegas gambler who discovers against a backdrop of purple mountains and the glitter of the Strip that he has been painted with magic by a divine hand. His prescience is in his walk and his benevolence toward his fellow man. He knows which cards will slip stiff and shiny out of a six-deck shoe; the dice he rolls bounce off the felt backboard in slow motion, the red dots freezing at seven or eleven, one pass after another, as though they’re loaded and incapable of forming any other combination.

Bankers wanted to lend us money. We turned them away. We were invited to visit Saudi Arabia and passed. In April Grandfather took a fall, and Rosita and I flew back to the ranch and helped my mother care for him. We knew he had recovered when we caught him saddling his horse at five in the morning.

We drilled our first well outside New Roads, Louisiana. The seismic reports were all good. Then we began a second one less than a mile away. Hershel said it was a sure bet. “We’re holding four aces, Weldon,” he said. “There’s a pay sand down there that people are not going to believe. All those dinosaurs have been waiting millions of years for me and you to turn them loose.”

In June our geologist declared both wells dry holes, what are called “dusters” in the oil business. We were standing by the first rig at high noon, in one-hundred-degree heat, the sun white and boiling overhead. I could feel sweat crawling down my sides. I got two bottles of Dr Pepper out of the cold box in my car and popped off the caps with my pocketknife and handed one to Hershel.

“It’s down there, Weldon,” he said. “I never felt so strong in my life about something.”

“I believe you,” I said, adjusting my hat so the shadow fell across my face. “Let’s go back to that café on the highway and have us some dirty rice and a chicken-fried steak.”

“How bad are we hit?”

I didn’t want to tell him. “Our level of liquidity won’t be quite the same for a while. We’ll adjust and get by. We’re still the boogie-woogie boys from Company B.”

“Next time I have an opinion on something, don’t listen. Last week I told Linda Gail I’d be buying her a home in Bellaire.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. His shirt was dry and hot, as though it had just been ironed. His eyes were a few inches from mine. I could feel his blood humming through my palm. “This stuff isn’t diddly-squat,” I said.

“I hate to disappoint Linda Gail,” he replied. “It makes me feel plumb awful.”

Chapter

10

W
E HAD BID
on three jobs, counting on capital we thought was ours. Overnight we discovered we were leveraged to the eyes. The bankers who had wanted to lend us money, bankers we had rebuffed, now treated us with caution. One loan officer said he would like to “revisit” our situation in a year or so; another wanted an audit; a third pressed my hand warmly and said, “I’m a Texas A&M grad myself. I like your ideas. I bet you have a bright future once you get your reversals behind you.”

Rain was pouring down at our house, flooding the street and washing over the gutters onto our lawn, when a taxi splashed into the driveway and stopped under the live oak nearest the porch. A man I never wanted to see again got out and ran through the puddles, an umbrella over his head. I met him at the front door. He was folding his umbrella, the brim of his hat dripping.

“Major Fincher?” I said.

“At least you haven’t forgotten me,” he said. “I’m changing planes for the Islands and thought I should come out to see you.”

“Come in,” I said, pushing open the screen.

Inside, his gaze roved around the living room. As long as I could remember, Fincher had been looking at something other than the person he was addressing. “You got a fine place here,” he said. “I hear you married that lady you rescued.”

“We rescued each other. But yes, you’re correct. I married her.”

“Damn fine. Good God, that’s a gulley washer out there, isn’t it? You have a drink? We hit a storm outside of San Antonio. Is that the little lady in the kitchen? I’m sorry to bust in on you like this, Weldon, but sometimes I miss the old days. Damn me if I don’t, war or not.”

“Have a seat, Major. I’ll see what we have in the cabinet.”

“None of that formal stuff. The army is the army. Peacetime is peacetime,” he replied, sitting in a stuffed chair. When Rosita came out of the kitchen, he rose from the chair. “You’re everything your husband said you were. I’m Lloyd Fincher. Weldon and I were in some rough spots together.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.

For just a second, or maybe a hundredth of a second, I saw his eyes drop to her breasts and hips. It was one of those instances when one man immediately knows the thoughts and makeup of another man, and from that moment on he never thinks of that man in the same fashion. Fincher wiped rainwater off his forehead and looked around the room again. “Well, this does beat all,” he said. “Who thought we’d make it plumb to the Elbe and end up in one piece and rendezvousing in the Heights?”

I fixed him a drink and wrapped it in a napkin and handed it to him. I had put aside most of my resentments from the war, particularly ill feeling toward the incompetents who never should have been promoted into positions of authority. It was hard, however, to forget that Fincher had been part of an investigation into Rosita’s past.

“Did you finally get your Silver Star?” he asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“It was an honor to put you in for it. There’s another reason I came out to see you. A friend of mine at the National Bank of Commerce said you were looking for a loan. Maybe I can help out.”

“In what way?”

“Oil exploration isn’t being financed by money from the banks, son. It’s coming from insurance companies. Mine is one of them.”

“I didn’t know you were in the loan business.”

He mentioned the name of an infamous wildcatter, an uneducated, brawling alcoholic who grew up dirt-poor within a few miles of Spindletop and was now one of the most cost-efficient oil producers in the business. The man was also building a luxurious hotel, one with a huge turquoise pool shaped like a shamrock, at the bottom of South Main Street. “Every dollar going into that hotel went across the top of my desk first,” Fincher said. “Know why we lend money to a violent drunk who can’t walk down stairs and chew gum at the same time? If you sent him into a desert with a bucket and a shovel to find water, he’d come back with a bucket full of oil. That’s you, Weldon. You’ve got the same kind of initiative. Except you’re intelligent and educated, and you’ve got manners and breeding on top of it.”

“We just brought in two dusters.”

“If it weren’t for dusters, everybody would be in the oil business.”

“Can you stay for dinner?” Rosita asked.

“Major Fincher has to catch a plane,” I said.

He finished his drink, the ice cubes clinking when he set it down. He studied the glass as though he couldn’t see his thoughts clearly.

“You’re the right man for the times,” he said. “My friend building the hotel belongs to another era. When he figures that out, he’ll probably become born again or stick a gun in his mouth. The big money is in oil, Hollywood, and technology. But you’ve got to have a brain. I knew it in the Ardennes.”

“Knew what?”

“The Germans weren’t going to kill you. You were fixing to walk into history. I’m willing to bet the ranch on it.”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

He removed a business card from his shirt pocket and wrote his home number on it and put it on the coffee table. “How’s Pine doin’?”

“Hershel’s the best there is.”

“They would have eaten up him and his welding machines if you hadn’t been on board.”

“Who would have eaten him up?”

“Good Lord, son, who do you think? The boys in Houston and Big D are putting a man in the United States Senate who used to be an elevator operator. Pine isn’t equipped to deal with men like that. You can. You got the smarts and the education, and you’re not afraid. Can I use y’all’s bathroom?”

“It’s at the back of the hall,” I said. “I’ll call a taxi for you.”

L
INDA GAIL STOOD
on the gallery of a country store north of Bogalusa and watched a black man crank the handle on the gas pump and begin fueling her car. The evening sun was red inside the dust from the fields, the cotton leaves wilted in the heat, the air close with the odor of herbicide and hot tar. On the far side of the road, three men with a camera on a tripod were filming several figures in the distance who were hoeing out weeds in the cotton rows. Linda Gail fanned herself with her handkerchief and went back inside the store and bought an Orange Crush at the counter. A soot-stained Confederate flag was tacked by all four corners to the ceiling, puffing and rippling in the breeze created by an oscillating fan mounted on the wall.