Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (15 page)

She asked the owner where the restroom was. “Out back. The latch is broken, but there’s a rock you can push against the door,” he answered.

The aggregate of the restroom’s interior was revolting, the heat stifling. When she was finished, she tried to wash her hands. The handle on the faucet squeaked dryly when she turned it, and it left a rusty smear on her palm. The bottom of the lavatory was matted with dead flies, the sides striped with noxious minerals that abided in the water. She walked around the side of the building to the gallery, trying to forget the experience of using a public restroom in the place where she’d grown up. The black man had just started up a gasoline-powered air compressor. “Your tires is low, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll be done in a minute.”

One of the men who had been filming the workers in the field walked toward her, an expensive camera hanging on a cord from his shoulder. He was tall and had a thin black mustache and wore two-tone shoes and a long-sleeved white shirt with pale silver stripes in it. He touched the brim of his panama hat. “Would you mind if I took your picture in front of the store?” he said.

“What for?”

“We’re making a documentary.”

“A documentary on what?”

“The agrarian culture of the South. Small-town hospitality and that sort of thing. You’ll probably see it as a short in your local theater. Are you from close by?”

“I live in southwest Houston.”

“Just visiting, huh?”

“I have a family member in a retirement home here. Why do you want to photograph me in front of an old run-down store?”

He held up his camera and looked through his lens, pushing up the brim of his panama. “You’re photogenic. The wide-brim flowered hat is perfect. So is the light. Do you mind?”

“I’m not sure. Who did you say you were?”

“Jack Valentine. I’m with Castle Productions.”

“Castle Productions? I never heard of it.”

“It’s a forgivable sin,” he said.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything.”

She heard him clicking the shutter, advancing the film by pushing a lever with his thumb, moving quickly from one angle to the next. “Wonderful,” he said. “Now turn your head toward me. No, don’t turn your body, just your head. Look straight at me. That’s fine. You must have done this before.”

“Not often.”

“I’m going to bring the Bolex over here. I just want you to walk back and forth on the porch. We’ll be recording, too. I’ll ask you a couple of questions. Say whatever is on your mind. Smile, look gloomy, pout, whatever you feel like.”

He was going too fast for her. “You’ll bring the what?”

“The sixteen-millimeter. You put me in mind of Miss Garland. The same smile, the same freshness, the same country-girl innocence. See? You’re blushing.”

“Judy Garland? That’s silly.”

“I worked with her on two pictures. What’s your name?”

“Linda Gail Pine.”

“Are you married, Miss Linda?”

She realized with a flush of guilt that she had been hiding her left hand and her wedding ring in the folds of her dress. “My husband is Mr. Hershel Pine. He’s from a plantation family in Avoyelles Parish. He’s president of the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company.”

“If he doesn’t object, we’re going to get you on film.”

The black man turned off the compressor. “It’s a dollar thirty-two for the gas, ma’am. You can pay inside. Right now you’re ready to go.”

She stared at her car, and at the molten redness of the sun, and at the cinnamon-colored dust that was rising into the sky like a veil obscuring all the mysteries she should have been privy to. The smell of herbicide made her eyes water. The workers in the fields were still chopping with their hoes among the cotton plants even though the hour was late. Then she realized these were not ordinary workers. They were convicts, and their warders were picketed on the edge of the field, dressed in khaki, mounted on horseback, each armed with a shotgun he rested across the pommel or butt-down on his thigh. The words Hershel had said to her days ago were as audible inside her head as if he were standing five inches from her ear:
We just cain’t live as high up on the hog as we thought, hon. It’s not so bad. Worst comes to worst, we can live at my folks’ place till Weldon and me get on our feet again.

“The windows are thick with dust,” she said to the black man. “Please wash them. In fact, throw a whole bucket of water on them.” She turned to the man with the pencil-line mustache. His eyes were blue-green, the color eyes she imagined a Spanish buccaneer would have. “Will there be any remuneration for these pictures?”

“Quite possibly,” he answered.

She touched at her brow with the tip of her handkerchief and tilted up her face so it caught the sunset. “I’m at your disposal, sir.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
on our pipeline right-of-way south of Beaumont, I smelled alcohol on Hershel, the boilermaker variety, heavy levels of it deep down in the lungs and the blood and the lining of the stomach. It was six-thirty
A.M.
, the sun not over the trees, the air still blue, ground fog billowing out of the woods. He was smoking a Camel, turning his face to exhale, as though protecting me from the smoke. His eyes were as rheumy as broken eggs.

“What time did you go to bed?” I asked.

“The baseball game was on. It couldn’t have been too late.” He flicked his cigarette into a pool of water and coughed into his hand. Up ahead, the welder on the tack rig was starting his first weld of the day. We were working extralong days, paying out large sums in overtime, trying to meet our contractual deadline.

“What’s going on, Hershel?”

“I ran into a couple of guys in a hotel bar. I showed some bad judgment, that’s all.”

“What were you doing at a hotel bar?”

“Linda Gail and I had a fight. She went out to Hollywood for a screen test.”

“There’s a thermos of coffee in my pickup. We’ll talk about this later.”

I began walking down the right-of-way alongside pipe that was propped on skids all the way to a saltwater bay. Up ahead, I could see two tack-welder rigs and one hot-pass rig moving up the line, the welder’s helpers yanking up the steel pipe clamp that acted as the ground, and running with it after the truck; then the welders crouched again, their shields down, the arc crackling alight when the stringer-bead rod touched the metal.

The oil boom broke the back of the Southern plantation system and was a godsend for working people. There was a tradeoff, though. A mistake on a drilling or seismograph rig or a pipeline could cost a man a limb, an eye, or his life. It happened in a blink, and it happened with regularity. That’s why there were no second chances in the oil patch.

I looked over my shoulder at Hershel. He was sitting in the passenger seat of my pickup, holding the plastic thermos cup to his mouth with both hands. He looked back at me, shamefaced. At noon I told him I would buy him lunch. We made it about three miles down the highway.

“Stop the truck,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m about to puke my guts. I’ve never been so sick in my life.”

He got out of the vehicle and walked through a field of buttercups into a grove of live oaks, clutching his stomach all the while, his face beaded with sweat. He sat down in the shade, his back against a tree.

I squatted down next to him. “Some people have a violent reaction to alcohol,” I said. “It doesn’t mean they’re weak-willed or lacking in character. In my family, it’s like matches and gasoline.”

I could see he wasn’t listening.

“She called me paranoid,” he said.

“Why would she do that?”

“Because I don’t trust these film people. Because I saw that guy again.”

“Which guy?”

“The one we had trouble with at the dance hall in Opelousas. The one who’s been following us around.”

He was wearing a straw cowboy hat. I took it off his head and placed it crown-down on his lap. He lifted his eyes to mine. His face was beet-red, his breath rank. “Don’t do this to yourself,” I said.

“I won’t,” he said, his hands knotting.

“Let Linda Gail have her way. If this Hollywood overture isn’t on the square, she’ll let it go. But it has to be her choice. In the meantime, we keep the cork in the bottle.” He didn’t reply. I fitted my hand on his shoulder and looked into his face. His shoulder bone felt as sharp as a knife. “Do we have a deal?”

“Yes, sir. How far in the red are we?”

“Seventy-six thousand dollars, plus what we owe my uncle.”

“We’re still afloat, though?”

“We lost the contract for the job in East Texas. I couldn’t pay the up-front money on the pipe. We’re in danger of having our welding machines confiscated.”

He looked seasick. “All because of those dadburned wells outside New Roads. It eats my lunch thinking about it.”

I picked up his hat and put it on his head. “They can kill us, but they can’t change us.”

“I think it’s like Linda Gail said.”

“What did she say?”

“We chopped a hole in the bottom of our own boat.”

I felt like telling him to kick Linda Gail Pine in the butt. Instead I waited until I had showered and put on fresh clothes and eaten dinner, then I called Lloyd Fincher in San Antonio, my throat so dry I could hardly speak when he picked up the phone.

“There’s some static on the line. I can’t hear you,” Fincher said. “Who is this?”

“Weldon Holland, Major.”

“I declare. What can I do for you, son?”

R
OSITA AND I
checked in to the Menger Hotel, close by the Alamo and the River Walk, the night before we were to meet with Lloyd Fincher and his attorney. The hotel was built in 1859 and had inlaid ivory-colored and royal blue marble floors and potted palms and slender white columns with gold trim in the lobby, and a balcony that wrapped around the atrium and allowed the visitor a wonderful overview of the hotel’s interior, which looked more like ancient Rome than modern-day Texas.

I threw our bag on the bed. Through the window, I could see the facade of the Alamo’s chapel, the building that had served as an infirmary during the siege of the mission in 1836. I opened the French doors and stepped out on the balcony. “Jim Bowie died right there,” I said to Rosita, pointing at the chapel. “He was bayoneted to death on his cot. Davy Crockett probably died by the barracks wall.”

Rosita didn’t reply. I stared at the plaza. I had been there many times and had always walked away with the same sensation. I felt that the spirits of the 188 men and boys who had died after thirteen days of siege were still among us, their ashes under the stones we walked on, their voices whispering to us in the wind, should we ever choose to listen.

“Are you worried about tomorrow?” Rosita asked.

“I’m gambling on Fincher, a man who got a lot of GIs killed at Kasserine Pass.”

“That was then. This is now,” she said.

“That’s what I tell myself.”

“You’ve done all you could to raise money, Weldon. Everything you’ve done is for Hershel. I just wish he understood that.”

“If it wasn’t for Hershel’s welding machines, we’d be living on the GI Bill. Let’s go to a restaurant on the river and get something to eat.”

“Just wait a minute. The real question is whether this man Fincher is honest or not,” she said. “Do you believe he’s honest?”

I could hear the music in the outdoor cafés along the River Walk. I didn’t want to think or talk about Lloyd Fincher. I didn’t want to believe I had deliberately put myself in a relationship with a man for whom I had no respect. I hadn’t slept in three nights. “Sometimes you have to do business with the devil,” I said.

“He’s not that bad, is he?”

“Probably not. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

She put her arm in mine. “We’ll always be together, no matter what happens,” she said. “You’ve always done the right thing, Weldon. That’s all that counts.”

When I needed someone to back my play, Rosita Lowenstein never let me down.

We walked along the river’s edge under the cypress and willow trees, over the pedestrian bridges, past a gondola filled with mariachi musicians wearing white sombreros and brocaded jackets and trousers. Up ahead was a tree with the bark and long thin leaves of a willow, but it was blooming with clusters of purple flowers that trailed in the water. I did not know its name. “What a beautiful tree,” I said.

Then I realized that a few feet away from the tree, Hershel and Linda Gail were sitting at a table with Lloyd Fincher and a heavyset peroxide-blond woman in an orange sundress. Her skin was like tallow, with the kind of tan you see on people who sunbathe in the nude. Fincher stood up, a bottle of Corona in his hand, his face flushed, as though he had run upstairs. He had on a tropical shirt printed with parrots and flowers that he wore outside a pair of pleated white slacks. A saucer of salted limes and a silver flask in a leather case sat in the middle of the table. “Hail, Sir Weldon, and hail your ladyship,” he said. “We’re rewriting the outcome of the Alamo. Help us clean Santa Ana’s clock.”

There was a glass of iced tea in front of Hershel, and a plate with three tacos and a scoop of avocado salad, but no bottle of beer.
Good for you, Hershel,
I thought.

“We’re taking a walk,” I said.

“Definitely not. You have to sit down,” Fincher said. “Travis is mortally wounded and the little brown buggers are coming over the wall. Time to give them a face full of chain and grape and send them back across the Rio Grande. We used to have a cheer in high school: ‘Two bits, four bits, six bits a peso. All good pepper-bellies stand up and say so.’”

“Don’t offend him,” Rosita whispered.

“What’s that?” Fincher said.

“We’d love to join you,” I replied.

“Damn straight,” he said. “How about two fingers of Mexican kickapoo juice with a Corona chaser? It’ll set you right. This is my friend Paula. She used to throw the shot put. Right, baby? She can still throw it, too, I’m here to tell you.”

Linda Gail turned around in her chair and smiled at us. She had tinted her hair a darker shade; her curls covered the back of her neck, the way an antebellum girl may have worn them. “I’m going to be in a motion picture,” she said.