Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (16 page)

“That’s grand,” Rosita said.

“I counted my lines in the script. I have a hundred and two,” she said. “That’s what most actors do, count their lines. I’m just happy to be in the film.”

Fincher remained standing until Rosita and I had sat down. “Linda Gail was starting to tell us about her experience in Hollywood,” he said. “What’s the name of that company?”

“Castle Productions,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said, his eyes unfocused. He sat down unsteadily. “Like moats and drawbridges and that sort of thing.” He looked into space, a bead of light in his eye, a faint smile on his mouth.

“You know them?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m not too up on the film world,” he said. “Truth is, I was never big on movies. How do you like staying at the Menger? Did you know Lillie Langtry and Robert E. Lee stayed there?”

“Are you talking to me?” Linda Gail asked.

“Who else, Hollywood lady?” Fincher said. “Theodore Roosevelt organized the Rough Riders here.”

“Well, I hope they all flushed the toilet before they checked out,” she said.

I had to hand it to her.

Fincher continued to get drunker and louder. His arm was draped over the shoulder of his girlfriend, his armpit dark with perspiration. He had become bored with the conversation. He waved his free hand at the air. “I never told you two guys I was sorry you got left behind at the Ardennes,” he said. “Actually, I thought a bunch of y’all might have hightailed it.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The woods were swarming with deserters. Everybody made a big deal out of that Slovik kid going before a firing squad. I personally think he had it coming, although I wasn’t unsympathetic with his situation. Considering what those Tigers did, I might have bagged it, too. Our headquarters got the crap knocked out of it. When we retook the area and didn’t find y’all’s bodies, I figured maybe you’d surrendered or headed over the hill for parts unknown.”

“That’s not what happened, though, is it?” I said.

“No, you ended up with the goddamn Silver Star,” Fincher said. “Where’s that waiter?”

“But you’re saying you thought Hershel and I were deserters?”

“No, what I said was the woods were full of them. And I think Eddie Slovik deserved death by a firing squad.” Fincher’s girlfriend was trying to shush him, to no avail. “What did you think I was trying to say?” he said to me.

“I guess I misunderstood you,” I replied.

He hiccupped and let his eyes settle fondly on Linda Gail. “Castle Productions, you say?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the name of the company. You have it absolutely right,” she answered.

He squeezed his girlfriend against him, then looked back at Linda Gail. “Think you can get roles for the likes of us?” he said. “I bet it’s more fun out there than three monkeys trying to hump a football. You never know which way the dice are coming out of the cup, do you?”

He laughed to himself. I had no idea at what.

Chapter

11

H
ERSHEL AND I
signed all the loan documents the following morning, and Fincher’s attorney presented us with a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I tried to forget the events of the previous evening. I told myself that Fincher’s boorish behavior was indicative of his kind and didn’t necessarily mean he served a corrupt enterprise. But one detail would not go away: He seemed intrigued by the name of the production company Linda Gail had signed a contract with, at the same time disclaiming any knowledge about the movie industry or serious interest in it.

He and his girlfriend had taken adjoining rooms down the veranda, and had not checked out yet. I tapped on his door. “I need to talk to you a minute about last night, Lloyd,” I said.

“That business about deserters? I got tongue-tied, that’s all. Too much flak juice.”

I stepped inside the room without being asked. The French doors to the balcony were open. Outside, on a table, were two half-empty Bloody Marys, celery stalks sticking out of the crushed ice. Earlier a bellhop had told me that a child had fallen into the river and was thought to have drowned. “Last night you seemed quite interested in Linda Gail’s contract with a film company called Castle Productions,” I said.

“You lost me, son.”

“You’ve heard of that company?”

“I could have. I don’t remember. What’s the problem?”

“You seemed to be enjoying a private joke about it.”

He removed a pocket comb from his slacks and combed back the hair on the sides of his head. “We didn’t give you enough money?”

“I’d just like a straight answer.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Weldon.”

“Roy Wiseheart told me he makes movies.”

“He and his father own half the planet. Why should you be surprised they’re in the movie business?”

“Does Roy Wiseheart own Castle Productions?”

“Ask him. I never met the gentleman.”

“Maybe I think too much, huh?” I said.

“I wouldn’t say that. You can’t be too careful in business.”

I went out on the balcony. Down below, two divers in wet suits and air tanks were climbing out of the river. An ambulance was parked close by, its back doors yawning open. An overweight Mexican woman was crying inconsolably, reaching out for a gurney that a paramedic was pushing toward the ambulance. Behind me, Lloyd Fincher put on his aviator glasses to protect his eyes from the glare. He screwed a cigarette into a gold holder. He stepped next to me and lit the cigarette, then dropped the burnt match over the railing. In profile, I could see the tiny red veins in the whites of his eyes, the discoloration of his skin from the booze still in his system, his down-hooked snub of a nose that reminded me of a sheep’s. I wondered who Lloyd Fincher was.

“A fine day,” he said. He took a puff off the cigarette holder and exhaled the smoke into the breeze.

“It’s too bad what happened down there,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“The little boy,” I said.

He looked at me, then at the ambulance. “What happened?” he said.

“I thought you were watching.”

He leaned over the rail to see better. “I was watching the skywriter. Look.” He pointed upward. A canary-yellow biplane was writing the word “Pepsi” in smoke against a sky as flawless as blue silk. “That pilot’s an artist, isn’t he?”

He continued to enjoy his cigarette and watch the biplane climb straight up into the sky. I didn’t know what to say. I believe there are people among us who are not simply insentient but are also incapable of thought. Lloyd Fincher was one of these. I left him to his reverie and started toward the door.

“Weldon?” he said behind me.

I turned around.

“Watch yourself,” he said.

“Regarding what?”

He drank the ice melt and remaining vodka and tomato juice out of his glass. He bit off a piece of celery and chewed it. “Whatever comes down the pike,” he replied. “It’s a nest of vipers out there. Maybe that’s why I have to get laid almost every day. It keeps my mind off things.”

R
OSITA AND I
stayed over an extra night and ate in an outdoor Mexican restaurant on the River Walk, by an arched stone bridge and a cypress tree whose leaves resembled green lace. I paid the mariachi band twenty dollars to play “San Antonio Rose” so we could dance under a full moon to Bob Wills’s signature song in front of the Alamo. I didn’t think those who died within the mission walls would find us disrespectful; in fact, I believed their voices whispered to us and told us to celebrate the lives that had been given us and the love we shared. They also told us to treat the world as a grand cathedral and to give no sway to either death or evil men who sought to spread their net over the globe.

I am almost sure I heard them say all those things.

F
IVE DAYS LATER,
deep in a Louisiana swamp, Roy Wiseheart rode a cream-colored gelding, sixteen hands high, down our pipeline right-of-way. When he dismounted, he removed his Stetson hat and wiped a mosquito out of his hair. “I knew you and Pine would pull it out of the fire,” he said, shaking my hand. “By God, it’s good to see you, Holland. You’re the real deal.”

“I didn’t quite catch all that,” I said.

He told me he had heard by chance that we were laying a pipeline across the Atchafalaya Basin to a refinery in Texas, and that a friend in Morgan City had lent him the horse and a trailer and a pickup. I wanted to believe him. He was handsome and clear-eyed and apparently humane and, for a rich man, egalitarian in his attitudes. I had never spent much time thinking about the very rich, primarily because I hadn’t known many. Those I knew came from old money and had always struck me as bland and obtuse and dependent upon servants and usually given over to vices that were adolescent in nature, particularly in their sexual lives, about which they seemed to show terrible judgment. In the town where I grew up, my grandfather was considered well-to-do. In reality, we barely got by. Once, when I asked him about the importance of money, he replied, “It won’t buy happiness, but it’ll keep a mess of grief off your porch. Rich or poor, everybody gets to the barn. It can be a hard ride, too.”

I always thought that statement summed up the human condition better than any line I ever heard. Death was the great leveler. Whenever I was tempted to compare my lot with others’, I tried to remember Grandfather’s words. I wondered if this wasn’t one of those moments.

“What’s the ‘real deal’?” I said to Wiseheart.

“You don’t rattle. You refinanced yourself, and you’re back in the game. I admire that.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Come on up to the highway with me. I want your advice about something.”

“You need to explain how you know about my financial situation.”

“You think a blabbermouth like Lloyd Fincher can keep a confidence? Wake up.”

“What do you want advice about?”

“It’s not about business.”

“Will you answer my question, sir?”

He looked sideways and blew out his breath. “It’s personal as it gets. Call it a spiritual problem.”

“I’m probably not your guy.”

“Then to hell with you.”

“Say again?”

“You don’t understand English?”

“I want to make sure I heard you right before I knock you down.”

He smiled, pointing his finger at me, as though tapping on the air. “See what I’m saying? You’ve got moxie, bud.”

W
E DROVE IN
his truck to a ramshackle roadhouse set back in a grove of live oaks and slash pines not far from the edge of a vast swamp. The sky had darkened, and the air smelled of ozone and brass and fish that had died from the explosive charges set off underwater by a seismic rig. The roadhouse was attached to a six-room motel that had already turned on the neon tubing that ran along the eaves. A gleaming purple Lincoln Continental, with whitewalls and wire wheels, was parked in front of the last room on the road.

“Is that your vehicle?” I asked.

“How do you like it?”

“Has anyone told you this is a hot-pillow joint?”

“I like to check in on the folk and see what they’re up to.”

“The
folk
?” I said.

He was laughing. “You’re the perfect straight man,” he said.

The roadhouse was almost empty. We sat at a table in front of the window fan and ordered a plate of boudin and two bottles of Dr. Nut. Wiseheart watched the waitress walk away from the table. “Is this place really a cathouse?”

“That’s its reputation.”

“What an irony. You know what I want your advice about?”

“No clue.”

“You ever stray?”

“From what?”

“You know what.”

“My marriage vows?”

“Boy, you’re fast as lightning.”

“That’s why you got me here? I can’t believe this.”

“My wife has multiple mental problems. I won’t go into detail. Put it this way: Her father liked little girls. One night he decided to drive himself and his wife off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean. Since the night her parents died, my wife has been an ice cube.”

I was trying to signal the waitress to bring the check.

“I say something wrong?” Wiseheart asked.

The shadows of the fan blades were rippling across his face. The impropriety of speaking about his marital problems to someone he hardly knew seemed totally lost on him. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I got into a sexual relationship with another man’s wife,” he said. “I don’t feel good about it. I’ve had a dalliance here and there, but not with a married woman.”

“Then get out of it.”

“Hell hath no fury,” he said.

“What do you want from me?”

He folded his hands on the table and looked out the window at the swamp and the thunderheads building in the south and the wind straightening the moss in the trees. “I just wondered what you thought of me.”

“Why should you care about my opinion?”

“I know your war record. You were at Omaha Beach and the Bulge. You heard the story about the Nip trainer I shot down at the expense of my squadron leader?”

I looked away from him.

“I had four kills. The trainer gave me five and the status of an ace. All I saw was the rising sun on the fuselage. I thought it was a Zero. I didn’t realize my mistake until I was down on the deck. I took out the trainer anyway. When it caught fire, I saw the pilot’s face. He looked like he was seventeen. When I climbed back upstairs, it was too late to help Captain Levy.”

“You thought you were protecting him. As far as the Japanese trainee is concerned, maybe he would have flown a kamikaze into the side of an American battleship.”

“Not everybody thinks that way.”

“They weren’t there. They’ve never paid any dues. They have no idea how you think when other people are trying to kill you. What if the trainer had been a Zero and gotten on your leader’s tail?”

“You’re a good guy, Holland.”

“There’s nothing exceptional about me. Regarding that other matter, my advice is to bail out.”

“Which matter is that?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, the marital question. I don’t know about that. She’s quite a gal.”