Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (19 page)

“I already ate. How do you know McFey?”

“He was a bird dog for my father. My father fired him a couple of years ago. You hit him in the nose with a Luger?”

“Probably. I have blank spaces in my head sometimes. Why’s he calling you now?” I said.

“He’s trying to sell information. Plus, you scared the crap out of him.”

“Information about what?” I asked.

“You, your wife, any dirt he can dig up. He’s a scavenger. Nobody takes him seriously.”

“I do,” I replied.

He leaned out of his chair and hit me on the arm. “Sit down. At least have some coffee. You’re a breath of fresh air. Most of the people I know have the thinking power of cinder blocks.” He folded a strip of bacon inside a biscuit, then took a bite of the biscuit. His eyes brightened as though he were examining a thought in the back of his mind. “Did you think Harlan was working for me?”

“You were the first person to show an interest in our welding machines.”

“And you think I hire dimwits like McFey to represent me?”

“You said he worked for your father.”

“My father employs people a Bedouin wouldn’t shake hands with.” He picked up an ornate silver coffeepot and filled a cup. He set the cup and a spoon on a saucer and handed them to me. “Come on, Holland. You’re a good judge of people. I’m not a back-shooter. I like the hell out of you.”

“I think McFey wants to hurt Hershel Pine.”

“In what way?”

I kept my eyes on his. “Maybe he’ll try to mess up Linda Gail and Hershel’s marriage.”

“I hear she’s doing just fine. She’s got a role in a western being filmed in New Mexico. The director says she’s a natural.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I own part of the company that signed her up. I told you I’m in the movie business, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. Do you know Linda Gail very well?”

His cheeks were rosy. He smiled with his eyes, the way a woman would. “What are you asking me, my friend?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Don’t let McFey get to you. He’s fun to laugh about, but under it all, he’s an evil man. The oil business is full of low-level operatives like him. If the money is right, they’d kill the president. That’s not hyperbole. See what happens if Truman tries to get rid of the oil depletion allowance. It’s the biggest corporate swindle in the history of American taxation, but nobody dares touch it.”

I wasn’t interested in his politics or his cynical statements about the corrupt empire that he both served and was empowered by. “You’ve got quite a place here,” I said. “It’s enough to make a Bolshevik out of a fellow.”

“I’ve got an extra swimsuit that should fit you. How about it?”

Autumn was on the wind, and the sky had turned a hard blue, like an inverted ceramic bowl. Red and yellow oak leaves tumbled onto the shimmering silklike surface of the pool; even the sun seemed captured by the inviting quality of the water, like a wobbling yellow balloon just beneath the surface. “Why not?” I said.

“That’s the spirit, by God,” he said, slapping me on the thigh.

“Who’s that down there, Roy?” a harsh voice called from the landing at the top of the stairs.

“Mr. Holland dropped by, Clara. Everything is fine,” Wiseheart replied. “We’ll be in the pool.”

“Is he with someone?” she said.

“No, he’s come to talk about a business matter.”

I set my cup quietly in the saucer and rose from the table. “I’d better be going,” I said.

“No, dammit, you will not.” He walked through a hallway to the foot of the stairs. “Go back to bed, Clara. We’ll go to the club for lunch. Do you understand me? Everything is grand.”

“Send Pepe up,” she said.

“What for?”

“I want him to massage my back. My sciatica is particularly bad this morning.”

“Right away, dear,” Wiseheart said.

“Is your wife bothered by the prospect of Rosita being here?” I said.

“No. I give you my word,” he replied. “Clara has convinced herself that Communist agents working for the government are about to turn the IRS loose on us. Come on, be a good fellow and stay with me. The water is fine.”

He was right. Ten minutes later, I was floating facedown on an air mattress in the middle of the pool, my arms trailing in the coolness of the water, my back warm under the sun, the oak limbs rustling overhead, a vague and sleepy erotic sensation spreading through my loins. Was there a sybaritic element in Wiseheart’s environment that made me feel the way I did, the sensations a visitor to the Baths of Caracalla might experience? Wealth buys insularity, and together the two guarantee secret access to all the forbidden pleasures the world can offer. What better example of satiating one’s repressed desires and celebrating the self than the place I was enjoying?

Wiseheart sprang from the diving board and plummeted to the bottom of the pool, as sleek and graceful and hard-bodied as a porpoise. When he surfaced, his face was inches from mine, his breath sweet from a piece of mint on his tongue. “It’s like a bit of the ancient world, isn’t it?” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “It’s not easily given up, either. It’s not unlike the allure of a woman’s thighs.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“We’re in the midst of creating an empire. Our virtues are those of pagans, not Christians. Once you admit that, you’ll be surprised how many of your inner conflicts will leave you.”

“I don’t have inner conflicts.”

“You will,” he said.

I wondered if he was speaking of the affair he was having with another man’s wife; I wondered if the woman was Linda Gail Pine.

He pushed off from my air mattress and dove to the bottom of the pool, not surfacing for almost two minutes, gasping for air, eyes wide, like a man with an invisible cord strung round his throat. “See? I’m more fish than mammal,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in rules, Holland. Accept the spoils of war. If you don’t, someone else will. Just don’t take a tour of a Saudi jail.”

“You’ve seen one?”

“I keep a short memory about those kinds of things,” he replied. “Hey, the world is a lovely, exotic brothel, in the best possible way, if a fellow wants to have a run at it. Regarding Linda Gail Pine, I know what you were thinking. Forget it. I may be a bastard, but I wouldn’t lie to a man like you, one I respect.”

He began swimming laps, taking long strokes, breathing with his mouth turned to one side, his tanned body slicing through the water. I was twenty-nine. He was about thirty-five. His body was as supple as a teenager’s. In terms of real age, he was a whole generation older than I. He pulled himself up on the side of the pool and sat on the tile, his legs hanging in the water, strands of his coppery hair in his eyes, his profile as handsome and ethereal as a Greek god’s.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

“I think you may be from an earlier time.”

“Like one of those fellows with a washboard brow flinging a javelin at mammoths?”

“More like a Byronic figure swimming through a wine-dark sea,” I replied.

“What I wouldn’t trade to have your gift for language. I majored in geology. We used to say, ‘Six months ago I couldn’t spell “geologist.” Now I are one.’ You dream about the war much?”

“I dream about the death camp where I found my wife.”

“You’re lucky.”

I got off the air mattress and stood up in the shallows. I pushed the mattress toward the deep end and watched it bump into the concrete drain gutter. “I guess I didn’t understand you.”

“My squadron leader’s kite burned. He was trying to get the canopy open. I saw his face when he went down. He was alive inside the flames. I swear he looked straight at me, like he wanted to tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“That he understood. That it wasn’t my fault.”

His eyes never blinked. They were red from chlorine, glistening with moisture.

“I tried to get a guy out of a Sherman that was on fire,” I said. “The plates burned my hands. I gave it up. We didn’t create those events, Roy. They were imposed upon us.”

“That’s the first time you called me by my first name. Know the real reason I want to go into business with you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You need somebody to save you from yourself. It’s you who’s out of the past. What’s the title of that great French ballad?
The Song of Roland
? That’s you, Holland. No matter what you say, you hear the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.”

The wind gusted across the surface of the pool, wrinkling it like old skin. My blood ran cold. Could Roy Wiseheart see into my soul? Were he and I more alike than I wanted to concede?

Chapter

13

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I drove to Lake Charles and took Rosita with me because I didn’t want her home alone with the likes of Harlan McFey roaming around, perhaps seeking revenge. Before I left the house, I picked up the morning newspaper from the lawn and stuck it in my coat pocket without looking at the front page. Hershel met us at the motel on the south end of town, out by the lake. The air was cool, the sun buried inside rolling clouds that reminded me of the dust storms in the early 1930s. Waves full of sand and tiny nautical creatures were scudding up on the shoreline, then receding into the water. I thought I could smell gas on the wind from the swamp, a hint of early winter and a drawing down of light from the shingles of the world. Hershel was standing in the porte cochere, staring at the southern horizon, his face as hot as a lightbulb. “I’ve got us a boat. Let’s get out to the rig,” he said. “These guys aren’t listeners.”

“You have to explain that to me.”

“This bonehead driller didn’t have the blowout preventer on. He said the dome was at least another two thousand feet, if it was there at all.”

“What does the geologist say?”

“Same thing. They’re down in the mouth about our prospects. I told them if they didn’t get the blowout preventer on, the sky was going to be on fire tonight.”

“It’s down there?” I said.

“I could smell it.”

I didn’t want to think about the two dusters we brought in outside of New Roads, a direct result of Hershel’s conviction that a huge pay sand lay under our feet.

“Come on, Weldon. We need a diplomat. If those guys don’t get the blowout preventer on, every guy on the floor is going to be incinerated.”

“Let’s don’t get out of the paddock too fast on this one, Hershel,” I said.

His face was stretched as tight as a helium balloon, his system hitting on all eight cylinders. “It’s going to blow. I’ve never felt so strong about anything in my life. I’m sweating all over.”

“I believe you, Hershel,” Rosita said, placing her hand on his arm. “Can I come along?”

I saw the rigidity leave his face; he smiled.

The boat was a sixteen-footer with a console and a canvas top and two big outboard engines. The sky was darkening, the barometer dropping, the groundswells in the Gulf long and green and as flat as slate, tilting sideways, as though the horizon were out of kilter, then suddenly cresting in waves that could cover the gunwales. Each time we slid down the far side of a wave, cascades of foam slapped across the windshield. If Rosita had any fear, it never showed.

When we climbed aboard the rig, the clothes of the floor men were flattening against their bodies; they looked like men on the deck of an aircraft carrier. I had to yell for the geologist to hear me: “Mr. Pine believes we need to get that blowout preventer in place!”

“Pine is an interesting guy!” the geologist yelled back.

We climbed the ladder into what was called the doghouse, with the geologist and tool pusher and driller and two men who were majority stockholders in the company. Even though I had introduced Rosita as my wife, they kept looking at her out of the corners of their eyes, as though they had to remind themselves who she was or why she was there. Through the windows I could see the long gray-green, mist-shrouded coast of Louisiana, a strip of barrier islands and swamps and bayous and flooded trees that seemed left over from the first days of Creation. Above me, the derrick man on the monkey board was leaning out into space on his safety belt, racking pipe, his hard hat cinched with a strap under his chin. Down below, around the wellhead, I could see the roughnecks on the floor wrestling with the drill bit and the tongs, the oiled chain whipping around the pipe. They never missed a beat, never looked up in apprehension or fear when lightning struck the water or thunder boomed on the horizon.

None of the men in the room was sympathetic with Hershel’s point of view—namely, that he knew more about drilling for oil than they did. The tool pusher took me aside. He had a round, clean-shaven face that was bright with windburn; he wore an insulated long-sleeved denim shirt and khakis that were hitched up high on his stomach. He glanced at his wristwatch, then glanced at it again.

“Are we taking too much of your time?” I asked.

“No, I appreciate y’all’s concerns,” he replied. “But that man over yonder drilled an offshore well about six miles from here in 1937 and went ninety-four hundred feet before he hit a pay sand. He’s also the majority stockholder in this company. If I was y’all, I wouldn’t be telling him his business, Mr. Holland. Another way of putting it is Mr. Pine is becoming a king-size irritant.”

“Hershel’s instincts are usually pretty good,” I said, trying not to remember New Roads.

“Religion is for the church house. Instinct is for the horse track. This here is a dollar-and-cents environment, Mr. Holland.”

I felt Rosita next to me, felt her arm slip inside mine, her hip touch against mine. “How’s your overhead so far?” she said to the tool pusher.

“Couldn’t be better. This whole job has been smooth as Vaseline.”

I looked him in the face to indicate my feeling about his metaphor, but he didn’t catch it.

“Which would be more costly?” Rosita asked. “Taking a preventive measure now or incurring a couple of dozen lawsuits?”

“Believe it or not, little lady, we’ve considered all the possibilities.”

“Are most of those men out there Cajuns?”

“Quite a few. Yes, ma’am.” He was looking straight ahead, visibly tired of the subject.