Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (20 page)

“How would you like explaining yourself to a jury made up of your employees’ relatives?”

The tool pusher’s eyes clicked sideways, fixing on hers. “Fellows, could I have your attention a minute?” he said to the other men in the room.

T
HE BLOWOUT PREVENTER
went into place. Offshore rigs were primitive in those days, lacking the galleys and living areas they contain today. We ate supper on a shrimp trawler anchored to the base of the rig and pitching against the rubber tires hung from the stanchions. I say “we.” Hershel ate nothing more than a piece of buttered white bread while he drank black coffee so hot it would scorch the paint on a fire truck. No one was happy with us; installing the blowout preventer was time-consuming and expensive. We had a minority interest in the rig but had prevailed over people with far greater experience in the oil field than we had. As the hours worn on, I became convinced our victory was Pyrrhic and once again Hershel’s prophetic gifts would prove illusory.

The three of us slept on narrow bunks inside a small cabin on the trawler. It was cold at sunrise, the early sun a paradoxical burnt orange inside black clouds that looked like smoke from a batholithic fire under the Gulf, the waves three feet high and hitting the trawler’s wood hull with the steady bone-numbing rhythm of a metronome. Hershel was undaunted. He shaved with cold water and dried his face with his shirt, his eyes jittering. “Let’s go up to the doghouse,” he said.

“I think we’d better stay out of there,” I said. “I think if the wind drops, we should head for shore.”

“Trust me on this, Weldon.”

I have, I have,
I thought. But I kept my own counsel. Rosita and I went to the galley to eat breakfast, depressed with our prospects, bored with the routine, anxious to get back on land. “I wonder what’s going on in the world,” she said.

I remembered the morning paper I had picked up from the lawn and stuck in my coat pocket. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I went to our cabin and returned to the galley, flipping open
The Houston Post,
glancing at the headlines above the fold. Then I sat down across from Rosita and flipped the paper over and looked at an article at the bottom of page one. Hershel had gone up to the doghouse.

“Weldon?” she said.

“What?”

“Your face is white.”

“Remember the man I went to see Sunday night?”

“What about him?”

“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He was a blackmailer.”

“He was trying to blackmail you?”

“The issue involved Hershel and Linda Gail. He also had two photos of my father. One showed my father just before he was killed in an explosion down in a bell hole. Another showed his body right after the explosion. All these years Grandfather and my mother and I had no idea what happened to him. The man’s name was Harlan McFey. He was a detective. I had hoped to find out who he was working for.”

“Is that why you went to see Roy Wiseheart?”

“Yes, I thought maybe he’d hired McFey. He said McFey had worked for his father but was fired two years ago.”

“Go back to what you said about Hershel and Linda Gail.”

“She’s probably having an affair.”

“How do you know?”

“McFey had a photo of her in a compromising situation. Half of the photo was torn off. I don’t know who the man is. I thought it might be Roy Wiseheart. I talked to him about it. I believe what he told me. I don’t believe he’s romantically involved with her.”

“You have to leave this alone, Weldon.”

“Just walk away?”

“Linda Gail has the mind of a child. Nothing you can do will change that. She’s Hershel’s responsibility.”

“I need to find out the circumstances of my father’s death. I have to find out why he didn’t write or tell us where he was.”

“But you have to leave Linda Gail and Hershel’s marital problems out of it.”

“Okay, General Lowenstein.”

“You want a slap?”

I looked out the porthole and saw two strange phenomena occur in a sequence that made no sense. The wind dropped, and instead of capping, the waves slid through the rig’s pilings like rippling green silk. Then the surface quivered and wrinkled like the skin on a living creature. I unlatched the glass on the porthole and looked up at the roughneck on the monkey board. He had unhooked his safety belt and stepped out on the hoist, one hand locked on the steel cable, and was riding it down to the deck, rotating his arm in a circle, like a third-base coach telling his runners to haul freight for home plate.

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“You have to see this. There’s nothing quite like it.”

We climbed the ladder onto the floor of the rig. I could smell an odor similar to rotten eggs leaking off the wellhead. The tool pusher and driller and Hershel were coming out of the doghouse. An unshaved roughneck with a beer barrel’s girth was dancing by the wellhead, joyfully pumping his loins against the air, his tin hat cocked on his head.

I could feel a vibration through the soles of my shoes, then the pipes on the wellhead began to sweat in drops that were as big and bright and wet to the touch as a bucket full of silver coins lifted from a sunken galleon. Every connector pipe was as cold as an ice tray fresh out of a freezer. The driller dipped a board into a can of turpentine and lit it and touched the burning end to a flare line that immediately erupted in flames reaching a hundred feet into the sky.

The confined eruption of oil and natural gas and salt water and sand through the wellhead created a level of pressure and structural conflict not unlike an ocean channeled through the neck of a beer bottle. The molecular composition of the steel rigging seemed to stiffen against the sky. A hammer fell from somewhere in the rigging, clanging through the spars as loudly as a cathedral bell, but no one paid any attention, even when the hammer bounced off the roof of the doghouse.

“Wahoo!” Hershel said, jumping up and down on the deck. “Wahoo!” He began singing the lyrics from a song I’d heard beer-joint bands play for years: “ ‘Ten days on, five days off, I guess my blood is crude oil now. I reckon I’ll never lose them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.’ Lord God in heaven, we’re rich, Weldon!” Then he shouted again: “Wahoo!”

He wasn’t through. He stood on his hands and walked across the deck.

“Did you ever see a happier man?” Rosita said.

“Never,” I replied.

“The private detective killed in the hit-and-run?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let his evil live beyond the grave,” she said.

T
HE WEEKS FOLLOWING
the completion of the rig were grand. We paid down our debt to Lloyd Fincher’s insurance company and started up another pipeline in Victoria, Texas, and one in Lottie, Louisiana. Linda Gail and Hershel painted their humble house in River Oaks, and she applied for admission in the River Oaks Country Club. Rosita and I went back to Grandfather’s ranch and planted a windbreak of poplar trees on the north side of the house, and bought my mother an automobile and hired a man to teach her how to drive. We celebrated Grandfather’s ninetieth birthday with a three-layer cake that had white icing and pink candles. Among his friends at the party were old men who had been drovers on the Goodnight-Loving and the Chisholm Trail, and twins who had gone up Kettle Hill with Fighting Joe Wheeler.

I did not know how to tell Grandfather or my mother about my father’s death. My mother was not stable and never would be. My father and Grandfather had never gotten along. My father was also a Holland, but a distant cousin, one who Grandfather claimed was a woods colt and not a legitimate member of the family. He had resented my father’s drinking and blamed it for my mother’s mental and emotional problems. For many years, Grandfather had been a master at transferring his guilt onto others. But I felt he had come to accept responsibility for his wayward life and for neglecting his children, and I didn’t want to open old wounds by telling him or my mother that my father had found work but hadn’t cared enough about his family to send money home or tell us where he was.

Or maybe I couldn’t face the fact that my father’s first love was alcohol and that everything else, even his son, was secondary.

I tried. Right after Grandfather’s birthday party, he and I were sitting on the porch in the sunset, our newly planted poplars green and stiffening in the breeze, the underbelly of the rain clouds as red as a forge. He was drinking his coffee from the saucer.

I told him what I had learned of my father’s fate from McFey. He didn’t speak for a long time. “It was him in the photographs? You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I’d like to get the people who caused the accident. I’d like to get the ones who covered it up.”

“That’s not what I meant. You feel he betrayed you?”

“I don’t know if ‘betrayed’ is the right word.”

“He couldn’t call y’all collect and tell you he was okay and coming home directly? That’s not betrayal?”

“Yes, sir, I wondered why he didn’t do those things.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the chance. There’d be no reason for him not to contact you. His grievance wasn’t against you and your mother. It was against me. What’s the name of the company he was working for?”

“I don’t know. The private detective was killed by a hit-and-run driver the day after I met him.”

“That’s pretty convenient for somebody, isn’t it?” he said.

“I’d say so.”

“You cain’t do what you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Same thing you did when you put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s stolen automobile.”

“McFey knew all about that. He was a guard in Eastham Pen.”

“Why didn’t you say so, Satchel Ass? String the phone out here and bring me my address book.”

“Would you not call me that awful name?”

“I’ll think about it.”

I went inside the house and brought out the telephone on a long cord. I also brought him the black notebook by which he kept in contact with his shrinking army of old friends. Then I went out in the vegetable garden and began hoeing weeds out of the rows, the sun melting inside its own heat on the earth’s rim. When I went back on the porch, Grandfather was wearing his spectacles, looking at the piece of notepaper he had written on and torn from his book.

“One friend of mine knew McFey at Eastham,” he said. “He says McFey was a harsh shepherd and made life as miserable as possible for Clyde Barrow. Barrow may have been raped at Eastham. Maybe repeatedly. A former Ranger told me McFey went to work for the Coronado Oil Company.”

“Coronado is owned by the Wiseheart family,” I said.

“Well, McFey got himself fired for padding his expense account.”

“How long ago?”

“Two or three years back.”

“That coincides with what Roy Wiseheart told me.”

“According to my friend, McFey was always bragging on his access to rich people.” Grandfather looked again at the page he had torn from his notebook. “He did chores for Clara Wiseheart. That’s Roy Wiseheart’s wife, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said, feeling my face constrict. “What kind of chores?”

“That’s what I asked. Know what my friend said? ‘When you work for somebody whose family owns a quarter of a billion dollars, you do whatever they tell you.’”

“That’s what the Wisehearts are worth?” I said.

“You got it wrong. Her family is the one with the big money. Roy Wiseheart married up.”

I sat down on the steps. It had been a wet summer, and the pastures and the low-lying hills were still green. The last of the sunlight was glinting like a red diamond at the bottom of the sky, and hundreds of Angus were silhouetted in its afterglow. Grandfather maintained that our land had been soaked in blood, first by Indians, then by Spaniards, then by Mexicans and white colonists, then by Rangers who virtually exterminated the Indian population after Texas gained its independence in 1836. I picked up a piece of dried mud from the step and tossed it out on the flagstones. “Blood and excrement,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s our contribution to the earth.”

Grandfather removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “You feel your friend Wiseheart took you on a snipe hunt?”

“That’s close.”

“It doesn’t change what you are. The shame is on him. Those people aren’t worth spitting on, Weldon. The Hollands are better than that bunch any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I’ll tell you something else, too. Since you were a little boy, I knew you’d be the one to shine.”

I went into the house and got a carton of peach ice cream that Rosita had brought home that afternoon. I brought out two bowls and two spoons, and Grandfather and I ate the entire carton, down to the bottom, under the porch light, while stars fell from the sky.

L
INDA GAIL PINE
had hand-dropped invitations to her lawn party through the mail slots of her neighbors’ homes, up one side of the street and down the other. Many of the neighbors were people she had never met. For these, she had written a special note at the bottom: “Let’s not be strangers.” To some, in order to vary her language, she wrote an extra note: “We’ve heard so many good things about you. Bring children if you like.”

She rented lawn furniture and strung bunting from the eaves of her house to the overhang of live oaks that grew in the neighbor’s yard. She hired a catering service and set up a bar under the gas lamp by the back fence and made sure the two bartenders arrived wearing white jackets and red bow ties and razor-creased black trousers, because that was what the bartenders had been wearing at a garden party she attended in the Hollywood Hills.

That morning she and Hershel had received a letter from River Oaks Country Club, telling them their application for membership had been rejected. She dropped the letter in front of him on the dining room table. “What did you put on the application form?” she asked.

“Our income for last year. That’s what they seemed most interested in. I guess it wasn’t enough.”

“What about all the equipment you have? What about the oil well you just brought in? That’s not enough?”