Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (32 page)

“I’ll find my way to my car,” I said. “No need to see me out. I’m sorry I intruded upon your privacy.”

“You wanted to be a gamesman,” she said. “Now you are. Enjoy it. An actor I knew before I met my husband once called it a ‘divine and sweet, sweet sewer.’ That was right before he killed himself. Maybe you won’t drown in it, Mr. Holland. Your friends probably will.”

As I walked away, I heard her start up the phonograph. I turned around, the air even colder now, the leaves of a transplanted swamp maple lit like fire against the sun. “Is that Bunny Berigan?” I asked.

“It’s ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’ Roy gave it to me on our second date. I guess I still have my sentimental moments.”

Are we our brother’s keeper? Her face was a Grecian mask of callousness and cynicism so blatant, you wondered if it was pretense. Did she fear the Great Shade? Did she know the last names of her servants? Did she ever experience joy? As I looked around, I wondered if I was standing inside a necropolis. That night I wrote these words in my journal:
Dear Lord, Thank you for my dear wife. Thank you for the wonderful life you’ve given us. God bless all those who work and play in the fields of the Lord. This is Weldon Avery Holland signing off again. Amen.

Chapter

20

L
INDA GAIL’S FLIGHT
back to Houston had been canceled because of bad weather, so she took a cab to Union Station and bought a stateroom ticket on the Sunset Limited, an expenditure she previously would have thought unimaginable. It was late afternoon when the train pulled out of Los Angeles, and in no time she found herself gazing through the lounge window at orange groves and palm trees and painted deserts and a red sunset that seemed created especially for her.

She ordered a glass of sherry and took her fountain pen and monogrammed stationery from her bag and began writing Hershel a letter she would ask the conductor to mail at one of the stops. When she thought about Hershel, she had to reconstruct her mental fortifications one brick at a time so an inconvenient truth or two didn’t steal its way into her peace of mind. It was a difficult task. He would never be able to understand the complexity of her situation, she told herself. Why burden him unnecessarily? She had made a conscious choice to enter into an affair with Roy Wiseheart, that was true. Yes, it was morally wrong and indefensible and even treacherous, but it had happened. That was it, it had happened. Things
happened
. Passive voice. And there was nothing to do about it. So enough about that.

She had stayed true to Hershel when he was overseas, hadn’t she? There had been temptations, many of them, potential boyfriends lurking around the edges of a dance floor or looking at her from a back pew in the church. What about Hershel? No French or Italian girl ever tempted him? Had anyone thought of that?

People were weak, she told herself. Her infidelity didn’t mean she was indifferent toward him. He doted on her and would give her anything she wanted. She wasn’t unappreciative. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t understand the creative world and the people who dedicated themselves to the arts and humanities and the making of great films. There was a simple way of putting it all in context: She had grown up in a place where she didn’t belong, and she had finally found her milieu. It was no one’s fault. That was life.

Dear Hershel,
she wrote in a navy blue calligraphy that had been the envy of everyone in her high school English classes,
I’ll probably be home before you receive this. But no matter. I just wanted to organize my thoughts and put them down on paper for you to look at. I’ve been thinking about building a home in Santa Monica, not far from the ocean. I think my commitments are going to keep me there much of the time. Would you object if I talked to an architect? A small house on one of the bluffs would be a grand place for you to relax, and it wouldn’t cost much. It’s not Malibu.

The train pulled into a biscuit-colored stucco station covered with a Spanish-tile roof and surrounded by an oasis of date palms that reminded her of an illustration from the
Arabian Nights
. She could see the ice and mail wagons on the loading platform, and the marbled pink and purple stain of the sun’s afterglow on the hills and desert floor, and car lights tunneling through the dusk out on Highway 66. She looked down at the flowery design on the borders of her stationery, and the blue swirls in the letters that comprised the words she had written to her husband, her heart becoming sicker and sicker at the betrayal she was making a systemic part of her life.

She had to stop this self-flagellation, she told herself. Adults needed to behave as adults and deal with the world as it was. Guilt solved nothing. She began another paragraph.

I think from a financial perspective, the investment would be a good one. One home in River Oaks and another by the beach in Santa Monica! Who would have ever believed that? It’s funny how things work out. Remember when we met at the dance? Boy howdy, life can be a jack-in-the-box, can’t it?

She felt her face shrink at her hypocrisy. She tore the stationery into strips and put them in her bag just as the train jolted forward and two men in suits and fedoras, one of them with a Graflex Speed Graphic, entered the lounge and sat down on the horseshoe-shaped couch across from her. The photographer raised his camera and popped a flashbulb in her face.

“Good heavens, who are you fellows?” she said innocently.

“We almost got you at the airport, but you were too quick for us,” the other man said. “Can you give us an interview?” He held a notebook and pen in his right hand.

“Who’s it for?”

“It’s a wire story about the new girl at Warner Brothers,” he said.

“Anything to pass the time. Can I buy you boys a drink?”

She was surprised by her ease and familiarity with the press. Well, why not? That was Hollywood. They were all part of the same culture, weren’t they? Others didn’t understand what it was like out
there
. The weather was beautiful. It seldom rained, although the bougainvillea and orange trees seemed to bloom year-round. The actors and producers and directors and news reporters and the army of people behind the camera were guests at a party that never ended, one that began with a mist-shrouded sunrise over the Santa Ana Mountains and at night was domed with the constellations and rimmed by waves that created a sensation like an erotic kiss when they surged around her thighs.

The two journalists sitting on the pale blue vinyl couch seemed like pleasant and considerate men, not lighting cigarettes without asking permission, the man with the Graflex dropping his used flashbulbs in his coat pocket so the porter would not have to clean up after him, both of them smiling good-naturedly. She particularly liked the older man. He said his name was Jimmy Flynn and that he had worked for several of the studios as a publicist and had been a correspondent during the war at the Battle of Monte Cassino and a friend of Ernie Pyle’s. He was handsome and dignified and wore a wedding band and addressed her as Miss Pine.

“Actually, I’m married,” she said.

“Out here, all actresses are eternally Miss,” he said. “What profession is your husband in, Miss Pine?”

“Do we have to go into that?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” he said.

“He’s from an old plantation family in central Louisiana. But he’s in the oil business these days. He has his own company.”

“How do you like being with Warner Brothers?”

“It’s wonderful. Everyone has been very nice, Mr. Warner in particular.”

“I think I remember reading about your husband,” Jimmy Flynn said. He set down his pen. “He created a big breakthrough in natural gas technology, didn’t he? Something to do with welding machines.”

“That’s correct, he did.”

“His business partner is a man named Holland?”

“Yes, that’s true,” she said.

“They call themselves the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company.”

“It’s not what they call themselves. It’s the name of their company.”

Outside the window, she could see the headlights of the vehicles on Highway 66 veering angularly into a stretch of desert that was white and cratered and devoid of vegetation, even cactus.

“It’s quite a story, if I remember it correctly,” Flynn said. “They were in the war together. Mr. Holland brought back a girl who was a prisoner of the Nazis. She’s related to Rosa Luxemburg. Her father was a Communist.”

Linda Gail’s smile had faded. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

“Her name is Rosita. To your knowledge, is the wife of your husband’s business partner a Communist?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking me this. I don’t know her.”

“Not at all?”

“I have met her, but I do not associate with her. Does that answer your question?”

“You didn’t know she was a Communist?”

“If I knew that, I would have reported her to someone.”

“Really?” Flynn said. “You’re a tough lady. She’s tough, isn’t she, Quinn?”

“Real tough,” the photographer said, blowing his cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth. “One more before we go, sweetheart. You don’t mind, do you?”

He didn’t wait for her answer or let her recover her composure. He popped the flashbulb three feet from her face. Even after they were gone, her eyes were filled with receding rings of red light, as though she had stared too long at the sun.

I
WENT BACK TO
work on the pipeline down in the Louisiana wetlands close to Grand Isle, and took Rosita with me. We stood on an oil platform at the southern tip of the state and gazed at the slate-green surface of the Gulf, the wind cold and smelling of salt and leakage from a well. Winter was on its way; the sky was black with thunderclouds and empty of pelicans and gulls. In the distance, I could see gas flares burning on three wells and lightning striking the water on the southern horizon, like gold wires without sound. Behind me was the largest and grandest watershed in North America. I wondered how long it would remain as such. Not far away was one of the channels our company had cut from the Gulf into freshwater swamp and marshland. The deleterious consequences had not been instantaneous, but their growing presence couldn’t be denied.

The tide was coming in, flowing like a river through the pilings under our feet. The grasses along the edges of the channel had turned yellow and, in some areas, brown and could be torn loose from their root systems in the sediment like handfuls of human hair. That’s an unpleasant simile to use, but to me it seems appropriate. The tupelo cypress and willow and gum trees and cattails and bamboo were being killed slowly through their root systems, the leaves in old-growth trees dying first. Ironically, the saline was reconfiguring the very channels that carried the salt water into the swamp. One of the first channels we had cut was no longer a straight line. Its banks had eroded and collapsed in places, and it had taken on the shape of a huge sulfurous-colored slug that a giant had stepped on.

The damage wasn’t confined to saltwater intrusion. Our bulldozing and dredging operations had dammed up streams and caused stagnation in ponds that were now coated with mosquitoes and a thick bacterial film as thick as paint dried on top of a bucket; you could pick it up like a tattered, soggy garment on the end of a stick.

It wasn’t good to brood upon the excesses of the Industrial Age, I told myself. Give unto Caesar. That was the latitude given to us by Our Lord. The earth abideth forever, said the writer in Ecclesiastes. Who was I to argue with Scripture? Unfortunately, my debates with myself on these matters were becoming more and more frequent.

“There’s Hershel,” Rosita said.

He was walking down the right-of-way toward the platform, wearing a slouch hat and khakis and a navy blue corduroy shirt and his old field jacket. I had no idea why he had come down to Grand Isle. My puzzlement wasn’t lost on him.

“I had to get out of Houston. I guess I’m just not good at big cities,” he said. “Let’s go up to the café and have some étouffée.”

But Hershel was a poor actor. During lunch, he seemed to catch about half of what either Rosita or I said. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “My father isn’t doing well. I thought I might go up to the farm and spend a couple of days with him.”

“That’d be fine, Hershel,” I said. “Everything is on track at both offices.”

“He wants to go squirrel and bird hunting,” he said.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“My father. He wants to get out his twenty-gauge and make a squirrel-and-robin stew and shell pecans and make a pie. It’s funny how old people retreat into the past, like it can bring back their youth. I think this might be his last Christmas.”

I nodded as though in sympathy, but in reality I believed Hershel was talking about himself, not his father. Then I asked a question I should have left unsaid. “How is Linda Gail?”

He looked at me like a man trapped under an airless glass bell. “Did she call?”

“No,” I replied. “I thought she was about to start work on a new film. It’s about the French Underground, isn’t it?”

“She hasn’t told me a lot,” he said. “I know what I read in the papers.”

Rosita set down her knife and fork. “It’s nice to have you here, Hershel,” she said.

Her words could have been snowflakes sliding down window glass.

T
HAT EVENING HERSHEL
rented a room at the same motor court we were using, way up the two-lane, surrounded by cypress and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. The clouds were lit from behind by the moon, the bamboo that grew along the flooded roadside clattering as loudly as broomsticks. I never knew a more haunted land or one that was more beautiful. I tapped on Hershel’s door.

“It’s open,” he said from inside.

When I opened the door, he was removing his clothes from his suitcase and laying them out on his bed, his back to me. He didn’t bother to turn around. On top of his neatly folded shirts was a 1911-model army-issue .45 automatic.

“When did you start carrying a gun?” I asked.