Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (35 page)

“Yes, I’m with you. I understand.”

“Do you?” he replied.

Why had Roy done this to her? He drove them to an adobe ranch house at the base of the volcano. The bougainvillea reached to the roof; the latticework over the walkways was interwoven with wisteria that had just gone into bloom. “Whose place is this?” she asked.

“An absentee landowner. He rented it to me.”

“Did you arrange this role for me?”

“I don’t have that kind of power. Regardless of what people think, it doesn’t work that way out here. You got it on your own hook.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Let’s go inside. I’ve missed you terribly.” He shut off the engine. “God, you’re lovely.”

“I have to work this afternoon,” she said. “You heard what Jerry said. What are you doing to me?”

“To
you
?”

“I never know what to believe. I think maybe my whole career was bought and paid for. You made me look like a fool in front of the whole cast and crew. How did you suddenly become a producer of the film? You’re on a first-name basis with my director. You seem to orchestrate everything you come near. You’re everywhere and nowhere.”

“I was on a first-name basis with famous actresses when I was ten years old. Sometime I’ll tell you the names of some my father slept with.”

“Did you buy me this role or not?”

“Let me tell you a story about Jack Warner. He once said, ‘I’ve got the best scriptwriter in Hollywood, and I’ve got him for peanuts.’ He was talking about William Faulkner. You know who else he said that about?
You
. In light of what you’re going to make for him, he considers your salary peanuts.”

“I don’t believe you, number one. Number two, what if I said I want out of our situation?”

“You’d hurt me beyond repair. But if that’s your choice, I’d honor it. Is that your choice, Linda Gail?”

She felt a great dryness come into her mouth. “It should be.”

“How should I read that?” he said. “What does a statement like that mean? People are what they do. Not what they say or what they think. You’re with me of your own volition. You’ve made a choice. We both have.”

The sun went behind the clouds. She could see the wind scouring dust out of the fields, peaches thudding to the ground in an orchard, the parked biplanes straining against their anchor ropes. “I grew up in a fundamentalist church,” she said. “So did Hershel. You don’t know what that does to you. Maybe I don’t have your strength. Maybe I’m one of those weak girls who always have to like themselves.”

“Let’s have lunch,” he said.

“You want to have lunch?”

“Yes. Don’t take all these things on yourself at one time. Whatever decision you make will be fine. If you walk away from me today, you’ll always remain my girl. A man meets a woman like you once in a lifetime. Every day with her is a gift. Then one day the gift ends. I can’t stand the thought of losing you, Linda Gail. But I can’t control your emotions. Just tell me what you want to do.”

She thought she would cry.

That wasn’t what she did. Ten minutes later, she was in bed with him, his head buried between her breasts, a wave building inside her with such intensity that the moans she made seemed to come from someone else.

T
HAT EVENING JERRY
Fallon came to her trailer, a new Airstream that had been brought from Guadalajara for her sole use. He was dressed in tennis shorts and a blue polo and a white cap and was carrying two bottles of Champale. “Where’s the lover boy?” he asked.

“Roy?”

“I hope you only have two of them. Lovers, I mean.”

“He had to go to Mexico City. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Nice of him to tell me. Want one of these?”

“No, thank you,” she replied.

“I admire your abstinence. You’re going to do great, love. You know that, don’t you?”

“Why did you call Roy a sod today?”

“That’s from our flying days. I used to call him a sod because he was anything but.”

“He chased women?”

“Not too far. It was wartime. We’d get what we called ‘seventy-two’ in Pearl. The navy nurses were everywhere. Roy cut a wide swath.”

“What do you want, Jerry?”

“Can I sit down?”

“Do whatever you want.”

He was wearing shades and had the darkest tan she had ever seen; his arms and chest were covered with swatches of black hair, his fingers tapered, like a piano player’s. He cracked the cap off a Champale bottle with an opener on his knife. He caught the foam on the web of his thumb and put it in his mouth. “You want to be shark meat?”

“Are you talking about Roy?”

“America is in love with Betty Hutton and Margaret O’Brien. They love Judy Garland. They love mythology, and the Puritan in them is still alive and well. Rob them of their myths and they’ll tear you apart.”

“You think I’m doing something wrong?”

“I’m saying don’t get caught. Anybody who was on the set today could sell a very nasty story with one phone call. Wake up, doll.”

“I don’t like you calling me names.”

“I’m assuming you’re an adult. The space between your teeth is worth a million dollars. Roy is reckless. He thinks his crate should have burned with him in it. One day he’ll find a way to do it. You want to ride it down with him?”

“He’s suicidal?”

“No, he’s worse. He wants the funeral of a Viking.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“He wants lots of companions for the trip across, a dead dog at his feet.”

“You’re upsetting me, Jerry.”

“That’s why I brought you a drink. Roy’s box score is legendary. You drove off with him at lunchtime in front of a hundred people. You know what I heard one of the cooks say? This is from one of the
cooks
. ‘Her husband and Wiseheart were both war heroes. Now they’re sharing the same foxhole.’”

Her face was as hot as an electric iron, her head throbbing. “And what did you do about it?”

“I’m not worried about what two scullions say. Hedda Hopper is another matter. You know the fun she’d have with a juicy bit of news like this?”

“Roy and I are friends. You stop assuming things.”

“When you came back from the hacienda, you looked like you’d forgotten to put your panties on.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

“I got a call from your husband fifteen minutes ago. He’ll be here tomorrow morning. We’re shooting the battle scene at first light. We don’t need distractions, love. Now you clean up your act and get with the program.”

“Hershel is coming
here
?”

“That’s what the man said. Does he know about you and Roy?”

She sat down in a chair. Her ears were ringing, her stomach roiling. Jerry upended the Champale, the foam running through the neck and down his throat. He set down the bottle and looked her evenly in the face.

“I hate to see you foul your own nest,” he said. “You’ve got it all, love. You don’t need the wrong guy crawling around on top of you. Dump the bastard while you have the chance.”

“Get out,” she said.

Maybe she threw something at him. She couldn’t remember. When she went to bed, the wind was buffeting her trailer, blowing dust devils out of the hills, dimming the stars that one hour earlier had glittered as brightly as electric bulbs in a theater marquee.

J
UST BEFORE DAWN
she woke from a dream in which wolves were sitting on tree limbs, their muzzles moist with blood. At first she thought the wolves were looking at her, a frightened, small girl unable to flee her attackers. Then she realized that was not the case at all. She was sitting on a tree branch among them. What did the dream mean? The answer wasn’t long in coming. She was a kindred spirit, her agenda as predatory as theirs. Linda Gail Pine had taken on a new identity, one that was probably hidden inside her all her life.

The first scene Jerry shot the next morning involved a Heinkel coming in low, out of a watery yellow sun, bombing and strafing the airfield, the planted explosives geysering showers of dirt and rock into the air, the Heinkel’s engines rattling the tin roofs of the hangars as it swept overhead, the bombardier hunched inside the Plexiglas nose cone, his face like a pig’s inside the leather cap and goggles and fur collar on his leather coat.

The explosions were deafening, their aftershocks vibrating through the ground under Linda Gail’s shoes. Curds of black smoke coiled out of giant smudge pots, powdering the air with soot and filling it with an oily stench that reminded Linda Gail of the refineries in Baton Rouge. A small tank clanked across the airstrip, a Falangist flag flapping from its radio antenna. After the driver got out, Jerry told a stagehand to fire a fully automatic weapon into the cupola so he could record the sound of live rounds ricocheting off the steel plates. Linda Gail found herself stepping back involuntarily, her arms folded across her chest, as the bullets whined into the distance and a German fighter plane streaked low overhead, the barrels of its wing guns flashing. Was this what Rosita Holland actually went through? Linda Gail looked around, wondering if any of the crew or cast sensed the fear that had invaded her body.

Jerry put his arm around her shoulders. “You ready?” he said.

“For what?” she asked, startled out of her reverie.

“You’re about to witness the fascists executing Republican wounded. It’s not your everyday event. You rush out to stop it. You’re the Angel of Andalusia. The poor buggers just want to touch the hem of your garment and be made whole. Remember Scarlett O’Hara walking across a train yard filled with Confederate wounded begging for water? That’s you, love.”

She felt as if a piece of wire were being tightened around her temples. Jerry stepped in front of her, placing his palms on her shoulders, staring into her eyes. “Many women live inside you, Linda Gail. That’s why you’re going to be a great actress. Don’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Give voice to those women who depend on you. You’re a strong woman, a fucking Amazon. You could rip the head off a fascist officer and spit in it. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then get on it. Don’t let me down.”

“I won’t, Jerry.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. He squeezed her against him. “Put the fear of God in them.”

The cameras began rolling as she ran toward a rampart that had been overrun by soldiers who carried bayonet-fixed rifles and wore tasseled caps and rolled blankets tied across their chests. Republican wounded, some wearing French helmets, were lying on the ground, their hands raised futilely against the bayonets being plunged into their bodies. The barrel of a knocked-out machine gun was still smoking behind a wall of sandbags. Some of the wounded were teenaged boys, their faces terrified as they awaited their fate.

Somehow the scene taking place around her had become real, the screams of the dying and the smell of cordite and burning vehicles and the raw stench of blood no longer imaginary or a creation of Hollywood but part of an actual battle in 1936 that she had stepped inside and was participating in among her comrades, all of them scarred by poverty and hunger and oppression. She not only owned this moment, she had earned it and would never separate herself from its suffering and pain.

She shielded the body of a fallen boy. She shoved aside bayonets with her bare hands. She implored a fascist officer to show mercy and yelled in his face when he didn’t. She had become more than the Angel of Andalusia; she was the Angel of Goliad whom she read about in high school, the Mexican prostitute who saved the lives of many a Texas soldier at the Goliad Massacre of 1836. She was no longer Linda Gail Pine.

The tears in her eyes were real. Her clothes were rent by the bayonets she shoved aside, the smears of blood and saliva on her hands and face and hair no longer cosmetic, the alarm she saw in the actors’ faces no longer feigned. She beat her fists on an officer’s chest and tried to gouge his eyes; she cursed and used words that were not in the script; she tore at her own skin with her fingernails as she recognized a dead boy who had sold goat’s milk to her family in their village. The actors playing the roles of fascist soldiers shrank back, blinking, afraid she might blind them.

“Cut!” she heard Jerry yell.

The world seemed to stop, the people around her frozen inside a single frame of film, their mouths open in midsentence. When she tried to speak, no sound would come out of her throat. The land, the sky, the orchards in the distance, the insignias on the wings of the biplanes, all of them were drained of color, just as the dust-covered bodies on the ground were, all of it caught forever inside a photograph taken in a place she had never been.

She saw Jerry walking toward her, his hands outstretched. He lifted her in the air and spun her in a circle. “That was bloody fucking glorious!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. “Ernest Hemingway couldn’t hold a candle to what you just did! By God, you’re a marvel!”

The wounded and the dead were rising from the ground as though a form of secular resurrection were taking place. Everyone in the cast and crew was applauding, as happy for her as they would be for themselves. The joy she felt was like nothing she had ever experienced.

H
ERSHEL ARRIVED AT
noon in a battered taxicab he had hired in a coastal town fifty kilometers away. He was wearing a sport coat and slacks that didn’t match, and carrying a canvas suitcase he had bought in an army PX, his serial number stenciled unevenly on the side. He was also carrying a cardboard tube, the kind that held architectural plans. She ate lunch with him in the outdoor tent that served as a commissary for the cast and crew, the canvas swelling and flapping in the wind, the mountains as blue as steel in the distance, the sun golden on the peach orchards. If anyone noticed Hershel and the conflict he was causing his wife, they pretended otherwise.

“I hope you don’t mind me popping in like this,” he said. “Does the director mind if I stay in your trailer?”

“I’m sure that will be fine,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

“I have this architect friend in Baton Rouge. He made up some sketches.”

“Sketches of what?”