Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (37 page)

“Say what you have to say,” she said.

“I’ve got your husband by the short hairs. That’s what I was gonna say. I can have the old man arrested for threatening an officer of the law with a firearm. Or I can forget all this and see that the charges against you are lost in the process.”

“Get him out of here, Weldon,” she said.

“You heard her, bub,” I said.

“Suit yourself. I tried. Someday y’all will figure out we’re all little people, even you, the big war hero.”

Slakely walked back through the hallway into the living room. The porch light was on, and candle moths were bumping against the screen. The wind was blowing, and the live oaks and pecan trees in the yard were full of shadows that kept changing shape, the leaves spinning on the lawn and driveway. Slakely was only a few feet from the door. In seconds he would be gone and we would return to our lives, and in the morning I would call our lawyer and see what could be done about Slakely’s invasion of our home. Then he turned around, like a man who can’t leave a dice table or an unfinished drink on a saloon table or a situation in which his paucity as a human being has been exposed.

He was still wearing his Stetson, his hands opening and closing at his sides, the veins knotting like twine under the skin. “The old man says he killed six men. That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“He killed eleven or twelve I know of. He killed some of them while he was blind drunk. He doesn’t count the Mexicans he shot on one of Pancho Villa’s troop trains. If you think he won’t kill you, call up Frank Hamer and ask him about Grandfather’s track record.”

“Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde?”

“That’s the one.”

“My goddamn ass.”

Rosita was silhouetted in the kitchen doorway, wearing an apron, a wooden spatula in her hand. Behind her, strings of steam were rising from Grandfather’s pot of stewed tomatoes and peppers. Next to the stove was a white table lined with glass jars and brassy metal tops, a metal spoon inserted in each jar to keep it from cracking when the preserves were poured into it.

It’s my belief that lust, greed, and violence die hard in all of us, whether we’re Semites or Gentiles or pagans, river-baptized, born again, or redeemed by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. But there’s another group in our midst. I believe some are born with the scales and the tailed spine of the four-footed reptilian creature with which we share a common gene pool. I never bore an animus toward the average German soldier; I did, however, toward the Waffen SS, and I was glad I had killed as many of them as I possibly could. I didn’t think Slakely had twin lightning bolts tattooed under his armpit, but if he had, I’m sure he would have worn them with pride.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

“Which way?” I said.

“Ten thousand dollars in cash or stocks. That’s all I want. I’m putting myself in danger on your behalf. You haven’t figured that out?”

“I’m going to get you,” I said.

“You’re threatening me?”

“It’s not a threat. I’m telling you what’s going to happen to you. You violated my wife’s person. You invaded my home. You tried to degrade my grandfather. You think you’re going to get away with that because you’re a Houston police officer?”

He huffed air out of his nostrils. “Live in your own shit. You’ll wish you never heard my name.”

“I believe you,” I said.

He went out the screen door and let it slam behind him. I saw Rosita go back into the kitchen and lift the lid off the metal pot on the stove and put on cloth gloves so she could begin filling the jars.

“Grandfather wants to do that,” I said.

“He’ll burn himself.”

“Let him do it or he’ll get riled up again. I’ll go get him.”

I went into the back bedroom to help Grandfather out of bed. I hadn’t latched the screen or bolted the door. It would have made no difference, though. Hubert Timmons Slakely was a man whose greatest enemy was knowledge about himself. He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom. He is pathologically incapable of change this side of the grave.

Slakely came back through the screen and entered the kitchen, his shadow falling across Rosita. “I’m on to you, Mrs. Holland,” he said.

She stared at him without replying.

“You know what the Jewish piano is, don’t you? The cash register. You’re a kike. You won’t let your husband’s money get loose from your hands. Also, you’re too dumb to see what you’re doing to both y’all.”

“Did you know it’s rude for a man not to remove his hat in someone’s house?” she said.

“Wait till you get up to the women’s prison. I’ll put some interesting notations in your jacket. There’s a section for bull dykes. I’ll make sure you get to meet them.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“One day somebody is gonna tear you and that smart mouth apart, woman.”

“That’s what you would like to do right now. But you won’t because there’re witnesses. A man like you doesn’t care for witnesses. They’re inconvenient when you arrest a street prostitute or a hapless Negro or a vagabond. You frighten the defenseless and impose your will upon them in order to hide the fear that governs your life. That’s why I pity rather than hate you.”

I put Grandfather in his reading chair and as I approached the kitchen doorway, I saw Slakely’s right hand, the one tattooed with a chain of blue stars, curl into a fist. I had no doubt that a blow from a man of his size could crush the bones in her face or even kill her. But if I thought I needed to protect my wife, I was mistaken. Rosita Lowenstein Holland did not need protection. Her adversaries did.

“The Krauts should have melted you into a bar of soap,” Slakely said.

He heard me behind him and glanced over his shoulder. It was bad timing for Hubert Timmons Slakely. The stewed peppers and tomatoes on the stove had become as thick as ketchup, bubbles rising like big red blisters to the surface. She flung the pot with both hands into his face, covering his eyes and nose and mouth like a wet red kerchief wrapped around the head of a mannequin. He screamed and pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and crashed into the doorjamb, fighting his way blindly through the living room and down the steps into the yard. She wasn’t finished with him. She went through the door after him and poured the rest of the pot onto his head and neck, then threw the pot high in the air and watched it bounce on the lawn.

“Voilà,” she said. “There’s a garden hose by the hydrant if you want to wash off. Thanks so much for dropping by.”

I
CALLED A SITTER
for Grandfather, went upstairs, and packed a bag for Rosita, and drove both of us to Galveston before Hubert Timmons Slakely could return to the house with his colleagues. I rented a motel room right across from the seawall that had been built after the great hurricane of 1900. I had not told her I would have to leave her there and return to Houston. Rosita was brave and loving and honorable and all things that are good. She deserved none of the things that had been done to her. Leaving her alone was one of the hardest things I had ever done. But I had to distract the authorities from her and somehow neutralize the power we had given Slakely.

“You’re leaving?” she said.

“There’s a taxi on the way.”

“I don’t like being a fugitive, Weldon. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

“They’re not going to get their hands on you again. I’m going to call the state attorney. I’m going to the police station tonight and file a complaint. There’s Grandfather to take care of, too. You’ll have the car, but if you go anywhere, take a cab. Don’t talk to anyone. I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Malory.”

“As in Thomas Malory?”

“Why not?” I said.

For the first time since we had left Houston, she smiled. Through the curtains, I could see the amusement pier extending from the beach into the surf, the waves bursting against the pilings. All of the rides and concession stands were closed for the season, the long row of windows in the seafood restaurant darkened. “Lie down with me before you go,” she said.

I saw the headlights of the taxi turn off the boulevard into the motel. I went outside and gave the driver three dollars and sent him away. When I came back inside, Rosita had already turned off the lights and undressed and was lying on top of the sheet, one knee pulled up in front of her, her back propped against the pillows. “You look like a painting on the side of a Flying Fortress,” I said.

“Maybe that’s what I am.”

I undressed and got in bed beside her. I put my hand inside the thickness of her hair and kissed her on the mouth. I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that any woman in the history of the world ever made love like Rosita Lowenstein. It was total and complete and unrelenting, and even after I was physically spent, my desire for her never dissipated. I never knew a woman whose hair was both mahogany-colored and black, one color inseparable from the other, yet always changing, depending on the light. Nor had I ever known one who had eyes that shone like sherry in a crystal glass.

As I write these remarks, I know they are personal in nature and perhaps violate good taste and might be embarrassing to read. They may never be read by another. But they reflect my feelings about Rosita. She never had to seek modesty. It was built into her. Reclining nude on a bed, or making love with an almost animal pleasure, or creating an erotic moment unexpectedly in a conventional situation was simply the expression of who she was.

She never had fewer than three climaxes, and after each one she began all over again with such heat and energy that I thought my heart would fail. I buried my face in the sweat on her neck and the dampness in her hair, and could feel both an ache and a rhythm in my loins that I believed would never end, in the same way that you know your love for another person will never end. That’s what it was like with Rosita Lowenstein. The two of us let go of the world and floated away to a kingdom under the sea where no one would ever disturb us again.

At three in the morning she bit me softly on the ear and released me and lay back on the pillow.

“This will be over soon,” I said.

“No, it won’t, Weldon. They’re like the fascists. They torture with passion and murder with indifference.”

“They messed with the wrong bunch.”

“The Hollands?”

“Sure. You’re a Holland, too. How’s it feel?”

“You still believe there’s light in all men. They know that about you. They also know you’ll never change, that you’ll always be bound by the restraints of conscience.”

“You worry too much, kid.”

She squeezed my arm and turned toward the wall, the sheet pulled over her shoulder.

I showered and dressed and called again for a taxi. As I drove away with the cabbie, I looked through the rear window at the darkened amusement pier and the great slate-green moonlit roll and pitch of the Gulf, and I felt a pang in my heart that I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was because I felt the spring and summer of our lives had slipped away, as though a thief had sneaked onto the pier and clicked off the switch on the Ferris wheel before we could reverse the terrible attrition that time imposes on us all. Or did my sense of mutability have another source? In 1942 Nazi U-boats had lain silently in wolf packs under the Gulf, waiting for the oil tankers that sailed from the Houston Ship Channel and the oil refineries in Baton Rouge. Four of them had been sunk by depth charges and were supposedly scudding along the Gulf’s bottom, some of the crew members still aboard, their uniforms and empty eye sockets strung with seaweed. I wondered if their time in history was about to roll round again, like Pharaoh and his chariots laboring up on the shores of the Red Sea, determined that God’s chosen would never get away from the points of their spears.

Chapter

23

T
HE LOCATION OF
the office I maintained in downtown Houston was one I had chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with commerce. The building was in a seedy area off Congress Street and looked more like a structure you would find in the New Orleans French Quarter or Old Natchez than in a commercial center. It was made of stucco and crumbling brick and had a courtyard and an upstairs balcony with Spanish grillwork. More important, one wall in the courtyard contained a wall within a wall, one constructed of heavy stones that were out of context, rocks not from the coastal plains but perhaps from the bed of the Comal or Guadalupe River or the rough terrain of the Texas hill country. Regardless of their origins, the wall within a wall resembled a mosaic, the rocks held together more by their weight and their chiseled shape than by mortar and plaster. According to the legend, three Texas soldiers had been executed against this wall by Santa Ana’s troops just before Santa Ana was entrapped, not far away, in the San Jacinto Basin on April 21, 1836.

These three soldiers, who in all probability were boys, may have lost their lives hours before Texas won its independence. A Mexican lady used to run a flower stall between two buildings on Congress Street, right next to Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop, and once a week I bought a bouquet from her and put it in a ceramic vase filled with water and set it in front of the wall within a wall.

I had already gone to the Houston police station and had just gotten off the telephone with an assistant to the state attorney in Austin when Roy Wiseheart stuck his head in my office door and said, “Buy you lunch, Lieutenant?”

“Another time,” I replied.

He stepped inside without being invited and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a powder-blue sport coat and a polo shirt and pressed gray slacks and oxblood tasseled loafers, his face fresh and ruddy, as though he had just come from his gym. Roy had a perpetual aura of youthfulness that made me wonder if there wasn’t a bit of Dorian Gray in his glue. “You mad at me about something?” he said, pulling up a chair.