Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (42 page)

I had fallen asleep with my book in my hand. I heard Rosita click off the light and gently set my book on the nightstand. She lay down next to me and curled her body into mine, her arm resting on my side, her breath rising and falling on my neck. I didn’t wake until I heard hundreds of geese honking in the early dawn.

I
WENT OUTSIDE WITH
a cup of coffee and stood in the midst of a fog that was so thick I felt as though I were standing inside a cloud. No, the sensation was more compelling than that. I felt as though I were not in Louisiana but on the mythic Celtic island of Avalon, at the beginning of time, when man first looked up through the trees and saw light shining from the heavens and thought that he was standing in a cathedral whose pillars were the tree trunks that surrounded him.

In another hour I would be out on the right-of-way, where the men I had hired would pull the welding hood over their faces and bend to their work, the welding hood shaped exactly like the helmet of a crusader knight, each man thickly gloved to the elbow, one knee anchored on the ground, as though all of them were genuflecting in preparation for battle.

Those were fine thoughts to have. The Arthurian legend and the search for the Grail are always with us and define who we want to be. But the chivalric stories of Arthur and Roland are hard to hold on to, and we’re dragged back into the ebb and flow of a world that celebrates mediocrity, wherein the forces governing our lives remain unknown and beyond our ken.

I heard the phone ring inside our room. It was Linda Gail. “Roy Wiseheart lied to me. He told me he went to our house to check on Hershel but couldn’t find him.”

“How do you know he lied?” I asked.

“Roy’s neighbor told me Roy was playing tennis with him all day. He didn’t go anywhere.”

“You’re calling me in Louisiana to tell me Roy lied to you?”

“Roy’s friend said he called a policeman. I thought maybe Roy sent this policeman out to the house because he didn’t want to be bothered.”

“Maybe he felt uncomfortable,” I said. “Maybe he was afraid. I’m not sure what Hershel might do.”

“Will you let me finish? I talked to our neighbor across the street. He’s a nice man. He asked Hershel to go fishing once. He said the cops asked if he thought Hershel was suicidal.”

“That’s why we’re all concerned, Linda Gail. Maybe the cops are trying to help.”

“The neighbor told the cops Hershel likes to drink sometimes at an icehouse on West Alabama, back in our old neighborhood.”

“What about it?” I said.

“The owner told me Hershel’s truck was there, but a wrecker towed it away. He doesn’t know what happened to Hershel; he said he’d been drinking a lot.”

I had been standing. I sat down in a chair by the writing table. The receiver felt warm against my ear. I saw Rosita looking at me. “He disappeared?”

“The two cops who came out to the house were plainclothes. One of them left his card with the neighbor. Here, I’m looking at the card now. His name is Hubert T. Slakely. Does that name mean anything?”

I
T WAS DARK
and cold when Hershel took his bottle of Jax outside the icehouse and sat down at one of the plank tables under the canvas canopy. He was wearing his beat-up leather jacket and a cloth cap, but neither seemed to keep the cold off his skin. He felt as though his metabolism had shut down and his body was no longer capable of producing heat, not even after four shots of whiskey straight up. Maybe it was just the weather, he told himself. It was too cold for the other patrons, who were inside by the electric heater, playing the shuffleboard machine and talking about Harry Truman integrating the United States Army. Hershel salted his beer and took a sip from the glass and listened to the wind swelling the canopy above his head.

Three blocks away he could see the red and yellow neon on the spire of the Alabama Theatre printed against the sky. This was a fine neighborhood in which to live, he thought. The houses were mostly brick bungalows built in the 1920s, the streets shaded by old trees. The buses to downtown ran every ten minutes and cost a nickel. The local grocery store sold its produce out of crates on the gallery, and the customers signed for their purchases and paid at the end of the month. Why did they have to move to River Oaks, where they didn’t belong? Why did Linda Gail have to discover Hollywood? Why did Roy Wiseheart have to come into their lives?

For the most part, he had been able to put aside the war and the things he had done and seen others do. Sometimes in his sleep, he heard the treads of a King Tiger clanking through the forest, the rounds of his Thompson flattening or sparking off its impervious plates, but he always managed to wake himself up before the worst part of the dream, the moment that left him shivering and hardly able to control his sphincter, a moment when seventy tons of steel tried to grind him into pulp inside his cocoon of ice and broken timbers and frozen earth.

A black man was cleaning cigarette butts and food wrappers and pieces of newspaper from under the tables with a push broom. His eyes were elongated, almost slits, and the peaked hat with earflaps that he wore tied under the chin gave his face the appearance of a sad football.

“Where you from?” Hershel asked.

“Mis’sippi, suh,” the man said.

“You like it here’bouts?”

“Yes, suh, I like it fine.”

Hershel shook a Camel loose from a pack and stuck it in his mouth. He watched the black man and didn’t light the cigarette. “What do you think about the president integrating the armed forces?”

“I don’t study on it, suh.”

“You don’t have an opinion? None? Is that correct? You’re a man of color living in a segregated society, but you don’t have an opinion about integration?”

“It ain’t nothing I have control over.”

“You want a smoke?”

“Thank you. I’m not supposed to light up on the job.”

“I figure if a man has fought for his country, he should have the same rights as any other man,” Hershel said.

The black man raised his eyes long enough to glance at the men inside the icehouse. “Yes, suh, that would make sense.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lawrence.”

“A colored washwoman saved my life. She was a juju woman. I was wrapped up in a rubber sheet. If she hadn’t looked through the window and seen me, I wouldn’t be here today.”

“I got to get on it, suh.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Yes, suh, that would be fine.”

“Did your wife ever mess around on you?”

“I ain’t ever been married. I thought about it, though. There’s a lady at the church I go out wit’.”

Hershel lit his cigarette. The smoke rose from his mouth as white as a cotton bole. What had he been talking about? The subject seemed to have dissolved into thin air. His head began to droop, his concentration to fade. “Sorry, I feel like I got malaria. Except I don’t. I guess I better go home.”

“Suh, there’s two men yonder in that car. They been looking at you. Maybe you shouldn’t be driving nowhere right now.”

“Which men?”

“They got suits and hats on. One of them comes in here. He’s a bad white man.”

“Say that again.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it. I just didn’t want to see you have no trouble.”

“When a colored person says a white man is bad, he’s pretty bad. Have I got it right?”

“I ain’t saying no more.”

When he stood up, Hershel had to steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the tabletop. “I hope you marry the church lady. I bet she’ll do right by you.”

“That’s your truck on the street?”

“That’s it. Give me your arm, will you?”

“Suh, don’t do this.”

“You know how to count cadence? Tell you what. I’ll count it and you march it, and the two of us will get me over to the truck.”

Lawrence backed away, shaking his head, his eyes on the ground, his hands clenched on the broom handle. “Suh, I need this job. I cain’t be getting in other people’s business.”

“I cain’t blame you,” Hershel said. “Take care.”

“You, too, suh.”

Hershel walked past the soda cooler and the ice chute into the darkness. There seemed to be bottle caps everywhere, crunching like glass under his feet. The sensation reminded him of walking barefoot as a boy on a gravel road in rural Louisiana, when his father worked all day for a dollar-and-a-half WPA grocery order.

The wind was colder, blowing through the trees on the unlit street where his truck was parked in the shadows. Behind him, he heard Lawrence stacking crates and pushing the broom along the concrete walkway by the side of the icehouse. An unmarked prewar Ford was parked by a fire hydrant, its hood pointed toward West Alabama, giving the occupants a clear view of the icehouse, the plank tables under the canopy, and Hershel’s truck. When Hershel stepped off the curb, he felt as though he had set his foot down on the deck of a ship just after it had pitched into a trough. He heard both doors of the Ford squeak open and two men get out on the asphalt. He removed his truck keys from the pocket of his leather jacket and opened the truck and dropped the keys on the back floor. When he turned around, he was facing the two men, who wore suits and hats with wilted felt brims.

“I was fixing to take a nap, not drive,” he said.

One man was duck-footed and had short, thick legs and a chest like an upended beer keg. The other man was tall and lean all over, his posture as stiff as a coat hanger. “I’m Detective Hubert Slakely, Houston PD,” he said. “Are you carrying a firearm?”

“I own one. It’s at my house. So I cain’t say as I’m carrying it.”

“Your name is Hershel Pine?”

“Yes, sir, it is. I’m not aiming to drive this truck anywhere, if that’s the issue.”

“There’s a report you’re suicidal.”

“I don’t figure I’m worth shooting. So why would I want to waste money buying a bullet to shoot a person I consider worthless?”

The detective took off his hat and drew a comb through his hair. The moon was shining through the live oak over the street. Hershel could see a peculiar luminosity in the detective’s eyes, one he had seen in the eyes of Klansmen and redneck sheriff’s deputies and gunbulls who worked in Angola and cashed their checks at Margaret’s whorehouse in Opelousas. All of them sought a badge, a flag, a banner; it didn’t matter what kind. Their enemy was the human race.

The detective clipped his comb inside his shirt pocket and replaced his hat on his head. “Would you mind putting your hands on the side of the vehicle?”

“I’m too tired. I think I need my nap now.”

“It beats a night in jail.”

“I cain’t say. I’ve never been in a jail. I know you, don’t I? Or at least your name.”

“Lean against the truck and spread your feet.”

“I not only know who you are, I know why you’re here and who you work for,” Hershel said. He could feel a fish bone in his throat. He coughed and started over. “Your name gets around. You’re the one who arrested Rosita Holland.”

“Now I’m arresting you.” Slakely removed a pair of handcuffs from a leather pouch on his belt. “Turn around, please.”

“If my father was here, he’d tell y’all to kiss his butt. Or he might give you a whipping. I ain’t going to no damn jail. The man who thinks he can put me there had better—”

That was as far as he got. The blackjack had been handmade by a convict and was tapered like a darning sock, the lead ball on the heavy end wrapped in rawhide, the lower end mounted on a spring and wood handle that doubled the velocity of the blow. Hershel bounced off the side of the truck and struck the concrete on his face. Slakely leaned over and beat him in the back and shoulders as though breaking up ice in a washtub. Then he began kicking Hershel with the point of his shoe, holding on to the truck for purchase, kicking every exposed place on his body he could target.

“Captains,” said the black man named Lawrence. “He’s just drunk. He didn’t mean no harm.”

Slakely turned around. “You better get out of here, Sambo.”

“Yes, suh.”

“You tell anybody about what you saw here, we’ll be back.”

“Yes, suh, I know that.”

“Glad we agree.”

For seconds or perhaps minutes, the only sound Hershel could hear was the wind in the oak limbs and the easy drift and sweep of leaves across the asphalt. The voices of the two police officers sounded as though they were resonating off the walls of a well that had no bottom.

“Is he—?”

“No, he’s all right. When you cain’t see the blood is when you got a problem.”

“You kind of lost control, Hubert. Jesus Christ.”

“He was resisting. He had it coming. There’s no problem here.”

“Want me to call it in?”

“Maybe he learned his lesson. Can you hear me, Pine? Did you learn something tonight?”

“The guy’s a mess, Hubert. I think we’ve got a problem.”

“You got a point. He’p me lift him up.”

“What are we doing?”

“Cleaning up the street.”

Hershel landed hard in the trunk of the prewar Ford. His head was jammed against the spare tire, his knees against a box of tools, his face half buried by a tarp stiff with paint. For an instant he saw Slakely staring down at him, his hand balanced on the open hatch.

Don’t do it,
he thought he heard himself say.
Please.

The hatch slammed down an inch from Hershel’s face, the stars in the sky gone in a wink.

R
OY WISEHEART CALLED
Linda Gail early in the morning, before the sun was up. The receiver felt cold against her ear. She stared through the back window at the blueness of the dawn and the bareness of a tree that was wet and gnarled and looked scraped of leaves. She wanted to be back in California, wrapped inside the fog that rolled off the ocean on mornings like these.

“Jack called late last night. He wants me at a meeting in the morning,” Roy said.

“Jack who?”

“Jack Warner. Who else would I be talking about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Jack Valentine. Except he’s dead, isn’t he? Killed in South Central L.A.”

There was a beat. “I’d like to see you before I go.”

“You want to see me? After you lied?”