Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (43 page)

“Lied about what?”

“You said you checked on Hershel. Your friend Mr. Green said you never left his house, that you were playing tennis all day.”

“It’s fifteen minutes to your house from mine. Green was on a business call for almost an hour. It was about noon. I’d gone over to your house already, but I went a second time. I also called the police. Why do you always think the worst of me, Linda Gail?”

“Because I don’t know what to believe. Never. Not on one occasion.”

“Believe that I love you. Let’s have breakfast and talk. I don’t want to fly out of here and leave things in the state they’re in. You’re going to drive me to the grave. That’s not an exaggeration.”

“Roy, you have to let me alone. I can’t think straight.”

“That’s why I want to be with you. We’ll face these things together.”

“You know what bothers me most, Roy? You know what bothers me right now, more than anything else in the world?”

“I have no idea.”

“You haven’t asked about Hershel,” she replied. “Not once. He could be dead or out working on his truck. You didn’t ask or show the least curiosity. How do you explain that?”

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER,
the phone rang again. “Hershel?” she said.

“No, my name is Albert,” a man’s voice said. “I help out at the relief center here. Who’s this?”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“You said Hershel. That’s the name of the man I’m calling for. Hershel Pine. I got your number out of his wallet.”

“I can’t understand what you’re saying. Don’t hang up. Please. Are you saying you found my husband’s wallet?”

“I found
him.
He was inside some cardboard boxes behind the center. He looks like somebody beat him up. I thought maybe he wandered in from the highway.”

“How bad is he hurt?”

“The way people get hurt in a fight.”

“Can you put him on the phone?”

“He’s sleeping now. It got pretty cold last night. His teeth were clicking. I covered him up on a cot.”

“What are his injuries? Please tell me. My husband doesn’t get in fights. How bad is it?”

“There was a pint of wine in the pocket of his jacket. It was broken. I don’t think it cut him. Lady, this neighborhood is mostly colored. Ask yourself why he was down here, because I don’t know. He’s no stew-bum. That’s why I called. I think somebody put the boots to him and dumped him here.”

She followed his directions to a rural neighborhood on the two-lane highway to Galveston, a neighborhood with dirt streets and shotgun and paintless frame houses that had peaked tin roofs and neat yards and coffee cans planted with flowers on the galleries. It reminded her of the sugarcane and rice-mill towns of southern Louisiana, trapped between the softly focused culture of the agrarian South and the petrochemical industries that chained the Gulf Coast. She pulled up to a clapboard church set among cedar and pine trees and parked in back by a rain ditch. The man named Albert helped her put Hershel in her car. Albert was dressed in an off-color, ill-fitting suit and unshined dress shoes with white socks; his hair looked like paint poured on a rock.

“You’re a minister?” she asked.

“No, just a drunk trying to get well. Fine car,” he said.

“I want to make a donation to your church,” she said.

“You can if you want. You don’t have to. Can I tell you something, lady?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t cry. He’s gonna be all right.”

“No, he’s not. But you’ve been very kind.” She opened her purse and took out a fifty-dollar bill. “Take this. Don’t argue.”

“Ma’am, if you’re in some kind of trouble, maybe you should call the police. I don’t like to see you drive out of here crying like that. You could have an accident. Let me call the cops for you. They’ll know what to do.”

Chapter

26

C
HRISTMAS MORNING I
received a person-to-person call at the motor court outside Morgan City. I heard the operator tell the caller to deposit two dollars in coins. “Weldon?” Linda Gail’s voice said.

“What’s happened?” I said, fearing the worst.

She told me everything she knew about the beating Hershel had taken, then had to deposit more coins. My stomach felt sick. I looked across the room at Rosita. I knew the target was not Hershel; it was us, and our choices were starting to run out.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“I don’t know. I’ve put him to bed,” Linda Gail said. “Our doctor says he may have had a psychotic break.”

“It was Hubert Slakely who beat him?”

“That’s the name Hershel gave me. I called the police. Somebody is supposed to call me back.”

“Where’s Roy?”

“I don’t know. I left a message at his office.”

“Did you call his house?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“Don’t take that attitude with me, Weldon.”

“I didn’t mean to. We’re heading back to Houston.”

“I’ve closed my eyes to what’s going on. Dalton Wiseheart plans to take over y’all’s company. That’s what all this is about.”

“There’s a lot more involved than our company.”

“Is Roy mixed up in any of it?”

“If you don’t know, how would I?”

I didn’t intend to hurt her. But when you deal with those who have chosen to inflict great harm on themselves and their loved ones on a daily basis, whatever you say to them about the reality of their lives will either prove inadequate or offend them deeply, and leave you with feelings of guilt and depression. It’s not unlike walking through cobweb.

“I sometimes think you hate me,” she said. “What bothers me is that I feel I deserve your contempt.”

“If I gave you that perception, it was unintentional.” I looked through the window. The day was blue and gold, the palm fronds in front of the motor court lifting in the breeze off the Gulf. It was Christmas, a day when the rest of the world seemed at peace. “Where are you calling from?”

“A pay phone,” she replied.

“Which pay phone?”

“Outside the drugstore. The one by the River Oaks police station.”

“Have you used it often?”

Again, I probably assaulted her sensibilities in asking a question that indicated surreptitiousness was a natural part of her life.

“Several times,” she replied.

“I’ll call you at your home later and see how Hershel is doing,” I said. “In the meantime, I want you to hear me on this: I think you’re a good person, Linda Gail. You read me?”

I don’t know if she replied. The operator asked for more coins, then the connection was broken.

R
OSITA AND I
checked out of the motor court and began the long two-lane drive down the Old Spanish Trail through the bayou country to Lake Charles and the Texas border. Back then, Christmas morning in the southern United States seemed to produce a strange environmental and cultural phenomenon that I could never quite explain. The weather was always mild, the sky more like spring than winter, the grass a pale green, sometimes with clover in it. The streets would be almost empty, except for a few children playing on the sidewalk with their new roller skates or Western Flyer wagons. The celebration of Saturnalia on the previous night would fade into the quiet predictability of a sunlit morning and a sense of abeyance that allowed us to step out of time for a short while and be safe from one another.

That was the mood in which we drove over the high bridge that spanned the Calcasieu River west of Lake Charles and dropped down into a complex of chemical plants where a few years ago there had been only gum and cypress and willow trees that used to remain red and gold all the way to the salt until at least mid-November. On this particular stretch of highway, the toxicity in the air was nauseating and so thick and palpable, it was impossible to keep out of the automobile. But the people who lived in the small town by the chemical plants seemed to give little heed to the degradation of their environment and were thankful to have the jobs and the homes they did. I wondered again about the sacrificial nature of life, the collective triage we performed with regularity on our fellow man, and the wars and human attrition we accepted as the cost of our survival.

Would that
The Song of Roland
defined our experience and not this gloomy projection of our future, I told myself. I couldn’t afford to lose myself in abstractions. Rosita and I were on our own. Or that’s what I thought at the time.

We crossed into Texas and entered a coastal area where hundreds of United States Navy ships had been mothballed after the war. They were anchored in bayous, canals, and brackish bays, their guns plugged, their scuppers bleeding rust, their decks and hulls scrolled with the shadows of giant cypress trees that had lost their leaves. It was a strange sight, as though our greatest creations had become refuse for which there was neither purpose nor means of disposal.

East of Beaumont, I could see traffic slowing down and stopping, as it does where there’s an accident. I pulled up to a café next to an outdoor fruit stand that sold pecans and pralines during winter. We sat in a booth close to the counter. Through the front window, I could see several of the mothballed ships inside a black-water swamp, the sunlight dying behind the clouds, the juxtaposed images like a still life of death on a massive scale, but for reasons that made no sense to me.

“This place is great for Mexican food,” I said.

Rosita looked at a calendar on the wall. “Merry Christmas,” she said. She rested one foot on top of mine under the table.

“You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,” I said.

She shaped the words “I love you” with her mouth.

A trucker came in, not happy with the traffic situation. “What’s the deal up there?” he asked.

“They put up a barricade,” the counterman replied.

“For what?”

The counterman shook his head and didn’t answer.

“Well, what the hell is it?” the trucker asked. “I thought your brother-in-law was a deputy sheriff.”

The counterman leaned over and lowered his voice. He was a huge man, his hair jet-black, his forehead ridged like a washboard. “They’re looking for a couple of Communists that tried to kill a Houston police officer.”

“Communists? What the hell are Communists doing around here?” the trucker replied.

I kept my eyes fixed on Rosita’s.

“Be with y’all in just a minute,” the counterman said.

The directions and the key to Lloyd Fincher’s duck-hunting camp were still in my wallet.

“Just coffee,” I said.

W
E DROVE ONE
mile back toward the state line and turned south on a dirt road that followed a bayou through pine woods and gum trees and pastureland dotted with palmettos. I could smell the salt in the air, and through the water oaks and persimmons, I could see the sunlight glittering on the Gulf of Mexico like thousands of bronze razor blades. Something else was occurring in the passage of the sun and the shifting of the light and the way the wind scudded across the algae that resembled green lace around the base of the cypress. The air was colder and damper, the shade alive with the smell of stagnant water and animal dung and carrion, the shadows of the plugged guns on the mothball fleet lengthening across a skeletal woods.

Up ahead was a cattle guard that looked in bad repair, like the one on Grandfather’s ranch years ago, the one he had warned Clyde Barrow about.

Then I saw something I tried to dismiss as a hallucination, the release of an image buried in the place where memories lived. It was the 1932 Confederate. It was moving down a dirt road toward the water with four occupants, their silhouettes as stiff as mannequins, dust rising off the wire-spoked wheels.

What did they want? What were they trying to tell me?

“Are you okay, Weldon?” Rosita said.

“The light was in my eyes,” I replied. “Will you get out and open the gate? Be careful where you step. There may be a broken spar in the cattle guard.”

I waited while she took the chain off the gate and pushed it back. She looked down at her feet and stepped carefully back on solid ground, then leaned in the window. “Stay to the right,” she said.

After I drove over the guard, she closed and latched the gate and got back inside the car. “How did you know the cattle guard was broken?”

“I think Fincher told me.”

“You
think
?”

I shrugged.

T
HE PLACE THAT
Fincher called a camp looked more like a mid-nineteenth-century planter’s home that had gone to seed. The main building was constructed of plaster and old brick, with wood trim and a wide, roofed porch. The house had electricity and running water, but the mortar was crumbling between the bricks, and the sinks were striped with an orange residue as crusty as metal filings, the fireplace and the front of the chimney blackened with soot. There was no telephone or radio.

“After dark, I’ll go back to the highway and find a grocery store,” I said.

Rosita was standing in the middle of the living room, gazing at its bareness. “There’s nothing here that has a name on it. The magazines don’t have address labels. All the drawers are empty. Why would Fincher let it get so run-down?”

“Maybe he’s fallen on bad days.”

We looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. An impoverished or desperate man is not one you want covering your back.

I cleaned an owl’s nest out of the chimney and started a fire. Through the window, I couldn’t see any other buildings beyond the railed fences that marked the boundaries of Fincher’s property. “Let’s do a little recon,” I said.

The sky was an ink wash of purple and black, the air thick with a stench that was like offal burning in an incinerator. I had to clear my throat and spit before I spoke. I didn’t want to mention the odor or what it reminded me of. “When I was a little boy, my father took me fishing for gafftop catfish west of here, over by Freeport,” I said. “They were the biggest catfish I had ever seen.”

“Where’s that odor coming from?” she asked.

“It’s probably a garbage fire. Look, you see those mounds down there, close by the swamp?”