Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (45 page)

“You got that from Roy.”

“It’s the only thing in life he’s been right about, except for his infatuation with you.”

“I don’t have the power to deal with these people. I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re the one with the talent. They’re the ones who want to buy it. What’s that tell you? Take their money and treat them with the contempt they deserve.”

“I quit.”

“Quit what?”

“The picture,” she said.

He stepped back from her and turned her shoulders so the carriage lamps shone on her face. “Look at me,” he said.

“You heard what I said.”

“Don’t even think those words.” She started to speak, but he pressed one finger to her lips. “No,” he said. “You did not say what you think you did. You imagined those words. You did not say them. You do not throw hundreds of thousands of dollars of studio money into the incinerator.”

She got into the Cadillac and started the engine. Jerry was trying to hold on to the door handle and walk alongside the Cadillac, talking all the while at the glass. He didn’t let go until she smacked into a ceramic urn by the entrance and bounced over the curb into the street, a hubcap rolling down the asphalt.

W
HEN I WAS
released from jail on the streets of downtown Houston, I knew what a derelict felt like. My coat was gone, my clothes filthy and torn, my face unshaved. There was blood in my hair. One eye was swollen into a slit. My wallet was gone, my car towed to an impoundment somewhere outside Beaumont.

Our enemies, whoever they were, had created a masterpiece of misery. There were no criminal charges against Rosita or me, so we had no way to seek redress. Rosita had been locked up in the psychiatric ward at the county hospital and was now classified as a mental patient and ward of the system. Wasn’t it the responsibility of the state to care for the insane? Anyone who doubted she was ill could examine her record of abnormal behavior, her insularity and detachment, her connection with Communists, her scalding of a police officer’s face. Hadn’t she been in an extermination camp? Perhaps she had been used in experiments that had driven her mad.

I walked to my office and borrowed money from my secretary to take a cab to our house in the Heights. Our maid, Snowball, and her daughter had moved into the back room and taken good care of Grandfather. I showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and placed an ice bag on my eye before I let him see me. He was in the sunroom, reading the newspaper, his boots on, his trousers stuffed in the tops. “Where’s Rosita?” he said.

“They got her.”

“Say again?”

I told him.

“That fellow Fincher sold you out?” he said.

“That’s what it looks like. I think I’m going down the drain, Grandfather.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

“I’m fixing to call up Dalton Wiseheart and tell him he can have our company at market price.”

“That’s not what they’re after, Satch. They want to break your spirit. Spit in their mouths.”

“What about Rosita?”

He removed his reading glasses and stared at the lawn. It was bright and sunny outside, as though the weather were mocking our problems. “I made a mess of everything in my life,” he said. “I shouldn’t be giving you advice.”

“What would you do?”

“What I always did. Sling blood on the trees. But look where it got me. None of my children, including your mother, have ever forgiven me for the violent and drunken man I was.”

“Will you be all right if I’m gone for a while?”

His pale blue eyes were rheumy and distant. “I wish I was younger,” he said.

I
HAD NO ACCESSIBLE
target for my rage and sense of helplessness. I couldn’t prove my suspicions about the treachery of Lloyd Fincher. I shouldn’t have been surprised by his behavior. He had been a midlevel functionary all of his life, one of those who liked nothing better than a public admission of wrongdoing so he could quickly move on to the next disaster in the making. Fincher’s kind of corruption was endemic to the system he served. He was the gland that prevented the infection from reaching the brain of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

There was only one face I could put on all our troubles. My lawyer had told me a few things about him, but nothing I wouldn’t expect in the file of a bad cop, and nothing that told me of his day-to-day patterns. For that very reason, I had retained a private investigator, a friend, to take a close look at Hubert Timmons Slakely.

I called the PI. His name was Boone Larson. He had worked for the Pinkertons and once told me the agency believed Butch Cassidy had not been killed during a bank robbery in Bolivia but had lived until 1937 in Spokane, Washington. I always liked that story.

I did not tell Boone of the attack on Hershel or the vigilante raid on Fincher’s hunting camp. “If a fellow wanted to have a private chat with Slakely, where would he catch up to him?” I asked.

“You might try his apartment.”

“Somewhere else.”

“What’s wrong with his apartment?”

“He might be having friends or relatives over. Why disturb him?”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Weldon?”

“I’m curious about what a guy like that does in his free time.”

“He’s got a place he goes to on weekends or on his off days. You know he used to work vice in Galveston?”

“Right.”

“I think he has yearnings for the old days.”

I went upstairs to the attic and opened the army-surplus footlocker where I kept many things from my boyhood: pocketknives, my
Boy Scout Handbook,
my first jitterbug bass lure, my collection of arrowheads, my catcher’s glove, three musket balls I had cut out of a dead cottonwood tree, an Indian trade ax that had a small tobacco bowl on one end and an air passage drilled through the handle so it could be smoked.

I waited until dark and drove to the place twenty miles outside of town where Slakely kept a shiny tin trailer on a bayou that dumped into the San Jacinto River. A fine mist was falling when I cut my headlights in a woods and walked toward the trailer, wearing gloves, a bandanna tied across the lower half of my face, a shapeless fedora pulled down on my brow, the trade ax hanging from my right hand. From the edge of the woods, I could see the trailer, a pickup truck, a toolshed in back, trash burning in an oil barrel, sparks twisting into the mist, a light burning on a pole above a boathouse, an old water tower silhouetted against the sky. Through a small pair of binoculars, I could see Slakely drinking a bottle of Pearl at a table in the trailer. He was talking to a young, round-shouldered, thin-hipped girl in a shift printed with pink hearts. Her face had no expression. She blinked when he raised his finger to make a point.

I went to the toolshed and kicked a pile of newspapers across the floor, then poured a can of paint thinner on them and set them alight with a paper match. The flames climbed up the wall and spread around the sides of a broken window, a draft sucking it out of the glass into the cold air. I went back into the darkness of the trees and waited. I told myself I had no plan. I had not taken the Luger with me. If I’d been acting with premeditation, I surely would have carried it on my person, wouldn’t I? There was no registration on it, no chain of possession that could link it to me. The lethality of a trade ax was a subjective matter. It could be used as a tool to cut meat or to make pemmican; it could be used as a ceremonial pipe. I had chosen latitude over specificity. When you roll the dice, you roll the dice and let the arithmetic take care of itself.

It all seemed quite reasonable to me.

The fire was not long in gaining Slakely’s attention. He came out the side door of his trailer without a hat, pulling on a raincoat. Sparks were fanning from the oil barrel onto the shed, and I’m sure he thought they were the cause of the fire. He turned on a garden hose and extinguished the flames inside the shed first, then flooded the barrel. He turned off the faucet and went into the shed to examine the damage.

He was bent over, trying to determine where the fire had started, and had no awareness that I was standing immediately behind him. He kicked at the can of paint thinner. Then he saw me. Even in the poor light, I saw his mouth open and the blood go out of his face.

“Who are you?” he said.

I stared at him and said nothing, as though he were the aberration and not I. His eyes dropped to the trade ax in my hand. “Maybe you don’t know I’m a detective with the Houston Police Department. If this has to do with the girl, she’s a runaway. I was trying to he’p her. That’s why you’re here? The girl?”

His face was glistening with rainwater, his hair splayed on his scalp, which was striped with welts where Rosita had scalded him. I saw him wet his lips and swallow. The holster of a small nickel-plated revolver was clipped on the left side of his belt.

“Let’s get the girl down here, if it’ll make you feel better. She’ll tell you everything is okay. You hearing me? You deaf or something? Maybe you got no voice box? Look, Flora’s coming now.”

It was a poor ruse, but one he probably used successfully before. Deceit, manipulation, guile, cruelty, and fear were the sum total of who and what he was. Back then we often sent his kind as our emissaries into black neighborhoods and later wondered why they hated us. I continued to hold my eyes on his, my fingers squeezing the hardwood handle of the ax.

I knew it was coming. What is “it”? “It” is that moment when the coward’s fear is so great, he has nowhere to put it except inside eternity, and that’s when he steps irrevocably across a line. His right hand reached for the butt of his revolver.

My first blow caught him across the side of the face, laying open a huge flap of skin, one of his eyes bulging like a marble. I hit him again, somewhere in the neck, then in the head. He was bent almost double, like a man with a violent stomachache. I could no longer see his right hand or determine if he had gotten his hand on his revolver. I knew only that I was hitting him, the blade of the ax rising and falling as though it had a will of its own. I knew that with each blow, he descended closer and closer to the floor, taking his evil with him. I knew, as Grandfather had said, that I was slinging his blood over every surface inside the shed. Let no man tell you our simian ancestor is not alive and well and waiting for his moment to come aborning again.

When I stopped, the only sounds I heard were a pinecone tinkling across the tin roof of the shed, a boat horn blowing on the river, an owl screeching in the trees. I backed out of the shed, unable to take my eyes off what I had done, the ax dripping in the dirt. When I turned around, the young girl from the trailer was staring at me, trembling in the cold, too frightened to speak.

“Don’t be afraid, Flora,” I said.

“How do you know my name?”

“He used it when he tried to trick me into looking behind me. You’re in no danger.”

“Is he dead?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

She had a pug nose and freckles and chestnut hair that was cut short and curled on the ends; her shoulders and arms were prickled in the wind. The accent was East Texas. “I won’t tell. I promise,” she said.

“Did he harm you?”

She turned her cheek into the light from the trailer so I could see the bruise on it.

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“What else did he do to you?”

She began to breathe through her nose, her lips pressed tightly together.

I picked up Slakely’s revolver from the floor of the shed and threw it out the broken window into the mud. Then I removed his wallet from his back pocket. It held around sixty dollars. I could not tell if Slakely was alive or dead. His eyes were shut, his mouth open. A piece of tooth was on his lip. I took twenty dollars from my own wallet and gave it and Slakely’s money to the girl.

“I’m going to take this bandanna off. I’m going to do so because I don’t like frightening you. This man did great injury to people I love. One of those people is my wife. Because of this man, I may lose her. He also pulled a weapon on me, and I’m sure if he’d had the chance, he would have killed me. You can stay here or ride with me back to Houston. If you like, I can drop you at the train station or the bus depot.”

“You’d do that?”

I flung the trade ax end over end into a bog by the river’s edge. “Do you have a coat?”

“He took it from me.”

“Put this on,” I said. I draped my jacket across her shoulders. “I bet you have a lot of good things waiting for you down the road. I bet you’re a fine young woman. The bad things are behind you, the good things are in front of you. It’s that simple.”

I
TRIED FOUR TIMES
to see Rosita at the county hospital. I was told she couldn’t have visitors. She was “undergoing treatment and resting” and “being reclassified for possible release or transfer.” For a moment I felt a surge of hope in my chest, as though a terrible mistake were about to be corrected and I would discover that a conspiracy was not at work in our lives, that in effect the problem lay in my perception. Then the nurse looked again at the clipboard in her hand and knitted her brow. “Excuse me, I was wrong. The diagnosis has been completed, but no determination has been made regarding treatment,” she said. “You’ll have to come back later. She’s in good hands.”

“You listen to me—”

“Sir, I think you should go.”

I glanced through a glass window down a corridor and thought I saw two men in white uniforms taking Rosita through a set of doors quilted with thick pads. She was wearing a smock tied loosely in back and slippers that looked made of cardboard. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. I beat on it with my fists and was escorted to the front entrance by two uniformed police officers.

I could not stand the thought of what was being done to Rosita. Two days passed and there was nothing in the newspapers about my attack on Hubert Slakely. My lawyer was of no help. I wondered if I was being taught a lesson about the nature of power: You either gave in to it or you were crushed by it. Tearing Slakely apart was poor redress. My attack upon him was similar to the hanging of the misanthropes at Nuremberg. They deserved what they got, but they were the instruments, not the designers. The orchestrators of the Reich skated, sometimes committing suicide, but they never had to look their victims in the eye.