Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (53 page)

“What’s that plane doing?” Rosita said.

The twin-engine had made one pass overhead, wagging its wings, then turned and climbed in a maneuver known in the Great War as an Immelmann. The pilot dove toward us, as though his plane were sliding down a ski slope, barrel-rolling, or flying upside down, I wasn’t sure which. He zoomed over the treetops behind us and banked up into the ribbon of blue that was rapidly disappearing inside the advancing storm.

Grandfather had said the rich always returned to their own kind. He may have been right about other wealthy people, but he was wrong, as I had been, when it came to Roy Wiseheart.

I had the accelerator on the floor. If we blew the engine, we blew the engine. Maybe the drivers of the police cars were distracted by the plane, or perhaps they had incurred their own mechanical troubles, but for whatever reason, they were dropping farther and farther behind, just as a great shadow began to spread across the valley. Rosita was kneeling on the seat and looking through the back window. For just a second, in my mind’s eye, I thought of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow speeding down a Texas road with bullets flying past their heads.

No one shot at us. They never got the chance. I heard Rosita scream. It sounded like the screech I had heard inside the Confederate when I fired Grandfather’s revolver through the back window.

“What is it?” I said.

“He’s going to kill us!” she said.

He came in low over the road, as though strafing a convoy of Japanese infantry. He roared right over the top of the Confederate, buffeting it the way the slap of a wave would. I thought he would pull up. Maybe that was what he intended to do. But in my relationship with Roy, I never saw him act without forethought, and I never saw him fail when it came to carrying out his intentions. His wheels were up, his speed faster than any safe landing would allow. The plane went over us, blocking out the sky, then belly-landed, sliding like a plow on the road, the propellers locking and then crumpling against the wings.

All the light had gone out of the sky. The meadows were dark and sodden, the water ponds in the grass flanged with ice. The sparks flying from under the plane’s fuselage resembled the bright orange drip from a welder’s torch. The explosion was not loud, more like a whoosh of heat, like metal rising into the air and collapsing back on itself, like a flash of yellow and red on the snow, like a Christmas log bursting alight.

None of the police cruisers was touched. But they weren’t going anywhere. The meadows, frozen or not, were nothing short of a bog. As we drove into the woods on the far side of the valley, I saw the burning plane and the cruisers and the policemen grow smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, like images frozen in time on an incandescent triptych dissolving inside its own heat.

Epilogue

R
OY’S FIERY DEATH
was described as a tragedy in newspapers all over the United States. The word was repeated so often that people probably believed it. One of the police officers added to Roy’s mystique by stating he could have escaped from the cockpit but had remained in the seat and, in the officer’s words, “melted like a candle.”

I believe Roy did not consider his life or his death a tragedy. I like to think he had more humility than that. If he had any last thoughts, I suspected they were about his father, a man I considered one of the most worthless human beings on the planet. Roy wanted to be a hero, in the best possible sense. It’s not a bad ambition. Regardless, I decided to turn loose of him and not look back on our relationship and not think of it in terms of good or bad. I concluded that he made a conscious choice to rejoin his squadron commander over the South Pacific and undo his mistake in judgment. I prayed that in some fashion, Roy finally found peace, if that was what he ever sought.

I may have been finished with Roy, but Roy was not finished with me. As I had learned from Bonnie and Clyde, the dead lay strong claim on the quick and do not easily take leave of the earth. After the authorities were made to look ridiculous by the press, we returned to Houston and found a package on the dining room table. There was no return address. The postmark was Clayton, New Mexico.

Sorry I couldn’t give you this in person. These items came from a storage cabinet at one of my father’s warehouses in East Texas. I don’t know if he’s aware of their existence. I doubt he is. I also doubt he cares. I thought you might like them.

You’ll always be an example to me. Give them heck, Weldon.

Your bud,

The Wayfaring Stranger

Inside the box were a wedding ring, my father’s wallet, a pencil stub, my dollar watch with the broken spring, a coin purse with two nickels and a dime and one penny in it, and an unstamped postcard addressed to Mrs. Emma Jean Holland. My father was a laconic man and never given to an excess of words or sentiment. The message was not only simple but unsigned. It read:
I’ve done right well and have saved some money. I’m getting my drag-up check this Friday and I should be home by Sunday. Buy some peach ice cream. We’re going to be a family again. And tell that boy of mine I love him.

Linda Gail and Hershel divorced, and six months later, she married Jerry Fallon. One year later, she divorced Fallon and was nominated for best supporting actress. She remarried two or three times after that. One of her husbands was an aviator; another had been an officer with the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; another was a country-club tennis champion and collector of race cars, one of which flipped on a test track and broke his neck.

There were lovers, too, evidently many of them. None of them ever spoke negatively of her to the media or anyone else. If they paid dues for their dalliance, none of them seemed to mind. To my knowledge, she never returned to Texas or Louisiana. She kept her looks and had a stunning career and called Hershel Pine from Mexico City the night before she died in 1968 of an overdose of barbiturates. Hershel never discussed the content of their conversation other than to say, “She was a good woman.”

At the Ardennes, Hershel had told me he sweated uncontrollably, even in freezing weather, when a calamity was about to occur, such as the German breakout at the Bulge. I didn’t believe him about the Germans, not until the King Tigers were crashing down on top of us. He also told me he could smell money, particularly untapped oil and natural gas, but he’d struck out when we brought in those two dusters outside New Roads, Louisiana. Even though we held on to the mineral leases, I had given up on them. Hershel never did. We held on to them for over two decades, then went back to Pointe Coupee Parish with new technology and drilled down twenty-one thousand feet. The land was owned by poor black sweet-potato farmers for whom seven to ten acres was a plantation. The reserve we punched into was one of the biggest postwar strikes in the country. Even after years of production, the dome contains an estimated seven billion barrels of oil. The first royalty checks paid to the sweet-potato farmers, checks that would come on a quarterly basis, were in excess of two hundred thousand dollars.

These events all took place in another era. In spite of the war, the country was still innocent about its potential, in the way that a child who does not know his strength can be both innocent and destructive. The dance palladia and the roller rinks like the one where Grandfather fell down were filled with young people for whom the season was eternal. From the Jersey Shore to Pacific Palisades Park, you could hear orchestra music that was always collective in nature, a celebration of ourselves and the victory over nationalistic forces that would have made the world a slave camp. A western sunset that was the color of a flamingo’s wings did not signify an ending but a beginning, an invitation to share in the glorious promise that awaited the young and the glad of heart. Highway 66, the Painted Desert, and Hollywood belonged to all of us. If we doubted that paradisiacal vision of ourselves, the radio reassured us nightly that we were part of an extended community where everyone lived next door to movie stars.

I heard Roy’s body was burned into a carbon shell and the remnants put into an urn and scattered on the water off Catalina Island by Jerry Fallon. Linda Gail’s coffin was misplaced and lost forever in a huge necropolis in the center of Mexico City. On a visit to Santa Monica, Rosita and I bought a dozen red roses, Linda Gail’s favorite flower, and walked out on the pier at sunset and threw them into a wave. I always hoped Roy knew who they were from.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my editor, Sarah Knight, and my copy editor, E. Beth Thomas, for their invaluable help on this manuscript. I would also like to thank my publishers, Carolyn Reidy and Jonathan Karp, and my editors at Pocket Books, Louise Burke and Abby Zidle, and all the other fine people in the Simon & Schuster family for the great contribution they have made to my writing career.

Turn the page to read an excerpt from

Light of the World

A Dave Robicheaux novel from “America’s best novelist” (
The Denver Post
),

James Lee Burke

Visit
www.jamesleeburke.com
“Like” James Lee Burke on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/JamesLeeBurkeAuthor

Chapter

1

I
WAS NEVER GOOD
at solving mysteries. I don’t mean the kind cops solve or the ones you read about in novels or watch on television or on a movie screen. I’m not talking about the mystery of Creation, either, or the unseen presences that reside perhaps just the other side of the physical world. I’m talking about evil, without capitalization but evil all the same, the kind whose origins sociologists and psychiatrists have trouble explaining.

Police officers keep secrets, not unlike soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. I believe that the account of the apple taken from the forbidden tree is a metaphorical warning about looking too deeply into the darker potential of the human soul. The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians. At some point we close the book containing photographs of this kind and put it away and convince ourselves that the events were an aberration, the consequence of leaving soldiers too long in the field or letting a handful of misanthropes take control of a bureaucracy. It is not in our interest to extrapolate a larger meaning.

Hitler, Nero, Ted Bundy, the Bitch of Buchenwald? Their deeds are not ours.

But if these individuals are not like us, if they do not descend from the same gene pool and have the same DNA, then who were they and what turned them into monsters?

Every homicide cop lives with images he cannot rinse from his dreams; every cop who has handled investigations into child abuse has seen a side of his fellow man he never discusses with anyone, not his wife, not his colleagues, not his confessor or his bartender. There are certain burdens you do not visit on people of goodwill.

When I was in plainclothes at the NOPD, I used to deal with problems such as these in a saloon on Magazine Street, not far from the old Irish Channel. With its brass-railed bar and felt-covered bouree tables and wood-bladed fans, it became my secular church where the Louisiana of my youth, the green-gold, mossy, oak-shaded world of Bayou Teche, was only one drink away. I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.

I had come to feel loathing and disgust with the mythology that characterized the era in which I lived. I didn’t “serve” in Southeast Asia; I “survived” and watched innocent people and better men than I die in large numbers while I was spared by a hand outside myself. I didn’t “serve and protect” as a police officer; I witnessed the justice system’s dysfunction and the government’s empowerment of corporations and the exploitation of those who had no political voice. And while I brooded on all that was wrong in the world, I continued to stoke the furnace inside me with Black Jack and Smirnoff’s and five-star Hennessy and, finally, two jiggers of Scotch inside a glass of milk at sunrise, constantly suppressing my desire to lock down on my enemies with the .45 automatic I had purchased in Saigon’s brothel district and with which I slept as I would a woman.

My real problem wasn’t the militarization of my country or any of the other problems I’ve mentioned. The real problem went back to a mystery that had beset me since the destruction of my natal home and family. My father, Big Aldous, was on the monkey board of an offshore drilling well when the drill bit punched into an early pay sand and a spark jumped off the wellhead and a mushroom of flaming oil and natural gas rose through the rigging like an inferno ballooning from the bottom of an elevator shaft. My mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, was seduced and blackmailed by a gambler and pimp named Mack, whom I hated more than any human being I ever knew, not because he turned her into a barroom whore but because of the Asian men I killed in his stead.

Rage and bloodlust and alcoholic blackouts became the only form of serenity I knew. From Saigon to the Philippines, from Chinatown in Los Angeles to the drunk tanks of New Orleans, the same questions haunted me and gave me no rest. Were some people made different in the womb, born without a conscience, intent on destroying everything that was good in the world? Or could a black wind blow the weather vane in the wrong direction for any of us and reshape our lives and turn us into people we no longer recognized? I knew there was an answer out there someplace, if I could only drink myself into the right frame of mind and find it.