Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (17 page)

“I’m done on this.”

He beamed. “I nailed you again. That’s three times. I have to invite you to one of our poker games. God, you’re fun.”

I’ve always subscribed to the notion that we can never really know the soul of another. I didn’t know whether Roy Wiseheart was tormented by his conscience or his ego. Maybe a little of both. Or was he simply a manipulator? I went to the bar and paid our check. When I returned to the table, he was staring out the window at the rain dimpling the water in the swamp. “Know why I stay at a place like this?” he asked.

“No, you’re a mystery man.”

“My room doesn’t have a phone. Nobody knows who I am. I fish at sunset and sunrise for big-mouth bass. I caught an eight-pounder right by that clump of flooded gum trees.”

“I need to get back to the line,” I said.

“They’re going to get you.”

“That’s the second time in less than a week someone has delivered me a vague warning. Who are
they
?”

“Take your choice.”

“Why am I a threat to anyone?”

“You’re a water walker. Guys like you cause trouble. You’re not a team player. Wait till you meet some of the Saudis. Some of them should be forced to wear full-body condoms.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“They’ll crush you and Pine. They’ll bankrupt your family and turn you against each other, they’ll take away your home, they’ll ruin your name. They can make a speed bump out of a guy without breaking a sweat.”

“My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and kicked him in the face and locked him in jail,” I said. “I put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s automobile, with Clyde and Bonnie Parker and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend inside. I was sixteen. What do you think of that?”

He didn’t answer my question. Maybe with the rain tinking on the fan blades, he couldn’t hear everything I said, or maybe he was unimpressed by the rural and violent world in which I had grown up.

We walked outside just as the rain cut loose. Then a strange event occurred that made me realize Roy Wiseheart would never be a quick study. A bolt of lightning struck a cypress tree not twenty yards from us, splintering the trunk, cooking the leaves, boiling the water around the roots, filling the air with a thunderous clap that was like someone slapping the flats of his hands on my eardrums. Mud and water and the detritus of the tree showered down on our heads. Wiseheart never moved. He stared at the smoke and flame rising from the base of the tree, his expression composed. “Incoming,” he said. “Told you. We’re on the wrong side of things, Holland.”

I wanted to get a lot of distance between me and Roy Wiseheart.

O
NE MONTH LATER,
the right-of-way flooded and we had to shut down the line for five days and return to Houston. On a fine summer evening, I drove to Hershel’s home on Hawthorne Street to talk over an offshore pipeline south of Lake Charles. I caught Hershel and Linda Gail unawares, in the midst of moving. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Into our new home,” Linda Gail replied. “In River Oaks.”

I looked at Hershel. He grinned and glanced away.

“River Oaks?” I said.

“Is something wrong with that?” Linda Gail said.

The dead-end street where they were living was beautiful, lined with bungalows and two-story brick houses and green lawns and shade trees. On the other side of the cul-de-sac were a canebrake and a huge pasture with live oaks in it that must have been two hundred years old. Beyond the pasture, against a salmon sky, you could see the neon-striped tower of a theater called the Alabama. The ambiance was a fusion of the pastoral and the urban South, in the best possible way. “Why would you want to leave?” I asked.

That was a mistake.

“Maybe it’s none of your business, Mr. Weldon Avery Holland,” she said.

“He’s just kidding, Linda Gail,” Hershel said. “Tell him what we’re doing. He has a misunderstanding.”

“I don’t see any misunderstanding at all,” she said. “We’re moving into an elegant neighborhood. Are you suggesting we don’t belong there, Weldon?”

“I like the bungalow y’all have, that’s all. This street puts me in mind of Norman Rockwell. There’s a watermelon stand just yonder on Westheimer, under those live oaks. There’s a firehouse on up the street, and an ice cream parlor and a grocery that has all its produce and fruit out on the porch. I always liked this part of Houston.”

“Well, I’m sure
The Saturday Evening Post
would love your endorsement,” she said. “If it will make you feel better, we are not buying the house in River Oaks. It is being lent to us by Jack Valentine. He’s the documentary director who arranged my screen test at Castle Productions.”

“It’s a rent-with-option-to-buy deal, Weldon,” Hershel said.

“I need to talk with you about laying some pipe in Calcasieu Parish,” I said.

“Do y’all have to do that now?” Linda Gail said.

“Yeah, we do, Linda Gail,” I said.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Please be candid in your response, too. Where would you be without Hershel’s welding machines?”

“Sweetheart, don’t be saying something like that,” Hershel said.

“I would appreciate your not telling me what to say and what not to say,” she replied.

I should have left. But business was business, and principle was principle. “How about I buy y’all some ice cream?” I said.

“I’ll be in the house, packing,” she said. “Jack will be here in twenty minutes with the van. Try to be of some help, would you, please, Hershel?”

She went into the house, a brick one-story bungalow covered with English ivy, and flowerbeds filled with roses and blue and pink hydrangeas. Hershel got into the car with me. I didn’t start the engine. “This won’t take long,” I said. “We can probably get the contract for that well going in the south of Calcasieu Parish. We can also get in on the drilling.”

“I don’t know, Weldon. We got burned pretty bad at New Roads.”

“I’ve talked to the geologist. I went to school with him. I trust him. He says the odds are one in three we’ll punch into a dome.”

“You call it.”

“Nope. Dixie Belle is a partnership.”

“I’m not thinking too clear right now. I thought this house in River Oaks might make Linda Gail happy. But nothing makes her happy. She’s always mad about something.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“What do you reckon it might be?”

I shook my head and didn’t reply.

“We went to the public pool, and she told me to wear canvas shoes till I got in the water. I asked if she didn’t like being seen in public with a man missing three of his toes. She said she was concerned for the children at the pool.”

I looked through the windshield at a rainbow that seemed to dip into the pasture. Clouds that resembled lavender horsetails were scattered against the sun’s afterglow.
What a perfect evening,
I thought, wondering why we often substitute pain for the fruits of heaven and earth. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the level of injury in Hershel’s eyes was one I’ll never forget. “You should have received the Silver Star instead of me,” I said. “You’re the best line sergeant I ever knew, and one of the best human beings.”

“Maybe she was telling the truth. Kids get shocked easily. My right foot looks like the flipper on a seal.”

“You want to go in on the well?”

“Hell yeah, I do,” he replied. He patted his hands up and down on his knees. “Weldon?”

“What is it?”

I knew what was coming. I wanted to get out of the automobile and begin walking back to the Heights before he said it. But I was trapped in my car with no way to exit the situation. I could see the neon-lit tower of the movie theater against the paleness of the sky, like a beacon telling us of the promise that awaited us in America’s Babylon by the sea. “You think Linda Gail is having an affair?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t have any way of knowing something like that,” I said. “I recommend getting those thoughts out of your head.”

A few minutes later, the documentary-maker named Jack Valentine arrived with a moving van and three workmen, and the Pines began moving their furniture out of the bungalow on Hawthorne in preparation for their new life in a sprawling oak-canopied green arbor across town, one where moat and castle were norms and even moth and rust and decay were given short shrift.

T
HE HARDEST AND
dirtiest work in the oil patch is done by the crews who cut right-of-ways and build board roads in swampy terrain. Imagine walking in a flooded woods dense with mosquitoes in hundred-degree heat, hacking your way through air vines and cypress and gum and willow trees, always watching for a cottonmouth moccasin that might drop from a branch on your neck or sink its fangs in your wrist when you reach down to move a log. Your boots are encased in mud up to the ankles; your clothes are sopping with sweat; gnats get in your nose and mouth; leeches attach themselves to your calves; your eyes burn. If you drink all the water in the canteen, you’re out of luck. Your face feels poached, out of round from all the mosquito bites. The air smells of humus and carrion and water grown stagnant inside the mud; there is a rawness to it that is like the odor of birth or fish roe or leakage from a sewer line. Through the trees, you can see waves smacking against a sandbar out on the bay, but there is no wind inside the woods, no breath of fresh air, no movement of any kind, and the hottest part of the day is ahead.

We were cutting a right-of-way through the southern tip of Calcasieu Parish when an old yellow school bus with Texas plates lumbered along the levee and stopped just above a dry spot that our brush gang and board road crew were using as a staging area. A man dressed in a cowboy shirt and straw hat and khaki pants stuffed inside rubber boots swung off the bus and approached me, the string and tab of a Bull Durham tobacco sack hanging out of his shirt pocket. The bus was packed from stem to stern with dark-skinned Mexicans. Not one of them got up from his seat to stretch or get a drink from the water can or relieve himself in the bushes.

“Well, we made it,” the man said, extending his hand. “Tell me where you want them at.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I got thirty-two men waiting to clear brush and lay board road.”

“Not for me, you don’t.”

“You’re with Dixie Belle?”

“I’m half owner. Somebody gave you a bum lead. We’ve got our own people.”

One of his eyes was watery and had no color and kept blinking, like an injured moth. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed the moisture out of it. “We drove all the way from San Antone. I think you’re mixed up.”

“No, I’m not the one with the problem. You’ve got the wrong address.”

“Hang on. I’ve got the paperwork on the bus.”

“Don’t bother. Obviously, a mistake was made. But that’s it. This conversation is over.”

“Sir, don’t turn your back on me. Sir?
Sir,
did you hear me?”

I turned around. The men on the bus were all looking at me through the windows. “Who do you work for?”

“Minuteman, Incorporated.”

“I’ve heard about you,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. But you need to leave now. I’m sorry about your men. There’s a campground outside Lake Charles where they can shower and rest up.”

“You think we’re just gonna drive off?”

“Unless you want the mosquitoes to start eating on you.”

I walked away. A couple of minutes later, I heard him start up the bus and clank the transmission into gear. “What was that about?” Hershel said.

I told him.

“How did he get our name? How’d he know where we were?” he said.

“You got me.”

“He’s out of San Antonio?”

“Yeah, same place Lloyd Fincher lives,” I replied.

That night the phone rang in my motel room. I hoped the call was from Rosita. It wasn’t. “What the hell is going on over there, Weldon?” Fincher said.

“How you doin’, Major?” I said.

“Not very well. I just heard from a labor office we use. Minuteman is their name.”

“How’d you get my number?”

“From your wife. You told the crew leader to get lost?”

“No, I told him he’d made a mistake.”

“You didn’t get my message that these guys were headed over there?”

“No, I didn’t. When did you become an executive with our company?”

“Maybe you don’t quite understand the nature of our arrangement. Our loan agreement guarantees us one percent of Dixie Belle’s profits as long as the contract is in effect.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“If you look carefully at the paragraph that details assignation and management of those profits, you’ll see my company has a fiduciary trust mandate. In other words, we have a managerial responsibility to protect our stockholders’ investment. We sent you a tremendous cost saver today. You refused it. We’ve got us a problem here. Now, what the hell are you going to do about it?”

“Minuteman hires wets for minimum wage or less. So far, we have a good relationship with the union. We don’t want a picket line in front of the job.”

“If you breach the terms of our contract, we can call in the loan.”

“Then do it. We’ll declare bankruptcy and your company won’t get five cents.”

“Remember what I told you in that tuberculosis sanitarium in France? Don’t be a hardhead. People will beat on you enough without you helping them.”

“Hershel and I know how to lay pipe and make money, Major. Stay out of the oil patch, and we’ll stay out of the insurance business. Don’t try to pull some kind of contractual flimflam on us again.”

I eased the phone back into the cradle, the side of my face tingling. Then I let out my breath and tried to decompress. What’s the old lesson in the army? Don’t make enemies with anybody in records. What’s the larger lesson in an organization? Don’t humiliate bureaucrats whose careers are characterized by mediocrity. It may take them a while, but sooner or later, they’ll park an arrow between your shoulder blades.

I called Fincher back. “Lloyd, you’re looking out for your company’s investment. I can understand that. But union trouble could tear us up. It’s not worth it. Let’s put this behind us.”