Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (25 page)

The man by my automobile had disappeared. Had he placed an explosive charge under my car? Or slashed my tires? Or played the role of voyeur and watched my wife and me during sexual congress?

This is how it will go,
I thought.
They’ll wage a war of gradual attrition that is the equivalent of death in the Iron Maiden. Their resources will be suspicion and anxiety and inculcation of self-doubt and feelings of personal violation. Like the blindfolded man being broken on the wheel, we will never know where the next blow is coming from. And the men behind all this will do it with a phone call they’ll forget about two minutes after they hang up.

“I think you’re still out there, within earshot,” I said. “I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance. Think what I’ll do to you.”

There was no answer except the wind blowing in the trees, shaking hundreds of raindrops on a pond that glistened in the dark.

Chapter

16

T
HE NEXT EVENING
Hershel knocked on my motel door. He had a six-carton of Jax in one hand and a greasy brown paper bag in the other. He was smiling awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Is Rosita here?” he said.

“She went to buy groceries in Golden Meadow,” I said.

“I didn’t see the car and thought you might like to have some beer and cracklings with me.”

“Sure, I would. Come in.”

“In the fall we always made cracklings and boudin and had people over to eat on the gallery,” he said. “You ever do that?”

“Yeah, my grandfather was big on barbecues. We had some fine times.”

I knew something else was on his mind. I guess for Hershel I would always be the lieutenant, the man who had pulled him from a collapsed foxhole and could do no wrong.

“Did something happen today?” I asked.

“Linda Gail called from Houston. She was pretty upset. It’s this guy Jack Valentine. Remember him? We got our house in River Oaks through Jack.”

“I remember him well.”

“He told Linda Gail this crazy story. He says you attacked him at the hotel opening Lloyd Fincher took y’all to.”

“I wouldn’t phrase it that way.”

“He also says you turned Bugsy Siegel loose on him.”

“That last part is pretty accurate.”

“You didn’t punch Jack in the mouth?”

“I flattened him.”

His eyes went away from mine. “What for?”

“He got out of line.”

“What’d he say?”

“What difference does it make? He’s coarse and vulgar and treats other people like they have the same frame of reference he does.”

“He says he told a joke in the restroom, and for no reason you blindsided him.”

“He told me Roy Wiseheart kept a hotel room for his trysts. I didn’t want to hear any more of his ugly stories about other people. He kept at it, and I lost control. It was a foolish thing to do.”

“You poleaxed a guy over something he said about Roy Wiseheart?”

“I’m a little foggy on what happened, Hershel. I don’t handle alcohol well.”

“This doesn’t sound like you. You handle your liquor just fine.”

“Valentine is a bum. Let it go.”

“Is he the guy?”

“What do you mean by ‘the guy’?”

“The guy sleeping with Linda Gail.”

“He was half in the bag. He made a loose remark. I’m not even sure what it was. I hit him. If I had it to do over, I’d walk away and not pay him any mind.”

“He said something about Linda Gail?”

“Ask Valentine.”

“You’re my friend, Weldon. I’m asking you.”

“A man like that has no credibility. Why should we care what he says or doesn’t say?”

I took the beer opener out of his hand and snapped a cap off a Jax and drank.

“What did he say about her?”

My blood was throbbing in my wrists. “He said he slept with her. He said it happened on the same day he filmed her on the front porch of the general store.”

I saw the lump in his throat and the color draining from his cheeks. “You weren’t going to tell me? You were going to let me walk around not knowing while this kind of thing was going on behind my back?”

“I considered the matter closed.”

“You believed him, or you would have told me he was spreading lies about her.”

“Don’t let a guy like this hurt you, Hershel. Two federal agents accused Rosita of being a Communist. You think I believe them? You think I’m going to empower J. Edgar Hoover’s errand boys?”

“You’re saying he was just drunk and shooting off his mouth?”

“I don’t know. Give Linda Gail a chance. Talk with her. And stay away from Valentine.”

“You know what would happen to a guy like that where I grew up?”

“Yeah, I do. And I don’t agree with it.”

“At the least, he’d get the skin taken off his back.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere. Hershel had gone into a mind-set I had known all my life. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that no one could understand the United States without understanding the graves of Shiloh. The penchant for vigilantism and the slaying of our brothers went all the way back to the colonial era. I had no doubt the hot coals out of which we forged our country were still glowing in the breast of my friend Hershel Pine. I could see his confusion growing in the silence, his forehead knitting.

“People make mistakes,” I said. “Too much to drink, wrong situation and wrong people, a decision made in anger after a domestic fight, who knows what? A person makes one bad choice at an intersection and spends a lifetime grieving over it.”

“You’re saying forgive Linda Gail?”

“I’m saying we should have the willingness to forgive. That’s ninety percent of the battle. You’re not even sure she did something wrong.”

He sat down at the writing desk. His forearm lay across the bag of cracklings he had brought. He seemed to have forgotten where he was or why he had come to my room.

I opened another bottle of Jax and pushed it in front of him. He watched the foam run over the lip and down the neck, without picking up the bottle. “She was too young to get married,” he said. “I’m seven years older than she is. I came home a cripple. That’s a lot for a girl in her teens to deal with. Maybe that’s the way I should look at it.”

I hoped one day Benny Siegel would run into Jack Valentine again and put a bullet in him. I looked through the window at the Gulf. The western sky was aflame, seagulls hovering like sketch marks above the surf. “There’s Rosita,” I said. “Why don’t the three of us have a seafood dinner at the café?”

“You meant what you said?”

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

“That maybe all this is smoke. That Valentine was drunk and trying to mess us up.”

“Yeah, it could be that simple,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

“Okay,” he said, and took a deep breath, like a man stepping out of a bathysphere. “Okay. Right. I get myself wrapped in a knot sometimes. I’m glad I talked with you.”

I prayed silently that our conversation about Linda Gail was over. I also prayed that I would not have to tell him another lie.

“You wouldn’t lead me on, would you?” he said. “Everything you told me is on the level?”

“I don’t know the truth about anything,” I said. “You and I were spared at the Ardennes. Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe we’ll see the reason down the track. That’s the way I look at it.”

Before he could speak again, I went outside and helped Rosita unload the automobile.

Later that night I got my notebook out of my suitcase and wrote down a line I remembered from the Book of Psalms:
For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.

Then I added my own words:
Lord, deliver up poor Hershel, because some very bad people are fixing to eat him alive.

G
RANDFATHER WAS AILING,
and Rosita and I flew back home to see him. He had reached a stage that elderly men enter when they see specters, sometimes those of old friends, beckoning to them from a shady copse or a roadside cemetery overgrown with mesquite and blown with dust and tumbleweed. His pale eyes seemed distracted, his attention drawn by voices or the sounds of cattle moving in large numbers across a river that had turned bloodred in the sunset, sounds that no one else heard. He slept with his Colt 1860 Army revolver, five chambers loaded, the hammer resting on the sixth chamber, which was empty.

My mother asked him why he needed his revolver.

“So I’ll be ready for him when he comes,” he replied.

“Ready for whom?” she said.

“Death.”

His ankles and feet were so swollen that he had to wear extralarge rubber boots resembling the ones Frankenstein’s monster wore in the movies. Our family doctor forbade him to get on a horse, or to drink whiskey or smoke a cigar or pipe, or to ingest sugar in any form.

For Grandfather, that meant he should fire up his pipe right after breakfast, have a bowl of homemade ice cream incised with a half dozen Oreo cookies for lunch, drink a glass of straight whiskey by three
P.M.
, and saddle and get on his horse.

“You have to stay off him, Big Bud,” my mother said. My mother called him by his nickname, I think, because she could not bring herself to accept him as her father. But how could I judge her and her siblings when I could not forgive my own father for abandoning his family? I felt sorry for Grandfather. I believed he was truly contrite. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in his contrition.

“You don’t need your horse. I drive an automobile and can take you wherever you want,” my mother said.

“Emma Jean, go fix yourself a pork chop sandwich or a bowl of grits with a big piece of ham hock,” he replied. “Pour some redeye gravy on top. Try to gain some weight, or tie a rock to your ankle. You’re skin and bones. A puff of wind would blow you off the planet.”

“I have the fragility of a dandelion?”

“That cuts to it.”

“You’re not going to talk to me like that, Big Bud.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’m going out the door and ride my horse,” he said.

Some might say Grandfather’s stubbornness about his horse was motivated by denial of his physical infirmities. They saw only the outside of Grandfather. When he rode into the woods, his rubber-booted feet wedged so tightly in the stirrups that sometimes he had to pull his right foot out of the boot to dismount, he was not simply resisting the earth’s gravitational pull. He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes and motorized vehicles and telephone wires and radios that surrounded him now. In his way, I think he had already taken leave of us.

The woods in late autumn had become his private sun-dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church. In the columns of light filtering through the canopy, he may have seen the ghosts of John Wesley Hardin and Bill Dalton and Quanah Parker. The saloon girls might have been there, too, most of them as small as Orientals, wearing dresses as tight as sealskin. There was a free lunch on a bar, a faro table, a rotating wheel with numbers on it, men who wore bowler hats and carried derringers under their sleeves, vaqueros and cowboys with coiled lariats hanging from the shoulder, bowie knives on the belt, some wearing wide-brim tall-crown hats that cost a week’s wage.

They didn’t care if he wore a badge or not. They were all cut out of the same fabric, or they wouldn’t have chosen to live and die and be buried in a godforsaken landscape where their grave markers would soon be gone. Susanna Dickinson, the only white adult survivor of the Alamo, was in the cathedral, too. Grandfather knew her when she lived in Austin; she had told him what really happened inside the walls on the last day of the siege: the Mexican soldiers who were so numerous coming over the walls they fired into one another; the drunk Texas soldier who hid in the rubble and begged and was executed; the stench of the bodies piled like cordwood and burned.

Grandfather’s stories were wonderful. He said the horns of the cattle glowed with electricity when a storm was in the offing. With the first pop of lightning, the herd would stampede and flow like a brown river through the ravines and dry washes of the Arbuckle Mountains, trampling wagons and tents into splintered wood and strips of canvas.

I don’t think he rode into the woods in anticipation of his death. I think he went there in preparation for his return to an era that, for him, had always existed just the other side of the horizon. Others watching him ride along the river’s edge saw an old man who was not willing to let winter have its way. I think Grandfather did not see the woods or the river but had already begun his journey on an infinite plain, one unmarked by fences or human structures, one whose mesas and buttes and dead volcanoes and ancient riverbeds antedated the arrival of man and even the dinosaurs. For the first time in his life, he no longer carried the thick gold pocket watch he had bought in Mexico City in 1910.

The snake was a diamondback, the kind of rattler that usually hid in rocks and sunned itself on hillsides and wasn’t drawn to dank woods piled with autumn leaves. Just as Grandfather’s horse stepped across a log, the diamondback made a sound like seeds rattling inside a dried poppy husk, then popped Grandfather’s horse on the fetlock. The horse crashed through the trees and brush and raked Grandfather out of the saddle on an oak limb.

We found him by flashlight two hours later. He had been stirrup-drug twenty yards across hard ground. His eyes were closed, his face spotted with drops of mud that looked like insects. I could not feel a pulse in his throat; I placed my ear against his chest. His skin was as cold as marble. Then he moved. “Is that you, Weldon?” he whispered.

“Yes, sir.”

“You were always my son rather than my grandson. You know that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Is that your mother behind you?”

“Yes, sir, she’s right here.”

“You don’t look anything like a dandelion, Emma Jean,” he said. “I just cain’t keep my mouth shut sometimes. You cut a fine figure. You always did.”