Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (26 page)

He came back from the hospital the next day with a diagnosis of a concussion and three broken ribs. We made a bed for him on the front porch so he could be outside during the day and visit with friends who dropped by; we also brought the mail and newspaper and his encyclopedias to him. I went to town and bought six Mexican dinners to go, although there were only four of us. That’s because Grandfather could eat more Mexican food than any man I knew. I sat on the porch with him and watched him eat a tamale soaked in frijoles wrapped with two flour tortillas, and chase it with a glass of buttermilk. “Where are the pralines?” he asked.

“The doctor says no sugar. He says if he catches you on your horse again, he’s going to shoot the horse, then you.”

“Telling a ninety-year-old not to eat sugar is like telling a death-row inmate to beware of uncooked pork.”

“Some people are trying to bushwhack me, Grandfather,” I said.

“What kind of people?”

“The kind you warned me about.”

“Those big oilmen?”

“That’s the bunch. I think Dalton Wiseheart might be involved.”

He looked at the dirt road that led into our property and the crows perched on our fences and the trees in the woods that were becoming more skeletal with each sunset. “I don’t think you could pick a worse enemy. How in God’s name did you get mixed up with a bucket of pig shit like that?”

“I think somebody is trying to break up my business partner’s marriage. And I think somebody has turned the feds loose on Rosita.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“No, sir.”

He put his empty plate on a chair and sat up on his pillows. He was wearing his beat-up Stetson, his shirt unbuttoned on his hairless chest. “Draw a line in the sand. But don’t tell anybody where it is. Don’t let your feelings show. Don’t let others know you’ve been hurt. No matter what they do, don’t react until they come over the line. Then you drop them in their tracks.”

“It’s 1947, Grandfather.”

“It certainly is,” he said.

I waited for him to go on. But he didn’t. A few minutes later, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. After sunset I turned on the porch light and covered him with a blanket. At ten
P.M.
I woke him and took him inside and helped him into his bedroom. As he sat on the side of his bed, he looked dazed and unsure where he was. I got his pajamas out of the dresser drawer.

“I dreamed we were at the county fair,” he said. “You and me and Emma Jean and your father. It was 1925. You were seven years old. You were afraid when I put you on the carousel. So I got on it with you.”

“I remember that,” I said.

“We rode it together, didn’t we?” he said.

“Yes, sir, we surely did,” I replied.

“I’m proud of you, Satch,” he said.

I
TRIED TO GET
information from the Houston Police Department about the hit-and-run death of Harlan McFey. The detective I spoke with wore a vest without a coat and polished needle-nosed boots and a delicate silver chain that held his necktie in place. He had Indian-black hair that was neatly clipped and shiny with oil. He had put aside a magazine when I entered his office. The windows were open, a hot wind blowing from the street, a fan rattling on the wall. He looked from me to his magazine and back to me. He poked his tongue into his cheek. “I haven’t figured out why you’re here,” he said. “You were an acquaintance of the deceased, not a member of the family?”

“No, I’m not a member of McFey’s family. No, I would not call myself an acquaintance.”

“So what would you call yourself?”

“Someone he wanted to blackmail or extort.”

“Blackmail about what?”

“Any lie he could think up.”

“Please explain to me why you’re concerned over the manner of his death.”

“McFey had been in the employ of Dalton Wiseheart.”

He laughed. “The oilman who does business on the veranda of the Rice Hotel? That’s who you’re trying to tie the tin can on?”

“You think that’s funny?”

“No, I don’t.” He opened a folder on his desk. “McFey came out of a bar and was crossing the street to his car. A truck hit him and kept going. There was one witness: a Mexican kid who shines shoes in the beer joints on the north side. He didn’t get a plate number, and he couldn’t describe the truck except to say it didn’t have its lights on.”

“Does the last detail seem significant?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. It was twilight.” He closed the folder and tilted back in his swivel chair.

“I have a feeling this isn’t going anywhere.”

He laced his fingers behind his head. “If you find out anything, let us know.”

“Is that a joke?”

“A feeble attempt at one. You’ve got an attitude, and it’s not helping your cause. Anything else?”

“Yeah, I think you’ve found the right line of work.”

A
FTER I LEFT
the police department, I started to drive back to the Heights. It was Friday, and I had been working at home, with no plans of returning to the job site in Louisiana for another week. I had gotten nowhere in my attempt to find out whom McFey had been working for, or where my father had died. I stopped at a drugstore and called Roy Wiseheart’s house. His wife told me he was at a boxing gym downtown.

“Roy is a boxer?” I said.

She hung up.

I suppose I should not have gotten more involved with him than I already was. But so far, he was the only conduit I had into the mystery surrounding my father’s death. Second, I wanted to believe he was not having an affair with Linda Gail. Or maybe I’d learn they’d made a brief mistake and had put it behind them. It happens. The world doesn’t end. Hadn’t I told Hershel as much?

The gym was in a borderline neighborhood between the business district and a decayed residential area that was mostly black and Mexican. I saw Roy on the far side of the gym. He was wearing a pair of scarlet Everlast trunks and a sweat-streaked jersey, the sleeves scissored off at the armpits. He was hitting a speed bag with such precision and force that the bag was a black blur, the rat-a-tat-tat rebound like a machine gun.

“How’d you know I was here?” he said.

“Your wife.”

“I’m surprised she’d admit I was here. I’ve got some extra gym clothes in the car. You want to work out?”

“I need another favor. I tried to get some information from the Houston Police Department on McFey’s death. I hit a dead end.”

He began unwrapping the leather bands on his gloves. “Nobody is going to help you with McFey, Weldon. He was disposable, a wad of soiled Kleenex. Who knows, maybe he was working for himself. Watch this.” Using his bare fists, he hit the heavy bag with a combination of punches that sent it spinning on its suspension chain. “Hang around. I’m about to go three rounds with this fellow who was supposed to be the middleweight champion of Huntsville Prison.”

“Did your father tell you Rosita and I went to see him at the Rice Hotel?”

“No, he didn’t. My father and I were never close. You know who my brother was?”

“No.”

“He was a fighter pilot in Europe. He had nine kills when a couple of Messerschmitts nailed him. He’s buried in Germany. My father always felt the wrong son came back home.”

I lowered my eyes, my hand on the chain of the heavy bag. His confessional tone made me trust him less. I looked up at him. “Are you on the square, Roy?”

“Regarding what?”

“My friend Hershel.”

“You think I’m milking through his fence?”

“Jack Valentine said you keep a fuck pad.”

“I’m disappointed to hear you use language like that.”

“Are you sleeping with Linda Gail or not?”

He said something I didn’t expect: “If I had my way, I’d be you. I wouldn’t be married to the woman I live with, and I wouldn’t have my father’s last name.”

“You always seem to slip the punch,” I said.

“Slipping the punch is the name of the game,” he replied. “Come on, you can be my cut man. Check out that guy’s skin. It’s luminescent. It reminds me of an exhumed corpse. He could pass for a human slug. This is going to be great.”

“Why don’t you say it louder?”

The ex-convict boxed under the name of Irish Danny Flannigan. His body was free of tattoos and wrapped like latex, his armpits shaved, his lats as ridged and hard as whalebone. He was flat-chested, his small eyes buried deep in his face. He danced up and down in his corner, rotating his neck, waiting on Roy. I had no doubt he was the kind of man you never provoked or underestimated.

“I think this is a mistake,” I said.

“Don’t be hard on him. I bet he’s a fine fellow,” Roy replied.

Flannigan worked his lips around his mouthpiece and hit himself in the face with both gloves,
pow, pow,
to show his indifference to pain and his frustration with the delay.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Roy said, climbing into the ring. “Tell me what to do. I’m a bit new to this.”

“There’s the spit bucket on the apron in case you want a drink,” Flannigan said.

“Really?” Roy replied. “Oh, excuse me. You meant that as a joke.”

“Let me know if I hurt you, and I’ll back off. Or tell the ref. You look like a bleeder. We try to screen out the tomato cans here. You a bleeder, pal?”

“That could be. I hope not,” Roy said.

A Mexican kid pulled the string on the bell, and Irish Danny Flannigan jabbed Roy once in the forehead, once on the eye, then hit him with a right cross that folded Roy’s face against his shoulder and bounced him off the ropes. The next blow caught Roy square on the nose and splattered blood all over his chest and shoulders.

“You all right?” Flannigan said, stepping back. “Maybe you ought to go lie down. You don’t look too good.”

Roy swung at him and missed. Flannigan hit him with a combination of blows that were devastating, pinning him against the turnbuckle, working on his rib cage and face and then his rib cage again, hooking him under the heart, the kind of blow that’s like a piece of broken wood traveling through the vitals. Roy was bent over, trying to cover up, blood running from his nose over his upper lip.

A referee got between the two of them. Other fighters in the gym had stopped their workout to watch. I climbed up on the apron. “How about it, ref?” I said.

“You want to stop, Mr. Wiseheart?” he said.

Roy showed no sign that he’d heard the referee. He went into a crouch, his gloves in front of his face, his elbows tucked in. He took two shots in the head for each one he threw. Flannigan didn’t try to hide his intentions; he was going to break every bone in Roy’s face. Then I realized I was about to see a side of Roy Wiseheart I had not seen. When the bell rang, he didn’t go to his corner. The referee tried to grab his shoulder, but Roy pushed him away.

Flannigan realized the game had changed, and turned around and faced Roy. “This is the way you want it? Fine with me,” he said. “Which funeral home does your family use?”

Maybe it was luck. Or maybe Roy was faster and smarter in the ring than anyone had thought. He feinted with his right, as a novice would, then shifted his weight and fired a left straight from the shoulder into Flannigan’s jaw, knocking his mouthpiece over the ropes. Flannigan was stunned. Somebody in the back of the gym laughed. Flannigan came back hard, windmilling his punches, sweat flying from Roy’s hair with each impact. By all odds, either from the number of blows Roy took or out of self-preservation, he should have gone down. Flannigan knew it, too. He acted as though he had won the fight and started through the ropes for the dressing room. Roy picked up a wood stool from the apron and brained him with it.

It didn’t end there. Roy climbed out of the ring with Flannigan, flinging the stool at his head and missing, then pulling off his gloves and clubbing Flannigan in the face with his bare right fist, squashing his nose, splitting his eyebrow. Flannigan toppled into the metal chairs, the spit bucket rolling across the floor. I had never seen anything like it. Flannigan’s people had to form a human wall to protect him.

I got in front of Roy, my left hand pushing against his sternum. His stench was eye-watering. “Where are your clothes?” I said.

“In the car. The locker room here is full of cockroaches.”

I shoved him ahead of me, out the door.

“Jesus, what’s the hurry?” he said.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I had a blackout or something. It’s a gym. What’s the big deal? The guy had it coming.”

“You could have fractured his skull.”

“What I said in there? You don’t hold it against me, do you?”

“Said what? What are you talking about?”

“I said I was disappointed by the remark you made. You know, about my keeping an apartment for romantic interludes? You used a vulgar term for it. That’s not you, Weldon. Fellows like you set the standards for the rest of us. I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

I couldn’t begin to explain what went on inside Roy Wiseheart’s head.

He felt his jaw before he got in his Rolls-Royce. “Boy, that guy’s got a punch.” Then he laughed.

O
N THE WAY
home, I stopped at a neighborhood drugstore for a box of aspirin. In those days we seldom locked our cars or homes. Perhaps we felt that the slaughter of thirty million people had somehow driven evil from our shores and that V-J Day marked the restoration of the isolationist policies we had clung to during the prewar era. Didn’t our prosperity indicate as much? Wasn’t there a divine hand at work in our lives?

I sat at the soda fountain and drank a cherry milk shake and listened to Hank Williams on the jukebox and tried to forget the bloody business I had witnessed at the boxing gym. The doors of the drugstore were open, and the interior was breezy and cool, the comic books on the magazine rack ruffling. Across the street, stubborn kids who refused to go with the season were playing baseball in a park, the pitcher taking an exaggerated full windup before his delivery, smacking the ball into the catcher’s glove as fast as a BB. I watched a seedy man wearing a hat and wire-framed dark glasses ride a bicycle past the window on the sidewalk. He was also wearing cloth gardening gloves. A moment later, I saw him stop his bicycle and look directly at me. His face was expressionless, like a death’s-head, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his face as deeply lined as a prune. He tossed a package wrapped with twine and brown paper through the open window of my automobile.