Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (38 page)

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because you look like it,” he replied.

I told him of Slakely’s visit to our house and what Rosita had done. Roy’s face was composed while he listened, not one hair out of place, his eyes never blinking or leaving mine.

“You want me to look into it?” he said.

“In order to do what?”

“I don’t know. Blitz the sod, as Jerry Fallon would say. Your troubles make mine sound minor.”

“What troubles?”

He looked through the doorway into the side office where my secretary was working. I got up and closed the door. “What’s the problem, Roy?” I said, barely able to hide my impatience.

“I’m co-producing Linda Gail’s movie. Her husband showed up on the set down in Mexico. I think he’s got the wrong idea.”

“Regarding what?”

“I guess there’re rumors going around about me and Linda Gail.”

“The rumors aren’t true?” I said.

“I suspect it’s a matter of how you look at it. Things happen on a set. I can’t say I’ve always stayed on the straight and narrow.”

“What kind of statement is that?”

“I know Hershel’s background. He comes from a place where they lynch Negroes and castrate people—that is, when the family isn’t diddling one another. Do I need to start carrying a weapon?”

“I feel like knocking your teeth down your throat.”

“I don’t think that’s a very rational attitude. I don’t want trouble with your friend. And I certainly don’t want to hurt him.”

“What do you call ruining a man’s marriage?”

He rested his forearm on the side of my desk and gazed wistfully out the window. “Did you spend a lot of time with your father when you were a kid?”

“No, I spent it with my grandfather. My father died at the bottom of a bell hole.”

“I think the time spent with one’s father figure makes all the difference in the life of a young fellow, don’t you?”

“What kind of boyhood do you think Hershel Pine had? Can you imagine the kind of public school he attended, the kind of medical care he had?”

“Actually, I envy a fellow like that. You know, growing up on a cotton farm and squirrel hunting and going to barbecues and fish fries and outdoor dances, things like that. There’s something a bit grand about it. Its simplicity, I mean.”

I realized I was sitting next to a man who had probably lived inside a soap bubble his entire life and had no idea what privation was, and no awareness of the travail that people of Hershel’s background endured.

“Does Linda Gail plan to leave Hershel?” I asked.

“I really don’t know. That’s their business anyway. Why should we be discussing something like that?”

“
Why?
Because he worships his wife. Because he’s coming apart. Because he stayed alive from Kasserine Pass through the invasion of Italy and France to the Ardennes Forest so he could come back to her.”

“I see what you mean. Yes, he seems a good fellow. That’s why I’m asking for your help. Come on, have some raw oysters and a beer with me.”

“Let me tell you how I feel about your father, Roy,” I said. “No man is more cowardly than one who uses a surrogate to injure others. That’s what your father has done. My wife and I go from day to day wondering who your father will send next into our lives. Right now it’s Hubert Timmons Slakely. Tomorrow it will be somebody else.”

Roy looked at me a long time before he spoke. “My father doesn’t care enough about people to hurt them. Why do you think you’re so special?”

“His company was responsible for my father’s death.”

“He could settle your suit for pocket change.”

“I’m not planning on suing your father. I want to see him in prison.”

He pinched his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “In the state of Texas? What world do you live in, Weldon?”

“The United States of America.”

“You still have those oil leases around New Roads, Louisiana, don’t you?”

“We brought in two dusters on those leases. They almost bankrupted us,” I said.

“But you still have the leases?”

“What if we do?”

“I’d hold on to them. Will you talk to Hershel?”

“No, I will not. It’s time you carry your own water, partner.”

“You have it all, Weldon, but you don’t realize it. Others covet what you take for granted. You’re an honorable man. Your wife loves you. You’re the captain of your soul. With time, others will take all that away from you. That’s what you fail to understand. They don’t want your possessions. They want your soul.”

“And how will they take that from me?”

“They’ll turn you into one of them. You’ll wake up one morning and look at your reflection in the mirror and wonder what happened to the little boy in his white First Communion suit. See you around, Buster Brown.”

I followed him into the street. The sunlight was cold and brittle, with a reminder of winter and the shortening of the days in the air. Leaves were scudding out of the alley next to Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop. The Mexican woman who ran the flower stall was gone. “Come back here,” I said.

“Not a chance,” he replied.

I went back into the office but couldn’t think my way through the exchange. Roy had made a cuckold of my best friend but had presented himself to me as a victim. He seemed genuinely concerned with my fate but remained firmly entrenched in the world of wealth and power that threatened to destroy Rosita in order to get to me. Last, and perhaps most tragically for him, he was brave but beset with guilt because his ambition may have cost a life.

I went into the courtyard and poured out the stale water in the vase of flowers. It was green in the sunlight and had a rancid smell when it struck the flagstones. I had never felt more alone and helpless, even at the Ardennes. I leaned against the wall with one hand. The stones were hard and gritty and cold against my palm. As the wind gusted across the rooftops, I heard a sound that was like the staccato popping of small-arms fire when first contact is made between two armies. But the series of reports was only an automobile backfiring on the street. I was almost positive about that.

I
KNEW WHAT WAS
coming next, in the way you know the next pitch is a slider when a left-handed pitcher mops the sweat off his brow and wipes the back of his hand on his pants and not his palm. Saturday morning I got a person-to-person call from Linda Gail. I could barely make out her words. “We’re having a terrible electrical storm here,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

“Barely. Where are you?”

“In Santa Monica. The sky is black. Lightning is striking the cliffs above the beach. I’ve never seen the sky this dark here.”

“What do you want, Linda Gail?”

“You’d better talk to Hershel. He’s acting crazy.”

“You’re just becoming aware of that?”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d moralize on your own nickel. Why do you think I called you?”

“Roy Wiseheart was in my office yesterday and was probably more candid about you two than he should have been.”

“Roy came to you?”

“I’ve had to put Rosita in hiding. She threw a pot of scalding tomatoes and peppers in a police officer’s face. If you want to have a dalliance with Roy, that’s your business, Linda Gail. But stop dragging your problems into my life.”

“I didn’t call you because of me. I called because I’m worried about
you
. God, you make me angry. Sometimes I want to break my fists on your head.”

“Somebody sent Hershel a photograph?”

“Yes, exactly. Do you know who’s in it?”

“If we’re talking about the same photograph, I’ve already seen it. It’s a fake. Or at least part of it is.”

I could hear her breathing into the phone, even though thunder was booming in the background. “You’re talking about me in the nude?”

“Yes, I am.”

I expected her to say something vitriolic, to take on the mantle of outrage that she was extraordinarily good at. But there were facets to Linda Gail that sometimes surprised me. “I hate myself for this. It’s all my fault, Weldon. It’s not Roy’s or Hershel’s or yours. Do you know about Jack Valentine’s death?”

“I read he was killed in South Central Los Angeles.”

“He was killed after Roy told me someone should teach him a lesson.”

“That’s probably just rhetoric.”

There was a violent intrusion of static on the line. Then she said in an almost plaintive voice, “Weldon?”

“Yes?”

“The lightning is hitting the water. I’ve never seen it do that. The ocean looks like it’s full of black oil and electricity. There’s green vapor rising off the waves. It looks like the world is ending.”

“It’s an optical illusion.”

“Do you believe in karma?” she asked.

“If there was such a thing as karma, most of the world’s leaders would have leprosy.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Do you think I’m a bad girl?”

I couldn’t think of the right words to use. “No, I don’t think that.”

“I’m afraid,” she said. “For all of us. Roy says we’re wayfaring strangers, like the Canterbury Pilgrims trying to wend their way past the Black Death. He says death is the only reality in our lives.”

“Roy is a nihilist.”

“Say it again.”

“Say what?”

“That I’m not a bad girl.”

“Good luck to you. I think you’re a formidable woman with qualities that you don’t give yourself credit for. Don’t let Hershel get hurt any more than he already has.”

The line went dead.

I
DROVE TO HERSHEL
and Linda Gail’s box of a house a few blocks off River Oaks Boulevard without calling first or knowing what to expect. It was hard for me to think of Hershel as a possible adversary, perhaps a dangerous one. But in light of how human frailty and jealousy affect us all, I knew if he had received the bogus photograph, anything was possible. As I drove down the boulevard past some of the grandest mansions in the Western world and turned onto Hershel’s street and pulled into the deep shade of his driveway, I smelled an odor that was like wet leaves burning in a barrel, and water that had gone sour in a pond, and moist dirt oozing with white slugs spaded up in ground that never saw sunlight.

Hershel was bare-chested and pushing a shovel deep into the soil with one booted foot, his back knotted and red and sweaty and powdered with dirt. His shirt and leather jacket hung on the back of a wood chair. He had torn the flowers out of the beds and stripped the climbing roses and the trumpet vine from the trellises and smashed the trellises into sticks. He dropped the shovel on the grass and began ripping divots out of the St. Augustine grass with a mattock, destroying the root systems, driving the mattock deeper into sandy soil and rock and a metal sprinkler line. Hershel was waging war on the environment that Linda Gail had been willing to trade her marriage for.

“What are you planting, farmer?” I said.

He looked up at me like a primitive creature hard at work in front of his cave. There was a crooked grin on his face, a liquidity in his eyes that I normally would associate with yellow jaundice. The knees of his canvas trousers were green with grass stains. “I’m putting in a vegetable garden.”

“It’s December.”

“I know. I kind of got carried away and tore up Linda Gail’s roses. She flat loves those roses. I’m sorry I did that.”

“It’s mighty cold to be digging a vegetable garden.”

“I’m late this year. That’s why I’d better get on it.”

Behind him was an aboveground swimming pool constructed of a pipe frame and sheets of blue plastic, a garden hose hung over the rim.

“Want to take a dip?”

“What’s that smell?”

“Linda Gail says the neighbor’s cat drowned in it. I don’t believe it, though. Cats don’t fall into pools. A coon or a porcupine might do that, but a cat is too smart.”

“Can we talk?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I’m going to explain some things that have happened. Put down the mattock and let’s go inside.”

“I like it out here just fine.”

His chest and shoulders and upper arms were hairless and smooth, his nipples as small as dimes. The temperature must have been fifty degrees, but sweat was leaking out of his hair and running down the sides of his face.

“Did somebody send you a photograph?” I said.

“They sure did.”

“With me in it?”

“Looked like you.”

“It’s a fake.”

“That’s not Linda Gail in it?”

“Yes, that’s Linda Gail, and that’s me. But the photos were taken separately and the negatives manipulated in a darkroom.”

The head of the mattock was resting by his foot, his palm propped on the handle’s nub. He looked at the rose petals and torn trumpet vines scattered on the grass. He had no expression, as though all his motors had shut down.

“Forget everything I just said. Do you think I would betray our friendship? Look me in the face and tell me you believe I would have an affair with your wife and then come here and lie about it.”

“No, sir, you wouldn’t do that.”

“So let’s put an end to this.”

“Who was with her when that photo was taken?”

“I think it was Jack Valentine. I think he got her drunk and took her to a motel the same day he filmed her on the gallery of that general store outside Bogalusa.”

“She’s been having an affair. Not with Jack Valentine. It’s that damn Roy Wiseheart, isn’t it?”

“It’s not my business.”

His face tilted up into mine. I could see the grainy lines around his eyes and smell the damp earth on his skin. “He confides in you like you’re his lost brother or something. He’s told you about Linda Gail, hasn’t he?”

“I say let both of them go, Hershel.”

“You’d give a thief the run of your house?”

“They’ll come to a bad end. If that’s their choice, you have to honor it.”

“Linda Gail was the only girl I ever wanted.”

There were any number of things I could have said to him, to no avail. Hershel Pine was one of those who went down with the decks awash and the guns blazing.

“Rosita scalded the face off the cop who molested her. Dalton Wiseheart is doing everything he can to destroy us, Hersh. Don’t help him do it. I’m done here.”

“Don’t go,” he called.