Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (41 page)

She knew one of them had to be Roy. Who else would play outdoor tennis at night in winter? Who else would wear long pants on the court, as though the year were 1920? Who else would try to insulate himself from his loveless marriage by turning profligacy and self-indulgence into a religion?

She had to admit she was drawn to his boyish immaturity, and the fact that in bed he could be sweet and caring. His reverential attitude toward her beauty and the way he touched her body and did everything she secretly wanted were confessions of his need and his adoration. These were things that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

She could not allow herself these kinds of thoughts. She had made a resolution on the plane during the electrical storm, and she had to keep it and not think in a self-centered manner. She had called Roy profligate, but she knew that deep down inside Linda Gail Pine, there was a sybarite always thinking about one more bite of forbidden fruit.

She parked her car by the carriage house and opened the chain-link door to the court and stepped out on its hard-packed surface. Roy turned around and grinned broadly in surprise, his face hot and sweaty under the lights. She felt her heart quickening, the way it had at high school dances years ago when a boy visiting from Baton Rouge or Vicksburg caught sight of her and was obviously smitten by her looks. Then Roy refocused his attention on the game. His opponent threw the ball in the air and served it like a white rocket across the net. Roy backhanded the ball up the line, then charged the net before his opponent could recover, slashing the weak lob diagonally across the court.

“Got you!” Roy said. “Be back in a jiff.” He walked toward Linda Gail, blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “What are you doing here, you lovely thing?”

“Wondering why you didn’t call me. Wondering if you saw Hershel.”

“I thought that might be it. Let’s go in my friend’s pool house. I need a drink. How’d you know where I was?”

“Your wife told me.”

“You called Clara?”

“No, I called you. She answered. She mocked me.”

“In an earlier incarnation, she likely ran a torture chamber for the Inquisition.”

He opened the door to the pool house and let her walk in front of him, then pulled off his sweater and dropped it on the bar. His T-shirt was soaked, his arms shiny with sweat. The room was outfitted with a billiard table, a refrigerator, a rack of cue sticks on the wall, and a felt poker table with mahogany trim and leather pockets for chips. He sat down in a deep cloth-covered chair and crossed one leg on his knee. “Can you fix us a Scotch and soda? I’m running on the rims. You picked up some tan in Santa Monica. You look stunning.”

“Did you see Hershel?”

“I banged on the front and back doors and looked through the windows. No one was there. I went back later and tried again. I talked to a neighbor who said he thought Hershel was out of town.”

“When did you do all this?”

“This morning and at lunchtime.”

“That’s it?”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

She didn’t have an answer. “Thanks for doing what you could. I don’t know where he could have gone.”

“Maybe to visit his family. These things always pass.”

“These things?”

“Don’t start. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Hershel isn’t one to disappear without saying anything. Why didn’t he tell Weldon or somebody at the office?”

“Maybe he did. Anyway, you’ve done your best. Time we talk about other things, namely ourselves. You know how I feel.”

“Does your friend want a drink?”

“Don’t shut me out like this, Linda Gail.”

“I asked if your friend wanted a drink.”

“No, he needs to sulk awhile. He does that every time I beat him. He was the clandestine Jew in our fraternity. I was the only fellow who knew he was Jewish. He’s extra-sensitive, particularly when I hammer him on the court.”

“Why would you want to belong to a fraternity made up of people like that?”

“All of the fraternities were like that. They still are. In Louisiana, a lot of Negroes attended your school and church?”

“None of us had choices about where we went. You did.”

“How about that drink?”

She filled a tumbler with ice and three fingers of Scotch, then squirted soda into it and wrapped a paper napkin around it and handed it to him.

“You’re not joining me?” he said.

“I have to find Hershel.”

He leaned forward in the chair and circled her wrist with his thumb and forefinger. His grip felt like a wet manacle. “Stay. Please. I’ll shower and change clothes, and we can go to a restaurant for dinner. There’s so much to talk about. Everyone is excited about the picture. There are so many wonderful things waiting for you. I want to be there when those things happen, to help you, to be your friend in any capacity you wish.”

“I betrayed Hershel and I seduced you,” she replied. “Believe me, I’m not worth your concern.”

“Give me a little credit. I don’t get seduced,” he said. “When you all got married, Hershel was a mature man and a combat veteran. You were sixteen and knew nothing of the world. You call that a level playing field? I doubt Hershel would.”

“I’m not your intellectual match. Thank you for going by the house. I’ll be seeing you on location, I guess.”

He put his drink down on the floor and stood up. “Are you saying good-bye?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to divorce your wife? Do you want to marry me and start spending the holidays with my relatives in Bogalusa? Would your father and his friends approve of me? Would your father have my Jewish agent in his house? Would he like Rosita?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

“I think you probably would. You’re quite a guy, Roy. The problem is, I’ve never figured out who you are. Maybe your wife has and sees a kindred spirit in you. That thought frightens me to death.”

She went out the door and began walking toward her automobile. She heard the chain-link door on the tennis court swing open behind her. “Miss Pine?” a voice said.

“Yes?” she said, turning around.

“I’m Bill Green. I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Roy’s tennis partner said. His hair was as black and shiny as a raven’s, his face fine-boned. “Wiseheart and I are old friends.”

“He told me. You were fraternity brothers.”

“That’s why I have to teach the bum a lesson on the tennis court sometimes. He’s a fierce competitor. I let him have that last point because you were watching.”

“I see. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Green.”

“You have to go?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Maybe Roy will go home, too. He’s been here since this morning. I think he and Clara have had some choppy sailing recently.”

“He’s been here all day?”

“Yes, he’s been a nuisance. He does this when he and Clara get into it.”

“He hasn’t gone anywhere else?”

“No, he’s either been playing billiards or trying to hand me my posterior across the net.”

“Mr. Green, this is very important. Did Roy talk to anyone today? Did he make a call inquiring about my husband?”

“I heard him call a policeman. That’s not unusual for Roy. He’s an honorary police officer. He likes to ride around in cruisers and that sort of thing.”

“What did he say to the policeman?”

“Something about doing Roy a favor. I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“You’ve been very kind. Good night, Mr. Green.”

Green glanced up at the sky. “There’s a ring around the moon. We’ll have rain. You know what they say about Texas. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

“It was Missouri,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Mark Twain said that about Missouri, not Texas. It’s funny how people get a quotation wrong, and then the misquote takes on a life of its own. It’s a bit like most relationships. We never get it quite right. The fabrication becomes the reality.”

Green nodded as though he understood. She walked away from the light that glowed through the windscreens on the court and crossed the lawn, the St. Augustine grass spongy and thick under her feet, the shadows of the camellia bushes and live oaks swirling and dancing around her. Her face felt cold and small, the skin shrunk against the bone. For just a second she thought she heard the mocking voice of Clara Wiseheart laughing inside her head.

Chapter

25

I
HAD NO IDEA
where Hershel had gone. I felt guilty for having spoken with him about the possibility of shooting Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Slakely. My sentiments about Wiseheart and Slakely were genuine, but whether I would shoot a man in cold blood was a matter of conjecture. In part, I had confided in Hershel to get his mind off Linda Gail’s infidelity. Just the same I felt irresponsible, and Grandfather hadn’t helped matters by taking me to task for my careless words.

Maybe I had begun to see the world through a glass darkly. I tried to remind myself that even as a teenager I had seen goodness in Bonnie Parker and an appreciable degree of heroism in Clyde. Even Lloyd Fincher, upon learning of Rosita’s jeopardy, had given me the key and directions to his duck camp southeast of Beaumont.

Besides my growing cynicism about the world, I had another problem: I had a business to run. In my low moments, I needed to remember what Rosita and I and Hershel and Linda Gail had accomplished. The Dixie Belle Pipeline Company was a huge success. We had contracts all over Oklahoma, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico. Our welds were known as the best in the oil patch. When we dropped the pipe into the ground, chances were it would lie there a century without a crack forming in the joints. On top of that, we had the patent on the machines responsible for the welds’ longevity.

I wouldn’t try to go inside the head of a dictatorial anti-Semite like Dalton Wiseheart, but I suspected he considered us usurpers, the kind of irritant he normally bought or neutralized with no more than a five-second commitment of time. That his minions had to deal with us on our terms, after I had indicated to him that his company’s negligence may have caused my father’s death, was probably a bitter cup for him to swallow. Even worse, he probably couldn’t stand the thought of the country becoming a Jeffersonian democracy.

Rosita and I checked out of the motel in Galveston and went to one of our job sites in Louisiana, right outside of Morgan City. I no longer thought about the particulars of our problems with the law. I believed Dalton Wiseheart’s people had written the script, and there was little Rosita and I could do to change it. Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption. For me, there was one operative principle to remember: They were not going to lock up my wife again. If I had to shoot Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Timmons Slakely, I would. In the meantime, my company couldn’t run itself.

In the years immediately following the war, Hollywood and the drilling industry were probably the only two portals through which a believer in the American dream could wander and suddenly find himself among amounts of wealth and levels of power he never imagined. The prerequisites were few. A teenager who escaped a chain gang in Georgia and climbed off a boxcar in California to pick peaches later became the actor we know as Robert Mitchum. A gambler and occasional wildcatter who drew to an inside straight in a Texas poker game won a deed to a seemingly worthless piece of land that became the biggest oil strike in the United States since Spindletop. The success stories were legion. All you had to do was believe. It was like prayer. What was to lose?

I loved the work I did and took pride in it. I loved the smell of a swamp or a pine woods at sunrise. I tried not to think of myself as someone who was despoiling the environment. When we laid pipe through woods, we cleaned and reseeded the right-of-way and created a feeding area for wildlife and a firebreak and access road for firefighting vehicles. The wetlands were another matter. Nonetheless, we broke the plantation oligarchy’s hold on working people, often paid no more than twenty-five dollars for a six-day week.

I wrote these words in my journal our first night back in the motor court outside Morgan City:
Dear Lord, I’ve been out of touch for a little while. Sorry for all my rhetoric about shooting people, even though I think some of them deserve it. Take care of Hershel, would you, and please help me take care of Rosita. As always, I pray that my sacrifice is acceptable in your sight. In truth, I feel powerless; hence I entertain all these violent thoughts and feelings.

Christmas is three days away. Happy birthday in advance, in case I don’t have time to say it later.

That night I began rereading
Le Morte d’Arthur.
For either a man or a boy, it was a grand and romantic tale about the chivalric world, the jingle of chain mail and the crash of two-handed broadswords on armor and shields rising audibly off the page. The irony lay in the fact that its author, Thomas Malory, had been a professional thug and full-time lowlife, more specifically a thief, a spy, an extorter, a rapist, and an assassin. He not only broke the law at every opportunity but did so with great joy. Apparently, the only times he was not committing serious crimes were when he was in prison or fighting as a mercenary in France or writing the greatest romance since
The Song of Roland
.

How could a man who was probably a sociopath draw on symbols from the subconscious and use Celtic legends with such passion and iconic meaning and artistic cohesiveness? Why was such an unlikely person chosen for such a gift?

It was not really Thomas Malory who was on my mind. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were. They were poor and uneducated and never succeeded in stealing over two or three thousand dollars in a bank robbery. John Dillinger once called them “a pair of punks who are giving bank robbery a bad name.” Like Woody Guthrie’s migrant farmworkers, they had come with the dust and gone with the wind. Why did they continue to intrigue and fascinate us? Was it because we secretly envied their freedom? Or was it because they got even for the rest of us?

I had confessed my feelings of powerlessness in my journal. There was a paradox in my confession. My epiphany about my lack of power in dealing with the system had come to me in peacetime, not during the war. At Normandy and at the Ardennes Forest, I had felt empowered, not the other way around. I could kill my enemies at will. If I so chose, I could destroy myself inside a firestorm, perhaps saving the life of another. I lived under the stars and in the snow and in windblown forests like a druid hunting animals with a sharpened stick. I lived one cold, foggy breath away from the edges of eternity; the trappings of civilization meant no more to me than stage props.