Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (51 page)

I walked to a phone booth down the street from the motor court and called to check on Grandfather. Through the Plexiglas windows, I could see the highway that led up through Raton Pass and the winding ponderosa-dotted canyon that opened onto the old mining town of Trinidad, where the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday finished paying the debt they owed the Clanton gang.

Snowball answered the phone. She was under five feet tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had the blackest skin I had ever seen. She often wore white dresses and blouses, some with eyelets on the shoulders.

“How’s Grandfather doing?” I said.

“A little laid up.”

“He’s sick?”

“More like he fell down. Bruised all over his seat and his back.”

“Would you tell me what happened?”

“He made me drive him to the roller-skate rink on South Main.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“You try arguing with him and see what happens.”

“He put on roller skates?”

“They didn’t want him to do it. He caused a big scene.”

“Snowball—”

“It ain’t my fault.”

“I know it. Can you take the phone to him, please?”

“Yes, suh.”

I saw the passenger train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles coming down the grade inside the canyon, the headlamp on its locomotive wobbling in the dark, the wheels screeching on the rails. If we decided on the train as our way out, we would have to wait until tomorrow evening.

“How’s Rosita?” Grandfather asked.

“She’s better every day. Are you trying to commit suicide?”

“If I wanted to commit suicide, I wouldn’t mess it up.”

“Why would you go to a roller rink?”

“I felt like it.”

“Is there anything in the papers about Rosita and me or the Wisehearts?”

“Yes, there is. That’s not all. That fellow Slakely burned up in his trailer. The paper said an electrical fire.”

“Hubert Slakely the cop?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. You pulled the tiger’s tail. The Wisehearts won’t quit. If they let you get away with it, any little pissant in Houston can climb out from under a rock and do it.”

“No one knows how to deliver an insult like you, Grandfather.” But I wasn’t thinking about his ongoing denigration of everything that breathed. I was trying to think through the implications of Slakely’s death.

“We need you,” Grandfather said.

“Linda Gail and Hershel haven’t looked in on you?”

“I didn’t rear you up to lose you to a wolf pack, son. Your mother needs you, and so do I. You come back home, you hear me? Just like I told you when you went overseas.”

He had never called me “son” before.

Chapter

31

I
WOKE AT DAWN.
The sky was clear and the moon still up, the grass on the foothills of Raton Pass stiff with frost. I placed my hand on the windowpane. It was ice-cold. I let Rosita sleep while I brushed my teeth and shaved and put on a clean corduroy shirt. I had a good feeling about the day. We had managed to get from Wichita Falls to within twenty miles of the Colorado state line without being apprehended or stopped. I told myself that in the greater scheme of things, we were not that important. Also, we had harmed no one and hence were not a threat to others. Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, and the Barker-Karpis gang had waged war against the banking system of the United States, and it had taken years for our best law enforcement agencies to kill or drive them to ground. We were hardly worth anyone’s notice.

I have always believed that the American West, like Hollywood, is a magical place and the biggest stage set on earth. I also believe it’s haunted by the spirits of Indians, outlaws, Jesuit missionaries, drovers, gunmen, conquistadores, bindle stiffs, Chinese and Irish gandy dancers, whiskey traders, temperance leaguers, gold panners, buffalo hunters, fur trappers, prostitutes, and insane people of every stripe, maybe all of them living out their lives simultaneously in our midst. The Homeric epic doesn’t have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica.

It was out there waiting for us, the Grand Adventure unscrolling beneath our feet. That’s what I felt as Rosita and I ate breakfast in a café not far from the train depot built in what was called Mission Revival mode, where we would board the Super Chief that evening.

“What are we going to do with the car?” she asked.

“Rent a garage. We’ll return for it later or hire someone to deliver it to Houston.”

“Sounds easy.”

“Hubert Slakely burned to death in his trailer. Grandfather told me last night.”

She was chewing a tiny piece of toast in her cheek, her eyes focused on the red Spanish-tile roof of the depot. She waited until the piece of toast seemed to dissolve in her mouth, her gaze never leaving the train station. “How did the fire start?”

“The paper said an electrical short.”

She let her eyes drift onto mine.

“You don’t believe that?” I said.

“I think bad people earn their fate. The form it comes in doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t believe it was an accident?” I said.

“Was Lloyd Fincher’s death a suicide?” she said. “Was that private detective’s death a hit-and-run? I don’t care how any of them died. I’m glad they’re dead.”

“Tomorrow we’ll be in Union Station in Los Angeles,” I said. “Wait till you see it. It’s beautiful. It looks like a Roman villa.”

She was smiling.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Who else would see ancient Rome in the middle of Los Angeles?”

“Any student of history,” I replied.

She looked up at me and winked, just as she had the day I found her deep inside Nazi Germany.

Two motorcycle cops came in and removed their caps and sat at the counter. They were wearing leather jackets and knee-high polished boots and jodhpurs with stripes down the legs. Their faces looked tight and blistered, the skin around their eyes leached of color from the goggles they wore on the highway. One of them blew on his hands. Before I could turn away, our eyes met in the mirror.

I looked straight ahead, then out the window, and tried not to scratch my forehead, which is what a person does when he wants to hide his face. I felt I had stepped onto a stage. I cursed myself under my breath for my carelessness in looking at the cops and for my phone call to Grandfather. I started to say something to Rosita. She was eating silently, her face lowered. “I saw them,” she whispered.

“We’re in no hurry. We have no cares.”

“We’ll be fine, Weldon,” she said, not looking up.

I drank my cup empty and raised it to catch the waitress’s attention. I kept my gaze off the cops, but I could feel one of them looking at me in the mirror. I feigned a yawn. “I’m going to the washroom,” I said. “Don’t ask for the check.”

She nodded and smiled as though I had said something pleasant.

I washed my hands and combed my hair, so I would look like I’d taken my time in the men’s room. When I came back to the booth, I hoped the cops would be occupied with their breakfast or talking with the waitress. They were waiting on their food; the closest one was still looking at me in the mirror. The waitress put the check on our table.

“Stay here,” I said to Rosita. “Don’t get up for any reason.”

“What are you doing?”

“Paying the check.”

I walked toward the cashier, putting on my hat, glancing casually at the check, pausing when I was abreast of the cops. “Excuse me, we’re headed east through Clayton and Texline. Do y’all know if there’s much black ice up that way?”

“In the shady spots, maybe,” said the cop who had been looking at me. “Where you headed?”

“Big D.”

“You should have smooth sailing.”

“Somebody told me Clayton is where Black Jack Ketchum was hanged.”

“If you stop in Clayton, go to the Hotel Eklund. They have pictures of the execution on the wall.”

“I don’t remember exactly what his crime was.”

“You name it, he did it. A general bad guy.”

“I hear there’s a famous restaurant there.”

“It’s in the Eklund,” he said. “You’re from Dallas?”

“No, I grew up in southwest Texas. Thanks for your help.”

He said nothing in reply. I paid the check and went back to our booth and placed a tip under my plate. Then Rosita and I walked side by side down the line of counter stools, past the cops. Neither turned around or seemed to take notice of us in the mirror. They were both smoking cigarettes, sipping from their coffee, tipping their ashes in the saucer. The waitress was bending over to get some water glasses from a shelf, her skirt stretched across her shapely rump. The cops looked into space; they did not speak to each other. Nor did they look at the woman.

Rosita and I walked down the street, past the depot, the wind so cold there was no difference between it and a flame.

“What do you think?” Rosita asked.

“We stepped on a land mine.”

W
E WENT THROUGH
the side door of a grocery store and filled a sack with bread and sliced meat and cheese and canned goods and soda pop. From a window, I saw one of the cops come out of the café with his helmet and goggles on. A cruiser pulled into the parking lot. The motorcycle cop talked to the driver, leaning down to the window, the tailpipe of the cruiser puffing smoke. Then the cruiser drove out of view, and the motorcycle cop went back into the café. What did it all mean? I couldn’t be sure.

Rosita and I walked as briskly as we could to the motor court. My eyes were watering; my face felt blistered from the wind. The room seemed to crawl with static electricity. If I touched a metal surface, a spark jumped from my fingers. I looked out the side of the curtain. The street and the two-lane highway were empty, newspaper swirling in a vortex next to a knocked-over garbage can.

“What do you want to do?” Rosita said.

“Get out of town.”

“Where?”

It was hard to think. If we went south, we would drive into sparsely populated badlands where our level of visibility would be maximized and our ability to change our route reduced to nil. Driving east into the Texas Panhandle would put us in the bull’s-eye again. Taos was a viable option, located down a winding road among wooded mountains, but it was full of artists and writers and bohemians, the kind of people who take note of everything they see and hear. The best choice—the only one, in my opinion—was to get out of New Mexico and into Colorado.

“We’re a half hour from Trinidad,” I said. “We’ll be out of sight and out of mind. We can go into the San Juan or Sangre de Cristo Mountains or keep going into Denver. They’ll never find us in Denver.”

“But they’ll find us somewhere,” Rosita said.

“Time’s on our side.”

“I want to talk to Linda Gail. I want to get a message to Roy Wiseheart and his wife,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“It doesn’t matter at this point,” she said. “Call them collect. Or would you rather I do it?”

I picked up the phone. “What’s the message?”

“Tell Linda Gail that if we live through this, I’m going to kill Roy and Clara Wiseheart.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Look at what they’ve done to us.”

Her attitude was hard to argue with. Clara and her father-in-law, Dalton Wiseheart, seemed to nurse their anti-Semitism like a poisonous orchid, and one or both of them was responsible for the grief we had been through. But prejudice took second place to their lust for money and power. I made the call, although not for the reason Rosita thought.

Linda Gail answered the phone and accepted the charges.

“I’ll make this quick,” I said. “Our meter may be running out. If something happens to me, the company goes to Hershel. That’s in my will. The will also states that my mother and grandfather are to be cared for for the rest of their lives. If you see Roy, tell him I hope he has a good life. If you ever see Dalton Wiseheart, tell him he failed. Tell him that in the House of Jesse, he wouldn’t be allowed to clean a chamber pot.”

“He failed at what?”

“Destroying me and my wife.”

“I don’t think you know what’s going on here,” she said. “Clara Wiseheart came to our house in a rage. Her friends in the DAR won’t take her calls. Her picture has been in the newspaper twice, once with her mouth hanging open. Roy went to the airport last night and left town for parts unknown. She thought he went to Los Angeles with me. Spit was flying off her lips while she was yelling at me in the driveway. The neighbors enjoyed the show tremendously.”

“I have to go.”

“Where do you think Roy went?”

“You and Hershel take care of each other. Take care of Grandfather, too. He’s not as tough as he lets on.”

“This sounds like a deathbed statement. What’s happening? Where are you?”

“We’re better than any of them. Remember that, Linda Gail,” I said.

When I hung up, Rosita was sitting in a wooden chair by the window. “You don’t like to leave threatening messages for people like the Wisehearts?”

“Grandfather faced down Wes Hardin and the Dalton gang. I asked him how he did it. He said, ‘You don’t say a word. You fill their ears with your silence. The only voice they’ll hear will be their own fear.’”

“I meant what I said about not going back.”

“I know,” I replied.

“There were times in the camp when I wished I had killed myself. If they had put me in the whorehouse, I would have done it. Even after the SS deserted the camp, I didn’t want to live anymore. Not with the memories I had. Not until I met you.”

“I was a poor catch.”

“They’re not going to take me alive, Weldon.”

As I looked into her eyes, I wondered if Bonnie Parker had thought the same thing on the blacktop parish road outside Arcadia, Louisiana. There was nothing more I could say. Sometimes death is preferable to life. Only a fool, or someone who has never seen suffering on an unimaginable scale, would say otherwise.

“We have to go,” Rosita said. “Snow is blowing at the top of the Pass.”

It was true. The sun was shining, but high up the grade, one of the steepest in the Rockies, snow crystals were whirling among the rocks and pine boughs like spun glass. Rosita backed out the car while I carried our suitcase and bag of groceries outside. We went through the intersection at the edge of town, and in under thirty seconds, we were climbing the incline toward the heavens, the bottom of the canyon dropping into shadow behind us. I reached under the seat and pulled out the Luger and set it by my thigh.