Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  After Grandfather and I returned to the house, I washed my mother’s hair in the upstairs bathroom and dried it with the electric fan, lifting it off her neck and eyes. When I finished, she got up from the chair and dropped her bathrobe to the floor in front of the closet mirror, staring at the flatness of her hips against her slip. She began tying a string around her waist, the way colored women do to keep their slip from hanging below the hem of their dress.

  “Mother, I’m in the room,” I said.

  My words didn’t seem to register. “I’ve lost so much weight,” she said. “Do you think I look all right? Did those people in the automobile come here in regard to your father?”

  “Why would they be here about him?”

  “He might have found work and sent word.”

  “I think they were drunk and got lost.”

  I went downstairs and set up our checkerboard on a folding bridge table we kept behind the couch. My mother loved to play checkers, and while she played, she smiled as though allowing herself a brief vacation from the emotional depression that consumed her life. Her hair had been dark blond when she was younger; it had turned brown with streaks of gray. She still bathed every day but no longer wore makeup or cut her fingernails. I believed that if I did not take my mother away from this house, away from the doctors who planned to kill thousands of her brain cells, she would end up a vegetable in the state asylum outside Wichita Falls.

  “Mother, what if you and I left here and went out on our own?” I said.

  “Where would we go?” she said, staring down at the red and black squares on the checkerboard.

  “Maybe Galveston or Brownsville, where the air is fresh and full of salt from the waves crashing on the beach. There’s no dust there’bouts. I could get a job.”

  “People are coming to take me away, aren’t they.”

  Through the kitchen door, I could see Grandfather reading his encyclopedia, which he did every day, one volume after the next. Behind him, out in the darkness, fireflies were lighting in the trees like sparks rising off a stump fire. I tried to think but couldn’t. “We have to fight them, Mother,” I said. “The doctors are not our friends. I wish they had rubber gags put in their mouths and their own machines were turned against them.”

  She stared at her hands. The heels were half-mooned with fresh nail marks. “I don’t know why I hurt myself this way or why I have the thoughts I do. I feel I’m unclean in the sight of my Creator. Something is about to happen. It has to do with the people in the car. They were here before. I saw them from the upstairs window. They took off their clothes out there in the trees.”

  I knew then that my mother was absolutely mad. But her mention of our visitors made me think once again of the driver and his rugged good looks and thick walnut-colored hair and toughness of attitude toward Grandfather. He was no shade-tree mechanic, no matter what he claimed. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I began hunting through a sheaf of old magazines stuck in a wood rack by the end of the couch. I flipped through the pages of a 1933 issue of True Detective until I came to a photo of a handsome man wearing a fedora whose expression had the intransigence of boilerplate. I took the magazine to Grandfather. “Does this fellow look familiar?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t even look. It’s the man you had words with.”

  “I think I’d know if I was talking to Pretty Boy Floyd.”

  “Same eyes, same chin, same mouth, same expression,” I said. “A real hard case.”

  “There’s only one problem. Floyd was killed last year on a farm in Ohio. Before the feds finished him off, he said, ‘Have at it, boys. It’s been that kind of day.’”

  Grandfather had one-upped me again. He closed his encyclopedia and removed his glasses. “I heard y’all talking in there,” he said. “She’ll be better off under the care of the state. Don’t encourage her to think otherwise. You’re not doing her a service.”

  “It’s you they ought to take away,” I said.

  I had never spoken to my grandfather like that. As I walked back into the living room, the back of my neck was flaming, my eyes filming, my mother’s image as distorted as a hank of hair and skin floating in a jar of chemicals. In my absence, she had illegitimately crowned two kings for herself and was obviously pleased with what she had done.

  THE WEATHER TURNED hot unexpectedly. The power went out during the night, shutting down our two electric fans, and within an hour the house was creaking with heat. The sun came up red and angry and veiled with dust at six A.M. The notion of cooking breakfast on a woodstove inside a superheated frame house was enough to make anyone lose his appetite, and the thought of cooking it for my cranky grandfather was even more irksome. But duty before druth­ers, I told myself, and poked kindling and newspaper through the hob into the firebox and set it aflame, then put the coffeepot on the lid and walked outside, hoping against hope there would be a cloud in the sky that had water and not half of West Texas in it.

  I followed the serpentine tracks of the four-door automobile through the trees and over a knoll and down a gulley humped with dead leaves. For me, it was like following the trail of a mastodon or a creature from ancient mythology. I didn’t care if the people in the car were outlaws or not. The driver and the woman who had a smile like a music box represented not only the outside world but defiance of convention. Rather than accept their fate, they had decided to change it. The two-story gabled home in which I had been born no longer seemed a symbol of genteel poverty but an institutionalization of retrograde thought and cruelty that disguised itself as love, a place where surrender to a merciless sun and silo owners who stole people’s land for fifty cents an acre at tax sales was a way of life.

  Grandfather said the notorious outlaws of our times were disenfranchised farm people, hardly more than petty thieves lionized by J. Edgar Hoover to promote his newly organized Bureau. I wondered if Grandfather would call Baby Face Nelson a lionized farm boy.

  Then I saw the whiskey bottle Raymond drank from, busted in shards on a rock. Grandfather had asked him not to throw the bottle out of the automobile. But if you tell a man like Raymond not to stick his tongue on an ice tray or to avoid lighting a cigarette while fueling his automobile, you can be guaranteed he’ll soon be talking with a speech impediment or walking around with singed hair and a complexion like a scorched weiner.

  The whiskey bottle wasn’t all I saw. On the other side of the knoll, down by the river bottom, was a camp complete with a lean-to, a stone-ringed fire pit, and some sharpened sticks that somebody had roasted meat on. Tire tracks led in and out of the trees. Our visitors had not only spent considerable time here but had probably buried their waste in our earth and had sex in the lean-to and shaved and brushed their teeth with water from a canteen and poured the water on the ground, conflating their lives with ours, without our consent.

  Who were they? In particular, who was the woman in the front seat? I sat down on the knoll and stared through the trees at our house. The wind had piled dust on the west wall to almost the window level of our dining room. Up in the Panhandle, the dust was stacked in mounds that reached the bottom of a windmill’s blades. Would that be our fate, too? Would my mother be taken away and returned to us with the lifeless expression of a cloth doll?

  I couldn’t bear the thoughts I was having.

  I lay down on the riverbank in the midst of our visitors’ camp and closed my eyes. I think I fell asleep and dreamed of the strawberry-blond girl with the beret cocked on her brow. I saw her smile at me, her mouth as soft and moist as a rose opening at sunrise. I swore I could hear wind chimes tinkling in the trees. I wondered what her name was and what it would be like to run away with her. Even more, I wondered what it would be like to place my mouth on hers. For just a moment the world felt blown by cool breezes and was green and young again; I would have sworn the willow branches were strung with leaves that
lifted and fell like a woman’s hair, and there was a smell in the air like distant rain and freshly cut watermelon.

  Six days later, a physician and a nurse with a scowl like a prison matron’s came to the house in a white ambulance. They went inside and, with hardly a word, sedated my mother and took her away to the psychiatric unit at Jeff Davis Hospital in Houston. I suspected my mother’s next stop was Wichita Falls, where they’d blow out her light proper.

  I STOPPED SPEAKING TO Grandfather unless the situation gave me no alternative. I went to school and did my homework and chores but avoided physical proximity to him. I could not even bring myself to look into his face, out of both resentment and shame at what he had done. Unfortunately for me, Christian charity required that I do things for him that he could not do for himself. His ankles and the tops of his feet were a reddish-purple color, the skin stretched so tight it looked like it was about to pop. I suspected he had diabetes and had decided to let it take its course, regardless if that meant blindness or amputation or the grave, which was the kind of self-destructive irrationality that characterized most of his time on earth.

  In my mind, he had become a traitor, or at best he had revealed the person he had always been—a self-centered, unfeeling, and brutal man who made use of his badge to indulge all his base appetites. The stories about his womanizing and drunkenness and gambling were legendary; so were the accounts of the men who had died in front of his revolvers. He joined the Hebron Baptist Church only after the coals of his lust had crumbled into ash.

  Ten days had passed since my mother was taken away in the ambulance. “The doctor told me she would probably kill herself if she didn’t get treatment,” Grandfather said, watching me from the kitchen table while I put away our dishes. “That’s why I finally gave in. I didn’t see another door out, Satch.”

  “Don’t call me that name anymore. Not now, not ever.”

  “All right, Weldon.”

  “The doctor is a goddamn liar.”

  “You’re acquiring a personality that’s not your own,” he said. “That might be understandable, considering what’s happened in your family, but it will cause you a shitload of grief down the road. Be your own man, even if you don’t add up to much.”

  How could anyone pack so many insults into so few words? I worked the iron handle on the sink; the trickle that came out of it was rust-colored and smelled of mud. Leaves were spinning in the yard, clicking against the walls and screens like the husks of grasshoppers. I could almost feel the barometer dropping, as though another great storm was at hand, perhaps one filled with rain and thunder and electricity forking across the heavens. “I think I might go away,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “They say the people who went to California to pick fruit have come back home. Maybe it’s better to starve among your own people than in a Hooverville. We have a nice house. A lot of people don’t.”

  I turned from the sink. His pale blue eyes were fixed on mine. I saw no recrimination in them, no desire to control or belittle. It was an uncommon moment, one that made me question whether I’d been fair to him.

  “I don’t think I belong here anymore,” I said.

  “When you woke up this morning, your name was still Holland, wasn’t it? If people stick together, they can always make do.”

  “It’s not the same now, Grandfather.”

  His eyes went away from mine. “I sold off thirty acres this afternoon. That’s part of your inheritance, so I thought you had a right to know.”

  “Who did you sell it to?”

  “A man from Dallas. He tried to get it for five dollars an acre. I got him up to six-fifty.”

  I already knew the mathematics of predatory land acquisition, and I was aware that my grandfather was notorious for his poor handling of money and lack of judgment when it came to bargaining. I also knew he wasn’t telling me the whole story. “You gave him the mineral rights, didn’t you.”

  “There’s nothing down there except more dirt.”

  “Then why does a man from Dallas want it?”

  “Maybe he’s going to build a golf course. How would I know? He’p me up.”

  I lifted him by one arm and fitted the handle of his walking cane into his right hand. He hadn’t bathed that day, and a smell like sour milk rose from his shirt. “I’ll walk you upstairs,” I said.

  “Get me my revolver.”

  “What for?”

  “Somebody tried to rob the bank in San Angelo today. There was at least one woman in the getaway car. Maybe our visitors didn’t head for Lubbock after all.”

  “Maybe it was Ma Barker,” I said.

  “I think that gal with the beret woke up the man in you,” he said. “I don’t blame you. If there’s any greater gift than a beautiful woman in the morning, I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

  THAT NIGHT I heard an automobile in the woods. I went downstairs and unlocked the back door and went out on the porch. The air was cold, the moon showing behind the edge of a cloud, the sky free of dust. Through the tree trunks, I could see a white glow, but it disappeared as quickly as someone blowing out a candle. At daybreak I started a fire in the woodstove and set a pot of water on the lid, then removed Grandfather’s double-barrel shotgun from the closet and walked through the woods to the riverbank. The river was almost dry, the bank dropping six feet straight down, the sandy bottom stenciled with the tracks of small animals and threaded with rivulets of water that were red in the sunrise. I must have walked a half mile before I saw a four-door Chevrolet parked under a live oak. It was a 1932 model, one called a Confederate, with wire-spoked whitewall tires and a maroon paint job and a black top and black fenders and red leather upholstery. The spare tire was mounted on the running board. It was the most elegant car I had ever seen.

  The backseat had been torn out and propped against the trunk of the tree. A man with his arm in a sling was leaning against the seat, while another man worked under the car, banging on something metal, his legs sticking out in the leaves.

  The woman with the strawberry-blond hair was tending to the injured man, but she wasn’t wearing her beret. The second woman was eating a Vienna sausage sandwich. “Raymond, we’ve got a boy with a gun,” she said.

  The injured man, the one I’d thought might be Pretty Boy Floyd, winked at me. “He’s all right,” he said, looking at me but talking to Raymond, who was crawling out from under the car. “He’s just protecting his property. Where’s your grandfather, kid?”

  “How do you know he’s my grandfather?”

  “Because you look just like him.” He pointed at the collapsed wire fence behind me. “Is that y’all’s boundary?”

  “It was. We just sold off some of our acreage. Is that a Browning automatic rifle by your leg?”

  “Is that what it’s called? I found it in an empty house,” he said. “Tell me, y’all have a phone?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Because we had an accident, and I might need to call a doctor. I thought I saw a line going into your house. That’s your house with the gables, isn’t it?”

  “We couldn’t afford the phone bill anymore.”

  Raymond was standing by the car now, brushing off his clothes with one hand. In the other, he held a ball-peen hammer. “I straightened out the steering rod, but it’s gonna shimmy. What are you fixing to do with that shotgun, boy?”

  “Shoot skunks that come around the house,” I said. “I’m right good at it.”

  “You know who we are?” the injured man said.

  “Folks who drive fine cars but who’d rather sleep in the woods than a motor court?”

  Raymond was grinning. He walked close to me, his shoes crunching in the leaves. He had taken off his dress shirt and hung it on the door mirror and was wearing a strap undershirt outside his trousers. His shoulders were bony and white and stippled with pimples.
I could smell the pomade in his hair. “You heard of people shooting their way out of prison, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ever hear of anybody shooting their way into prison?”

  “That’s a new one,” I said.

  “Like you know all about it?” Raymond said.

  “You asked me a question.”

  “You’re looking at people who made history,” he said. He lifted up his chin, a glint in his eye.

  “Raymond is a kidder,” the injured man said. “We’re just reg’lar working folks. I’ve been fixing this car for a man. Like to give it a spin? I bet you would.”

  “Y’all broke into a prison?” I asked.

  “I was pulling your leg,” Raymond said.

  “I read about it in the newspaper,” I said. “It was at Eastham Pen. A guard was killed.”

  “Maybe you should mind your own business,” said the woman eating the sandwich.

  The only sound was the wind blowing in the trees. I felt like I was in the middle of a black-and-white photograph whose content could change for the worse in a second. I couldn’t have cared less. “Could y’all bust into an asylum?” I asked.

  “Why would we want to do that?” Raymond said.

  “To get somebody out. Somebody who doesn’t belong there.”

  The woman with the strawberry-blond hair took a brush from her purse and stroked the back of her head. “Somebody in your family?”

  “My mother.”

  “She was committed?”

  “I don’t know the term for it. They took her away.”

  She began brushing her hair, her head tilted sideways. “You shouldn’t fret about things you cain’t change. Maybe your mama will come home just fine. Don’t be toting a gun around, either, not unless you’re willing to use it.”

  “I’d use it to get my mother back. I wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

  The injured man laughed. “Keep talking like that, you’ll end up picking state cotton. Can you forget what you saw here? I mean, if I asked you real nice?”