Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  “They’re going to give her electroshock. Maybe they already have,” I said. “You think that’s fair? She’s an innocent person, and she’s getting treated worse than criminals who deserve everything that happens to them.”

  Leaves were dropping from the oak tree, spinning like disembodied wings to the ground. They were yellow and spotted with blight, and they made me think of beetles sinking in dark water.

  The woman eating the sandwich turned her back and said something to the injured man. It took me a moment to sort out the words, but there was no mistaking what she said: Don’t let him leave here.

  “Mary, can you get me a cold drink from the ice chest?” said the woman with the strawberry-blond hair. “I want to talk to our young friend here.”

  “I say what’s on my mind, Bonnie,” Mary said. “You like to be sweet at other people’s expense.”

  “Maybe there’s an ice-cold Coca-Cola down in the bottom,” Bonnie said. “I don’t remember when I’ve been so thirsty. I’d be indebted if you’d be so kind.”

  She took my arm and began walking with me along the riverbank, back toward the house, never glancing over her shoulder, not waiting for Mary’s response, as though the final word on the subject had been said. She was wearing a white cotton dress with pink and gray flowers printed on it and lace at the hem that swished on her calves. “I want you to listen to me real good,” she said close to my ear. “Pretend we came with the dust and went with the wind. Tomorrow when you get up, you’ll still be you and we’ll be us, and it will be like we never met. Your mama is gonna be all right. I know that because she reared a good son.”

  “Who killed the guard, Miss Bonnie? It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Go home, boy. Don’t come back, either,” she replied.

  I RETURNED TO THE house and replaced Grandfather’s shotgun in the kitchen closet. A few minutes later he came downstairs, walking on his cane. I fixed oatmeal and browned four pieces of bread in the skillet and put a jar of preserves on the table. I filled his oatmeal bowl and set it in front of him, and set his bread next to the bowl. All the while, I could feel him watching me. “Where have you been?” he said.

  “I took a walk down by the river.”

  “Counting mud turtles?”

  “There’s worse company,” I replied.

  “I guess it’s to your credit, but you’re the poorest excuse for a liar I’ve ever known. I heard a car out in the woods last night. Did that same bunch come back here after I told them not to?”

  “They’re not on our property. The driver was hurt. The fellow named Raymond was fixing a tie rod.”

  “Did the driver have a gunshot wound?”

  “No, they were in a car accident.”

  He had tied a napkin like a bib around his neck; he wiped his mouth with it and set down his oatmeal spoon. “Did those people threaten you?”

  “The lady with strawberry-blond hair said my mother was going to come home and be okay. I think she’s a good person. Maybe they’ve already took off. They’re not out to cause us trouble.”

  He got up from the table and went to the phone. It was made out of wood and attached to the wall and had a crank on the side of the box. He picked up the earpiece and turned the crank. Then he turned it again. “It’s dead,” he said.

  “Maybe a tree fell on the line.”

  “I think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “The driver asked if we had a phone. I told him we didn’t. He said he saw a line going into the house. I told him we couldn’t afford the service anymore.”

  “So you knew?”

  “Knew what?”

  “That these people are dangerous. But you chose to pretend otherwise,” he replied.

  My face was burning with shame. “What are you aiming to do?” I asked.

  “Let’s clear up something else first. Why were you talking about your mother to a bunch of outlaws?”

  “I wondered if they could help me get her out of the asylum.”

  I saw a strange phenomenon occur in my grandfather’s face. For the first time in my life, I saw the lights of pity and love in his eyes. “I called the doctor yesterday, Satch,” he said. “I told him not to put your mother through electroshock. I told him I’d made a mistake and I was coming down to Houston to get her.”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was waiting on him to call me back, to see if everything was ready to go.”

  I got up and went to the sink and looked at the woods. I felt like a Judas, although I didn’t know exactly whom I had betrayed, Grandfather or our visitors down by the river. “The woman’s name is Bonnie. The driver had a Browning. I think he might be Clyde Barrow.”

  “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” he said.

  HE TOLD ME to take our Model A down to the store at the crossroads and call Sheriff Benbow.

  “Go with me,” I said.

  “While they burglarize our house?”

  “We don’t have anything they want.”

  “It must have been the tramp in the woodpile. That’s the only explanation I have for it,” he said. “Were you hiding behind a cloud when God passed out the brains?”

  I drove away and left him standing in front of the porch, his khaki trousers stuffed into the tops of his stovepipe boots, the wilted brim of his Stetson low on his brow, his thoughts known only to him. I turned onto the dirt road that led past the woods where our visitors had camped. Our telephone wire was hanging straight down on the pole. There was no tree limb on the ground. A dust devil spun out of a field and broke apart on the Model A’s radiator, powdering the windshield, almost like an omen. The crossroads store was still two miles away. I did a U-turn and headed back home.

  Grandfather owned two horses. The Shetland was named Shorty and was blind in one eye. When Grandfather rode Shorty through a field of tall grass, all you could see were his shoulders and head, as though he had been sawed in half and his upper body mounted on wheels. His other horse was a four-year-old white gelding named Blue who was part Arabian and hot-wired to the eyes. All you had to do was lean forward in the saddle and Blue would be halfway to El Paso. A man Grandfather’s age had no business on that horse. But try to tell him that.

  I parked by the barn. Shorty was in the corral. Blue was nowhere in sight. I looked in the kitchen closet, where I had replaced Grandfather’s double-barrel shotgun. It was gone.

  I took the holstered Colt from the drawer and walked into the woods and followed Blue’s hoofprints along the riverbank to the end of our property. Through the trees I could see the Chevrolet and four people standing beside it, all of them looking up at Grandfather, who sat atop Blue like a wood clothespin. They were all grinning, and not in a respectful way. None of them looked in my direction, not even Bonnie.

  Grandfather had bridled Blue but hadn’t saddled him. Blue was sixteen hands and had the big-footed, barrel-chested conformation of an Arabian, and he rippled with nervous power when he walked. If a blowfly settled on his rump, his skin twitched from his withers to his croup. I could hear Grandfather talking: “Times are bad. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to use my place for a hideout or be a bad influence on my grandson. I know who y’all are. I also know it was y’all cut my phone line.”

  “We’re plain country people, not no different from y’all,” Raymond said. “We’re not on your damn property, either.”

  “No, there’s nothing ordinary about you, son. You’re a smart-ass. And there’s no cure for your kind,” Grandfather said. “You’re going to end up facedown on a sidewalk or fried by Old Sparky. I’d say good riddance, but somewhere you’ve probably got a mother who cares about you. Why don’t you try to change your life while you got a chance?”

  “We’re leaving,” Bonnie said. “But don’t be talking down to us anymore. Your grandson tol
d us what you let happen to your daughter.”

  “Enough of this. Let’s go,” the injured man said.

  “You’re Clyde Barrow, aren’t you?” Grandfather said.

  “I told you, the name is Smith.”

  “You were born in Telico. You tortured animals when you were a child. You got your brother killed up in Missouri. You’re a certified mess, boy.”

  “Yeah, and you’re a nasty old man who’s going to have tumbleweed bouncing across his grave directly,” said the man who called himself Smith.

  They all got in the Chevrolet, slamming the doors. That was when Blue went straight up in the air, his front hooves higher than the Chevrolet’s top. Grandfather crashed to the ground, the shotgun flying from his hands, his face white with shock, his breath wheezing from his throat. I thought I heard bones snap in his back.

  Bonnie and her friends drove away with Raymond behind the wheel. One of them spat on Grandfather. In the shadows I couldn’t tell who it was, but I saw the spittle come out of the window like wet string and stick on Grandfather’s shirt. In seconds the Chevrolet was going up a dusty rise between the trees, the sunlight spangling on the windows.

  I let the holster and belt slide free of the revolver and pulled back the hammer and aimed with both hands at the back of the automobile.

  “Don’t do it, Weldon,” Grandfather said.

  I didn’t aim at the gas tank or a tire or the trunk. I aimed ten inches below the roof and squeezed the trigger and felt the heaviness of the frame buck in my palms and heard the .44 round hit home, whanging off metal, breaking glass, maybe striking the dashboard or the headliner. Inside the report, I thought I heard someone scream.

  The car wobbled but kept going forward and was soon gone. I shut my eyes and opened them again, unsure of what I had done, my ears ringing.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me?” Grandfather asked.

  My right ear felt like someone had slapped it with the flat of his hand. I opened and closed my mouth to get my hearing back. “I didn’t think. Was that a woman who screamed?”

  “No, it was not. You heard an owl screech. Do you understand me?”

  “I heard a woman scream, Grandfather.”

  “The mind plays tricks on you in a situation like that. That was a screech owl. They’re blind in the daytime and frighten easy. Get me up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  “An owl. I heard an owl.”

  “From this time on, you don’t look back on what happened here today. It doesn’t mean a hill of beans. Don’t you ever stop being the fine young man that you are.”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, three of Grandfather’s old friends came to our house. They were stolid, thick-bodied men who wore suits and Stetsons and polished boots and had broad, calloused hands. One of them rolled his own cigarettes. One of them was a former Texas Ranger who supposedly killed fifty men. They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee while Grandfather told them everything he knew about our visitors. He made no mention of me. I was in the living room and heard the former Texas Ranger say, “Hack, I’d hate to bust a cap on a woman.” But he smiled when he said it.

  Grandfather glanced up and saw me looking through the doorway. Something happened in that moment that I will never forget. Grandfather’s eyes once again were filled with a warmth that few associated with the man who locked John Wesley Hardin in jail. The lawmen at his table were killers. Grandfather was not. “Go upstairs and check on your mother, will you, Weldon?” he said.

  I read later about the ambush in Louisiana. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were blown apart with automatic weapons fire. Later, their friend Raymond would die with courage and dignity in the electric chair at Huntsville. His girlfriend, Mary, would go to prison. None of them was struck by the bullet I fired into their automobile.

  It rained that summer, and I caught a catfish in the river that was as reddish-brown as the water I took it from. I slipped the hook out of its mouth and replaced it in the current and watched it drop away, out of sight, an event that was probably of little importance to anyone except the catfish and me.

  Chapter

  2

  WHEN I WAS a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, about to embark for England in the spring of 1944, I purchased a leather-bound notebook in a stationery store not far from the campus of Columbia University. I suspect I thought I might take on the role of a modern Ishmael, and my notebook would become the keyhole through which others would witness the greatest event in human history.

  I was vain, certainly, and like most young men of that era, at least those from the heartland, unable to reconcile my vanity and eagerness with my shyness around girls and my discomfort among people who were educated at eastern universities. Maybe my notebook would give me an understanding of myself, I thought, opening the door of the stationery store, within sight of the plazas and green lawns and monarchical buildings of the university where I hoped one day to attend graduate school. Maybe writing in a notebook about things most people could not imagine would make me captain of my soul. I saw myself in a trench, my back against the dirt wall, writing in my notebook while artillery shells whistled out of the heavens and exploded in no-man’s-land. All my fantasy lacked was a recording of “Little Bessie” playing in the background.

  Like all young men about to go to war, I did not want to hear talk about the grand illusion. If war was so bad, why did those who served in one never indicate that they regretted having done so? Think of the images conjured up by mention of the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux. Which lays greater claim on the human heart, The Song of Roland or cloistering oneself inside inertia and ennui while the world is being set alight?

  My generational vanity was not of an arrogant kind. I didn’t mean that at all. Our vanity had its origins not only in our youth but in our collective innocence. We told ourselves we had prevailed during the Great Depression because we had kept faith with Jeffersonian democracy and had not given ourselves over to the Reds or the American equivalent of fascism. The truth about us was a little more humble in nature: We were born and raised in a transitional era; we were the last Americans who would remember a nation that was more agrarian than industrial, with more dirt roads than paved highways. We would also be the last generation to believe in the moral solvency of the Republic.

  This is not meant to be a dour evaluation of what we were or the era when we lived. In many ways, it was a grand time to be around. The cultural anchors of the continent were Hollywood on one end and Ebbets Field on the other. The literary staple of almost every middle-income American home was The Saturday Evening Post, which contained the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and John O’Hara. A cherry Coke at the drugstore cost a dime, the music was a nickel, and the dance floor was free. For most of us, each sunrise was like a pink rose opening on the earth’s rim. Perhaps we created a myth and became acolytes in the service of our own creation; but if that was the case, the entire world was envious of us all the same.

  Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considered memorable or historically insightful, even after Normandy, where we waded ashore in the second wave, the surf a frothy red from the initial assault. War is always a dirty and unglamorous business. Most of it has to do with head colds and body odor and crab lice and trench foot and sleeping in the rain and sometimes throwing your own feces out of a foxhole with your e-tool. But I never hated the army or dwelled on the unnecessary cruelties of my fellow man (Sherman tank crews knocking down farmhouses just for fun). Many of the Southerners in my regiment could hardly read and write. The Northerners believed a factory job in a unionized plant was the fulfillment of the American dream. I admired them and thought most of them were far braver and more resourceful than I. If I had to go off to war with anyone, I could not have picked a better bunch. They were always better than they thought they we
re, no matter how bad it got, and never realized how extraordinarily courageous and resilient they were.

  I settled in for the duration and wrote in my notebook more as a reminder of the city where I had bought it than as a process of self-discovery. I’d return to New York, I told myself. I’d have lunch with a beautiful girl in an outdoor café, under an awning, on a cool afternoon in spring, perhaps by a park blooming with flowers. I’d take her dancing, maybe in a ballroom where Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra were playing. And in the morning, I would attend classes at Columbia University, armed with the confidence that I, like Stephen Crane, had faced the Great Death and hence never had to speak of it again. Little did I know that the next few decades of my life would be altered as a result of events that began in an innocuous fashion at the bottom of a hill in the Ardennes Forest, at a time when we believed the Third Reich was done and the lights were about to go on again all over the world.

  IN THE FADING grayness of the day, at the bottom of my foxhole, I opened my notebook on my knee and began writing. My field jacket felt as stiff and cold as canvas in subfreezing weather. I heard a pistol flare pop overhead, but inside the gloom it seemed to give off neither heat nor light and, like most day-to-day events in the army, seemed to signify absolutely nothing.

  The fog in the trees is ghostly, I wrote, so dense and smokelike and pervasive I cannot see more than thirty yards into the forest. The majority of trees are fir and larch and spruce. In the soil, where there are no snowdrifts, I can see stones that are smooth and elongated like loaves of bread, the kind used to make Roman roads or build a peasant’s cottage. Around me are apple and pear and plum and nut trees that are not indigenous to this forest, and I wonder if an early-medieval farmer and his wife and children swinked in the fields close by, living out their lives to ensure the well-being of the man who lived in a castle atop a hill not far away.

  The evening is so quiet I can hear a bough bend and the snow sifting through the branches to the ground. There are rumors that Waffen SS made a probe on our perimeter, within one thousand yards of us. I don’t believe the rumor. SS initiatives are usually accompanied by a large panzer presence. Major Fincher agrees with me. Unfortunately, Major Fincher is widely regarded as a dangerous idiot. At Kasserine Pass he ordered an entire regiment to dig slit trenches instead of foxholes. Tiger tanks overran their position and turned in half circles on top of the trenches and ground sixty men into pulp with their tracks.