Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  “As you wish, my friend,” he said.

  I reached into my coat pocket and took out a small felt-covered box. “This belonged to my grandmother. My mother gave it to me just before I shipped out. She said, ‘If you meet the right girl, give her this.’”

  “You’re asking me to marry you?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. I actually think it’s already a done deal.”

  “A what?”

  “You’re the most magnificent woman I’ve ever known. I’ve never seen eyes like yours. I’ve never known anyone as brave. Since last March, I’ve had you in my mind every minute of every day. You think I’m just going to walk away? That’s a ridiculous idea.”

  “You know almost nothing about me.”

  “I know everything about you. You radiate light. You’re unafraid. You probably have an IQ of over 160.” I took the ring out of the box. It was set with two diamonds and two sapphires. “How about it, Rosita? You could get stuck with worse than me. You’ll love Texas. I was thinking about getting us a place down on the Gulf. It’s like the Riviera without the riffraff.”

  And that’s where and how we got married, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, not far from the tomb of Napoleon and the bells Quasimodo swung on, in the last week of October 1945, in a European city where the ashes from chimney pots rose into the sky, perhaps as a reminder of the past or as a harbinger of the future.

  Chapter

  7

  BY CHRISTMAS EVE of the same year I had been processed out of the army and we had taken up residence at Grandfather’s ranch. At sunrise the fields and the barn and trees had been limed with frost, the stock tank by the windmill glazed with ice. As the sun rose higher into a flawless blue sky, the day warmed and the trees began ticking with water; steam rose from the tank and squirrels began racing about in the pecan orchard. It was another fine winter day in a land where all four seasons could visit us within a week’s duration. From the front porch I watched a Western Union messenger come up the dirt road on a service cycle. He dismounted and pulled his goggles up on his face with his thumb, the skin white around his eyes. “Beautiful day, huh, Mr. Holland?” he said.

  “None better,” I said.

  I tipped him and sat down on the steps and opened the telegram and read it. There are moments when you make decisions that seem inconsequential. Later you discover that your life has been changed in an inalterable way by a choice as arbitrary as not dropping a message in a drawer and forgetting about it. I reread the telegram, then folded it and stuck it in my shirt pocket. Let go of the past, I told myself.

  Unfortunately, upon my return to civilian life, I had entered a troubling period marked by indecision and depression. At my age, the idea of sitting in a classroom and listening to a professor lecture on books I had probably already read did not seem very appealing. Also, I had begun to dream every third or fourth night about the war. I didn’t tell Rosita about my dreams, nor did I mention them to my mother or to Grandfather. One night I sleepwalked into the kitchen and woke up only when Rosita turned on the light. I was at the breakfast table, my ears roaring with the sound of tank treads, Grandfather’s ancient pistol in my hand.

  Now Rosita was sitting behind me in a rocker. She was wearing jeans and half-top suede boots I had bought her, a magazine on her lap.

  “Want to take a ride to Kerrville?” I said.

  “What for?” she asked.

  “Hershel Pine is coming in on the bus and wants to get together,” I replied.

  “Is he all right?”

  It wasn’t an unreasonable question, considering the times. The revisionists had not had adequate time to rewrite our recent history, and for many of us who had been participants, who knew war for the dirty business it was, resuming old relationships was sometimes another way of keeping the wounds green.

  I took the telegram from my pocket and unfolded it and looked again at the words pasted in strips across the pale yellow paper. “He says, ‘Told you I would pay you back.’”

  IT TOOK AN hour and a half on the old road, most of it unpaved, to reach the café in Kerrville that served as the bus stop for our intrastate line. When Hershel stepped down from the bus, he was wearing an ill-fitting suit, the kind you could buy off a Robert Hall rack for twelve dollars, and a clip-on bow tie and brown shoes that didn’t go with the suit. The backs of his hands were tanned and freckled, the top of his forehead pale from wearing a hat in the sun.

  He carried a cardboard tube and a suitcase held together with a belt. “Y’all are a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “The docs took off three of my toes. I could go the rest of my life without seeing snow again. How you like Texas, Miss Rosita?”

  “Just call me Rosita, Hershel. It’s very nice to see you again,” she said. “We’ve thought of you often.”

  “That’s kind of you,” he said. He hadn’t shaken hands and clearly felt awkward. He set down his suitcase and stuck out his hand to Rosita, then to me, his face coloring.

  I patted him on the shoulder. “What do you have there in the tube?”

  “Designs,” he replied.

  “Why do you keep looking at the bus?” I asked.

  “A peculiar fellow was sitting in the back,” he replied. “Maybe I’ve got a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies. That’s what my wife says.”

  “Let me help you with your bag,” I said.

  “That’s him now, that tall unshaved guy going into the café. I’d swear his eyes were burning holes in the back of my neck.”

  “He looks like a regular guy to me, Hershel.”

  “Maybe so. Linda Gail, that’s my wife, she says I’m a worrywart.”

  “What are the designs?” I asked.

  “I’ll show them to you when we can relax. Boy, the sky out here is sure big.”

  I wondered how long it would take for the subject of money to come up.

  BUT I WAS unfair to Hershel. He was obviously happy to see us, and filled with childlike curiosity about everything he saw on the drive to the ranch. I suspected the paintless Victorian home and six hundred acres I associated with “genteel poverty” was the equivalent of a kingdom to him. As soon as he set down his suitcase in the hallway, he went into the dining room and asked permission to spread the rolls from his tube on the table, as though he had to justify his presence in our home.

  “What you’re looking at is the diagram for the welding machine that created the Tiger tank, Loot,” he said. “See, the Germans were two or three steps ahead of the process we use. They tacked together homogenous rolled nickel-steel plates that nothing short of a point-blank hit from an antitank shell could crack. You with me so far?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  I could see Grandfather looking at us from the kitchen, his expression bemused. He was almost ninety, his eyes like blue milk, his calves swollen into eggplants.

  “Before the war, we were still laying natural gas pipe bolted together at the joint, Lieutenant,” Hershel said. “I’ve got seventeen of these German arc welding machines located. It’s just a matter of transporting them into the country. I got a deal on a fleet of army-surplus flatbeds, too.”

  “It’s Weldon,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. I can get us German steel that we can use as center cutters on our own ditching machines. The next step is obtaining patents for the modifications on the arc welders. Sir, you have no idea how big this can be.”

  I nodded. “There’s a hurdle we haven’t gotten to yet, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, sir. A big one. We need thirty, maybe forty thousand dollars to get out of the chute.” He looked straight ahead, his face tight.

  Rosita was standing between us, gazing at the designs of the welding machines. “Who are the people selling you the machines?”

  “Krauts,” he said.

  “Were they members of the Nazi Party?” she sai
d.

  He kept his eyes on the table. “They could have been. I didn’t ask. For me, the war is over, Miss Rosita.”

  “I’ve got an uncle who’s a wildcatter,” I said.

  I heard Grandfather work his way into the room on his walking canes. “Satchel, did you sustain an appreciable amount of brain damage while you were over there?” he said.

  WE ATE DINNER late that night, and Rosita said little at the table. Upstairs, she put on her nightgown and lay down on the mattress and turned on the bed lamp. It was ceramic, its white glaze painted with green and purple flowers. She touched the flowers with the tips of her fingers.

  “Is something bothering you?” I asked.

  “Those machines have blood on them.”

  “They’re just machines. They’re neither good nor bad.”

  “You’ve given up your plans to enter graduate school, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You have the soul of a poet,” she said. “You’d be a wonderful teacher.”

  “The GI Bill pays eighty-five dollars a month for a married man. Can you imagine living in New York on that?”

  “We can move to Austin. You can attend the state university.”

  “Hershel and I are going to see my uncle Cody tomorrow afternoon. I want you to come with us.”

  “You don’t need me for this.”

  “I want you to understand my family. Some of them have led violent lives. I’m not like them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love and admire them. Uncle Cody left home when he was twelve years old and became a vagabond. In a freight car outside St. Louis, he offered to share his food with two drifters. They thanked him by taking his food and trying to rape him. He killed both of them with a pocketknife. In New York, he was a bodyguard for Owney Madden, the man who owned the Cotton Club. Today he’s a wealthy oilman. I’m going to ask him what he thinks of Hershel’s plans.”

  “Why are you telling me all these things?”

  “I’m not sure, Rosita. My family is different. We were never spectators.”

  She turned on her side, her back to me, her hip rounded under the sheet. Her shoulders were white and as cool and smooth to the touch as marble.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.

  “You don’t realize the gift you have.”

  She reached out and clicked off the lamp.

  CODY HOLLAND’S RANCH, one of several he owned, was a long drive, almost to the Gulf of Mexico, a spot he’d obviously chosen to create the home and the life he had never enjoyed as a boy. It was almost dark when we passed Goliad, the site of the execution of 350 Texas soldiers under the command of James Fannin on Palm Sunday, 1836. A winter storm was building in the south as we pulled up to a brightly lit diner on the highway, within sight of Matagorda Island. The palm fronds down by the beach were whipping in the wind against a black sky that rippled with electricity.

  My uncle had not invited us to his home. He was an untrusting man, unpredictable, sentimental, often controlling and quick to anger. He was also feared. Oddly, though, I had never felt uncomfortable around him. I think I saw the orphan in his eyes, because like my mother, Cody was one of the children Grandfather had let founder by the wayside.

  Rosita and I and Hershel and my uncle sat in a cigarette-burned red vinyl booth in back and drank long-necked Jax beer and avoided talking business until after we had finished eating. Hershel’s level of ill ease was palpable. His face had an oily shine; he constantly touched at his mouth with a folded paper napkin and rubbed his neck, as though he wore a serf’s collar. “Is the fishing right good down here?” he said.

  “Speckled trout and gafftop catfish, mostly,” Cody said. He was built like a door. His hair was wavy and black, silver in places; he looked directly into people’s faces whether they were offended or not.

  “I’d like to get in on that,” Hershel said. He stared down at the steak gravy and blood and pink-edged remnants of the T-bone on his plate, unable to think of anything else to say.

  The waitress put the check on the edge of the table. It stayed there, absorbing the wet rings left by our beer bottles.

  “What’s this pipeline venture you’ve got in mind?” Cody asked.

  In the background, somebody dropped a nickel into the jukebox. Harry Choate’s famous recording of “La Jolie Blon” began playing.

  “I’ve got a way to put pipe in the ground that will stay there a hundred years without a leak,” Hershel said. “I’m talking about the same weld that held the King Tiger tank together. I was doing both tack and hot-pass welds when I was sixteen years old, Mr. Holland. It’s something I always had a talent for.”

  “Is that a fact?” Cody said.

  “Yes, sir, you can take it to the bank,” Hershel said.

  There was a pause. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Hershel’s passion was that of a true believer, in the same way that the Puritans saw work as a virtue and idleness as sin and failure as a preview of perdition. Hershel had probably never heard of Cotton Mather, but in a large crowd, one quickly would have recognized the other.

  While Hershel talked, Cody wrote on a paper napkin. Then he shook a Lucky Strike out of a pack and lit it, looking at the figures on the napkin, without offering a cigarette to anyone else. “What’s your feeling about all this, Miss Rosita?” he asked.

  “How about not addressing me as though I’m a character in Gone With the Wind?” she replied.

  Cody removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “You seem like an intelligent woman. I want to know what you think.”

  “I think Hershel is a good man. I think you’re fortunate that he’s come to you rather than to someone else.”

  “I didn’t get that.”

  “You’re rude and you’re arrogant, Mr. Holland. You radiate a sense of self-satisfaction that’s hard to take.”

  Cody tipped the ashes from his cigarette on the side of his plate. I took the dinner check from the table and put it in my pocket.

  “Give me that,” Cody said.

  Rosita, what have you done? I thought.

  “This is the way I see it,” Cody said, placing the napkin he had doodled on in front of Hershel and me. “Thirty to forty thousand won’t cut it. You’ll need bulldozers and side booms, and you want to buy them, not rent them. At the least, you’ll need seventy thousand dollars. I’ll lend it to you at four percent interest. I’ll need eighty percent of that to be guaranteed by collateral. Since you don’t have any, you’ll have to factor me in as a fifty-one-percent partner. I don’t know if that suits y’all or not.”

  “I might have to study on that, Uncle Cody.”

  “You don’t want a relative as your partner? You just want to borrow his money?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “You know who’s funding the major drilling around here now?” he said. “It’s not the banks; it’s insurance companies. Talk to those sons of bitches.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that language in front of my wife,” I said.

  He tapped the ashes off his cigarette again, his expression neutral. He looked out the window. “I wouldn’t want to get caught on the highway in that storm.”

  “Grandfather said if we went to the bank, he’d put up the ranch as collateral. Except the ranch just isn’t worth the kind of money we need.”

  Cody put out his cigarette on his plate. Waves were capping out on Matagorda Bay, exploding in geysers of foam against a jetty that looked like a long black spinal cord protruding from the water. “He said he’d do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” I replied.

  “Tell him it’s not necessary.”

  “What isn’t?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t need to put up the ranch. Not with the bank, not with me. I don’t need a percentage of your compa
ny, either.”

  “Do we got us a deal, Mr. Holland?” Hershel said.

  “You deaf, son?” Cody said. He got up from the booth and placed three ten-dollar bills by the cash register and walked out into the rain. He turned around and looked at us, the rain clicking on his hat. “Y’all want to come up to the house?”

  AT SUNRISE THE next morning, I fired up the woodstove in the kitchen and began cooking a large breakfast for everyone. Grandfather was the first to come downstairs, sitting down heavily at the breakfast table, his chin razor-nicked, a piece of bloody toilet paper stuck to it. I poured him a cup of coffee and placed the cup on a saucer and set the saucer and cup in front of him. He poured coffee into the saucer and blew on it, then drank from the saucer. I had told him late the previous night of the agreement we had struck with Uncle Cody. Grandfather had said nothing in reply.

  “You want a pork chop or ham with your eggs, Grandfather?” I asked.

  “Whatever you’re fixing.”

  “You’re the one who has to eat it.”

  “How’s Cody doing?”

  “He sure has a pretty home.”

  “You got to see it?”

  “He invited us over after we had supper with him. No one can call him ordinary.”

  “Cody doesn’t forgive. He harbors resentments. I stole his childhood, Satch, just like I did your mother’s.”

  “I don’t think they see it that way,” I lied.

  “I want you to listen to me about the oil people you’re fixing to involve yourself with. Give them the chance, they’ll tear you boys up. They might be from Texas, but they’re not our kind of people. They’ll wave every flag they can get their hands on and tell you they’re patriots. Don’t be taken in. They’re not political. They’re just downright mean.”

  Chapter

  8

  SPRING CAME EARLY in 1946, the year that arguably marked the inception of the New American Empire, and with it came the development of our company, which Hershel insisted on naming the Dixie Belle Pipeline Company. We underbid two contractors in Louisiana, and by April we were cutting a right-of-way through wooded areas north of the Atchafalaya Basin. The night before the first weld was made on our first pipe joint, we celebrated by going to a Cajun dance hall in Opelousas.