Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  She walked down the carpeted hallway to the front entrance, her little purse gripped in front of her like a family coat of arms. It should have been over. With a phone call or two from Roy Wise­heart, the country club probably would have been glad to admit the Pines. But Linda Gail in motion was like an artillery shell. The law of gravity would have its way.

  In this instance, that meant Linda Gail getting into her Cadillac and backing into the grille of an Oldsmobile. Rather than get out and examine the damage, she shifted the hydromatic transmission into low and drove away, tearing the bumper loose from the Oldsmobile and T-boning a Buick at the end of the aisle.

  “So it’s a parking-lot car accident,” I said to Wiseheart. “Her insurance rates will go up. Hershel has had worse problems.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. She slapped a cop in the face,” Wise­heart said. “You don’t slap a Houston cop.”

  “I guess that puts things in a different light.”

  “Do you want me to go down to the police station by myself, or do you want to come, too?” he asked.

  When I arrived at the substation on the edge of River Oaks, Roy Wiseheart was sitting down in a small room with a uniformed police officer. The officer dwarfed the folding chair. His head was the size of a cider jug, his hands as broad as baseball mitts, ridged with knuckles that resembled lead washers. Wiseheart leaned forward and cupped his hand on the officer’s shoulder. “She and her husband are church people. Mr. Pine was at Kasserine Pass and Omaha and the Bulge,” he said. “I’m sure Linda Gail feels like hell about this. Officer, they’re just getting started here in Houston. They’re a little bit insecure. That’s why she was carrying on the way she did. The girl is scared.”

  “She’s insecure because she owns a Cadillac?” the policeman said.

  “I bet they busted their piggy bank to buy it at a used-car lot. She’s got a chance at a movie career. Do you know what this will do to her? I saw the Globe and Anchor on your arm. I flew with Pappy Boyington. How about it, gunny?”

  The policeman stood up. He wore a sky-blue uniform with black flaps on the pockets. The back of his neck was thick and pocked with acne scars. “My wife belongs to the Northside Church of Christ,” he said.

  Wiseheart nodded reverentially.

  “They could use some he’p,” the policeman said.

  “I know exactly where it is. They’re fine people,” Wiseheart replied. “If you’ll give me the name of your pastor, I’d like to give him a ring.”

  Ten minutes later, Wiseheart and I and Linda Gail were back on the sidewalk, across the street from an enormous high school whose lawn was shadowed by live oaks. Linda Gail’s face looked glazed, as though she had just walked out of a meat locker into a warm room. Her Cadillac had been towed.

  “How did you know Hershel was at Omaha Beach?” I said to Roy.

  “You must have told me,” he replied.

  If I did, I had no memory of it.

  “I guess that winds things up here,” he said, looking up and down the street. He tapped his palms together, his fingers spread, his eyebrows raised. “Can I give you a ride?” he said to Linda Gail.

  “That’s very nice of you,” she replied.

  “I’m going right by your house,” I said.

  “On your way to the Heights?” Wiseheart said.

  “I’m supposed to see a friend in River Oaks,” I lied.

  “Well, it’s been quite a morning. I hope everything turns out all right for you, Linda Gail. Call me if I can help in any other way.”

  “Thank you so much. I’ll be forever in your debt,” she said.

  I opened the passenger door of my car for Linda Gail to get inside. She tried to look straight ahead and not let her eyes follow Wise­heart’s Rolls, but there was no mistaking the resentment she felt because I had not let Wiseheart drive her home.

  Neither of us spoke. When I pulled into her driveway, I heard her take a breath as though resuming a routine that was unbearable.

  “Do you want to say something to me, Linda Gail?” I asked.

  “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Then what did you mean?” she asked.

  “Are you and Hershel having problems?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “He loves you.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She stared wanly at the front of her house. “I know what it looks like now. I couldn’t put my hand on it, probably because I wouldn’t let myself admit it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to,” I said.

  “My house. It looks like the public restroom on West Venice Beach. I was there just last week. Now I’m here.”

  “Hershel said you made him wear slippers at the public pool.”

  She turned her head and looked at me like someone awakening from a dream. “What did you say?”

  “I don’t think you know how he lost part of his foot. He and I walked in snow up to our knees in zero-degree weather. He carried Rosita in his arms while his right foot was so swollen with frostbite that he couldn’t unlace his boot.”

  “He told you I asked him to wear slippers at the pool?”

  “His feelings were hurt, Linda Gail.”

  “I didn’t want the children staring at him. I didn’t want to correct them in front of him. So I tried to avoid an unpleasant situation that would embarrass him. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “What good would it do? Talking to either of you is a waste of time, particularly you, Weldon. Do you think it’s wrong to want a better way of life? I never want to go back to the house I grew up in. If you’d lived in my house, you wouldn’t want to, either. During the Depression, we glued cardboard soles on our shoes.”

  “Hershel is a good man. I’m not sure what Roy Wiseheart is,” I said.

  “I want to hit you. Instead, I’m going to forget everything you’ve said. I’m flying on a private plane tonight to Albuquerque. Tomorrow I’ll be on location, and none of this will have happened. Goodbye. Thank you for calling Roy.”

  I wanted to tell her that Rosita’s family had been exterminated by the Nazis, and that I had pulled her from under a pile of corpses, and that Rosita didn’t feel the world owed her anything as a consequence. But I didn’t. For some reason I thought of Bonnie Parker and the way her smile reminded me of someone opening a music box. I guess I tried to remind myself that most people, no matter how offensive they might be, are doing the best they can at the time. It’s a hard precept to follow, and I was certainly not good at it.

  So here’s to you, Linda Gail, I thought. You’ve wrecked three cars, struck a behemoth of a Houston policeman in the face with your bare hand, and are on the edge of entering an adulterous affair with a man married to probably one of the most vicious women in Texas, and it’s not even noon.

  I COULD NOT GET the photograph of my dead father out of my mind. My father was an eccentric man who drank too much and wanted to be a journalist but instead went to work in the oil field. Every night he came home and washed his hands with a brush and Lava soap, as though trying to scrub the oil-and-natural-gas business out of his life. Aside from his drinking, he was good-natured and generous and treated all people equally; he was honest in his dealings with others and deserved better than dying in a bell hole explosion and having his remains disposed of anonymously, his family left to wonder what had happened to him.

  Somebody owed me an answer. I wasn’t sure who. I’d learned a lesson in the Ardennes. When we went up against the panzer corps, we were not fighting only German armor. We had also taken on Stonewall Jackson. Erwin Rommel and his colleagues in martial mischief had studied Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign and had used Tiger tanks in the same way Jackson used cavalry. How egregious can the ironies of history be? Out there in the snowy forests
south of the Belgian border, the right-hand man of Robert E. Lee was guiding the Waffen SS against his countrymen, some of them probably descendants of the Confederate soldiers who were with him when he died at Chancellorsville.

  Jackson’s strategy, as he explained once, was simple: “Mystify, mislead, and surprise.” I thought I might give it a try. I drove back home and ate lunch on the screened porch with Rosita. It was Indian summer, the air tannic with the smell of burning leaves. “I’m going to the office of Dalton Wiseheart this afternoon, then I should head on over to Louisiana,” I said.

  “Is that Roy Wiseheart’s father?” she asked.

  “He’s supposed to be quite a character.”

  “What are you doing, Weldon?”

  “The detective who showed me a death photo of my father worked for him. Mr. Wiseheart needs to be made accountable.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “It’s better you don’t.”

  “Try to stop me.”

  The reddish-brown light that lived in Rosita’s eyes never changed. It didn’t diminish; it didn’t intensify. Every time I looked into her eyes, I thought about the light of the world that Jesus mentions in the Gospels. Dark memories never had their way with her; anger never made her its captive.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “I feel sorry for Hershel. I think Linda Gail is going to destroy both of them.”

  “Whatever they do, they won’t destroy us,” she said. “Do you hear me, Weldon? That can’t happen.”

  DALTON WISEHEART OWNED an office building in downtown Houston but did most of his business on the veranda of the Rice Hotel, where a personal bartender fixed mint juleps for him and his friends while they decided the future for arguably hundreds of thousands of people. His origins and background and education were at odds. He grew up on a large wheat farm on the Texas–New Mexico line, not far from the original XIT Ranch. Journalists liked to use terms such as “homespun” and “pioneer patriarch” in describing him. They took little note of his degrees from Georgia Tech and MIT. They also failed to remember a statement he made about his method of dealing with troublesome people. For clarity of line, it had no equal: “Make them wince.”

  I don’t mean to fault journalists. Like most people who worked for others in that era, they did as they were told. Besides, Dalton Wiseheart’s appearance was deceptive. When we walked out on the veranda, he was dozing in a swayback straw chair, his booted feet up on the rail, a battered cowboy hat over his face, his body half in shadow. One of his aides touched him on the shoulder and told him we were there. His face was as plain as a bowl of porridge. The nose was bulbous and pitted, the teeth long, the bottom lip protruding, as though snuff were tucked inside it. He wore khakis and a long-sleeved denim shirt and wide suspenders, and he had a stomach that made me think of piled bread dough. He took a dark blue handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose in it. “I hate to sleep during the day,” he said. “I wake up with a head full of cobwebs. You’re Roy’s friend?”

  “Weldon Avery Holland,” I said. “This is my wife, Miss Rosita.”

  “Forgive me for not getting up. I’m about half fossil these days,” he said, his gaze lingering on Rosita. He wiped at his nose with his wrist. “What’s this about?”

  “A private detective named Harlan McFey. A hit-and-run driver killed him in north Houston,” I said. Down below I could hear the traffic in the street, a policeman blowing a whistle at an intersection.

  “Yes, I remember him,” Wiseheart said. “He was a bird dog for anybody who’d throw him a bone. Here, sit down. Why are you coming to me about him?”

  “My father was killed in 1934 at the bottom of a bell hole in East Texas. McFey had a photograph of his body. The company my father was working for covered up his death.”

  “My son sent you to me to help find information on your father? That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “McFey worked for you, sir, at least until two years ago. He also worked for your daughter-in-law, Roy’s wife.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and picked up his julep glass from the floor. “Y’all want a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Good for you. Roy’s wife is a different kettle of fish. That’s all I have to say on the subject.”

  “Were any of your companies laying pipe in East Texas in ’34, Mr. Wiseheart?”

  “Probably. You think my people had something to do with your daddy’s death?”

  “That’s what I’d like to determine,” I said.

  Others around us had stopped talking. A white-jacketed black waiter had brought another julep on a tray and was standing motionlessly next to Wiseheart’s chair. “Set it down,” Wiseheart said.

  “Yes, suh,” the waiter replied.

  “Now go back over there by the bar.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  Wiseheart turned back to me. “How’d you make my son’s acquaintance?”

  “He wanted to buy out my company.”

  “I remember the name now. You’re the one with the welding machines. They say your welds never leak. I’m happy for your success, son, but our visit is over. No offense meant. I’ve got a mess of work to do, more mess than work.”

  “Somebody sicced McFey on us. If it wasn’t you, who do you think it was?”

  The awning above the veranda was riffling in the breeze. Wise­heart watched a pigeon glide out of the sunlight into the shadows; his eyes shifted to Rosita, his mouth wrinkling at the corner when he grinned. “What are you?” he asked.

  “Beg your pardon?” she said.

  “You’re either European or British. Which is it?”

  “I grew up in Madrid. You might say I’m Spanish. Some of my family came from Germany.”

  “You’re a handsome woman. I think your husband is a fortunate man. Now I need somebody to prop me up behind my desk so I can get some work done.”

  With the passage of years, I’ve learned that age can be used as either a sword or a shield. Dalton Wiseheart was a master at both.

  As we walked to our car, Rosita put her arm in mine. “Want me to go to Louisiana with you?” she said.

  “I’d like that.”

  “Leave that man alone,” she said.

  “He’ll be hearing from me again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a liar from his hairline down to the soles of his feet,” I said.

  “You underestimate him.”

  “About what? My father’s death?”

  “Lying is probably one of his virtues. If he had his way, I’d be a lampshade.”

  HERSHEL AND I had bought a half interest in a doodlebug rig, a seismograph drill barge with propellers that allowed it to move from location to location, where it would be anchored to the floor of a river or bay with four hydraulic pilings. Once the drill site was established, a long, flat powerboat strung recording cables in both directions from the barge, sinking the instruments to the bottom of the river or the bay. After the exploratory hole was drilled, the deckhands would begin building explosive charges from cans of dynamite that screwed together end to end in sticks of six. A can of primer was attached to one end and screwed into a second and third stick. Then a nitro cap and an electric wire were attached to the last can and the charge dropped down the hole, the cap wire slithering through the driller’s hands as it disappeared inside the pipe.

  That’s when everyone went to the stern or got on the jug boat, and the shooter would holler “Fire in the hole!” and twist the switch on the detonator. The explosion was so powerful, it would slam the iron hull of the barge against the water and send a geyser of sand and brackish water high into the air and often break dishes and cups in the galley. Seconds later, a huge dirty cloud of sulfurous yellow smoke would rise from the water and drift back through the barge; if you breathed it,
the inside of your head would ache for the rest of the day.

  The seismograph crew was working deep in the Atchafalaya Basin, an enormous watershed composed of marsh, saw grass, cypress swamp, rivers, networks of bayous that didn’t have names, inland bays, and miles and miles of flooded tupelo gums and willow trees. The crew worked ten days on the water and five days off. The work was hard and physical and sometimes dangerous; in the summer the crew did it under a blistering sun, and in winter they lived in wet clothes from sunrise to sunset, wading through waist-high swamp while they strung electronic recording cable from a spool on their backs. They were brave and hardworking and never complained about the food or the low pay; most of them had soldiered all over the world and were carefree and irresponsible in the way that children are. When it came to women and matters of race, they had the lowest self-esteem of any group I have ever known. They also got in trouble, often for reasons that made no sense other than a desire to see how much harm they could do to themselves.

  Morgan City, down on the coast, with its Spanish-tile roofs and stucco buildings and palm trees and stilt houses along the Atchafalaya River, looked like a conduit into a nineteenth-century Caribbean postcard, a place where anonymity and a self-congratulatory paganism were a way of life. The bars and the brothels never closed. Slot and racehorse machines were everywhere. The Cajun girls were beautiful and often illiterate and believed any story told to them. Fugitives from the law only had to step on a boat to find themselves one week later in Brownsville or Key West or on the Mexican coast, eluding the law like a cipher disappearing inside a bowl of alphabet soup. What better place for a man who believed he had run out of options?

  Hershel and I had nothing to do with hiring the crew on the doodlebug barge we had bought a half interest in. That didn’t mean we weren’t responsible for what they did. He and I were in the pilothouse on the barge when one of the drillers got into it with a jug hustler on the deck. The party chief was away on the quarter boat, and we were the only form of authority on the barge. I had seen the driller in action before. His nickname was Tex because he had the word “Texas” tattooed in large blue letters across his back, not unlike the food-dye lettering on the rind of a smoke-cured ham. A geologist nobody liked had flown his pontoon plane right over the top of the barge, causing everybody to scatter except Tex. He climbed up on the drill with a monkey wrench, and when the plane came in for another swoop, he threw the wrench, barely missing the windshield and the geologist’s face.