Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

“Are you sleeping with Linda Gail or not?”

  He said something I didn’t expect: “If I had my way, I’d be you. I wouldn’t be married to the woman I live with, and I wouldn’t have my father’s last name.”

  “You always seem to slip the punch,” I said.

  “Slipping the punch is the name of the game,” he replied. “Come on, you can be my cut man. Check out that guy’s skin. It’s luminescent. It reminds me of an exhumed corpse. He could pass for a human slug. This is going to be great.”

  “Why don’t you say it louder?”

  The ex-convict boxed under the name of Irish Danny Flannigan. His body was free of tattoos and wrapped like latex, his armpits shaved, his lats as ridged and hard as whalebone. He was flat-chested, his small eyes buried deep in his face. He danced up and down in his corner, rotating his neck, waiting on Roy. I had no doubt he was the kind of man you never provoked or underestimated.

  “I think this is a mistake,” I said.

  “Don’t be hard on him. I bet he’s a fine fellow,” Roy replied.

  Flannigan worked his lips around his mouthpiece and hit himself in the face with both gloves, pow, pow, to show his indifference to pain and his frustration with the delay.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Roy said, climbing into the ring. “Tell me what to do. I’m a bit new to this.”

  “There’s the spit bucket on the apron in case you want a drink,” Flannigan said.

  “Really?” Roy replied. “Oh, excuse me. You meant that as a joke.”

  “Let me know if I hurt you, and I’ll back off. Or tell the ref. You look like a bleeder. We try to screen out the tomato cans here. You a bleeder, pal?”

  “That could be. I hope not,” Roy said.

  A Mexican kid pulled the string on the bell, and Irish Danny Flannigan jabbed Roy once in the forehead, once on the eye, then hit him with a right cross that folded Roy’s face against his shoulder and bounced him off the ropes. The next blow caught Roy square on the nose and splattered blood all over his chest and shoulders.

  “You all right?” Flannigan said, stepping back. “Maybe you ought to go lie down. You don’t look too good.”

  Roy swung at him and missed. Flannigan hit him with a combination of blows that were devastating, pinning him against the turnbuckle, working on his rib cage and face and then his rib cage again, hooking him under the heart, the kind of blow that’s like a piece of broken wood traveling through the vitals. Roy was bent over, trying to cover up, blood running from his nose over his upper lip.

  A referee got between the two of them. Other fighters in the gym had stopped their workout to watch. I climbed up on the apron. “How about it, ref?” I said.

  “You want to stop, Mr. Wiseheart?” he said.

  Roy showed no sign that he’d heard the referee. He went into a crouch, his gloves in front of his face, his elbows tucked in. He took two shots in the head for each one he threw. Flannigan didn’t try to hide his intentions; he was going to break every bone in Roy’s face. Then I realized I was about to see a side of Roy Wiseheart I had not seen. When the bell rang, he didn’t go to his corner. The referee tried to grab his shoulder, but Roy pushed him away.

  Flannigan realized the game had changed, and turned around and faced Roy. “This is the way you want it? Fine with me,” he said. “Which funeral home does your family use?”

  Maybe it was luck. Or maybe Roy was faster and smarter in the ring than anyone had thought. He feinted with his right, as a novice would, then shifted his weight and fired a left straight from the shoulder into Flannigan’s jaw, knocking his mouthpiece over the ropes. Flannigan was stunned. Somebody in the back of the gym laughed. Flannigan came back hard, windmilling his punches, sweat flying from Roy’s hair with each impact. By all odds, either from the number of blows Roy took or out of self-preservation, he should have gone down. Flannigan knew it, too. He acted as though he had won the fight and started through the ropes for the dressing room. Roy picked up a wood stool from the apron and brained him with it.

  It didn’t end there. Roy climbed out of the ring with Flannigan, flinging the stool at his head and missing, then pulling off his gloves and clubbing Flannigan in the face with his bare right fist, squashing his nose, splitting his eyebrow. Flannigan toppled into the metal chairs, the spit bucket rolling across the floor. I had never seen anything like it. Flannigan’s people had to form a human wall to protect him.

  I got in front of Roy, my left hand pushing against his sternum. His stench was eye-watering. “Where are your clothes?” I said.

  “In the car. The locker room here is full of cockroaches.”

  I shoved him ahead of me, out the door.

  “Jesus, what’s the hurry?” he said.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I had a blackout or something. It’s a gym. What’s the big deal? The guy had it coming.”

  “You could have fractured his skull.”

  “What I said in there? You don’t hold it against me, do you?”

  “Said what? What are you talking about?”

  “I said I was disappointed by the remark you made. You know, about my keeping an apartment for romantic interludes? You used a vulgar term for it. That’s not you, Weldon. Fellows like you set the standards for the rest of us. I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  I couldn’t begin to explain what went on inside Roy Wiseheart’s head.

  He felt his jaw before he got in his Rolls-Royce. “Boy, that guy’s got a punch.” Then he laughed.

  ON THE WAY home, I stopped at a neighborhood drugstore for a box of aspirin. In those days we seldom locked our cars or homes. Perhaps we felt that the slaughter of thirty million people had somehow driven evil from our shores and that V-J Day marked the restoration of the isolationist policies we had clung to during the prewar era. Didn’t our prosperity indicate as much? Wasn’t there a divine hand at work in our lives?

  I sat at the soda fountain and drank a cherry milk shake and listened to Hank Williams on the jukebox and tried to forget the bloody business I had witnessed at the boxing gym. The doors of the drugstore were open, and the interior was breezy and cool, the comic books on the magazine rack ruffling. Across the street, stubborn kids who refused to go with the season were playing baseball in a park, the pitcher taking an exaggerated full windup before his delivery, smacking the ball into the catcher’s glove as fast as a BB. I watched a seedy man wearing a hat and wire-framed dark glasses ride a bicycle past the window on the sidewalk. He was also wearing cloth gardening gloves. A moment later, I saw him stop his bicycle and look directly at me. His face was expressionless, like a death’s-head, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his face as deeply lined as a prune. He tossed a package wrapped with twine and brown paper through the open window of my automobile.

  By the time I got outside, he had rounded the corner and disappeared on the other side of the baseball diamond, like a satyr working his mischief among the innocent and seeking another vale in which to play. I got behind the wheel and picked up the package from the passenger seat. It was thin, perhaps fifteen by fifteen inches in width and breadth, the paper stiff and neatly folded on the corners, the twine snipped and tied in a square knot.

  I opened my pocketknife and cut the twine and peeled back the paper gingerly. There were no wires, no capsules containing explosive gelatins, no suspicious devices that I could see, only a square tin box. At the bottom of the lid was a small German swastika. I took off the lid and removed a reel of movie film from the box.

  There are times in your life when you know, without any demonstrable evidence, that you are in the presence of genuine evil. It is not generated by demons, nor does it have its origins in the Abyss. It lives in the breast of our fellow man and takes on many disguises, but its intention is always the same: to rob the innocent of their faith in humanity and
to destroy the light and happiness that all of us seek.

  To watch the film was to do the bidding of iniquitous men. To destroy it was to preempt any chance of finding out who had sent it. I drove to a photography store owned by a family friend who had been a member of the OSS and had parachuted into the Po Valley in the last days of the Italian campaign. “Can you put this on a projector?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I’d like to know what for,” he said.

  “An anonymous person dropped it on the seat of my automobile. I have no idea what’s on it.”

  My friend tapped his fingernail on the tin container. “I’ve seen these cans before. They were carried by German army combat photographers, sometimes by guys who worked for Joseph Goebbels. Some of them shot footage in the camps, then doctored it. You don’t want to see the footage that wasn’t doctored.”

  “I walked into a camp right after the SS pulled out. I’m not worried about the content of a newsreel, doctored or undoctored.”

  He placed the reel on a projector in the back room and aimed it at a small screen on the wall. His thumb rested on the switch. “Is there a reason I should leave?”

  “None that I know of.”

  He clicked the switch. The footage was in black and white and set in a large room with three beds in it. At first the lens was partially blocked by a man who had a head like a white bowling ball and a thick neck spiked with pig bristles. He wore suspenders and jackboots and was drinking from a stein and eating a sausage, his porcine face split with a grin, his tombstone teeth shiny under a lightbulb suspended from the ceiling. Two naked young women were sitting side by side on the edge of a bed, their faces turned from the camera. One had her arm around the waist of the other.

  An SS colonel walked past the lens, his shoulders erect, a cigarette held in front of him, the way a European gentleman would smoke. The two women were taken to separate beds, where one was slapped repeatedly in the face by the man with the beer stein and the other was systematically degraded and mounted by the colonel.

  “I don’t think this is the kind of crap either one of us needs to see,” my friend said.

  “I’ll watch it by myself,” I replied.

  “Turn it off when you’ve had enough. We need to find the guy who left this in your car.”

  I didn’t answer. He started to leave the room. Then we saw another woman appear on the screen. She was wearing a dress that went almost to her ankles, and a Spanish blouse, and pearls around her neck, and a white rose in her hair. I felt as though a sliver of ice had been pushed into my heart.

  “I’m going to turn it off, Weldon,” my friend said.

  “Leave it alone.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself, buddy.”

  “I’m fine. I appreciate the help you’ve given me. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.”

  He closed the door behind him. I could hardly bear to look at the screen. Rosita was undressing directly in front of the camera; then she and the SS colonel re-created all the fantasies that a perverse and misogynistic and depraved sex addict was capable of imagining. The film lasted nineteen minutes. When the colonel rose from her body, she washed him with a towel and a pan of water while he combed his hair in a mirror.

  I took the reel off the projector and replaced it in the tin container. Then I sat down in a wood chair, staring at the floor, a train whistle blowing inside my head. When I closed my eyes, I saw a snowfield under a blazing moon and a primeval forest that was dark and green and pure and smelled of colossal trees reaching into the clouds, the way the earth probably smelled before the first man despoiled it with his scat.

  I got up and tucked the container under my arm and walked out to my automobile with the precision of a drunk man making his way along the edge of a precipice. I heard my friend calling to me from the door of his shop, but the words were like the underwater sounds you hear in a swimming pool when you have caught your foot in the drain and think you are about to drown.

  Chapter

  17

  THE PHYSICIAN HAD told Linda Gail the sedatives would allow her to sleep without dreaming and to arise rested and fresh in the morning. But that was not how she felt now. The light outside was brittle and harsh, the inside of the house too warm, even though she had opened all the windows. Her skin was clammy, her breath sour, her coffee cup trembling on the saucer when she set it down.

  She had awakened in the predawn hours from a harrowing dream, one in which she was covered with tentacles that searched in the cavities of her body and wrapped around her chest and face and squeezed the light from her eyes.

  All of this was Jack Valentine’s fault. After he had filmed her on the gallery of the general store, he had taken her to dinner and then to a private club in Bogalusa. She had never had a vodka Collins. The cherries and orange twists and crushed ice and the sweetness of the mix were wonderful. Perhaps she drank three. Or was it five? Her throat was cold, her skin warm, her nipples hard. When he placed his hand on her thigh under the table, she clasped it as she would the hand of a friend. He told her what the ocean looked like from the deck of a house on the cliffs of Malibu. He showed her the photographs in the celluloid windows of his wallet: Jack Valentine standing next to Tom Mix, both of them wearing tall-crown snow-white Stetsons; Deanna Durbin handing him a Coca-Cola on a tray; Bob Steel showing him how to load a six-gun. She hardly remembered what occurred later at the motor court.

  Or at least that was what she told herself. In the middle of the night, she had gotten up and gone to the bathroom and realized that something terrible had happened and that she was in a place she had never seen and that there were scratch marks on the tops of her shoulders and a soreness inside her like a shard of broken glass. Her stomach was nauseated, the backs of her thighs shaking, her face a bloodless white balloon she hardly recognized in the mirror.

  She told Valentine at breakfast that they were adults who had made a mistake and they would treat their situation as such. That’s what adults did, didn’t they? Whatever had occurred was the result of circumstances that were unplanned and nobody’s fault. They would remain friends. He was a nice man. If he didn’t wish to introduce her to his fellow directors and producers in Hollywood, she wouldn’t hold it against him.

  While she spoke to him across a plate of eggs and greasy bacon that made her sick to look at, he gazed out the café window, a merry gleam in his blue-green eyes, eyes she had associated with a buccaneer on the Spanish Main.

  “Do you find this humorous?” she asked.

  “I guess I shouldn’t suggest the hair of the dog that bit you,” he replied.

  “I think I’ll go now,” she said. “You can leave me out of your documentary. I’m going to erase the last twenty-four hours from my memory and restart my life without any of this in it. Good-bye, Mr. Valentine.”

  He clenched her wrist as she started to rise from the chair, his eyes still focused out the window. “You’re going to Hollywood, and the world is going to be your oyster. It’s your destiny, Miss Linda. You’ve got it all. Do you have any idea what the average Gump would pay to see a sweet-faced girl like you in a negligee?” He held up his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “You’re that far away from having your name on every marquee in the country. Don’t throw it away.”

  Now it was obvious that Hershel knew of her infidelity and that Valentine had sullied her name with anyone he could. She could have confessed, but she saw no reason that she should carry the responsibility, or the odium, for an act that was not the result of a conscious choice. Plus, she would hurt Hershel, she told herself. Yes, she needed to protect Hershel.

  There was a problem in her thought processes. After she and Valentine had left a cottage party on the beach north of Malibu, he made another pass at her, this time for a go-round in the backseat of his convertible. He had been smoking marijuana and drinking whiskey and had put his arm around her shoulders and was walking her t
oward the sand dune where his vehicle was parked, as though their coupling were a foregone conclusion. “We’ll do it au naturel, out in the fresh air,” he said.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” she replied. “You’re drunk and you smell bad. As far as skill in the sack is concerned, your reputation among the extras is between a D-minus and an F-plus. You avoided getting an F only because of the Japanese rubbers you supposedly use.”

  “You’re fast on your feet, kid. But there’s a little matter you’ve never latched on to. Do you believe you got your contract because of your brains or the space between your front teeth? The people who wanted your name on a contract had other reasons, and it wasn’t that heart-shaped twat, either, although they’ll probably get to it eventually.”

  He got in his convertible and drove away, stranding her on the beach. The wind was cold and blowing hard, full of sand that stung her eyes and invaded her person. The ocean was as black as satin, lustrous when the moon peeked out from a cloud, the waves welling over the rocks along the shore, forming pools where trapped baitfish skittered like handfuls of silvery dimes thrown on the water. One hundred yards away, the party at the cottage was still in progress. Should she go back and ask for a ride from people she hardly knew, signaling to all of them the squalid nature of her relationship with a man like Jack Valentine?

  She walked up the incline among huge wind-sculpted formations that resembled abstract works of art and came out on the highway and began walking back to Los Angeles, ignoring the backdraft of trucks that sucked past her. At dawn a police cruiser picked her up and a patrolman drove her home. He was young and had olive skin and a dimple in his chin and sun-bleached hair and was obviously impressed when she told him about her acting career. “Sounds like you’re on your way,” he said.

  “I bet you’re from the South,” she said. She was riding in front with him.

  “You caught my accent, I guess,” he said.

  “No, I can tell because you’re a gentleman. They seem in short supply out here. I grew up on a plantation in Louisiana. All the young men I knew were very much like yourself—courteous and genteel. You’ve been terribly kind.”