Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  Chapter

  22

  I CAN’T TELL you what evil is. I’ll leave that to the theologians. But I can tell you what it looks like in human form. In this instance its name was Hubert Timmons Slakely, the uniformed cop who arrested and molested my wife.

  We had left Grandfather at home and driven to a miniature golf course a few blocks away. There was still light in the sky, and it was cool enough for a jacket. The stars were out, and families were putting golf balls down felt-lined corridors into imitation greens outfitted with toy windmills and tiny bridges over watercourses and tunnels that plunked the ball into a cup. I had no reason to worry about Grandfather. He enjoyed listening to the radio by himself and reading his encyclopedias and putting up preserves from our garden or the vegetable market, and we had told the next-door neighbor where we would be in case of an emergency.

  Earlier I’d said I didn’t expect to see Officer Slakely again. I was dead wrong. Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.

  Grandfather was sitting up in bed with his spectacles on, the King James Bible propped open on his stomach, when he heard the house creak and felt the air in his room decompress. Someone had just opened and closed the front door.

  “Is that you, Weldon?” he said.

  A tall man wearing a pearl-gray short-brim Stetson and a sharkskin suit and a black shirt with red flowers on it appeared in the bedroom doorway. His hands were big, the back of the right hand tattooed with a string of blue stars. He was smoking a cigarette. “Howdy,” he said.

  Grandfather nodded.

  “Where’s your ashtray?” the tall man asked.

  “I don’t have one,” Grandfather replied.

  “You must be the former Texas Ranger.”

  Grandfather didn’t reply.

  “I didn’t figure you for a student of Scripture,” the visitor said.

  “I was looking for the loopholes.”

  The visitor’s cigarette was almost down to his fingers. “I got to remember that one. Where’s your grandson at?”

  “He comes and goes. Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in our house?”

  “I’m Detective Hubert Timmons Slakely of the Houston City Police Department.”

  “You knocked and walked in? Or you didn’t bother to knock and just walked in?”

  “I knocked and thought I heard someone say come in.”

  “Are you the one who arrested Rosita in Hermann Park?”

  “It’s my opinion she got herself arrested.”

  “When did you become a plainclothes?”

  “I passed the test a few months back but only got promoted recently. It’s a little late for me, though. I’m fixing to retire and buy a beach home down by Padre Island.”

  Grandfather worked himself up on the pillow, one hand propped behind him. The detective wore a half smile on his face. He unhooked the window screen and flipped his cigarette into the yard. “What’s an old fart like you doing by himself?” he said.

  “Listening to the radio.”

  “You were listening to the radio.” The detective clicked it off. “When are they due home?”

  “Who?”

  “Your grandson and his wife.”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  “Then why did you just look at the clock?”

  “I listen to Lux Radio Theatre every Sunday night.”

  “It’s not Sunday.”

  “That’s probably why it didn’t come on. What do you want with my grandson?”

  “I’d like to make things easier for him and the little woman.” Slakely sniffed and pinched at one nostril. “What’s that odor?”

  “A pot of stewed tomatoes and peppers I have on slow boil.”

  “I think it’s you. Somebody hasn’t been taking care of you. You need somebody to wash you. You want me to take you to the tub and do it for you?”

  Grandfather could see the neighbor’s lighted windows through the live oaks and pecan trees in the side yard. He could hear music playing on his neighbor’s radio and leaves tumbling across the yard, striking the screens.

  “An old man is a nasty thing,” Slakely said. “He yellows the sheets and leaves his stink in everything he lies on.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “How much what?”

  “Money.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of stock options. You know what? I’m going to bring a washcloth in here and wipe you down.”

  “Have you ever been shot?”

  “A few have tried.”

  “I killed six men. I wish things had worked out otherwise. But they didn’t give me much selection. Has it ever been that way with you?”

  “Is there supposed to be some kind of message in that?”

  “You could call it that. You’re about two seconds away from getting your head blown off.”

  “Get up, old man. I’m taking you in the bathroom. I think you messed yourself.”

  Grandfather peeled the sheet off his hand and forearm. “I had it converted for conventional ammunition in 1880. I shot one of Bill Dalton’s gang off a windmill with it. He fell straight down into the cattle tank.” He raised the barrel of the revolver so it was pointed at Slakely’s face. He cocked the hammer with his thumb.

  “It looks like a relic to me,” Slakely said.

  “If you can see into the chambers, you’ll notice there’s an ‘X’ cut in the nose of each round. It’s more or less the equivalent of getting hit with four pieces of buckshot. The exit wound is the size of a silver dollar. In your case, there won’t be an exit wound. Your skull and your brain matter will be on the wall.”

  “Hold on.” Slakely stepped back involuntarily, trying not to raise his hand in front of him.

  “I think you should not move around too much,” Grandfather said.

  “I just came here to talk, not for trouble.”

  “No, you’re here to bring grief to innocent people. You put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog. There’s no cure for your kind. Where’s your weapon?”

  “I’m not carrying one,” Slakely said. He opened the flaps of his coat. His face was tight, the color gone, his pulse jumping visibly in his throat, like a damaged moth. “See? You need to put that thumb buster away.”

  “Where’s your throw-down?”

  “I don’t carry one. I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “Pull up your pants cuffs.”

  Slakely tugged on his trouser leg, his face turned to one side, his forehead and profiled cheek shiny with moisture.

  “Unstrap it with your left hand and let it fall to the floor,” Grandfather said.

  Slakely leaned over and released the strap on a small holster attached to his right ankle. It contained a .32 revolver. The sight was filed off, the grips wrapped with black tape.

  “Step away from it,” Grandfather said.

  “Whatever you want. My visit here is according to protocol. There’s no need for—”

  “How many times have you planted one of those?”

  “I never had to. I never shot anyone. Not as a police officer.”

  “I think you’re a liar. Close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I pull this trigger, I don’t want to see the look in your eyes. The men I killed all had the same look when they died. They knew their lives and souls were forfeit and there was no way they could change what was about to happen. That’s why I read Scripture. It allows me to forget that look. Then a simpleton like you shows up and taints my spirituality.”

  “I apologize.”

  “You’ve got another problem. Like most white trash, you’re disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance. If you didn’t have the nigras to feel superior to, most of y’all would kill yourselves. I’m done talking. You want to say
anything before I shoot you?”

  WE CAME THROUGH the front door seconds before Grandfather probably would have pulled the trigger. I wished Grandfather had killed him. There is no downside to the death of a man like Slakely, except the body is an insult to the earth in which it’s buried.

  “Get that gun away from him,” Slakely said.

  “What are you doing in our house?” I asked.

  “I offered to take him to the bathroom. He pulled a revolver on me. This man belongs in an asylum.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I came here to make your problems go away. I’m not a bad man.”

  “Yes, you are,” I replied.

  “Tell him to point that gun somewhere else.”

  “Grandfather, it’s all right,” I said.

  He rested the revolver on his thigh and released the hammer. “This boy strikes me as highly excitable. He doesn’t seem to do well in manly confrontation. I think he should stick to abusing women and cripples and children and such.”

  I picked up Slakely’s ankle pistol and holster and handed it to him. “Out of my house.”

  “You need to talk to me, Mr. Holland.”

  “I already know what you’re going to say.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  Rosita was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed so intensely on the back of Slakely’s head that he seemed to feel their heat. He turned and looked at her. “We meet again.”

  “Say what you have to say,” she said.

  “I’ve got your husband by the short hairs. That’s what I was gonna say. I can have the old man arrested for threatening an officer of the law with a firearm. Or I can forget all this and see that the charges against you are lost in the process.”

  “Get him out of here, Weldon,” she said.

  “You heard her, bub,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. I tried. Someday y’all will figure out we’re all little people, even you, the big war hero.”

  Slakely walked back through the hallway into the living room. The porch light was on, and candle moths were bumping against the screen. The wind was blowing, and the live oaks and pecan trees in the yard were full of shadows that kept changing shape, the leaves spinning on the lawn and driveway. Slakely was only a few feet from the door. In seconds he would be gone and we would return to our lives, and in the morning I would call our lawyer and see what could be done about Slakely’s invasion of our home. Then he turned around, like a man who can’t leave a dice table or an unfinished drink on a saloon table or a situation in which his paucity as a human being has been exposed.

  He was still wearing his Stetson, his hands opening and closing at his sides, the veins knotting like twine under the skin. “The old man says he killed six men. That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “He killed eleven or twelve I know of. He killed some of them while he was blind drunk. He doesn’t count the Mexicans he shot on one of Pancho Villa’s troop trains. If you think he won’t kill you, call up Frank Hamer and ask him about Grandfather’s track record.”

  “Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who killed Bonnie and Clyde?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “My goddamn ass.”

  Rosita was silhouetted in the kitchen doorway, wearing an apron, a wooden spatula in her hand. Behind her, strings of steam were rising from Grandfather’s pot of stewed tomatoes and peppers. Next to the stove was a white table lined with glass jars and brassy metal tops, a metal spoon inserted in each jar to keep it from cracking when the preserves were poured into it.

  It’s my belief that lust, greed, and violence die hard in all of us, whether we’re Semites or Gentiles or pagans, river-baptized, born again, or redeemed by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. But there’s another group in our midst. I believe some are born with the scales and the tailed spine of the four-footed reptilian creature with which we share a common gene pool. I never bore an animus toward the average German soldier; I did, however, toward the Waffen SS, and I was glad I had killed as many of them as I possibly could. I didn’t think Slakely had twin lightning bolts tattooed under his armpit, but if he had, I’m sure he would have worn them with pride.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

  “Which way?” I said.

  “Ten thousand dollars in cash or stocks. That’s all I want. I’m putting myself in danger on your behalf. You haven’t figured that out?”

  “I’m going to get you,” I said.

  “You’re threatening me?”

  “It’s not a threat. I’m telling you what’s going to happen to you. You violated my wife’s person. You invaded my home. You tried to degrade my grandfather. You think you’re going to get away with that because you’re a Houston police officer?”

  He huffed air out of his nostrils. “Live in your own shit. You’ll wish you never heard my name.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  He went out the screen door and let it slam behind him. I saw Rosita go back into the kitchen and lift the lid off the metal pot on the stove and put on cloth gloves so she could begin filling the jars.

  “Grandfather wants to do that,” I said.

  “He’ll burn himself.”

  “Let him do it or he’ll get riled up again. I’ll go get him.”

  I went into the back bedroom to help Grandfather out of bed. I hadn’t latched the screen or bolted the door. It would have made no difference, though. Hubert Timmons Slakely was a man whose greatest enemy was knowledge about himself. He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom. He is pathologically incapable of change this side of the grave.

  Slakely came back through the screen and entered the kitchen, his shadow falling across Rosita. “I’m on to you, Mrs. Holland,” he said.

  She stared at him without replying.

  “You know what the Jewish piano is, don’t you? The cash register. You’re a kike. You won’t let your husband’s money get loose from your hands. Also, you’re too dumb to see what you’re doing to both y’all.”

  “Did you know it’s rude for a man not to remove his hat in someone’s house?” she said.

  “Wait till you get up to the women’s prison. I’ll put some interesting notations in your jacket. There’s a section for bull dykes. I’ll make sure you get to meet them.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “One day somebody is gonna tear you and that smart mouth apart, woman.”

  “That’s what you would like to do right now. But you won’t because there’re witnesses. A man like you doesn’t care for witnesses. They’re inconvenient when you arrest a street prostitute or a hapless Negro or a vagabond. You frighten the defenseless and impose your will upon them in order to hide the fear that governs your life. That’s why I pity rather than hate you.”

  I put Grandfather in his reading chair and as I approached the kitchen doorway, I saw Slakely’s right hand, the one tattooed with a chain of blue stars, curl into a fist. I had no doubt that a blow from a man of his size could crush the bones in her face or even kill her. But if I thought I needed to protect my wife, I was mistaken. Rosita Lowenstein Holland did not need protection. Her adversaries did.

  “The Krauts should have melted you into a bar of soap,” Slakely said.

  He heard me behind him and glanced over his shoulder. It was bad timing for Hubert Timmons Slakely. The stewed peppers and tomatoes on the stove had become as thick as ketchup, bubbles rising like big red blisters to the surface. She flung the pot with both hands into his face, covering his eyes and nose and mouth like a wet red kerchief wrapped around the head o
f a mannequin. He screamed and pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and crashed into the doorjamb, fighting his way blindly through the living room and down the steps into the yard. She wasn’t finished with him. She went through the door after him and poured the rest of the pot onto his head and neck, then threw the pot high in the air and watched it bounce on the lawn.

  “Voilà,” she said. “There’s a garden hose by the hydrant if you want to wash off. Thanks so much for dropping by.”

  I CALLED A SITTER for Grandfather, went upstairs, and packed a bag for Rosita, and drove both of us to Galveston before Hubert Timmons Slakely could return to the house with his colleagues. I rented a motel room right across from the seawall that had been built after the great hurricane of 1900. I had not told her I would have to leave her there and return to Houston. Rosita was brave and loving and honorable and all things that are good. She deserved none of the things that had been done to her. Leaving her alone was one of the hardest things I had ever done. But I had to distract the authorities from her and somehow neutralize the power we had given Slakely.

  “You’re leaving?” she said.

  “There’s a taxi on the way.”

  “I don’t like being a fugitive, Weldon. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “They’re not going to get their hands on you again. I’m going to call the state attorney. I’m going to the police station tonight and file a complaint. There’s Grandfather to take care of, too. You’ll have the car, but if you go anywhere, take a cab. Don’t talk to anyone. I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Malory.”

  “As in Thomas Malory?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  For the first time since we had left Houston, she smiled. Through the curtains, I could see the amusement pier extending from the beach into the surf, the waves bursting against the pilings. All of the rides and concession stands were closed for the season, the long row of windows in the seafood restaurant darkened. “Lie down with me before you go,” she said.

  I saw the headlights of the taxi turn off the boulevard into the motel. I went outside and gave the driver three dollars and sent him away. When I came back inside, Rosita had already turned off the lights and undressed and was lying on top of the sheet, one knee pulled up in front of her, her back propped against the pillows. “You look like a painting on the side of a Flying Fortress,” I said.