Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  “Maybe that’s what I am.”

  I undressed and got in bed beside her. I put my hand inside the thickness of her hair and kissed her on the mouth. I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that any woman in the history of the world ever made love like Rosita Lowenstein. It was total and complete and unrelenting, and even after I was physically spent, my desire for her never dissipated. I never knew a woman whose hair was both mahogany-colored and black, one color inseparable from the other, yet always changing, depending on the light. Nor had I ever known one who had eyes that shone like sherry in a crystal glass.

  As I write these remarks, I know they are personal in nature and perhaps violate good taste and might be embarrassing to read. They may never be read by another. But they reflect my feelings about Rosita. She never had to seek modesty. It was built into her. Reclining nude on a bed, or making love with an almost animal pleasure, or creating an erotic moment unexpectedly in a conventional situation was simply the expression of who she was.

  She never had fewer than three climaxes, and after each one she began all over again with such heat and energy that I thought my heart would fail. I buried my face in the sweat on her neck and the dampness in her hair, and could feel both an ache and a rhythm in my loins that I believed would never end, in the same way that you know your love for another person will never end. That’s what it was like with Rosita Lowenstein. The two of us let go of the world and floated away to a kingdom under the sea where no one would ever disturb us again.

  At three in the morning she bit me softly on the ear and released me and lay back on the pillow.

  “This will be over soon,” I said.

  “No, it won’t, Weldon. They’re like the fascists. They torture with passion and murder with indifference.”

  “They messed with the wrong bunch.”

  “The Hollands?”

  “Sure. You’re a Holland, too. How’s it feel?”

  “You still believe there’s light in all men. They know that about you. They also know you’ll never change, that you’ll always be bound by the restraints of conscience.”

  “You worry too much, kid.”

  She squeezed my arm and turned toward the wall, the sheet pulled over her shoulder.

  I showered and dressed and called again for a taxi. As I drove away with the cabbie, I looked through the rear window at the darkened amusement pier and the great slate-green moonlit roll and pitch of the Gulf, and I felt a pang in my heart that I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was because I felt the spring and summer of our lives had slipped away, as though a thief had sneaked onto the pier and clicked off the switch on the Ferris wheel before we could reverse the terrible attrition that time imposes on us all. Or did my sense of mutability have another source? In 1942 Nazi U-boats had lain silently in wolf packs under the Gulf, waiting for the oil tankers that sailed from the Houston Ship Channel and the oil refineries in Baton Rouge. Four of them had been sunk by depth charges and were supposedly scudding along the Gulf’s bottom, some of the crew members still aboard, their uniforms and empty eye sockets strung with seaweed. I wondered if their time in history was about to roll round again, like Pharaoh and his chariots laboring up on the shores of the Red Sea, determined that God’s chosen would never get away from the points of their spears.

  Chapter

  23

  THE LOCATION OF the office I maintained in downtown Houston was one I had chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with commerce. The building was in a seedy area off Congress Street and looked more like a structure you would find in the New Orleans French Quarter or Old Natchez than in a commercial center. It was made of stucco and crumbling brick and had a courtyard and an upstairs balcony with Spanish grillwork. More important, one wall in the courtyard contained a wall within a wall, one constructed of heavy stones that were out of context, rocks not from the coastal plains but perhaps from the bed of the Comal or Guadalupe River or the rough terrain of the Texas hill country. Regardless of their origins, the wall within a wall resembled a mosaic, the rocks held together more by their weight and their chiseled shape than by mortar and plaster. According to the legend, three Texas soldiers had been executed against this wall by Santa Ana’s troops just before Santa Ana was entrapped, not far away, in the San Jacinto Basin on April 21, 1836.

  These three soldiers, who in all probability were boys, may have lost their lives hours before Texas won its independence. A Mexican lady used to run a flower stall between two buildings on Congress Street, right next to Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop, and once a week I bought a bouquet from her and put it in a ceramic vase filled with water and set it in front of the wall within a wall.

  I had already gone to the Houston police station and had just gotten off the telephone with an assistant to the state attorney in Austin when Roy Wiseheart stuck his head in my office door and said, “Buy you lunch, Lieutenant?”

  “Another time,” I replied.

  He stepped inside without being invited and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a powder-blue sport coat and a polo shirt and pressed gray slacks and oxblood tasseled loafers, his face fresh and ruddy, as though he had just come from his gym. Roy had a perpetual aura of youthfulness that made me wonder if there wasn’t a bit of Dorian Gray in his glue. “You mad at me about something?” he said, pulling up a chair.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you look like it,” he replied.

  I told him of Slakely’s visit to our house and what Rosita had done. Roy’s face was composed while he listened, not one hair out of place, his eyes never blinking or leaving mine.

  “You want me to look into it?” he said.

  “In order to do what?”

  “I don’t know. Blitz the sod, as Jerry Fallon would say. Your troubles make mine sound minor.”

  “What troubles?”

  He looked through the doorway into the side office where my secretary was working. I got up and closed the door. “What’s the problem, Roy?” I said, barely able to hide my impatience.

  “I’m co-producing Linda Gail’s movie. Her husband showed up on the set down in Mexico. I think he’s got the wrong idea.”

  “Regarding what?”

  “I guess there’re rumors going around about me and Linda Gail.”

  “The rumors aren’t true?” I said.

  “I suspect it’s a matter of how you look at it. Things happen on a set. I can’t say I’ve always stayed on the straight and narrow.”

  “What kind of statement is that?”

  “I know Hershel’s background. He comes from a place where they lynch Negroes and castrate people—that is, when the family isn’t diddling one another. Do I need to start carrying a weapon?”

  “I feel like knocking your teeth down your throat.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very rational attitude. I don’t want trouble with your friend. And I certainly don’t want to hurt him.”

  “What do you call ruining a man’s marriage?”

  He rested his forearm on the side of my desk and gazed wistfully out the window. “Did you spend a lot of time with your father when you were a kid?”

  “No, I spent it with my grandfather. My father died at the bottom of a bell hole.”

  “I think the time spent with one’s father figure makes all the difference in the life of a young fellow, don’t you?”

  “What kind of boyhood do you think Hershel Pine had? Can you imagine the kind of public school he attended, the kind of medical care he had?”

  “Actually, I envy a fellow like that. You know, growing up on a cotton farm and squirrel hunting and going to barbecues and fish fries and outdoor dances, things like that. There’s something a bit grand about it. Its simplicity, I mean.”

  I realized I was sitting next to a man who had probably lived inside a soap bubble his entire life and had no idea what privation was, an
d no awareness of the travail that people of Hershel’s background endured.

  “Does Linda Gail plan to leave Hershel?” I asked.

  “I really don’t know. That’s their business anyway. Why should we be discussing something like that?”

  “Why? Because he worships his wife. Because he’s coming apart. Because he stayed alive from Kasserine Pass through the invasion of Italy and France to the Ardennes Forest so he could come back to her.”

  “I see what you mean. Yes, he seems a good fellow. That’s why I’m asking for your help. Come on, have some raw oysters and a beer with me.”

  “Let me tell you how I feel about your father, Roy,” I said. “No man is more cowardly than one who uses a surrogate to injure others. That’s what your father has done. My wife and I go from day to day wondering who your father will send next into our lives. Right now it’s Hubert Timmons Slakely. Tomorrow it will be somebody else.”

  Roy looked at me a long time before he spoke. “My father doesn’t care enough about people to hurt them. Why do you think you’re so special?”

  “His company was responsible for my father’s death.”

  “He could settle your suit for pocket change.”

  “I’m not planning on suing your father. I want to see him in prison.”

  He pinched his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “In the state of Texas? What world do you live in, Weldon?”

  “The United States of America.”

  “You still have those oil leases around New Roads, Louisiana, don’t you?”

  “We brought in two dusters on those leases. They almost bankrupted us,” I said.

  “But you still have the leases?”

  “What if we do?”

  “I’d hold on to them. Will you talk to Hershel?”

  “No, I will not. It’s time you carry your own water, partner.”

  “You have it all, Weldon, but you don’t realize it. Others covet what you take for granted. You’re an honorable man. Your wife loves you. You’re the captain of your soul. With time, others will take all that away from you. That’s what you fail to understand. They don’t want your possessions. They want your soul.”

  “And how will they take that from me?”

  “They’ll turn you into one of them. You’ll wake up one morning and look at your reflection in the mirror and wonder what happened to the little boy in his white First Communion suit. See you around, Buster Brown.”

  I followed him into the street. The sunlight was cold and brittle, with a reminder of winter and the shortening of the days in the air. Leaves were scudding out of the alley next to Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop. The Mexican woman who ran the flower stall was gone. “Come back here,” I said.

  “Not a chance,” he replied.

  I went back into the office but couldn’t think my way through the exchange. Roy had made a cuckold of my best friend but had presented himself to me as a victim. He seemed genuinely concerned with my fate but remained firmly entrenched in the world of wealth and power that threatened to destroy Rosita in order to get to me. Last, and perhaps most tragically for him, he was brave but beset with guilt because his ambition may have cost a life.

  I went into the courtyard and poured out the stale water in the vase of flowers. It was green in the sunlight and had a rancid smell when it struck the flagstones. I had never felt more alone and helpless, even at the Ardennes. I leaned against the wall with one hand. The stones were hard and gritty and cold against my palm. As the wind gusted across the rooftops, I heard a sound that was like the staccato popping of small-arms fire when first contact is made between two armies. But the series of reports was only an automobile backfiring on the street. I was almost positive about that.

  I KNEW WHAT WAS coming next, in the way you know the next pitch is a slider when a left-handed pitcher mops the sweat off his brow and wipes the back of his hand on his pants and not his palm. Saturday morning I got a person-to-person call from Linda Gail. I could barely make out her words. “We’re having a terrible electrical storm here,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Barely. Where are you?”

  “In Santa Monica. The sky is black. Lightning is striking the cliffs above the beach. I’ve never seen the sky this dark here.”

  “What do you want, Linda Gail?”

  “You’d better talk to Hershel. He’s acting crazy.”

  “You’re just becoming aware of that?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d moralize on your own nickel. Why do you think I called you?”

  “Roy Wiseheart was in my office yesterday and was probably more candid about you two than he should have been.”

  “Roy came to you?”

  “I’ve had to put Rosita in hiding. She threw a pot of scalding tomatoes and peppers in a police officer’s face. If you want to have a dalliance with Roy, that’s your business, Linda Gail. But stop dragging your problems into my life.”

  “I didn’t call you because of me. I called because I’m worried about you. God, you make me angry. Sometimes I want to break my fists on your head.”

  “Somebody sent Hershel a photograph?”

  “Yes, exactly. Do you know who’s in it?”

  “If we’re talking about the same photograph, I’ve already seen it. It’s a fake. Or at least part of it is.”

  I could hear her breathing into the phone, even though thunder was booming in the background. “You’re talking about me in the nude?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  I expected her to say something vitriolic, to take on the mantle of outrage that she was extraordinarily good at. But there were facets to Linda Gail that sometimes surprised me. “I hate myself for this. It’s all my fault, Weldon. It’s not Roy’s or Hershel’s or yours. Do you know about Jack Valentine’s death?”

  “I read he was killed in South Central Los Angeles.”

  “He was killed after Roy told me someone should teach him a lesson.”

  “That’s probably just rhetoric.”

  There was a violent intrusion of static on the line. Then she said in an almost plaintive voice, “Weldon?”

  “Yes?”

  “The lightning is hitting the water. I’ve never seen it do that. The ocean looks like it’s full of black oil and electricity. There’s green vapor rising off the waves. It looks like the world is ending.”

  “It’s an optical illusion.”

  “Do you believe in karma?” she asked.

  “If there was such a thing as karma, most of the world’s leaders would have leprosy.”

  “It isn’t funny,” she said. “Do you think I’m a bad girl?”

  I couldn’t think of the right words to use. “No, I don’t think that.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “For all of us. Roy says we’re wayfaring strangers, like the Canterbury Pilgrims trying to wend their way past the Black Death. He says death is the only reality in our lives.”

  “Roy is a nihilist.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Say what?”

  “That I’m not a bad girl.”

  “Good luck to you. I think you’re a formidable woman with qualities that you don’t give yourself credit for. Don’t let Hershel get hurt any more than he already has.”

  The line went dead.

  I DROVE TO HERSHEL and Linda Gail’s box of a house a few blocks off River Oaks Boulevard without calling first or knowing what to expect. It was hard for me to think of Hershel as a possible adversary, perhaps a dangerous one. But in light of how human frailty and jealousy affect us all, I knew if he had received the bogus photograph, anything was possible. As I drove down the boulevard past some of the grandest mansions in the Western world and turned onto Hershel’s street and pulled into the deep shade of his driveway, I smelled an odor that was like wet leaves burning in a barrel, and water that had go
ne sour in a pond, and moist dirt oozing with white slugs spaded up in ground that never saw sunlight.

  Hershel was bare-chested and pushing a shovel deep into the soil with one booted foot, his back knotted and red and sweaty and powdered with dirt. His shirt and leather jacket hung on the back of a wood chair. He had torn the flowers out of the beds and stripped the climbing roses and the trumpet vine from the trellises and smashed the trellises into sticks. He dropped the shovel on the grass and began ripping divots out of the St. Augustine grass with a mattock, destroying the root systems, driving the mattock deeper into sandy soil and rock and a metal sprinkler line. Hershel was waging war on the environment that Linda Gail had been willing to trade her marriage for.

  “What are you planting, farmer?” I said.

  He looked up at me like a primitive creature hard at work in front of his cave. There was a crooked grin on his face, a liquidity in his eyes that I normally would associate with yellow jaundice. The knees of his canvas trousers were green with grass stains. “I’m putting in a vegetable garden.”

  “It’s December.”

  “I know. I kind of got carried away and tore up Linda Gail’s roses. She flat loves those roses. I’m sorry I did that.”

  “It’s mighty cold to be digging a vegetable garden.”

  “I’m late this year. That’s why I’d better get on it.”

  Behind him was an aboveground swimming pool constructed of a pipe frame and sheets of blue plastic, a garden hose hung over the rim.

  “Want to take a dip?”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Linda Gail says the neighbor’s cat drowned in it. I don’t believe it, though. Cats don’t fall into pools. A coon or a porcupine might do that, but a cat is too smart.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “I’m going to explain some things that have happened. Put down the mattock and let’s go inside.”