Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  “I like it out here just fine.”

  His chest and shoulders and upper arms were hairless and smooth, his nipples as small as dimes. The temperature must have been fifty degrees, but sweat was leaking out of his hair and running down the sides of his face.

  “Did somebody send you a photograph?” I said.

  “They sure did.”

  “With me in it?”

  “Looked like you.”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “That’s not Linda Gail in it?”

  “Yes, that’s Linda Gail, and that’s me. But the photos were taken separately and the negatives manipulated in a darkroom.”

  The head of the mattock was resting by his foot, his palm propped on the handle’s nub. He looked at the rose petals and torn trumpet vines scattered on the grass. He had no expression, as though all his motors had shut down.

  “Forget everything I just said. Do you think I would betray our friendship? Look me in the face and tell me you believe I would have an affair with your wife and then come here and lie about it.”

  “No, sir, you wouldn’t do that.”

  “So let’s put an end to this.”

  “Who was with her when that photo was taken?”

  “I think it was Jack Valentine. I think he got her drunk and took her to a motel the same day he filmed her on the gallery of that general store outside Bogalusa.”

  “She’s been having an affair. Not with Jack Valentine. It’s that damn Roy Wiseheart, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not my business.”

  His face tilted up into mine. I could see the grainy lines around his eyes and smell the damp earth on his skin. “He confides in you like you’re his lost brother or something. He’s told you about Linda Gail, hasn’t he?”

  “I say let both of them go, Hershel.”

  “You’d give a thief the run of your house?”

  “They’ll come to a bad end. If that’s their choice, you have to honor it.”

  “Linda Gail was the only girl I ever wanted.”

  There were any number of things I could have said to him, to no avail. Hershel Pine was one of those who went down with the decks awash and the guns blazing.

  “Rosita scalded the face off the cop who molested her. Dalton Wiseheart is doing everything he can to destroy us, Hersh. Don’t help him do it. I’m done here.”

  “Don’t go,” he called.

  I ignored him and drove away. I didn’t get far. There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason. I turned the car around and went back to Hershel’s house. His garden tools lay amid the havoc he had visited on his lawn and flowerbeds, but he was nowhere in sight. A small boy from next door was staring through the hedge, his face full of alarm. “What’s going on, little partner?” I said.

  The boy was not over eight or nine. His mouth was shaking. He pointed at the wood chair where Hershel had hung his shirt and leather jacket. The jacket lay on the ground.“Mr. Pine had a gun,” the boy said. Then he ran for his back door.

  I tried to see through Hershel’s windows, but the shades were drawn. I went to the front door and eased it open. Hershel was sitting on a footstool in front of a gas-log fireplace. The logs were not lit. His 1911-model .45 automatic was propped on his knee. I took it from his hand and released the magazine and ejected the round in the chamber. I sat down in a stuffed chair next to the stool and placed the gun on the coffee table. “We survived the Tigers. We saved Rosita from a death camp. Are you going to let a Houston oil tycoon do us in?”

  There were lines of dried sweat and dirt on his face. “Maybe if I’d spent more time at home, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s like trying to figure out how you got hit by a bus. The only thing that counts is you got hit by a bus.”

  My attempt at humor was in vain. He started to cry, his head down, his back shaking, and his hands hanging in his lap. I waited a long time before I spoke. “I may need your help.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Killing at least one man, maybe two,” I replied.

  I NEVER THOUGHT I would have a discussion about the premeditated, cold-blooded murder of another human being. Hershel listened as though a stranger rather than a friend and business partner had wandered into his living room. Even to me, the words I spoke seemed to come from someone else. As repellent as they were, I meant every one of them.

  When I had visited the Houston Police Department the previous day, hoping to sit down with the chief and explain why Rosita had almost burned the face off one of his detectives, I was told by a captain that I could either bring her in or be charged with aiding and abetting. I didn’t believe him. I had learned long ago from Grandfather that a serious lawman never told you what he might do. He simply did it, and usually with his sidearm or a baton or a blackjack; the target of his wrath seldom knew what hit him.

  When I talked with an assistant to the state attorney, I got a much better perspective on the strategy about to be used on my beautiful and brave and loving wife.

  “Her case is being turned over to the Department of Public Health, Mr. Holland,” he said.

  “It’s being what?”

  “You asked me to make an inquiry, sir. I’ve done that. This office no longer has any jurisdiction in the disposition of your wife’s case. Neither does the district attorney’s office in Houston.”

  “That sounds like quite a coincidence.”

  “Considering the seriousness of the charges against Mrs. Holland, perhaps y’all should show a little gratitude.”

  “You bastards,” I said.

  After I left Hershel’s house, I used a pay phone to check in with Rosita at the motel in Galveston.

  “Are you coming down?” she said.

  “After dark,” I replied.

  “You sound a little strange.”

  “I just left Hershel. He’s not doing too well. Someone sent him that bogus photo of me and Linda Gail.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about that,” she said.

  “I’m telling you what happened.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.”

  The air inside the phone booth had become hard to breathe. The sunlight through the scratched and vandalized Plexiglas windows was smudged and ugly, stained with the smell of the diesel trucks and junker cars passing on Wayside Drive. “They want to turn us against each other, Rosita.”

  There was a pause. “When are you coming to Galveston?”

  “After dark,” I repeated.

  In my own country, we were taking on the identity of fugitives, people who thought and behaved in surreptitious fashion and traveled by night. Where had we gone wrong? What were we turning into? I picked up a box of takeout Mexican food for Grandfather and drove to our house in the Heights.

  I KNOW I’M REPEATING myself, but it’s hard to explain how much I loved Grandfather. In the darkest times of my life, wading ashore at Omaha Beach or shrinking into an embryonic ball at the bottom of a foxhole while German 88s rained down on us, I thought of Grandfather and said his name over and over in my mind. Even when I rebelled against him as a boy, he was always my model. And what a model he had been: a compulsive gambler and womanizing alcoholic who had knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and stomped in his face as an afterthought, a man who read the encyclopedia every night of his life, a gunman who feared bloodlust and was the friend of professional killers with badges who considered him a colleague but had no understanding of him.

  I set the kitchen table for the two of us and laid out our dinner.

  “Did you remember the pralines?” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I got you a mess of them.”

 
“Are you going down to Galveston tonight?”

  “I surely am.”

  He bit into a taco, the shell cracking between his teeth, his washed-out blue eyes never leaving mine.

  “Would you not stare at me, please?” I said.

  “What’s fretting you, Satch? It’s not just Rosita’s situation, is it?”

  “I talked earlier with Hershel Pine about killing one or two people.”

  The winter solstice was almost upon us. The sunset was a purple melt beyond the live oaks in the yard, the Christmas lights in the neighbor’s house flashing on and off. I couldn’t look at Grandfather’s face.

  “Anybody I know?” he asked.

  “Dalton Wiseheart, for openers. I thought I might throw in Hubert Timmons Slakely for good measure.”

  He placed his taco on his plate and cleaned the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “Did you learn that from me?”

  “Learn what?”

  “That it’s all right to shoot an old man or maybe one you have to sneak up on.”

  “They’re turning Rosita’s case over to the Department of Public Health. You know what for, don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He lifted his finger at me. “You killed German soldiers in war because you had to, not by choice. Don’t you dare let these worthless people make you over in their image.”

  “You were fixing to drop the hammer on Slakely.”

  “I wanted to do it. But I didn’t.”

  “I wish you’d parked one right in his mouth.”

  “The men you kill stand by your deathbed. Did you know that? I’ve seen them. They’re out there. Waiting on me.”

  “They’re going to take Rosita from me, Grandfather.”

  He looked into space, a great sadness in his eyes.

  Chapter

  24

  THAT NIGHT, AS I drove down to Galveston Island, I could not free myself of images that seemed to have nothing to do with my situation. The moon was up, the clouds lit like silver plate, the sand dunes on the roadside spiked with salt grass. When I passed a lonely filling station, I thought I saw a boxlike vehicle with a lacquered black top and fenders and a maroon paint job on the body parked at the pumps. It had white sidewalls and chromed-wire wheels. I was almost sure it was the 1932 Chevrolet Confederate, the same model driven by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker shortly before they were cut into pieces by automatic weapons fire in Arcadia, Louisiana. I thought I saw a man wearing a slug cap fueling the tank.

  Almost fourteen years had passed since my encounter with them. Was I imagining things, a man my age? Or did I want their ghosts to pursue me? Did I secretly admire their cavalier attitude toward the law, their indifference to the lives they took? No, that was not the case. My fascination was not with them; it was with Bonnie Parker. Someone from the car spat on Grandfather, and I had always prayed that it was not she. It was the kind of thing Clyde might do, or Raymond Hamilton, or Mary, with her cleft chin and mean-spirited, downturned Irish mouth. Miss Bonnie wouldn’t do that, I told myself.

  They had been despised by the law. The four lawmen who went after them never intended for them to survive the trap they created with a broken-down truck on an isolated piney woods blacktop. What had always bothered me most in the aftermath of Bonnie and Clyde’s death was the newspapers’ failure to mention they had shot their way into Eastham Pen to honor their word and free a friend, with nothing to gain and everything to lose. How many law-abiding people would be willing to do the same?

  The odds were stacking up against Rosita. Her immigration status had become suspect; her father had been an official in the leftist government of the Spanish Republic; she was related to Red Rosa Luxemburg; and she had assaulted a plainclothes detective. I had no doubt the referral of her case to Public Health was an attempt to circumvent the legal process and place her in a mental institution.

  Where do you go for help under those circumstances?

  That night Grandfather had our maid, Snowball, drive him to a pay phone from which he called me at the motel. “Your old commanding officer was here,” he said. “He gave me a number in Houston for you to call.”

  “Lloyd Fincher was at the house?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “He says it’s got something to do with Garth McQueen. Fincher wants to he’p you.”

  “What’s your opinion of him?” I asked.

  “I’d say he’s a ladies’ man.”

  “He had a woman with him?”

  “She put me in mind of a Yorkshire pig that’s been shampooed at the county fair—pink all over and fresh-smelling as a rose. She had a laugh just this side of an oink. You gonna be all right, boy?”

  I DIDN’T WANT TO have contact with Lloyd Fincher, but I didn’t have a lot to lose. I drove down the boulevard and called him from the pay phone at the Jack Tar restaurant. Through the front window, I could see the waves crashing on the beach, sucking the sand backward in the undertow. “My grandfather says you want to talk to me,” I said.

  “Holland? Is that you?” he replied.

  Who else would I be? I thought. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

  “I don’t want to talk over the phone. Know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Tell me where you are. I’ll be there.”

  “I’m down on the coast.”

  “The coast, huh? Ten miles north of Galveston, there’s a Pure filling station on the east side of the highway. Meet me at the diner next door in one hour.”

  “What’s this about, Major?”

  “I guess I’m trying to undo my sins. Who the hell knows? Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  The Pure station was the one where I thought I’d seen the 1932 Chevrolet Confederate. Was it coincidence? I had no idea.

  The station was dark, but the diner was open when I pulled into the shell parking lot. The only automobile out front was a prewar Cadillac; the bottoms of the fenders had rusted into orange lace. The interior of the diner was dour, the menu written in chalk on a blackboard above the stove, the air smelling of grease and disinfectant. Fincher and his girlfriend were at a wood booth in back. She was just as Grandfather had described her—pink-complexioned and rotund and jolly and drenched in perfume. Her hair was dark red and tied with a pink scarf. Fincher introduced her as Norma, no last name. They had white coffee mugs and a plate of French-fried onions in front of them. He saw me glance out the window at the Cadillac.

  “I picked that up just recently. I’m restoring it,” he said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “I heard about your troubles,” he said.

  “They’ll pass.”

  “That’s what Garth McQueen thought when he built that damn hotel. He went into catastrophic debt so he could erect a monument to himself and leave behind the raggedy little boy who used to tote water in the oil field. Now he’s teetering on ruin.”

  “You came down here to tell me about Garth McQueen?”

  “Garth shouldn’t be in the hotel business. He should be drilling wells. I thought you might want to partner up with him. Wildcatting may have gone into history, but he’s still the best there is.”

  “I have a partner. And I have a couple of other things on my mind right now.”

  “Have you been swimming at his pool?” Norma said. “It’s shaped like a big four-leaf clover. We saw a gangster there. What was his name? Frankie something. Lloyd knows him. He was a friend of Bugsy Siegel.”

  “Frankie Carbo,” Lloyd said.

  “It’s getting late, Major,” I said.

  “I made a mistake at Kasserine Pass and got a lot of men killed. I’m trying to do good deeds here and there to make up for it.” He pushed a brass key across the table to me. “I’ve got a duck-hunting camp down by the swamp, southeast of Beaumont. The
place is yours. For whatever purposes you need. You hearing me on this?”

  “Can you tell me who’s trying to hurt me and my wife?” I said.

  He pinched his eyes. “Hell if I know. It’s like the army. Somebody up top gives an order, and it gets carried out by people they never see.”

  I picked up the key and dropped it in my shirt pocket. “Why do they have it in for me?”

  Fincher leaned forward. “You really want to know?”

  “That’s why I asked you the question.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It keeps their minds off the fact that they have to die and all their money is worthless on the other side of the grave. They can buy anything they want except a free pass from the Grim Reaper. It makes them madder than hell.”

  Norma turned and looked at the side of Fincher’s face as though she didn’t know him.

  LINDA GAIL’S COSTAR had contracted dysentery in Mexico and had sidelined production back in the United States for almost two weeks. In Santa Monica, she stared out her picture-glass window at the bronze-skinned young men lifting weights on Muscle Beach. Many of them had peroxide hair and wore bathing trunks hardly more than G-strings. She wondered how many of them were as unfaithful as she. Jerry Fallon sipped from a vodka Collins at her wet bar. Down below, against the brick wall that surrounded her tiny garden and patch of lawn, the bougainvillea bloomed as brightly as drops of blood in the cool sunlit air. “You’re going back to Houston?” Jerry said.

  “Does that bother you?” she replied.

  He pulled a cherry out of the ice in his glass and bit it off the stem. His mouth made a sucking sound when he swallowed it. “Yes, it does, love.”

  “You think I’m escaping the menagerie?” she said, turning around.

  “As talented as you are, you share many commonalities with the girls we dig out of these small-town anthills you Americans are so fond of. You do grand for a while, then you start to grow a conscience. You look upon your former life as one of naïveté and goodness. The rest of the world thinks of these places as the cultural equivalent of Buchenwald. That’s why all of you left. You might remind yourself of that.”