“You’re not joining me?” he said.
“I have to find Hershel.”
He leaned forward in the chair and circled her wrist with his thumb and forefinger. His grip felt like a wet manacle. “Stay. Please. I’ll shower and change clothes, and we can go to a restaurant for dinner. There’s so much to talk about. Everyone is excited about the picture. There are so many wonderful things waiting for you. I want to be there when those things happen, to help you, to be your friend in any capacity you wish.”
“I betrayed Hershel and I seduced you,” she replied. “Believe me, I’m not worth your concern.”
“Give me a little credit. I don’t get seduced,” he said. “When you all got married, Hershel was a mature man and a combat veteran. You were sixteen and knew nothing of the world. You call that a level playing field? I doubt Hershel would.”
“I’m not your intellectual match. Thank you for going by the house. I’ll be seeing you on location, I guess.”
He put his drink down on the floor and stood up. “Are you saying good-bye?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to divorce your wife? Do you want to marry me and start spending the holidays with my relatives in Bogalusa? Would your father and his friends approve of me? Would your father have my Jewish agent in his house? Would he like Rosita?”
“I’d do anything for you.”
“I think you probably would. You’re quite a guy, Roy. The problem is, I’ve never figured out who you are. Maybe your wife has and sees a kindred spirit in you. That thought frightens me to death.”
She went out the door and began walking toward her automobile. She heard the chain-link door on the tennis court swing open behind her. “Miss Pine?” a voice said.
“Yes?” she said, turning around.
“I’m Bill Green. I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Roy’s tennis partner said. His hair was as black and shiny as a raven’s, his face fine-boned. “Wiseheart and I are old friends.”
“He told me. You were fraternity brothers.”
“That’s why I have to teach the bum a lesson on the tennis court sometimes. He’s a fierce competitor. I let him have that last point because you were watching.”
“I see. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Green.”
“You have to go?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Maybe Roy will go home, too. He’s been here since this morning. I think he and Clara have had some choppy sailing recently.”
“He’s been here all day?”
“Yes, he’s been a nuisance. He does this when he and Clara get into it.”
“He hasn’t gone anywhere else?”
“No, he’s either been playing billiards or trying to hand me my posterior across the net.”
“Mr. Green, this is very important. Did Roy talk to anyone today? Did he make a call inquiring about my husband?”
“I heard him call a policeman. That’s not unusual for Roy. He’s an honorary police officer. He likes to ride around in cruisers and that sort of thing.”
“What did he say to the policeman?”
“Something about doing Roy a favor. I wasn’t paying much attention.”
“You’ve been very kind. Good night, Mr. Green.”
Green glanced up at the sky. “There’s a ring around the moon. We’ll have rain. You know what they say about Texas. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”
“It was Missouri,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Mark Twain said that about Missouri, not Texas. It’s funny how people get a quotation wrong, and then the misquote takes on a life of its own. It’s a bit like most relationships. We never get it quite right. The fabrication becomes the reality.”
Green nodded as though he understood. She walked away from the light that glowed through the windscreens on the court and crossed the lawn, the St. Augustine grass spongy and thick under her feet, the shadows of the camellia bushes and live oaks swirling and dancing around her. Her face felt cold and small, the skin shrunk against the bone. For just a second she thought she heard the mocking voice of Clara Wiseheart laughing inside her head.
Chapter
25
I HAD NO IDEA where Hershel had gone. I felt guilty for having spoken with him about the possibility of shooting Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Slakely. My sentiments about Wiseheart and Slakely were genuine, but whether I would shoot a man in cold blood was a matter of conjecture. In part, I had confided in Hershel to get his mind off Linda Gail’s infidelity. Just the same I felt irresponsible, and Grandfather hadn’t helped matters by taking me to task for my careless words.
Maybe I had begun to see the world through a glass darkly. I tried to remind myself that even as a teenager I had seen goodness in Bonnie Parker and an appreciable degree of heroism in Clyde. Even Lloyd Fincher, upon learning of Rosita’s jeopardy, had given me the key and directions to his duck camp southeast of Beaumont.
Besides my growing cynicism about the world, I had another problem: I had a business to run. In my low moments, I needed to remember what Rosita and I and Hershel and Linda Gail had accomplished. The Dixie Belle Pipeline Company was a huge success. We had contracts all over Oklahoma, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico. Our welds were known as the best in the oil patch. When we dropped the pipe into the ground, chances were it would lie there a century without a crack forming in the joints. On top of that, we had the patent on the machines responsible for the welds’ longevity.
I wouldn’t try to go inside the head of a dictatorial anti-Semite like Dalton Wiseheart, but I suspected he considered us usurpers, the kind of irritant he normally bought or neutralized with no more than a five-second commitment of time. That his minions had to deal with us on our terms, after I had indicated to him that his company’s negligence may have caused my father’s death, was probably a bitter cup for him to swallow. Even worse, he probably couldn’t stand the thought of the country becoming a Jeffersonian democracy.
Rosita and I checked out of the motel in Galveston and went to one of our job sites in Louisiana, right outside of Morgan City. I no longer thought about the particulars of our problems with the law. I believed Dalton Wiseheart’s people had written the script, and there was little Rosita and I could do to change it. Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption. For me, there was one operative principle to remember: They were not going to lock up my wife again. If I had to shoot Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Timmons Slakely, I would. In the meantime, my company couldn’t run itself.
In the years immediately following the war, Hollywood and the drilling industry were probably the only two portals through which a believer in the American dream could wander and suddenly find himself among amounts of wealth and levels of power he never imagined. The prerequisites were few. A teenager who escaped a chain gang in Georgia and climbed off a boxcar in California to pick peaches later became the actor we know as Robert Mitchum. A gambler and occasional wildcatter who drew to an inside straight in a Texas poker game won a deed to a seemingly worthless piece of land that became the biggest oil strike in the United States since Spindletop. The success stories were legion. All you had to do was believe. It was like prayer. What was to lose?
I loved the work I did and took pride in it. I loved the smell of a swamp or a pine woods at sunrise. I tried not to think of myself as someone who was despoiling the environment. When we laid pipe through woods, we cleaned and reseeded the right-of-way and created a feeding area for wildlife and a firebreak and access road for firefighting vehicles. The wetlands were another matter. Nonetheless, we broke the plantation oligarchy’s hold on working people, often paid no more than twenty-five dollars for a six-day week.
I wrote these words in my journal our first night back in the motor court outside Morgan City: Dear Lord, I’ve been out of touch for a little while. Sorry for all my rhetoric about sh
ooting people, even though I think some of them deserve it. Take care of Hershel, would you, and please help me take care of Rosita. As always, I pray that my sacrifice is acceptable in your sight. In truth, I feel powerless; hence I entertain all these violent thoughts and feelings.
Christmas is three days away. Happy birthday in advance, in case I don’t have time to say it later.
That night I began rereading Le Morte d’Arthur. For either a man or a boy, it was a grand and romantic tale about the chivalric world, the jingle of chain mail and the crash of two-handed broadswords on armor and shields rising audibly off the page. The irony lay in the fact that its author, Thomas Malory, had been a professional thug and full-time lowlife, more specifically a thief, a spy, an extorter, a rapist, and an assassin. He not only broke the law at every opportunity but did so with great joy. Apparently, the only times he was not committing serious crimes were when he was in prison or fighting as a mercenary in France or writing the greatest romance since The Song of Roland.
How could a man who was probably a sociopath draw on symbols from the subconscious and use Celtic legends with such passion and iconic meaning and artistic cohesiveness? Why was such an unlikely person chosen for such a gift?
It was not really Thomas Malory who was on my mind. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were. They were poor and uneducated and never succeeded in stealing over two or three thousand dollars in a bank robbery. John Dillinger once called them “a pair of punks who are giving bank robbery a bad name.” Like Woody Guthrie’s migrant farmworkers, they had come with the dust and gone with the wind. Why did they continue to intrigue and fascinate us? Was it because we secretly envied their freedom? Or was it because they got even for the rest of us?
I had confessed my feelings of powerlessness in my journal. There was a paradox in my confession. My epiphany about my lack of power in dealing with the system had come to me in peacetime, not during the war. At Normandy and at the Ardennes Forest, I had felt empowered, not the other way around. I could kill my enemies at will. If I so chose, I could destroy myself inside a firestorm, perhaps saving the life of another. I lived under the stars and in the snow and in windblown forests like a druid hunting animals with a sharpened stick. I lived one cold, foggy breath away from the edges of eternity; the trappings of civilization meant no more to me than stage props.
I had fallen asleep with my book in my hand. I heard Rosita click off the light and gently set my book on the nightstand. She lay down next to me and curled her body into mine, her arm resting on my side, her breath rising and falling on my neck. I didn’t wake until I heard hundreds of geese honking in the early dawn.
I WENT OUTSIDE WITH a cup of coffee and stood in the midst of a fog that was so thick I felt as though I were standing inside a cloud. No, the sensation was more compelling than that. I felt as though I were not in Louisiana but on the mythic Celtic island of Avalon, at the beginning of time, when man first looked up through the trees and saw light shining from the heavens and thought that he was standing in a cathedral whose pillars were the tree trunks that surrounded him.
In another hour I would be out on the right-of-way, where the men I had hired would pull the welding hood over their faces and bend to their work, the welding hood shaped exactly like the helmet of a crusader knight, each man thickly gloved to the elbow, one knee anchored on the ground, as though all of them were genuflecting in preparation for battle.
Those were fine thoughts to have. The Arthurian legend and the search for the Grail are always with us and define who we want to be. But the chivalric stories of Arthur and Roland are hard to hold on to, and we’re dragged back into the ebb and flow of a world that celebrates mediocrity, wherein the forces governing our lives remain unknown and beyond our ken.
I heard the phone ring inside our room. It was Linda Gail. “Roy Wiseheart lied to me. He told me he went to our house to check on Hershel but couldn’t find him.”
“How do you know he lied?” I asked.
“Roy’s neighbor told me Roy was playing tennis with him all day. He didn’t go anywhere.”
“You’re calling me in Louisiana to tell me Roy lied to you?”
“Roy’s friend said he called a policeman. I thought maybe Roy sent this policeman out to the house because he didn’t want to be bothered.”
“Maybe he felt uncomfortable,” I said. “Maybe he was afraid. I’m not sure what Hershel might do.”
“Will you let me finish? I talked to our neighbor across the street. He’s a nice man. He asked Hershel to go fishing once. He said the cops asked if he thought Hershel was suicidal.”
“That’s why we’re all concerned, Linda Gail. Maybe the cops are trying to help.”
“The neighbor told the cops Hershel likes to drink sometimes at an icehouse on West Alabama, back in our old neighborhood.”
“What about it?” I said.
“The owner told me Hershel’s truck was there, but a wrecker towed it away. He doesn’t know what happened to Hershel; he said he’d been drinking a lot.”
I had been standing. I sat down in a chair by the writing table. The receiver felt warm against my ear. I saw Rosita looking at me. “He disappeared?”
“The two cops who came out to the house were plainclothes. One of them left his card with the neighbor. Here, I’m looking at the card now. His name is Hubert T. Slakely. Does that name mean anything?”
IT WAS DARK and cold when Hershel took his bottle of Jax outside the icehouse and sat down at one of the plank tables under the canvas canopy. He was wearing his beat-up leather jacket and a cloth cap, but neither seemed to keep the cold off his skin. He felt as though his metabolism had shut down and his body was no longer capable of producing heat, not even after four shots of whiskey straight up. Maybe it was just the weather, he told himself. It was too cold for the other patrons, who were inside by the electric heater, playing the shuffleboard machine and talking about Harry Truman integrating the United States Army. Hershel salted his beer and took a sip from the glass and listened to the wind swelling the canopy above his head.
Three blocks away he could see the red and yellow neon on the spire of the Alabama Theatre printed against the sky. This was a fine neighborhood in which to live, he thought. The houses were mostly brick bungalows built in the 1920s, the streets shaded by old trees. The buses to downtown ran every ten minutes and cost a nickel. The local grocery store sold its produce out of crates on the gallery, and the customers signed for their purchases and paid at the end of the month. Why did they have to move to River Oaks, where they didn’t belong? Why did Linda Gail have to discover Hollywood? Why did Roy Wiseheart have to come into their lives?
For the most part, he had been able to put aside the war and the things he had done and seen others do. Sometimes in his sleep, he heard the treads of a King Tiger clanking through the forest, the rounds of his Thompson flattening or sparking off its impervious plates, but he always managed to wake himself up before the worst part of the dream, the moment that left him shivering and hardly able to control his sphincter, a moment when seventy tons of steel tried to grind him into pulp inside his cocoon of ice and broken timbers and frozen earth.
A black man was cleaning cigarette butts and food wrappers and pieces of newspaper from under the tables with a push broom. His eyes were elongated, almost slits, and the peaked hat with earflaps that he wore tied under the chin gave his face the appearance of a sad football.
“Where you from?” Hershel asked.
“Mis’sippi, suh,” the man said.
“You like it here’bouts?”
“Yes, suh, I like it fine.”
Hershel shook a Camel loose from a pack and stuck it in his mouth. He watched the black man and didn’t light the cigarette. “What do you think about the president integrating the armed forces?”
“I don’t study on it, suh.”
“You don’t have an opinion? None? Is t
hat correct? You’re a man of color living in a segregated society, but you don’t have an opinion about integration?”
“It ain’t nothing I have control over.”
“You want a smoke?”
“Thank you. I’m not supposed to light up on the job.”
“I figure if a man has fought for his country, he should have the same rights as any other man,” Hershel said.
The black man raised his eyes long enough to glance at the men inside the icehouse. “Yes, suh, that would make sense.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lawrence.”
“A colored washwoman saved my life. She was a juju woman. I was wrapped up in a rubber sheet. If she hadn’t looked through the window and seen me, I wouldn’t be here today.”
“I got to get on it, suh.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Yes, suh, that would be fine.”
“Did your wife ever mess around on you?”
“I ain’t ever been married. I thought about it, though. There’s a lady at the church I go out wit’.”
Hershel lit his cigarette. The smoke rose from his mouth as white as a cotton bole. What had he been talking about? The subject seemed to have dissolved into thin air. His head began to droop, his concentration to fade. “Sorry, I feel like I got malaria. Except I don’t. I guess I better go home.”
“Suh, there’s two men yonder in that car. They been looking at you. Maybe you shouldn’t be driving nowhere right now.”
“Which men?”
“They got suits and hats on. One of them comes in here. He’s a bad white man.”
“Say that again.”
“I didn’t mean nothing by it. I just didn’t want to see you have no trouble.”
“When a colored person says a white man is bad, he’s pretty bad. Have I got it right?”
“I ain’t saying no more.”
When he stood up, Hershel had to steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the tabletop. “I hope you marry the church lady. I bet she’ll do right by you.”
Wayfaring Stranger Page 33