Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  Up ahead was a cattle guard that looked in bad repair, like the one on Grandfather’s ranch years ago, the one he had warned Clyde Barrow about.

  Then I saw something I tried to dismiss as a hallucination, the release of an image buried in the place where memories lived. It was the 1932 Confederate. It was moving down a dirt road toward the water with four occupants, their silhouettes as stiff as mannequins, dust rising off the wire-spoked wheels.

  What did they want? What were they trying to tell me?

  “Are you okay, Weldon?” Rosita said.

  “The light was in my eyes,” I replied. “Will you get out and open the gate? Be careful where you step. There may be a broken spar in the cattle guard.”

  I waited while she took the chain off the gate and pushed it back. She looked down at her feet and stepped carefully back on solid ground, then leaned in the window. “Stay to the right,” she said.

  After I drove over the guard, she closed and latched the gate and got back inside the car. “How did you know the cattle guard was broken?”

  “I think Fincher told me.”

  “You think?”

  I shrugged.

  THE PLACE THAT Fincher called a camp looked more like a mid-­nineteenth-century planter’s home that had gone to seed. The main building was constructed of plaster and old brick, with wood trim and a wide, roofed porch. The house had electricity and running water, but the mortar was crumbling between the bricks, and the sinks were striped with an orange residue as crusty as metal filings, the fireplace and the front of the chimney blackened with soot. There was no telephone or radio.

  “After dark, I’ll go back to the highway and find a grocery store,” I said.

  Rosita was standing in the middle of the living room, gazing at its bareness. “There’s nothing here that has a name on it. The magazines don’t have address labels. All the drawers are empty. Why would Fincher let it get so run-down?”

  “Maybe he’s fallen on bad days.”

  We looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. An impoverished or desperate man is not one you want covering your back.

  I cleaned an owl’s nest out of the chimney and started a fire. Through the window, I couldn’t see any other buildings beyond the railed fences that marked the boundaries of Fincher’s property. “Let’s do a little recon,” I said.

  The sky was an ink wash of purple and black, the air thick with a stench that was like offal burning in an incinerator. I had to clear my throat and spit before I spoke. I didn’t want to mention the odor or what it reminded me of. “When I was a little boy, my father took me fishing for gafftop catfish west of here, over by Freeport,” I said. “They were the biggest catfish I had ever seen.”

  “Where’s that odor coming from?” she asked.

  “It’s probably a garbage fire. Look, you see those mounds down there, close by the swamp?”

  “No,” she said, distracted by the smell blowing through the trees and across the water onto the land.

  “Those are burial or ceremonial mounds. There were fisher people here before Indians had tribal names. Maybe the fisher people weren’t even Indians. Maybe Semitic explorers were here thousands of years ago, men in boats made from papyrus reeds.”

  She wasn’t listening. Sometimes a look came into Rosita’s eyes that I could not undo, any more than I could erase the memories that lived in both her conscious and unconscious. Those who had stood in front of the ovens and chimneys and scaffolds were never the same, and no power on earth could change that.

  We were almost to the edge of the swamp. I squatted by a mound and picked up a handful of sandy soil and broken seashells and let them slide off my palm. “See? This was probably a hummock, the kind you see in the Florida Everglades today. They were peaceful people who lived in groups of twenty-five or thirty. They lived almost idyllic lives.”

  “Where did they go?” she asked.

  “They were infected with European diseases. Some were enslaved.” I stood up, my knees creaking. I looked back at the house. The wind had dropped, and the smoke from the chimney was rising straight into the sky. “I’ll go back to the highway and get us some food. We’ll be fine.”

  My words were a vanity. I was looking at the remains of people who probably thought the same way I did, people who one bright morning saw sails on the southern horizon and walked into the water to welcome the strange-looking men who had hair on their faces. Rosita clutched my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “Oh, Weldon,” she said.

  That’s all she said. Just that. Oh, Weldon.

  AFTER DARK, I drove back to the two-lane and found a small grocery store and bought milk and coffee and sugar and lunch meat and bread and eggs and two steaks and packets of Kool-Aid and a quart of peach ice cream. I fixed a fine meal for us. In the warmth of the fire, my sense of apprehension began to fade. I had heard and seen nothing out of the ordinary at the grocery. Nor did I see any police presence on the road. It was Christmas night and the stars were bright over the Gulf, the moss in the cypress trees straightening against the moon, the smell of the garbage fire gone. There were no electric lights out in the woods or on any of the land that adjoined Fincher’s property. Tomorrow would be a new day, I told myself. We had survived a war that was the worst in human history. One way or another, as we approached the year 1948, we would prevail.

  We found blankets and sheets and a quilt in a closet and slept on the floor in front of the fire. I slept without dreaming, with Rosita’s body molded into mine. I heard rain tinking on the roof in the middle of the night, and I was sure that when I woke in the morning, the grass would be greener and spangled with dew in front of Fincher’s house, the wind blowing fresh and cool off the Gulf, the world filled with promise.

  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  THERE’S A GROUP of men in Texas you have probably never met. I hope you never do. Contrary to the biblical admonition, you will not know them by their deeds but by their western dress and coarse speech, their nativism and misogyny. They often wear long mustaches and do not shave for several days at a time. The decals on their vehicles proclaim their politics and might contain a message of warning to the incautious. They may be as lithe as a buggy whip or as unhealthy in appearance as a washtub of clabber milk. The reality is they’re poseurs and thespians. With rare exceptions, they’ve never busted broncs, ridden drag on a cattle herd, shoved their hand up to the armpit in a cow’s uterus, gone eight seconds to the buzzer at a fairground, roofed a house in an electrical storm, been stirrup-drug through a dry riverbed, or huddled in a cellar while a tornado ripped the house off its foundation and funneled livestock into the sky. Their symbols of power are their trucks and their firearms. They shoot deer at salt licks and on game farms and take enormous pride in the trophies they hang on their walls, all of which assure them they are the givers of death and will never be its recipient.

  They came at dawn, perhaps twenty of them, armed with shotguns and lever-action Winchesters, fanning out from their vehicles, the ground fog puffing whitely around their knees, some of them with badges of auxiliary lawmen clipped on their hand-tooled belts. I wondered if they had any idea how many tactical errors they committed, slamming truck doors, calling out to one another, approaching an adversary with the sun in their eyes, their chrome-plated belt buckles glinting like the crossed bandoliers on the British Redcoats our ancestors potted from two hundred yards away.

  I was barefoot when I went outside, unprepared, stunned, and angry at myself for having trusted Lloyd Fincher. As I stared at the men approaching me, I felt like the Dutch boy who had stood in front of the dike while fissures spread outward from a single hole he tried to plug with his thumb. I could have stuffed the Luger in the back of my belt, but it would have done no good and perhaps would have provided this fraudulent collection of tobacco-chewing nativists with the excuse they needed to kill Rosita and me. I don’t remember w
hat I said to them. It was probably not a rational statement. I know I hated them as much as I had hated the Waffen SS or any group who preys upon the weak or the outnumbered. I know that whatever I said was greeted with a rain of blows that knocked me to the ground. I know that for a few seconds I could see only the billowing fog and the dampness of their cowboy boots and tight jeans. I know that when I rose into the sunlight again, I was trying to get my Queen knife free of my pocket. My design was simple. I was going to spill their entrails in the dirt, lay open their unshaved faces, and leave at least one of them with a carotid artery pumping a bright red jet all over his shirt.

  That was not what happened. I was shoved facedown in the dirt and handcuffed with my wrists behind me while a stick was tied in my mouth. My Hebrew warrior woman from the House of Jesse was paraded off the porch and locked inside a white restraint jacket, one made out of double-stitched canvas-like cloth that tinkled with straps and buckles, the kind a medieval court jester might wear.

  I thought of my mother and the day she was taken away to the psychiatric ward at Jeff Davis Hospital in Houston. I thought about killing people and in large numbers. I saw a filmstrip in my mind that showed me doing things I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of.

  Chapter

  27

  LINDA GAIL CALLED Roy Wiseheart at his office and was told he would not be in during the holidays. “Has he left for Los Angeles?” she asked.

  “If you’d like to leave a message, I’ll make sure he gets it,” the receptionist said.

  “I’ve already done that.”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said I’m not sure who is calling,” Linda Gail said, and hung up.

  She fixed a sandwich and a glass of milk for Hershel and turned on the radio for him, then put on her sheerest stockings, a black suit, high heels, long white gloves, and a purple pillbox hat with a veil, and drove in her Cadillac to Roy Wiseheart’s home. Two automobiles she didn’t recognize were parked in front. The columned porch was brightly lit by the carriage lamps. Clara Wiseheart answered the door.

  “I need to see Roy, Mrs. Wiseheart,” Linda Gail said.

  “My impression is you have seen quite a lot of him.”

  “Great injury has been done to Hershel. I won’t take much of Roy’s time.”

  “Hershel? Oh, yes. Sorry, I’m forgetful with names. And what does Roy have to do with Hershel?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “You look quite nice. You seem to have taken on a new persona. It’s funny how Hollywood can transform an individual.”

  “I need to talk to your goddamn husband, Mrs. Wiseheart.”

  “You are a little potty mouth, aren’t you? Follow me out to the terrace. Jerry is here. So is another gentleman. Let me know what you think of him.”

  Clara Wiseheart walked ahead of her through the dining room and opened the French doors onto the terrace. It was lit by gas flares and warmed by electric heaters placed on the flagstones. Steaks two inches thick were smoking on a grill. Roy and Jerry Fallon were having drinks at a round redwood table with a third man Linda Gail thought she had seen before. Was it at the Shamrock? Or a party in Beverly Hills?

  The third man was half reclining in his chair, his legs extended in front of him, a highball in one hand, his thick lips wrapped around a cigar. His graying hair was cut tight, his eyes as devoid of light as charcoal. “This is Mr. Carbo,” Clara said.

  “Frankie Carbo?” Linda Gail said.

  “That’s me. I’m pleased to meet you,” he said. He didn’t rise from the chair. The accent was adenoidal, Brooklyn or Rhode Island. “We met before?”

  “I saw you at a hotel opening.”

  “At the Shamrock? Yeah, I was there. I bet you know who I was with. I can see it in your face.”

  “I’m sorry, my memory doesn’t serve me well sometimes.”

  “I was with Benjamin and Virginia. She could have had a Hollywood career, too. I think being with Benjamin hurt her.”

  “You’re talking about Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill?” she said.

  “I never called him by that name. We grew up together. Virginia and him both looked like stars. The studio gave him a screen test, but they didn’t want him around. It’s like that out there.”

  Like what? she thought. She didn’t want to ask. She couldn’t believe she was having a conversation with a man who had been a suspect in a half dozen murders. Jerry Fallon was smiling at her, his face warm from either alcohol or the red glow of the space heater. Was he telling her something? Not to say any more?

  “People out in L.A. are worried about you,” Jerry said. “We can’t go off schedule, love. There’s only one unforgivable sin in the industry. You don’t lose other people’s money.”

  “Don’t start picking on her,” Roy said. His julep glass was wrapped with a cloth napkin, the shaved ice dark with bourbon, a sprig of mint stuck in it. His face was dilated and oily, like that of a heavily medicated man working his way through an illness, his knees close together, pointed away from Carbo.

  “I need to get some information from you, Roy,” she said.

  But he wasn’t finished talking with Jerry. As always, his words were necessary to define the discussion, to complete a thought, to close down a particular moment, to leave his signature at the bottom of the last paragraph hanging in the air. “She’s a good girl. You all don’t deserve her,” he said. He stood up from his chair. “Have a seat, Linda Gail. Don’t pay attention to these guys.”

  “Two policemen almost killed Hershel,” she said. “They locked him in a car trunk. Hershel can’t stand to be trapped in tight spaces. He almost suffocated inside a rubber sheet when he was a baby.”

  “Which policemen?” Roy said.

  “One of them is named Slakely.”

  “That doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “You know the police. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

  “I’ve never heard of this fellow. We’ll straighten him out, though. Please sit down.” He glanced once at Clara, then back at Linda Gail.

  “I wouldn’t talk about a police officer like that,” Carbo said. “You say something careless, and a rumor starts. You call a lawyer. That’s how you handle it. That’s why lawyers were invented.”

  “Sit down by the heater, Linda Gail,” Roy said. “Clara made some eggnog.”

  “Yeah, sit down,” Carbo said. “I hear you’re working for Mr. Warner. Benjamin lived right next door to him. He saw an empire in the Nevada desert. There’s a word for that. Visionary? I think that’s why he was killed. He was shot four times in the face. The bullets blew his eye out on the rug.”

  Linda Gail’s knees felt weak. From the corner of her eye, she could see Clara Wiseheart obviously taking pleasure in her embarrassment and discomfort.

  “I had better go now,” Linda Gail said. She waited for Roy to speak.

  He took a sip from his julep, his eyes on hers. “You still like it pink around the bone?” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Your steak,” he said. “I’ll put another one on.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” Jerry said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She took his arm, her high heels catching on the edges of the flagstones, the heat from a gas torch bright on the side of her face. She looked once more at Roy. He was turning a steak on the grill, watching the grease flare on the coals. His gaze lifted to hers. He pointed a finger at the back of Carbo’s neck, grinning, his thumb cocked like a pistol. He jerked his finger as though he had just pulled the trigger.

  Jerry opened the driver’s door on her car. Clara Wiseheart had gone back inside the dining room. Carbo was talking to Roy, who kept looking through the piked gate at Linda Gail.

&
nbsp; “What’s that man doing here?” she said.

  “He’s the laddie you see if you want into the fight game,” Jerry said. “You know what the sports wire is?”

  “It has to do with Las Vegas?”

  “The people who control it control all the gambling in the United States. Some of the money gets laundered in the film industry. The Mafia already controls the projectionists and stagehands. You think that guy in there is bad? You ought to meet Charlie Luciano.”

  “Hershel might die, and I’m responsible. Did Roy have Jack Valentine killed?”

  “He knows the guys who could do it. I doubt Roy would go to the trouble with a guy like Valentine. Frankly, who cares? People live, people die. Carbo was just telling us he was pals with Bugsy Siegel. Some people think he was involved in Siegel’s murder. It’s not ours to worry about. Move your husband out to Santa Monica and forget all these people in River Oaks. There’s nothing that goes on in Roy’s house that doesn’t go on in the government. At Okinawa I strafed Japanese fishing boats because they had radios on them. There were families on those boats. It’s the way of the world. We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.”

  “You got that from Roy.”

  “It’s the only thing in life he’s been right about, except for his infatuation with you.”

  “I don’t have the power to deal with these people. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re the one with the talent. They’re the ones who want to buy it. What’s that tell you? Take their money and treat them with the contempt they deserve.”