Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  Her eyes looked into mine.

  “Tom Malory is my name. I hope you don’t mind my pulling up a chair and speaking with you,” I said.

  “She hears you okay,” the black woman said. “She’s got an awful lot of medicine in her right now. I’m going over here and let y’all talk. I’ll be here if you need anything. My name is Clementine.”

  I got a folding chair and sat down in front of Rosita, the clipboard on my knees. “I’m going to get you out of here,” I said.

  I saw a light come into her eyes, the beginnings of a smile. Her lips moved without sound.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “Nod to show me you understand.”

  She didn’t nod, but she blinked.

  “Did they give you shock treatment?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “We’re not going to let them,” I said.

  “Weldon,” she whispered down in her throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Weldon,” she repeated.

  “Tell me. What is it?”

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  I could hardly restrain myself from reaching out and touching her hand. I knew as soon as I did, someone would realize I was not who I claimed to be.

  “Linda Gail and Hershel know where we are,” I said. “They’ll do everything they can to help us. But you and I will be the ones to get ourselves out of here. That means we have to be good actors. Do you understand? I’m Mr. Malory. That’s the only name I have.”

  Her eyes became sleepy again, her head sinking, although it was obvious she was trying to concentrate. At that moment I wanted to kill the entire Wiseheart family.

  Clementine approached us. “She needs to go back to the room,” she said.

  “Can I see her again this afternoon?”

  “Better ask Mrs. Penbrook. I expect she’ll say it’s okay.”

  I asked Clementine to step away from the wheelchair with me. “Is Mrs. Holland scheduled for electroshock treatment?” I said.

  “I don’t have anything to do with that. They got her on the second floor.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The second floor is for people that’s depressed real bad. That might kill themselves. I’ll be taking her back now.”

  I lingered on the lawn in the cold sunshine, the wind like dry ice on my face. I studied the parking lot, the security fence around it, the uniformed guard in the booth by the entrance. How would I get a vehicle inside? How would I get Rosita into the vehicle? The problem seemed insoluble. I glanced up at the second story of the sanitarium and saw Rosita’s face in a window. Her breath had crystallized into icy white flowers on the glass. I don’t think I will ever forget that image.

  I HAD TOLD LINDA Gail and Hershel where I would be. When I returned to the hotel, the clerk took a message out of the key box and handed it to me. Linda Gail wanted me to call her. She didn’t say why. If there was a tap on her phone, whoever had installed it would know the city I was calling from and figure out the rest of it. But I couldn’t ignore her message. She was an intelligent woman and wouldn’t have asked me to call unless something important had happened. I walked down the street and used a pay phone; at least I wouldn’t give away the name of the hotel.

  She answered on the second ring. “How’s our friend doing?” she said.

  “About the same,” I said. She had not mentioned Rosita’s name. I felt better about phoning her.

  “Roy would like to talk with you.”

  “What for?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “That’s because he wants something. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, he always has an agenda. His thinking is no different from a sociopath’s.”

  “He’s not one to make frivolous phone calls.”

  I couldn’t believe Linda Gail was still under Roy’s influence. “Tell him to put it in a letter.”

  “Maybe he can do something to help. Give him a chance.”

  “Dealing with Roy is like picking up broken glass with your bare fingers,” I said. “Did he give you the Bunny Berigan record?”

  “No.”

  “He tried to get me to give it to you. He’d wrapped it in satin paper with a ribbon. He believes he’s the protagonist in an Elizabethan tragedy, and he wants the rest of us to be his stage props.”

  There was a pause. I wished I hadn’t told her about the record. Maybe Roy had been sincere. Maybe he wanted to do something tender and not embarrass her or hurt Hershel. Maybe he was caught inside the impossibility of correcting the past.

  “Can either Hershel or I do anything?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll be headed back to Louisiana tonight. I’m meeting in Baton Rouge with some geologists from Sinclair.”

  I had told another lie in case anyone was listening. I felt foolish constructing a conversation to mislead someone who may not exist. That’s how the invasion of a person’s privacy works. It makes us afraid of shadows and fills us with suspicion about our fellow man, and ultimately, it causes us to degrade and resent ourselves.

  “Maybe Roy wants to make amends,” she said. “Maybe he can help Rosita.”

  “Then why hasn’t he already done it?”

  “Maybe he’s tried. He wants your respect. He’s like a little boy. He flew his plane upside down on location.”

  “I don’t care about Roy’s problems. I don’t know how I can get Rosita back. I’m against the wall. They’re going to destroy her brain.”

  I heard her exhale against the receiver, not in exasperation but in surrender. “Can we do something?”

  “There’s Grandfather to think about. I’ll call you all from Baton Rouge,” I said, and hung up.

  I ate a sandwich at the soda fountain in the drugstore that had a Coca-Cola sign over the doorway. I tried to think through all the events and improbabilities that had occurred in my life since I first saw Rosita. The Greek tragedians viewed irony, not the stars, as the agency that shaped our lives. They were probably right. I was a river-baptized Christian, but I had married a Jew who was a better Christian than I. I wanted to be an anthropologist, but I became a pipeline contractor and a rich man through the use of machines that made the tanks that tried to kill me. Roy Wiseheart was born with everything except the approval of his father and consequently seemed to value nothing. Hershel Pine was a man of humble birth who could have served as a yeoman under Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, yet he possessed the chivalric virtues of an Arthurian knight. Clara Wiseheart owned unimaginable amounts of money, and seemed governed day to day by the vindictive child living inside her. Linda Gail had stopped for gas at a country store and stepped off the gallery into a camera’s lens and a career in Hollywood. And since 1934, the single most influential ongoing event in my life had been my encounter with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, people who had the cultural dimensions of a hangnail.

  Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.

  More ironic, I was soon to discover that Bonnie and Clyde were not through with me. And I was about to learn that Roy Wiseheart was one of the most determined people on the planet, at least when it came to getting his way. The phone in my hotel room was ringing just as I came through the door. It was 12:55 P.M. I picked up but didn’t speak.

  “Is that you, Weldon?” the voice said.

  “How’d you know where I was?”

  “You told me where Rosita had been moved. So I called every hotel in Wichita Falls. By the way, I’m using a phone that nobody has tapped.”
r />   “I didn’t register under my own name. How would you know to call here?”

  “I got the desk clerk to give me the names of the people who had registered in the last twenty-four hours. How many guests named Thomas Malory check in to a run-down dump in a sinkhole like Wichita Falls?”

  “You’re not a fan of small-town America?”

  “Boy, are you a pill.”

  “Why would the desk clerk give you the names of their hotel guests?”

  “I told him I was an FBI agent.”

  “The only subject I’m interested in discussing is Rosita. If you could help her, you would have already told me. That means I’m going to let you go. I’m asking that you not call me again.”

  “Give me a chance, pal. We’re more alike than you think.”

  “No, we’re not. Stay the hell away from me.”

  I hung up. It wasn’t smart.

  I HAD TO GET a car, and I had to get Rosita out of the sanitarium and into the car. Then I would have viable choices, a chance to run for it, to force the other side to come after us if they wanted to try, a chance to make others pay a price for what they had done to us. As long as we had choices, we had opportunities. If you get your ticket ripped in half, you do it in hot blood, and you do not go gently into that good night. Bonnie and Clyde were murderers, but no one can say they didn’t have courage when they shot their way into a Texas prison to rescue a friend.

  If we had choices, I could drive us across the Red River into Oklahoma and head for the Winding Stair Mountains and on into Arkansas and disappear inside the misty blue vastness of the Ozarks. Or we could go south and catch the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles and buy another car and rent a cottage in the vineyard country and live among Mexicans and southern Europeans who had known Jack London. Or we could drive to a café at a dirt crossroads that served as a bus stop and catch a Greyhound to Nevada and that night find ourselves milling among the crowds on the neon-striped sidewalks of Las Vegas, in high desert country surrounded by purple mountains, under a sky that turned turquoise at sunset and sparkled with stars by eight P.M. Then time would take care of our problems. Others would learn what had been done to my wife, and a degree of sanity would be restored in our lives. That’s what I believed. All I needed was a car and a way out of the sanitarium.

  My thoughts had run away with me. What would I do about Grandfather and my mother? I had replaced my fear with poetic fantasies. The reality was I felt like a man who had been sucked into a whirlpool and was drowning a few feet away from dry land, while the rest of the world sat by and watched and did nothing.

  I WALKED DOWN THE street, past the diner and the drugstore and the mechanic’s garage, to an automobile dealership on the corner. Pennants attached to wires flapped in the wind above the rows of new and used cars. Then I saw a vehicle that made my scalp shrink against the bone. It had four doors and a black roof and black fenders and a maroon body and whitewalled wire-spoked wheels. The red leather upholstery was sun-faded but looked like it had been rubbed with mink oil to prevent it from cracking. On the edge of my vision, I saw a man walking toward me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the 1932 Confederate.

  “See something you like?” the man said. He had a long pointed beard like a mountain man’s and wore an incongruous suit coat and corduroy trousers hitched up on his hips with firehouse suspenders. If he had an expression, I couldn’t see it inside his beard.

  “Where’d you get that ’32 Confederate over there?” I said.

  “That belonged to Dr. Jones. He works at the sanitarium. He decided to trade it in on something more sporty. The engine is rebuilt, and the tires are good. Want to take it for a spin?”

  “Do you know where Dr. Jones got it?” I asked.

  “I think he said he bought it from a banker in San Angelo.”

  A sunbaked gas ration sticker was still attached to the bottom of the windshield. On the right was a numbered sticker with the name of the sanitarium, the kind issued to employees. I opened the driver’s door and ran my hand across the dashboard, then across the edge of the headliner. I touched a spot in the metal molding that had been soldered and sanded smooth and repainted, and I knew this was the spot where the .44-caliber bullet from Grandfather’s revolver had lodged.

  “Looking for something?” the salesman said.

  “I just noticed there was a scratch here. It’s not important.”

  The keys were hanging from the ignition. “Go ahead,” the salesman said. “I’ll ride with you and have a smoke.”

  I started the engine, and we bounced out into the street.

  “Hums like a sewing machine and turns on a dime,” the salesman said. “It’ll do sixty on the highway without breaking a sweat. If you happen to be a traveling man, I think this baby has your name on it.”

  I looked at him, wondering if there was a second meaning in his words. He shook a Lucky Strike out of his pack and lit it. He gazed idly out the window as we drove up the main street and back to the lot.

  “I’d like to pay cash. What do you want for it?” I asked.

  “You said cash?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re asking nine hundred because it’s a collectible. I can give it to you for eight.”

  “Sold American,” I said.

  “Let’s get the paperwork done. I think it’s fixing to cut loose out there. You ever seen such weather? Puts me in mind of the Dust Bowl years. We sure don’t need any more of that.”

  Chapter

  30

  I CALLED THE HOUSE to check on Grandfather, then drove to a secondhand clothing store and bought a man’s overcoat and an old cowboy hat. At three-fifteen P.M. I pulled up to the entrance of the secured parking lot behind the sanitarium. My suitcase and a paper bag from the store were on the floor in back, the Luger under the seat. The security guard wasn’t much more than a boy and reading a copy of Saga magazine in the booth by a sliding gate. A military-style cap with a lacquered brim was sitting crown-down by his elbow. He had the lean physique and profile I had always associated with the West Texas boys I had known in the army. They were great pals to have, but almost every one of them was an unchurched Calvinist and not given to latitude. He closed his magazine and came outside as I rolled down the window. My heart was thudding so hard in my chest that I had to press my hand against my side. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m picking up somebody for Dr. Jones.”

  He nodded politely and glanced at the employee sticker on the windshield. “That’s a fine-looking car,” he said.

  “You bet.”

  “I’m fixing to get me a convertible. At least when it’s a little bit warmer.” He placed one hand on the roof and smiled down at me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. “When I ask my girlfriend on a date, I got to take her on the bus. That don’t flush real well.”

  Before I could reply, he pushed the gate free of the driveway and waved me through.

  I parked at the very back of the lot, in a spot where the car couldn’t be seen from the security booth. Fourteen or fifteen patients were sitting in the sunshine on the knoll. A sidewalk sloped from the top of the knoll to the curb of the parking lot. I had loaded the Luger that morning. It was hard to believe I had come armed into the midst of people such as the receptionist and the attendant named Clementine and the good-natured kid in the security booth. I felt a terrible sense of shame. I told myself over and over that I had no recourse. My wife’s life was at stake. Nonetheless, I knew I was systematically deceiving others and that I might endanger their livelihoods and, if push came to shove, put their lives in jeopardy. I couldn’t think my way out of the problem. I had reached the point where I had begun to think in terms of “unavoidable attrition,” which was the rhetoric we had used to justify carpet-bombing and dropping incendiaries on civilian populations.

  I saw Rosita in a wheelchair and Clementine sitting behind her on a stone b
ench. I picked up my clipboard and went up the sidewalk. Rosita was wearing a purple kerchief with red flowers instead of the shawl, as though setting aside winter and entering spring, regardless of what the seasons were doing. Her face seemed to have no expression, but when I looked at her eyes, I knew she was smiling inside.

  I’d thought I would have a plan by that time. I didn’t. At least not one that was rational. I had used subterfuge to gain access to the institution. However, I had reached a juncture where I had to make a choice between more of the same or trusting the potential for charity that secretly we pray is always at work in our fellow man.

  I sat down next to Clementine. At that time in our history, it was unusual for a white person to sit next to a person of color. It was acceptable to stand next to one but not to sit. “You know that Mrs. Holland was in a Nazi death camp, don’t you, Miss Clementine?” I said.

  “Yes, sir, I heard that.”

  “There are people out yonder who love her and want to take care of her.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “There are also people who want to hurt her. That’s how she ended up here.”

  “That’d be a pretty mean thing to do. Hard to imagine.”

  “It happens, probably more often than people think.”

  “What are you saying to me, sir?” she said, looking straight ahead.

  “I’m not a sir. I gave up being a sir when I was discharged from the army.”

  “Polite is polite. Bad manners are bad manners.”

  “Are you a Baptist?” I asked.

  “I have been a Baptist all my life.”

  “I was baptized in the Guadalupe River when I was twelve years old. I think the preacher was drunk. He almost drowned me.”

  “Better say what you need to say, Mr. Malory.”

  “I’ve done many things wrong in my life, but as an adult, I’ve prided myself on never telling a lie except to avoid injuring someone. I’ve told quite a few lies in the last couple of days.”