Wayfaring Stranger

by James Lee Burke

  Her eyes were on the horizon and the blue sky that was more like summer than winter, and the orange dust clouds that kept rising up like funnels on the plains.

  “I saved my wife from the Nazis,” I said. “I carried her in my arms through an artillery barrage. I hid with her in a cellar inside Germany until we were rescued by American paratroopers. I searched months for her after the war, and when I found her, I married her in Paris. I’d give my life for her right now, on this spot.”

  “I believe you, sir.”

  “Would you like to take a break? I can watch Mrs. Holland. Maybe I’ll push her around the yard a little bit.”

  Her hands were folded together on her knees. “Yes, it’s getting mighty cold. We’re in the shadow of the building now.” She looked at the horizon and at a bird flying out of a bare field. She rose from the bench and buttoned her mackinaw at the throat. “Mrs. Holland would probably like to be in the sun. I’ll be back in five minutes with a hot chocolate. Not one second past five minutes. Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Miss Clementine,” I said.

  She made no reply, and her eyes never met mine.

  I wheeled Rosita slowly down the walk to the edge of the parking lot and paused by the curb, as though we were looking at the dust clouds gathering on the horizon. I helped her from the chair and put her in the front seat of the Confederate and set the chair in the backseat and closed the doors. I removed the overcoat and the oversize cowboy hat from the paper bag and put them on Rosita and tucked her hair inside the hat. I turned the car around and drove toward the security booth. Then I rolled down the driver’s window and leaned my head out as though I wanted to thank the guard. He came out of the booth and waved at me and pushed back the gate, and just that fast, we were out on the street and headed for the highway and the Great American Desert, a ball of tumbleweed smacking the windshield.

  THIRTY MILES FROM town, a fine mist began blowing out of the south, mixing with the dust, and the sun seemed to dull over and grow cold and smaller inside its own glow. Then a shadow moved across the entirety of the landscape like a shade being pulled down on a window. I turned off on a side road and drove down to a creek bed among a grove of cottonwoods whose limbs glistened with mist and were as pointed and stark as the tips on a deer’s antlers. A ribbon of red water wound its way through the bottom of the creek, and I saw raindrops splashing in it like drops of lead. I kept the engine and the heater running. Rosita had fallen asleep with her head on her chest, the brim of the cowboy hat slanted over her eyes. I didn’t know how many or what kinds of drugs she had been administered. I suspected the dosage was large. She raised her head, maybe because the car had stopped.

  “We need to stay off the road until dark,” I said.

  She looked into my eyes as though trying to make sense out of my words.

  “It’s all right to go back to sleep,” I said. “We’re safe.”

  “Weldon?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “I was having a dream.” She touched my face. Then she touched her own, the way people do when they’re looking for the source of a toothache. “Is it morning?”

  “No, it’s almost nightfall. You’ve been sleeping. You have your times mixed up.”

  “I don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “We’re leaving hospitals and drugs behind us. We have a good car and a lot of money. We’ll stay in a nice hotel someplace. We’ll eat in a fine restaurant, maybe even tonight. How do you like this car?”

  She pushed down on the softness of the leather upholstery. “It’s elegant.”

  “It’s funny you choose that word. That’s what I thought when I first saw it.” I was saying too much, burdening her at a time when her mind was probably on the edge of breaking. “See, the sky is completely dark in the north. In another half hour, we’ll be back on the highway.”

  She pulled her knees up on the seat, canting them sideways, and held on to my arm with both hands and pointed her forehead into my shoulder, mashing the crown of her hat flat.

  We drove through the night into Amarillo and ate steak and eggs in a truck stop and saw the sun rise on the badlands. I thought of selling the car and buying another, but any business transaction with an automobile dealer at this point invited a number of risks that could be our undoing. The dust was blowing in serpentine lines on the asphalt. In an army-surplus store, I bought a large piece of canvas with eyelets on the corners, and we parked at a rest stop and I covered the car with the tarp, and we slept for three hours, snug and safe and warm inside our little Bedouin tent on the plains.

  When I pulled off the canvas, a sheriff’s car and the Texas Highway Patrol passed us without slowing down, although they may not have been able to see the car clearly from the highway.

  We changed radio stations constantly but heard nothing on the news about ourselves. By evening we were in New Mexico. Snow was spitting against the windshield, sliding in crystals down the glass, the clouds charged with electricity. The topography had probably changed little since the Ice Age. For miles we could not see a human structure. By sunset, the snow had stopped and columns of smoke or dust seemed to rise of their own accord from atop the mesas and break apart in the wind. Against the horizon, we could see a solitary mountain whose top had caved inward, forming a cone like that of a dead volcano. Along the roadsides were piles of igneous rock that resembled slag scraped from a furnace. Later, I saw the lights of emergency vehicles blinking ahead of us and turned onto a side road and drove fifteen miles before I got back on the asphalt. Rosita watched the country go by as you would on a train.

  We spent two days in a motor court downwind from a feeder lot full of Angus that bawled through the night. I could see the influences of the drugs that had been injected into Rosita’s body gradually leaving her system. I had turned out the light and gone to bed when she came out of the shower and got under the covers without putting on her nightgown, her hair damp, her body glowing. She made me think of a mermaid rising from dark water. I held her against me and pressed my face in the coolness of her hair and kissed the top of her shoulder.

  “Hello, stranger,” I said.

  “Hello, yourself,” she replied.

  “Do you know the song ‘Hello, Stranger’ by A. P. Carter?”

  “I don’t think so. Is it special for some reason?”

  “Once you hear it, you don’t forget it. It’s like you. A man sees you once, and he never gets you out of his mind.”

  “If they catch us and take me to another sanitarium, I want you to put me out of your mind forever.”

  “I’ll never do that.”

  “I’ll take my life, Weldon.”

  “No, you will not. They’re never going to beat us, Rosita. We beat them in Germany. We’ll beat them here.”

  She put her arm across my chest and closed her eyes and was soon asleep.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON we checked into a motor court at the bottom of Raton Pass. We had reached a crossroads in our odyssey. Each night a passenger train came down the Pass, actually sliding down the rails, the wheels deliberately locked because of the steepness of the grade, on its way to the coast. We could sell the car and board the train to Albuquerque, Flagstaff, or Los Angeles. Or we could head for the high country in Nevada. Or we could continue north, up Raton Canyon and through Trinidad and into Denver. From there, if we wished, we could take a plane to any city in the United States.

  The car was parked under the porte cochere attached to the side of our cottage at the motor court. I walked down the main street to buy a newspaper. The sky was green. A layer of warm air was rising from the desert into the abrupt ascent of the Southern Colorado Plateau. The juxtaposition of miles and miles of flatlands and buttes and mesas, all of it lit by a flaming red sun low on the horizon, and the great, darkening massivity of the Rocky Mountains behind me was head-reeling. I tried to see the tops of the mountains, but
they were higher than the clouds, and the clouds were as black and swirling and sublime as smoke from an inferno. I don’t believe I ever saw a greater artwork than the one I witnessed that evening. Somehow it seemed an indicator of all the good things that awaited us down the track.

  The only newspaper on the drugstore magazine rack was a local one, the kind usually published by a staff of no more than four or five, including the printer. I bought a copy and sat at the soda fountain and ordered a cup of coffee. The biggest local news was about a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and a grease fire in a café and the theft of a tractor from a barn. Then I turned to a section that was made up of ads and general-interest stories probably pulled randomly off the wire, one just as extraneous to small-town concerns as another. At the top of the page was a follow-up on the reported crash of a flying saucer at Roswell in July of that year. The air force was restating its recantation of the initial claim that it had found the wreckage of a UFO on a local ranch; the salvaged materials were obviously pieces of a weather balloon. Contrary to rumor, no bodies of extraterrestrials had been recovered from the crash site. How strips of wood and rubber and aluminum and tinfoil-like material from a weather balloon could be mistaken for the wreckage of a spaceship was never quite addressed. Regardless, it was good entertainment, no matter which point of view you chose.

  I was about to put aside the paper and leave it for someone else when I turned the page. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The four photographs at the top of the story showed the four brain-­destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured.

  I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched.

  In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by a Texas oilman whose heroic war record and good looks had lured others to his cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Of course, there was the vindictive wife, a human tarantula, who had tried to use her connections with Mafia figures such as Frankie Carbo and Bugsy Siegel to destroy the brain of an innocent woman she had scapegoated for her husband’s profligate behavior.

  The story could have been borrowed from a history of the Borgias or the manipulations of Nero’s mother. The real story, involving greed and the death of my father and the attempted theft of our pipeline company, was not one many people would be interested in. I supposed, however, that iniquity is iniquity, and the story told by Linda Gail and the tabloid writer contained its own kind of truth. Which is the better medium for its portrayal? A grocery list of legalisms or a bloody saga backlit by handheld torches, with the shadows of rogues dancing on the greasy waters of the Tiber? I wanted to send a box of candy to the scandalmonger who wrote the article.

  I BELIEVE THE MOST dangerous and vulnerable moments in my early experience as a combat soldier were not what one would think. I was in the second wave at Normandy, and most of the suffering that had taken place along that blood-frothed, ugly strip of coastline was already over. My real initiation would come at Saint-Lô. I wanted to be brave but feared that I was not. My greater fear was that I would prove a coward had lived inside me all my life, and this cowardly presence would come to define who I was.

  Before the breakout at Saint-Lô, we laid down one of the heaviest rolling barrages in history. The forward artillery observer was from my platoon, a kid who carried a half dozen good-luck charms in his fatigue jacket and taped his dog tags so they wouldn’t tinkle and had no higher ambition than to return to his job as a shoe salesman at a Thom McAn store in New Jersey. A round came in short, right beside his hole, rendering him stone-deaf, cutting his wire, isolating him in the dark. Then the Germans began answering our barrage. Amid the explosions, we could hear him calling for help, his cries becoming weaker and weaker. I went after him, the ground lighting around me as though a downed power line were dancing in a pool of water. I found him spread-eagled on his back in the bottom of his hole, the skin around his mouth webbed with blood. I got him across my shoulders and carried him to a road, where we hid inside a culvert until dawn. He died shortly after sunrise.

  In the following days, I began to feel that I was invulnerable. I had been through what, in medieval times, was called “ordeal by fire,” and I had proved myself worthy in the eyes of others. I was sure that Providence had intended for me to survive the war. It is impossible for a combat soldier to be more self-deluded or to be possessed of a more reckless attitude.

  The article in the Raton newspaper had given me an undue level of confidence. At last Rosita and I had been vindicated by the support of the crowd, I told myself. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the support of the crowd has a shelf life of about three minutes.

  I walked to a phone booth down the street from the motor court and called to check on Grandfather. Through the Plexiglas windows, I could see the highway that led up through Raton Pass and the winding ponderosa-dotted canyon that opened onto the old mining town of Trinidad, where the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday finished paying the debt they owed the Clanton gang.

  Snowball answered the phone. She was under five feet tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had the blackest skin I had ever seen. She often wore white dresses and blouses, some with eyelets on the shoulders.

  “How’s Grandfather doing?” I said.

  “A little laid up.”

  “He’s sick?”

  “More like he fell down. Bruised all over his seat and his back.”

  “Would you tell me what happened?”

  “He made me drive him to the roller-skate rink on South Main.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “You try arguing with him and see what happens.”

  “He put on roller skates?”

  “They didn’t want him to do it. He caused a big scene.”

  “Snowball—”

  “It ain’t my fault.”

  “I know it. Can you take the phone to him, please?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  I saw the passenger train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles coming down the grade inside the canyon, the headlamp on its locomotive wobbling in the dark, the wheels screeching on the rails. If we decided on the train as our way out, we would have to wait until tomorrow evening.

  “How’s Rosita?” Grandfather asked.

  “She’s better every day. Are you trying to commit suicide?”

  “If I wanted to commit suicide, I wouldn’t mess it up.”

  “Why would you go to a roller rink?”

  “I felt like it.”

  “Is there anything in the papers about Rosita and me or the Wisehearts?”

  “Yes, there is. That’s not all. That fellow Slakely burned up in his trailer. The paper said an electrical fire.”

  “Hubert Slakely the cop?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. You pulled the tiger’s tail. The Wise­hearts won’t quit. If they let you get away with it, any little pissant in Houston can climb out from under a rock and do it.”

  “No one knows how to deliver an insult like you, Grandfather.” But I wasn’t thinking about his ongoing denigration of every
thing that breathed. I was trying to think through the implications of Slakely’s death.

  “We need you,” Grandfather said.

  “Linda Gail and Hershel haven’t looked in on you?”

  “I didn’t rear you up to lose you to a wolf pack, son. Your mother needs you, and so do I. You come back home, you hear me? Just like I told you when you went overseas.”

  He had never called me “son” before.

  Chapter

  31

  I WOKE AT DAWN. The sky was clear and the moon still up, the grass on the foothills of Raton Pass stiff with frost. I placed my hand on the windowpane. It was ice-cold. I let Rosita sleep while I brushed my teeth and shaved and put on a clean corduroy shirt. I had a good feeling about the day. We had managed to get from Wichita Falls to within twenty miles of the Colorado state line without being apprehended or stopped. I told myself that in the greater scheme of things, we were not that important. Also, we had harmed no one and hence were not a threat to others. Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, and the Barker-Karpis gang had waged war against the banking system of the United States, and it had taken years for our best law enforcement agencies to kill or drive them to ground. We were hardly worth anyone’s notice.

  I have always believed that the American West, like Hollywood, is a magical place and the biggest stage set on earth. I also believe it’s haunted by the spirits of Indians, outlaws, Jesuit missionaries, drovers, gunmen, conquistadores, bindle stiffs, Chinese and Irish gandy dancers, whiskey traders, temperance leaguers, gold panners, buffalo hunters, fur trappers, prostitutes, and insane people of every stripe, maybe all of them living out their lives simultaneously in our midst. The Homeric epic doesn’t have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica.

  It was out there waiting for us, the Grand Adventure unscrolling beneath our feet. That’s what I felt as Rosita and I ate breakfast in a café not far from the train depot built in what was called Mission Revival mode, where we would board the Super Chief that evening.