Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (33 page)

“Recently,” he replied.

“What for?”

“You never know.”

“Never know what?”

“When you might need one.”

“Did you come here to talk about something, Hershel?”

“She wants to build a house in Santa Monica. I told her we don’t have that kind of money. She said our house in River Oaks looks like a filling station. She doesn’t like our snooty neighbors, either. She says they’re too stupid to know what it means to have a contract at Warner Brothers.”

“Maybe she’s got a point. I mean about your neighbors. It might not be a bad idea to own a home in Southern California. A lot of people say that’s the place to be.”

“You think so?”

“It’s a cinch that any land you buy there will go up in value.”

“Except I think she wants to build the house for herself. I don’t think she wants me out there. I embarrass her.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “How could anybody be embarrassed by you? You were at Kasserine and Salerno and Omaha and Saint-Lô and the Bulge. Don’t talk about yourself like that, Hersh.”

“She just got back from Los Angeles. I made dinner reservations for us at the San Jacinto Inn. I filled up our bedroom with flowers. She told me she had a stomachache. Then told me it was her time of the month.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“There’s something else I got to tell you. A guy from a wire service called me. He asked if Linda Gail and I were friends with a Communist by the name of Rosita Holland.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said if he was calling Rosita a Communist, he was a damn liar. I’m correct on that, right? Rosita was never a Communist?”

“Would you feel differently toward her?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a good answer.”

“Maybe her family was. That doesn’t mean she is,” he said.

“What if I said she was?”

“Then she wouldn’t be Rosita. Why are you talking to me like this, Weldon?”

“Because she’s my wife. Because people are trying to hurt her, and my friends are either behind her or they aren’t, no matter what her politics were.”

He sat down on the side of the bed. He was in his socks and undershirt, and there was a V-shaped area of tan below his neck. The top of his forehead was pale above his hat line, and the effect made him look older than he was. There was a strange cast to his face, like that of a man who had seen into the future and realized the Fates had perpetrated a terrible fraud. He picked up the .45 from his stack of shirts and opened the drawer on the nightstand and placed the .45 on top of the Gideons Bible inside the drawer. “I had a peculiar experience today,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“I was looking at one of our welding machines. I saw a swastika inside the frame. It was like the Krauts were telling us they were still with us, they weren’t going to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That we made our money off their invention. That we owe them. That maybe we weren’t supposed to come home.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Linda Gail is in the sack with another man,” he said.

“Sometimes we have to let things run their course. That’s a tough lesson, but it’s the way it is.”

I could see his face darken, his restraint beginning to slip. “What would you do if it was your wife?” he asked.

“Leave my wife out of it.”

“I thought you might say that,” he replied, his jawbone flexing.

“I’m worried about you, partner.”

“Don’t.” He closed the drawer hard, with the heel of his hand.

“You shouldn’t take your anger out on the wrong people,” I said.

“Is Rosita a Communist?”

“I won’t answer that question.”

“I know she’s not. But what if you knew she was a turncoat? How would you feel, Loot? How would you like to be deceived by the woman you love?”

I didn’t have an answer for him.

“See what I mean?” he said. “I was a virgin when I married Linda Gail. I’ve never wanted another woman. You ask why I’m carrying my forty-five? I think I might shoot myself for being so damn dumb.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s on your mind.”

“It’s my upbringing. If a badger digs under your back fence, you deal with it.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. Hershel had said he planned to visit his father on their farm. I had never met his family, but I knew their frame of reference well. Whether Hershel knew it or not, he was rejoining his family and the culture they represented without ever stepping out of the motor court. I clicked off the light switch for him on my way out.

R
OSITA AND I
returned to Houston two days later. Historically, in the long and weary traditions of warfare, snipers were treated as ignominious individuals who seldom became prisoners of war. The degree of enmity directed at them was for a reason. A successful sniper destroyed morale, robbed exhausted soldiers of the few hours of sleep they were allowed, and inculcated feelings of nakedness and vulnerability in a foot solider that can only be compared to having your skin stripped off with a pair of pliers.

A single sniper could influence the behavior of hundreds or even thousands of troops, whether he was close by or not. We didn’t salute in combat zones or silhouette on a hill or wear good-luck pieces or watches or rings that reflected light. We believed in the three-on-a-match warning passed down from the Great War. (The first and second man who lit his cigarette off the same match would probably be all right; by the time the third man lit up, the crosshairs of a scoped rifle would be on his face.) An effective sniper did not simply command territory; he lived in your mind like a parasite, sapping your energies, eating away at your nerve endings.

The people trying to hurt us operated in the same fashion. We did not know who or where they were, but they could reach out and touch us any time they wished. We were blindfolded, groping about in the darkness, waiting for them to strike, while they stood faceless in the sunlight and enjoyed our plight.

We had been home three hours when I saw a police cruiser pull into our driveway, a uniformed officer behind the wheel and a middle-aged woman in the passenger seat. The woman got out and walked across the grass to the front porch, her plain black bag hanging from her shoulder, her dark suit too tight for her body.

As adherents of a Judeo-Christian ethos that teaches us not to judge, we have a tendency to shut down our instincts and avoid first impressions that are cautionary in nature. But as I review my own experience, I have to conclude that my choice not to pet a junkyard dog was probably a good one, and I should not have been surprised at the irritability of a black-garbed, wimple-encased two-hundred-pound Catholic nun on a one-hundred-degree sidewalk when I asked for directions to the San Jacinto Battleground. Of course, those are facetious examples. There was nothing humorous about the encounter I was about to have.

The woman who knocked on my door wore no expression, unless you counted the flat stare in her eyes and the bitterness around her mouth. She seemed to radiate the kind of repressed animus that has no origins, the kind that is probably pathological and characterizes functionaries who serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. When we meet people of this kind, we assume their source of discontent has nothing to do with us, and hence we’re often incautious in dealing with them. I was not the exception. She said her name was Lemunyon and that she was a probation officer assigned by the court to make a recommendation regarding the charges against Rosita.

“Recommendation about what?” I said through the screen.

“I’ve called three times to make an appointment. No one answered,” she said. “So I came out. May I come in?”

I pushed open the door. “Sit down,” I said.

“Is Mrs. Holland here?”

“She went to the store.”

“I also sent a letter and asked that you call me.”

“We were out of town. We haven’t had time to open the mail.”

“Out of town?” she said, sitting down in a stuffed chair but touching it first, as though it might have dust on it.

“Yes, my company has several pipeline contracts in Louisiana. I’m over there two weeks out of four.”

She looked at a spot midway between her chair and me. “You’re telling me you and your wife were in the state of Louisiana?”

“That’s what I said. Excuse me, but I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

“Obviously,” she said, looking around the room, as though its old furniture and bookcases and dark drapes and big globe mounted on a stand were an extension of an attitude she couldn’t piece together. “I’m doing a background report on your wife. She can be tried for misdemeanor battery or for felonious assault. Do you know the difference between the two?”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“You believe?”

This time I didn’t speak.

“Do you know the penalty for felony assault on a police officer?” she said.

“My wife did not assault anybody,” I said.

“She just goes out of state while she’s on bail?”

“I didn’t know there was a proscription on the bail. The prosecutor knows our attorney. We were a phone call away.”

“She left the state. What is it you don’t understand about that?”

I wasn’t sure what “that” was. But I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The anger I saw in her eyes had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Rosita and I were a personal affront to Miss Lemunyon and the system that validated and empowered her. I thought of the nurse who came to our house with a psychiatrist in 1934 and took away my mother. I also thought of the death camp where I had found Rosita. Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

“The fault is mine, Miss Lemunyon,” I said.

“What do you think ‘bail’ means?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Do you think it means permission to do whatever you want?”

Any answer I gave her would be the wrong one. I knew that. I also knew it was too late to turn the situation around. “Would you like to talk to our attorney? Maybe he can assure the prosecutor’s office that Mrs. Holland had no desire to be a fugitive.”

“She’s an alien?”

“A resident alien, that’s correct.”

“Her file has been flagged.”

“Flagged?”

“She’s come to the attention of the FBI. Where did you go in Louisiana?”

“Down by the coast.”

“You were there for business purposes, and you took her with you?”

“Yes, that says it.”

“I want to see the letter I sent you.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“You said you had not opened it. I want to see it. It should be in your mail.”

“You’re right,” I said.

I found her letter among a stack of unopened envelopes on the dining room table. I showed it to her. She placed a business card on the coffee table. “I want her in my office by eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll be there.”

She got up from the chair. She brushed at her skirt and straightened her jacket. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“There’s a chance Mrs. Holland might not leave the building. I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she replied.

L
INDA GAIL MET
Roy in the lounge at the Shamrock. After they had a drink, he went up to the penthouse; she followed him twenty minutes later. From the balcony, she could see the nocturnal glow of the swimming pool and, across South Main, the oil wells that pumped night and day, as steady and reassuring as the beat of the human heart. Roy turned down the lights and undressed her and laid her down on the bed, then sat beside her and looked into her face. “You like the hotel?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He put his mouth on hers. His lips were cold from the whiskey and soda he had been drinking. He tried to put his tongue inside her mouth.

“Roy?” she said, turning away on the pillow.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?” he asked.

She shook her head and smiled. “You know me. I’m just funny sometimes.”

He undressed and got under the sheet; he molded himself against the curve of her buttocks, his hands slipping around her hips. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.

“No, I just have moods. It’s a silly way to be.”

“If you have a problem, I’d like to help.”

“Eventually, we all die and then nothing makes any difference. So why talk about it?”

“We’re not going to die now, though. Why not enjoy the party in the meantime?”

“You’re right,” she said.

She went through it with her eyes closed, her senses dead, her face slanted away from the hardness in his jaw. Minutes later, she felt him rise from her and his weight lift off the bed. She kept her eyes closed and turned toward the wall and pulled the sheet up to her shoulder. She heard the blender flare to life, the grinding noise as invasive as a dentist’s drill. He sat down next to her. “I made you an orange frappé,” he said.

“Put it on the nightstand, would you?”

“You weren’t quite with it tonight.”

“Thanks. A girl loves hearing she’s a bad lay.”

“I wondered if it was because of something I said or did.”

She felt for his hand and squeezed it but did not look at him. “You’re fine.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

“It’s a funny feeling I have. Like things are coming apart. Like birds are all flying from a tree. The way they do at sunset.”

She heard him set down the glass he was holding. His hand was ice-cold when he touched her shoulder.

“Do you want me to call the hotel physician?” he asked.

“I’m not sick. I just feel strange. We start production in Mexico in five days.”

“I thought you were making a movie about the French Resistance.”

“There’re flashbacks in it. About the Spanish Civil War. The male lead is based on André Malraux.”

“I just don’t follow you, Linda Gail. I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“I’ll be playing in scenes about the Spanish Civil War. I’m the lover of an aviator fighting for the Republic.”