Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga, #1)

by James Lee Burke

I think the postwar era was a golden age, and I don’t believe my feelings are simply an expression of generational nostalgia. I’ll always be proud I was witness to the events that characterized the era in which I grew up, and I’m also proud that I’ve written about it with some degree of objectivity. When all is said and done, and I don’t care what anyone else says, it was a grand time to be around.

My father was looking for work on a pipeline in East Texas. Maybe he would come back one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever.

That didn’t mean he was an ill-natured or entirely uncharitable man, just one who seemed to have a hole in his thinking. He had not been a good father to his children. Through either selfishness or ineptitude, he often left them to their own devices, even when they foundered on the wayside. I had never understood this obvious character defect in him. I sometimes wondered if the blood he had shed had made him incapable of love. He hid behind flippancy and cynicism. He rated all politicians “somewhere between mediocre and piss-poor.” His first wife had “a face that could make a freight train turn on a dirt road.” WPA stood for We Piddle Around. If he hadn’t been a Christian, he would have fired the hired help (we no longer had any) and “replaced them with sloths.” The local banker had a big nose because the air was free. Who was my grandfather in actuality? I didn’t have a clue.

“My first wife had a sense of humor like yours. The only time I ever saw her laugh was when she realized I’d developed shingles.”

“There’s a busted spar in my cattle guard,” Grandfather said. “Don’t pop a tire going out. I’d appreciate you not throwing that whiskey bottle in my trees, either.” “Tidy is as tidy does,” Raymond said. Grandfather rested one hand on the bottom of the window. He let his eyes roam over Raymond’s face before he spoke. “The man who kills you will rip out your throat before you ever know what hit you,” he said. “I’m not talking about myself, just somebody you might meet up the road, the kind of fellow who turns out to be the worst misjudgment you ever made.” “We apologize, sir,” said the woman in front, leaning across the driver so Grandfather could see her expression more clearly. Her smile made me think of somebody opening a music box. “We didn’t mean to bother y’all. You have a mighty nice spot here. Thank you for being so gracious and kind.” “No harm done,” Grandfather said.

Where in the name of suffering Jesus have you been, boy?”

“Are you going to call the sheriff about the people in the car?” “They’re not our business. If they come back, that’s another matter.” “The woman in the front seat caught your eye,” I said. “All women do. That’s the way things work. That’s why preachers are always railing about sex. It’s here for the long haul.”

But duty before druthers, I told myself,

WHEN I WAS a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, about to embark for England in the spring of 1944, I purchased a leather-bound notebook in a stationery store not far from the campus of Columbia University. I suspect I thought I might take on the role of a modern Ishmael, and my notebook would become the keyhole through which others would witness the greatest event in human history. I was vain, certainly, and like most young men of that era, at least those from the heartland, unable to reconcile my vanity and eagerness with my shyness around girls and my discomfort among people who were educated at eastern universities. Maybe my notebook would give me an understanding of myself, I thought, opening the door of the stationery store, within sight of the plazas and green lawns and monarchical buildings of the university where I hoped one day to attend graduate school. Maybe writing in a notebook about things most people could not imagine would make me captain of my soul. I saw myself in a trench, my back against the dirt wall, writing in my notebook while artillery shells whistled out of the heavens and exploded in no-man’s-land. All my fantasy lacked was a recording of “Little Bessie” playing in the background. Like all young men about to go to war, I did not want to hear talk about the grand illusion. If war was so bad, why did those who served in one never indicate that they regretted having done so? Think of the images conjured up by mention of ...

My generational vanity was not of an arrogant kind. I didn’t mean that at all. Our vanity had its origins not only in our youth but in our collective innocence. We told ourselves we had prevailed during the Great Depression because we had kept faith with Jeffersonian democracy and had not given ourselves over to the Reds or the American equivalent of fascism. The truth about us was a little more humble in nature: We were born and raised in a transitional era; we were the last Americans who would remember a nation that was more agrarian than industrial, with more dirt roads than paved highways. We would also be the last generation to believe in the moral solvency of the Republic. This is not meant to be a dour evaluation of what we were or the era when we lived. In many ways, it was a grand time to be around. The cultural anchors of the continent were Hollywood on one end and Ebbets Field on the other. The literary staple of almost every middle-income American home was The Saturday Evening Post, which contained the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and John O’Hara. A cherry Coke at the drugstore cost a dime, the music was a nickel, and the dance floor was free. For most of us, each sunrise was like a pink rose opening on the earth’s rim. Perhaps we created a myth and became acolytes in the service of our own creation; but if that was the case, the entire world was envious of us all the same. Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considere...

There are rumors that Waffen SS made a probe on our perimeter, within one thousand yards of us. I don’t believe the rumor. SS initiatives are usually accompanied by a large panzer presence. Major Fincher agrees with me. Unfortunately, Major Fincher is widely regarded as a dangerous idiot. At Kasserine Pass he ordered an entire regiment to dig slit trenches instead of foxholes. Tiger tanks overran their position and turned in half circles on top of the trenches and ground sixty men into pulp with their tracks. Our regiment is made up of National Guardsmen, draftees, and regular army. The officers and enlisted men get along fine. It’s a good outfit. Except for Major Fincher. Someone said the German army has been trying to find him for years in order to award him the Iron Cross. When the joke was reported to Fincher, a corporal had to explain its meaning.

another

In the background, somebody dropped a nickel into the jukebox. Harry Choate’s famous recording of “La Jolie Blon” began playing.

“I want you to listen to me about the oil people you’re fixing to involve yourself with. Give them the chance, they’ll tear you boys up. They might be from Texas, but they’re not our kind of people. They’ll wave every flag they can get their hands on and tell you they’re patriots. Don’t be taken in. They’re not political. They’re just downright mean.”

I have always believed that women have a much more accurate sense about other women than we do. I think the same is true of men: We know things about our own kind that women do not. The things we know are not good, either. There are feral creatures among our gender, throwbacks to an earlier time, and as a man, you know this as soon as you are in their proximity. For that reason I have never subscribed to the notion that we all descend from the same tree. There are gatherers and there are hunters. The inclination of the latter is always in their eyes.

I think that Linda Gail belonged to the vast hordes who believed in what we call the American dream, a fantasy somehow linked to the magical world of Hollywood and the waves crashing on the rocks at sunset along the beaches of Santa Barbara.

Hershel turned around his cap, put on a welder’s mask, and clipped a stringer-bead rod into the electrode holder of a rebuilt Nazi welding machine. Then he knelt down by a pipe joint and began a tack weld on the first of two hundred joints we would complete that day, the ball of reddish-yellow flame working its way around the circumference of the pipe. When he stood up and lifted the shield off his face, he was grinning so widely that I could have counted his teeth. “We just do’ed it, Loot,” he said. “Great God Almighty, we have done do’ed it.”

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are paradoxically the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.

“What’s the expression your grandfather is always using?” “Don’t borrow trouble.” “Good words to remember.

“You’re an honorable and brave man, Weldon. For that reason you’ll always be feared and rejected by the world.”

To make love with Rosita Lowenstein was to enter a Petrarchan sonnet. I told her she was probably the only woman in the world who made love in iambic pentameter, and the Lowenstein sonnet always ended with a rhyming couplet, one that left me weak and breathless. To make love with Rosita was not a sexual act; it was a sacrament. After she fell asleep, I went downstairs with my notebook and wrote these words: Lose the entire world if you have to, drive your car off a cliff, gamble away a fortune in Vegas, single-handedly invade the Soviet Union, but never let go of Rosita Lowenstein. Never, never, never. NEW YEAR’S DAY of 1947 seemed like the beginning of another celebratory season.

In the town where I grew up, my grandfather was considered well-to-do. In reality, we barely got by. Once, when I asked him about the importance of money, he replied, “It won’t buy happiness, but it’ll keep a mess of grief off your porch. Rich or poor, everybody gets to the barn. It can be a hard ride, too.”

I eased the phone back into the cradle, the side of my face tingling. Then I let out my breath and tried to decompress. What’s the old lesson in the army? Don’t make enemies with anybody in records. What’s the larger lesson in an organization? Don’t humiliate bureaucrats whose careers are characterized by mediocrity. It may take them a while, but sooner or later, they’ll park an arrow between your shoulder blades.

here’s to you, Linda Gail, I thought. You’ve wrecked three cars, struck a behemoth of a Houston policeman in the face with your bare hand, and are on the edge of entering an adulterous affair with a man married to probably one of the most vicious women in Texas, and it’s not even noon.

I washed my hands in the lavatory and went outside, almost colliding with Siegel and his girlfriend. They stepped back, smiling, amused rather than polite. “Blow your horn so we’ll know you’re coming,” Siegel said. “You’re Mr. Siegel, aren’t you?” I said. “I was when I got out of bed this morning.” “My name is Weldon Avery Holland. I just knocked a man down in the restroom. He called y’all riffraff. That’s not why I knocked him down, but I thought you should know.” “You’re kidding me, right?” Siegel said. “I think he’s looking for his tooth in the urinal. He said you use the unions to extort the studios in Hollywood.” “You get off a spaceship?” “Check it out,” I said. Siegel pushed open the restroom door and looked inside. He let the door swing back in place. “Who’s the guy?” he asked. “His name is Jack Valentine. He’s with Castle Productions. He says you live next door to Jack Warner but Warner hates your guts.” “Do you believe this guy?” Siegel said to his girlfriend. “He’s just having fun. Keep it in your pants, Benny,” she said. “That’s what you’re doing. Playing a joke?” Siegel said. “Not me. Not with you. I know better.” “Yeah?” His eyes were a piercing blue and reminded me in their intensity of the warning light I used to see in Grandfather’s. “Have a drink with us.” “My wife is waiting on me.” “Go get her,” he said. “Can’t do it.” “No, you need to sit down and have a drink.” I shook my head. “Virginia says I’m full of shit,” he said. “Is that what you’re saying? I’...

He slept with his Colt 1860 Army revolver, five chambers loaded, the hammer resting on the sixth chamber, which was empty. My mother asked him why he needed his revolver. “So I’ll be ready for him when he comes,” he replied. “Ready for whom?” she said. “Death.” His ankles and feet were so swollen that he had to wear extralarge rubber boots resembling the ones Frankenstein’s monster wore in the movies. Our family doctor forbade him to get on a horse, or to drink whiskey or smoke a cigar or pipe, or to ingest sugar in any form. For Grandfather, that meant he should fire up his pipe right after breakfast, have a bowl of homemade ice cream incised with a half dozen Oreo cookies for lunch, drink a glass of straight whiskey by three P.M., and saddle and get on his horse.

“Draw a line in the sand. But don’t tell anybody where it is. Don’t let your feelings show. Don’t let others know you’ve been hurt. No matter what they do, don’t react until they come over the line. Then you drop them in their tracks.” “It’s 1947, Grandfather.” “It certainly is,” he said.

There are times in your life when you know, without any demonstrable evidence, that you are in the presence of genuine evil. It is not generated by demons, nor does it have its origins in the Abyss. It lives in the breast of our fellow man and takes on many disguises, but its intention is always the same: to rob the innocent of their faith in humanity and to destroy the light and happiness that all of us seek.

Hubert Timmons Slakely was a man whose greatest enemy was knowledge about himself. He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom. He is pathologically incapable of change this side of the grave.

ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.

“That’s like trying to figure out how you got hit by a bus. The only thing that counts is you got hit by a bus.”

“Your lover is a handsome war hero and millionaire movie producer. Except you can’t have him and still be the virginal lass from Hushpuppyville.”

“You never fucked somebody cross-eyed, all the time telling yourself you were in control? You never told yourself you had sexual power over others that they couldn’t resist? Because the day you did is the day you not only got fucked in spades but helped the other person do it.”

“Would you deliver the message for me, please?” “I certainly will. You must come see us more often. I hear so many wonderful things about you. How is your husband? I bet you two are having a jolly time with all your success. I have to admire your composure when you call here. Your gall is like none I’ve ever encountered.”

He was in a rocking chair by the window, smoking his pipe, wearing a flannel shirt and his boots and Stetson, the window opened high, even though the weather was cold and the heat was escaping the room. The woman next door, who was young and strong and had large breasts and upper arms the size of hams, was hanging wash. I pushed the window down. “Have you thought about finding a lady friend your own age?” I said. “Who wants a ninety-year-old lady friend?” he replied.

You need to stop fretting yourself over a waste of oxygen like Slakely. The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.” Grandfather should have been an exorcist.

I was never good at lying. Most Southerners are not. As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as “you son of a bitch” with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a “lying son of a bitch,” you know he’s serious. I had just lied to the cabbie. And I was about to tell a lot more lies as the day progressed. I didn’t know if I would be up to the charge.

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.