Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Just call me Rosita, Hershel. It’s very nice to see you again,” she said. “We’ve thought of you often.”

“That’s kind of you,” he said. He hadn’t shaken hands and clearly felt awkward. He set down his suitcase and stuck out his hand to Rosita, then to me, his face coloring.

I patted him on the shoulder. “What do you have there in the tube?”

“Designs,” he replied.

“Why do you keep looking at the bus?” I asked.

“A peculiar fellow was sitting in the back,” he replied. “Maybe I’ve got a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies. That’s what my wife says.”

“Let me help you with your bag,” I said.

“That’s him now, that tall unshaved guy going into the café. I’d swear his eyes were burning holes in the back of my neck.”

“He looks like a regular guy to me, Hershel.”

“Maybe so. Linda Gail, that’s my wife, she says I’m a worrywart.”

“What are the designs?” I asked.

“I’ll show them to you when we can relax. Boy, the sky out here is sure big.”

I wondered how long it would take for the subject of money to come up.

BUT I WAS unfair to Hershel. He was obviously happy to see us, and filled with childlike curiosity about everything he saw on the drive to the ranch. I suspected the paintless Victorian home and six hundred acres I associated with “genteel poverty” was the equivalent of a kingdom to him. As soon as he set down his suitcase in the hallway, he went into the dining room and asked permission to spread the rolls from his tube on the table, as though he had to justify his presence in our home.

“What you’re looking at is the diagram for the welding machine that created the Tiger tank, Loot,” he said. “See, the Germans were two or three steps ahead of the process we use. They tacked together homogenous rolled nickel-steel plates that nothing short of a point-blank hit from an antitank shell could crack. You with me so far?”

“I think so,” I said.

I could see Grandfather looking at us from the kitchen, his expression bemused. He was almost ninety, his eyes like blue milk, his calves swollen into eggplants.

“Before the war, we were still laying natural gas pipe bolted together at the joint, Lieutenant,” Hershel said. “I’ve got seventeen of these German arc welding machines located. It’s just a matter of transporting them into the country. I got a deal on a fleet of army-surplus flatbeds, too.”

“It’s Weldon,” I said.

“Yes, sir. I can get us German steel that we can use as center cutters on our own ditching machines. The next step is obtaining patents for the modifications on the arc welders. Sir, you have no idea how big this can be.”

I nodded. “There’s a hurdle we haven’t gotten to yet, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir. A big one. We need thirty, maybe forty thousand dollars to get out of the chute.” He looked straight ahead, his face tight.

Rosita was standing between us, gazing at the designs of the welding machines. “Who are the people selling you the machines?”

“Krauts,” he said.

“Were they members of the Nazi Party?” she sai

d.

He kept his eyes on the table. “They could have been. I didn’t ask. For me, the war is over, Miss Rosita.”

“I’ve got an uncle who’s a wildcatter,” I said.

I heard Grandfather work his way into the room on his walking canes. “Satchel, did you sustain an appreciable amount of brain damage while you were over there?” he said.

WE ATE DINNER late that night, and Rosita said little at the table. Upstairs, she put on her nightgown and lay down on the mattress and turned on the bed lamp. It was ceramic, its white glaze painted with green and purple flowers. She touched the flowers with the tips of her fingers.