Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I picked the rose up from her stomach and put it in her hair. I kissed her stomach. “I love you,” I said.

Then I kissed her all over, and when she tried to get up and hold me, I pressed her back down on the bed and entered her, her eyes closing and her mouth opening. I heard the trees moving in the wind outside, brushing wetly against the eaves of the house. I felt her hands kneading the small of my back, running up and down my ribs, her breath on my cheek, her tongue on my neck, her thighs like long golden carp. Her climax was gradual, like a swell building in the ocean, then cascading onto a beach, and seconds later sliding back into the surf, only to crest again and again and again, as steady as the movements of the tide, a tiny cry leaving her throat each time she pressed her stomach into mine.

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. Hershel had always said he could not only smell money but he broke into a sweat when he was about to make it. I had come to believe him. Hershel sweated and the money rolled in. One offshore drilling rig after another punched into a pay sand, and the gas flares burning far out on the horizon gave witness to the birth of a new secular religion. We had arrived, and the technological reach of our nation knew no bounds. The bejeweled refineries along the Texas coast, smoking like an outer-space facility inside the great American night, were not a blight but a continuation of Walt Whitman’s ode to American promise. The displacement of an emerald-green swampland of sawgrass and cypress and gum trees was forgotten in the sacrifice that had to be made for the greater good.

The brothels of Port Arthur, Texas City, and Galveston never closed. A bottle of cold beer, served in an illegal gambling joint on the beach, was twenty cents. A paper plate full of boiled shrimp was thirty-five. And we were part of it all. A dance orchestra played under the stars on the amusement pier that extended into Galveston Bay, the waves bursting against the pilings beneath our feet. We flew to Fort Lauderdale and hit quinellas and even the daily double at the racetrack as a matter of course.

We became like the Las Vegas gambler who discovers against a backdrop of purple mountains and the glitter of the Strip that he has been painted with magic by a divine hand. His prescience is in his walk and his benevolence toward his fellow man. He knows which cards will slip stiff and shiny out of a six-deck shoe; the dice he rolls bounce off the felt backboard in slow motion, the red dots freezing at seven or eleven, one pass after another, as though they’re loaded and incapable of forming any other combination.

Bankers wanted to lend us money. We turned them away. We were invited to visit Saudi Arabia and passed. In April Grandfather took a fall, and Rosita and I flew back to the ranch and helped my mother care for him. We knew he had recovered when we caught him saddling his horse at five in the morning.

We drilled our first well outside New Roads, Louisiana. The seismic reports were all good. Then we began a second one less than a mile away. Hershel said it was a sure bet. “We’re holding four aces, Weldon,” he said. “There’s a pay sand down there that people are not going to believe. All those dinosaurs have been waiting millions of years for me and you to turn them loose.”

In June our geologist declared both wells dry holes, what are called “dusters” in the oil business. We were standing by the first rig at high noon, in one-hundred-degree heat, the sun white and boiling overhead. I could feel sweat crawling down my sides. I got two bottles of Dr Pepper out of the cold box in my car and popped off the caps with my pocketknife and handed one to Hershel.

“It’s down there, Weldon,” he said. “I never felt so strong in my life about something.”

“I believe you,” I said, adjusting my hat so the shadow fell across my face. “Let’s go back to that café on the highway and have us some dirty rice and a chicken-fried steak.”

“How bad are we hit?”

I didn’t want to tell him. “Our level of liquidity won’t be quite the same for a while. We’ll adjust and get by. We’re still the boogie-woogie boys from Company B.”

“Next time I have an opinion on something, don’t listen. Last week I told Linda Gail I’d be buying her a home in Bellaire.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. His shirt was dry and hot, as though it had just been ironed. His eyes were a few inches from mine. I could feel his blood humming through my palm. “This stuff isn’t diddly-squat,” I said.

“I hate to disappoint Linda Gail,” he replied. “It makes me feel plumb awful.”

Chapter

10

WE HAD BID on three jobs, counting on capital we thought was ours. Overnight we discovered we were leveraged to the eyes. The bankers who had wanted to lend us money, bankers we had rebuffed, now treated us with caution. One loan officer said he would like to “revisit” our situation in a year or so; another wanted an audit; a third pressed my hand warmly and said, “I’m a Texas A&M grad myself. I like your ideas. I bet you have a bright future once you get your reversals behind you.”

Rain was pouring down at our house, flooding the street and washing over the gutters onto our lawn, when a taxi splashed into the driveway and stopped under the live oak nearest the porch. A man I never wanted to see again got out and ran through the puddles, an umbrella over his head. I met him at the front door. He was folding his umbrella, the brim of his hat dripping.

“Major Fincher?” I said.

“At least you haven’t forgotten me,” he said. “I’m changing planes for the Islands and thought I should come out to see you.”

“Come in,” I said, pushing open the screen.

Inside, his gaze roved around the living room. As long as I could remember, Fincher had been looking at something other than the person he was addressing. “You got a fine place here,” he said. “I hear you married that lady you rescued.”

“We rescued each other. But yes, you’re correct. I married her.”

“Damn fine. Good God, that’s a gulley washer out there, isn’t it? You have a drink? We hit a storm outside of San Antonio. Is that the little lady in the kitchen? I’m sorry to bust in on you like this, Weldon, but sometimes I miss the old days. Damn me if I don’t, war or not.”

“Have a seat, Major. I’ll see what we have in the cabinet.”

“None of that formal stuff. The army is the army. Peacetime is peacetime,” he replied, sitting in a stuffed chair. When Rosita came out of the kitchen, he rose from the chair. “You’re everything your husband said you were. I’m Lloyd Fincher. Weldon and I were in some rough spots together.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.