Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I am almost sure I heard them say all those things.

FIVE DAYS LATER, deep in a Louisiana swamp, Roy Wiseheart rode a cream-colored gelding, sixteen hands high, down our pipeline right-of-way. When he dismounted, he removed his Stetson hat and wiped a mosquito out of his hair. “I knew you and Pine would pull it out of the fire,” he said, shaking my hand. “By God, it’s good to see you, Holland. You’re the real deal.”

“I didn’t quite catch all that,” I said.

He told me he had heard by chance that we were laying a pipeline across the Atchafalaya Basin to a refinery in Texas, and that a friend in Morgan City had lent him the horse and a trailer and a pickup. I wanted to believe him. He was handsome and clear-eyed and apparently humane and, for a rich man, egalitarian in his attitudes. I had never spent much time thinking about the very rich, primarily because I hadn’t known many. Those I knew came from old money and had always struck me as bland and obtuse and dependent upon servants and usually given over to vices that were adolescent in nature, particularly in their sexual lives, about which they seemed to show terrible judgment. 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 always thought that statement summed up the human condition better than any line I ever heard. Death was the great leveler. Whenever I was tempted to compare my lot with others’, I tried to remember Grandfather’s words. I wondered if this wasn’t one of those moments.

“What’s the ‘real deal’?” I said to Wiseheart.

“You don’t rattle. You refinanced yourself, and you’re back in the game. I admire that.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Come on up to the highway with me. I want your advice about something.”

“You need to explain how you know about my financial situation.”

“You think a blabbermouth like Lloyd Fincher can keep a confidence? Wake up.”

“What do you want advice about?”

“It’s not about business.”

“Will you answer my question, sir?”

He looked sideways and blew out his breath. “It’s personal as it gets. Call it a spiritual problem.”

“I’m probably not your guy.”

“Then to hell with you.”

“Say again?”

“You don’t understand English?”

“I want to make sure I heard you right before I knock you down.”

He smiled, pointing his finger at me, as though tapping on the air. “See what I’m saying? You’ve got moxie, bud.”

WE DROVE IN his truck to a ramshackle roadhouse set back in a grove of live oaks and slash pines not far from the edge of a vast swamp. The sky had darkened, and the air smelled of ozone and brass and fish that had died from the explosive charges set off underwater by a seismic rig. The roadhouse was attached to a six-room motel that had already turned on the neon tubing that ran along the eaves. A gleaming purple Lincoln Continental, with whitewalls and wire wheels, was parked in front of the last room on the road.

“Is that your vehicle?” I asked.

“How do you like it?”

“Has anyone told you this is a hot-pillow joint?”

“I like to check in on the folk and see what they’re up to.”

“The folk?” I said.

He was laughing. “You’re the perfect straight man,” he said.

The roadhouse was almost empty. We sat at a table in front of the window fan and ordered a plate of boudin and two bottles of Dr. Nut. Wiseheart watched the waitress walk away from the table. “Is this place really a cathouse?”

“That’s its reputation.”