Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

I’ve always subscribed to the notion that we can never really know the soul of another. I didn’t know whether Roy Wiseheart was tormented by his conscience or his ego. Maybe a little of both. Or was he simply a manipulator? I went to the bar and paid our check. When I returned to the table, he was staring out the window at the rain dimpling the water in the swamp. “Know why I stay at a place like this?” he asked.

“No, you’re a mystery man.”

“My room doesn’t have a phone. Nobody knows who I am. I fish at sunset and sunrise for big-mouth bass. I caught an eight-pounder right by that clump of flooded gum trees.”

“I need to get back to the line,” I said.

“They’re going to get you.”

“That’s the second time in less than a week someone has delivered me a vague warning. Who are they?”

“Take your choice.”

“Why am I a threat to anyone?”

“You’re a water walker. Guys like you cause trouble. You’re not a team player. Wait till you meet some of the Saudis. Some of them should be forced to wear full-body condoms.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“They’ll crush you and Pine. They’ll bankrupt your family and turn you against each other, they’ll take away your home, they’ll ruin your name. They can make a speed bump out of a guy without breaking a sweat.”

“My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and kicked him in the face and locked him in jail,” I said. “I put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s automobile, with Clyde and Bonnie Parker and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend inside. I was sixteen. What do you think of that?”

He didn’t answer my question. Maybe with the rain tinking on the fan blades, he couldn’t hear everything I said, or maybe he was unimpressed by the rural and violent world in which I had grown up.

We walked outside just as the rain cut loose. Then a strange event occurred that made me realize Roy Wiseheart would never be a quick study. A bolt of lightning struck a cypress tree not twenty yards from us, splintering the trunk, cooking the leaves, boiling the water around the roots, filling the air with a thunderous clap that was like someone slapping the flats of his hands on my eardrums. Mud and water and the detritus of the tree showered down on our heads. Wiseheart never moved. He stared at the smoke and flame rising from the base of the tree, his expression composed. “Incoming,” he said. “Told you. We’re on the wrong side of things, Holland.”

I wanted to get a lot of distance between me and Roy Wiseheart.

ONE MONTH LATER, the right-of-way flooded and we had to shut down the line for five days and return

to Houston. On a fine summer evening, I drove to Hershel’s home on Hawthorne Street to talk over an offshore pipeline south of Lake Charles. I caught Hershel and Linda Gail unawares, in the midst of moving. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Into our new home,” Linda Gail replied. “In River Oaks.”

I looked at Hershel. He grinned and glanced away.

“River Oaks?” I said.

“Is something wrong with that?” Linda Gail said.

The dead-end street where they were living was beautiful, lined with bungalows and two-story brick houses and green lawns and shade trees. On the other side of the cul-de-sac were a canebrake and a huge pasture with live oaks in it that must have been two hundred years old. Beyond the pasture, against a salmon sky, you could see the neon-striped tower of a theater called the Alabama. The ambiance was a fusion of the pastoral and the urban South, in the best possible way. “Why would you want to leave?” I asked.

That was a mistake.

“Maybe it’s none of your business, Mr. Weldon Avery Holland,” she said.

“He’s just kidding, Linda Gail,” Hershel said. “Tell him what we’re doing. He has a misunderstanding.”

“I don’t see any misunderstanding at all,” she said. “We’re moving into an elegant neighborhood. Are you suggesting we don’t belong there, Weldon?”

“I like the bungalow y’all have, that’s all. This street puts me in mind of Norman Rockwell. There’s a watermelon stand just yonder on Westheimer, under those live oaks. There’s a firehouse on up the street, and an ice cream parlor and a grocery that has all its produce and fruit out on the porch. I always liked this part of Houston.”

“Well, I’m sure The Saturday Evening Post would love your endorsement,” she said. “If it will make you feel better, we are not buying the house in River Oaks. It is being lent to us by Jack Valentine. He’s the documentary director who arranged my screen test at Castle Productions.”

“It’s a rent-with-option-to-buy deal, Weldon,” Hershel said.

“I need to talk with you about laying some pipe in Calcasieu Parish,” I said.