Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

S

he felt as if a piece of wire were being tightened around her temples. Jerry stepped in front of her, placing his palms on her shoulders, staring into her eyes. “Many women live inside you, Linda Gail. That’s why you’re going to be a great actress. Don’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Give voice to those women who depend on you. You’re a strong woman, a fucking Amazon. You could rip the head off a fascist officer and spit in it. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then get on it. Don’t let me down.”

“I won’t, Jerry.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. He squeezed her against him. “Put the fear of God in them.”

The cameras began rolling as she ran toward a rampart that had been overrun by soldiers who carried bayonet-fixed rifles and wore tasseled caps and rolled blankets tied across their chests. Republican wounded, some wearing French helmets, were lying on the ground, their hands raised futilely against the bayonets being plunged into their bodies. The barrel of a knocked-out machine gun was still smoking behind a wall of sandbags. Some of the wounded were teenaged boys, their faces terrified as they awaited their fate.

Somehow the scene taking place around her had become real, the screams of the dying and the smell of cordite and burning vehicles and the raw stench of blood no longer imaginary or a creation of Hollywood but part of an actual battle in 1936 that she had stepped inside and was participating in among her comrades, all of them scarred by poverty and hunger and oppression. She not only owned this moment, she had earned it and would never separate herself from its suffering and pain.

She shielded the body of a fallen boy. She shoved aside bayonets with her bare hands. She implored a fascist officer to show mercy and yelled in his face when he didn’t. She had become more than the Angel of Andalusia; she was the Angel of Goliad whom she read about in high school, the Mexican prostitute who saved the lives of many a Texas soldier at the Goliad Massacre of 1836. She was no longer Linda Gail Pine.

The tears in her eyes were real. Her clothes were rent by the bayonets she shoved aside, the smears of blood and saliva on her hands and face and hair no longer cosmetic, the alarm she saw in the actors’ faces no longer feigned. She beat her fists on an officer’s chest and tried to gouge his eyes; she cursed and used words that were not in the script; she tore at her own skin with her fingernails as she recognized a dead boy who had sold goat’s milk to her family in their village. The actors playing the roles of fascist soldiers shrank back, blinking, afraid she might blind them.

“Cut!” she heard Jerry yell.

The world seemed to stop, the people around her frozen inside a single frame of film, their mouths open in midsentence. When she tried to speak, no sound would come out of her throat. The land, the sky, the orchards in the distance, the insignias on the wings of the biplanes, all of them were drained of color, just as the dust-covered bodies on the ground were, all of it caught forever inside a photograph taken in a place she had never been.

She saw Jerry walking toward her, his hands outstretched. He lifted her in the air and spun her in a circle. “That was bloody fucking glorious!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. “Ernest Hemingway couldn’t hold a candle to what you just did! By God, you’re a marvel!”

The wounded and the dead were rising from the ground as though a form of secular resurrection were taking place. Everyone in the cast and crew was applauding, as happy for her as they would be for themselves. The joy she felt was like nothing she had ever experienced.

HERSHEL ARRIVED AT noon in a battered taxicab he had hired in a coastal town fifty kilometers away. He was wearing a sport coat and slacks that didn’t match, and carrying a canvas suitcase he had bought in an army PX, his serial number stenciled unevenly on the side. He was also carrying a cardboard tube, the kind that held architectural plans. She ate lunch with him in the outdoor tent that served as a commissary for the cast and crew, the canvas swelling and flapping in the wind, the mountains as blue as steel in the distance, the sun golden on the peach orchards. If anyone noticed Hershel and the conflict he was causing his wife, they pretended otherwise.

“I hope you don’t mind me popping in like this,” he said. “Does the director mind if I stay in your trailer?”

“I’m sure that will be fine,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

“I have this architect friend in Baton Rouge. He made up some sketches.”

“Sketches of what?”

“That house you want to build in Santa Monica. Is there somewhere we can go look at them?”

“I have to go back to work.”

“I mean later.”

“Whatever you want to do is fine, Hershel.”

“There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

“No, not at all. I said everything will be just fine.”

His reddish-blond hair was freshly barbered, his face clean-shaven, his eyes clear and devoid of guile. “I saw that tank and those biplanes out there. Where’d y’all find that stuff?”

“A contractor supplies it,” she answered. She tried to repress her irritability. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know about these things. Why was she angry at him? “I’m sorry we’re so busy now.”

“I heard some people talking about how good you were this morning.”

“Jerry helped me a lot with the particular scene. It involved the fascists killing the Republican wounded.”

“You’re talking about the Spanish Civil War? Rosita’s father was mixed up in that, wasn’t he?”