“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Maybe Roy will go home, too. He’s been here since this morning. I think he and Clara have had some choppy sailing recently.”
“He’s been here all day?”
“Yes, he’s been a nuisance. He does this when he and Clara get into it.”
“He hasn’t gone anywhere else?”
“No, he’s either been playing billiards or trying to hand me my posterior across the net.”
“Mr. Green, this is very important. Did Roy talk to anyone today? Did he make a call inquiring about my husband?”
“I heard him call a policeman. That’s not unusual for Roy. He’s an honorary police officer. He likes to ride around in cruisers and that sort of thing.”
“What did he say to the policeman?”
“Something about doing Roy a favor. I wasn’t paying much attention.”
“You’ve been very kind. Good night, Mr. Green.”
Green glanced up at the sky. “There’s a ring around the moon. We’ll have rain. You know what they say about Texas. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”
“It was Missouri,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Mark Twain said that about Missouri, not Texas. It’s funny how people get a quotation wrong, and then the misquote takes on a life of its own. It’s a bit like most relationships. We never get it quite right. The fabrication becomes the reality.”
Green nodded as though he understood. She walked away from the light that glowed through the windscreens on the court and crossed the lawn, the St. Augustine grass spongy and thick under her feet, the shadows of the camellia bushes and live oaks swirling and dancing around her. Her face felt cold and small, the skin shrunk against the bone. For just a second she thought she heard the mocking voice of Clara Wiseheart laughing inside her head.
Chapter
25
I HAD NO IDEA where Hershel had gone. I felt guilty for having spoken with him about the possibility of shooting Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Slakely. My sentiments about Wiseheart and Slakely were genuine, but whether I would shoot a man in cold blood was a matter of conjecture. In part, I had confided in Hershel to get his mind off Linda Gail’s infidelity. Just the same I felt irresponsible, and Grandfather hadn’t helped matters by taking me to task for my careless words.
Maybe I had begun to see the world through a glass darkly. I tried to remind myself that even as a teenager I had seen goodness in Bonnie Parker and an appreciable degree of heroism in Clyde. Even Lloyd Fincher, upon learning of Rosita’s jeopardy, had given me the key and directions to his duck camp southeast of Beaumont.
Besides my growing cynicism about the world, I had another problem: I had a business to run. In my low moments, I needed to remember what Rosita and I and Hershel and Linda Gail had accomplished. The Dixie Belle Pipeline Company was a huge success. We had contracts all over Oklahoma, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico. Our welds were known as the best in the oil patch. When we dropped the pipe into the ground, chances were it would lie there a century without a crack forming in the joints. On top of that, we had the patent on the machines responsible for the welds’ longevity.
I wouldn’t try to go inside the head of a dictatorial anti-Semite like Dalton Wiseheart, but I suspected he considered us usurpers, the kind of irritant he normally bought or neutralized with no more than a five-second commitment of time. That his minions had to deal with us on our terms, after I had indicated to him that his company’s negligence may have caused my father’s death, was probably a bitter cup for him to swallow. Even worse, he probably couldn’t stand the thought of the country becoming a Jeffersonian democracy.
Rosita and I checked out of the motel in Galveston and went to one of our job sites in Louisiana, right outside of Morgan City. I no longer thought about the particulars of our problems with the law. I believed Dalton Wiseheart’s people had written the script, and there was little Rosita and I could do to change it. Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption. For me, there was one operative principle to remember: They were not going to lock up my wife again. If I had to shoot Dalton Wiseheart or Hubert Timmons Slakely, I would. In the meantime, my company couldn’t run itself.
In the years immediately following the war, Hollywood and the drilling industry were probably the only two portals through which a believer in the American dream could wander and suddenly find himself among amounts of wealth and levels of power he never imagined. The prerequisites were few. A teenager who escaped a chain gang in Georgia and climbed off a boxcar in California to pick peaches later became the actor we know as Robert Mitchum. A gambler and occasional wildcatter who drew to an inside straight in a Texas poker game won a deed to a seemingly worthless piece of land that became the biggest oil strike in the United States since Spindletop. The success stories were legion. All you had to do was believe. It was like prayer. What was to lose?
I loved the work I did and took pride in it. I loved the smell of a swamp or a pine woods at sunrise. I tried not to think of myself as someone who was despoiling the environment. When we laid pipe through woods, we cleaned and reseeded the right-of-way and created a feeding area for wildlife and a firebreak and access road for firefighting vehicles. The wetlands were another matter. Nonetheless, we broke the plantation oligarchy’s hold on working people, often paid no more than twenty-five dollars for a six-day week.
I wrote these words in my journal our first night back in the motor court outside Morgan City: Dear Lord, I’ve been out of touch for a little while. Sorry for all my rhetoric about sh
ooting people, even though I think some of them deserve it. Take care of Hershel, would you, and please help me take care of Rosita. As always, I pray that my sacrifice is acceptable in your sight. In truth, I feel powerless; hence I entertain all these violent thoughts and feelings.
Christmas is three days away. Happy birthday in advance, in case I don’t have time to say it later.
That night I began rereading Le Morte d’Arthur. For either a man or a boy, it was a grand and romantic tale about the chivalric world, the jingle of chain mail and the crash of two-handed broadswords on armor and shields rising audibly off the page. The irony lay in the fact that its author, Thomas Malory, had been a professional thug and full-time lowlife, more specifically a thief, a spy, an extorter, a rapist, and an assassin. He not only broke the law at every opportunity but did so with great joy. Apparently, the only times he was not committing serious crimes were when he was in prison or fighting as a mercenary in France or writing the greatest romance since The Song of Roland.
How could a man who was probably a sociopath draw on symbols from the subconscious and use Celtic legends with such passion and iconic meaning and artistic cohesiveness? Why was such an unlikely person chosen for such a gift?