Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

It was not really Thomas Malory who was on my mind. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were. They were poor and uneducated and never succeeded in stealing over two or three thousand dollars in a bank robbery. John Dillinger once called them “a pair of punks who are giving bank robbery a bad name.” Like Woody Guthrie’s migrant farmworkers, they had come with the dust and gone with the wind. Why did they continue to intrigue and fascinate us? Was it because we secretly envied their freedom? Or was it because they got even for the rest of us?

I had confessed my feelings of powerlessness in my journal. There was a paradox in my confession. My epiphany about my lack of power in dealing with the system had come to me in peacetime, not during the war. At Normandy and at the Ardennes Forest, I had felt empowered, not the other way around. I could kill my enemies at will. If I so chose, I could destroy myself inside a firestorm, perhaps saving the life of another. I lived under the stars and in the snow and in windblown forests like a druid hunting animals with a sharpened stick. I lived one cold, foggy breath away from the edges of eternity; the trappings of civilization meant no more to me than stage props.

I had fallen asleep with my book in my hand. I heard Rosita click off the light and gently set my book on the nightstand. She lay down next to me and curled her body into mine, her arm resting on my side, her breath rising and falling on my neck. I didn’t wake until I heard hundreds of geese honking in the early dawn.

I WENT OUTSIDE WITH a cup of coffee and stood in the midst of a fog that was so thick I felt as though I were standing inside a cloud. No, the sensation was more compelling than that. I felt as though I were not in Louisiana but on the mythic Celtic island of Avalon, at the beginning of time, when man first looked up through the trees and saw light shining from the heavens and thought that he was standing in a cathedral whose pillars were the tree trunks that surrounded him.

In another hour I would be out on the right-of-way, where the men I had hired would pull the welding hood over their faces and bend to their work, the welding hood shaped exactly like the helmet of a crusader knight, each man thickly gloved to the elbow, one knee anchored on the ground, as though all of them were genuflecting in preparation for battle.

Those were fine thoughts to have. The Arthurian legend and the search for the Grail are always with us and define who we want to be. But the chivalric stories of Arthur and Roland are hard to hold on to, and we’re dragged back into the ebb and flow of a world that celebrates mediocrity, wherein the forces governing our lives remain unknown and beyond our ken.

I heard the phone ring inside our room. It was Linda Gail. “Roy Wiseheart lied to me. He told me he went to our house to check on Hershel but couldn’t find him.”

“How do you know he lied?” I asked.

“Roy’s neighbor told me Roy was playing tennis with him all day. He didn’t go anywhere.”

“You’re calling me in Louisiana to tell me Roy lied to you?”

“Roy’s friend said he called a policeman. I thought maybe Roy sent this policeman out to the house because he didn’t want to be bothered.”

“Maybe he felt uncomfortable,” I said. “Maybe he was afraid. I’m not sure what Hershel might do.”

“Will you let me finish? I talked to our neighbor across the street. He’s a nice man. He asked Hershel to go fishing once. He said the cops asked if he thought Hershel was suicidal.”

“That’s why we’re all concerned, Linda Gail. Maybe the cops are trying to help.”

“The neighbor told the cops Hershel likes to drink sometimes at an icehouse on West Alabama, back in our old neighborhood.”

“What about it?” I said.

“The owner told me Hershel’s truck was there, but a wrecker towed it away. He doesn’t know what happened to Hershel; he said he’d been drinking a lot.”

I had been standing. I sat down in a chair by the writing table. The receiver felt warm against my ear. I saw Rosita looking at me. “He disappeared?”

“The two cops who came out to the house were plainclothes. One of them left his card with the neighbor. Here, I’m looking at the card now. His name is Hubert T. Slakely. Does that name mean anything?”

IT WAS DARK and cold when Hershel took his bottle of Jax outside the icehouse and sat down at one of the plank tables under the canvas canopy. He was wearing his beat-up leather jacket and a cloth cap, but neither seemed to keep the cold off his skin. He felt as though his metabolism had shut down and his body was no longer capable of producing heat, not even after four shots of whiskey straight up. Maybe it was just the weather, he told himself. It was too cold for the other patrons, who were inside by the electric heater, playing the shuffleboard machine and talking about Harry Truman integrating the United States Army. Hershel salted his beer and took a sip from the glass and listened to the wind swelling the canopy above his head.

Three blocks away he could see the red and yellow neon on the spire of the Alabama Theatre printed against the sky. This was a fine neighborhood in which to live, he thought. The houses were mostly brick bungalows built in the 1920s, the streets shaded by old trees. The buses to downtown ran every ten minutes and cost a nickel. The local grocery store sold its produce out of crates on the gallery, and the customers signed for their purchases and paid at the end of the month. Why did they have to move to River Oaks, where they didn’t belong? Why did Linda Gail have to discover Hollywood? Why did Roy Wiseheart have to come into their lives?

For the most part, he had been able to put aside the war and the things he had done and seen others do. Sometimes in his sleep, he heard the treads of a King Tiger clanking through the forest, the rounds of his Thompson flattening or sparking off its impervious plates, but he always managed to wake himself up before the worst part of the dream, the moment that left him shivering and hardly able to control his sphincter, a moment when seventy tons of steel tried to grind him into pulp inside his cocoon of ice and broken timbers and frozen earth.

A black man was cleaning cigarette butts and food wrappers and pieces of newspaper from under the tables with a push broom. His eyes were elongated, almost slits, and the peaked hat with earflaps that he wore tied under the chin gave his face the appearance of a sad football.

“Where you from?” Hershel asked.

“Mis’sippi, suh,” the man said.

“You like it here’bouts?”

“Yes, suh, I like it fine.”

Hershel shook a Camel loose from a pack and stuck it in his mouth. He watched the black man and didn’t light the cigarette. “What do you think about the president integrating the armed forces?”

“I don’t study on it, suh.”

“You don’t have an opinion? None? Is t