Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I see.”

“Don’t take that attitude with me, Weldon.”

“I didn’t mean to. We’re heading back to Houston.”

“I’ve closed my eyes to what’s going on. Dalton Wiseheart plans to take over y’all’s company. That’s what all this is about.”

“There’s a lot more involved than our company.”

“Is Roy mixed up in any of it?”

“If you don’t know, how would I?”

I didn’t intend to hurt her. But when you deal with those who have chosen to inflict great harm on themselves and their loved ones on a daily basis, whatever you say to them about the reality of their lives will either prove inadequate or offend them deeply, and leave you with feelings of guilt and depression. It’s not unlike walking through cobweb.

“I sometimes think you hate me,” she said. “What bothers me is that I feel I deserve your contempt.”

“If I gave you that perception, it was unintentional.” I looked through the window. The day was blue and gold, the palm fronds in front of the motor court lifting in the breeze off the Gulf. It was Christmas, a day when the rest of the world seemed at peace. “Where are you calling from?”

“A pay phone,” she replied.

“Which pay phone?”

“Outside the drugstore. The one by the River Oaks police station.”

“Have you used it often?”

Again, I probably assaulted her sensibilities in asking a question that indicated surreptitiousness was a natural part of her life.

“Several times,” she replied.

“I’ll call you at your home later and see how Hershel is doing,” I said. “In the meantime, I want you to hear me on this: I think you’re a good person, Linda Gail. You read me?”

I don’t know if she replied. The operator asked for more coins, then the connection was broken.

ROSITA AND I checked out of the motor court and began the long two-lane drive down the Old Spanish Trail through the bayou country to Lake Charles and the Texas border. Back then, Christmas morning in the southern United States seemed to produce a strange environmental and cultural phenomenon that I could never quite explain. The weather was always mild, the sky more like spring than winter, the grass a pale green, sometimes with clover in it. The streets would be almost empty, except for a few children playing on the sidewalk with their new roller skates or Western Flyer wagons. The celebration of Saturnalia on the previous night would fade into the quiet predictability of a sunlit morning and a sense of abeyance that allowed us to step out of time for a short while and be safe from one another.

That was the mood in which we drove over the high bridge that spanned the Calcasieu River west of Lake Charles and dropped down into a complex of chemical plants where a few years ago there had been only gum and cypress and willow trees that used to remain red and gold all the way to the salt until at least mid-November. On this particular stretch of highway, the toxicity in the air was nauseating and so thick and palpable, it was impossible to keep out of the automobile. But the people who lived in the small town by the chemical plants seemed to give little heed to the degradation of their environment and were thankful to have the jobs and the homes they did. I wondered again about the sacrificial nature of life, the collective triage we performed with regularity on our fellow man, and the wars and human attrition we accepted as the cost of our survival.

Would that The Song of Roland defined our experience and not this gloomy projection of our future, I told myself. I couldn’t afford to lose myself in abstractions. Rosita and I were on our own. Or that’s what I thought at the time.

We crossed into Texas and entered a coastal area where hundreds of United States Navy ships had been mothballed after the war. They were anchored in bayous, canals, and brackish bays, their guns plugged, their scuppers bleeding rust, their decks and hulls scrolled with the shadows of giant

cypress trees that had lost their leaves. It was a strange sight, as though our greatest creations had become refuse for which there was neither purpose nor means of disposal.

East of Beaumont, I could see traffic slowing down and stopping, as it does where there’s an accident. I pulled up to a café next to an outdoor fruit stand that sold pecans and pralines during winter. We sat in a booth close to the counter. Through the front window, I could see several of the mothballed ships inside a black-water swamp, the sunlight dying behind the clouds, the juxtaposed images like a still life of death on a massive scale, but for reasons that made no sense to me.

“This place is great for Mexican food,” I said.

Rosita looked at a calendar on the wall. “Merry Christmas,” she said. She rested one foot on top of mine under the table.

“You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,” I said.

She shaped the words “I love you” with her mouth.

A trucker came in, not happy with the traffic situation. “What’s the deal up there?” he asked.

“They put up a barricade,” the counterman replied.