Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“For what?”

The counterman shook his head and didn’t answer.

“Well, what the hell is it?” the trucker asked. “I thought your brother-in-law was a deputy sheriff.”

The counterman leaned over and lowered his voice. He was a huge man, his hair jet-black, his forehead ridged like a washboard. “They’re looking for a couple of Communists that tried to kill a Houston police officer.”

“Communists? What the hell are Communists doing around here?” the trucker replied.

I kept my eyes fixed on Rosita’s.

“Be with y’all in just a minute,” the counterman said.

The directions and the key to Lloyd Fincher’s duck-hunting camp were still in my wallet.

“Just coffee,” I said.

WE DROVE ONE mile back toward the state line and turned south on a dirt road that followed a bayou through pine woods and gum trees and pastureland dotted with palmettos. I could smell the salt in the air, and through the water oaks and persimmons, I could see the sunlight glittering on the Gulf of Mexico like thousands of bronze razor blades. Something else was occurring in the passage of the sun and the shifting of the light and the way the wind scudded across the algae that resembled green lace around the base of the cypress. The air was colder and damper, the shade alive with the smell of stagnant water and animal dung and carrion, the shadows of the plugged guns on the mothball fleet lengthening across a skeletal woods.

Up ahead was a cattle guard that looked in bad repair, like the one on Grandfather’s ranch years ago, the one he had warned Clyde Barrow about.

Then I saw something I tried to dismiss as a hallucination, the release of an image buried in the place where memories lived. It was the 1932 Confederate. It was moving down a dirt road toward the water with four occupants, their silhouettes as stiff as mannequins, dust rising off the wire-spoked wheels.

What did they want? What were they trying to tell me?

“Are you okay, Weldon?” Rosita said.

“The light was in my eyes,” I replied. “Will you get out and open the gate? Be careful where you step. There may be a broken spar in the cattle guard.”

I waited while she took the chain off the gate and pushed it back. She looked down at her feet and stepped carefully back on solid ground, then leaned in the window. “Stay to the right,” she said.

After I drove over the guard, she closed and latched the gate and got back inside the car. “How did you know the cattle guard was broken?”

“I think Fincher told me.”

“You think?”

I shrugged.

THE PLACE THAT Fincher called a camp looked more like a mid-­nineteenth-century planter’s home that had gone to seed. The main building was constructed of plaster and old brick, with wood trim and a wide, roofed porch. The house had electricity and running water, but the mortar was crumbling between the bricks, and the sinks were striped with an orange residue as crusty as metal filings, the fireplace and the front of the chimney blackened with soot. There was no telephone or radio.

“After dark, I’ll go back to the highway and find a grocery store,” I said.

Rosita was standing in the middle of the living room, gazing at its bareness. “There’s nothing here that has a name on it. The magazines don’t have address labels. All the drawers are empty. Why would Fincher let it get so run-down?”

“Maybe he’s fallen on bad days.”

We looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. An impoverished or desperate man is not one you want covering your back.

I cleaned an owl’s nest out of the chimney and started a fire. Through the window, I couldn’t see any other buildings beyond the railed fences that marked the boundaries of Fincher’s property. “Let’s do a little recon,” I said.

The sky was an ink wash of purple and black, the air thick with a stench that was like offal burning in an incinerator. I had to clear my throat and spit before I spoke. I didn’t want to mention the odor or what it reminded me of. “When I was a little boy, my father took me fishing for gafftop catfish west of here, over by Freeport,” I said. “They were the biggest catfish I had ever seen.”

“Where’s that odor coming from?” she asked.

“It’s probably a garbage fire. Look, you see those mounds down there, close by the swamp?”

“No,” she said, distracted by the smell blowing through the trees and across the water onto the land.