Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“What for?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“That’s because he wants something. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, he always has an agenda. His thinking is no different from a sociopath’s.”

“He’s not one to make frivolous phone calls.”

I couldn’t believe Linda Gail was still under Roy’s influence. “Tell him to put it in a letter.”

“Maybe he can do something to help. Give him a chance.”

“Dealing with Roy is like picking up broken glass with your bare fingers,” I said. “Did he give you the Bunny Berigan record?”

“No.”

“He tried to get me to give it to you. He’d wrapped it in satin paper with a ribbon. He believes he’s the protagonist in an Elizabethan tragedy, and he wants the rest of us to be his stage props.”

There was a pause. I wished I hadn’t told her about the record. Maybe Roy had been sincere. Maybe he wanted to do something tender and not embarrass her or hurt Hershel. Maybe he was caught inside the impossibility of correcting the past.

“Can either Hershel or I do anything?” she asked.

“No, I’ll be headed back to Louisiana tonight. I’m meeting in Baton Rouge with some geologists from Sinclair.”

I had told another lie in case anyone was listening. I felt foolish constructing a conversation to mislead someone who may not exist. That’s how the invasion of a person’s privacy works. It makes us afraid of shadows and fills us with suspicion about our fellow man, and ultimately, it causes us to degrade and resent ourselves.

“Maybe Roy wants to make amends,” she said. “Maybe he can help Rosita.”

“Then why hasn’t he already done it?”

“Maybe he’s tried. He wants your respect. He’s like a little boy. He flew his plane upside down on location.”

“I don’t care about Roy’s problems. I don’t know how I can get Rosita back. I’m against the wall. They’re going to destroy her brain.”

I heard her exhale against the receiver, not in exasperation but in surrender. “Can we do something?”

“There’s Grandfather to think about. I’ll call you all from Baton Rouge,” I said, and hung up.

I ate a sandwich at the soda fountain in the drugstore that had a Coca-Cola sign over the doorway. I tried to think through all the events and improbabilities that had occurred in my life since I first saw Rosita. The Greek tragedians viewed irony, not the stars, as the agency that shaped our lives. They were probably right. I was a river-baptized Christian, but I had married a Jew who was a better Christian than I. I wanted to be an anthropologist, but I became a pipeline contractor and a rich man through the use of machines that made the tanks that tried to kill me. Roy Wiseheart was born with everything except the approval of his father and consequently seemed to value nothing. Hershel Pine was a man of humble birth who could have served as a yeoman under Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, yet he possessed the chivalric virtues of an Arthurian knight. Clara Wiseheart owned unimaginable amounts of money, and seemed governed day to day by the vindictive child living inside her. Linda Gail had stopped for gas at a country store and stepped off the gallery into a camera’s lens and a career in Hollywood. And since 1934, the single most influential ongoing event in my life had been my encounter with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, people who had the cultural dimensions of a hangnail.

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.

More ironic, I was soon to discover that Bonnie and Clyde were not through with me. And I was about to learn that Roy Wiseheart was one of the most determined people on the planet, at least when it came to getting his way. The phone in my hotel room was ringing just as I came through the door. It was 12:55 P.M. I picked up but didn’t speak.

“Is that you, Weldon?” the voice said.

“How’d you know where I was?”

“You told me where Rosita had been moved. So I called every hotel in Wichita Falls. By the way, I’m using a phone that nobody has tapped.”

r /> “I didn’t register under my own name. How would you know to call here?”

“I got the desk clerk to give me the names of the people who had registered in the last twenty-four hours. How many guests named Thomas Malory check in to a run-down dump in a sinkhole like Wichita Falls?”

“You’re not a fan of small-town America?”

“Boy, are you a pill.”

“Why would the desk clerk give you the names of their hotel guests?”