Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

they were higher than the clouds, and the clouds were as black and swirling and sublime as smoke from an inferno. I don’t believe I ever saw a greater artwork than the one I witnessed that evening. Somehow it seemed an indicator of all the good things that awaited us down the track.

The only newspaper on the drugstore magazine rack was a local one, the kind usually published by a staff of no more than four or five, including the printer. I bought a copy and sat at the soda fountain and ordered a cup of coffee. The biggest local news was about a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and a grease fire in a café and the theft of a tractor from a barn. Then I turned to a section that was made up of ads and general-interest stories probably pulled randomly off the wire, one just as extraneous to small-town concerns as another. At the top of the page was a follow-up on the reported crash of a flying saucer at Roswell in July of that year. The air force was restating its recantation of the initial claim that it had found the wreckage of a UFO on a local ranch; the salvaged materials were obviously pieces of a weather balloon. Contrary to rumor, no bodies of extraterrestrials had been recovered from the crash site. How strips of wood and rubber and aluminum and tinfoil-like material from a weather balloon could be mistaken for the wreckage of a spaceship was never quite addressed. Regardless, it was good entertainment, no matter which point of view you chose.

I was about to put aside the paper and leave it for someone else when I turned the page. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The four photographs at the top of the story showed the four brain-­destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured.

I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched.

In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by a Texas oilman whose heroic war record and good looks had lured others to his cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Of course, there was the vindictive wife, a human tarantula, who had tried to use her connections with Mafia figures such as Frankie Carbo and Bugsy Siegel to destroy the brain of an innocent woman she had scapegoated for her husband’s profligate behavior.

The story could have been borrowed from a history of the Borgias or the manipulations of Nero’s mother. The real story, involving greed and the death of my father and the attempted theft of our pipeline company, was not one many people would be interested in. I supposed, however, that iniquity is iniquity, and the story told by Linda Gail and the tabloid writer contained its own kind of truth. Which is the better medium for its portrayal? A grocery list of legalisms or a bloody saga backlit by handheld torches, with the shadows of rogues dancing on the greasy waters of the Tiber? I wanted to send a box of candy to the scandalmonger who wrote the article.

I BELIEVE THE MOST dangerous and vulnerable moments in my early experience as a combat soldier were not what one would think. I was in the second wave at Normandy, and most of the suffering that had taken place along that blood-frothed, ugly strip of coastline was already over. My real initiation would come at Saint-Lô. I wanted to be brave but feared that I was not. My greater fear was that I would prove a coward had lived inside me all my life, and this cowardly presence would come to define who I was.

Before the breakout at Saint-Lô, we laid down one of the heaviest rolling barrages in history. The forward artillery observer was from my platoon, a kid who carried a half dozen good-luck charms in his fatigue jacket and taped his dog tags so they wouldn’t tinkle and had no higher ambition than to return to his job as a shoe salesman at a Thom McAn store in New Jersey. A round came in short, right beside his hole, rendering him stone-deaf, cutting his wire, isolating him in the dark. Then the Germans began answering our barrage. Amid the explosions, we could hear him calling for help, his cries becoming weaker and weaker. I went after him, the ground lighting around me as though a downed power line were dancing in a pool of water. I found him spread-eagled on his back in the bottom of his hole, the skin around his mouth webbed with blood. I got him across my shoulders and carried him to a road, where we hid inside a culvert until dawn. He died shortly after sunrise.

In the following days, I began to feel that I was invulnerable. I had been through what, in medieval times, was called “ordeal by fire,” and I had proved myself worthy in the eyes of others. I was sure that Providence had intended for me to survive the war. It is impossible for a combat soldier to be more self-deluded or to be possessed of a more reckless attitude.

The article in the Raton newspaper had given me an undue level of confidence. At last Rosita and I had been vindicated by the support of the crowd, I told myself. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the support of the crowd has a shelf life of about three minutes.

I walked to a phone booth down the street from the motor court and called to check on Grandfather. Through the Plexiglas windows, I could see the highway that led up through Raton Pass and the winding ponderosa-dotted canyon that opened onto the old mining town of Trinidad, where the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday finished paying the debt they owed the Clanton gang.

Snowball answered the phone. She was under five feet tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had the blackest skin I had ever seen. She often wore white dresses and blouses, some with eyelets on the shoulders.

“How’s Grandfather doing?” I said.

“A little laid up.”

“He’s sick?”

“More like he fell down. Bruised all over his seat and his back.”

“Would you tell me what happened?”

“He made me drive him to the roller-skate rink on South Main.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“You try arguing with him and see what happens.”

“He put on roller skates?”

“They didn’t want him to do it. He caused a big scene.”

“Snowball—”

“It ain’t my fault.”

“I know it. Can you take the phone to him, please?”

“Yes, suh.”

I saw the passenger train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles coming down the grade inside the canyon, the headlamp on its locomotive wobbling in the dark, the wheels screeching on the rails. If we decided on the train as our way out, we would have to wait until tomorrow evening.

“How’s Rosita?” Grandfather asked.

“She’s better every day. Are you trying to commit suicide?”

“If I wanted to commit suicide, I wouldn’t mess it up.”