“Here what?”
“We do it. I do it. I don’t care which of us does it. Give me the gun.”
I stopped the car and got out. I flung the Luger over the cliff. When I got back in the car, her eyes were shiny and wet. She started to open the door. I grabbed her by the arm. “Do you want to give in to these guys?”
“Someone left the door open on the electroshock room. I saw a woman being electrocuted. She had a rubber gag in her mouth. I’ll never forget her face.”
I popped the clutch and spun gravel off the tires and drove along the edge of the cliff, then turned onto a dirt track through the trees on the west side of the mountain. The descent was the steepest we’d attempted. Even in second gear, the brake bands were squealing, rocks as sharp as knives bouncing under the chassis, banging against the tie rods and oil pan, maybe slicing the tires.
We came out of the woods onto a corrugated road spanning two miles of swampy meadow that offered no cover and exposed us to the twin-engine plane turning out of the sun. The first of three police cruisers emerged from the woods, its red and blue emergency lights housed inside a Plexiglas dome of whirling mirrors on the roof. Two other police cruisers were bringing up the rear.
I can’t say I regretted throwing away the Luger. But I felt naked without it, the way you feel powerless in a dream, the way the tankers I saw at the Ardennes probably felt when they were trying to run in knee-deep snow while a German machine gunner locked down on them. There was no doubt in my mind this was it. The Confederate could not outrun the cruisers on a straight road. We would be arrested and separated, and Rosita would be at the mercy of the system.
Earlier I said I believed we had driven into another dimension. The events of the next few minutes would convince me that my perception was correct, but not because of any supernatural factor at work in our lives. I had acted on presumption about Roy Wiseheart, forgetting that presumption and arrogance are one and the same.
“What’s that plane doing?” Rosita said.
The twin-engine had made one pass overhead, wagging its wings, then turned and climbed in a maneuver known in the Great War as an Immelmann. The pilot dove toward us, as though his plane were sliding down a ski slope, barrel-rolling, or flying upside down, I wasn’t sure which. He zoomed over the treetops behind us and banked up into the ribbon of blue that was rapidly disappearing inside the advancing storm.
Grandfather had said the rich always returned to their own kind. He may have been right about other wealthy people, but he was wrong, as I had been, when it came to Roy Wiseheart.
I had the accelerator on the floor. If we blew the engine, we blew the engine. Maybe the drivers of the police cars were distracted by the plane, or perhaps they had incurred their own mechanical troubles, but for whatever reason, they were dropping farther and farther behind, just as a great shadow began to spread across the valley. Rosita was kneeling on the seat and looking through the back window. For just a second, in my mind’s eye, I thought of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow speeding down a Texas road with bullets flying past their heads.
No one shot at us. They never go
t the chance. I heard Rosita scream. It sounded like the screech I had heard inside the Confederate when I fired Grandfather’s revolver through the back window.
“What is it?” I said.
“He’s going to kill us!” she said.
He came in low over the road, as though strafing a convoy of Japanese infantry. He roared right over the top of the Confederate, buffeting it the way the slap of a wave would. I thought he would pull up. Maybe that was what he intended to do. But in my relationship with Roy, I never saw him act without forethought, and I never saw him fail when it came to carrying out his intentions. His wheels were up, his speed faster than any safe landing would allow. The plane went over us, blocking out the sky, then belly-landed, sliding like a plow on the road, the propellers locking and then crumpling against the wings.
All the light had gone out of the sky. The meadows were dark and sodden, the water ponds in the grass flanged with ice. The sparks flying from under the plane’s fuselage resembled the bright orange drip from a welder’s torch. The explosion was not loud, more like a whoosh of heat, like metal rising into the air and collapsing back on itself, like a flash of yellow and red on the snow, like a Christmas log bursting alight.
None of the police cruisers was touched. But they weren’t going anywhere. The meadows, frozen or not, were nothing short of a bog. As we drove into the woods on the far side of the valley, I saw the burning plane and the cruisers and the policemen grow smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, like images frozen in time on an incandescent triptych dissolving inside its own heat.
Epilogue
ROY’S FIERY DEATH was described as a tragedy in newspapers all over the United States. The word was repeated so often that people probably believed it. One of the police officers added to Roy’s mystique by stating he could have escaped from the cockpit but had remained in the seat and, in the officer’s words, “melted like a candle.”
I believe Roy did not consider his life or his death a tragedy. I like to think he had more humility than that. If he had any last thoughts, I suspected they were about his father, a man I considered one of the most worthless human beings on the planet. Roy wanted to be a hero, in the best possible sense. It’s not a bad ambition. Regardless, I decided to turn loose of him and not look back on our relationship and not think of it in terms of good or bad. I concluded that he made a conscious choice to rejoin his squadron commander over the South Pacific and undo his mistake in judgment. I prayed that in some fashion, Roy finally found peace, if that was what he ever sought.
I may have been finished with Roy, but Roy was not finished with me. As I had learned from Bonnie and Clyde, the dead lay strong claim on the quick and do not easily take leave of the earth. After the authorities were made to look ridiculous by the press, we returned to Houston and found a package on the dining room table. There was no return address. The postmark was Clayton, New Mexico.
Sorry I couldn’t give you this in person. These items came from a storage cabinet at one of my father’s warehouses in East Texas. I don’t know if he’s aware of their existence. I doubt he is. I also doubt he cares. I thought you might like them.
You’ll always be an example to me. Give them heck, Weldon.
Your bud,
The Wayfaring Stranger
Inside the box were a wedding ring, my father’s wallet, a pencil stub, my dollar watch with the broken spring, a coin purse with two nickels and a dime and one penny in it, and an unstamped postcard addressed to Mrs. Emma Jean Holland. My father was a laconic man and never given to an excess of words or sentiment. The message was not only simple but unsigned. It read: I’ve done right well and have saved some money. I’m getting my drag-up check this Friday and I should be home by Sunday. Buy some peach ice cream. We’re going to be a family again. And tell that boy of mine I love him.
Linda Gail and Hershel divorced, and six months later, she married Jerry Fallon. One year later, she divorced Fallon and was nominated for best supporting actress. She remarried two or three times after that. One of her husbands was an aviator; another had been an officer with the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; another was a country-club tennis champion and collector of race cars, one of which flipped on a test track and broke his neck.
There were lovers, too, evidently many of them. None of them ever spoke negatively of her to the media or anyone else. If they paid dues for their dalliance, none of them seemed to mind. To my knowledge, she never returned to Texas or Louisiana. She kept her looks and had a stunning career and called Hershel Pine from Mexico City the night before she died in 1968 of an overdose of barbiturates. Hershel never discussed the content of their conversation other than to say, “She was a good woman.”