Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Why are you wearing your raincoat?”

I put my right hand in the pocket, adjusting the weight of the coat on my shoulders. “It’s fixing to rain.”

She looked out the window. A solitary raindrop struck the glass. “Don’t be long. It’s Sunday. You need to relax a little more, Weldon.”

Geographically, the distance from our neighborhood in the Heights to the Bloody Bucket was no more than two miles. In terms of the cultural divide, the distance could not have been greater. It was a beer joint that prided itself on its violent clientele. The women were either masochists or over-the-hill whores; hardly a man drinking in there had not been in Huntsville or Sugar Land. Houston cops didn’t enter the Bloody Bucket except in numbers, usually with a baton hanging from the wrist.

The interior was painted red and black; the only illumination came from the neon beer signs on the wall behind the bar and the electrified rippling colors inside the casing of the Wurlitzer and the tin-shaded bulb hanging above the pool table. My caller was sitting in a booth by the entrance to the women’s restroom, his hands folded on the tabletop, a cigarette burning in an ashtray inches away. I sat down across from him. “What’s your name?” I said.

“There’s coat hooks by the door if you want to hang up your coat,” he replied.

“I’m fine. Are you going to tell me who you are?”

“Harlan McFey. I’m a private investigator. Want to see my ID?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can buy one at any pawnshop on Congress Street. You fond of looking in people’s windows, Mr. McFey?”

“If the occasion demands it.” He took a puff off his cigarette and returned the cigarette to the ashtray. He opened a manila folder on the tabletop. “We got a four-inch file on you and people of your acquaintance. I’m willing to share it. I’m also willing to share information on the man who hired me to bird-dog you and yours. Here’s for openers.” He handed me the top torn half of a blown-up black-and-white photograph. “She’s enough to make any man forget his Christian upbringing. If we can come to a business agreement, I’ll show you who’s underneath her. Believe me when I say it’s not her husband.”

In the photo, Linda Gail’s head was tilted back, her mouth open in the midst of orgasm, her bare breasts as taut as cantaloupes. I pushed the photo back across the table. “What are you after?” I said.

“A percentage of that offshore well y’all are drilling south of Lake Charles.”

“Is that all?”

“I’ve been picking up rich men’s crumbs all my life. I think it’s time I get in on the entrée.”

“Let me tell you what you’re going to get out of this, Mr. McFey. With luck, you’ll stay alive. If you show this photo to Hershel Pine, he’ll probably kill you. If he doesn’t, there’s a good chance I will.”

He picked up his cigarette from the ashtray and took another puff, squinting as he did, breathing the smoke out of his nose before he stubbed out the cigarette. “You and me go way back; you’re just not aware of it. I know that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend came to your house in 1934. I was a guard in Eastham Pen when Bonnie and Clyde shot their way inside the gates and killed a guard. That guard was a friend of mine. So I made a point of talking to Raymond before he died, reminding the boy of his sins and what was awaiting him when he met Old Sparky. I also watched him ride the bolt. You know what those boys mean when they say ‘ride the bolt,’ don’t you? I know everything about your wife, too.” He lit another cigarette and waited for me to speak.

“I’ve run across my share of white trash, Mr. McFey, but I think you’ve set a new standard,” I said.

He smiled while the bartender served him a bottle of Pearl off a circular tray. He poured his glass full and salted the foam. He took a sip and wiped his mouth, then licked the salt off the web of skin behind his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got some other things here that might interest you. Your daddy left y’all in ’33, didn’t he?”

An electric fan on a stanchion was blowing across the tops of the booths. Nonetheless, I could feel the temperature rising in the room, my body heat intensifying inside the raincoat. I touched the back of my neck.

My skin seemed on fire. “It’s warm in here, isn’t it?” I said. I pulled my raincoat off my right arm and let it flop on the seat, my hand resting on a hard lump inside the pocket. “Would you repeat what you just said?”

“Your father went to parts unknown and never came home,” he replied. He slipped an eight-by-ten off a stack of photos and set it in front of me. He placed a penlight next to it. “Take a look and tell me what that is.”

The photograph showed an excavation dug around a section of pipe buried five feet deep in the ground. “That’s called a bell hole,” I said.

“When there’s a leak in the pipe, it’s got to be dug up and rewelded on the joint, right?” he said.

“Yes, the hole around the joint has the shape of a bell, hence the name. What does this have to do with my father?”

He placed another photo on top of the first one. “See anybody in that group you recognize?” He tilted his glass and emptied it, the salt draining down to the edge. “Come on, boy, who do you see?”

There were four men digging inside the bell hole. They were all thin, their stomachs flat as shirt board, their clothes loose on their bodies. They looked like Depression-era men who might have climbed out from under a boxcar. One of them was wearing a slug cap and staring straight at the camera, as though bemused, as though he didn’t belong there.

“That’s my father.”

“Thought you’d be interested.”