Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel Read Free Page B

one else in the yard except you and me and Weldon.”
    My mother went silent, seeming to believe now more than ever that we were her enemies, and she could not understand the poisonous vapor that awaited her every afternoon when the sun became a red wafer inside the dust clouds rising in the west.
    After Grandfather and I returned to the house, I washed my mother’s hair in the upstairs bathroom and dried it with the electric fan, lifting it off her neck and eyes. When I finished, she got up from the chair and dropped her bathrobe to the floor in front of the closet mirror, staring at the flatness of her hips against her slip. She began tying a string around her waist, the way colored women do to keep their slip from hanging below the hem of their dress.
    “Mother, I’m in the room,” I said.
    My words didn’t seem to register. “I’ve lost so much weight,” she said. “Do you think I look all right? Did those people in the automobile come here in regard to your father?”
    “Why would they be here about him?”
    “He might have found work and sent word.”
    “I think they were drunk and got lost.”
    I went downstairs and set up our checkerboard on a folding bridge table we kept behind the couch. My mother loved to play checkers, and while she played, she smiled as though allowing herself a brief vacation from the emotional depression that consumed her life. Her hair had been dark blond when she was younger; it had turned brown with streaks of gray. She still bathed every day but no longer wore makeup or cut her fingernails. I believed that if I did not take my mother away from this house, away from the doctors who planned to kill thousands of her brain cells, she would end up a vegetable in the state asylum outside Wichita Falls.
    “Mother, what if you and I left here and went out on our own?” I said.
    “Where would we go?” she said, staring down at the red and black squares on the checkerboard.
    “Maybe Galveston or Brownsville, where the air is fresh and full of salt from the waves crashing on the beach. There’s no dust there’bouts. I could get a job.”
    “People are coming to take me away, aren’t they.”
    Through the kitchen door, I could see Grandfather reading his encyclopedia, which he did every day, one volume after the next. Behind him, out in the darkness, fireflies were lighting in the trees like sparks rising off a stump fire. I tried to think but couldn’t. “We have to fight them, Mother,” I said. “The doctors are not our friends. I wish they had rubber gags put in their mouths and their own machines were turned against them.”
    She stared at her hands. The heels were half-mooned with fresh nail marks. “I don’t know why I hurt myself this way or why I have the thoughts I do. I feel I’m unclean in the sight of my Creator. Something is about to happen. It has to do with the people in the car. They were here before. I saw them from the upstairs window. They took off their clothes out there in the trees.”
    I knew then that my mother was absolutely mad. But her mention of our visitors made me think once again of the driver and his rugged good looks and thick walnut-colored hair and toughness of attitude toward Grandfather. He was no shade-tree mechanic, no matter what he claimed. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
    I began hunting through a sheaf of old magazines stuck in a wood rack by the end of the couch. I flipped through the pages of a 1933 issue of True Detective until I came to a photo of a handsome man wearing a fedora whose expression had the intransigence of boilerplate. I took the magazine to Grandfather. “Does this fellow look familiar?” I said.
    “No.”
    “You didn’t even look. It’s the man you had words with.”
    “I think I’d know if I was talking to Pretty Boy Floyd.”
    “Same eyes, same chin, same mouth, same expression,” I said. “A real hard case.”
    “There’s only one problem. Floyd was killed last year on a farm in Ohio. Before