Texas by James A. Michener
Cobb found in the distraught area one local leader who seemed to have as firm a grasp of reality as he, Cobb, had. It was Mayor Simón Garza of Bravo, who toured the Valley ceaselessly, organizing relief operations, and as the two men worked together, Cobb ten years the older, they formed a pact that would endure through the years ahead: ‘Garza, you make more sense than anyone else I’ve met. People live on the land, the rancher out west, the citrus grower down here, the farmer up the coast. We’re restricted by what the land will allow us to do, and when we forget that, we’re in trouble.’
Garza said: ‘I read an editorial the other day. It said: “God has gone out of His way to remind us that even Texans are mortal.” These are devastating years, but we can build upon them.’ And the two men, optimists as all Texans are required by law to be, went quietly ahead with their plans, however fragmentary, to save the citrus industry in the Valley, ranching on the high plains and water supplies everywhere.
But Cobb, like his valiant ancestors and like his aunt Lorena up in Waxahachie, was an ebullient man, and as he toured his state, proud of its ability to fight back, he savored the many hilarious behaviors that made Texas different from any other state he knew. And as he witnessed these crazy things he jotted down brief notes, which he mailed back to his wife so that she, too, could laugh.
… In Jefferson, I attended in the schoolhouse a lecture entitled ‘The Heritage of Robert E. Lee,’ and at the end the chairlady said, voice throbbing with emotion: ‘Now if we will all stand, please,’ and with her hand over her heart she led the singing:
‘I wish I was in de land of cotton
Old times dar am not forgotten …’
Fervently we sang of a glory none of us had ever known but whose legends were etched on our hearts, and when we reached that marvelous chorus, one of the most powerful ever written, I was shouting with the others:
‘In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand
To lib and die in Dixie.
Away, away, away down South in Dixie.’
When the song ended, with some of us wiping our eyes, I said to the man next to me: ‘If a bugle sounded now, half this crowd would march north,’ and he said: ‘Yep, and this time we’d whup ’em.’
… You and I have often talked about what our favorite town in Texas was. North Zulch always stood high. Oatmeal was good. You liked Muleshoe. The other day I drove through my favorite. Megargel, population 381, with a sign that says WATCH US GROW. As I drove through I saw a pickup with the bumper sticker SUPPORT JESUS AND YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF. Carry on, Megargel!
… At Larkin, where they have that famous statue you wouldn’t let me photograph, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. On the courthouse lawn were two bold bronze plaques, one proclaiming that for three glorious years during the 1920s the Larkin Fighting Antelopes had been state champions in football, the other that one night in 1881 the notorious one-armed gunman, Amos Peavine, had slept in Larkin prior to his gunning down of Daniel Parmenteer, respected lawyer of the place, and as I studied the two memorials I had to reflect upon the mores of the small Texas towns.
I’m sure Larkin must have produced dedicated women who taught their students with love and constructive influence. It surely had bright boys who went on to become state and national leaders. It must have had brave judges who tamed the western range, and men who built fortunes which they spent wisely. And there must have been citizens of no wide repute who held the town together, perhaps a barber or a seamstress on whom the weak depended. I can think of a hundred citizens of Larkin that I would like to memorialize, but what do we do?
We erect monuments to a murderous gunman who slept here one night and to a football team whose coach and most of whose players came from somewhere else. Just once I would like to drive into a Texas town and see a bronze plaque to a man who wrote a poem or to a woman who composed a lasting song.
… Returning from the session on catchment dams, I had the radio on and heard the song I’m going to recommend as the official state song of Texas, because it honors the two noblest aspects of our culture, football and religion: ‘Drop-Kick me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life.’
… I grow mournful when I hold a water meeting in some little town that used to flourish but is now dying. There must be hundreds of such places doomed to disappear before the end of the century, and I’ve constructed Cobb’s Law to cover the situation: ‘If a town has less than four hundred population and stands within twenty miles of a big shopping center, it’s got to vanish.’ The automobile determines that and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. Texas, always dying, always arising in some new location with some new mission.
… I love the redneck songs of Texas, ‘San Antonio Rose,’ ‘El Paso,’ and the new one I’ve memorized so I can sing it to you when we’re traveling:
Blue flies lazin’ in the noon-day sun,
Dogies grazin’ at their rest,
Old steers drinkin’ at the salty run …
This is Texas at its best.
Sleep on, Jim, I’ll watch the herd,
Doze on, Slim, fly northward bird.
All the range is peaceful.
He had a chance to sing this ballad to his wife when she accompanied him to two water meetings held by chance in two of the truly bizarre places in Texas. The first was the schoolhouse in the little oil town of Sundown, southwest of Levelland. The feisty town fathers, discovering that the oil companies would have to pay for whatever the board legally decided, opted to have the finest school in America. So for a total school enrollment of only a hundred and forty pupils they built a seven-million-dollar Taj Mahal, featuring a gymnasium fit for the Boston Celtics, an auditorium finer than most New York theaters and an Olympic-sized swimming pool under glass.
‘What staggers me,’ Cobb told his wife, ‘is that in the pool they teach canoeing. Yep, look at those two aluminum canoes, and there isn’t any water within miles. When I asked about this, a member of the school board said: “Well, some of our kids may emigrate to Maine, where canoeing is real big.” ’ Mrs. Cobb preferred the miniature condominium built into the center of the school: ‘What’s it for?’ And an official explained: ‘We want to teach our home-ec girls how to make beds.’ The superintendent’s office was special: directly under it at a depth of thousands of feet, rested an oil well, drilled at an angle. ‘It’s how we get our petty cash,’ an official said.
But what gave the Cobbs renewed hope for Texas every time they saw it was an amazing structure in the roughneck oil town of Odessa, where the oil rigs Rusk had been unable to sell even at a heavy loss rusted in the sun. There, years ago, a young woman schoolteacher without a cent had fallen in love with William Shakespeare. Driven by a vision that never faltered, she had begged and borrowed and scrounged until she had accumulated enough money to build an accurate replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. There it stood in the sandy desert, full scale, and to it came Shakespearean actors from many different theaters and countries to orate the soaring lines of the master.
‘We don’t do many of his historical plays,’ the director told Cobb. ‘Our customers prefer the love stories and the gory tragedies.’
‘I’ll be sending you a check one of these days,’ Mrs. Cobb said, for the Globe was kept alive by families like the Cobbs who felt that Shakespeare added a touch of grace to the drylands.
As Cobb left the meeting at which, speaking from the Shakespearean stage, he had pleaded for water legislation, he stopped and looked back at this preposterous building: ‘I love the craziness of Texas. It’s still the biggest state in the Union … without Eskimos.’
Maggie Morrison had been shocked by the murder of her husband, not by the fact that his shady behavior had resulted in the shooting, for she had anticipated something like this, but by the fact that it was Roy Bub who had done it. She knew him to be a man of intense integrity, and for him to have pulled the trigger added extra pain.
After the verdict was returned, a proper one she thought, she learned tha
‘Allow the will to be probated. Take Allerkamp and keep your mouth shut.’
‘To do that would strangle me.’
‘Maggie, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I’ve taken care of Roy Bub. What we call a finder’s fee.’
‘What did he find?’
‘Allerkamp. Before Todd died, the scoundrel was preparing to sell me Allerkamp. He was going to quit the exotic business.’
‘What about Roy Bub?’
‘Your husband never gave a damn about him.’
‘I’m not surprised. Houston ruined Todd. When we first came down we held family meetings: “Kids, Maggie, we’re going into this deal and we could lose our shirts.” We shared everything. Then, when he began to shave corners, we knew only the honest parts. Finally we knew nothing.’
‘Your husband and I agreed on a fair price for the place. I’ll show you the papers. His lawyer, mine will confirm their authenticity. You should allow the deal to go through.’
‘What will it mean to me?’
‘Four million dollars.’
The deal did go through, and on the day it was settled Maggie initiated three moves which symbolized her changed attitudes. She drove out to Allerkamp to inspect the manner in which Roy Bub Hooker had laid out the seven main areas that would make it one of the best exotic ranches in Texas, and when Rusk explained how it would be used, she told the partners: ‘You’re putting the place to good use. May it succeed beyond your dreams.’
The second thing of importance she did was surrender the family’s fancy condominium along Buffalo Bayou. As she confided to her children: ‘I feel uneasy sitting here and looking across the way at those three towers of The Ramparts, thinking how I bought them at distress from the Mexicans and sold them to the Canadians three weeks before the hurricane. It haunts me … seems immoral.’
She moved instead to a beautiful, dignified condominium well west of the center of town, The St. James, where she bought one of the smaller units on the twenty-third floor for $538,000 and spent another $92,000 decorating it. There, overlooking a park, she did the brainwork for her real estate business, driving to her office early each morning.
When real estate acquaintances in other cities called to ask: ‘Did Hurricane Alicia destroy values in Houston?’ she felt so defensive about her city that she drafted a thoughtful form letter:
I know you saw the horrendous scenes on television, our beautiful buildings with their windows knocked out like old women with no front teeth. I assure you with my hand on the Bible that only a few buildings were so hit and not one of them suffered any structural damage.
Houston has snapped back stronger than before. I am buying and selling as if there had never been a hurricane, for I know that if we survived Alicia, we can survive anything. If you crave action, come aboard.
But it was her third change that represented the most significant modification, because when she moved to The St. James she found herself conveniently close to Highway 610, that magic loop which encircled the central Houston she loved. Now, two or three nights a week after dinner when the intolerable traffic abated, she went down to her garage, climbed into her Mercedes, and drove thoughtfully eastward till she hit a ramp leading to 610. There she weaved her way onto the striking thoroughfare, one of the busiest in America, and started the thirty-eight-mile circuit of the city, ticking off her position on an imaginary clock.
Where she entered was nine o’clock, due west. Up where the airport waited, with its enormous flow of plane and auto traffic, was twelve. Three o’clock on the extreme east carried her into the smoke-filled, bustling commercial district that huddled about the Houston Ship Channel with its hundreds of plants affiliated with the oil industry; this area interested her immensely, for in it she saw many prospects for growth. Six o’clock was due south where the immense Medical Center and the handsome Astrodome predominated, and at the end of fifty minutes she was back at Westheimer, taking a last look at the city she had grown to love: What a glorious town! Spires everywhere glinting in the moonlight! God smiled at me when He brought me here. To help build and sell those splendid buildings!
Two nights a week, sometimes three, she made this circuit of her city, checking upon current building, predicting its future growth; sometimes male dinner companions accompanied her: ‘Maggie, you mustn’t do this alone. Six-ten is a jungle, worst highway in America. You know that during rush hour the police won’t even enter it to check on ordinary fender-benders. They got beat up too often by enraged motorists, sometimes shot and killed.’
‘But I stay clear during rush hours.’
‘And for God’s sake, don’t drive with your window down.’
‘This is my town. I love it and I want to check on it.’
One night as she was driving, with her eye to lands outside the circle, a full moon illuminated a section of the city she had never before studied seriously; it stood at ten o’clock, to the northwest, and it comprised about fifteen blocks of housing which could be torn down at no great loss, and she eased into an outer lane so that she could slow down and inspect the place. With imaginary bulldozers and wrecking balls, she leveled the houses, then erected a pair of soaring towers with all attendant shopping areas: Forty-eight floors to each tower, right? Six condominiums per floor? But save the first four levels for office space. We could get five hundred units easily, plus six gorgeous penthouses at $3,500,000 each.
Futura she dubbed her imaginary towers, and now when she circled the city at night she waited breathlessly for the approach of Futura, analyzing it from all angles. In the daytime, after work, she drove through the area and found that seventeen blocks would provide the necessary land area. Then she began to consult secretly with Gabe Klinowitz as to prices in the district, and with his figures in her head she started sketching plans for a major development. When she costed them, as the phrase in her industry went, she found that for $210,000,000 she could probably acquire the land, raze the buildings on it, and erect her twin-towered masterpiece.
As soon as she had a working budget in mind, she realized that there was only one source available to her for such a vast amount, so she flew to Dallas and placed her design before Ransom Rusk, who was recovering nicely from the shocks of the preceding years when he saw his net worth drop by nearly half a billion. He was deeply engaged in the election, sweating over whether or not Reagan would be reelected: ‘So many damned blacks and Mexicans registering, a man can’t make predictions.’ He was also contributing vast sums toward the defeat of eight or nine Democratic senators around the country, because he felt, as he told Maggie: ‘This is one of the crucial elections of our national history. If Reagan’s coattails are long enough, we’ll even regain control of the House, and then we can turn this sloppy nation around permanently. Reagan, a great patriot in the White House. His nominees filling the Supreme Court. A Republican Congress. And we’ll start taking over the state houses.’ With each potential triumph he became more excited: ‘Maggie, we can put some backbone into this nation. Clean up things in Central America. End the disgrace of public welfare, and see America tall in the saddle again. We’ll wipe out the stain of Franklin Roosevelt once and for all.’
As a lifelong Democrat whose parents had come from the working class, she was amused when Rusk fulminated in this way and did not take him seriously, but gradually he said things which astonished her: ‘It’s criminal for the Democrats to go around making Mexicans register, when they understand none of the issues. The vote should be reserved for the people who own the nation and pay the taxes.’
‘Do you mean that?’ she had asked, and his thoughtful reply surprised her: ‘I calculated the other day that my efforts ensure the empl
When she pursued the matter, he confessed: ‘Yes, I’d like to see a means test for the vote. Only people who have a real stake in society can know what’s best for that society.’
She was not yet ready to accept this new philosophy which was sweeping the nation, but in August when Rusk invited her to join him at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, she had an opportunity to observe him as he moved among people of his own kind, and she was impressed to find that he knew all the leaders and was welcomed in the suites of both President Reagan, delightful man, and Vice-President Bush, a reassuring fellow Texan from Midland. She noticed that Rusk was warmly greeted by the famous clergymen who had swarmed into Dallas to prove that God was a Republican and America a Christian nation.
It was an exciting week, and once when she sat in a privileged seat she felt a surge of pride as she looked down upon the delegates, that endless parade of fine, clean-cut people from all parts of the nation: the bankers, the managers, the store owners, the elderly women with blue-tinted hair. And not too often a black or a Hispanic to confuse the pattern. It was at this euphoric moment that Maggie first began to consider seriously her partner’s philosophy that the men who own a nation ought to govern it. The idea was crudely expressed and she knew that if the newspapers got hold of it, they would make sport of Rusk, but it did summarize a fundamental truth about America, and it was worth further study.
On the morning after the convention ended on a note of high triumph, Maggie placed before Rusk the plans for her master development, and was distressed when he seemed to back off, as if the project was too big for him to finance at this time.