Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Read online

  I came to like that town, and I came to hate it as well. The more things I made up about it, the truer it all seemed to me. As I kept writing about it, it didn’t seem so mean anymore, and I found that there were as many good things about it as bad. I wanted to be honest about it, though, so I kept making up things, expanding things here, shrinking things there, altering the facts of reality as I went, all the time drawing on the truth of my memory but weaving that truth into a tapestry of lies that fit my imaginary small town.

  I didn’t want to sentimentalize the town. There were good people there, and, I discovered when I began to write about them, there were funny people there, too. At the time I was writing, though, I didn’t think I was a writer. I never thought anyone would read my writing. So I was frank and honest and open. It tends to make trouble for me, now. People in small towns that become the models for writers are sensitive about having their secrets—even those that are made up—revealed.

  Another question writers hear a lot is, “What are you going to do next?” This is an ironic question, and I know that the inquirer has a compliment in mind when the sentence is formed, that what he really means is that he liked the first book and is looking forward to another one. But it always disturbs a writer to have someone ask “What’s next?” It’s like saying, “What have you done for me lately?”

  For most writers, publishing a book, one book, is the goal of a lifetime. That quickly gives way to ambition, of course, but in the back of a writer’s mind is always the insecurity, the recollection of feeling that his book will never be published, that he will always write in a personal vacuum. Rejection is part of the business. A book, even a second book, or a third or a fourth, can be rejected by an agent, an editor, the critics, or even the public. Indeed, that sort of thing happens more often than it doesn’t. Most writers think that writing one book, or even two, should be enough. But it’s not. We live in a consumer’s society. People want more of what they like, but they usually want it to be “new and improved,” and when writing is concerned, that’s scary.

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  Personally, I often worry that I might not be able to write about the same small town again. I would like to, but that mysterious place where my ideas come from doesn’t always yield many good ones about the town, and I sometimes can’t seem to think up any new lies to tell about it. At one point, I decided to “go home,” not to my mythical town, but to the real one. I hoped that I would find something to write about there. And I did.

  One of the things I found was about the history of the town and its region. I grew up there, spent eighteen years there, and the only historical incident I ever heard of that took place there was that Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured nearby. Sul Ross was up on the Pease River killing Indian women and children one morning when, supposedly, he saw her blue eyes and took her, the wife of a chief and the mother of the “Last Chief of the Comanche,” back to her people from whom she had been captured decades earlier. She died—it’s said, of grief, but another story is that she starved herself to death—quickly after she was restored to the Christian bosom of her loved ones. People from that part of Texas, I’ve learned, even the Comanche, don’t like too much change, and history is something to be trotted out and dusted off on “Western Day.”

  But history can also be full of lies. I later learned that both stories about Cynthia Ann were untrue; she most likely died of pneumonia. To this day I haven’t visited the “battle site,” though, not out of perversity, but rather because I never could find it. The historical marker was erected after I left, and I’ve never had the time to search for it. I’m told, however, that the place where they put it is actually several miles from the capture site since the Pease River changed course and the actual location is now in the wrong county.

  I was undeterred by such anomalies of history, though. I started writing about the region and its settlement once more. I thought about the kind of people it took to settle an area that Cynthia Ann’s son, Quanah Parker, had said was good for nothing but “scorpions, red ants, and rattlesnakes,” a place where it could be 80 degrees and drizzling in the morning, blowing a dust storm in the afternoon, and snowing by midnight. A place where drought, flood, tornados, and wheat-killing hail, prairie fires and insect plagues vied with mesquite, Johnson grass, and scrub cedar to keep the forces of agriculture and civilization out and away long after the Comanche had given up the chore as a bad job and went to Oklahoma to raise cattle and drill for oil. I was surprised to find that buffalo used to roam all over the area, for the only buffalo I ever saw were in California. I learned that the shortest railroad in the world was once there, the Acme Tap Line. I learned that the only railroad ever owned by an Indian, the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific, was there. It was a shock to me. My father worked for the “Q” for nearly thirty years.

  I also found out, again later on, that Quanah Parker never owned a dime’s worth of stock in that railroad. It was another lie.

  In my first two books, I had dealt with the decline of the area. I talked about the last passenger train, the Zephyr, which came through the year after I left for college; I spoke of burned-out and boarded-up buildings; I wrote of the seamier side of life, the hidden sex, hypocrisy, and fear that gripped a community that looked fruitlessly for hope in a faith that seemed to be as ignorant of them as they were that there was a world outside their region, a world that ignored them as well. What I was learning, though, was of something else. I learned of shootouts on Main Street, of murder in remote pastures, of suicides in gas stations, of socialists who preached on street corners. I learned of a time when hope had promise to bolster it, of a place that survived a dustbowl and depression, two world wars and government farm programs, oilfield blight, used up cotton fields, and poor wheat harvests, that found their heroes in jerseys, pads, and pimples every Friday night in the fall, and that, in spite of the fact that the century-old, fieldstone buildings of downtown were crumbling around them, still believed that where they were was the best place they could be.

  I realized, to my surprise, that when I grew up there, I also thought that it was the best place I could be. I hated it, certainly, in the way any youngster hates what is familiar and longs to know what lies beyond the mountains—or, in my case, beyond the Wichita River. I had seen Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. I had dreamed of New York. I wanted to leave worse than anything. I never wanted to come back.

  Through my writing, though, I returned. I discovered that there was more substance to the place than I ever thought was there, and even though I have no desire to go back, permanently, I find that I am drawn to it as a prodigal, as one who has seen the outside world and found it wanting. The urban setting may be, as some have asserted, the proper subject for contemporary fiction, but I’ve never found the grimy boulevards of metropolitan Texas to be as interesting as the dust-blown streets of my small town. Human relationships, good ones and bad ones, tend to be magnified there, and the significance of human action tends to be greater. There might be eight million stories in the naked city, but somehow none of them seems as interesting to me as the couple of hundred that can be found in my imaginary small town.

  In his wonderful memoir, Lost in West Texas, Jim W. Corder calls the region that contains my towns, the real and the imaginary, “lost.” He notes that it lies on a line of demarcation that extends south through Jack County to 1-20, west to just above Abilene, and then north to the Red River and home again. It is an unknown region. Neither Caprock nor grassland, it is pockmarked with cedar breaks and river sloughs, swamps and mysterious caves, sandy, quicksand-filled rivers and badlands, gypsum that lies on the ground like snow and invades the native water to the point that soap won’t lather. Along the state highways that infrequently crisscross the region, small towns sit like starving sentinels of a bygone age, a time within living memory when farmers drove wagons and plowed with mules, and lawyers were the only ones allowed to wear vests, when no one but preachers worked on Sundays, and Saturday night filled Main Stree
t, when salesmen traveled by train, ate in diners, and stayed in fleabag hotels and called such whistle stops “bergs” with a derisive curl of their mustachioed lips, when the only law worth worrying about was the sheriff, and when the biggest scandal anyone knew about or dared to mention was the pint bottles behind the Coke machine in the domino parlor. It was a time when the head cheerleader’s unexpected pregnancy was a cause for shame, and the worst crime a football boy could be accused of was mixing peppermint schnapps with a lime coke. It was an era when the banker was both the worst enemy and the best friend a town could have, when homosexuals were called “old bachelors” and lesbians were called “spinster sisters.” It was a time when a first kiss was a teenager’s greatest ambition—and fear, when dinner was served at noon, ice cream was hand-cranked, and Saturday afternoon meant “western,” a time when “out there” referred to a world no one understood or, truly, wanted much of anything to do with. Now much of that has changed, or has it? That’s what I wanted to come home to, that’s what I wanted to write about.

  Towns in that region were “Huck Finn” kinds of places when I grew up. Only we knew of places to hunt more than fish, places to steal a melon instead of a raft. A river, to my generation, was something you could walk across, if you didn’t get stuck in quicksand. A forest was something resembling a plum thicket that had grown up in a CCC shelter-break. The first time I saw the Mississippi, I couldn’t believe it, and I’m still not sure that the Great Southern Forest is natural.

  If the people there were “lost,” they didn’t know it or care very much. The only salvation they sought was in church, not in geography. If you knew how to get into Wichita Falls to shop at Sears for Christmas, over the Red River to “trash hill” to buy a pint of Oklahoma whiskey to “naughty up” the egg nog, and down to Fort Worth for the Fat Stock Show and Rodeo or to Dallas for the State Fair, that was all the direction you needed. County roads had numbers, but no one knew them. They were the “Country Club Road”, “The Groesbeck Road”, “Medicine Mound Road”, “The Lake Road”, “Wolf Hunt Road”, “Beasley’s Cave Road”, and “The Airport Road”. Who needed numbers in a place where everyone knew where he was all the time? “You go out to Connally’s farm an’ take a left at the watermelon patch.” Never mind that it’s February and a melon patch looked pretty much like any other field. If you don’t know where Connally’s melon patch was, you have no business running around the county in the first place.

  At least one writer I know once said that he was a “herder of words.” I think most writers are “herders of souls.” Not shepherds—evangelism isn’t their purpose. Instead they gather souls together less for counting than for assessing. The small towns of West Texas—we always called it West Texas (it was, after all, west of Fort Worth)—are less places than they are collections of souls. Some of the best souls found peace in the cemeteries there. Some fled never to return. And some are still there. But a few who left, come back from time to time to consider the truer values of a place that’s invisible to the skiers on their way to and from the snowcaps of Colorado and street markets of Santa Fe. These, I think, are the writers, and in their return is where their ideas come from; in the lies they tell about their memories is where the truth of their fiction may be found.

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  So I decided to revisit my small town. I had been there infrequently throughout the years both before and since becoming a writer. Usually, though, I would go and “hide” at her house, secreting myself away from those who I might know or recognize. I didn’t realize it until that particular visit, but I didn’t want to see any change. I suppose I shared that with the Comanche.

  During that visit, it snowed. My wife, a Yankee-bred girl who regards anyplace with fewer than two malls a small town, insisted we take a walk on an icy morning. We strolled through the “downtown” area—two brick-paved blocks of century-old buildings, most of which boast newer fronts on the street level at least. The snow hid a lot of defect and ruin from my eyes, but it also revealed something worse. I saw the old Dinner Bell Café where travelers ate while waiting for a train, and the Liberty Hotel, where thousands of weary pilgrims found a night’s rest on their journeys. Both were crumbling as was one of the two depots suffered to remain standing and spared the bulldozer and wrecking ball’s terror. I discovered a hundred-year-old building which had once been the only hotel in town. It was a warehouse of some sort for a while. Now, though, all the floors have collapsed, but the rickety wooden fire escape is still in place, testimony to the pragmatism of a by-gone era that thought any way out of a burning building was better than none, whether it was “up to code” or not.

  I was disturbed by much that I saw during my snowy walk. Places I remembered were gone, shut down, boarded-up, gutted by fire or demolition, changed. There was a real estate office where my daddy took me for fifty-cent burr haircuts every June first. A dry cleaners had invaded the drugstore’s space where we used to sit in booths and drink soda-fountain Cokes and milkshakes. The Teen Canteen, which had formerly been a Church of Christ before they sold it to the city and built a new one, was boarded up. I learned to dance in there, tasted my first sip of wine in the parking lot, fell in love, had my heart broken more than once. It was in ruin, and honeysuckle vines covered the old porch where once an outraged coalition of Baptist and Church of Christ parents descended on a Valentine’s Day dance and raided it and jerked their mortified and sinful children home by their indiscreet ears while the band continued to play and the Methodists laughed. Someone had plowed up and planted a winter garden in the vacant lot where I learned to hit Tommy Nelson’s slider—if you got it over the holly hedge of Old Man Waterby’s backyard, it was a ground-rule homer, but you had to buy a new ball. I figure Old Man Waterby probably collected a couple of hundred baseballs in those days. We didn’t need Freddy Kruger or Jason. We were terrified enough of him. The rumor was that he had axe-murdered and cut up his wife and mailed her in little pieces packed in dry ice, back to her father in Tennessee, Railway Express. Everyone knew it, but because he was rich, no one would arrest him.

  I saw him during that visit. He was old, frail, and kind of pathetically harmless as he inched his way down an icy walk to retrieve his Fort Worth Star Telegram. His sweater was ratty, and the house that we had all thought of as opulent and befitting a man of great wealth was in need of paint and a new roof. He had a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet rusting in the driveway. How could I have been afraid of him? I started to ask him if he still had all those baseballs, but I didn’t. I was afraid he might also still have an axe hidden away somewhere, and I remain convinced that he spends his nights counting his money.

  The capper, I suppose, was walking past the high school. In small towns, life centers on the high school. My high school was a turn-of-the-century, three-story affair with hardwood floors and huge sash windows in response to a land which thought air conditioning was a dip in a stock tank and standing naked in the summer wind. There was a huge masonry arch some ancient senior class had paid to have built, and it looked like a school. But it was gone. In its place was a cold steel and yellow brick building with no windows, no expansive quad, and only one story. It had no character, no sense of tradition. Even the arch was gone.

  Later that day, I visited the cemetery where my father and grandfather and other family members are buried. It too seemed cleaner, smaller, less ominous and oppressive than I remembered it. The story is that the cemetery was founded on the spot where Indians had killed and scalped a cowboy named Earle. His grave was the first one, dug before the townsite was founded. I’d never been able to find it, and I couldn’t find it under the snow that day, either. Someone had put some plastic flowers on my grandfather’s grave. They were red, once, but in the snow they looked pink and faded. The granite headstones announced dates and names, but they didn’t talk about years of back-breaking toil my father put in on an ungrateful and unforgiving railroad. My grandfather’s stone said nothing of the fact that he was a wrangler and a horseman, or that his
father had fought in the War Against Northern Aggression, as my family always called it, before being burned out in Arkansas and coming to Texas to raise horses. None of the stones there, in fact, bespoke the family histories of those who lay beneath them. I knew there were good people there, bad people as well, and their lives were as much a part of the memories I had of the small town as were my own.

  In short, the town wasn’t there anymore. It’s likely that it never was there, not as I remember it and imagine it in my writing. It’s as much a part of a mythic past as Old Man Waterby’s supposedly checkered life, as much a part of the fabric of imagination as the significance of a ratty, weed-grown patch of earth we called a “quad” at the high school. In my memory—and in my writing—the buildings are taller, the summers hotter, the winters colder, the winds stronger than they’ll ever be again. The people are better, and worse, than they ever were, their secrets darker, their lives entirely more interesting.

  But somehow, the place still exists in my mind, and somehow, I continue to believe it’s more fascinating than the glass and steel, concrete and neon of any urban setting. In my mind, there’s more of a story to tell there than I’ll ever discover in Dallas or Houston, New York or Los Angeles. There, indiscretions and conflicts are commonplace, unremarkable, and expected. In a small town, what would be a ripple in the metropolis rolls with the force of a tidal wave as it envelopes the sensibilities and excites the outrage or admiration of all. There’s a kind of brutality there that urbanites for all their ghettos, barrios, and crime can never understand; there’s also a kind of acceptance and forgiveness that few city dwellers ever experience.