The Texas Connection

Even as Texans reckon distance, Groesbeck and Crowell aren’t near enough to each other to make an extramural beer run, or send an away- team to the pasture-hockey finals.  They do have something in common, though.  They’re both partial to a particular ghost.

I’m partial to that ghost myself. She took me to Texas in 1980 and she keeps me coming back; she, and the fact that the rear view of a rodeo roper in tight levis is a deeply religious experience. The ghost’s name is Cynthia Ann Parker and I have a lot to thank her for. She sent me off on a course I never could have imagined. She changed my life, profoundly and for the better. You can’t cannonball deeper into debt to someone than that.

My Texas connection started innocently enough with arrant lust at a Baltimore science fiction convention on Easter weekend, 1979. There, amidst sword fights raging through the hotel lobby and loathsome ET’s crammed into the elevators, I met the science fiction writer, Brian Daley, and his editor. Brian asked me if I had read the new Han Solo novel. I airily replied, no, I didn’t read movie spin-offs. His editor’s wife blurted out, “He wrote it.” So I took Brian to the hotel bar to mend fences, screwdrivers being the best tool to mend this sort of fence.

That was Saturday night.

Sunday morning, Brian and I watched the pastel-and-polyester Easter breakfast crowd collide with Balticon’s google-eyed aliens, Darth Vader wannabes, and industrial-sized lasses in dog collars and leopard-skin bikinis. In one 12-hour period, I found love and an editor. Love got me grinning like a baked possum. The editor got me a book contract.

I was looking for love, but not an editor. I already had a respectable job as a librarian in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. I mentioned Cynthia Ann Parker to this editor though. At the age of nine Cynthia Ann was taken by Comanches after an attack on her family’s fort in east Texas in 1836. She lived with the Comanches twenty-four years, married, and had three children.

Her story, I observed, would make a helluva novel. The editor, who otherwise seemed a sensible specimen, suggested that I write it. I gave him the flounder-eye, as though he’d suggested I run for pope, and said, “I don’t know beans about plot or dialogue.”

He called me at work every Monday anyway, to ask if I’d started writing. To placate him I ordered a few books on Commanches through interlibrary loan, emptied out my recipe box to put note cards in, and squandered $125 of my $15,000 annual salary on a manual portable typewriter. On Halloween night of 1979 I hitched a chair up to the old door laid across two night stands that still serves as a desk. I cracked my knuckles, tucked my hair behind my ears, poised my bony fingers over the typewriter keys, and made the acquaintance of the wretch who would become my second most faithful companion in life: writer’s block.

The first line finally came to me in the shower, and I bolted out, wet and nekkid, to write it down. I solved the problem of plot development by starting with a massacre.  My advice to beginning writers: start with a massacre. You don’t need snappy dialogue for that.

Maybe it was propitious that I began writing on All Hallows’ Eve. My house has been full of ghosts ever since.  It’s no wonder that writers have a reputation as a substance abusing lot. We don’t just hear voices, we are voices. We historical novelists table-tap in a perpetual seance, trying to get a postcard, a laundry list, a doodle on a bar bill, any sort of communication from those who cashed in their chips a hundred years ago or more.

of hometown hardpan in her household inventory so that wherever the Air Force might send her and her husband, their children would be born on Texas soil. That must have generated some lively discussion in the delivery room in Germany when her son was born. Darlyne and her Box O’ Dirt gave me the first inkling that Texans were different from us trail-broke critters in the herd.

Darlyne’s husband Bill tuned up their red Rabbit until it was humming in the key of C, added a CB, and handed me the keys. I threw my tent and sleeping bag into it and took off for Groesbeck where, as any Texan can tell you, Fort Parker has been re-created. It wasn’t re-created in my image though.

The countryside matched what I had imagined, but the fort was larger than mine, and it lacked the small cabin I pictured in the center. The main gate was on the side opposite where I thought it should be, which meant the spring I’d read about was not where I’d assumed.

I asked the ranger in charge if this was the way the fort had looked in 1836. He shifted his chaw to the other cheek and said, no, it would have been smaller. A family couldn’t defend a stockade that big. “And,” he added, “we think there was a small cabin in the middle where Elder John and his wife lived.” I asked about the gate. He said it would have been on the other side to catch the morning sun.

I stood there in the same morning sun that had shined down on the Parkers and felt the waters of the past rising around me. I’d waded into history’s flow, and it was proving to be more mysterious and surprising than I’d expected.

I knew that coincidence accounted for the similarities between the image I’d conjured up, and the fort as it probably was. But even so, that was the first hint that this research trip, and those to follow, would include more than current reality. It showed me that truth and fiction, the past and the present are hard to tell apart without an arc lamp and a jeweler’s loupe.

I put 3,000 miles and a couple hundred years on the Morales’s Rabbit during that first foray into the past. Two decades later odd details come to mind: a thimble-sized hummingbird nest on a mesquite limb at the Alamo movie set in Brackettville; a Don Quixote of a rattlesnake who tilted with my front tire near Enchanted Rock; a fiddle contest in Archer City where the emcee asked me to stand up and eye-dentify myself; tea with four hulking truckers whom I met via the CB; strangers who gave me the two-fingers-above-the-steering-wheel salute as their pick-ups rumbled past on the back roads.

I remember watching my first professional wrestling act on TV at two a.m. in San Angelo with Darlyne’s grandmother. Darlyne’s grandmother more than made up in exuberance what she lacked in size. I’d’ve put my money on her against any of them in the ring.

I remember joining the grand orbit of dancers two-stepping to the music of Bubba Litrell and his Melody Mustangs. I remember standing on a bluff overlooking the Pease River and imagining the Comanche lodges scattered along it. Imagining soldiers attacking and Cynthia Ann running from them with her youngest child in her arms.

I pitched my tent on the floor of Palo Duro Canyon. I spent a morning lying on my back watching the buzzards circle between the parentheses of the canyon walls. I was careful to twitch now and then before they mistook me for the main corpse, or the cadaver d’jour.

North of Amarillo I followed a ranch road to the site of the buffalo hunters’ camp at Adobe Walls where Billy Dixon made his legendary one-mile shot at an army of Indians eager to take a lot off the top. Two monuments stood there at the base of hills carpeted in flowers and with a magnificent view of the Canadian River threading the plain far below. A coyote passed silently into the tall grass, as indifferent to my presence as any big city dweller.

That’s where I first experienced The Hackle Factor. The hair on the nape of my neck stirred in an old and phantom wind, as though an unseen hand had opened a coffin and released a djin. The air and earth felt charged with the spirits of the people who had died there. I could almost see the force of Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho and Cheyenne warriors urging their ponies over the crest of the ridge and racing down the slope, determined to eradicate the heedless entrepreneurs who were destroying their food supply, their families and their way of life.

On that first jaunt through Texas I acquired a life-long addiction to time-tripping. What I discovered was that solitary travel gives a sense of timelessness, of animated suspension between the nattering of the present and anxieties about the future. On the back roads, sharing the car with their ghosts and a companionable silence, it may be easier for me to understand the lives my characters led than for them to understand mine. That may be why I have found myself trying to explain muzak, call-forwarding, mail-waiting, rush hour, and RuPaul to the wraith riding shotgun.

The book that came out of that first trip, Ride the Wind, is in its twenty-fourth printing. Thanks to Darlyne’s grandmother, I could describe in it how a horse eats thistles, how to peel an armadillo, and how to bark a squirrel. No, not bark at a squirrel. Even Texans don’t bark at squirrels, at least not often. They shoot at the limb just ahead of the animal so the bark explodes up and knocks him out of his tree. Then he can be bulldogged, hog-tied, bludgeoned, skinned, hanged, drawn, butchered, dressed out and quartered. The resulting forkful of meat can be tossed into the evening stew with no pesky lead to take a bite out of the bridgework.

A writer friend once confessed that early in his career he described two cowboys sitting down to feast on a prairie dog. At a book signing a ranch woman came up to him and pointed out that there’s not enough meat on a prairie dog to fill a cavity in a molar. My friend looked at her solemnly and said, “Ah, but, Madam, a hundred years ago prairie dogs were much larger.” I’ve used that same line to counter skepticism about my description of a rampaging Texas river. Everyone knows that Texas is so dry the trees whistle for the dogs.

Texans usually eat higher on the hog than squirrel or prairie dog though. For the barbecue at Fort Parker’s Christmas celebration a few years ago, I helped sort and clean seventy pounds of dry beans, also at two in the morning. Do Texans never sleep?

That was my first experience with steer-on-a-stick, a shish-kabob of half a beef carcass. My friends basted it with a mop sloshed in a washtub of sauce.  That’s nothing out of the ordinary for Texans, but we hardly ever use mops as cooking utensils in Arnold.  Nor do we carry bottles of our favorite hot sauce in our pockets wherever we go.  Also, the hot sauce we do use cannot double as paint remover.

I recently read, by the way, that while it’s not true that Texans will eat armadillos, ‘possums, prairie dogs or rattlesnakes, if times get tough, they know where to find them.  I tried that material out on my Groesbeck friends, Celeste and Bob Coffee and Dale McDaniels.  At the time we were riding in the Coffees’ double-axle, jalapeño-red “fun” truck with a perimeter of flashing running lights.  At night the fun truck looks like a casino making house calls.

I got as far as “I hear it’s not true that Texans will eat possums, armadillos, prairie dogs or rattlesnakes…” when as if on cue they made the roll-bar ring with, “Yes, they will! Texans will eat anything.”