Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  They just shit like crazy, he says about the bats a short time later. What they don’t know, those tourists on the bridge, is that the first thing the bats do when the fly out is shit.

  You really need a raincoat to be standin’ there, he says. Or ’n umbrella.

  Bat shit that falls like manna from heaven.

  The restaurant with the diverse menu selection plays country music in the background. A waitress in cowboy boots guides us to our table. Layne sounds like a poem behind the enormous menu.

  Tuna trout redfish.

  You know, from the ocean?

  Put it on a grill to grill it,

  to blacken it up,

  or bake it or fry it.

  When his sister visited with her family, he faded into the walls of his parents’ house. Now he’s blooming. He enjoys this role as host, ordering from a large menu, suggesting dishes, taking care of his mother’s cousin’s daughter. He looks up from the menu. You probably wantsom wine with that? For himself he orders a steak and a beer. This is my cou-sin, he explains to the waitress.

  I ask him about my grandmother. He says that Gussie was a real storyteller. She always wanted to tell stories. She had a story for everything. I ask if he recalls any. Or maybe he has some stories himself? Let’s see. He considers. She always had that house in Lockhart. At the end of that street. We basically only spent time in the kitchen and in that back bedroom. Stories aren’t Layne’s strong suit, he’s better with numbers. My grandmother served as his grandmother, but that’s all he can remember. He teases the waitress about the tip. Let’s see, a dollar fifty-four—no, that’s too much. He laughs. I think the irs man gives good tips.

  Later he takes me to Amy’s Ice Cream, another Austin classic. In a way that seems typical for this place, Texas, or maybe the South, he says the same thing that he said to the waitress. This is my cou-sin. My cou-sin from Denmark. By some mythic extension we’re all cousins. The cashier says: Oh, that’s nice, in a way that makes you believe it really interests her.

  I remember her getting that car, says Layne, who’d recalled a story about my grandmother. The Ford that she drove me around in with her glasses in her mouth. Who in their right mind would sell a car to a ninety-two-year-old woman? Are they that hard up for a commission?

  I recall it quite differently. Or else I didn’t view it the same way. She could be very convincing, I say. If she wanted a car, she would get a car.

  Layne, on the other hand, is certain she had Alzheimer’s. One weekend they’d all been at his Mom and Dad’s, and during the course of two days she’d told the same story eight times. It was pretty bad in the end.

  in his quiet way my dad reminded me why I’m here. He wants to show me his Texas, let me see the place as much as possible through his eyes. In turn, I try to find him in what I see, to get to know him better.

  My dad is still busy in St. Louis with his students’ exams, but not so much that he can’t spend a little free time skyping me. When I drove up to Austin to check into the next motel, he told me to be sure to check out the clocktower and ut’s campus. He encouraged me, again, to contact his old roommate, a man who went on to become a professor at the University of Texas. He and Bob studied physics together, not at ut but in St. Louis, where they shared a small apartment close to Washington University’s campus.

  The first thing I thought of when he mentioned the clocktower was the madman who rode the elevator up to the observation deck one August day in 1966 and shot and killed fourteen random passersby on the campus and wounded many more. A twenty-five-year- old student at ut, he’d long been haunted by fantasies of shooting people from the tower. The evening before, he’d shot his mother and girlfriend, ostensibly to spare them the shame of what he planned to do. That morning he drove to a hardware store and purchased a semi-automatic M1 carbine, and in Sears he purchased a semi-automatic shotgun plus a bunch of ammunition. On top of that, he had a .35-caliber pump rifle that was almost as fast to load as the semi-automatic Remington he brought with him, a 9mm Luger, 25mm Galesi-Brescia, which is a cheaply made Italian gun, and a Smith & Wesson M9 that is still a preferred model for border patrols and immigration officials and is described on the internet as “a peace officer’s dream.” He gathered these weapons in a large bag that he carried up to the tower and began a shooting spree that lasted ninety-six minutes, until the police managed to put an end to him.

  I remember being ten or eleven the first time I’d heard of the shooting on the ut campus, not only because it had happened at my dad’s old university but because it was the first time I’d heard of the phenomenon that was then—and remains to this day—incomprehensible to me. That someone could go out and simply buy enough firearms to fill a bag, take them to a school, and, urged by some sickness in their head, shoot random people from a clocktower. The last man on the observation deck, who’d passed the shooter on the stairwell, noticed the guy was carrying a bag filled with weapons, but he figured he was going up there to shoot doves. As if it were normal to drag a bag of guns up in a clocktower at a university to shoot doves. The first victim of the man who would come to be called the Texas Tower Sniper wasn’t a dove but a woman who was eight months pregnant. A number of students on the campus were armed and began to return his fire, a detail that I find endlessly fascinating.

  It’s possible to find earlier examples of school shootings, but he was the one who on that August day cemented school shootings in everyone’s mind as a uniquely American discipline.

  My dad would often spend entire days sitting in the clocktower, he said, absorbed in his books in a splendid, high-ceilinged reading room. The walls were thick with quotations from famous saints, and all around him were books and more books. When the school shooting took place, he was in Copenhagen. He was at the Niels Bohr Institute, and in a few months he would meet my mother at El Toro Negro.

  of all the things concealed on the island that is my dad, physics feels like the most impenetrable. After all these years, my dad still floats like an astronaut alone in space. Maybe my dad’s old roommate, with whom he studied physics in St. Louis, can bring him out of the darkness. I’ve written him, and he’s picked me up at the motel and driven me to the campus where he is a professor.

  Bob’s hair is thick and silver, and his accent reminds me of Bill Clinton’s. He’s a year older than my dad, so he must be eighty. He looks out across the campus with gentle and patient and slightly bulging brown eyes that make me think of a cow gazing across a field, taking in the clocktower, the new and old buildings, the window of the room where my dad probably lived when he went to ut.

  Bob knows I’m interested in my dad’s roots. Maybe that’s why he begins talking about his own. He’s originally from Arkansas but has spent his entire adult life here. On the faculty wall, he points out his heroes among the faces, the names mean nothing to me, but the pictures are the same as those I knew from Washington University, the same wide photographs of researchers, the faces, the clothes, the assemblage of long rows, and the way some of the younger ones on the margin of the back row year by year inch forward until, at last, they sit in the center of the front row. From gangly, dark-haired nerds to old, white-bearded men, from black-and-white to color.

  Those physicists are crazy at what they do, he says.

  That surprises me. I thought he was a physicist like my dad, but no, Bob says, he switched to double e.

  Double e?

  Electrical engineering.

  He explains how after taking a winding detour and barely passing his qualifying exams he’d landed in the small St. Louis apartment with my dad. How they studied under the famous physicist Eugene Feenberg, Bob working on the thesis that took him two years to finish. He sat in a room, the last in a series of other rooms, and processed data on an expensive machine, an ibm computer that filled the entire room. My dad collaborated closely with Feenberg on the PhD dissertation that he managed to complete in two months. A many-body problem, Bob says, which I think he spent most of his career on. But not
Bob. He gave up physics. Those physicists are crazy at what they do, he repeats.

  What do you mean by crazy?

  Bob sighs deeply and says something about how it must feel to work outside the experimental field, on some sort of ‘particle-thing,’ practically in darkness. Physics sounds almost as foreign to him as it does to me, but of course it’s not. He tries to explain, there are a number of laws pertaining to theoretical physics, he says, about what’s what and how many have you. And where are they. And maybe the theory indicates there must be something or other, he waggles his fingers, because otherwise the theory doesn’t make sense, something doesn’t work, a fundamental law is broken, and that’s not possible. So they keep juggling and guessing, he says, and then hoping the experimentalists will find it.

  He mentions a Nobel Prize winner from ut, Weinberg, who in an interview said that he had only one hour in his entire career when he felt productive. One hour! Bob looks at me with round eyes. Every time he did something, it was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. And I thought, my God, I’d hate being into something like that. Oh, can you imagine? Just hitting a—he strikes his fist with a series of loud slaps. Ever, forever?

  I admit that it can’t be very encouraging. I’m just about to tell him that my own profession feels the same way most of the time, but Bob interrupts.

  So you know, he says, I admire him. But I wouldn’t …

  In the very least engineers solve problems, is his point. They don’t just sit there rooting around in the dark, fumbling their way forward, hoping to find something. I always wanted to solve a damned problem! he says. You know? Physics is crazy. So I changed my course. And I didn’t like mathematics, because they don’t care about solving the problem. They just want to know if it’s a good problem. If it exists.

  In Bob’s stories, he’s the baffled hero who always lands on his feet. My dad is a secondary character on the periphery. The one who doesn’t come home to the apartment, who sleeps on a cot at the office. I chase him with my butterfly net, but he keeps slipping away. The person I capture in my net each time is Bob.

  My dad is the silent type who disappears between words.

  The only thing his old friend can do is point at the window.

  It’s like catching smoke with a pair of pliers.

  There’s something else too. The conversation seems a little derailed by the fact that I come from a place more than a stone’s throw from Texas. Bob’s ears don’t seem adjusted to my specific variant of English. Each time I open my mouth, his eyes begin to wander, he hesitates a moment, but instead of asking me to repeat, he says yeah and continues talking, unaffected.

  Bob is a nice man, I tell myself. He has taken the day off, has picked me up at the motel, and spent hours showing me the university, filling every minute with his thoughts. I must be a reminder to him that he’s not international. That unlike my dad, he didn’t travel around the world, didn’t write scientific articles with researchers of every nationality. That he hasn’t been married to a German, a Dane, and a Dutch woman.

  It’s not his fault that he, in return, reminds me that I’m a stranger. I tramp around with the Round Tower on my back. I have bells on my clogs. His intentions are good. He simply doesn’t understand what I say.

  Texas is really big, he tries.

  I am a polar bear with horns.

  ◊

  On the way back to my motel, Bob makes a detourl; he wants to show me something. He takes an exit, on a quiet street he points casually out the window and says: I think it was on this corner that your dad’s uncle Gene was hit by a car. Soon after we park next to a small local park. We get out and walk through a tranquil scenery, where mothers push their children around in strollers in the sharp, flickering sunlight, until Bob stops. This is it, he says.

  We stand before a rather humble monument. “In Memoriam,” it reads, “Marking the spot where Josiah Pugh Wilbarger of Austin’s Colony was stabbed and scalped by the Indians in 1832 while locating lands for the Colonies.” The man was scalped? I say. Read on, he says. I do. There’s something wrong with the dates, his death year can’t be right, is that it? He was scalped in 1832 but didn’t die until 1845. He survived?

  That’s right. Scalped—and lived! Bob says excitedly.

  So, here on this very spot someone was scalped. Here the soil was sullied by a man’s blood. Earth and blood, blood and earth. The soil remembers, the past lives in it, in Texas there’s a widespread belief that the soil can be tarnished by history. The Comanches had taken the colonist’s scalp and left him under a tree, believing him dead. The next day, he was discovered by the husband of a pioneer wife who’d seen him lying there in a dream.

  According to Wilbarger, the scalping itself had been relatively painless. Losing his scalp had sounded like a distant thunder to him. He died thirteen years later when he banged his head against a doorframe.

  Bob speaks about the Comanches with a hunger I’ve seen before. A tribe eradicated on the prairie and resurrected in the victors’ consciousness so weighted by myth that it’s difficult to know what’s what. The Comanches were the worst, Bob says, and means: the most warlike, the most persistent, the toughest, and the most savage. Simply the most violent. War was their way of life, he says. This is the third time I’ve heard someone speak of the Comanches using this formulation. Exactly the same formulation. War was their way of life.

  I’ve always thought the Apaches were the most warlike, I say.

  Oh, the Comanches were far worse, Bob says, once they got horses. Up until that point they were your run-of-the-mill tribe. Their physical stature was a hindrance. Short, Bob says. They were big from the waist up, but they had short little legs. He wiggles with two fingers to show how short. Hunting bison with such little legs is difficult, so they resided in the hills and lived hand to mouth. Then came the Spaniards with their horses. Boy, did they love those horses, he says. They learned to ride those things. Barebacked. And they could shoot from underneath the things. Arrows. The animals became their legs; horse and man merged into one, is Bob’s point.

  In the car, he says: They are still out there. Bob once spent a weekend at a hotel in Llano, a station village sixty miles west. The hotel was a small cabin next to the train tracks where the owner had prepared what he called a simple country breakfast involving a pot of coffee over open flame. The actual meal consisted of local stories about the Comanches’ savage raids. Bob had asked him what had become of them, and he’d responded just as Bob had with me. They are still out there. Bob’s eyes lit up. The hotel owner had pointed out the window at the empty street, where little happened but the occasional pickup driving past. Just look around, he said. But Bob didn’t know what he was supposed to see. Look again, the hotel owner said. The pickups going down the street.

  Bob gives me a knowing look. The Comanches have exchanged their horses for pickup trucks. They are still out there, he says again. Same legs. Short.

  Before we part, he loans me a book he’d brought for me about the Comanches. There’s also a book for my dad, a biography of a physicist. Beneath his words lies an appeal of some kind. Tell John I want to talk to him when he comes. I sense the faint desperation of a man who has hooked a fish and knows he can’t reel it in on his own. He needs my dad’s help with a discovery he may have made.

  san antonio feels like a city one ought to ride into on a horse. All I have is my white Hyundai, which I wedge between the buildings, I’m filled with a strange sensation. It’s as if the city has lain waiting for me always, that until one moment ago it was invisible only to rise from the dust in this moment, as though a string has been pulled, in honor of me.

  I park at the motel and continue on foot. The sky looks like a sky from a distant past, yellow and pink, with the sun cascading between buildings, endlessly slow. The people bleed brooks of ink. Shadows as long as the city.

  I sit on a bench watching shiny black limousines arrive in drawn-out, daydreamy intervals, their doors opened and held by Black chauffeurs in whit
e gloves, white women in long, flowing gowns emerging from their interiors, then husbands in tuxedos with colorful sashes and vivid orders.

  A Black woman sits on the bench beside me, or maybe it’s a man, it’s hard to tell, one eyeball bulging, as if it doesn’t believe what it’s seeing either, hair pulled back in a stiff little ponytail, tattered shoes, black wool pants held together with a safety pin. Her good eye stares blindly at a stain on the sidewalk. She has a decorated cane; she speaks with the dead.

  The street is peach-colored in the gloaming; the sunset seems to have no end, no end, and the gowns keep floating through the air, like seaweed. Like a vision from a distant past. One by one they disappear into a building, shadows clinging to their feet. Just as the sun glides behind the building, the last of them vanish into it, a silky coattail, and they are gone. It’s dark. An undulation on the walls, of glittering white fish.

  my motel room looks like all the previous ones. Two large beds, a small fridge, a coffee machine and a tv. Outside it smells of gasoline and exhaust fumes, inside, of pungent chemicals. The bedcover is heavy and crackles with the sleep of strangers, and a long, curly hair rests on the pillow. On the balcony beyond my door, travelers drag their suitcases back and forth, back and forth, and on a dark-stained desk rests a puffy plastic bucket to collect ice from the ice machine that’s always out there somewhere, always ice in a bucket in motel rooms, god knows why.

  A few streets away lies a small ruin, the remains of the old mission, the Alamo, which is as significant to Texans as Mecca is to Muslims. They spiff it up and throw greenish projector light on it every evening, should there be any doubt that here is something significant.