Texas

by James A. Michener

  He provided the funds for leprosy research, but was pleased when his gardener informed him that more than twenty armadillos now resided in the Rusk fields. None of them were tame, but they made a noble procession when they set out at dusk to excavate some neighbor’s lawn.

  When he returned to Fort Worth he found Dewey Kimbro, still with no teeth, perched outside his office, talking excitedly with his secretary. As soon as the old wildcatter spotted him, he jumped up, took his arm, and accompanied him into the inner office: ‘Mr. Rusk, I don’t want to talk if or how or even how much. Just when.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve spotted a field you have to put under lease. And then you have to pay for the exploration well.’

  ‘Now look, Kimbro …’

  ‘No, you look. Where do you suppose you got the money you now have? They say in the papers more than a hundred and fifty million. Because I found a field for your daddy. I’m an oilman, Mr. Rusk. You owe me one last shot, because I know where oil can be found.’

  The plea was irresistible. In an average year Rusk had been spending three million dollars on the hunches of men with far dimmer track records than Dewey Kimbro and with far less dedication to the oil business. He did owe the old man one last shot: ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘No tricks. I’m too old for tricks.’

  ‘My father warned me that you were completely honest, Dewey, but if anyone crossed you, you bided your time, then shot him in the back … dead of night.’

  ‘Your father ever tell you how we got the Yeager land back under our control? He had me goad the poor devil till he lifted his shotgun, then your father drilled him.’

  ‘It’s a deal. Now where is this precious land that’s going to make us both rich?’

  ‘You richer, me rich.’ And he drove Rusk to a big ranch, El Estupendo, tucked away among the mesas north of Fort Stockton.

  ‘This land couldn’t produce goats,’ Rusk complained, but Dewey’s enthusiasm could not be quenched, and in their secret explorations he showed the financier faults whose edges protruded and domes half hidden by mesquite.

  ‘There could be oil down there,’ Rusk conceded, and Dewey cried: ‘There has to be!’

  The ranch was one of the nine accumulated by Lorenzo Quimper in obedience to the principle laid down by his famous ancestor Yancey: ‘If you grab enough Texas land, somethin’ good is bound to happen.’ Quimper was not in residence, and in his absence the place was run by a young Mexican in whom he apparently placed much confidence. ‘I am Cándido Guzmán,’ the manager said in carefully enunciated English. ‘Mr. Quimper’s the man in charge.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe at the Polk ranch, down on the Rio Grande.’

  They made a series of phone calls and located Quimper, not at any of his western ranches but in his newly built ranch on the shores of Lake Travis near Austin, and as soon as he heard the name Rusk he told Guzmán: ‘Keep him there. I’ll fly right out.’ Climbing into his Beechcraft, he directed his pilot to drop him off at the improvised runway at El Estupendo, where Cándido was waiting, as always, with his pickup. ‘What’s the focus?’ he asked, using a phrase he liked, and Guzmán replied: ‘Oil, I think. I went in to Fort Stockton to ask about Kimbro and they told me “Oil.” ’

  ‘Well, if a man has nine Texas ranches, one of them ought to have oil,’ Quimper said, and Cándido replied: ‘Mr. Quimper, the papers say you already have two with oil,’ and Quimper said: ‘You can never have too many.’

  When Rusk and Quimper met in a tin-roofed shack on the ranch, they formed a powerful pair, Rusk older and more cautious in Texas gambling, Quimper more eager to leap at a promising chance. In personal appearance, too, they were contrasting, Rusk leaner and more sharklike, Quimper fleshier and more prosperous-looking. Ransom said little, and Quimper could hardly be stopped, indulging in such Texas phrases as ‘Wiser’n a tree full of owls’ and ‘We’ll dig the damned well and nail the coonskin to the barn door.’ He also uttered a great truth about oil in Texas: ‘My pappy told me: “Lorenzo, in an oil deal always be satisfied with the overriding royalty of one-eighth. Let the other dumb bastards do the drillin’ and grab their seven-eighths. You’ll always come out ahead.” And time has proved him right. Gentlemen, you can have your lease, but in some ways I’m a lot wiser than my pappy. Not ten years, like the early ones. Two years. Not fifty cents an acre, like he did. Three dollars, because this is prime land. And not one-eighth, three-sixteenths.’

  ‘They told me you were a miserable bastard, Quimper,’ Rusk said, ‘but you have the land, you’ve been to law school, even though you flunked out, and they say they’re putting you on the Board of Regents at the university, so you must know something. It’s a deal.’ They shook hands, and that’s how the exploration of those barren wastes north of Fort Stockton began.

  They left the positioning of the first well to Kimbro, but from a distance they hovered, watching him. ‘Vultures waiting for the old man to die,’ Dewey said of them one day as his drilling probed deeper and deeper, with no results. ‘They’ll wait in vain.’

  This enforced waiting had one productive consequence; it became an opportunity for Rusk to renew acquaintance with a gifted gentleman who worked the oil fields. He was Pierre Soult, collateral descendant of one of Napoleon’s better marshals, and another of the engineering geniuses France was producing in these years.

  Pierre Soult, latest of this enterprising breed, had worked with Rusk before; it was his genius that prodded development of the procedure of digging a deep hole in the earth, filling it with dynamite, and then placing a dozen sensitive detectors at varied distances and exploding the charge. His detectors recorded how long it took for the reverberation to penetrate the earth below, strike a granite base, and come bouncing back. Exquisite timing and even more exquisite analysis revealed secrets of the substructure, and from these Soult could advise his clients as to what lay beneath the ground and where best to dig to find it.

  ‘Seismographic exploration,’ Soult called his process. ‘We are like the scientists who detect and record earthquakes thousands of miles away. With our dynamite we make the little earthquake and record it half a mile away.’

  Of course, his procedures were now much advanced over those primitive ones Rusk had employed in his early days of oil exploration, and when Rusk complimented him on this, Soult said: ‘I’ve about run my course with seismography. I’m thinking seriously about a new device to solve mathematical problems, useful in all fields, very daring. A hand-held computer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Given the proper technical advances, and I think I know a way to ensure them, you can carry in your hand, Mr. Rusk, more mathematics than Newton and Einstein together ever mastered.’

  ‘Come see me when this is over. That is, if we strike oil.’

  ‘If there is any around here, you’ll find it. My little earthquakes ensure that.’

  One very hot afternoon, temperature 104 degrees, humidity seven percent, when the log at 22,000 feet had shown not a sign of carbon, a mighty roar from below signaled an upsurge of oil and gas so powerful that it tore away the superstructure as it struck the air, ignited from a spark thrown by crashing steel girders, and flamed into a beacon visible for seventy miles across the flat and arid land.

  Five crew members were incinerated. A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of petroleum products burned for days, then a million dollars’ worth. Dewey Kimbro’s men tried every trick to control the wild flames of Estupendo #I; they poured in tons of mud to seal off the flow of oil, they tried dynamiting the hole to exhaust its oxygen, but nothing worked. The flames roared into the midnight sky and helped the sun illuminate the day.

  Red Adair, the Texan who specialized in the dangerous task of subduing oil-well fires, was summoned, and after three weeks he brought this tremendous conflagration under control. Rusk, bleary-eyed from watching the flames, told his new partner: ‘Quimper, it hurts to see so much wealth vanishing in smoke. Bu
t when you know that a million times as much is still down there …’

  With his royalty from the Estupendo field, Quimper more than doubled his wealth and was promoted into the rich category. Dewey Kimbro’s share was more than two million, with which he purchased some new teeth, but within two years he was back prowling marginal fields, listening for leads at the morning breakfasts, searching for some new source of exploration capital; his wealth had vanished in divorce settlements, the acquisition of a fourth wife, and extensive lawyers’ fees for getting rid of her after seven months.

  The knowledge that his assets now totaled just under $400,000,000 altered Ransom Rusk very little. He retained four Mexican servants at his Larkin home, but because he still tried to avoid entanglement with women, the mansion saw little social life. He spent most of his time in Fort Worth, where his frugal office had to be enlarged, for he now required a full-time accountant to keep track of his intricate participations in the various wells he supervised.

  But he was never satiated; always he looked for that next big field, that lucky wildcatter who was going to lead him to the next gusher, and it was in pursuit of what he called ‘the significant multiplier,’ that he sought out Pierre Soult: ‘Is what you told me that day while we were waiting for Estupendo Number One true?’

  ‘You mean about the radical new system for calculators?’

  ‘Yes. How much would you need?’

  ‘We must invent a new way to form silicon chips, and I believe I have it.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I’ll have to hire real brains, you know. The best the Sorbonne and Cambridge and MIT produce.’

  ‘How much, damnit?’

  ‘Real brains cost real money. Maybe twenty million.’

  ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it Texas style. You can count on fifty.’

  They shook hands, and because of the way the world was developing, this investment would turn out to be the wisest he would make.

  Spending so much time in Midland, a city ninety-eight-percent Republican, produced a significant change in Ransom Rusk. Already conservative, like most oilmen who took great risks but did not want others to do so, he moved steadily right to become a reactionary, dedicated to the principle that all government was bad and that enterprising men should be allowed to write their own rules. But at the same time he defended the depletion allowance, which enabled him to retain a huge percentage of the income he gathered, and he sought to drive from public life any political leader who spoke or acted against this preferential treatment enjoyed by oilmen. Government was all bad except that which furthered his interests.

  He was partly justified in this stand: ‘I gamble fantastic sums trying to find oil. Fifty, sixty million, and three-fourths of it can go down the drain. I deserve protection.’

  Of course, on the one-fourth of his venture capital which was not lost he made gigantic profits, and these he spent freely in trying to defeat candidates who were not supportive of the oil industry: ‘A basic rule of self-defense. The man who attacks my interests is my enemy.’ It so happened that only Republicans could be seen as protecting his interests, so he was forced to oppose most Democrats, which he did with huge sums of money.

  He had never liked Lyndon Johnson personally, but Johnson had been one of the staunchest defenders of big oil, so with his left hand Rusk slipped him generous contributions while with his right he continued to pull the straight Republican lever. He was quietly pleased when Johnson decided not to run in 1968, but when Hubert Humphrey was nominated to succeed him, he sprang into furious action: ‘The man’s an ass, a bumbling ass. The Republic will fall if he’s elected.’ And in his sour, sharply focused way, Rusk spent millions to defeat him, all the Democratic senators running that year, and sixteen selected Democratic congressmen whose votes had offended him.

  He was delighted when the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon, for here was a man who had proved over a long period in public service that he knew what was good for the nation. Ransom invited Nixon to Texas, spent lavishly to influence his fellow oilmen, and literally bit his fingernails on election night when it looked as if Humphrey and George Wallace might, because of the inane electoral college, succeed in throwing the election into the House of Representatives. He did not go to bed all that night, and when morning came, with Nixon the victor by a precarious margin, he cried to the empty rooms at Larkin: ‘The Republic has been saved!’

  While these developments were taking place, another aspect of Texas life was undergoing a radical change, which might, in the long run, prove more important to the state than either oil or financing. Sherwood Cobb, grandson of the late United States senator from Waxahachie, had decided regretfully that the splendid plantation his family owned just south of that engaging town was so beset by the boll weevil, the declining bale-per-acre ratio and the inflated value of land that the only sensible thing to do was to leapfrog his entire cotton operation out to the far western part of the state, where land was still cheap, flat and so high in altitude that the boll weevil could not survive the winters.

  Nancy Nell Cobb, raised on a farm, asked about the extreme dryness of the region in which her husband proposed to grow his cotton, a crop which needed a lot of water, and he assured her: ‘Aridity makes it impossible for boll weevils to breed.’ But she countered: ‘If weevils can’t grow, neither can cotton. Jefferson had forty-six inches of rain a year, and cotton thrived. Waxahachie has thirty-six inches, and cotton did well till the weevils took over. But Lubbock had only sixteen inches last year, and I can’t see how your plants can prosper.’

  It was then that he revealed to her one of the miracles of the United States, and of how Texas profited from it. Spreading before her a map which the Department of Agriculture had provided cotton growers in the Waxahachie area in a commendable effort to make them quit trying to grow cotton there and move out to the high plains, where production was booming, he indicated the eight Western states—South Dakota to Texas—under which lay hidden the nation’s greatest water resource, barring the Mississippi: ‘Think of it as a vast underground lake. Bigger than most European countries. Dig deep and you invariably find water. It’s called the Ogallala Aquifer, after this little town in Nebraska where it was discovered. Fingers probe out everywhere to collect immense runoffs, and the aquifer delivers it right to our farm.’

  ‘How can you know all this? If it’s hidden, like you say?’

  ‘They’ve been studying it, in all the states. Seems to be an interrelated unit. And it’s inexhaustible.’

  ‘You mean it’s down there and anyone can use it?’

  ‘That’s how we’re going to grow cotton in Lubbock. You pay for your well once, and you have water for the rest of your life.’

  Nancy Nell had trouble believing that an area which gathered only sixteen inches of rainfall a year could grow a crop which required thirty-six or more, and she told Sherwood: ‘Seems like an enormous risk to me. I really think we ought to stay where we are and fight the weevil with field-dusting, like the Andersons are doing.’

  ‘Nancy Nell,’ he said, singing her name as if it were one unbroken syllable, ‘hundreds of farmers out in that dryland are getting the best cotton crop in Texas, and with the know-how they’re accumulating, it’s bound to be the best in the world within a decade. We’re going to make the try.’

  To show her the land where her home was to be, he roused his family one morning at four, packed them into the big Buick, and headed west at sunrise, displaying the same excitement that his grandfather had shown in the early 1900s when shepherding his family from the closed-in Old South atmosphere of Jefferson to the black earth and open spaces of Waxahachie.

  They angled across to Fort Worth, avoiding the breakfast traffic about Dallas, and as they drove west, Sherwood became sensitive to one of the miracles of Texas, operative for the past five thousand years. With each fifteen miles of travel, east to west, the yearly rainfall dropped by one inch, and through one of the coincidences of nature, the ninety
-eighth parallel of longitude coincided roughly with the line that demarcated thirty inches of rainfall. East of that line the standard agriculture of planting and harvesting crops was possible; to the west it was not. There settlers had to rely not upon farming but upon ranching and perhaps mining.

  ‘It’s as if a mighty wall had been erected along this line,’ Cobb told his family as they approached the imaginary ninety-eighth, ‘to warn farmers “halt here!” Each mile we go from here on, not enough rain to grow a crop.’ After his passengers had digested this unpleasant fact, he laughed: ‘What saves us is hiding down below. Because it’s also true that each mile we travel, we get closer to the Ogallala. And that means cotton.’

  Once past the ninety-eighth, they were into the real West: Jacksboro, past Three Cairns, where the state had erected a monument recalling the 10th Cavalry stand against the Comanche, and on to Larkin, where they stopped to see the famous courthouse with the portraits of Mabel Fister; they did not allow their children to find the notorious fifth sculpture.

  West of Larkin the rolling plains began, sometimes not even a tree visible in any direction, but with softly dipping hills, and far beyond that they entered upon the high plains, as flat as earth could be and twice as empty. Awed by the immensity of the land they proposed to occupy, they drove past Lubbock and west to locate their six thousand acres which, in their pristine state without irrigation, could feed only one cow and calf to every sixty acres.

  They had come three hundred and forty-nine miles in one day, touching neither the eastern border of the state nor the western, and had traversed four different terrains as distinct from one another as Italy and Portugal: the Black Prairies of Waxahachie, the Cross Timbers of Larkin, the Lower Plains marked only by little towns, and the High Plains of Lubbock. As they pulled into the little town of Levelland, where they would spend the night, population 10,445, Sherwood said: ‘Our farm will lie north of here. Properly handled, it’s going to be a gold mine. All the land we’ll ever need, and all the water.’ That night, ravenously hungry after their long ride, they had some of the best chicken-fried steak and grits they’d had in a long time, while the restaurant jukebox ground out a song which had gained recent popularity: ‘It takes a lot of squares to make the world go round.’