God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Presently, the bride and groom emerged, and as the bells pealed they stood for photographs in front of the Moorish arch of the doorway. History leaves such interesting traces of itself—subtle, as Steve would have it—and here was a remnant of the Alhambra. We talked about how the Spanish colonization of America was an outgrowth of the Inquisition and the ousting of the Moors. After they captured Granada in 1492, the Spanish Catholics took their holy war to the New World. They were rather late in arriving in Texas. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked near Galveston Island in 1528. The conquistadors brought with them the entire catalog of European pestilence—bubonic plague, smallpox, measles, influenza—producing one of history’s greatest demographic disasters. “Half the natives died of a disease of the bowels and blamed us,” Cabeza de Vaca complained. The Indians who rescued the stranded Spaniard demanded that he become their medicine man; thus the first European in Texas found himself attempting to cure the very infections he had caused. Generations later, when Europeans began coming to Texas to stay, the original, thickly settled Indian country had been reduced to the wide-open spaces that greeted the Spanish friars. Their missions are about the oldest material objects in Texas, aside from arrowheads and dinosaur bones.

  As we were finishing lunch, I spotted another bride waiting beside the ruined walls; a tall black photographer with a red Mohawk was snapping photos of her, while her plump Mexican mother held her train. Steve and I took a peek inside the chapel, then decided it was time to mount up and ride.

  We pedaled along a paved trail beside the river—or what used to be the river before it was channelized following a series of floods in the first half of the twentieth century. In the last two decades, however, there has been a heroic attempt to return life to this waterway. Engineers installed artificial shoals and falls; native plantings now line the shoreline, disguising the reinforcements, so that the river, while no longer natural, has at least become naturalistic. Cormorants perch on the artfully positioned boulders, hanging their wings, like Dracula’s cape, out to dry. We passed a number of small farmhouses, where roosters called to us, along with the occasional fussy peacock. These birds, with their incessant screeching, are among the most annoying immigrants to the state. A rancher friend of mine claims that peacocks were first brought to Texas because they were said to be excellent snake eaters. They’ve become a plague in some city neighborhoods. The best way to silence them, folks have found, is to station a mirror nearby, so that the males spend their time gaping at their own reflection.

  The peacock invasion reminded me of the collapse of the great emu bubble of the 1990s, when breeding pairs of the five-foot-tall Australian flightless bird were selling for $50,000 in Texas. Emu oil was promoted as a treatment for cancer and arthritis and was even said to repel mosquitoes. Emu steak was on the menu. Soon more than half a million emus were grazing on Texas ranchland. Ostriches joined the big-bird craze. Then the bubble popped, and the formerly prized emus turned into unwanted tenants that were sold at auction for about two bucks apiece, or simply shooed out the open gate. Some counties had to hire emu wranglers to recapture the fast and notoriously obstinate birds. There are still colonies of feral emus roaming the state.

  Texas has practically no laws regulating exotic animals. After a herd of nilgai antelope was released on the King Ranch in 1930, every rancher felt compelled to own a few zebras, or camels, kangaroos, gazelles, maybe a rhinoceros. Hunters decided to breed Russian boars with the feral hogs that are a remnant of the Spanish colonization, and now we’ve got more than two million of these beasts, each weighing twice as much as a white-tailed deer, with tusks like bayonets, tearing up fences and pastureland and mowing down crops, even eating the seed corn out of the ground before it sprouts. They can run twenty-five miles per hour and smell odors seven miles away.

  But at least they’re not tigers. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that there are more tigers living in captivity in Texas than the three thousand that are thought to be living in the wild. Some are kept as pets in backyards. During the floods in East Texas in 2016, a tiger escaped in Conroe still wearing its collar and leash. When my wife, Roberta, was teaching kindergarten, she would go to a state teacher supply center to get classroom materials, and one of the options was to check out a few Madagascar hissing cockroaches to amuse the children. That’s all we need.

  * * *

  WHAT I KNOW about Steve:

  He was born Michael Stephen McLaughlin, but his father, a fighter pilot who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross in the Second World War, died in a crash six months before he was born. Steve’s name was changed when his mother remarried, so he became Stephen Michael Harrigan. Or else Michael Stephen Harrigan. It’s one way on his driver’s license and the other on his passport. He’s not sure himself what his legal name is.

  Steve has always been set in his ways. When he was a boy, a pretty girl gave him a rock, and he kept it in his pocket for two years. One time when we were on another bike ride, Steve confessed that he has difficulty changing gears because his personality is so inflexible.

  He’s a serial sneezer—I have counted up to fourteen in a row—and he has impressive dexterity, being able to snap all his fingers, and peel an orange with a spoon. He is a somnambulist, who occasionally walks in his sleep, and once even showered and dressed without waking up. He has been known to latch his hotel room door to keep himself from wandering into the hallway in his underwear.

  He fathered three adorable daughters and evidently has no Y chromosomes.

  He suffers from a crippling civility and is constitutionally unable to enter a door before anyone else. His niceness sometimes gets him into trouble, but it goes along with his chivalry. Once he saw a woman being manhandled on the street and he sprung to her defense, whereupon her boyfriend beat him up while she told him to mind his own business.

  He goes to the movies at least twice a week, even those known to be awful, which he will sometimes defend because “it succeeds on its own terms” or some such inarguable formulation. He hates clowns and mimes, which scream phoniness to him, but he’s soft on pests, like rats and snakes, because they can’t help being what they are.

  Nothing depresses him like good news. He’s always worried about money, but tell him he’s won the lottery and he’ll sink into a funk, imagining all the things that will inevitably go wrong. He claims he’s not a pessimist; he’s just anxious about being taken in by dreamy illusions. When we got our first movie contract, he glumly observed, “This could be the worst thing that ever happened to us.”

  Steve still has his old interior lineman frame, but he’s bald and his beard is going white. In fashion, he inclines toward survivalist gear. He divides the world into those who are ready to flee into the hills on a moment’s notice and those who are liable to find themselves, like Pierre in War and Peace, trapped on the field of battle in a swallowtail coat—to Steve, the most frightening passage in all of literature.

  As it happens, Steve and I were born in the same hospital in Oklahoma City, and lived at the same time in Abilene, Texas. Steve’s stepfather was an oilman, which brought his family to Texas. We didn’t meet until I moved to Austin in 1980 to work for Texas Monthly magazine, where Steve was a staff writer. Living such parallel lives, we were destined to get together eventually.

  * * *

  THE WRIGHTS CAME to Texas through a terrible error of judgment. My great-grandfather Edwin Wright was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, one of the most charming and historic villages in all of the United Kingdom. The 1861 British census lists his occupation as “castrator.” Why he left is a mystery no one has ever solved. He immigrated to America around the time of the Civil War, lived for several years in Buffalo, where he had an uncle, and filed for citizenship in 1868. We think he went from there to Minnesota, possibly to practice his craft on the local sheep. By then he had a family. Kansas was open for homesteading, and Edwin decided to try his luck the
re. It was then that he made his colossal mistake.

  With no history as a farmer, Edwin brought with him a wooden moldboard plow. We believe he bought it in Buffalo. This was, already, ancient technology, long since replaced by steel, but when my great-grandfather and his family stepped off the train in central Kansas, he was faced with a choice. On one side of the tracks was blackland prairie, which his wooden plow couldn’t turn, and on the other side was sandy soil, not much denser than a beach. That’s where Edwin Wright made his claim, in the heart of what became the Dust Bowl.

  Generations of Wrights were ruined by that cursed decision. My father, John Donald Wright, the youngest of five children, was the only one of his siblings to escape. He worked his way through college and law school, then spent seven years at war, in Europe and Korea. Disgusted with the law, he decided to become a banker, which is how we got to Texas. Daddy was a vice president of Citizens National Bank in Abilene at the same time that Steve’s stepfather had his office downtown. We wondered if they might have had coffee together.

  In 1960, my father finally got the opportunity to be president of a little independent bank in a strip shopping center in East Dallas, between a drugstore and a beauty salon. He built that bank into a major institution, and used its resources to renovate the declining neighborhood, granting innovative loans to young people willing to apply “sweat equity” to resurrect the old houses. Texas was a place where ambitious young men like Don Wright were welcomed and given a chance to succeed.

  Many years after my father had put down roots in Dallas, he paid a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon to see if he could figure out what had caused his ancestor to leave such a civilized spot and move to Kansas, where he lived in a sod house, like an igloo made of dirt. Our ancestral English home, on the other hand, is a tidy brick row house on West Street. My father knocked on the door, but no one was there. Daddy remembered his grandfather as a cantankerous old man who hated children. Perhaps my ancestor’s dark mood was colored by regret.

  Years later, Roberta and I were in England, hiking in the Cotswolds, and we also made a pilgrimage to the old place. A young man from Bangladesh answered the bell, saying, “Master not here.” While we waited for Master to come home, we walked over to the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried. He’s inside the chapel, but the churchyard itself is filled with Wrights, the patrilineal mother lode.

  We finally did meet the landlord of the two-bedroom house that gave birth to our portion of the Wright clan. He cheerfully confided that it was now an illegal jeans factory—a sweatshop, I suppose, but on a small scale. The rooms upstairs were filled with sewing machines. The landlord gave me a pair of very nice jeans as a souvenir.

  I must have inherited some of the restlessness that propelled Edwin Wright to leave the land of his birth and my father to fight his way out of Kansas. By the time I graduated from high school, I was sick of Texas. I did everything I could to cleanse myself of its influence. I had been pious, but I became a bohemian existentialist. I ditched the accent, which I hadn’t been conscious of until my first session in the language lab when I heard myself speaking Spanish—with that high nasal twang so typical of North Texas.

  I’ve seen the same thing happen to people who come from other societies with a strong cultural imprint; they reverse the image. But being the opposite of what you were is not the same as being somebody new. As soon as the doors to liberation opened, I fled. I wanted to be someplace open, tolerant, cosmopolitan, and beautiful. I thought I would never come back. I turned into that pitiable figure, a self-hating Texan.

  * * *

  STEVE AND I PEDALED to Mission San Juan Capistrano, a plain, whitewashed structure with the traditional belfry. The mission was named after Giovanni da Capistrano, a friar who defended Christian Hungary against the Muslim invasion in 1456. There’s a carved wooden icon of the saint inside a glass case; he has a red flag in one hand and an upraised sword in the other. As he gazes heavenward with a beatific expression, one of his sandaled feet rests on the head of a decapitated victim.

  Outside, several Indians were taking down a huge tepee, stacking the lodgepoles on a flatbed truck. A young man who was watching the others work told us that there had been a Native American Church ceremony here on the campo santo—the graveyard of their ancestors—the night before, with eighty-five people crowded inside the tepee. “It’s a lot of work,” he said, as the others hefted the giant poles and bore them toward the truck.

  “I can see you’re doing your part,” I observed.

  He grinned and said, “I’m with management.”

  “Is that your altar?” Steve asked, gesturing toward the low mound of red sand that remained from the ceremony. The altar is usually crescent-shaped, signifying the journey from life to death, but this one was angular. An older man leaning on the tailgate of the truck had been watching us with squinted eyes, but he suddenly brightened and acknowledged that the altar was his handiwork—“the Quanah Parker altar,” he said, referring to the last great Comanche chief.

  Farther down the river we passed the ruins of the old Hot Wells Hotel, a once grand resort where Will Rogers and Rudolph Valentino came to take the waters. A pioneering French filmmaker, Gaston Méliès, set up a movie studio next door in 1910, hoping to turn Texas into what would become Hollywood. That didn’t happen, although the first movie to win an Academy Award for best picture—Wings in 1927—was filmed nearby on Kelly Field. We rode on, leaving behind the alternate history Texas might have had.

  There was a time when Steve and I considered moving to L.A. and going into the movie business—our own alternate history. We had just sold a script to Sydney Pollack, right after he finished directing Tootsie, when he was the king of Hollywood. On the first-class flight home, we mulled over what our lives were going to be like from now on. A friend of ours in the trade had warned that writing movie scripts was like raising children for adoption. On the other hand, we’d be consoled by the weather and our enormous wealth.

  Sydney made Out of Africa instead of our script, but our next project was for Jane Fonda. When we arrived in her office in Santa Monica, she opened the door and stuck out her hand. The collar on her blue blouse was turned up, and it matched the startling blue of her eyes. Her hair was blond and leonine. This was at the peak of her exercise video sensation, and she looked like she could jump over a building. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Jane Fonda.”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Steve Harrigan.”

  I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. Jane never got us straight after that, always seeming a little anxious in our presence. In any case, Jane married Ted Turner and retreated from the film business, while Steve and I returned to our books and articles. The lure of Hollywood faded, although we each continued to do occasional screen work from afar. Another friend of mine moved back to Austin after spending a couple of years in the screenwriting business. “One day in Los Angeles, I heard a mockingbird imitating a car alarm,” she told me. “That’s when I knew. I was like a bird that had lost my song.”

  * * *

  WE DECIDED to save the two prettiest missions, Concepción and San José, for the ride back so we’d have plenty of time at the Alamo. On the horizon we could see the Tower of the Americas, a lonely remnant of the 1968 HemisFair. There was once a bill by a San Antonio lawmaker and professional gambler, V. E. “Red” Berry, to divide Texas in half, with San Antonio becoming the capital of the southern entity and the governor’s office placed in the rotating restaurant atop the tower. South Texas today really is a virtual linguistic province, like Quebec, with San Antonio playing the role of its bilingual capital.

  Soon we were on city streets, passing through the King William Historic District, with its great nineteenth-century German houses nested under massive oaks and pecans, and then into the low-slung downtown. Unlike other bustling Texas metropolises, San Antonio still has the look of a city that might be on a colorized postcard. />
  We were hot from the ride, and Steve suggested we indulge in a snow cone. Bees swarmed around the syrup dispensers at the shaded stand in front of the Alamo. On the plaza, we examined the Alamo Cenotaph, which the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, peed on in 1982. (The conscience-stricken celebrity later apologized for his actions.) The stone barricade that once enclosed the mission has given way to parasitical tourist attractions such as Ripley’s Haunted Adventure and the Guinness World Records Museum. Steve pointed out the area where the Mexican forces broke through, near the corner of what had been the north wall, now occupied by Tomb Rider 3D.

  The Alamo itself is a modest construction of limestone, yellowed by the patina of age, like old teeth. The primitive symmetry of the facade, with its arching pediment resembling a child’s drawing, is a familiar feature of the Texas imagination. Steve once described it as “a squat and oddly configured structure that is in almost every way inscrutable.” Here in 1836 about 250 men and a number of women and children gathered, determined to block the progress of the army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the imperious president of Mexico, who styled himself the “Napoleon of the West.” Santa Anna might easily have gone around San Antonio or stationed a small garrison to keep the rebels penned up inside the mission as he pursued Sam Houston’s army of insurgents. The hapless defenders were expecting to be reinforced at any moment. “The Alamo guarded the Camino Real, the only road and supply route into Texas from Mexico,” Steve observed. “The defenders just got trapped there, and Santa Anna wisely attacked before help could arrive.” As for Houston, he never wanted to defend the Alamo; he had proposed simply blowing it up.