Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Cocaine started showing up among some of my friends in 1984. I ran into my neighborhood drug dealer one night in Acuña, and he suggested we go for a ride. He directed me to a quiet spot under some trees in the shadow of Acuña’s bullfighting ring, and we shared a couple of lines. Snorting coke in a car in Mexico was probably the single stupidest thing I’ve ever done. My dealer friend later sold me a baggy of what was probably baking soda for a hundred dollars, thus ending what might have been a dangerous infatuation.

  The drug war was escalating all along the border at that time, but I didn’t really have the wit to notice it or to connect it to my cravings for stimulation and release. My father began to grow more agitated about our outings to Mexico. Rumors of kidnappings and killings on both sides of the river were circulating. Bodies and body parts began to turn up in border towns. Not all the killings were drug related.

  On Friday, January 27, 1984, a customs inspector named Richard Latham was abducted from the international bridge at Del Rio. He was one of my father’s best friends, practically an uncle to me. I was at home alone the next day when I got a call that Richard was dead. A man collecting firewood along the highway near Eagle Pass found his body facedown in a ditch. He had been bound with his own handcuffs, shot twice in the back with his own gun.

  Richard’s killers had robbed a jewelry store in Acuña. They crossed the river at around 4:00 p.m. in a gray 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix. In those days the port of entry at Del Rio was very low-tech and casual, with just a few inspection lanes and no video cameras. Agents entered license plate numbers by hand as cars approached. They used to just wave me through when I was headed home at 1:00 a.m. The agent on duty that day had some questions about the robbers’ papers, so he pulled them over for a secondary inspection, and Richard was working secondary. No one saw what happened. It was an hour before anyone noticed that Richard was missing.

  The killers were soon caught, two of them within a day. At Eagle Pass they had crossed the river into Piedras Negras, where they sold the Pontiac. Rafael Calderon and Jesus Ramirez crossed back into Eagle Pass and hired a man to drive them to Presidio, a border town about 350 miles to the west. They were west of the Pecos River, between Langtry and Dryden, not far at all from our Cinco de Mayo ranch, when a state trooper pulled them over. During the stop, Ramirez shot himself dead, perhaps by accident. Richard’s gun and a bag of jewelry were found in the car. Calderon blamed Ramirez for killing Richard.

  Ricardo Cortez was arrested a week later in El Paso. He and Samuel Olguin-Mato had separated from their compadres in Piedras Negras and caught a bus to Juárez. Cortez said that Calderon had pulled the trigger. Olguin-Mato later surrendered to police on the Santa Fe bridge between El Paso and Juárez. He also testified that Calderon was the killer. Cortez and Olguin-Mato were convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. Rafael Calderon was convicted of murder and received a life sentence.

  Richard Latham was one of my favorite people. He was funny in a way that no one else was. He teased me without mercy, about the music I listened to, about girls, and about my longish hair, but he made me laugh when he was doing it. He had big ears and a big nose and ironic eyes. He snored like a chain saw. These fragmentary impressions and decaying memories are all that remain of him, for me, that and some newspaper clippings and an episode of The FBI Files.

  My father told me that Richard had never wanted to take a job that would require him to carry a gun; he was afraid of developing a lawman’s swagger. But good jobs are hard to come by along the border, so he became a lawman in the end, though he never let the gun on his hip change him.

  I can’t explain why, but I have dreamed about Richard’s death off and on for thirty years. I’ve tried to imagine what went through his mind during that last hour of his life as his kidnappers drove south toward Eagle Pass. I have sought to picture the killing itself, to feel what he felt as the life drained out of him into the dry rocky ground where he lay. I guess you could say his death scarred me, because all these years later I’m still haunted by it. If you talk to Border Patrol and customs people nowadays, everyone knows who Richard Latham was. His portrait hangs in the new state-of-the-art port of entry at Del Rio. Other agents who were on the bridge that day blamed themselves for his death. Some never got over it.

  —

  When I was eighteen years old, I packed up my car and left Texas forever. Maybe not forever, but I’m still gone. I spend as much time there as I can, and its landscapes inhabit my imagination, but since that bright sunny day in 1985 when I drove off to college in Tennessee, unconsciously reversing my family’s long-ago westward migration, I haven’t lived in my home state for more than a few months at a time. The Texas that I keep in mind is largely defined by the Rio Grande and from my hometown perspective stretches westward from Del Rio—which sits at a crossroads of Texas geography, on the northern shoulder of that intermittent stream that we insist on calling a big river, where the rolling grasslands of the Edwards Plateau give way to the great Chihuahuan Desert—through Comstock and beyond the Trans-Pecos creosote flats and the steep draws along the canyons of the Rio Grande and the wide volcanic vistas of the Big Bend to the barren sandy wastelands of El Paso. But also and especially it includes the rugged canyons of the western Hill Country that drain into the Devils River as it winds its way toward the Rio Grande. Beyond the immediate range of my boyhood domain, that long riverine landscape drops below the Balcones Escarpment to encompass the flat savannas and harsh Tamaulipan thorn brush of South Texas and the fertile lowland vegas of the lower Rio Grande valley. Beyond the Hill Country to our northwest, the Llano Estacado rises up and opens the infinite expanses of the high plains, whence the Comanches came down their raiding trails toward the rivers, where they preyed on their ancient enemies the Apaches as well as the precarious settlements and ranches of Texas and northern Mexico.

  Above all, I think of Juno, now just a name on a map, a spot on a perilous winding road, no longer a town. The post office and the school, the hotels and the saloons and the old country store are all long vanished, the stones and the lovely old hardwood washed away by floods, carried off by interior decorators and “reclaimed,” or gone to dust.

  My great-grandfather B. E. Wilson, Byron Earl (called Dandy by his grandchildren), was just a young boy when his father, T.A. (for Thomas Austin), brought the family in a wagon to the Juno country. When I was a child, spending my summers working sheep and goats and cattle on my family’s ranch, the house Earl grew up in was still standing, miles from the highway, near a set of pens and a shearing barn called the Murrah Place. As I recall, it was in that barn that I sheared my first sheep, a difficult job that I did my best to avoid thereafter. Near that ruined house I shot my first deer and changed my first flat tire. I did my best to experience what it would have been like to live out there at the end of the nineteenth century, in that high lonesome country, traveling by horseback every morning to a remote schoolhouse where a teacher, in awesome solitude, taught the children of a handful of ranching families.

  My ancestral home, as I’ve always thought of it, is that ranch in Juno, where an expanse of bone-white gravel marks the remnants of what we still call Beaver Lake, along a historic stretch of the Devils River. Ancient live oak trees shade the banks. Ponds covered in green scum, the remnants of flash floods that can fill the mile-wide valley, dot the old lake bed, and the gnawed leavings of a recently departed beaver colony lie scattered over the dried mud. I see it in my mind’s eye. Up the road a few miles, where the old Juno store used to be and not far from where my cousin lies buried, the beavers are still working, taking down cottonwood trees and stripping them of bark.

  I never expected to be a professional Texan, one of those writers who wear the lone star like a brand, who play up the drawl and affect pointy boots or a cowboy hat with a tailored suit. Even as a child I never had much of an accent, and people still express surprise when I tell them where I’m from, for Texas to New Yorkers and other lifelong eastern c
ity dwellers is a terrifying land of racism and violence and retrograde politics. Of course, eastern cities like Baltimore and New York and Boston can also be places of racism, violence, and retrograde politics. Yet something about Texas and the epic violence of its history continues to mystify, to attract and to repel the American imagination.

  In 2006, when I came to occupy the editor’s chair of Harper’s Magazine, I was interviewed by a colorful New York Times media reporter who was dressed head to toe in black. When he learned I was from Texas, he immediately asked whether I owned a gun. I told him I did, whereupon he asked if I was a good shot. Once more I answered in the affirmative. And so was born the fleeting public image of a cowboy editor with a “gimlet eye.”

  I was a little surprised by the discovery that I was a “Texan,” yet I had to accept the judgment. As it happened, I had just published an essay on Cormac McCarthy and the puzzling reception of No Country for Old Men, his great novel of the low-intensity warfare that has been consuming the borderlands for a generation. McCarthy’s fiction had long been the primary medium through which I indulged a stubborn nostalgia for my lost Texas landscape. No other writer has so perfectly captured the sublimity of that rough country, its subtle beauty and deceptive power. McCarthy’s prose comforted me in my spiritual exile and helped make bearable the collapsed horizons of life in a small New York apartment above a troll-like neighbor who regularly protested my toddler’s heavy footsteps with broomstick blows to her ceiling.

  Then, several years ago, when I was suddenly free from both the troll and, for a time, the responsibilities of running a national magazine, my thoughts quickly turned to my lost Texas landscape. My young sons required instruction in handling a rifle, and it had been too long since my soul was refreshed by the sight of a limestone countryside dotted with mesquite and prickly pear. We met up with my family in Juno, where my father taught my boys to shoot and my grandmother told my children stories of the town’s heyday, of saloons and stagecoaches, Indians and outlaws. On the hill above the rock house my grandfather built from native stone, I showed my wife and sons ancient Indian metates, bedrock mortars ground in the limestone shelves overlooking the valley, where meal was made from mesquite pods and perhaps from the acorns of those gnarled oak trees along the riverbank, over the course of hundreds if not thousands of years. Right next to the metates was a mysterious concrete receptacle, about four feet high, clearly unused for decades. I’d been on horseback in that pasture so many times, but I’d never given it any thought; there were always so many inexplicable ruins, remnants of my grandfather’s adventures farming hay or onions or who knows what in the fertile bottomlands along the river. My father told me, as we watched my sons searching for arrowheads, that the tank had been used in the fight against screwworm flies in the 1930s. When I was growing up, Rambouillet sheep and Angora goats populated the pastures of that ranch, along with Brangus cattle. Today they are all gone, replaced by Spanish goats, which are exported to places like Detroit and Brooklyn, to be eaten.

  Nowadays the neighboring ranches are mostly empty of livestock, predator populations are booming, and exotic creatures like aoudads and axis deer have invaded. They aren’t the only invaders. Now we have tobacco lawyers and oil tycoons buying up land, while drug mules paid by Mexican drug cartels play cat and mouse with various armed functionaries of the Department of Homeland Security. Beaver Lake, once a stop for stagecoaches and mail riders, a refuge to overland emigrants and ragged cavalrymen harried by hostile Indians on the southern road to California, is now merely a picturesque bend in the road. Like all American landscapes, that of West Texas is a palimpsest of lost and vanishing lifeways. Yet the aura of a potent mythology lies heavily upon the land and exerts a fascination that defies easy analysis; it draws new blood, new life, to refresh the thorny countryside.

  Beaver Lake

  As I stood there, surveying the vistas of my birthright, standing in a place where seven generations of my family have gazed over the same hills and valleys, I realized that my knowledge of the lives of my forebears and their contemporaries, their motivations and their passions, was pathetically thin. So much had happened in this place that I was ignorant of, but even more mysterious to me was the route that had brought my people here. I wasn’t even sure what year they had arrived in the border country, or even when they had come to Texas. It’s not that I never asked. I was vaguely aware that we had come from Tennessee, or maybe it was Virginia, like many of the early Texas settlers, but that was about all I could say for sure. I was always told we were Scots-Irish, but I’d read enough nonsense about that fabled tribe to be skeptical of what it meant. So much about the history of my family and my home remained hidden. How was it that my forebears had come to settle along the Rio Grande, just beyond the 100th meridian, engaged in one of America’s most iconic vocations?

  Of course I knew the official version of the settlement of Texas. Like all Texas schoolkids, I had spent a year on my state’s glorious history in seventh grade, studying the deeds of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, the treachery of the dictator Santa Anna, the great tragedy of the Alamo, and the eternal victory over Mexico at San Jacinto. In the years since I moved away, I had read a long bookshelf of the standard works, of which T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star stands as the most magnificent and problematic example. But such epic histories sweep high above the hard ground of lived experience. Fehrenbach and others make their grandiose arguments and synthesize the material of human history into broad streams of migration and triumphant inevitabilities. The singularities of human striving and affection, which are far weirder than an epic “rise of a people,” tend to fall by the wayside. No historian could answer my questions.

  The outsized Texas of popular lore is the “Lone Star State,” the cauldron of ugly politics that spawned George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. It’s the state you don’t mess with, the land that always remembers the Alamo but maybe not so much the slaughter of peaceful Cherokee and Mexican farmers. It’s the land of longhorn cattle, bull riders, calf ropers, Aggies, the oil patch and J. R. Ewing, and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders; the land of the big river and an even bigger sky.

  This Texas was settled by genteel southern planters, whose slaves cleared the eastern forests, and conquered by fierce Scots-Irish hill men, rough-and-tumble pope haters, borderlanders from the ancient war zone in the north of merry intolerant ole England, Scots Lowlanders, and Ulster brawlers, who in a great spontaneous migration swarmed out of the British Isles like termites into Appalachia. Yet the coves and sinkholes and eroded picturesque stubs of those ancient mountains could not contain them; the Scots-Irish longed for new borderlands, for the bleeding edge of civilization, for blood and soil and conquest. They needed more room, so they pushed westward, the most warlike of all warlike tribes. To Texas! Where the most vigorous and restless and violent specimens of the Scots-Irish were drawn southward as if by geographical and temperamental gravity, leaving behind their more sedentary brothers and cousins to raise a patch of beans or maybe some corn and a couple head of cattle. GTT! Gone to Texas! That was the sign they nailed on their empty cabins by way of explanation to their creditors and forsaken wives. They didn’t know it yet, but a cattle kingdom awaited. There was a whole new country to be liberated from the red savages and effeminate Spaniards in tight pantaloons. Coahuila y Tejas was a dark-eyed beauty longing for a real man to set her free. Texas would grow to become a rich man with murder in his eyes.

  —

  As I reread the conventional histories, I remained dissatisfied by their generalizations and hoary meditations on Texas “character.” Much of it struck me as self-congratulatory nationalistic rubbish. I read those fat tomes mostly for the footnotes, the infinite forking paths of primary sources and archives. The revisionist historians, the borderlands scholars, and the ethnohistorians were far more useful, but even so I was more drawn to the first-person accounts of exploration and contact and Indian captivity; the travel memoirs of fur traders and scalpers, soldiers and
profiteers and pioneer wives; the apologetics of utopian visionaries and confidence men; the letters home of sheep farmers and cowboys, the travelogues of nineteenth-century journalists and architects. I immersed myself in the stories of the first Europeans who penetrated the wilderness of the border country, and that study led me to the Native peoples who were displaced by the arrival of the Spanish, then the Mexicans, the Tejanos, and the Anglo Texians.

  The official story of Texas is not false, but there is another Texas, every bit as violent but perhaps more tragic and thus far more interesting. This Texas is a land of Apaches and Comanches and Kiowas, but also the Jumano, the Ervipiame, the Bobole, and the Gueiquesale. Explored by unlucky Spanish conquistadors like sad Coronado and misfortunate Cabeza de Vaca, who walked barefoot and naked from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of California. This Texas, sparsely populated by missionaries and lonely ranchos, menaced by American filibusters, freebooters, and buccaneers and French pirates, was invaded by the Scots-Irish, yes, but also by Quakers and German liberals and utopian Frenchmen and Poles who sought to create a New Jerusalem but instead simply added to the entrepreneurial energies of Dallas.

  It should be obvious enough if you stare at the old maps, but it’s too often overlooked that the history of Anglo Texas up through the latter years of the nineteenth century is largely the story of East Texas, because during those early decades the Anglos were pinned down in precarious settlements along the lower reaches of Texas’s rivers in the gulf plains, with a few border settlements on the central plains and in the fringes of the Hill Country along the Balcones Escarpment. Austin was such a border town, as was San Antonio, exposed and vulnerable to the depredations of Texas’s great western neighbor, the Comanche empire. West Texas was unconquered, largely unsettled, until years after the Civil War, when the U.S. Army finally chased the last bands of Comanches off the caprock and into the dreary reservations of Oklahoma. Apaches were still raiding into the late 1880s. The military outposts farther west were mostly just primitive camps along the mail routes to El Paso and beyond.