Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  While I was waiting, trying to keep my mind on business, Borger was proving a fine place to learn—about being a reporter and about myself. I was talking to a young Texas highway patrolman one morning outside the Stinnett Courthouse when his radio buzzed him. A double fatality on Highway 206 about twelve miles north. He roared away. I followed. A Packard sedan had collided head-on in about the center of the two-lane highway with some sort of pickup truck. The remains of the truck was scattered in the roadside wheat field. The sedan was still on the pavement, its front end back to the instrument panel missing. The body of the driver was in his seat, his head impaled on the steering post, blood, teeth, and tissue splashed everywhere. The highway patrolman backed away from this, unable to control his nausea. I remember standing there untouched, guessing at the combined speeds, noticing how the wheel rim had gouged a rut in the concrete, collecting the details I’d need for my story, finally aware the patrolman, still pale and shaken, was looking at me as if I was something less than human. And all I could say to explain it was that it’s not so bad when the dead are not your friends.

  The shrinks had not yet invented post-combat trauma syndrome but I suppose that’s the name for it—for the accumulation of baggage we sometimes talk about even now when what’s left of Charley Company has its annual reunion. We mention a recurrence of the old nightmares, of how long it took us to get rid of chronic moments of “morning sickness,” but we hardly ever discuss this incurable numbness. A deep, deep burn costs one the feeling in a fingertip. Perhaps seeing too much ghastly casual death does it to a nerve somewhere behind the forehead bone.

  The impending 1948 election taught me another essential lesson—about premature bridge burning and human decency. A University of Texas law school alum was running for Congress against the right-wing incumbent. Our publisher was a proud founder of the Hutchinson County Anti-Communist League, the first such county organization in the country, and held this upstart contender’s Red-hating credentials suspect. He called me into his cubicle, handed me a sealed envelope, and told me to drive out to a residence in Rubbertown that evening, pick up a fellow who would be awaiting me there, drive him to a political rally being held for the lawyer, drop him off down the street, then attend and write a story on what happened. What was all this about? Confidential, he said. I didn’t need to know. Just do it.

  There we have the Nike sporting goods slogan, the great exhortation for self-indulgence to its yuppie customers to accept irresponsibility. My first impulse was to hand him his envelope and quit. But that would have made me one of the indigent unemployed just before becoming a married man. Besides, I was curious about this.

  I checked around about my future passenger, whom I’d met at an American Legion Post meeting. Our publisher paid our dues and required eligible hired hands to join. We quickly noticed the members were all stateside warriors and their interest seemed purely in foiling union organizing. None of the members had seen combat and none of the news staff, all combat vets, went more than once. I learned my passenger was, in AFL-CIO parlance, a scab. He had been employed as a strikebreaker for one of the rubber companies and was now unemployed. I took a peek into the envelope. Three $20 bills (more than a week’s pay for me) and a list of questions. The first one asked our candidate if he was “still a member” of the Young Communist League. The others were similar. I stuck the notes and cash back in the envelope, gave it to my passenger when I picked him up, hauled him to the school where the rally was scheduled, dropped him, parked, and went in to watch. My plan by then was to report what happened, including the fact that the questions had been provided by the newspaper publisher and the asker had been paid $60 to ask them. I’d be out of work but I wouldn’t be ashamed of myself.

  The asker must have had the same sorts of thoughts. I sat watching him and listening to the usual political platitudes. Then he came over, handed me the envelope, money and all, and said he wanted to go home. We left. I returned the envelope to the editor the next day, told him what happened, and resumed my efforts to find a more respectable job.

  I found two—one through the “good old boy network” and one the way you like to get job offers—from a competitor editor who had been reading my stuff. But before any of that happened, it was time for Marie and me to marry. It was the greatest thing ever to happen to me, but getting it done proved to be stressful. It involved a door-to-door campaign to borrow money, a head-on collision, sleeping in the Pampa jail, and other such incidents.

  16

  Now the Good Life Begins!

  I tend to blame the troubles that led up to the altar rail of St. Benedict’s Church in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on Tommy and Brad. Both were confirmed bachelors at the time (that didn’t last long) and so was our photographer and our sports editor. They lectured me about the mistake I was making and the bad example it gave. Worse, they refused to allow me more than the weekend off—which ruled out a honeymoon and complicated matters. If I had a day or two off I might have avoided the following problems, which I brought crashing down upon myself.

  Oklahoma requires blood tests before issuing marriage licenses. I had that done at the hospital in Borger with the results sent to Marie’s brother, Charlie, who was taking care of getting the license. Friday morning before our Monday wedding date Marie called, agitated. Oklahoma didn’t recognize Texas blood tests. Oklahoma required one done in Oklahoma. I dropped whatever job I was on in the newsroom and roared off toward Guymon, eighty miles north and the nearest Okie town large enough to have a clinic. I did the nail-biting wait, eye on clock, while the only doctor in town dealt with a farmer mangled in a harvest injury. When he took my blood he asked me the wedding date. When I say Monday he says “I hope you don’t mean next Monday.” It seems that he has to send my blood sample to a lab in Oklahoma City. It will probably arrive about Tuesday, be tested Wednesday, and certified Thursday.

  Even now describing that awful moment recalls a sense of panic mixed with despair. What I am about to screw up is the rest of my life. Marie’s mother had organized a major and formal wedding at St. Benedict’s with the usual bride’s attendant, maids of honor, flower girls, etc. Barney was lined up to be my best man, Dick Wharton and Charlie as my ushers. Invitations had been out for weeks, the church reserved, reception planned, etc. It was short of the preparations for D-Day but still a major logistic project and not something that can be casually postponed.

  I race the eighty miles back to Borger. The only idea I can think of is getting Barney to pretend he’s me and get his blood tested under my name. From Borger, I call Barney in Norman. Mama answers the phone. Barney is off somewhere, but she advises calm. With the aid of prayer, nothing is impossible. Have faith. She recommends I get home as soon as possible. I tell her I’m on my way.

  But not quite. The time I had planned to use getting to the bank to withdraw traveling money, to borrow a suitcase, and pack had been used in the race to Guymon. Now the banks are closed and paying for the blood test had left me with about $3.00. Credit cards had not yet been invented. I race around Borger, borrowing money from my assorted coworkers, the sheriff, from cops on my beat, etc., five bucks here, ten there—handing out scribbled IOU notes where required and accumulating $61 and change. No time to pack. I grab my stuff and toss it into the backseat of my Ford and head through the twilight on a planned high-speed, nonstop race to Norman.

  So much for plans. The first stop was abrupt, ending a slide off mud-slick U.S. 273 southeast of Pampa by crashing into the front of a car getting onto the highway off a section line road. Both vehicles left undrivable. I confess blame. His wife rigs up a handkerchief bandage over my bloody forehead bruise. He spots a car coming along lonely 273, races out, flags it down, and sends it on to Pampa to notify the sheriff and send a wrecker. We wait in our respective vehicles. The rain pours down. In about five minutes I realize I can’t afford to wait without risking the loss of the girl of my dreams. I wad up my clothes, carry them up to the highway, and flag down a truck which deposits me, soaki
ng wet, at the Pampa police station. There my plight provokes sympathy as well as amusement. The next bus for Oklahoma City is due about 5 A.M. I am offered a bunk in a cell adjoining the drunk tank. I wring out my wet wardrobe and sleep the sleep of exhaustion.

  I can’t remember the bus ride—only Barney awaiting me at the station to take me to St. Anthony’s Hospital, where arrangements had been made to open the lab on Saturday to get the blood-work done and certified. All that remains now is getting the Pottawatomie County Clerk at Shawnee to rush out a marriage license before 9 A.M. Monday when the wedding is scheduled. That sounds impossible, but Charlie had been a tech sergeant in the Marines and half the folks in the county owed favors to either Charlie himself or my future father-in-law. Charlie says don’t worry. I didn’t need to.

  A lovely wedding. I stand at the altar rail so blissful that I’m unaware the organist is playing that “Here Comes the Bride” theme over and over and over again. But Marie finally got there and, unlikely as it must seem after the foregoing, she married me, which means the next half century of this memoir is colored by my happiness.

  Since my crippled Ford has been left in the Texas Panhandle mud at the mercy of some unidentified wrecker crew, Barney loaned us his car for our twenty-four-hour honeymoon and the drive back to Borger to our first home. That requires explanation. America of 1948 was suffering an awful housing shortage. This was complicated in boomtown Borger because nobody wanted to build in a town that wasn’t there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow. I had found only two places affordable on a $55 a week salary. One was a lean-to built against the alley wall of a downtown office. The other was also reached by driving down an alley—a very small two-car garage, which had been partitioned into two spaces. One housed living room and kitchen, the other bedroom and bath. It was superior to the other (faint praise, indeed) but renting it required paying $600 for a small collection of ramshackle and worn-out furniture worth perhaps $50.

  Years later when Marie and I (Santa Feans by then) were driving toward Amarillo we noticed the smoke smudging the northern horizon—Borger’s carbon black trademark—and decided to make a nostalgic detour. Our newlywed home would be gone of course, and the bare dirt yards of the junior high where Marie taught would be covered with grass, etc., but the place would still be full of happy memories. The memories were there, and so was everything else. The school yard was still bare, trampled dirt innocent of any landscaping. And down the cluttered alley our happy home still stood. A clutter of trash blown against its only door just as we remembered but it was empty now. The lacy white curtains Marie had hung over the tiny kitchen window were gone and a leaky boat had been abandoned beside it but the air was full of fond recollections. Marie got out and took some pictures of the place to show to our skeptical children. I sat in the car, reliving the joy of parking there long ago, home tired from the newsroom, knowing Marie was in there waiting for me, ready to swap stories and turn the day’s misadventures and disappointments into fun.

  Marie got home first because she had landed a job as a teacher. Being at the bottom of the seniority list, Marie was given Seventh Grade-X. Seventh graders are notoriously preoccupied with puberty and virtually unteachable and her class’s “X” designation meant her room was the habitat of the incorrigibles. “They’re good kids,” Marie would insist, who never saw one who wasn’t. Borger, however, offered its share of surprises even in the gentle 1950s, and even in junior high. For example:

  Good day today, she said. Seeing progress. Virtually no disruptions. Just one boy decided to be a smart aleck.

  What did he do?

  One of her little girls was missing. Marie asked the class if anyone knew why Alice was absent. The boy said Alice and her mother were in jail and of course everybody had to laugh. I had been in Borger long enough by then to know it might not be a joke. It wasn’t. Alice and her mother were held on prostitution charges.

  Fun though it was, Borger was not the place to advance journalistic ambitions. Tom, Brad, and Fred, one by one, found jobs elsewhere and fled, creating a vacuum that sucked me upward into the editor’s job (no pay raise, of course), with night work added to the six-day-a-week routine. Winter came to the High Plains, with its famed Blue Northers sweeping down our alley and pushing soot-flavored dust through crevices around our window and piling such a mound of trash and tumbleweeds against the door that once Marie had to use a shovel to gain entrance. Even while I was calling on the good old boy network to rescue me from all this, I was learning from it.

  For example:

  A middle-aged cowboy comes in one such night, frostbitten and exhausted. He walks up the desk hat in hand, says he has a problem and asks if he can use the telephone. I say sure, hand it to him. He tells whoever he called that the current storm has driven a herd of Herefords up against a fence and he needs help getting them to shelter. Upon which he thanks me and leaves, with me realizing about then that he looked familiar because he owns the newspaper, plus the big paper in Amarillo, plus one of America’s largest ranches, plus one of the country’s largest natural gas reserves. Where but on the windswept plains would one find a billionaire mogul enduring frostbite to get his cows to safety?

  The same storm taught me an indelible lesson about the nature of sports writers. Our basketball team, band, cheerleaders, etc., had gone to White Deer for a game. They had been trapped overnight. All highways closed, all telephone and power lines down. We were besieged by nervous parents wanting to know if their children had survived. Our efforts through state police, highway maintenance folks, ham radio operators, everyone else we can think of, had been fruitless. Then comes a Western Union messenger with a telegram. (Remember those?) Our sports reporter had made it to the railroad depot and persuaded the operator there to send it. News at last? No. Our sports reporter has telegraphed us the box score of the game.

  The call that was to begin the second phase of our married life came from the Lawton Morning Press. The paper, apparently dying from the inattention of its editor/publisher and fierce competition from the strong Lawton Constitution, had been taken over by a newspaper chain and was being revived with an infusion of money and a new staff, hired mostly through the OU journalism department Class of 1948. Cousin Larry had been called in as Sports Editor, and he phoned me to take over the news desk. The pay was $60 for the standard six-day week. That sounded fine to Marie and me.

  17

  Death Watch at the Morning Press

  One saw that the Lawton Morning Press might be seriously short of journalistic energy before walking through the front door. The paper’s plant occupied space in a low-rent section of downtown. The building immediately across the street from it had been gutted by a fire so recently that the smell of cinders was still in the air. I had been reading back issues of both the Press and the Constitution—our afternoon competitor. The Constitution had a big front-page story on the fire, with dramatic photos. Incredible to any journalist, there was no mention of the fire in the Press.

  But that was a few days in the past. Now a new regime occupied the newsroom—all fresh out of the OU journalism except Managing Editor Frank Hall and Malcolm, our farm editor, both of whom deserve some description.

  Hall, a hard-bitten and very savvy newsman, had left his job as city editor of the Constitution in a sharp disagreement with its top management. Hall had proclaimed, in a banner headline:

  JESSE JAMES ALIVE: IN LAWTON

  Under that headline ran a photograph of a grizzled old fellow identified as the famous slayer of lawmen and robber of banks and trains, along with Hall’s account of how he had not been murdered by one of his gang members decades earlier as historians uniformly believed, but had been hiding for years under an assumed name and was surfacing now due to extreme age and ill health. This story—spread nationwide by the wire services—provoked a storm of denials, derision, and scoffing. Hall, feeling his reputation soiled, presented more proof that the old fellow was indeed James. This provoked a new barrage of rebuttals. So it wen
t until the Constitution, a most dignified old paper, cried no more and Hall went over to the Morning Press, which had neither dignity to protect nor reputation to lose.

  Farm Editor Malcolm was a Manhattan native Ivy League graduate sent in from the home office of the newspaper chain that had bought the Press. Officially, his title was Farm Editor, but we presumed he was a company spy assigned to keep an eye on things. He was amiable, though, and smart, and we did what we could to help him overcome his absolute ignorance of all things agricultural. (“Holstein,” Malcolm would shout: “Pig, chicken, horse, cow, what?” and someone would shout, “Cow,” and Malcolm would resume typing.) While Malcolm wasn’t one of the band of Boomer Sooner country boys he was one of our team and just as determined as the rest of us to beat the Constitution. He just had a different reason.

  Meanwhile, Marie and I had found ourselves another garage. This one was in a residential backyard with a tiny apartment built on top of it. One climbed a steep steel stairway to its door and reached this stair by navigating a expanse of mud. Tiny as it was this apartment defied efforts to heat it. Unlike our cozy Borger home it was perpetually chilly. Marie rescued herself from this solitary confinement by finding a laboratory job at Fort Sill Indian Hospital, and we located a better home—a unit in a U-shaped sixplex.

  While vastly better, it wasn’t luxury. It had been built of plywood on a landfill between the highway to Texas and a set of tracks where the railroad parked its diesel engines between their assignments. When these diesels were left idling, they caused vibration in the shaky land under the unit’s floor slab. First the pictures on the wall would shake, then dishes and pans would rattle, and soon the apartment would be filled with the sound of tinkling, clicking, and clacking.