“I couldn’t see what happened. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I just lay there, utterly still, hoping they wouldn’t discover me. I was afraid to breathe too loudly. Then the other sounds started.”
Hetty took a long shot of liquor before asking, “Other sounds?”
“Yeah.” Garret swallowed. “The sounds of the wounded men. It was awful, honey. I’ve never heard such piteous cries. They must have been in unbearable pain. I just kept thinking, a few minutes earlier and that might’ve been me out there, bleeding to death. They would cry out, begging, then I’d hear a dull thud, and the voice would be silenced. Before long, all was calm again. I waited until the voices drew away and I knew it must be growing dark. I slipped out without a sound and made sure no one saw me. I peered around the hood and saw rangers in the lighted windows of the ranch house. Two others patrolled the cars, making it impossible for me to drive away. I hid behind the tree, then tiptoed into the brush.”
“The brush?” Hetty knew what that meant.
“Yeah! The brush. Chaparral up to my hips, no gloves on, hardly any light left. That’s why I got scratched so bad.” He groped in his pockets, wincing as his wounds stung. “You got a smoke, honey?”
Hetty was about to say no, when a bony hand lifted a red pack of Lucky Strikes into the light. “Thanks, Pearl.” Garret latched on to a cigarette with obvious relief, gulping smoke a couple of times before going on. Pearl sat opposite them in the nook.
“I looked for a sendero—paths they cut along the fences. I made it into town, went to Rodriguez Grocery. The store was closed, but I knew he lived in the back. I knocked on the rear door. Severino answered—that’s Mr. Rodriguez. I must have looked a fright because he crossed himself when he saw me. I had blood dripping down my face. But he knew who I was and let me in. He told me some things. The raid came from los federales, he said. They sent in Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, a sergeant in the Texas Rangers. The Mexicans fear him more than anybody. One of their own that defected to the other side. He led the raid. It’s part of a crackdown.”
Hetty nodded. “It was in the paper. Running’s now a felony. The Jones Act. But why did they kill Mexicans?”
“Told to. The governor’s declared war on tequileros. He made an announcement, Severino said. They are now considered an armed invasion of the United States, to be destroyed like any other foreign army would be. That’s why they sent in the Wolf.”
“They’re serious about this, aren’t they?” Hetty said, lighting herself a Lucky.
“ ’Fraid so. It was a slaughter. Just like that song said—they hunt them down like rabbits.”
“Did they get Seca?” Hetty asked.
Pearl cursed in the darkness. “I don’t care about some snake. What happened to Odell?!”
“The Anglos are alive. All of them.”
“Thank God, thank God,” Pearl moaned.
“Sheriff locked them up, but nobody believes they’ll be there for long. Not in Duval County.”
“So Odell can come home soon?”
“I think you can count on it, Pearlie. El Patrón will get them out. When I heard Odell was all right, I figured the best thing I could do was leave town. Severino doesn’t have a phone, and I couldn’t be seen at the hotel. That’s why I didn’t call. He drove me into Alice, where I caught the afternoon train just as it was leaving.”
“And the car?” Hetty asked.
Garret sniggered. “I think you can kiss that good-bye—five thousand dollars’ worth of machinery. Along with a small fortune in mescal.”
They talked for a long time, drinking mescal and passing the Luckies around, reassuring each other in the arms of light that reached down through the smoke floating over their heads.
Hetty came to believe in omens, in a startling conjunction of events that seemed to be connected in some mysterious way. A tan envelope arrived by post the very next day embossed with a Greek temple. She knew what the letter was going to say before she ripped it open: “The board has reviewed your application for membership in the Cupola Club. We regret to inform you that, at this time . . .”
She crumpled the letter and let it drop to the floor. “It’s over,” she said under her breath. She reached for her handbag, took out her passbook, and made an entry under Withdrawals: My place in society.
The next few months were an exercise in survival. Odell was still in jail, and his “pipeline flowing with cactus juice” had dried up. Hetty had to ration their money carefully to make it last. She was shocked when Garret revealed their bank balance: $1,030.75. Panic flashed through her like heat lightning. We’ve been clearing over $3,000 a month since Christmas! Could we really have run through $11,000? She dug into a drawer of her new antique secretary and found the stack of crinkled receipts for all the items she’d bought: the chifforobe and tea cart, the Victrola and fancy smoking stand with its built-in humidor, the Silvertone Radio with its own console table, her chaise lounge, the grenadine portieres she’d hung over doors between rooms, the Oriental carpets and marble pedestals, the vacuum sweeper and the hand-painted china lamps from London, the twelve-piece sets of silverware and crystal, the Lalique candelabras, the ceramic baking dishes, the pressed glass water bottle in her new electric Frigidaire. She hadn’t really kept track of how much she’d spent. Each purchase had seemed effortless at the time, a tiny extravagance to brighten the gray winter days, but when she tallied the prices, Hetty realized that her manic campaign of redecorating had cost them $4,897.99, not counting the labor she’d hired. Then there were Garret’s tailor-made suits and the jewels he kept bringing her in velvet cases: the jade pins and cameos, the long drop earrings, those endless strands of pearls. She could account for everything but a couple of thousand dollars. He wouldn’t tell her what he’d done with it. She accused him of gambling it away at the tables down in Galveston. They had a huge fight, and he walked out. She never found out what happened to the money. He kept insisting that, any day now, he’d be able to start making runs back to Duval County. Hetty wasn’t so sure. Gun smoke from the San Diego massacre still haunted the air of South Texas—hatred and fear made it gather and thicken until it began to move like a dust storm across the whole state.
When she’d walk to Sander’s Grocery on Oxford Street to do her shopping, Hetty would scan the headlines of the newspapers displayed in a rack at the front of the store. Almost all of them ran front-page stories about the capture. She soon realized that the widespread publicity was making it impossible for El Patrón to drop the charges against his prisoners. Pearl waited weeks for an arraignment, only to find out that no bail had been set and that the men were to be detained indefinitely in San Diego. The weather got hot. Hetty lay in the chaise lounge in her new living room with a circulating fan brushing over her, back and forth, listening for the sound of distant thunder. She kept expecting the heavens to break, unleashing one of those torrential downpours Houston was famous for. Something catastrophic had to happen. First, the US District Attorney got involved. This was the moment the government had been waiting for, they learned: a chance to demonstrate publicly that the controversial new Jones Act would be enforced, that Hoover’s administration would be the first to really do something about America’s drinking problem.
The D.A.’s team swept in, moving the venue out of corrupt Duval County, where a conviction would be highly unlikely. The prisoners were all transferred to the jurisdictions in which they resided, in Odell’s case, Harris County. The brutal truth became inescapable: Odell would have to stand trial for the illegal selling of liquor and, since it was a criminal offense, the case would be pushed through the courts in under ninety days. His only hope was to face a sympathetic jury, but alas, it was not to be.
As Hetty sat beside Garret and Pearl in the county courthouse, she grew sick of heart when the members of the jury filed in. Women with pinched faces and ramrod straight posture, men in the somber suits worn by ministers. It was high August. The courtroom was sweltering. Nobody would have much patience in this kind
of weather. Odell went down in a matter of days. The maximum sentence. Ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. He looked pale as the verdict was read; he’d lost weight from repeated bouts of dysentery in jail. But when they went to visit him in the penitentiary at Huntsville, he was still trying to piece together scraps of dignity, quoting Thoreau: “ ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.’ ”
Pearl was out of her mind with grief. She was given ninety days to raise the staggering fee. She had no idea what to do, she told Hetty, bumbling about in a confused state, weeping on and off, snatching at bits of advice that came in censored letters from her husband.
“Oh, Lord, why wasn’t I a crib death?” she asked over and over as she paced the kitchen floor in her old mules. “I told Odell not to go into this business. The wages of sin is death, I said, but he just wouldn’t listen.”
By October, the two women had managed to pull together a fairly comprehensive portfolio of Odell’s investments. It looked like there would be more than enough to pay the fine and still leave some money for Pearl to live on for a few years. Hopefully by then Odell would be out on parole for good behavior, and they could resume some kind of life together. He wrote and instructed her not to liquidate anything until she absolutely had to.
That’s why she and Hetty were puzzled by phone calls that started coming in from local brokers in the closing days of October. There had been a plunge in the market, they said, so Pearl needed to sell off some of her stock to provide additional “margin.”
“Ain’t got a head for business, sir,” she said at one point and handed the phone to Hetty. The man on the line explained that Odell, like a lot of small-time investors, had bought stocks with a marginal down payment and had let the brokers finance the rest of the purchase price through loans. It was a scheme Odell had kept secret from his wife, a way to stretch his assets by speculating on the bull market. Pearl either had to come up with more “margin,” meaning ready cash, or sell some of her stocks at reduced prices. She had no choice. She told them to sell.
That was on Friday. On Monday, Hetty bought the late edition of the Houston Post-Dispatch and took it over to Pearl. There had been an even bigger drop in securities that morning. Pearl had been getting more phone calls demanding “more margin.” Then Tuesday morning a frantic letter arrived from Odell, dated Friday, telling her to sell everything immediately. She tried for hours to get through to the brokers, but the lines were busy, busy, busy. Later, they turned on the radio and heard the devastating news: The market had gone through the biggest crash in history, slumping by billions in one day. Pearl grew glassy-eyed as she listened, wondering vaguely how much money she’d lost.
The next morning, Hetty went over to the big house and kept dialing all day until she finally got through to one of the brokers. After talking to him, she didn’t know how she was going to break the news to Pearl: The securities Odell had invested in were not only worthless, he owed money on top of it for “margin.”
Hetty shoved her pride to the back of her mind and called her father at Citizen’s Bank of South Texas. He couldn’t talk to her—he was batching up the accounts. But she called back every fifteen minutes until she got him on the phone.
“Yes.”
“Dad, it’s Hetty.”
“I know.” His voice sounded weary.
“I’m worried about your bank. Are you all right?”
“Keeping my head above water. Barely.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“The worst break in history. The market’s down ten billion. Everyone I know is being hit. It’s a disaster.”
“Can’t the banks do something?”
“We waited too long. Nobody expected this. Now we just have to let prices seek their own level. I—” His voice trailed off. Hetty could hear shouting in the background.
“Listen . . . I need a favor for a friend. Dad?”
“Yes?”
Hetty outlined Pearl’s problems and asked if Citizen’s could help her out. “I wouldn’t ask for myself, of course.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” Kirb said brusquely. “Investors like Odell are part of the reason this happened.”
“She’s going to lose her home, Dad. Can’t you—”
“I said there’s nothing we can do.” More shouting in the background. “Now I really must go. Good night.” He hung up on her. The dial tone stung her ear. I bet if I were Charlotte, she thought, you’d help me.
By November, when the court fine came due, the market had bottomed out completely and Pearl had no way to raise the ten thousand dollars. Her house and its furnishings were auctioned off under a sheriff’s sale. They brought in a little over six thousand dollars.
Hetty sat in the kitchen with Pearl after the auction was over. Though night was falling, neither stood up to turn on a light and neither spoke. They didn’t know what to say. They just sat there in the breakfast nook, smoking, waiting for Garret to return with beer and sandwiches. Hetty felt spellbound with grief. Her dreams had not led them to treasure, as she’d hoped, but to trouble. To a man in prison, to two women left speechless here in a darkened room.
Hetty’s devastated dreams made her remember the old Magnolia Park. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking of that now, sitting here in the dusk, but she was. Nella used to tell her and Charlotte stories about it. She and Kirby had conducted their courtship out there, taking the trolley to the turning basin in Buffalo Bayou. They would stroll through the sixty acres of parkland, attend concerts at the bandstand, have picnics in the shade of three thousand seven hundred and fifty Magnolia grandiflora trees that had been planted there by the developers. Nella said the air for miles around hung heavy with the sweet perfume of those giant white blossoms, often thousands of them blooming at once. This earthly paradise, she told her enraptured daughters, was designed to rival Central Park in Manhattan and Woodward’s Gardens in San Francisco, making Houston known coast to coast as the Magnolia City. Hetty begged Nella to take her there so she could experience such a place for herself. When Hetty was old enough, she finally did. All around the turning basin loomed refineries, factories, warehouses, and shipping docks. The magnolia trees had been razed years before to make room for industrial development. Hetty never forgot the acrid smell of smoke that had replaced the heady aroma of those delicate white flowers.
Why was she thinking of that now? She wasn’t sure. Somehow the events of the last few days made her mourn all over again the destruction of such a magical forestland east of Houston. Hetty thought she heard something roaring in the distance, like chain saws at work. Or maybe she was just remembering Pick’s deep voice intoning the words of that hymn he sang as he painted—the one about the lamp burning down. She left Pearl alone in the kitchen and made her way through the twilight to the apartment. Stumbling about like a blind woman, she felt her way into the bedroom, thinking, We are no longer the Magnolia City. What’s to become of us now? She opened the window beside the bed and took the Japanese lantern out of the post oak tree. She held it in her hands as she sat on the bed and sang in the darkness, the misery in her heart welling into the words of the hymn:
O, poor sinner
Now is your time
O, poor sinner
What you going to do when your lamp burn down.
Chapter 9
The last great storm of 1929 came like a whisper out of the Caribbean and ambushed the Texas coast. People had already shelved their storm shutters for the winter and burned their candles at the last crabbing parties along the bay. Late editions of the Houston Post-Dispatch broadcast the news: TROPICAL STORM UPGRADED TO HURRICANE: Headed for Mexican Coast.
As she sat in her living room packing, Hetty absentmindedly scanned the headlines while wrapping her new china in the day’s paper. Tankers steaming out of the Ship Channel had radioed the news—something unfriendly was brewing out there, spawned in the incubator of the equator, nursed on the warm b
reast of the Caribbean, and bawling as it crawled its way westward toward the nearest land. It had an empty, inhuman heart: a pocket of air pressure so low that winds from all directions poured down the wall of its eye like Niagaras of air. The earth’s rotation made it turn, spinning off across the glassy sea like a child’s top out of control. It bounced into Tampico and back out, careening here and there in a bad temper, stopping only to suck more heat out of the sea and spur its winds to over a hundred miles an hour. It wore a wide whirling sombrero of clouds, hundreds of miles across.
Already, down at Galveston, Hetty read, they were seeing the long coasting waves that glide into shore before the squall itself, the ones that move like those scenes she’d seen in motion pictures where they slow the action down and everything seems to hang suspended in time. Like she was. The rooms of the garage apartment around her were emptying bit by bit, draining her old life away. All her new clothes had disappeared into trunks, the carpets had been rolled up, the drawers cleaned out. She had taken all her portieres and curtains down; through the bare dusty panes, the clouds that passed beyond the post oaks never changed. They just kept revolving, around and around, waiting to see what the storm would decide to do.
Drainpipes gurgled and eaves dripped as Hetty flapped along the driveway under a Chinese parasol. Her galoshes were unbuckled as usual, and a canvas raincoat two sizes too big hung halfway off her shoulders. Raindrops big as bullets ricocheted all around her. She made her way up the back steps, dropped the parasol upside down on the porch and, knocking lightly, slipped into the Weems’ house for what would surely be the last time. Pearl was moving to a Victorian rooming house on Studewood.
The kitchen had been cleared out completely. The only sign of where they used to sit at the breakfast nook were scuff marks on the table. A dirty glass had been left in the sink.
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