Maybe the recipient would do that. It would be nice to see where her mother’s pension went.
August, 1979
Speaking of Dallas
SOMEWHERE IN DALLAS tonight people will be standing or sitting around, sipping cocktails, eating bean dip and potato chips, and talking about books or music or a play or movie they’ve seen or the prospects of the Cowboys or the fate of the Rangers or their bowling or golf scores or their problems with Internal Revenue or whether they’ve ridden the Shock Wave at Six Flags yet or the prices they paid for their last lawnmower or the headaches of swimming pool upkeep or Jimmy Carter or Ted Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or crime in the streets or the best soil for azaleas or the right way to cook spaghetti or an amusing little wine they’ve found or whether the city can stand one more shopping mall or the weather or the latest adventures of Billie Sol Estes or the courtroom style of Racehorse Haynes or whatever happened to Candy Barr.
I pray that is so, but maybe it isn’t so. If it is so, I would like to find that place. I would like to go there and discuss any or all of those things or any other topic the other chip-eaters have in mind except one.
I don’t want to know how they like Dallas. I already know how everyone who lives in Dallas likes it, and how quite a number of visitors like it, and I’ve already told everyone how I like it. Since 1976, when I moved here, I haven’t swallowed a bite of bean dip without the word “Dallas” in my ears. And I can report without the slightest fear of contradiction—for I know this more surely than my own name—that three kinds of people live in Dallas: those who like it, those who don’t like it, and those who like it a little but not as well as they liked the places they moved here from.
In the beginning, those who asked me how I liked Dallas were people who liked it themselves. A lot of them had lived here a long time and took a certain pride in the place, and some had just moved here from someplace else and liked what they had seen so far. Some, however, said they didn’t like it. They were usually people who were moving out of it to some other city that they said they already liked a lot better than Dallas, even though they hadn’t lived there yet.
Lately, though—well, for almost two years—every party I’ve attended has turned into a sort of geography lesson. I’ve learned, for instance, that Dallas is built on a flat place, that it has no hills like North Carolina or Kentucky, and certainly no mountains like Colorado, or as many old buildings as Philadelphia. I’ve learned it isn’t on an ocean, neither Atlantic nor Pacific nor even the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve learned that the surfing is much better in California and the sailboating is much better in New England. I’ve learned that a larger supply of nice high-rise apartments is available in New York City and that Reunion Tower isn’t the Statue of Liberty, a fact that had escaped my notice. I’ve learned that the trees are taller in Louisville; that both the Ohio and the Mississippi are longer, wider rivers than the Trinity; that city politics is more entertaining in Chicago; and that the labor unions are more fascinating in Detroit. Someone even told me that Dallas isn’t even a real city like London or Paris or—for crying out loud—Miami. I’ve even heard Big Poor Old D criticized because the streets downtown are too clean and there are too few filthy words spray-painted on the buildings.
I shan’t reveal my own opinion of Dallas here, because it doesn’t matter. I’ve lived in a number of cities scattered, roughly, from El Paso to Boston, and all had things I liked and things I didn’t like, and I didn’t feel that my life would be ruined if I moved out of any of them. I’m proud to say that I didn’t have to leave any of them, that I was free to stay if I liked, that all my decisions to move elsewhere were of my own volition, usually motivated by what I perceived as a chance to Get Ahead in the World. With varying degrees of difficulty I achieved some kind of harmony with all my various environments, never grieving for the place I had left and never believing I had forsaken heaven to live in hell. Had I held such a belief, I would have done my damnedest to regain heaven. My opinions of all those places are boring, and I’m glad no one has asked me to deliver them. My opinion of Dallas is hideously uninteresting, too, and I apologize to all those people who have had to listen to it.
But it’s their fault. They asked me. It was either exchange opinions of Dallas or sulk in the corner.
Well, I discovered the other night that sulking is a lot more fun than talking about Dallas or listening to others talk about Dallas and/or grieve for the glorious places they left. The only thing I’ve learned from three years of party-going is that other people’s opinions of Dallas are just as boring as mine, and their opinions of other cities are just as boring as my opinions of other cities, which, thank God, nobody has asked me.
I realize that now I’ll never be invited to another party in Dallas, but that’s okay. Home is a better place to sulk in, anyway.
August, 1979
Camp Meeting Time
IF LISTENING TO SERMONS sanctified people, the Davis Mountains would be inhabited by saints in the summertime. Including regular Sunday church service, more sermons may be preached there during July and August than on any piece of real estate of comparable size in the country.
Yet no one would classify the area as a hotbed of religious fanaticism, feverish sectarianism, or even evangelistic zeal. In fact, the devout of the area— most of them, anyway—are emphatically in favor of the idea that a creature’s relationship with his Maker is pretty much his own business, and there aren’t many arguments about who’s going to heaven and who’s not. Piety there is rather low-key, and such sects as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Pentecostals, who devote a lot of energy to trying to change the minds of people who already consider themselves Christians, haven’t made much of a dent in the religious statistics of the place.
But during “camp meeting time”—one week in July and another in August—thousands of mainline Protestant faithful cross the deserts of West Texas and New Mexico to live in rustic cabins built of clapboard and sheet metal, eat under sheds, and spend their days and evenings praying, studying the Bible, listening to preaching two or three times daily, and hobnobbing with friends they haven’t seen since last “camp meeting time.”
The first half of this divine doubleheader is the Paisano Baptist General Encampment, where two thousand worshipers come together on its grounds between Marfa and Alpine. The second half is the Bloys Camp Meeting, where additional thousands meet in a grove of oaks between Fort Davis and Valentine.
Both sites are, during those brief times, teeming mountain villages of primitive dwellings, cook sheds, tabernacles, and Christians. Although both are deserted fifty-one weeks a year, they’re as sacred to many Southwestern Protestants as Rome is to Catholics. Many have measured their lifetimes by the number of consecutive years they’ve attended one or the other—or both—of the camp meetings.
How many people have been made better by that experience, I wouldn’t presume to say, even if I knew. But there’s no denying the importance of the camp meetings in the social life of the people who go to them. Courtships and friendships are begun there, babies are conceived, deals are made, and news and gossip are exchanged, in addition to whatever spiritual transformations might take place.
It has been that way, I guess, since the beginning, which was in 1888, when a little Tennessean named William Benjamin Bloys wanted to be a Presbyterian missionary to India but was turned down because he wasn’t healthy enough. His church sent him west as a missionary to the cowboys instead. I don’t know how healthy one had to be to go to India in those days, but traveling Bloys’s territory—all of Texas west of the Pecos—on horseback must have required a little stamina, it seems to me.
Noticing that it was awfully hard to get cowboys to come indoors for anything, Bloys preached outdoors on the ranches. And as more and more ranch families began requesting his services, he decided to hold a camp meeting and chose Skillman Grove, a popular campsite of the Overland Trail stagecoach drivers and soldiers, as a central location for it.
; All the families thirsting for the Word weren’t Presbyterian, and Bloys’s decision to make his camp meeting interdenominational may account for the general lack of sectarian rivalry in the region. To this day, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ministers alternate in the pulpit at the campground, and—with many additions over the years—they still preach to the same families Bloys preached to in 1890. The Baptists, perhaps believing that Baptist cowboys needed more preaching than others, started their own, additional camp meeting thirty-one years later.
Many descendants of the original cowboys don’t live on the ranches anymore, of course. They leave comfortable homes and churches with stained-glass windows in Dallas and Houston and Albuquerque and Phoenix, drive hundreds of miles to the camp ground, don the boots and hats of their heritage, and reaffirm their familial and religious ties to the place. For some, no doubt, a week-long dose of religion is enough to last all year, as it was for many of the cowboys. For others, it’s the main event on a crowded church calendar.
For still others lately the Paisano and Bloys camp meetings have become something else: a chance to look at the natives and eat a free meal before they move on to the next tourist attraction. The natives don’t really mind tourists dropping by, especially those who make at least a token donation for the food they consume. But they do mind those who park their campers on the fringe of the campground for the entire week, eat the faithful out of house and home, and never attend a service.
That, they say, isn’t very Christian.
August, 1979
Disarming the Airport Kid
THE KID WAS SEVEN years old, a redheaded, freckled type wearing boots and a cowboy hat. Anyone could see that he was an experienced traveler. He swung his bag onto the conveyor belt of the airport security X-ray machine with the casual flair of a rodeo hand hefting his saddle onto one more bronc. The canvas bag was a tattered thing with a broken strap, held shut by a piece of cotton rope.
The woman assigned to keep hijackers off planes at Midland’s airport gazed at the X-ray screen, her eyes narrow with suspicion. “You got anything besides toys in there?” she asked in her official voice.
“No, ma’am,” the kid replied.
“Well, there’s something funny about one of them toys. I’m going to open that bag.”
She untied the rope and rummaged among crayons, glue bottles, comic books, crumpled bits of paper covered with childish drawings, and pieces of those cheap plastic toys that the Taiwanese design to fall apart as soon as a kid tries to play with them. She eyed each piece disapprovingly, as if wondering what kind of parent would let a kid lug such trash aboard a big, important airplane full of important attache cases full of important papers.
“I could swear I saw…,” she muttered under her breath. She squinted like a nearsighted grandmother threading a needle. The line behind the kid was growing, but she didn’t care. Here it is!” she said at last. She groped to the bottom of the bag and came up with a blob of red plastic, about three inches long. “You can’t carry this on the plane.”
“I carried it down here on the plane,” the kid said.
“Well, you can’t carry it back.” the woman said. “You can’t take guns on a plane.”
It was a water pistol of vaguely space-age design, of the type that hangs in plastic bags on racks in supermarkets and convenience stores. It had a white plastic trigger, but no more resembled a gun than the kid resembled Yasser Arafat.
“It just shoots water,” the kid said. “It’s not even loaded.”
“It’s still a gun,” the security woman said. “And you can’t take guns on airplanes, no matter what kind they are.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” the kid asked.
“Take it back to the lobby and give it to whoever brought you here.”
“We’re all going on the plane,” the kid said, indicating his father and brother behind him.
“Throw it away, then. It’s The Rules.”
The kid’s father was about to protest, but the kid waved him away. “It leaks, anyway,” he said. He carried the pistol to the waste basket near the security gate, dropped it in, gathered up his toy bag, and started down the corridor.
But the security gate beeped when his brother stepped through. The woman made him empty his pockets, in which he was carrying a travel alarm clock in a plastic case. It was ticking. “Okay, go ahead,” the guard said.
What went through her mind during that interchange? I wondered. Did she suspect that the redhead was a miniature terrorist who, once aloft, would pull the red plastic water pistol on the flight attendant and demand to be flown to Six Flags? If that were his scheme, wouldn’t the cotton rope be more effective than the little toy? Might he not bind the attendant and hold her hostage? Or hang the pilot?
What about the mysterious liquids in the father’s shaving kit? Nitro? What about the ticking alarm clock? Shouldn’t she have X-rayed that? Couldn’t it be a bomb? Unlikely, but more likely than a .45 disguised as a red plastic water pistol.
Maybe none of those possibilities inhabited her skull, or she’s simply one of the tribe that governs us so much of our time now, one of the robots stationed at the intersections of our lives to see that we obey The Rules. There’s no room in such heads for reasons, for explanations, certainly no room for exceptions and no time for courtesy. There’s only room for The Rules.
Maybe The Rules don’t mention cotton ropes or after-shave lotion or alarm clocks, but they do mention guns. And a gun is a gun, even if it’s made of red plastic, even if the X-ray shows it’s as empty as the security guard’s head, even if it leaks. And, as the kid was experienced enough to know, when a robot says, “It’s The Rules,” it’s pointless to argue.
August, 1979
Pussycat and Mockingbird
I WISH I WERE a naturalist, so that I could explain what’s going on in my yard, or at least understand it.
Loyal readers know that my fief is inhabited by two beasts of the nonhuman persuasion: a cat and a mockingbird. At least I still think of them as nonhuman.
Having grown up in country where animals—even horses and dogs, those favorites of sentimentalists— serve utilitarian purposes, I don’t usually indulge in anthropomorphism, enlarging the circle of homo sapiens to include creatures with feathers and fur. Pet banty roosters, I learned early, eventually wind up on the dinner table, and pet pigs go to their rest as cracklings and bacon and ham and lard. Good dogs are meant for hunting, and those useless ones that hang around the house and follow the kids around and get petted and stroked sneak off at night to run in packs and be poisoned by sheep ranchers. Horses and men in that environment are natural enemies. I never knew a horse that wanted to spend the day under the sun with a bit in his mouth and a woolen blanket and a saddle and a man on his back.
Years in cities weaken one’s understanding of the natural order of things, I guess. And maybe the wild streak that remains in even the most docile of domesticated animals is diluted further by constant contact with man, away from others of their own kind.
Pussycat, for instance, originated in as wild an environment as can be imagined—a New York City alley—but spent years on Park Avenue. When she moved to Texas, she would sit for hours in the living room window, gazing at the crape myrtle and the chattering birds in it as if trying to remember—“I think I’m supposed to do something with that swaying green thing…but what? Something tells me I should want those feathery things…but why?”
For her the yard soon became what it was for me and the lady who came with her—a place for lying in the sun—and she more and more frequently responded to our sweet-talk in tones that sounded eerily like conversation. Her natural cat sounds were employed only with neighbors of the feline male gender who would drop by to ask her how it was going and what she was doing Saturday night. Her replies were so nasty and final that even her most persistent suitor—a long-legged, orangish fellow with more energy than grace—stopped coming around.
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Pussycat, we concluded, had decided she was human.
Mockingbird, however, remained a wild spirit, darting constantly from front yard to back, down the alley, across the street to his favorite utility pole, guarding his territory with the ferocity of a Scot, spilling his songs with the profligacy of a drunk who has inherited a distillery. Like Bobby Burns, he was redeemed from common rowdiness only by the beauty of his music.
I don’t know when the two met. They were first observed together on the patio—he in the tree that branches over the fence and shades the table, and she on the back step. They were making noises at each other, and we surmised a territorial dispute. The tree was his, we imagined Mockingbird saying. Okay, but the step was hers, Pussycat was replying.
The second meeting we saw was in the front— Mockingbird in the crape myrtle, Pussycat sunning atop the low brick wall near the door. The bird’s single shrill note, repeated and repeated, filled the living room. If Pussycat answered, we couldn’t hear her through the glass. She seemed to be trying to ignore him, but the tip of her tail, which was draped over the wall and out of sight of the bird, flicked, flicked. Why? Was she angry? Upset? Was latent feline instinct stirring at last, urging her to the attack and the taste of warm blood? There was no telling. When she came inside, she didn’t mention Mockingbird.
Then, the other afternoon, when the sun was at its lowest and hottest, I slouched at the patio table, musing sweatily on life’s puzzlements, while Pussycat lounged on the sill above the geranium, apparently sleeping. Wings fluttered into the tree above me, and she raised her head and looked at Mockingbird, and he looked at her.
He sounded a single, strong, clear note in which I heard neither proclamation nor warning. She responded with a call she had never used in our conversations with her or her scolding of the rejected suitors. Her jaw trembled like the chin of a soprano reaching beyond her range.
The Time of My Life Page 9