Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Well," I said, as we shook hands, "you still look like Roy Harris."

  "Yeah, but a little heavier," he said, smiling. He was wearing a dark blue leisure suit and a blue-and-white-figured sports shirt, the collar open. His full head of glossy black hair was carefully groomed, his black eyebrows heavier than I remembered.

  "You remember my wife, Jean?" he said.

  She is dark-haired and had on a black pants suit. We shook hands and I introduced Skipper.

  "We haven't had time for lunch," Roy said. "We thought we'd go across the street to the drugstore."

  In Carter's Drugstore, on the corner of Main and Davis, we took the last booth on the left beyond the soda fountain. Roy and his wife ordered Coke floats, and Skipper a cup of coffee.

  "How long have you been County Clerk?" I said.

  "Ten years," he said. "I was workin' in real estate, and I'd always had an interest in law. My grandfather on my father's side was a lawyer."

  "I remember about "Cussin' " Harris," I said.

  They said he was three-quarters Indian, a six-foot-three-inch 200 pounder who thought it was a disgrace for a man to take money for fighting. He had been reading law and practicing it in Oklahoma, where he was a justice of the peace, before the day of bar exams and before he led the family south and into the Big Thicket. There he and his family raised their own crops and livestock, fished, shot game, and made moonshine whiskey, but he would emerge whenever one or more of the nesters ran afoul of the law.

  "He cussed a lot," Roy had told me, "and whenever he defended anybody in court in Conroe they came from miles around just to listen to him. They crowded that courtroom, and I guess his greatest victory was when he defended himself. One night somebody hollered that the revenuers were comin', and Granny poured the whiskey down through the floor boards of the cabin and Uncle Bob threw the coil from the still out into the corn field and the dome into the creek. In court he convinced them that, with the equipment they had there as evidence, they couldn't prove it was a still. Then he got a court order forcin' them to return it and put it back together again."

  "So I studied law," Roy was saying now. "I went to the University of Arkansas Law School in 1961, but I didn't go but one year. They have a lot of b.s. they put you through the first year, and it's all right for a kid, but I was a little older. I came home and studied in a law office for around three years and passed the bar exam and became a country lawyer.

  "Then I figured the best way to learn about county government was to get into it. I didn't care to be a judge, but to be in a position to help other people and provide a service. I enjoy people, and I figured that county clerk would, be the best position to be in."

  "How long have you been in real estate?" I said.

  "Around sixteen years," he said. "I paid $10 an acre for my first 1,000 acres in Arkansas, and it's layin' there now probably worth $250 an acre. Last year I bought land for $250 an acre that's probably worth $500 an acre now. I've* got about 2,000 acres in Lawrence County, Arkansas and 440 in Randolph, and my father bought a place adjoining mine."

  "Your dad doesn't live out in Cut and Shoot any more?"

  "No," he said. "His place is still there, but the wells are dead now. He left, though, before they played out, because so many people moved in and it kinda messed up his life. He likes people, but he likes to be by himself, too."

  "How is his health?"

  "He's sixty-seven now, but his health is good. My Uncle Bob's not so good, though. He had a stroke, and his left arm and left leg don't mind him so good any more."

  "They used to mind him very well," I said, "especially when they called him out onto the road that night."

  "That's right," he said. "He used to be the strongest and fastest man ever lived. He used to turn flips frontwards and backwards."

  "How's your brother Tobe?"

  "Tobe's in Arkansas, too," he said. "He's married and workin' in real estate some and on the farm there. He had a lot of hard luck, but Tobe is smart. He always read easy, and he read a lot and made 140 in those I.Q. tests."

  "When I was out here before," I said, "I got the impression that Tobe didn't think too highly of me."

  "Oh?" Roy said. "I don't know."

  "On the last day," I said, "I was saying good-by on the porch, and I shook hands with your dad. He said, 'Now the next time you come, don't stay in that hotel in Houston. Come stay with us.' I thanked him, and he said, 'You know, that first day you came out here you told those stories about Lew Jenkins. I always admired Lew Jenkins, and when I found out that you knew him and admired him, too, I knew you were all right.' Then I walked over to Tobe to shake hands and he looked me right in the eye and said, 'We've got a fella down the road with a bigger nose than you.'"

  "Tobe said that?" Roy said now. "Heck, I've got a cousin would just really put you to shame. He lives in Arkansas now, too."

  "How about Cousin Armadillo?" I said.

  He was four years older than Roy, and not of the Harris clan, and one afternoon we drove by the shack in which he was living. It, too, stood on log pilings, and Cousin Armadillo had hollowed out the ground beneath it so that, on hot and humid nights, he could lie there on a quilt and benefit from any cooling breezes.

  "About ten years ago," Roy had explained to me, "they had a bounty on armadillos here. They'd pay you ten cents for a pair of ears, and when we'd want to go fishin', all he wanted to do was hunt armadillos. He'd come in with thirty or forty pairs of ears, so we gave him the name."

  Cousin Armadillo, according to J. T. Montgomery, had experienced great difficulty in mastering the intricacies of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and so in junior high school he had spent most of his time in the gym. One day he tied a can to a hound dog and sent it howling through the halls, and on another occasion, while the band played on the front steps in celebration of some historic event, Cousin Armadillo, from a high window, pelted the leader and the musicians with overripe tomatoes he had hauled to the top floor.

  "Cousin Armadillo?" Roy said now. "He's in the penitentiary in Huntsville. He killed one of the neighbor boys, and I think they gave him twenty years. It's been several years ago, and they were old stealin' buddies. They went around and stole things in the oil fields, and Armadillo'd been sent up before on a deal. He felt the other fella had turned State's evidence, and he was kind of gunnin' for him.

  "Armadillo had married a woman who had a little boy, and they were eating in a joint out in Cut and Shoot. This fella walked in, and the kid had on kind of a helmet, and he thumped the kid on the helmet. Armadillo said something, and the other fella drew his knife. Armadillo jumped up and pulled his pistol and shot him through the heart. The other fella sat down, and he said, 'You've been wantin' to do this for a long time, Armadillo.' And he died there.

  "Armadillo ran to my daddy's house, and my daddy called the sheriff. Every time he got in trouble he ran to my daddy's house. A lot of people did that when they got in trouble, I guess because they thought he knew a lot about trouble and was always around it."

  I looked over at Skipper Lofting, who was sitting across from me and next to Roy. He was sipping coffee and looking at me, and he raised his eyebrows.

  "There's a fella over here," Roy said now, indicating a man standing at the counter to our left, "who was in college with me."

  "When you did that job on that dude from Houston Heights?" I said.

  "That's right," he said. "There's another, Charles Denman, who's a lawyer here in town now, and he and Dan Rather were among the student leaders who helped get me back in."

  "Dan Rather, the CBS newsman?"

  "That's right," he said. "I always liked Dan, and he was always fair."

  "When you fought Patterson," I said, "and had him down, you must have thought at that moment that you could beat him and become the heavyweight champion of the world."

  "I did," he said, "and I still do. Three weeks ahead of the fight I knew I wasn't right. Lou Viscusi knew it when he came out there, that I was over my peak.
I was young then, and I thought that the harder you work the better you get, but once you reach your peak you go down.

  "I was readin' these stories about the boxing game, and I thought maybe my own people weren't on my side. Lou and Bill Gore wanted me to take a week off. If I'd listened to them I'da won the fight because of the way I handled him the first few rounds. Lew is a fine fella, just as straight as an arrow, just one hundred per cent, and Bill's gone now, but he was, too. I just didn't know."

  When we left the drugstore and walked back across the street to the Court House, his wife got into her Cadillac to drive home. Roy and Skipper and I go into his, and we drove to his real estate office. It occupies a one-story brick building, painted white, and on a wall of the reception room he showed us an old, framed photograph of "Cussin' " Harris and Granny Harris riding a mule. He explained that this had been taken in Palestine, Texas, right after they had come out of Oklahoma Territory, and after he had signed some letters, we drove back to the Court House.

  "You'd never believe this would happen in the United States of America," he was saying as we drove into the parking space beneath one wing of the building. "That's one of our sheriffs there, and he's gonna quit to take a job in private industry protection. You wouldn't believe that you'd have to protect everything."

  On the wall behind his desk there were five shelves of bound volumes entitled Texas Civil Statutes. He check through some memos on his desk and made a phone call, and then he settled back in his chair.

  "Driving in here," I said, "you remarked about what's happening to this country, about the need for private protection."

  "That's right," he said. "I think we're being infiltrated by other countries tryin' to tear us down. They know they can't defeat us militarily, and nobody is goin' to drop the big bomb. They find a minority group, and they shove and agitate them and push 'em, and everybody feels a little sorry for himself anyway.

  "They tell the Indians how bad they were treated, and the Nigra they tell how's he's been mistreated. Every minority they sell a bill of goods. You can't live in the past, and I don't think our government has put enough emphasis on braggin' on our country. Our country is the greatest country in the world. We've got the greatest people in the world. We've made more progress in two hundred years than the rest of the world in two thousand, done by people who didn't know it was impossible to do it. It's like an army charge up a hill. That happened in World War II and in Korea. The boys did it because they didn't know they couldn't do it.

  "We don't have a democracy any more," he said. "We have a bureaucracy. When the population grows, they appoint people to do this or that so they won't have to shoulder the responsibility themselves. They turn it over to HUD and say, 'Well, that's the regulation.' There's no place for the individual to go for relief, and thousands of people get hurt for years before there's a public outcry.

  "The other problem we've got," he said, "is too many people drivin' the wagon who don't help pushin'—people on relief and welfare with the right to vote and holdin' the balance of power. If they want to ride in the wagon, they should be content to ride where they're told to sit, and not be at the steerin' wheel and tellin' us where to go. They don't know how many of them can ride without breakin' it down.

  "Only the productive people should be allowed to vote. I don't mean the old folks. I mean the total deadbeats, and we've got third and fourth generations of people who have been just ridin'. It's goin' to get so bad that the productive people will throw up their hands and say, T can't go any further.' And we may have a revolution.

  "You take Viet Nam," he said. "Our leaders felt we should be over there. They may have been wrong, but if one is drawn to go, and they have been enjoyin' the goodies, they should have gone. Cassius Clay, people said, 'If he can do it, I can. If they don't do nothin' to him, what can they do to me?' I don't know all the answers, but I sure know all the problems."

  He and his wife, Jean, have five children, three girls who were sixteen, eleven, and three, and two boys, who were fourteen and twelve at the time. The boys, he said, usually box late afternoons or early evenings at the open-air gym that had been erected, after my visit and before the Patterson fight, on the old Harris property in Cut and Shoot.

  "I'd like to see that," I said, "if they're going to work out out today."

  "My boys haven't got their growth yet," he said, "so I don't know what they'll be like. They didn't grow up like me."

  "Maybe that's one of the problems of this country," I said.

  "I do believe they've had it too easy," he said. "You worry about them some."

  "Parents always have," I said, "and in many ways it's more difficult today. Is there a drug problem down here?"

  "I guess it's everywhere," he said. "I guess it's fairly open. The children know about it. They don't talk too much about it, but it's even in the smallest towns, the most remote."

  "That has to be a worry."

  "I worry about it some, but not about mine," he said. "I hope I've raised them better than that, and I've got confidence in them. There's been parents who've been surprised I know, but I've spent a lot of time with them, and that's what they need—time, not money. People neglect their kids, and try to make up for it with ' money. Poverty isn't so bad if there's love that goes with it."

  "So what do you think the answer to the drug problem is?"

  "It's very simple," he said. "They could cure it in thirty days if they wanted to. They don't want to. If you want to cure it, you've got to make up your mind what you want to do, and whenever the people decide to do it, they can do it. When you go to cure it, you have to make the penalty hanging by the neck when they catch a drug pusher. If they started hangin' them on the court house steps, it'd be over in thirty days.

  "I don't want to hurt anybody," he said, "but if a man gave drugs to one of my kids, I'd kill him. I'd cut his throat. If they hung them and gave it TV coverage, they could cure it easy in thirty days. That's cruel, but look at how cruel it is to destroy those kids, their minds.

  "Does Skipper know about Roe Brown?" he said now, abruptly.

  "No," Skipper said. "I don't believe I do."

  "You didn't tell him about Roe Brown?" Roy said to me.

  "No," I said, "but I remember him."

  Roe had married Big Henry's sister Sibby. He was about five feet eight inches and weighed about ninety pounds and had a handlebar mustache.

  "They claimed he was the champion storyteller in the county," I said, "but your dad said to me, 'He's the greatest in the world. They think Walt Disney is good, but they should get around Roe.'"

  "That's right," Roy said, smiling.

  "Your dad said, 'Once Roe gets started on a story, if you don't watch yourself you get soaked up in that stuff and you set there for twenty-four hours.' He said they used to have lying contests, and the people would bet on Roe—and he'd beat everybody."

  "That's right," Roy said, and then to Skipper. "They brought this other fella in once, and they were supposed to tell fishin' stories. Roe, he went first, and he started off on how the weather was and the time of day, and how he'd catch these fish and haul them in. It took him several hours, and he'd always go 'huh-huh' so you couldn't interrupt him. He told about the kinds of trees and the way the branches were and the kinds of birds in the branches. Well, this other fella that they'd brought in and had bet Henry $10, he just paid Henry and left without even tellin' his story."

  December darkness had fallen when we left the office at five o'clock. I got into Roy's car with him, and Skipper Lofting followed us in his. We drove through traffic over the black, rain-slicked pavement that reflected the car lights and the street lights and the glow from the store windows, and then he turned right onto Route 105, as Lou Viscusi had that first time almost two decades before.

  "I saw Floyd Patterson not long ago," I said.

  "Floyd?" Roy said. "How's Floyd doin'?"

  "He's fine," I said. "He and his wife split up, and he married a white woman who was his secretary,
and they have two little girls. He's concerned about the drug problem, too, and he's started a boxing club to try to combat it. He's also started taking piano lessons to encourage one of his daughters who is, I guess, as shy as he used to be. He believes, as you do, in spending time with his children."

  "I'm glad to hear that," Roy said.

  "He's miffed, though," I said, "about something you said about him and that, he felt, degraded him."

  "Is that so?" he said. "I don't know what that was, and I like Floyd. I really do, and I'm sorry he feels that way. I think his problem was, though, that he had an inferiority complex. He never hurt anybody until they hurt him."

  "He had too much compassion for a fighter."

  "That's right," he said. "He did, and I'm glad he's all right."

  Outside of town now only our headlights and those of oncoming cars broke the darkness. After several miles we turned into a driveway on the right and stopped in a pine and oak grove in front of a modern two-story natural wood and fieldstone house, and it was as if we were not in Cut and Shoot, Texas, but in the executive suburbs of upper Westchester Country, New York, or Fairfield County, Connecticut.