Michener, James A.

by Texas

  Mr. Kramer defended the little creatures to anyone who would listen, but not many cared: 'You ever see his tongue? Darts out about six inches, long, very sticky. Zoom! There goes another ant. another beetle. He was made to police the garden and knock off the pests.'

  Once when a Mrs. Cole was complaining with a bleeding heart] about what the armadillos had done to her lawn, he stopped hei with a rather revolting question: 'Mrs. Cole, have you ever inspected an armadillo's stomach? Well, I have, many times. Dis sected bodies I've found along the highway. And what does the stomach contain? Bugs, beetles, delicate roots, flies, ants, all tht

  crawling things you don't like. And you can tell Mr Cole that in seventeen autopsies, I've never found even the trace of a bird's egg, and certainly no quail eggs.' By the time he was through with his report on the belly of an armadillo, Mrs. Cole was more than ever opposed to the destructive little beasts.

  But it was when he extolled the beauty of the armadillo that he lost the support of even the most sympathetic Larkin citizens, for they saw the little animal as an awkward, low-slung relic of some past geologic age that had mysteriously survived into the present; one look at the creature convinced them that it should have died out with the dinosaurs, and its survival into the twentieth century somehow offended them. To Mr. Kramer, this heroic persistence was one of the armadillo's great assets, but he was even more impressed by the beauty of its design.

  'Armadillo 7 What does it mean? "The little armored one." And if you look at him dispassionately, what you see is a beautifully designed animal much like one of the armored horses they used to have in the Middle Ages. The back, the body, the legs are all protected by this amazing armor, beautifully fashioned to flow across the body of the beast. And look at the engineering!' When he said this he liked to display one of the three armadillos he had tamed when their parents were killed by hunters and point to the miracle of which he was speaking: 'This is real armor, fore and aft. Punch it. Harder than your fingernail and made of the same substance. Protects the shoulders and the hips. But here in the middle, nine flexible bands of armor, much like an accordion. Always nine, never seven or ten, and without these inserts, the beast couldn't move about as he does. Quite wonderful, really. Nothing like it in the rest of the animal kingdom. Real relic of the dinosaur age.'

  But he would never let it end at that, and it was what he said next that did win some converts to the armadillo's defense: 'What awes me is not the armor, nor the nine flexible plates. They're just good engineering. But the beauty of the design goes beyond engineering. It's art, and only a designer who took infinite care could have devised these patterns. Leonardo da Vinci, maybe, or Michelangelo, or even God.' And then he would show how fore and aft the armor was composed of the most beautiful hexagons and pentagons arranged like golden coins upon a field of exquisite gray cloth, while the nine bands were entirely different: 'Look at the curious structures! Elongated capital A's. Go ahead, tell me what they look like. field of endless oil derricks, aren't they? Can't you see, he's the *ood-luck symbol of the whole oil industry. His coming to Larkin was no mistake. He was sent here to serve as our mascot.'

  How beautiful, how mysterious the armadillos were when one took the trouble to inspect them seriously, as Mr. Kramer did. They bespoke past ages, the death of great systems, the miracle of creation and survival, they were walking reminders of a time when volcanoes peppered the earth and vast lakes covered continents. They were hallowed creatures, for they had seen the earth before ! man arrived, and they had survived to remind him of how things once had been. They should have died out with Tyrannosaurus Rex and Diplodocus, but they had stubbornly persisted so that they could bear testimony, and for the value of that testimony, j they were precious and worthy of defense. 'They must continue i into the future,' Mr. Kramer said, 'so that future generations can J see how things once were.'

  'What amazes,' Mr. Kramer told the women he tried to per-j suade, 'is their system of giving birth. Invariably four pups, and i invariably all four identicals of the same sex. There is no case of ; a mother armadillo giving birth to boys and girls at the same time. .1 Impossible. And do you know why? Because one fertilized egg is j split into four parts, rarely more, rarely less. Therefore, the resulting babies have to be of the same sex.

  'But would you believe this? The mother can hold that fertilized s four-part egg in her womb for the normal eight weeks, or, if thingsI don't seem propitious, for as long as twenty-two months, same as j the elephant. She gives birth in response to some perceived need,! and what that is, no one can say.'

  As he brooded about this mystery of birth, wondering how the armadillo community ensured that enough males and femalesi would be provided to keep the race going, he visualized what he called 'The Great Computer in the Sky,' which kept track of how. many four-girl births were building up in a given community: And some morning it clicks out a message—'Hey, we need a couple of: four-boy births in the Larkin area.' So the next females to become: pregnant have four male babies, and the grand balance is maintained.

  Mr. Kramer could find no one who wished to share his specula-E tion on this mystery, but as he pursued it he began to think about human beings, too: What grand computer ensures that we have a balance between male and female babies? And how does it make the adjustments it does? Like after a war, when a lot of men have died in battle. Normal births in peacetime, a thousand and foui males to a thousand females, because males are more delicate in , the early years and have to be protected numerically. But after a war, when The Great Computer knows that there's a deficienc)

  in males, the balance swings as high as one thousand and nine to one thousand.

  So when he looked at an armadillo on its way to dig in his lawn, he saw not a destructive little tank with incredibly powerful digging devices, but a symbol of the grandeur of creation, the passing of time, the mystery of birth, the great beauty that exists in the world m so many different manifestations: An armadillo is not one whit more beautiful or mysterious than a butterfly or a pine cone, but it's more fun. And what gave him the warmest satisfaction: All the other sizable animals of the world seem to be having their living areas reduced. Only the armadillo is stubbornly enlarging his. Sometimes when he watched this mother and her four daughters heading forth for some new devastation, he chuckled with delight: There they go! The Five Horsewomen of the Apocalypse!

  Another Larkin man had a much different name for the little excavators. Ransom Rusk, principal heir and sole operator of the Rusk holdings in the Larkin Field, had a fierce desire to obliterate memories of his unfortunate ancestry: the grand fool Earnshaw Rusk; the wife with the wooden nose; his own obscenely pbese father; his fat, foolish mother. He wanted to forget them all. He was a tall, lean man, quite handsome, totally unlike his father ind at forty-five he was at the height of his powers. He had married i Wellesley graduate from New England, and it was amusing that ler mother, wishing to dissociate herself from her cotton-mill •ncestry, had named her daughter Fleurette, trusting that some-[ hing of French gentility would brush off.

  Fleurette and Ransom Rusk, fed up with the modest house in

  vhose kitchen Floyd had maintained his oil office till he died, had

  employed an architect from Boston to build them a mansion' and

  Me had suggested an innovation which would distinguish their

  ■•lace from others in the region: 'It is very fashionable, in the better

  states of England, to have a bowling green. It could also be used

  Dr croquet, should you prefer,' and Fleurette had applauded the

  lea.

  It was now her pleasure to entertain at what she called 'a leasant afternoon of bowls,' and she did indeed make it pleasant, lot many of the local millionaires—and there were now some two ozen in the Larkin district, thanks to those reliable wells which fever produced much more than a hundred barrels a dav, rarely ss—knew how to play bowls, but they had fun at the variations ley devised.

  I Ransom Rusk, as th
e man who dominated the Larkin Field, was

  not spectacularly rich by Texas standards, whose categories were popularly defined: one to twenty million, comfortable; twenty to fifty million, well-to-do; fifty to five hundred million, rich; five hundred million to one billion, big rich; one to five billion, Texas | rich. By virtue of his other oil holdings in various parts of the state, and his prudent investments in Fort Worth ventures, he was now rich, but in the lowest ranks of that middle division. His attitudes ij toward wealth were contradictory, for obviously he had a driving i ambition to acquire and exercise power in its various manifestations, and in pursuit of this, he strove to multiply his wealth. But he remained indifferent to its mathematical level, often spending an entire year without knowing his balances or even an approximation of them. Impelled by an urge to control billions, he did not care to count them. On the other hand, he had inherited his father's shrewd judgment regarding oil and had extended it to the field of general financing, and he always sought new opportunities and knew how to apply leverage when he found them.

  He was brooding about his Fort Worth adventures one morning when he heard Fleurette scream: 'Oh my God!' Thinking that she had fallen, he rushed into the bedroom to find her standing by the window, pointing wordlessly at the havoc which had been wreaked upon her bowling green.

  'Looks like an atomic bomb!' Ransom said. 'It's those damned armadillos,' but Fleurette did not hear his explanation, for she was wailing as if she had lost three children.

  'Shut up!' Ransom cried. 'I'll take care of those little bastards.'

  He slammed out of the house, inspected the chopped-up bowling lawn, and summoned the gardeners: 'Can this be fixed?'

  'We can resod it like new, Mr. Rusk,' they assured him, 'but you'll have to keep them armadillos out.'

  'I'll take care of them. I'll shoot them.' In pursuit of this plan, he went to the hardware store to buy a stack of ammo for his .2% rifle, but while there, he happened to stand beside Mr. Kramer at the check-out counter, and the retired oilman, who had worked for Rusk, asked: 'What are the bullets for?' and unfortunately, Ran-: som said: 'Armadillos.'

  'Oh, you mustn't do that! Those are precious creatures. You should be protecting them, not killing them.'

  'They tore up my wife's lawn last night.'

  'Her bowling green? I've heard it's beautiful.'

  'Cost God knows how much, and it's in shreds.'

  'A minor difficulty,' Kramer said lightly, since he did not have to pay for the repairs. And before Ransom could get away, the

  enthusiastic nature lover had drawn him to the drugstore, where they shared Dr. Peppers.

  'Did you know, Ransom, that we have highly accurate maps showing the progress north of the armadillo? Maybe the only record of its kind 7 '

  i wish they'd stayed where they came from.'

  They came from Mexico.'

  'One hell of a lot comes from Mexico—wetbacks, boll weevils . . .'

  'A follower of the great Audubon first recorded them in Texas, down along the Rio Grande, in 1854. They had reached San Antonio by 1880, Austin by 1914, Jefferson in the east by 1945. They were slower reaching our dryer area. They were reported in Dallas in 1953, but they didn't reach us till this year. Remarkable march.'

  'Should have kept them in Mexico,' Rusk said, fingering his box of shells.

  'They're in Florida too. Three pairs escaped from a zoo in 1922. ■And people transported them as pets. They liked Florida, so now they move east from Texas and west from Florida. They'll occupy the entire Gulf area before this century is out.'

  'They aren't going to occupy my place much longer,' Ransom said, and that was the beginning of the hilarious adventure, because Mr. Kramer persuaded him, almost tearfully, not to shoot the armadillos but to keep them away from the bowling green by building protection around it: 'These are unique creatures, relics of the past, and they do an infinite amount of good.'

  The first thing Rusk did was to enclose his wife's resodded bowling green within a stout tennis-court-type fence, but two nights after it was in place, at considerable expense, the bowling green was chewed up again, and when Mr. Kramer was consulted he showed the Rusks how the world's foremost excavators had simply burrowed under the fence to get at the succulent roots.

  'What you have to do is dig a footing around your green, six feet deep, and fill it with concrete. Sink your fence poles in that.'

  'Do you know how much that would cost?'

  'They tell me you have the money,' Kramer said easily, and so :he fence was taken down, backhoes were brought in, and the deep :rench was dug, enclosing the green. Then trucks dumped a huge imount of cement into the gaping holes, and the fence was rejected. Eight feet into the air, six feet underground, and the irmadillos were boxed off.

  But four days after the job was finished, Fleurette Rusk let out

  another wail, and when Ransom ran to her room he bellowed: 'Is it those damned armadillos again 7 ' It was, and when he and Mr. Kramer studied the new disaster the situation became clear, as the enthusiastic naturalist explained: 'Look at that hole! Ransom, they dug right under the concrete barrier and up the other side. Probably took them half an hour, no more.'

  The scientific manner in which Kramer diagnosed the case, and, the obvious pleasure he took in the engineering skill of his armadil-i los, infuriated Rusk, and once more he threatened to shoot hisl, tormentors, but Kramer prevailed upon him to try one more experiment: 'What we must do, Ransom, is drive a palisade below the! concrete footing.'

  'And how do we do that?'

  'Simple, you get a hydraulic ram and it drives down metal stakes Twenty feet deep. But they'll have to be close together.'

  When this job was completed, Rusk calculated that he hac $218,000 invested in that bowling green, but to his grim satisfac-; tion, the sunken palisade did stop the predators he had namec 'Lady IVlacbeth and Her Four Witches.' The spikes of the palisade went too deep for her to risk a hole so far below the surface.

  But she was not stopped for long, because one morning Ransorr was summoned by a new scream: 'Ransom, look at those scoun drels!' and when he looked, he saw that the mother, frustrated b) the palisade but still hungry for the tender grass roots, had suci ceeded in climbing her side of the fence, straight up, and ther descending straight down, and she was in the process of teaching her daughters to do the same.

  For some minutes Rusk stood at the window, watching the ode procession of armadillos climbing up his expensive fence, anq when one daughter repeatedly fell back, unable to learn, he brok< into laughter.

  'I don't see what's so funny,' his wife cried, and he explained 'Look at the dumb little creature. She can't use her front claws tc hold on to the cross wires,' and his wife exploded: 'You seem tc be cheering her on,' and it suddenly became clear to Rusk that h< was doing just that. He was responding to his wife's constant nagging: 'Don't wear that big cowboy hat in winter, makes yoi look like a real hick.' 'Don't wear those boots to a dance, make: : you look real Texan.' She had a score of other don'ts, and now Ransom realized that in this fight of Fleurette versus the lady armadillos, he was cheering for the animals.

  But as a good sport he did telephone Mr. Kramer and ask 'Those crazy armadillos can climb the fence. What do we do?' Mr Kramer noted the significant difference; always before it had beer

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  'those damned armadillos,' or worse. When a man started calling them crazy, he was beginning to fall in love with them.

  Tell you what, Ransom. We call in the fence people and have them add a projection around the upper edge, so that when the armadillos reach the top of the fence, they'll run into this screen curving back at them and fall off.'

  'Will it hurt them?'

  'Six weeks ago you wanted to shoot them. Now you ask if it'll hurt them. Ransom, you're learning.'

  'You know, Kramer, everything you advise me to do costs money.'

  'You have it to spend.'

  So the fence builders were brought in, and yes
, they could bring a flange out parallel to the ground that no armadillo could negotiate, and when this was done Rusk would sit on his porch at night with a powerful beam flashlight and watch as the mother tried to climb the fence, with her daughters trailing, and he would break into audible laughter as the determined little creatures clawed •their way to the top, encountered the barrier, and tumbled back to earth. Again and again they tried, and always they fell back. Ransom Rusk had defeated the armadillos, at a cost of $238 000 total.

  'What are you guffawing at in the dark?' Fleurette demanded, and he said, 'At the armadillos trying to get into your bowling *reen.'

  'You should have shot them months ago,' she snapped, and he •eplied, They're trying so hard, I was thinking about going down md letting them in.'

  'You do,' she said, 'and I'm walking out.'

  That was the beginning of the sensational Rusk divorce :ase, though of course many problems more serious than armadil-os were involved, and most of them centered upon the husband. ■ie had wanted the social cachet of an Eastern bride, but he had ilso wanted to remain a Texan. He had wanted to forget his loseless grandmother, his strange Quaker grandfather and espe-:ially his obese and ridiculous parents, but Fleurette often dragged hem into conversation, especially when strangers were present. Vnd although he had wanted a wife and had courted Fleurette rduously, he also wanted to be left alone with his multitude of projects. Had he married a woman of divine patience and sublime understanding, he might have made a success of his marriage, but Meurette had proved increasingly giddy and insubstantial. A wiser voman would never have inflated armadillos into a cause celebre,