Michener, James A.

by Texas

  hut once it reached that status, there was no turning back.;

  She charged him with numerous cruelties and more insensitivi-l ties. She swore, in her affidavit, that life with such a brute hadi become quite impossible, and when the case was well launched,: she did the one thing that was calculated to ensure her victory: shej hired Fleabait Moomer from Dallas to press her claim for a finan-s cial settlement in the Larkin County court.

  Ransom's lawyer almost shuddered when he learned that Fleabait was coming into the case: 'Ransom, we're in deep trouble.'

  'Why?''

  'Fleabait tears a case apart. When he's in the courtroom anything can happen. Do you really want to go ahead with this?' And: when Rusk replied: 'I sure as hell do, I want to get rid of that millstone,' the lawyer felt he had better explain Fleabait Moomer.

  'He's a country genius. Very bright, no morals at all. He'll do anything to win, and I warn you right now that with a case like this, he'll prohably win.

  'He gets his name from his habit of scratching himself like a yokel while he's pleading. Scratch here. Scratch there But twice in each case he stops, looks at the jury, crosses his arms, and scratches with both hands. The jury expects this, and they lean forward with special attention because they know he's going to make an important point. And God help you when he scratches with both hands, because that's when you're going to be crucified.

  'He'll charge you with sodomy, with theft of public funds, with the corruption of juveniles, with murder, with surreptitious dealing with the enemy, anything to make you the hideous focus of the case and not vour poor, wronged wife. Are you strong enough to go up against Fleabait 7 '

  ;

  Ransom said he thought he was, and the notorious trial began. was held in that majestic room designed seventy years earlier b) James Riely Gordon, and when the disputants began their in flamed accusations, an observer might have wished that the dig nified hall of justice had been reserved for worthier cases.

  The judge was a serious jurist, aware of the sensational natun of the trial he was conducting, but he was powerless against th< antics of Fleabait Moomer, who told the jury: 'My client, tha beautiful and distressed woman you see over there, all she claim m this divorce proceeding is twenty-two million dollars. Now, tha might seem a lot to you, especially if you have to work as hard fo your money as I do.' And here he wiped his brow, his wrists anc

  his fingers. 'But it will be my duty to { ove that the defendant, that slinkin' man over there—'

  'I object, your Honor!'

  'Objection sustained. Mr. Moomer, do not cast aspersions on the defendant.'

  'That unfeeling, ungentlemanly, ungenerous and—'

  'I object, your Honor!'

  'Objection sustained. You must not attack the defendant, Counselor Moomer.'

  'It will be my task to show you good people of the jury that Ransom Rusk, who inherited all his money from his father and never did a day's lick of work in his life—'

  'I object, your Honor!'

  'Objection sustained. The jury will disregard everything Counselor Moomer has said regarding the defendant.'

  Fleabait, who wore a string tie, suspenders, a belt, and his hair combed forward in the Julius Caesar style, scratched and mumbled and fumbled his way along, playing the role of the poor country boy doing his best to defend the interests of a wronged wife, but on the third day he stopped abruptly, crossed his arms, and scratched himself vigorously while the jury, having expected him to do this, smiled knowingly. When he finished scratching, he asked ominously: 'Have you members of the jury considered the possibility that Ransom Rusk might have been involved with a gentleman in the neighborhood, whose name I refuse to divulge because of my innate sense of decency?' There was a flurry of objections, stampedes to the telephones and general noise, after which the trial continued.

  The second time Fleabait scratched with both hands, the jury leaned forward with almost visible delight to hear what scandalous thing was about to be revealed, and this time the lawyer said: 'You might well ask "How did Ransom Rusk acquire his wealth?" Did he do it by ignoring every decency in the book, every law of orderly business relations between men of honor?'

  The judge properly ordered this to be stricken, but the jury were as powerless to forget what had been said as they were to ensure Rusk the impartial justice to which he was entitled. Their recommendation was for the full $22,000,000, which the judge would later scale down to $15,000,000. Fleabait had told Fleurette: 'We'll go for twenty-two and be happy if we get twelve.' Of the award, he would take forty percent, or $6,000,000.

  On the evening of the adverse verdict, and while it still stood at twenty-two million, Ransom returned to his big house overlook-

  ing Bear Creek and watched with satisfaction as the sun went down. In the darkness, Mr. Kramer stopped by to check on the new fence, and Ransom told him: 'I'm happier tonight than I have been in years. Free of that terrible millstone.'

  'How did you happen to marry her?' The men of Larkin had long known her to be quite impossible.

  'Worst reasons in the world. Reasons I'm ashamed of, believe me. Like a lot of Texas boys, I went north to Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey. One of the best. Strong teachers and all that. Well, they had this Father's Day or something, and my parents came up. Filthy rich. My father weighing three hundred, my mother the cartoon version of a Texas oilman's wife. He a slob, she ridiculous in her jewels and oil-field flamboyance. The worst three days of my life, because all the boys knew they were super-Texas, but out of decency no one said anything unkind. They just looked and laughed behind my back. When, by the grace of God, my parents finally left, I overheard one of the boys on my hall say: "She was a walking oil derrick, with the dollar bills dripping off. Poor Ransom." '

  In the darkness he shuddered at that searing memory: 'Right then I decided that I would never be oil Texas. I dated the most refined girls from Vassar and Wellesley. I talked art, philosophy, anything to be unlike my father and mother. That's how I met Fleurette. I think the French name had a lot to do with it. And her determination to be so refined ... so Eastern.'

  'To tell you the truth, Ransom, you picked one hell of a lemon. You're well off, especially if you can afford the settlement.'

  'Kramer, do you have a pair of wire cutters?'

  'In the back of my truck.' When he returned with the long-handled instrument, which had once been outlawed in these parts, he was surprised when Rusk grabbed it and marched to the wire fence protecting his former wife's bowling green. With powerful clicks he cut a vertical path from ground to bending tip, then moved to a spot three feet away and cut another. W r hen this was done he called for Mr. Kramer to help him knock the panel flat, trampling it on the ground.

  Moving farther along to where he thought the armadillos nested, he cut down two more panels, and then the fence-busters, who would have been shot for such action eighty years earlier, returned to the porch, where they sat with flashlights, and when the moon was up, Ransom cried with sheer delight: 'Here they

  come

  •'

  By morning the armored destroyers would have that green looking as if it had been run over by careless bulldozers, and Ransom

  Rusk, $22,000,000 poorer, plus $238,000 for the fence, was happier than he had been in a long time.

  As soon as Todd Morrison started digging into Houston he liked what he found. 'This town has room for a stepper,' he told his wife, 'and I think I can step.' With the funds provided by the men in Detroit, he began looking around for likely spots at which to locate his franchises, and he became excited about the possibilities.

  'This place is incredible!' he told the family one night. 'A population this large and absolutely no zoning. A man can build anything he pleases, and no one can say him nay.' He pointed out that this remarkable freedom did not result in a hodgepodge: 'Some kind of rational good sense seems to prevail. Builders don't go wild. They just do what they damned well please, but they sort of hold things together.'

 
As with many operations in a democracy, cost seemed to enforce common sense, for no builder would erect his monumental new set of condominiums next to some hovel. What he did was buy up four hundred shacks, level them, and on this cleared land erect his Taj Mahal. Some other builder would do the same half a mile away, erect his Taj Mahal. Some other builder would place his huge Shangri-La half a mile away, and then, out of self-respect, all the property in between would be subtly cleaned up. Houston was not a city; it was an agglomeration of stunningly beautiful spots connected by strips that would be beautiful later on. 'Zoning on the measles principle,' Todd called it. 'A red splotch here, one over there, and finally, all bound together in interrelated patterns.' Houston was the last bastion of free, private enterprise, laissez faire at its best, and Todd relished it.

  As he worked he found that a good many of the locations he preferred were controlled by a hard-working real estate agent named Gabe Klinowitz, sixty-three years old and hardened in the Houston way of doing things. He was a small, round man, smoked a cigar and wore conservative business suits when the rest of Houston preferred less formal dress. And he was bright, as the success of his firm proved.

  During his first meeting with Todd he revealed one of his guiding principles: 'I look for the bright young man just entering the field. Help him get started right. Then expect to do profitable business with him for the next thirty years.'

  When Todd said he'd appreciate guidance, Gabe suggested: 'What you must do is master the wraparound.'

  'Which is what?'

  Taking a piece of paper, Klinowitz showed Todd the secret of buying real estate for a large corporation like a gasoline company: 'You find a good spot, on the corner of two busy roads. The owner has two acres, won't break it up into smaller lots. The company, say Mobil or Humble in the old days, they can use a quarter of an acre, only. That leaves you with an acre and three-quarters wrapping around the corner in a kind of capital L. Your job as buyer is to buy the entire piece, but not before you've found someone like me who'll take the wraparound off your hands. Do you see the economics?'

  When Todd said that he did not, Klinowitz asked him to write down the figures: 'You personally buy the whole two acres from the farmer for sixty thousand dollars. You've already arranged to sell the choice corner to Mobil for seventy-five thousand. And you sell me the wraparound, all that good land next to the corner, for fifty thousand. Your profit on the deal, a cool sixty-five thousand dollars.'

  Morrison studied this for a while, then pointed to the flaw: 'But I'm buying this for the company, not for myself,' and Klinowitz said: 'Before long, I suspect you'll be buying it for yourself.'

  The more Todd worked with Klinowitz, the more he liked him. The man was forthright, quick and impeccably honest. He was constantly making sharp deals, but he insisted that all participants understand the intricacies, and he would go to great lengths to explain to a farmer whose land he was trying to buy what the good and bad points of the proposed deal were. Often Todd heard him say: 'You wait eight, ten years, undoubtedly you'll get a better buy. But why wait? I promise you, you'll not get a better deal right now than I'm offering.'

  From watching many sales, Morrison learned one secret of Gabe's remarkable success in Houston real estate: 'Todd, you must go to bed each night reassuring yourself: "This is going to go on forever." I think it is. Houston is going to grow and grow and grow. You told me the other day that compared to Detroit prices, these are outrageous. Todd, I give you my solemn word, the two acres you buy today for sixty thousand, you'll live to see them resell for six hundred thousand. You must tell yourself that every night, and you must believe. This can go on forever.'

  Once when he gave this sermon he grabbed Todd by the arm: 'So you warn me: "Gabe, the bottom can fall out of this dream," and I'm the first to confess: "Yes, it can. But only temporary. Two, three bad years, then we come zooming back." Todd, this really can go on forever.'

  Having confessed that the bottom might drop out, temporarily,

  he gave Todd his first piece of long-range advice: 'Always keep yourself in position to weather a few bad years. Fire three-fourths of your staff. Put your wife and kids on a severe allowance. Draw in your horns. Bring the wagons into a circle. But never lose faith. Houston real estate will always bounce back.'

  And then he reached the operative part of his counsel: 'Do you see the logical consequences of this situation? If real estate is bound to zoom, it does not really matter how much you pay for a good site today. If you think the corner is worth no more than forty thousand and the farmer wants sixty thousand, give him the sixty, but he must allow you to write the terms.'

  'What terms?'

  'Smallest possible down payment, longest possible payout, lowest possible interest.' And he shared with Todd the details of one of his latest deals: 'This big corner, prime shopping area in the future, worth, I'd say, a hundred thousand dollars. Farmer thought he'd make a killing and ask a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Without blinking an eye I agreed, but then I insisted on an eleven-year payout, and a six-and-a-half-percent interest. He was glad to sign.'

  'What's the point?'

  'Don't you see? Suppose I was able to buy it at my price, but had to pay eight-percent interest for eleven years. Total interest, eighty-eight thousand dollars. If I pay his price with interest at six and a half percent, my interest bill for eleven years is eighty-nine thousand three hundred and seventy-five, only about a thousand dollars higher. Add that to the extra twenty-five thousand he chiseled me out of, I spent only twenty-six thousand extra dollars to make him very, very happy. He can boast to all his friends: "I certainly handled that sharp Jew real estate fellow."

  'But it still cost you twenty-six thousand extra bucks.'

  'Todd, you miss the whole point! If Houston real estate is going to climb like I think, eleven years from now that corner will bring me not the hundred and twenty-five thousand I paid, but more than a million. You give a little today, you make a million tomorrow.'

  And when Todd still deemed it imprudent to pay more now than one had to, Gabe revealed his last principle: 'Always leave a little something on the table for the other guy. Six years from now, when the rest of that man's property is for sale, he'll come to me because he'll remember that I treated him square in 1969. I left a little on the table.'

  It was strange, but perhaps inevitable, that of all the advice Gabe Klinowitz shared with his new friend, the one thing that

  Todd remembered longest was a chance remark: 'You may be buying for the company now, but before long you'll be buying for yourself.' And the more he contemplated this prediction the more sensible it became. One night he told his wife: 'With a little cash and a lot of gumption, a man could make a killing in this market.'

  He began riding tirelessly about the highways and country roads, looking not for franchise sites, because he had that end of his business rather well in hand, thanks to leads provided by Klinowitz, but for any stray properties which he might one day purchase for himself, and as he rode he found himself drawn northward, almost as if by magnet, to a peculiarity of the Texas scene: FM-1960.

  Up to about 1950, Texas had been predominantly an agricultural state, with its laws, banking procedures and business habits attuned to the rancher and the farmer. Not even oil had exceeded in general and financial interest the importance of the land, and a generation of Texas politicians had invented and supported a creative idea of high quality, the farm-to-market road, which ignored the through highways in favor of the small rural roads that wound here and there, enabling the farmer to bring the produce of his fields to the marketplace in the big towns. Forget the fact that if the quiet farm-to-market road was not well planned, it quite promptly became a jammed thoroughfare; the end result of this commendable system was a network of rural roads equaled in few states.

  So far to the north of central Houston that it seemed construction could never reach it, a modest farm-to-market had been established in the 1950s, called FM-1960. It was a narrow, bumpy road, w
ell suited to a farmer's slow-moving trucks, but Morrison could see that with a little impetus from a growing population, it had a strong chance of becoming a major thoroughfare. He was so enthusiastic about its possibilities that he took options on two corners, well separated, believing that automobiles must soon be careening past, but when one of the owners of Engine Experts flew down from Detroit, the man decided instantly that these two corners were too far out to be of any use to his company, and Todd was ordered to unload.

  'We have eight thousand dollars tied up in option money,' he protested, and the man said: 'That's why you pay out option money, so you gain time to correct mistakes.' In no way did he rebuke Todd, for he appreciated what a good job the latter had; done in Houston, but long after he had flown back to Detroit, his i decision rankled, and it was what happened as a consequence that launched Morrison on his unexpected career.

  Without telling Klinowitz that he had been forced to unload the:

  options, he went to him and said: 'I think I'd better stay closer to town. The kind of market I'm in. I have eight thousand tied up in these two options on FM-1960. Must I lose the down payments, or is there some way I could unload?'

  When Klinowitz saw the excellent sites he said immediately: 'I'll give you twelve thousand for your options right now. They're choice.'

  'Why give twelve when you know I'd be glad to get back my eight?' Todd asked, and Gabe said: 'Always leave a little something on the table.'

  Now Morrison faced a grave moral problem: Should he inform the Detroit men of the $4,000 profit he had made on the deal, or should he pocket the windfall? He consulted with no one, not Gabe, not his wife, and certainly not the big men in Detroit, but he did argue with himself: First, I was acting as their agent. Second, they laughed at the deal. Third, what are the chances they'll find out? In the end he decided to keep the money, and that, along with the $3,000 bonus he received at Christmas, plus the money his wife was earning as receptionist in another big real estate firm, enabled him to enter the new year with a nest egg of more than $11,000 and some tantalizing ideas.