“Oh, let’s just use oil,” he said. “It might be cheaper than water by the time we put on the pageant.”
“I think the final scene should be like a grand entry in a rodeo,” Jenny said. “Only instead of riding around the arena on horses we could all ride around it in Cadillacs. That’d be a wonderful way to end. It would suggest prosperity.”
“By then every Cadillac in town will have been repossessed,” Duane said peevishly. It annoyed him that no one had voted with him to end the pageant on a recessionary theme.
Just as he was working up to adjourning the meeting for lack of a quorum, Suzie Nolan walked in wearing a startling new hairdo. She had had her brown hair frosted and cut in a manner reminiscent of Tina Turner. She was also chewing gum in a rather energetic fashion. That was even more un-Suzie-like than the hairdo. It was a small thing, but it made Duane feel apprehensive.
She was followed almost immediately by Buster Lickle and the Reverend G. G. Rawley. Buster, in addition to being a Council member, was the local merchant prince. He owned several businesses of various natures in Thalia and neighboring towns, including the Dairy Queen. He was short and energetic, and he devoted his leisure time to historical pursuits.
G.G. Rawley was a horny-handed old man who had clawed his way onto the committee over the feebler efforts of other local churchmen. G.G., who had been called to the ministry from a life of lust and alcoholism, ministered to a Baptist splinter group called the Byelo-Baptists. Duane had never been certain what a Byelo-Baptist believed, but whatever it was, they believed it fervently. At one time the Byelo-Baptist creed had had a strong appeal to the ladies of Thalia, many of whom had left their normal churches to join G.G.’s.
Buster and G.G. had hardly taken their seats before Ralph Rolfe, a local rancher, and Jenny Marlow came in. To everyone’s astonishment Jenny Marlow also had a new hairdo. She had always worn her hair in a short boyish cut so it wouldn’t interfere with her pitching motion. It was still short, but now managed to stick out every which way in a spiky fashion. Jenny was also wearing a good deal of vivid blue eye shadow.
“Well, I guess we’re all here,” Duane said, with a sinking heart. He wished he knew what the new hairdos meant. When Karla changed hers it usually meant a new boyfriend.
The main reason his heart sank, though, was that the whole committee was present, and the more members who came, the longer the session. Arguments tended to flare up like grass fires. Just thinking about all the arguments that might flare up caused him to experience a sudden energy loss.
“This should be a short meeting, folks,” he said, trying to sound brisk. “The T-shirts and ashtrays and bumper stickers should be coming in next week. That’ll be one worry off our minds.”
No one seemed to be too interested in that particular worry, so Duane went on to the next one.
“The first thing we need to vote on is whether to hire an outside person to direct the pageant,” he said. “We’re gonna need to start rehearsals in about another month.”
The committee remained silent. The question of hiring an outside director for the pageant did not seem to interest them deeply. Duane felt like hitting them with his work glove, as he did Shorty, to make them talk.
“I have the name of a man from Brooklyn who directs pageants,” Duane said. “He did one down in Throckmorton County and they were real pleased with him.”
“Is Brooklyn over near Tyler, or where would it be at?” the Reverend Rawley inquired.
“It’s part of New York City,” Duane informed him. “He comes with a crew of three, to help him with special effects. We’re gonna need a little light show when we’re doing the Creation.”
“The Lord didn’t employ electricity,” G.G. pointed out. He saw it as his duty to fend off any skits that might lead to a liberal interpretation of the Bible.
“He employed lightning,” Sonny said. “That’s electricity.”
“He didn’t employ nobody from Brooklyn, New York,” G.G. said. “The man might be a Catholic.”
Duane sighed. “He’s supposed to be real good with fight scenes,” he said. “We’re doing about ten wars, we need somebody who knows how to stage fight scenes.”
“Most people around here already know how to fight,” G.G. said.
“But they won’t be fighting, they’ll be pretending to fight,” Duane said. “At least I hope they’ll just be pretending.”
The necessity of staging the Revolutionary War, the Texas war of independence, the Civil War, the two World Wars and possibly Korea and Viet Nam worried him a good deal, considering the stressed-out condition of the people who would be simulating all that combat.
It was agreed to place a call to the man from Brooklyn to find out how much he would charge the county to direct their pageant.
Duane had recovered a bit from his energy loss. He decided to move at once to adjourn the meeting while he still felt vigorous enough to walk to his pickup; but before he could act, Buster Lickle hunched forward, a passionate gleam in his eye.
“Now that that’s out of the way, can we talk about Texasville?” he asked. “We got to settle that question pretty soon, don’t we?”
“I guess we do, Buster,” Duane said. He had lost his appetite for a steak and wished he could just be at home, eating a bowl of Cheerios.
CHAPTER 19
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE PLANNING COMMITTEE of the Hardtop County centennial, Thalia had not always been the county seat. That honor had not fallen to it until 1906.
The original county seat had been called Texasville and had consisted at first of nothing more than a clapboard post office constructed on the stark prairie by two land speculators, Mr. Joe Brown and Mr. Ed Brown, who were not related. They had needed a post office so land-hungry suckers could mail them checks, and had managed to get the state to authorize one.
Texasville, by all accounts—and from the point of view of the Centennial Committee, there were far too many accounts—had never developed into much of a town, though the two Mr. Browns had chosen a site that offered anyone who cared to look an almost unlimited view of the commodity they had for sale.
Unfortunately for the two gentlemen, not many cared to look, and of those who looked, even fewer liked what they saw. The Comanches had been officially whipped a few years previously, but there were still those who doubted that the whipping would take.
Another discouraging factor in the eyes of early settlers was that the sun around Texasville was a good deal too bright. The nearest shade tree was a half day’s ride to the south, and the nearest creek as well. Though Joe Brown and Ed Brown printed up flyers assuring settlers of abundant water, most were in a thoroughly parched condition long before they reached the little post office. The two Browns dug a well and dispensed free water lavishly, but despite their generosity a land boom failed to develop. Even once there was an official county—named Hardtop because of the flintlike nature of the topsoil—settlement remained sluggish. The few pioneers who straggled in ignored Texasville and homesteaded near one of the county’s five or six anemic creeks.
The two Browns were resourceful men, not easily discouraged. They soon gave up on land and turned their attention to sin. They tacked a saloon onto their little post office and procured a shady lady or two from the fleshpots of Fort Worth.
Sin didn’t really boom either—the homesteaders couldn’t afford it—but enough cowboys and drummers passed through to support Texasville for another twenty years. Mr. Joe Brown and Mr. Ed Brown became their own best customers. Mr. Joe Brown drank himself to death in 1915, and Mr. Ed Brown married a toothsome little shady lady in the same year.
When oil was discovered in the county a few years later, Mr. Ed Brown rapidly converted his windmill into a drilling rig and began to puncture, more or less at random, the large tract of land he still owned.
Instead of striking oil, he struck rattlesnakes. He positioned his drilling rig a bit too close to one of the many rocky bluffs in the neighborhood and drilled right into what was t
hen believed to be the most populous den of diamondbacks in the world. It was conservatively estimated to contain ten thousand snakes and made headlines as far away as Waco.
The veracity of the count was soon called into question by envious snake hunters in neighboring counties, several of whom claimed to have uncovered dens containing fifty or even one hundred thousand snakes.
Claims and counterclaims filled the pages of small prairie newspapers for the next several years, but when the excitement subsided it became evident that the proximity of ten thousand snakes would do little to spur land sales around Texasville.
Mr. Ed Brown racked his brain for the next year or two, trying to think of a way to market the snakes, or to turn the den into a profitable tourist attraction. Unfortunately it was necessary to crawl into the den itself in order to appreciate the magnitude of the discovery, and not too many could be found who were willing to pay money to crawl into a den containing ten thousand snakes.
Ed Brown grew increasingly discouraged. Despite his hopes, the prosperous little community he had envisioned refused to develop. Texasville continued to consist of one building, his own saloon-post office. He tacked on a third room and made it a general store, but three rooms didn’t make a town.
Meanwhile, in another part of the county, just the sort of community he had envisioned did develop. It was called Thalia. It, too, started as a post office. The site was no less barren than the site of Texasville, but for some reason houses were built and businesses started. There were even churches.
Ed Brown was consumed with envy, and had other problems as well. Belle Brown, the little shady lady he had married, proved more toothy than toothsome. Ed Brown was frequently heard to say he would rather go crawl in with his rattlesnakes than share a bed with Belle.
Desperate to utilize the one resource that remained to him, he made an expensive trip to Chicago to see if the meat-packing interests would be interested in packing rattlesnakes. He was promptly assured that they wouldn’t, and returned to Hardtop County a broken man, only to discover Belle dancing gaily with three cowboys. He promptly found a pistol and emptied it at his wife and the cowboys, but the shots did no damage. Then he found a shotgun and again approached his victims, who were cowering behind a barrel of molasses in the general store.
“I curse the goddamn fate that caused me to start up this goddamn place,” he said. “It’s ruined me to the point where I can’t even shoot straight. I would like to see a plague of scorpions descend on Texasville and sting you skunks to death.”
Having delivered that chilling hope, Ed Brown walked out with his shotgun and was last seen, about sundown of that day, standing pensively at the entrance to the snake den.
Attempts to recover his body were half-hearted. Hooks were dropped into the den in hopes of snagging it, but when the hooks were pulled up they were usually covered with a dozen or so writhing diamondbacks. The crews soon grew discouraged.
Belle Brown, his bereaved widow, didn’t press the search.
“A grave is nothing but a hole in the ground, anyway,” she observed.
A year later oil was struck on the old Brown & Brown tract, of which Belle was sole owner. The tract soon had one hundred and fifty producing wells. Belle moved into Thalia and built a mansion. Though by far the richest person in the county she refused to have any truck with high society, such as it was then. She rode her mule to town to get her mail and let her coon dogs sleep in her big Packard automobile. Her passion was chicken-fighting; she often had a few cronies in and held cockfights in her vast living room. She drank heavily and went from toothy to toothless within a few years. She was quick to take offense and flung unintelligible threats at almost anyone who crossed her path.
Meanwhile a legend grew around the unhappy Ed Brown. Cowboys crossing the plains at night near Diamondback Hill, the bluff where the den was located, reported hearing singing that seemed to come from under the ground. Ed Brown had had a fine tenor voice.
Once or twice a figure was seen strolling around the bluff. There were people who felt Ed Brown wasn’t dead at all. He was living with the snakes, they said. Travelers reported that the snakes encountered on Diamondback Hill were unusually testy, as if protecting a secret. Old-timers speculated that Ed Brown was just biding his time, waiting to get revenge on Belle.
If that was true, he waited too long. Belle Brown wandered out on her second-story porch one night, deep in her cups, fell off and broke her neck. The whole fortune went to her three nephews, who sued one another for more than twenty years, each trying to secure the lion’s share.
Texasville thrived during the boom. Boomers gladly paid Belle five dollars a night just to be allowed to bed down on the floor. Five or six more clapboard shacks were built, and it looked as if the place might become a town after all.
But when the boom died all forward progress stopped. Texasville soon lost its post office, and when the county voted itself dry the saloon had to close. The general store failed and the clapboard shacks were soon pulled down by people needing lumber. The only visitors were cowboys who would occasionally stop and nap in the shade of the old porch.
The original building began to sag, and eventually it collapsed. A small tornado passed through in the late thirties and scattered the remains far and wide. The floor was all that was left. Scorpions bred plentifully under the sandy floorboards, but no skunks, human or otherwise, got killed.
In the fifties a bulldozer cutting a pipeline trench along the side of Diamondback Hill bored right through the snake den. It happened in March, and a couple of hundred sluggish snakes were killed by the pipeline crew. They found a few bones, but none of the pipeliners had ever heard of Ed Brown, so the bones were let lie. A month or two later one of the pipeliners casually mentioned the snake den to the local newspaper editor, who rushed to the site at once hoping to find the skeleton of Ed Brown, the father of Hardtop County.
The only bones that could be found turned out to belong to a calf. The editor, who had little enough to write about, rehashed the whole legend of Texasville and the two Mr. Browns for a week or two and then forgot about it.
Another quarter century passed and the centennial loomed on the horizon. Buster Lickle, who had only lived in the county a few years, began to agitate for a celebration. He took more interest in the county’s history than many people who had lived there all their lives.
By the time the actual planning for the centennial began, almost no one was left who could say with certainty where Texasville had been. Old Man Balt, whom everyone had counted on for help, couldn’t remember the place at all. When pressed he grew defensive and denied that it had even existed. Family albums were canvassed and a number of pictures of Texasville collected. These were shown to Old Man Balt, who said it looked like someplace in Arkansas to him.
The indefatigable Buster Lickle made an exhaustive search of the prairie south of Diamondback Hill and eventually managed to kick up a few rotting boards that he claimed were the remains of Texasville. The boards were only a few hundred feet north of Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge.
A dispute soon arose over the boards. By this time it had become clear to many people, Duane foremost among them, that putting on a county centennial was no simple matter. Hardly anything of interest had ever happened in Hardtop County, but the few things that undeniably had occurred were almost all subjects of dispute.
Duane felt a little betrayed. Until the Centennial Committee started its work, the people of the county had been blithely indifferent to their own scanty history, but as soon as he committed himself as head of the project everyone came alive and started arguing like wildcats. Rumors casually passed down by grandparents thirty and forty years previously took on the weight of Scripture—and the weight of the real Scripture, as invoked by G. G. Rawley, was heavy enough.
So far no issue had proven more explosive than Texasville. Hoyce Howell, editor of the Thalia Times, and himself a relative newcomer to the county, had never liked Buster Lickle. Hoyce set out to debunk Bu
ster’s discovery of the remains of Texasville. In a front-page article he claimed that the boards Buster had kicked up were only the remains of an outhouse.
Buster Lickle was so outraged by this slur on his archeology that he threatened to pull all his advertising out of the Times.
The threat of economic sanctions soon became a common tool. Karla despised Buster Lickle and was outraged by his pretensions to historical expertise. She threatened to organize a boycott of the Dairy Queen if he didn’t stop bugging people about things they weren’t interested in.
“He could have planted those boards himself, and aged them to look old,” Karla said.
“Even Buster wouldn’t be crazy enough to age boards in a place where there’s lots of old lumber,” Duane argued.
“I don’t like his attitude anyway,” Karla said. “I’m gonna print a T-shirt that says, TEXASVILLE SUCKS.”
“Please don’t do that,” Duane pleaded. “I’ve got enough trouble without you doing that.”
They were bobbing on the surface of their vast waterbed at the time, watching David Letterman.
“I might relent and not do it but there’s no telling what else I will do if you start censoring my T-shirts,” Karla said.
Duane had never liked the waterbed.
“If they’re gonna make waterbeds this big they oughta provide life jackets, just in case,” he said.
“You didn’t used to complain about any bed as long as I was in it,” Karla said. “What do you say to that?”
Duane didn’t say anything to it. He tried to feign sleep.
“I’ve never heard of half the people on these interview shows,” Karla said.
She had graciously refrained from printing the TEXASVILLE SUCKS T-shirt, but the many issues raised by the fact that Texasville had been the first county seat continued to bedevil the committee. There was no getting around the fact that the place had once existed—any comprehensive celebration dealing with the history of the county would have to take it into account.