Texas

by James A. Michener

  The Morrisons were aware that even with the loss of Maggie’s income, they could survive if Todd kept his job, but there was an additional aggravation: their two children—Beth, an extremely bright thirteen, and Lonnie, aged eleven—had already stated that under no circumstances did they want to leave the Cascade schools, which they had grown to love and which enrolled all their friends.

  The Morrisons had long practiced the art of family democracy, with ample discussion of most problems, and they did not back off from this unpleasant one: ‘Kids, if things get worse at Chrysler, I’m going to get laid off. What then?’

  ‘That would be horribly unfair,’ Beth cried.

  ‘They fired your mother, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but the school board’s a bunch of cruds.’

  ‘We must consider the possibilities if I do lose my job,’ Todd said.

  ‘You could become a policeman,’ Lonnie suggested. ‘The News had an article about needing more cops.’

  ‘Not my age, and not my salary,’ his father replied. He was thirty-seven, his wife thirty-three, at the exact time in their lives when they needed every penny to enjoy the amenities they treasured—a good movie now and then, books—and to afford careful attention to health, orthodontics, a sensible diet, durable clothes. And these cost money. Their house carried only a six-thousand-dollar mortgage, and they had never been extravagant with cars or socializing; they drove one new Plymouth and one very old Ford.

  Normally they should have been at the cresting point in their careers, with Todd looking forward to rapid promotion and Maggie being considered for a principalship. Now the bottom was falling out of their world, and they could not even guess where the terrifying drop would end.

  ‘Well, what shall we do if I’m fired?’ Todd asked again, and his three advisers sat silent, so he explored the subject: ‘Ford and GM won’t take me on, that’s for sure. Stated frankly, my type of work is ended unless I can find a job in Japan.’

  The Morrisons laughed at this suggestion, but then Beth asked: ‘Transfer? What’s a practical possibility?’

  ‘I don’t really know. For your mother, no school jobs in these parts, nor in places like New York, but I hear there are openings in California and boom towns like Atlanta.’

  ‘I’m attracted to neither,’ Beth said bluntly in her surprisingly adult manner, whereupon her mother said: ‘You’ll like whatever we have to do, Miss Beth, and remember that,’ and the girl said: ‘I know. I don’t want to leave Cascade, but if we have to, we have to.’

  ‘I vote for California,’ Lonnie said. ‘Surfing.’

  Todd ignored this suggestion: ‘I really think I’ll have to start looking for a new job.’

  ‘What could you do?’ Beth asked.

  ‘I’m good at what I do …’

  ‘Yes, you are, dear,’ Maggie said quickly.

  ‘I can keep an organization on its toes. Maybe labor relations. Maybe selling something.’

  ‘Death of a Salesman!’ Beth cried. ‘Willie Loman of the auto trade.’

  ‘You’d be awfully good at labor relations,’ Maggie said as she cleared the table. ‘But where?’

  The next three weeks passed in growing apprehension as Maggie Morrison applied to one school district after another; the results were not depressing, they were terrifying. At night she told her family: ‘Enrollments dropping everywhere in the city. Everyone suggests we move to some new area. We may have to.’

  In the month that followed, the spate of news from Chrysler was so depressing that Todd could barely discuss it with his family, and it was at one of these doleful meetings that the word Texas was first voiced. Todd said: ‘I hear that electronics is real big in the Dallas area. If they’re expanding …’ Beth said she did not want to go to Texas, too big, too noisy, but Lonnie could hardly wait to get started: ‘Cowboys! Wow!’

  On the next Friday night Todd was fired.

  In their despair, the Morrisons organized as a team: Todd studied the want ads; Maggie continued to seek work as a teacher, or even as a teacher’s helper; Beth, with remarkable maturity, took charge of the housework; and Lonnie volunteered for extra chores. But each week the family savings declined, and the children knew it.

  Todd applied for three dozen different jobs, and was rejected each time: ‘I’m too old for this, too young for that. I know both the assembly line and sales, but can’t land a job in either. This is one hell of a time to be out of work.’

  It was Maggie who found him a job, and she did it in a most peculiar way. She was in the industrial section of the city interviewing at a school for children with special problems, when she met a woman whose husband worked for a firm that had developed a new line of business: ‘What they do, Todd, they overhaul automobile engines. They have new diagnostic machines to spot weaknesses, other machines to fix them. They’ve had real success in Detroit and Cleveland, and they want to franchise widely. This woman said there were real opportunities.’

  Early next morning Todd was at the new company’s office, and he learned that what his wife had reported was true. Engine Experts had hit upon a system for adding years to the life of the average automobile engine and its subordinate parts; intricate new machines diagnosed trouble spots and instructed the workmen how to repair them. The initial cost of the system was rather high, but the cash return of the four installations that Todd was allowed to inspect was reassuring, and he entered into serious discussion with the owners.

  ‘What we want to do,’ the energetic men said, ‘is break into the Dallas, Houston market. Go where the cars are, that’s our motto.’

  ‘I don’t have the funds to buy in,’ Todd said truthfully, but the men said: ‘We don’t want you to. You know cars. You have common sense. We want you to go to Texas, scout out the good locations, what we call the inevitables, and buy us an option on the corner where the most cars pass, but where an industrial shop would be allowed. Would you be interested?’

  ‘What are the chances I’d fall on my ass?’

  ‘We’d carry you for one year, sink or swim. But we think you’d swim, especially in Texas, where they have poor public transportation and people are nuts about their cars.’

  They offered Todd a year’s assignment in Texas—Dallas or Houston, as he wished—during which he was to identify eight locations and arrange for the purchase of real estate and the issuance of licenses to open Engine Experts shops. That night he handed his wife and children pencils and paper and asked them to take notes as he lined out their situation: ‘Six months ago this family had income as follows. Father, twenty-six thousand dollars; mother, eight thousand dollars. Total how much, Lonnie?’

  ‘Thirty-four thousand dollars.’

  ‘Well, we both lost our jobs. Salary right now, zero. We can get something for the house. Our savings go steadily down, but still nineteen thousand dollars. Should have been a lot more, but we didn’t anticipate.’

  ‘We can cut back,’ Beth said. ‘I don’t need special lessons.’

  ‘We can all cut back, or starve. I’ve been offered a job in Texas …’

  ‘Hooray!’ Lonnie cried. ‘Can I have a horse?’

  ‘The salary will be eighteen thousand dollars, with promise of a bonus if I do well.’

  ‘You’ll do well,’ Maggie said.

  It was agreed. The Todd Morrisons of Michigan, a family deeply imbedded in that state, would move to Houston, Texas. On a morning in July 1968, with tears marking all their faces, they left Michigan forever and headed south. They did not paint on their truck the ancient sign G.T.T., but they could have, for the social disruptions which were forcing them south were almost identical with those which had spurred the migrations to Texas in 1820 and 1850. They, too, were in search of a better life.

  In that summer of 1968 a different family of immigrants—mother, father, four daughters—moved quietly into the oil town of Larkin, and within three weeks had the owners of better-class homes in a rage. They were such a rowdy lot, especially the mother, that an observ
er might have thought: The rip-roaring boom days of 1922 are back!

  They were night people, always a bad sign, who seemed to do most of their hell-raising after dark, with mother and daughters off on a toot marked by noise, vandalism and other furtive acts. They operated as a gang, with their weak and ineffective father along at times, and what infuriated the townsfolk particularly was that they seemed to take positive joy in their depredations.

  Despite their unfavorable reputation—and many sins were charged against them which they did not commit—they really did more good than harm; they were an asset to the community, and they had about them elements of extraordinary beauty, which their enemies refused to admit.

  They were armadillos, never known in this area before, a group of invaders who had moved up from Mexico, bringing irritation and joy wherever they appeared. Opponents of the fascinating little creatures, which were no bigger than small dogs, accused them of eating quail eggs, a rotten lie; of raiding chicken coops, false as could be; and of tearing up fine lawns, a just charge and a serious one. Ranchers also said: ‘They dig so many holes that my cattle stumble into them and break their legs. There goes four hundred bucks.’

  The indictment involving the digging up of lawns and the making of other deep holes was justified, for no animal could dig faster than an armadillo, and when this mother and her four daughters turned themselves loose on a neat lawn or a nicely tilled vegetable garden, their destruction could be awesome. The armadillo had a long, probing snout, backed up by two forefeet, each with four three-inch claws, and two hind feet with five shovel-like claws, and the speed with which it could work those excavators was unbelievable.

  ‘Straight down,’ Mr. Kramer said, ‘they can dig faster than I can with a shovel. The nose feels out the soft spots and those forelegs drive like pistons, but it’s the back legs that amaze, because they catch the loose earth and throw it four, five feet backwards.’

  Mr. Kramer was one of those odd men, found in all communities, who measured rainfall on a regular basis—phoning the information to the Weather Service—and who recorded the depth of snowfall, the time of the first frost, the strength and direction of the wind during storms, and the fact that in the last blue norther ‘the temperature on a fine March day dropped, in the space of three hours, from 26.9 to 9.7 degrees Celsius.’ He was the type who always gave the temperature in Celsius, which he expected his friends to translate into Fahrenheit, if they wished. He was, in short, a sixty-two-year-old former member of an oil crew who had always loved nature and who had poked his bullet-cropped sandy-haired head into all sorts of corners.

  The first armadillos to reach Larkin were identified on a Tuesday, and by Friday, Mr. Kramer had written away for three research studies on the creatures. The more he read, the more he grew to like them, and before long he was defending them against their detractors, especially to those whose lawns had been excavated: ‘A little damage here and there, I grant you. But did you hear about what they did for my rose bushes? Laden down with beetles, they were. Couldn’t produce one good flower even with toxic sprays. Then one night I look out to check the moon, three-quarters full, and I see these pairs of beady eyes shining in the gloom, and across my lawn come these five armadillos, and I say to myself: “Oh, oh! There goes the lawn!” but that wasn’t the case at all. Those armadillos were after those beetles, and when I woke up in the morning to check the rain gauge, what do you suppose? Not one beetle to be found.’

  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 her with a rather revolting question: ‘Mrs. Cole, have you ever inspected an armadillo’s stomach? Well, I have, many times. Dissected bodies I’ve found along the highway. And what does the stomach contain? Bugs, beetles, delicate roots, flies, ants, all the 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? 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. A field of endless oil derricks, aren’t they? Can’t you see, he’s the good-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, they were precious and worthy of defense. ‘They must continue into the future,’ Mr. Kramer said, ‘so that future generations can see how things once were.’

  ‘What amazes,’ Mr. Kramer told the women he tried to persuade, ‘is their system of giving birth. Invariably four pups, and 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. Impossible. And do you know why? Because one fertilized egg is 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 four-part egg in her womb for the normal eight weeks, or, if things don’t seem propitious, for as long as twenty-two months, same as 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 females 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 speculation 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 four 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 deficiency 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 in 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!