Texas

by James A. Michener

  In these exciting days her father was playing a game much more daring than twirling or football. He had learned from his mentor, Gabe Klinowitz, how to put together a real estate syndicate, and he had already launched three, with outstanding success. ‘What you do,’ he explained to his wife, ‘is find a group of people with money to invest, doctors and dentists primarily, because they often have ready cash, and oilmen if you can get to them. You have to keep it less than thirty-six, because beyond that level Internal Revenue says: “Hey, look, that’s not a syndicate, that’s an ordinary stock offering,” and you fall under much stiffer rules. But suppose you find seven partners, twenty thousand dollars each. There’s a lot of people around Houston who have twenty thousand dollars they’d like to play with.’

  As he said this he stopped: ‘God, Maggie, doesn’t Detroit seem a far distance? Nobody up there had even two thousand dollars.’

  He went on: ‘Now, everybody knows that seven people cannot run a business, so they agree that you, who have the time, will be the general partner in charge, and they will be the limited partners. Very careful legal papers spell this out. You are to make the decisions. So with the hundred and forty thousand from the seven of them … you put in no money of your own, you’re the manager. So with their dough as down payment, you buy this great piece of property worth three million dollars. Immense future. You get ten percent of the action as your fee, plus another five percent as broker if and when you arrange a deal to sell it.

  ‘With your hundred and forty thousand dollars you’ve sewed up a hundred acres of choice land, worth millions later on, but you’ve paid only a down payment, long-term payout, everybody happy. Now, here comes the tricky part, and you have to have nerves of steel. The day comes when you sell that gorgeous piece of land so that your investors can get their money out plus a reasonable profit. And who do you sell it to? To yourself. You wave around a little money of your own as if you were putting it up, a new set of investors who pay for everything, and under the legal document determining what you can do as general partner, you sell it to the new group, not informing your earlier partners of your participation in the new syndicate.

  ‘You already own ten percent of the sale price, and there’s that five percent for acting as broker, and here’s the clever part. You leave on the table—’

  ‘What do you mean leave on the table?’

  ‘Gabe taught me. Always leave on the table a reasonable profit for the other man. You see to it that your original partners each make a nice profit. Not spectacular, respectable. Everybody’s happy, presto-changeo a lot of action, and you wind up with forty percent of the new syndicate, which now owns one hundred extremely valuable acres, and you started without a cent in the kitty.’ He chuckled: ‘And of course, you pay yourself a nice brokerage fee, which gives you even more ready cash.’

  ‘Sounds illegal to me.’

  ‘As legal as the Bank of England. All you have to do is keep your group of investors so happy that they won’t try to oust you as general partner.’

  It was legal, but it was not honorable, and after a second syndicate had been sold by its original owners to another consortium controlled by Morrison, at a price far below real value, Gabe Klinowitz, one of his partners, came to see him: ‘Todd, this is an unhappy day. I’m pulling out of your deals.’

  ‘You’ve made money on them.’

  ‘You’ve seen to that. But nowhere near what I should have made. I’m like your other partners. You trickle down just enough to keep us from suing you. I can’t afford scandals, neither can they. But we know what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘But wait a minute, Gabe. You and I …’

  ‘That’s the sad part, Todd. If you would do this to me … Do you realize how much you owe to me?’

  ‘It’s on my mind constantly. I told Maggie just the other day …’

  ‘If you would do this to a friend, Todd, some day you’ll do it to a stranger, and he’ll throw you in jail … or into a coffin.’

  ‘Now wait …’

  ‘We play hard in Texas. In Houston we play very hard and very rough. But we play honest. A handshake is a handshake, and by God, you better not forget it. Twice with me you’ve abused a handshake, Todd, that Gulf Oil deal and now this. Sooner or later when you do that around here, somebody blows a very loud whistle, and either the sheriff or the undertaker comes running. Goodbye, Todd. Keep your nose clean. Right now it’s very dirty.’

  As if he were intuitively aware that what he was doing was immoral if not illegal, Todd would not permit his quail-hunting friends to participate in his first syndicates, but when they heard of the considerable profits being made in such deals, they wanted in. Now, when he had a firm grasp of the intricacies, he told them on a ride south to their lease: ‘All right, you clowns, you wanted to share in the action. I have a lead on a swell chunk of property north of FM-1960 but well south of Route 2920, place near Tomball, two hundred choice acres, about ten thousand an acre.’

  ‘Hey,’ the oilman said, ‘that’s two million bucks.’

  ‘But we don’t put it up. Most we have to contribute, maybe ten thousand each. The rest, a mortgage, long payout, whatever interest the seller demands, because the rate of growth on this property is going to be sensational. Let time take care of the mortgage and the interest.’

  They were approaching Victoria when he made this proposal, and Roy Bub, who was driving as usual, slowed down and stared at him: ‘You sneaky sumbitch! When you bought my place you didn’t have a nickel to your name, did you? All hokey-pokey and fancy dance steps.’

  ‘Did you lose a penny on the deal, cowboy?’

  ‘No, and I’ve been tryin’ to figure out who did.’

  ‘Nobody, that’s who. We were playing the Texas game, all of us, and that time it worked. It can work this time too.’ His final talk with Gabe Klinowitz had scared him, and he had vowed that on this deal with his three friends, he would play it completely honest; they would share totally in any growth this land achieved, and if there was a sale, it would be at arm’s length to some complete stranger, with all the papers visible to the partners.

  He was so determined to avoid the traps that Gabe had warned about that he even called on Gabe in the latter’s grubby office: ‘You scared me, Gabe. I can see what you were warning me about, been brooding over it. Three of my close friends and I are organizing this syndicate for some choice land up by Tomball. I want you to come in, open books and a final sale to some third party. Clean.’ But Gabe said: ‘I never double back.’ And when the time came to liquidate the Quail Hunters’ Syndicate, as they termed it, Todd could not resist putting together a secret syndicate in which he had an unannounced share and of which he would be the sub rosa general partner, and he sold the Tomball acreage to this syndicate for about half its real value.

  In addition to his share of the Quail Hunters’ profit, he took a ten-percent brokerage fee for handling the sale, and a huge percentage of the new syndicate. Todd Morrison was now a multimillionaire.

  When Maggie Morrison made out the family’s income tax she discovered that in liquidating the Quail Hunters’ Syndicate, her husband had inadvertently failed to distribute to his three hunting partners profits to which they were legally entitled, and she drew his attention to this oversight. Todd, not wishing to reveal that his retention of those profits had been far from accidental, said with ill-feigned astonishment: ‘Maggie, you’re right. There’s forty-eight thousand dollars they should split among them,’ and she replied: ‘At least.’

  So on the next drive down to Falfurrias he told the men, as if bringing good news which he had uncovered: ‘Hey, you junior J. P. Morgans! Final figures on our syndicate show that we have an unexpected forty-eight thousand to split up,’ but when the cheering stopped and time came to tell them it would be split three ways, for it was their money, he found himself saying: ‘So that means an extra twelve thousand dollars for each of us. Come Monday, we can all buy new Cadillacs.’

  When the Cobbs sett
led into their home north of Levelland, Sherwood started immediately to make his gin the premier one in the area, and he began in the traditional way: He became a vociferous supporter of the Levelland Lobos, who consistently seemed to wind up their seasons three and seven, if they got the breaks. The countryside appreciated his enthusiasm and entered the judgment that ‘this here Cobb is dependable.’ From this solid foundation he could build.

  At the end of the third year, Sherwood gathered Nancy and their children in the kitchen and spread the figures before them: At Lammermoor, 119 pounds of lint to the acre, bringing 9¢ a pound. In Waxahachie, 239 pounds at 28¢ a pound. Here in Levelland, 391 pounds at 42¢ a pound. Year’s profit from cotton, gin and other operations—$149,000.

  In view of these figures he advised his family not to complain about the disadvantages of living atop the Cap Rock: ‘This is the cotton capital of the world, and no gin in the United States processed more of it last year than we did. I’m putting every cent we earned into more land and more wells. This can go on forever.’

  It was a sultry afternoon in May when Ransom Rusk and Mr. Kramer were on Rusk’s patio discussing the latter’s work in providing armadillos for the leprosy research in Louisiana. It was going well, Kramer said, and new discoveries were being made every month, it seemed, toward an ultimate cure for Hansen’s Disease: ‘They don’t like to call it leprosy any more. The Bible gave what’s an ordinary disease a bad name.’

  To the surprise of the two experts, Lady Macbeth and her eight witches were moving about, long before sunset, and this was so unusual that Rusk commented on it, and Kramer said: ‘Something’s afoot,’ and they watched the little insect-eaters for some minutes as they darted here and there, their armor reflecting in the sun.

  Then, suddenly, the mother began rounding up the four youngest pups and nudging them toward their burrow in the middle of the former bowling lawn, and as she herself headed for the hole, the four older pups galloped across the lawn and beat her to the entrance.

  ‘They must know something,’ Kramer said, and before he could begin to speculate on what it was, a maid came onto the patio: ‘Radio says tornado watch!’ and Kramer dashed inside. Telephoning a friend who helped him maintain a close guard on the weather, he spoke only a few words, then ran back to Rusk: ‘Not a watch. A real warning. Tornado touched down at the southern end of Tornado Alley.’ The words were ominous.

  ‘I must get to my anemometers,’ Kramer cried, running toward his car. ‘Stay here!’ Rusk bellowed, and so imperative was his voice that the expert on weather obeyed.

  From a vantage point on the second floor of the mansion, they studied the southwestern sky, supposing that the tornado, if it sustained its forward motion, would move north along its customary corridor, and they had been in position only briefly when they saw a sight that meant horror to anyone who had ever experienced a tornado. As if some giant scene shifter were rearranging the sky, the desultory clouds which had been filtering the heat were moved aside, their place taken by a massive black formation.

  ‘It’s a real one,’ Kramer said quietly. He started below, seeking some sturdy archway under which to hide, but Rusk grabbed his arm: ‘We have a cellar.’ So for some minutes the two stayed aloft to watch the frightening cloud.

  It came directly at Larkin on its way to Wichita Falls, and Kramer spotted the twister first, a terrible, brutal finger reaching down, a black funnel twisting and turning and tearing apart anything unlucky enough to lie within its path. It was going to hit, and hard.

  ‘One of the big ones,’ Kramer said.

  But still Rusk held fast, mesmerized by the awesome power of that churning finger as it uprooted trees, tossed automobiles in the air and disintegrated houses. His final view, before Kramer dragged him to the first floor, was of the upper cloud moving much faster than the lower spout, with the latter trailing behind and trying to catch up, destroying everything in its way as it did so.

  Rusk showed remarkable control, checking rooms as he ran: ‘Everybody to the cellar!’ On the ground floor he led the way to the heavy door that opened upon a flight of steel stairs, at the bottom of which waited a small, dark room lined with bottles of water, dehydrated foods, medical supplies and blankets. With that door closed, the household members were as safe as anyone could be with the needle of a tornado passing overhead.

  Walls shook, windows shattered as suction pulled them outward from their frames. A roar like that of a train passing echoed through the heavy door, and even this strongly built house trembled as if made of the frailest adobe. For one sickening moment it seemed as if the rooms above were being torn apart, and a Mexican maid began to sob quietly, but Rusk reassured her in an effective way: ‘Magdalena, when the storm ends, the people out there will need your help,’ and he issued directions: ‘As soon as I open the door, fan out and collect the wounded. If you find any dead bodies, put them on the lawn out front.’

  When Rusk gingerly opened the door, the servants scrambled up the steel stairway to view the desolation. No windows were left along the south and west faces of the mansion. Large chunks of the roof had been torn away. In the garden, trees had been uprooted, and to demonstrate the grotesque power of the storm, a small bungalow had been carried two hundred feet through the air and deposited upside down in the middle of the bowling lawn, its structure intact.

  After a brief survey, the servants began to search the streets and alleys, and the tragic task of finding bodies in the rubble began. Some were miraculously pulled free minutes before they would have suffocated; others would not be found for two days. Mr. Kramer saved four men by piping oxygen to them through metal tubes which he forced through debris that could not at the moment be moved. One woman was distraught, for her five-year-old son had been torn from her arms and sucked high into the air, to be thrown down she could not guess where. Frantically she searched for him through the mass of damaged buildings, and she was trying to tear boards away to look for him when a neighbor found him four hundred yards away, unscathed.

  Fourteen people died in Larkin, ten of them in automobiles, a heavy toll for such a small town. ‘Remember, damnit,’ Mr. Kramer muttered as men helped him pull a body out of one of the crushed cars, ‘worst place to hide in a tornado, your car. Wind must have lifted this one three hundred feet in the air and smashed it down. We’ll need torches to get him out.’

  The dead man inside was Dewey Kimbro. For seventy years he had roamed Texas, looking for carboniferous signals. Four times his discoveries had made him a millionaire; four times he had allowed the money to slip away. His will distributing his final fortune displayed his customary gallantry, for it awarded two hundred thousand dollars each to the five women with whom he had been entangled, and that included the girl Esther, whom he had brought to Larkin with him that first time but had never married. When the citizens heard of his generosity to the women who had given him so much trouble, they forgot how they had censured him, and said at his funeral: ‘Good old Dewey, he was a character.’

  Of course, when his will was probated the court found that it had less than three thousand dollars to distribute; all the wealth Dewey had accumulated in those last wonderful years in the Permian Basin had been dissipated. The tombstone, which Ransom Rusk erected, said: A REAL TEXAS WILDCATTER.

  … TASK FORCE

  For the past twenty-eight years Lorenzo Quimper had participated in the Texas Olympics, that is, Man versus Mesquite, and the score stood Mesquite 126, Quimper 5, which was better than many Texans did.

  Whenever Lorenzo had acquired a new ranch he started the same way, as if following the score of a ritual ballet: ‘Cándido, we’ve got to clear these fields of mesquite!’ In 1969 he had tackled his first field: ‘Cándido, we’ll chop it down.’

  He and his Mexican work force did just that, using power saws instead of axes, and they did a respectable job: ‘Meadow’s completely clean.’ But since the pesky mesquite had one very deep taproot plus innumerable laterals for every branch that showed above, this l
aborious cutting was nothing more than a helpful pruning. Nearly two years later: ‘Good God, Cándido! There’s more out there than when we started!’

  So in 1970 he and his workers burned off the mesquite, but this was a dreadful mistake, because the ashes served as a perfect fertilizer for the roots; a year later the fields were positively luxuriant, not with grass but with new mesquite.

  In 1972, following the advice of experts at A&M, he once more cut down the trees and then used acid on the visible roots, and this did kill them, definitely. But his acid reached only some six percent of the roots, whereupon the survivors leaped into action to take up the slack. ‘You’d think there were devils down there, proddin’ them to spring up through the soil,’ he groaned one day, and Cándido said: ‘You may have something there, boss.’

  In 1974 a new group of experts, including men from the great King Ranch in South Texas who had fought mesquite for half a century, visited the Quimper ranches to demonstrate a new technique: ‘What we do, Lorenzo, is cut the tree off at the base of the trunk, then use these two huge tractors to drag a chain which cuts deep beneath the soil. We don’t just pull up the main roots, we root prune the entire plant, get all the little trailers.’

  For three years the Quimper ranches looked fairly good, with a minimum of mesquite, but by 1977 the savage trees were back in redoubled force: ‘They been sleepin’, Mr. Quimper, jes conservin’ their strength.’ They had a lot of it when they reappeared, so that in 1978, Lorenzo said: ‘To hell with it,’ and his costly fields grew a little grass for his cattle, a lot of mesquite in which his quail, his deer and his wild turkeys could hide.

  Of course, Il Magnifico did not lose completely; as the score indicated, he did win five times, but only because he poured into selected fields a modest fortune in dynamite, tractors, chains, acid and muscle. He calculated that for a mere $6,000 an acre any man could effectively drive mesquite off land which had cost $320 an acre to begin with. His victories were Pyrrhic, but he did have a limited revenge.