Texas

by James A. Michener

  On schedule, these urges hit the four members of Roy Bub’s hunting team, with results that could have been anticipated: in their occupations the men had prospered unevenly, with the oilman finding headline success, and Todd Morrison, once of Detroit, approaching the well-to-do category of a real estate millionaire with close to twenty million. But the dentist was mired in the lower levels with only one or two million, and Roy Bub still dug sewers with no millions at all.

  So Morrison and the oilman bought the plane, a four-seater Beechcraft, but it was Roy Bub who learned to fly it, and for three memorable years they flew almost each weekend during hunting season and at least twice a month thereafter down to Falfurrias to their lease, which was now a minor Shangri-La, but they had not been doing this for long when the greatest of the Houston urges trapped them, and they began to think about purchasing a ranch west of Austin.

  In Houston a young man of ambition and talent was allowed so much elbowroom that he could progress pretty much at his own speed, but if he passed into his forties without owning a ranch, he betrayed himself as one who had left the fast track to find refuge in mediocre success along the more relaxed detours.

  Although Morrison and the oilman had the money, they still looked to Roy Bub as the outdoor expert, so that when they started searching seriously for their ranch, they placed in his hands the responsibility for finding it. Often in the late 1970s Roy Bub and one or two of the others would fly out for scouting trips through the lovely hills and valleys beyond the Balcones Fault.

  Few visitors from the North ever saw this wonderland of Central Texas, this marvelously rich congregation of small streams winding down valleys, of sudden meadowlands encompassed by hills, of a hundred acres of bluebonnets in the spring, and of the probing fingers of the man-made lakes, creeping deep into the rolling corners of the land. To see it from the highways that wandered through was delectable, but to see it as the four hunters now did, from low altitude in their plane, was a privilege of which they never tired. This was the golden heart of Texas, and a man was entitled to a share after he had brought in his third oil well or built his fourth skyscraper.

  It was Roy Bub who first spotted their dreamland. He had flown west from Austin and was keeping to the south shore of the huge lake which had appeared one day among the hills, when he saw a small feeder river winding here and there, aimlessly and with many bends, as if reluctant to lose its identity in the larger body of water. He told Morrison, who had accompanied him this time: ‘That’s got to be the Pedernales,’ and he pronounced the name as Texans did: Per-dnal-iss.

  As he followed the little stream westward he suddenly twisted the Beechcraft about, doubled back, and shouted: ‘There it is!’ They were over the magnificent ranch put together by Lyndon Johnson, and for some minutes they circled this Texas monument to a prototypical Texas man. Morrison, looking down at the airstrip built with federal taxes, the roadways paved by the state, the fences built by friends, and the pastures stocked by other friends, thought: Who really cares if he was a wheeler-dealer? He was a damned good President and one day this will all seep back to public ownership. I’d like to be President … for just one term.

  And then, after they passed the Johnson ranch, Roy Bub saw it, a stretch of handsome land on the north bank of the Pedernales. It contained everything the four hunters sought: a long stretch fronting the river, good ground cover for grouse and turkey, ample trees for deer to browse, plus a kind of park along the river and bleak empty spaces for wildlife to roam. It was the original Allerkamp ranch of five thousand acres, to which had been added the Macnab holdings of equal size, and when Roy Bub landed his plane at Fredericksburg, he and Morrison discovered to their delight that it was for sale. Once they satisfied themselves that it suited their purposes, neither man ever turned back, Roy Bub assuring his partners that it was the best available ranch in Texas, and Morrison convincing the oilman that it was a bargain, regardless of what the German owners wanted, and a deal was struck, with Todd and the oilman putting up most of the money and Roy Bub and the dentist doing most of the work.

  On a sad November Friday in 1980 they flew down to Falfurrias to inform the owner of their present lease that they would be terminating it on March first, and he was genuinely unhappy to see them go: ‘You lived up to every promise you ever made. I’ll miss you.’ The oilman said: ‘Now, if this causes you to lose any money—’ but he interrupted: ‘I’ll be able to arrange a new lease by tomorrow noon. Must be two hundred young tigers in Houston panting for a lease like this.’

  On one point the old contract was clear: any building which they had erected belonged to him … if it was fastened to the ground; any that remained movable belonged to them, and Roy Bub surprised the owner by saying: ‘We’ll want to take all the buildings with us.’

  ‘They’re yours, but I was hopin’ you’d want to sell them … at an attractive price … save you a lot of trouble,’ but Roy Bub said: ‘No, we can use them at the new place,’ and the owner looked in amazement as the oilman moved in three of his crews, who sawed the six small houses apart, mounted them on great trucks, and headed them two hundred and forty-one miles northwest to their new home, where they would be reassembled to form an attractive hunting lodge in a far corner of the Allerkamp land.

  The four hunters and their families had occupied the new ranch only two years when once more the inevitable pressures exerted by the rites of passage attacked them. The dentist discovered that he was now strong enough financially to abandon his practice and devote himself full time to the propagation and sale of his hunting dogs; he withdrew from the consortium and opened a master kennel on the outskirts of Houston. At the same time, the oilman was struck by an insidious disease which affected many Texas oilmen: ‘All my life I’ve dreamed of shooting in England and Scotland. The moors. The hunt breakfasts with kippers under the silver covers. The faithful gillies. The long weekends. Gentlemen, I’ve leased a stretch of good salmon river near Inverness and you’re invited to come over in season.’

  His Scottish adventure so absorbed him, what with the purchase of another Purdy gun and the making of arrangements for his Highland headquarters, that one night he informed Morrison and Roy Bub that he wanted to sell off his portion of the Allerkamp ranch, but when Todd said, almost eagerly: ‘I think I could swing it,’ he surprised both men by saying: ‘I’d want to cut Roy Bub in. Let him get a grubstake.’ And he persisted in this decision, arranging for Hooker a long-term payment with no interest: ‘I owe it to you, Roy Bub. You taught me what the outdoors was.’

  Six months later the Houston social pages displayed photographs of the oilman at his lodge in the Scottish Highlands, where he had been entertaining a British executive of Shell Oil, a Lord Duncraven, and a financier involved with the big oil operation in the North Sea, a Sir Hilary Cobham. It was an engaging shot, with the Houston man looking more like a Scottish laird than the locals.

  So now Todd Morrison and Roy Bub Hooker owned a ranch on the Pedernales and half a Beechcraft airplane, but the latter awkwardness was resolved when the oilman, totally preoccupied with his holdings in Scotland, offered to sell his part of the plane at a tremendous bargain, which Todd and Roy Bub gladly accepted. When the deal was closed with this remarkably generous old friend, they saw him no more. He had leaped five steps up the social ladder.

  But Morrison was generating enough income from his manifold real estate deals to permit him to absorb most of the cost of the ranch, and after an airstrip had been installed well away from the river, the private planes of many Houston real estate managers appeared at Allerkamp, and the place became known as a site where developers and their wives could enjoy a good time.

  Despite this concentration on business, and Morrison was never far removed from a deal of some kind, his love for the land never diminished, and he was therefore in a receptive mood when Roy Bub came to him one weekend with a challenging proposition: ‘Ol’ buddy, I think we got ourself a gold mine here. My recommendation, we fence it in …’


  ‘It’s already fenced in.’

  ‘I mean gameproof fence.’

  These were startling words, and Todd remained silent for some time, simply staring at the driller of septic tanks. Finally he asked, very slowly: ‘You mean those fences eight and a half feet high?’ And before Roy Bub could respond, he asked: ‘You thinking of exotics?’ Then Roy Bub said: ‘I sure am. Todd, with your money and my management and my feel for animals, we could have us a ball on this ranch.’

  ‘Do you know what gameproof fencing costs?’

  ‘I do,’ and from his wallet he produced a study of costs: ‘Very best, guaranteed to hold ever’thin’ but an armadillo, around nine thousand dollars a mile.’

  Rapidly Todd analyzed their situation: ‘Ten thousand acres, divide by six hundred forty acres to the mile, that’s about sixteen square miles. If it was a perfect square, which it isn’t, that would be a perimeter of twelve miles we’d have to fence. But we’d need cross fencing to break it into pastures, so add eight miles. Twenty miles of fencing at nine thousand a mile. Jesus, Roy Bub! That’s a hundred and eighty thousand, just for the fences, without the stock, which doesn’t come cheap.’

  ‘Todd, I got me a lead on some of the best exotics in the United States. Everybody wants to deal with me. The basic stock I can pick up for a hundred and thirty thousand, believe me.’

  They sat in the evening darkness reviewing these notes, and when Karleen and Maggie came in to see if they wanted drinks, the men asked their wives to stay. ‘The land isn’t square,’ Todd explained, ‘so the fencing might be even more than we’ve calculated.’

  ‘But I’ll bet I can get us a lot better bargain than nine thousand a mile,’ Roy Bub said.

  ‘What do you ladies think?’ Todd asked, and Maggie responded quickly: ‘I believe we could swing it. So long as real estate stays up,’ and Karleen said: ‘Roy Bub’s always liked animals. I suppose we’d want to move up here to get things organized,’ and Roy Bub said: ‘We sure would.’

  He did manipulate a much better price than $9,000 a mile, and when the fences were erected, nearly eighteen miles of the best, he fulfilled the rest of his promise, for he knew where to locate real bargains in aoudad sheep, sika deer, mouflon rams and eight American elk. He astonished Morrison by also acquiring nine ostriches and six giraffes: ‘We won’t allow anyone to shoot them, but they do add color to the place.’

  When the animals began to arrive, often by air, Roy Bub greeted each one as if it were a member of his family, showing it personally to the large, almost free fields in which it would roam: ‘Madam Eland, you never had it better in Africa than you’re gonna have it right here.’

  From the start it had been intended that when the exotics were well established, and this would come soon, for the Allerkamp ranch was much like the more interesting parts of South Africa from which the elands and other antelopes came, big-game hunters would be invited to come and test their skill against animals in the wild. ‘Year after next,’ Roy Bub said, ‘when we have the lodge fixed up and my wife has hired some cooks and I’ve got guides, we’re in business.’

  They would charge substantially for the privilege of killing one of their exotics, but as the pamphlet which Roy Bub composed pointed out: ‘It’s a danged sight cheaper coming to Allerkamp for your eland than going to Nairobi.’ Extremely practical where his own money was concerned, he established a rather high rate for the Texas hunters:

  But when they were in place, with Morrison paying one bill after another for their purchase and their transportation, Roy Bub introduced a stunning addition, which he paid for out of his own pocket. One morning he called Houston with exciting news: ‘Todd, Maggie! Fly right up. It’s unique.’

  When they reached the ranch they found that a large trailer had moved in with animals of some kind. ‘You’ll never guess,’ Roy Bub cried.

  The van was maneuvered to one of the smaller fields where hunting was forbidden, and when the gate was opened and men stationed so that the animals, when released, could not scamper back toward the trailer, ramps were placed, the door swung out—and down came a quiet, noble procession. The watchers gasped, for Roy Bub had acquired from an overstocked zoo four of nature’s loveliest creations: sable antelope, big creatures as large as a horse, but a soft purplish brown, a majestic way of walking and the finest horns in the animal kingdom.

  When they felt themselves to be free, they sniffed the unfamiliar air, pawed at the rocky soil so like their own in South Africa, then raised their stately heads and began moving away. When they did this, the observers could see the full sweep of their horns, those tremendous lyrelike curves that started at the forehead and turned backward in an imperial arch till the tips nearly touched their flanks. Almost as if they appreciated how grand and eloquent they were, they posed at the edge of a tree cluster, then leaped in different directions and lost themselves in the woodlands of their new home.

  Sometimes a whole month would pass without anyone seeing one of the sables; then a visitor would be driving aimlessly along the ranch roads and suddenly before him would appear that stately animal, purplish gold in the afternoon sun, with sweeping horns unlike any the traveler would have seen before, and he would come scrambling back to the lodge, shouting: ‘What was that extraordinary creature I saw?’ and Roy Bub would ask: ‘Sort of purple? Huge horns?’ and when the man nodded, he would say proudly: ‘That was one of our sables, glory of the Allerkamp.’

  ‘What would it cost me to shoot one?’

  ‘They ain’t for shootin’.’

  During the early years of the Houston crises, no real estate people escaped the adverse effects, but since Maggie Morrison had always avoided the rental business, she did not suffer immediately from the collapse of petroleum prices. Associated with one of the solid firms, she continued to specialize in finding a few inexpensive homes for Northern executives whose corporations had moved them into the Houston area: ‘I sometimes wonder who’s running the store up there. All the bright vice-presidents seem to be moving down here.’

  She did not yet have the courage to do what her husband did so easily: put together a really big operation with outside financing from Canada or Saudi Arabia, but she was doing well and could have supported herself had she been required to do so. She had fallen into a Texas pattern of thought in which any gamble, if it had even a forty-percent chance of success, was worth the taking: ‘And anyway, Todd, if it all did collapse, we could start over as clerks in somebody’s office and within six months own the place.’

  That she was now a complete Texan manifested itself in two ways. In her letters home to her friends in Detroit she no longer even spoke of returning:

  Something in Houston catches the imagination and sets it aflame. Last week I found a home for one of the most famous of the astronauts out at NASA east of here. For years he’d been saying: ‘One of these days I’ll go back to Nebraska.’ Last week he bit the bullet and will be staying here, even after retirement from the program. He has a little business going on the side.

  The thing that catches you, I think, is the dynamism of the place. It’s like watching some great flywheel whirring about. In the first moments you marvel at its speed, and then suddenly you find yourself wanting to be a part of it, and you’re sorely tempted to jump in. Well, I’ve jumped. Would you believe it, Pearl, I’ve put together a deal for three Arabs involving some of the finer houses, $14,000,000, of which I hold on to a small part. Until I close, I’ll be so nervous I won’t sleep.

  That turned out to be a frightening one-week nightmare, which, when disposed of, she swore never to repeat. She took this oath because she had become aware that her husband frequently found himself in rather delicate positions from which he extricated himself by moves which she supposed she would not have approved had she known the details. For example, when the oilman who had been their partner shifted from the ranch on the Pedernales to the hunting lodge in Scotland, he confided: ‘Maggie, I don’t like to say this, but I’m very fond of you, and so
is Rachel. Protect yourself. I’ve been in four financial deals with your husband, and damn it all, in every case he pulled some swifty. The Lambert Development, the ranch at Falfurrias, the airplane, out at Allerkamp. He cuts corners. He gigs his friends. He’s always looking for that little extra edge. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m switching my hunting to Scotland.’

  ‘Have his actions … I mean … have they been …?’

  ‘Illegal?’ He intertwined his fingers until they formed a little cathedral. ‘The line is tenuous … shady. When you deal with big numbers you face big problems. But you must never gig your own associates.’

  ‘Certainly he’s treated Roy Bub fairly?’ The fact that she asked this as a question indicated that doubt had been sown.

  ‘Roy Bub’s the best man in Texas. Everybody treats him fair. But even Roy Bub had better watch out, because some day he’s going to find he owns no part of that ranch. “So long, Roy Bub, nice to have known you.” ’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘And you better watch out, Lady Meg, or you’re going to be out on your keester with the rest of us.’

  He did not see her again, and to her surprise, the dentist with the big kennel ignored her too, so one day while she was surveying corner lots that might be converted into modest wraparounds, she stopped by the kennels and asked bluntly: ‘Did my husband have anything to do with your pulling out of the Allerkamp deal?’ and he said frankly: ‘After a while, Maggie, men get fed up with dealing with your husband. Watch out.’

  The second way in which Maggie indicated that Texas had captured her was the manner in which she adjusted to her daughter’s strange behavior. Beth, a spectacular beauty in her late teens, had refused to attend the University of Michigan: ‘The only place I want to go is UT.’

  ‘Stop using that nonsensical phrase! If you mean Texas, say so.’

  ‘That’s certainly what I mean,’ and at UT she had become chief baton twirler.