God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

There really are white buffalo—most are albinos—and one was shot by a famous buffalo hunter, J. Wright Mooar, on October 7, 1876, just outside Snyder. Tens of millions of buffalo were exterminated by hunters at the end of the nineteenth century, in equal parts for the hides and to deprive the Indians of their food source. A plaque in front of the White Buffalo statue says that Mooar personally killed 22,000 of them, “a record probably unsurpassed.” An exhibit in the museum quotes a settler in the region: “The bones were so thick in some places that one could walk upon them some distance without touching the ground.”

  Although white buffalo are extremely rare—only fifty are said to exist in the world—they are mysteriously abundant on some of the exotic game ranches in Texas. At the Ox Ranch near Uvalde, you can shoot one of their fifteen white buffalo for $25,000 to $30,000, depending on the size of the animal. The ranch’s website notes: “According to the National Bison Association, it is estimated that only one of every 10 million births results in a White Buffalo!” You can also shoot an addax, an endangered antelope; or a dama gazelle (“the largest and rarest gazelle in the world”—only five hundred known to exist); or many of the magnificent animals whose heads grace trophy rooms around the state. “When hunting these rare animals at Ox Ranch, you may choose from these hunting methods: from a Blind, Spot and Stalk, Bow Hunting, Pistol Hunting, Rifle Hunting, or Safari Style!” The site cheerfully adds that the white buffalo is sacred to many Native American tribes. “Their presence is a sign of spiritual rebirth and better times ahead.”

  I know this sounds grotesque to non-hunters, but these exotic game ranches serve as a repository for animals that may be extinct in the wild. “There are now more Arabian Oryx on Texas hunting ranches than in the rest of the world combined!” the website boasts. By the way, if you are there to shoot a white buffalo, the ranch will throw in a free hog hunt. You can stalk your prey with night-vision glasses, or you can choose to hunt from a blind, which sounds more congenial. “This Blind Has a TV That Receives Live Game Camera Footage, DirecTV, a Poker Table, Air Conditioning, and a Fully Stocked Bar.”

  * * *

  STEVE DROVE UP from Austin and met me at the Dixie Pig in Abilene. We both lived in Abilene as kids, and although we didn’t know each other then, our lives were like rails of track running in the same direction. We wonder why we never met earlier. We could have been friends so long ago.

  I went to public school in Abilene and Steve went to St. Joseph’s Academy, which has long since been torn down. Steve wanted to see if he could find the site where it once stood. I wanted to go by my old neighborhood as well. We passed Alta Vista Elementary, the handsome redbrick building where I entered fourth grade. It was closed in 2004, but at least it was still standing. We went around back of the schoolhouse, and Steve took my picture in the spot where I was struck by lightning. I had been playing with some kids, and suddenly we were all sprawled on the ground like tenpins. I think the lightning must have hit the metal gutter and shot through the downspout near where we were standing. I was at an age when close calls didn’t have the mortal resonance they do now. Steve also claims to have been the victim of a lightning strike, although he was still a fetus when his mother was shocked during a storm while washing dishes. He can’t expect full credit for that.

  The house I lived in, on Amarillo Street, is also still standing. I was pleased to see how nicely it is cared for. There’s a sign on the back fence saying that the house is now a member of the Society for the Preservation of Quaint Old Homes. When we lived there, the house was white, and nearly every year after a dust storm I’d have to wash it. More sensible owners have painted it a sandy color. My father had planted magnolias on either side of the door, which were still there the last time I passed by, thirty years ago. Now they’re gone, replaced by two oaks that tower over the house. The passage of time was made shockingly visible. I knocked on the door, but nobody was home. I wondered if the cork floor in the den was still scarred from my games of mumblety-peg.

  Steve and I stopped in at the Grace Hotel, once the fanciest spot in town. Steve had set a scene in one of his novels there. The Grace is now a museum, and there happened to be an exhibit of Abilene in the 1950s, exactly the time when we lived there. There were mannequins wearing the clothes our parents would have worn—sack dresses and tropical shirts, in Popsicle colors of lime and orange—and appliances that had been in our kitchens. It was strange to see your own life and times laid out in front of you in a museum exhibit. “If you think about it,” Steve said, “when we moved here we were as close to the Indian wars as we are now to the day we were born.”

  As we were exiting the exhibit, we came upon a street map of Abilene in 1955. I called Steve over and pointed to St. Joseph’s Academy. It was directly across the street from my elementary school.

  I drove back to Austin, under a Turneresque sunset with a gibbous moon rising from a bank of pink clouds. A herd of Black Angus cattle moved like shadows in the places where the buffalo once grazed. I thought about how unintentional most of life is. Part of me had always wanted to leave Texas, but I had never actually gone. Sometimes we are summoned by work or romance to move to another existence, and for me those moments when there is no reasonable alternative to departure have always been joyful, full of a sense of adventure and reinvention. Staying is also a decision, but it feels more like inertia or insecurity. Most of the time I live in a state of vague discontent, tempted by the vision of another life but unwilling to let go of the friends and daily habits that fill my time. When I am in other states or countries, I’m always aware of being in exile from my own culture, with all its outsized liabilities. I wish I lived in the mountains of Montana or on the Spanish Mediterranean. I wish I had a condo in a high-rise overlooking Central Park, with a piano by the window. These thoughts have been at play in my imagination for decades. Now here I was, on a darkening highway in Texas, with so much more road behind me than what lay before.

  * * *

  IN 2015, I received a Texas Medal of Arts Award, along with a lot of people I have long admired, including the Gatlin Brothers, playwright Robert Schenkkan, and Jamie Foxx. At the reception, the head of the Texas State Cemetery passed through the crowd, noticing name tags. I saw him eyeing Dan Rather and T Bone Burnett. Then he approached me with a smile and said, “We’re looking forward to hosting you.”

  Several lifetime achievement awards had come my way recently. I was inducted into the Hall of Fame at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, joining another list of notable alums, including a couple of Heisman Trophy winners, an Olympic gold medalist, and the guys who invented the margarita machine and the corny dog—contributions to Texas culture I could never hope to match. It was nice to be honored by people I cared about, although I couldn’t help hearing that drumroll of departure.

  Of all the eccentric honors that Texas can bestow on its citizens, however, admittance to the state cemetery is in every way the ultimate. It’s the Texas version of Arlington National Cemetery. The list of famous Texans interred there includes Stephen F. Austin, Barbara Jordan, and several once-well-known authors. Those who have been accepted but are still alive, like Steve, are listed as “pending.” It had been suggested that I should let my availability be known, and I had done so.

  “But my application got turned down,” I told the cemetery chief. “I heard that Governor Perry vetoed me.”

  “Surely not!”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  Perry and I had had a tiff a few years before, in his first months as governor. I was once again the emcee of the gala for the Texas Book Festival. I noticed that Perry didn’t show up. “He’s probably at a public high school leading the prayer,” I cracked, referencing a recent unconstitutional incident on the part of the new governor.

  The next day, the director of the festival informed me that word of my remark had gotten back to Perry and he was demanding an apology.

  “But it wa
s a joke!”

  “I know that, but the governor took offense,” she pleaded. “Now his office is threatening to withhold the use of the capitol for the festival. We’ll have to close down!”

  Golly. I wrote the governor, saying I was “so sorry.” He wrote back right away, claiming that he had been raising money for paralyzed children, not snubbing the festival. He signed it, “Prayerfully, Rick.”

  At the arts reception, the cemetery chief urged me to reapply. He reiterated that the governor would certainly not have stooped to such a mean-spirited action. In any case, we had a new governor, who had just given me a medal, so my chances were improved.

  I wasn’t so sure I would reapply, however. Nothing says commitment like a burial plot.

  THIRTEEN

  Far West, Far Out

  I used to think Marfa was a kind of practical joke that West Texans were playing on cultural elites. It’s remote even for Texas. The nearest airports are in El Paso and Carlsbad, New Mexico, each two hundred miles away. The landscape is okay if you like scrubby hills and plains of yellow grass. And yet aesthetes come from all over, lured by the minimalist vibe the place embodies.

  Whenever I’m in Marfa I feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone episode and something really strange is about to happen. One winter evening, when Roberta and I passed through town on our way to Big Bend, we saw a skunk sauntering down the sidewalk of the main street. He had the place all to himself. He affected an air of proprietorship as he navigated past the Hotel Paisano, where James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor stayed in 1955, when they were filming Giant. During a classic West Texas hailstorm, Hudson and Taylor raced around with buckets to catch ice for their Bloody Marys. We lost sight of the skunk as he approached the pink wedding-cake courthouse in the center of town.

  That night we drove east of town on U.S. 67 to see the Marfa Mystery Lights. Against the shadowed outline of the Chinati Mountains, odd yellow and white lights darted about, merging and dividing, disappearing, then reappearing seconds later in a different spot. They seemed to be dancing, which added to the air of enchantment. There have been numerous explanations—gas from petroleum deposits, optical illusions, electrical discharges from crystal formations—the most plausible being that they are reflected lights from the highway. James Dean was reportedly so fascinated by them that he bought a telescope. Your perceptions of what is real or at least normal get tested.

  The artist Donald Judd rented a house in Marfa in 1971, “due in part to the harsh and glib situation within art in New York and to the unpleasantness of the city,” he wrote. He was also on the run from any form of government, and far West Texas was as close to anarchy as he could get. “I chose the town of Marfa (pop. 2,466) because it was the best looking and the most practical,” he wrote.

  He wound up buying an abandoned army base that had been a detention center for German prisoners of war. There were a number of barracks and two massive brick sheds that had been used to repair tanks and artillery pieces. Judd filled the sheds with rectangular aluminum boxes of the exact same dimensions, differing only in the ways in which they are subdivided. One box is bisected by a vertical panel, another by a slanted panel at a sixty-degree angle, and so on—a hundred geometric variations on a single theme. The glare off the boxes made it difficult to see inside; it was like looking at water through the reflection of a bright afternoon.

  Judd noted that as an artist he was primarily interested in space, and he designed this immaculate environment to eliminate the distraction of color or whim. He claimed to have invented the concept of an “installation,” by which he meant the use of an entire room to present his concept. The rectangular theme of the boxes was echoed in the etched-concrete floor, the coffered ceiling, the windowpanes, and even the weathered bricks. Looking through the windows at the bleached-out field, one sees larger, concrete boxes replicating similar choices. They are well made and dignified but also look like leftover shipping containers.

  Roberta adores Donald Judd. “I appreciate the spareness and severity of the lines in concert with the spareness and severity of the surroundings,” she explained, as we wandered among the concrete boxes outside in the blinding sunlight, which Roberta called “an essential part of the art.” She was so caught up she didn’t notice the shimmering whipsnake sliding through the grass at our feet.

  I admired the exactness of Judd’s enterprise, although it was hard to square his fixation on order with his anarchic politics, or the cultish following that has sprung up in the two decades after his death. When we checked into our hotel, there were Donald Judd books for sale at the front desk, and even bumper stickers asking WWDJD? What Donald Judd would do was a question I had never asked, but the Marfans were deeply interested in the answer.

  We walked over to the new Robert Irwin installation, a U-shaped building. One wing is painted black, the other is white, and they are transected by scrims that filter the light. Rectangular windows at specific intervals admitted trapezoidal patches of sunlight onto the concrete floor. Through the windows I could see farmsteads and telephone poles. Doves were cooing. A piece of tin roof was flapping in the breeze. I wondered what art even was. Donald Judd in 1986:

  A definition of art finally occurred to me. Art is everything at once. Insofar as it is less than that it is less art. In visual art the wholeness is visual. Aspects which are not visual are subtractions from the whole.

  Which means what?

  * * *

  A PAINTER FRIEND of ours in Marfa, Julie Speed, bought the old jail and turned it into her studio. While she and her husband, Fran Christina, the former drummer with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, were renovating the place, Fran jackhammered out a portion of the wall, which was fourteen inches thick. “He came in all covered with cement dust,” Julie recounted. “He told me he had found a leg bone in the wall.”

  “ ‘Oh, a deer leg bone,’ ” Julie surmised.

  “ ‘No, a human leg bone.’ ”

  Julie insisted that it must be a deer tibia and that Fran was confused.

  “ ‘Well, Julie, it was wearing a boot,’ ” he said.

  Julie speculated that since the walls were poured around 1917, the leg might have belonged to a U.S. cavalryman in General Pershing’s army, which was chasing Pancho Villa at the time. Perhaps the soldier got shot in the leg and it had turned gangrenous and had to be sawn off, she suggested. “They are about to bury it, but then someone remembers, hey, they’re pouring cement for the new jail today, so let’s throw the leg in there so the coyotes don’t dig it up.”

  She consoled herself with this thought as Fran buried the leg, reciting some Latin he recalled as an altar boy in Rhode Island. Only later did she consider that the rest of the body might still be inside the wall.

  Julie’s art is like Judd’s mainly in its obsessiveness. Sex, violence, and religion are her constant themes. Many of her human figures have three eyes or an extra nose. She mixes Mexican folk art and Japanese woodcuts with Italian Renaissance portraiture, making work that is both gorgeous and bizarre. Her art reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch’s in its singular, haunting vision. Julie now wears her hair in three asymmetrical gray braids, topped by a beret.

  We had a drink on the “cloud balcony” that Julie and Fran built to watch the sky. The clouds in the high desert sail past like galleons. It’s the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen. As soon as the sun went down, Venus switched on like a searchlight.

  I asked Julie what she thought of Judd’s and Irwin’s art. She placed them in the “Because I Say So” school of conceptual art, which began with Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists. “They do have a way of making you focus on the world and seeing it in a different way,” she said.

  I thought about how, when we came out of the Irwin installation, the shadows of a barbed-wire fence on the sidewalk were so striking that Roberta took a picture—art being made by the noticing of it.

  I think Ju
lie feels at home in Marfa in part because of the weirdness. She told us a story that obviously delighted her. A couple of blocks away from her house, a thirty-two-year-old man, Christopher Michael Cobos, allegedly beat his wife and was attempting to run her over when family members and passersby pulled her out of the street. Juan Lara, a Marfa cop, arrived just as Cobos was fleeing in his Chevy pickup. Officer Lara turned on his siren and gave chase. Cobos suddenly stopped, threw his pickup into reverse, and rammed the police car, disabling it. Lara radioed for assistance. A state trooper took up the high-speed chase on Highway 90, which runs beside the Union Pacific railroad tracks. A train was heading west at the same time. Suddenly, Cobos veered off the highway into the pasture, aiming his truck for a spot on the tracks just ahead of the oncoming train. His timing was off; the train collided with the pickup full force and sent it flying over the top of the locomotive and landing upside down. The trooper was astounded to see that Cobos was still alive. An ambulance arrived to take the badly injured man to the hospital in Alpine, but in the middle of the ride, Cobos came to and attacked the EMS attendant. The ambulance driver radioed for assistance. Another state trooper forcibly subdued Cobos, and they got him to the hospital.

  The next morning, Officer Lara and another cop drove Cobos back to Marfa to be arraigned. They took the precaution of having him in handcuffs. The county judge, Cinderela Guevara, received the Marfa maniac in her third-floor office in the lovely pink courthouse. She opened the window for some air, and Cobos leaped out, headfirst. Fortunately, recent rains softened the impact. By now, Cobos had been in a car wreck, been hit by a train, gotten in a fistfight with a state trooper, and plunged three stories out of a courthouse window. He was airlifted to a hospital in Odessa with a full menu of broken bones and damaged organs.