War Day
Page 8
The fact that I had lost a home, a car, a career, and a thousand small possessions didn't even occur to me, especially as I looked at what was left of San Antonio. Instead, like most people in America, I thought of faces that were no longer there. And of family histories and small treasures burned away.
The landscape came back into view again. I could see the outlines of shopping centers, portions of streets, and enough of a building here and there to guess that it had been a school or a church or a store. One large shopping center, at the edge of a blast area, was a flattened ruin surrounded by a vast field of congealed cars melted into the asphalt of the parking lot.
I had intended to take notes or record impressions as I flew, but I just sat there. My silence seemed to disappoint the captain. Without realizing it, he had begun to take a certain pride in the drama of his tour. He asked if I wanted to see more. "How about Kelly Air Force Base? You can see the shadows of twenty B-52s and four C-5As on the runway. Really weird."
I shook my head.
Back in San Marcos I was given a color enlargement of the San Antonio zone taken from three miles up. On the back in red letters was stamped, W A R N I N G , N O PUBLICATION. There isn't much detail; it is a dark gray moonscape.
"Sorry it's not from a lower altitude," the captain apologized,
"but at least you have a memento of your visit."
Rumors
The Road to Aztlan
Jim and I are on a train between Dallas and Austin, passing through Waco. I remember Waco as a small, intense city in the heart of the cotton-growing country. The parents of our friend Jay Westbrook lived there in the sixties, and the three of us used to be invited up for occasional weekends—usually after Jay's mother had been to the apartment we all shared in Austin and had become concerned that we were too thin.
The train rattles along at about forty-five. It's clean, but pretty worn. Twelve Amtrak chair cars and a baggage car. There is no diner and no snack bar, and air conditioning is provided by keeping the front and rear doors of the cars open. The windows cannot be opened, for these prewar cars were built with many assumptions that no longer hold true. The trip will take two hours and thirty minutes station to station, with four stops.
Most of our fellow passengers are business people. The cotton industry in Waco is booming. With the collapse of cotton imports from Egypt and other countries, the local growers are finding their product much in demand. Jim tells me that Governor Parker is hoping to make cotton and cotton products a net export item in the Texas economy soon.
We are asking our fellow passengers about Aztlan, the Hispanic Free State that stretches roughly along the Texas-Mexico border 68
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from Piedras Negras to New Mexico. We intend to go there via Austin, San Angelo, and Odessa, with a stop in Austin to interview the Governor. But our fellow passengers are not encouraging.
M R S . T O M M U L L I N : "I had a sister lived in El Paso and all of a sudden one day she turns up at our house in Waco with everything she owns in a shopping bag. She just got kicked out by the Mexicans, she says. And a lot of people weren't so lucky. They got hanged from street lights. And in Roswell—the Indians went in there and just about tore the place apart, the way I hear it."
J O D Y P I C K E R E L : "It's probably not really a separate country from Mexico. The way I see it, Mexico went in there and started something. We mighta forgot the Alamo, but they never did. They remember the Alamo and they want all of Texas back. Unless Parker gets on the stick, they'll be in Austin before too long, or maybe even up here in Waco."
L i z P I C K E R E L : "He's right, it's a Mexican thing. You have to remember that they didn't get touched by the war. They still have an army and everything. They're in good shape down there, except for the money troubles and the food troubles and . . . well, I take that back, they're in bad shape. But that just makes them all the more dangerous."
C A R L O S G O N Z A L E Z : "I am on my way to Aztlan right now. You know what I am doing there? I am selling clothes. That's right, clothes I bought in Atlanta. I have them on this train. Seven hundred good, strong pairs of overalls. You think I'll get a nice price?
You bet I will! Fifty Aztlan pesos each, and you know you can change them things for good Japanese yen. Americans don't want to trade with Aztlan. Everybody's scared. Like, this train doesn't go south of Odessa. You'll find out. I have to take a truck down from Odessa. The train goes on that old Santa Fe freight track up through to Albuquerque. They fixed up those tracks last year. Before that they ran buses."
M I N D Y S C H W A R T Z : "I don't really know much about it. I live in Odessa, and we don't much go to El Paso anymore. I really don't think about it."
T O M L E G A N : "YOU two gringos are going in there? Lemme tell you, they cleaned house last year. No gringos allowed. They hanged 'em if they stayed. You're a couple of assholes, you know 70 WARDAY
that? They'll hang you if the bandidos don't get you first. Fifty miles south of Odessa the trouble starts. You try to stay on 1-20
down there the other side of Monahans, and them bandidos are going to carve up your asses. That's all I got to say about it"
The train pulls into the station in McGregor, which serves as the stop for Waco. There is a lot of bustle, people getting off and on, men wearing weathered jeans and straw hats, carrying duffels full of possessions, people pushing carts loaded with baggage, children crying, voices rising in joy or sorrow at the partings and returns.
About three-quarters of the passengers get out. We buy Cokes on the platform. We will eat out of our backpacks, to save money.
Five minutes later the train is full again, with a few people sitting in the aisles. We pull out exactly on time. Like many of the other passengers, Jim and I have our homemade lunches. The train is due in Austin at 4:07. It had better be on time, because our interview with Oliver Parker is scheduled for 4:30.
When the wind is from the south, I understand that the corrupt odor of San Antonio is sharp on the Austin air.
Interview
Oliver Parker, Governor of Texas
You know, Whitley, the fact is that some of the states are becoming separate countries. We have the beginnings of a military structure right here in Texas. I'm pushing a bill that will place the U.S.
Third Army, the Twelfth Air Force, the state national guard, and the highway patrol under the overall authority of the governor's office. I consider this the most important single thing I've done so far in my administration.
We are going to restore authority in the areas of Texas where there's a problem. Especially down in South Texas. Those people have suffered enough. They've really had it much worse than in most of the rest of the country, what with the destruction of San Antonio and the sickness and all. Plus there has been a tremendously high level of illegal immigration. All authority in Mexico has broken down. Without any significant oil income, with the collapse of trade and tourism, and our inability to export foodstuffs, I wouldn't be surprised if Mexico hasn't experienced a greater population decline than we have. I'd put it at forty to fifty percent in five years. I know from personal friends that there have been eight revolutions in Mexico City, and when we were suffering from the famine here, they were absolutely and totally destitute. They had no corn, no bread, no soy products, only their own beans. They lacked cooking oil. In Mexico City there was no potable water be-
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cause their U.S.-made sewage treatment system failed. Mexico City was hit as bad by dysentery and cholera as it was by the Cincinnati Flu. You had whole huge areas of the city where there was nobody left alive at all.
If people wonder why in the world they're still coming north in spite of what we're going through, that's the reason.
You said you wanted me to say what I was doing on Warday.
Well, I was in Dallas trying to get my campaign for the Senate together. I was going to get that seat from the Republicans. Mary was with me, and so was Elizabeth. The other kids were i
n San Antonio, I'm sorry to say.
After we're finished, we can go over to the house and you can see our war baby, Oliver Junior. Perfect formation. He looks just like his mother. I don't live in the Governor's Mansion, by the way.
The state doesn't have the money to keep it up. We're just barely staying solvent as it is, so I live in a raised ranch over on Red River. Maybe next year we'll reopen the mansion.
I deal with real basic issues: defense, disease, food, shelter, crime. I classify this whole Aztlan thing as a crime. As far as I'm concerned they're rebels, no different from the Confederates. I consider Texas a part of the United States, and Aztlan a part of Texas. If there's ever a new Constitutional Convention, Texas will certainly be sending delegates.
Other crimes we have, mainly, are crimes of desperation. There is still a lot of hunger. Real, raw hunger. Hell, people are dying of hunger and a lot of other things down in South Texas every day.
The area between Houston and San Antonio is blighted. I guess you could consider that whole area depopulated.
You know, from the roof of St. Edwards University south of here—you remember St. Edwards? Well, from the roof you can see the start of the San Antonio Dead Zone. The horizon to the south is charcoal gray. And the sky is brown. It's a weird sight. like looking across to the surface of another planet.
You remember my house in San Antonio, Whitley? We finished that bathroom, and we were going to put in a pool.
I was meeting with the Dallas County Democrats at the Anatole Hotel when the war happened. The lights went out. That was because the EMP killed the hotel's computer. As it died, it turned THE WEST 73
off all the lights and sent the elevators to the lobby. I thought it was an internal thing. After a while we continued our meeting in the lobby, which is skylit.
Mary came in with the news that there were planes crashing all over the place. We went outside and looked up and there was this American Airlines jet wobbling around. It kept banking first one way and then the other. Then we found out my brand-new Lincoln wouldn't start. I had a lunch scheduled at the Adolphus with Bob Rossiter of Rossiter Industries. We tried to phone him and found out the phones didn't work. I said to Mary, "Something big's happened." We tried to find a working TV. Couldn't do it.
We ended up walking all the way from the Anatole to the Adolphus, only to find that Rossiter wasn't there.
It was in the Adolphus lobby that we first heard the rumor that San Antonio had been bombed. Mary burst into tears. We held each other. We didn't know what to believe. Finally we went back to the Anatole. It was almost a year before we left Dallas. We lived with the Clint Rossiters, and I did legal work to pay our board.
I've been governor for three years now. The Senate campaign was canceled, of course. When Mark White announced that he wasn't going to run for another term, Rossiter and the Dallas County Democrats got me to take it on. Mark's not at all well. He flew over San Antonio three days after the war and got a hell of a dose. I did it too, last year, at three thousand feet. The way I look at it, that's not a place anymore. It's a hole in the world.
One of our problems in Texas is that we haven't got the banking technology available to run the state at a deficit. We're limited to straight-line budgeting. I've been thinking of issuing a Texas currency, but I don't see the underlying assets to do it. I could peg it to the state's proprietary oil holdings, but with oil at eleven cents a barrel, I wouldn't get very much out of it. And full faith and credit aren't going to wash, especially not overseas.
Look at this. Isn't this beautiful? A Texas dollar. It's an en-graving, done for us by an outfit in Lubbock. For a while we were dreaming of Texas currency. We'd have bills denominated from a quarter to ten dollars. Sam Houston's on the one, Austin's on the two, Davy Crockett's on the five. We haven't had the others made up, because Texas hasn't got any underlying assets that would 74 WARDAY
support a currency, as I said. Texas got hurt so bad in the war, sometimes I'm surprised that it's still here at all, that everybody didn't just move.
But we are still here. You travel around this state as much as I do, you'd end up with a deep feeling of confidence and reverence.
Texas is the land of the strong. People are working to rebuild. You know who really runs this state? Volunteers. People see something that needs doing and they just do it. Fill a pothole. Pull down an abandoned house. You name it. When we censused in 1990, every single census taker was a volunteer. That project of mine, naming the dead—you must remember it, Jim, you wrote a tiling about it in the Dallas paper—that was all volunteers. I know you didn't think it made sense, Jim, and maybe it didn't. But it means something to name the dead. I think it does. Here's what they did.
There's over a million names in these books. Handwritten, every one. Over a million.
San Antonio was so pretty. God, I remember when I had my Austin Healey and we were running the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Youth, right? We were a bunch. Who was that priest in charge of the thing? Oh yeah, Martin. Father Edwin Martin. I remember him well. He always had high hopes for us. We put on some pretty good things, really. For a bunch of overheated intellectuals we did a good job.
Is that thing running? Lemme see it. Sanyo. You got this from the paper? I've never seen one like it. Two hours of recording on that? It looks like a quarter. That's amazing. Well, let me get back to business. You'll have to edit this tape a little.
Another thing we're doing is working very intensively with some of the other states. California, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona. We're going to form a sort of loose co-alition. California will lead it. That's got to be. They're ten times the size of Texas. You know that California is almost like the old days? You been out there? Well, it's just beautiful. One thing, the Japanese are everywhere. And electronics are a good bit easier to get. I don't think there's any conspiracy to deprive America of electronic devices, by the way. That's a subject the Legislature's been farting about an awful lot lately. They don't want to debate Aztlan. Don't want to think about the rough stuff. Can't say as I THE WEST 75
blame 'em. But I'm going to have to get the Speaker to get the House off its ass on my military bill. Trask's got the Senate wrapped up tight. No problems there. I need an army to go after Aztlan. Or they'll come after us. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find them on their way to Midland-Odessa within a year if we don't take some very damn decisive action.
Anyway, getting back to the electronics. This thing is really beautiful. How big is it—let's see—yeah, I could put two of these inside a cigarette pack. Three of 'em. Nice to see a Japanese thing like this again. Beautifully made. Running flat out, the Japs can build fourteen million televisions a year. If we bought 'em all, we'd be back to prewar standards in about 2000. But we can't afford the foreign exchange. We imported six million last year and made eight hundred thousand here in the States. We managed to get a hundred and thirty thousand of those sets in Texas. That tells me we now have a million televisions in Texas. Here's a piece of sweet news. Starting next July, we are going to be getting HBO via the new communications satellite California sent up from Vandenberg in June. And NBC is starting up again in the fall, broadcasting from Los Angeles. It's going to be all reruns at first, but who the hell cares? Maybe you ought to go back to writing, Whitley. Somebody told me you'd become a gardener. Well, I'll bet you could make some money in television. A growth industry all over again.
We've got the Texas State Network, of course. I think the Hunt brothers bought two prints of every John Wayne picture ever made. I do a program once a week, "The Governor's Desk." I think people need to feel that the governor's there. Without a President, the governors are that much more important.
You know, the amazing thing is, when we've polled the citizens, we've found that they aren't too interested in having a Presidential election. There just isn't all that much interest. Concerns telescope when people are having trouble. Somebody who has a sick kid or is facing cancer or NSD, or just living in t
hese times, they don't care about the Israelis slaughtering the Arabs or the South Africans marching into Zimbabwe or the Poles into the Ukraine. They're in-different to world affairs. And about all they remember of the U.S.
is the flag and taxes. We still have the flag, so they figure the hell with the taxes.
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I just think one thing, though, and it's the message I want to leave at the end of this tape. Aztlan is a serious problem, and the only way Texas can deal with it is by going in there and establishing strict martial law. If we don't, Aztlan will get stronger and stronger, and we'll soon be facing an army. The Legislature has to act on my military bill. That's the key issue in Texas right now.
Documents on
the Triage
Mother, mother, I feel sick,
Send for the doctor, quick, quick, quick.
Doctor, doctor, shall I die?
Yes, my dear, and so shall I.
—Skipping rhyme
FROM THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL
The most feared and controversial medical decision of this century has been the CDC's triage recommendation.
Both Whitley and I have been especially eager to include as much information about the triage as we can, since it affects American life so profoundly.
I don't have any really good sources at the CDC headquarters in Dallas, so I was very glad for our stopover in Austin. It gave me a chance to visit a friend who works for the CDC here, and who was willing to give me the kind of documents that would be useful.
I wanted information that few people had seen before.
I hit a vein of gold, as it turned out. My friend gave me the three documents reproduced here. For this I thank him and I guarantee his anonymity. It is ironic that more lives have been affected by these three short memoranda than by any number of critically important medical discoveries.