Generations and Other True Stories (8 page)

The book's something of a Lone Star literary event for Kinkster fans, for it's the first of his seven whodunits to be set in his native state instead of New York City's Greenwich Village and environs. A serial killer is murdering little old ladies in the Hill Country, and it's up to the Kinkster and several real-life “Kerrverts,” as the author calls residents of Kerr County, to stop him.

In all the Kinky mysteries, most of the characters are based on the author's friends, neighbors, and relatives, and they're called by their real names. Kinky feels free to do this, he says, “because there is very little innocence to protect.”

The cast of characters in
Armadillos and Old Lace
includes Pat Knox, who defeated Kinky in his effort a few years ago to become a Kerr County justice of the peace; Frances Kaiser, the county's female sheriff; and the author's own father and sister. He even drags two dogs, a cat, several children, and an innocent armadillo into his plot.

“I've been a fan of yours for a long time…” I say, intending to elaborate. My fandom, I'm about to tell him, dates back nearly twenty years, to the days when Kinky and his band, the Texas Jewboys, were riding the crest of the urban cowboy bizarreness, singing
Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed
at the Lone Star Cafe in New York. The song had the same effect on the feminists of the day as a sharp stick poked into their nest has on wasps.

“A man of impeccable taste,” Kinky interrupts. He has spotted an emergency exit and darts through it to the sidewalk outside and relights the Honduran butt, leaving Lenore and me to watch the carousel for his bags and guitar.

It's about noon when we arrive at his hotel, and his room isn't ready yet. “This is a horrible inconvenience for the Kinkster,” he mutters. He checks his bags with the bellman and changes out of the tuxedo jacket into an iridescent little number that might have come from a garage sale at Hunter Thompson's place. It shimmers soft-neon reds and greens on a field of black.

While a dose of enchiladas and tacos at El Fenix is restoring the Kinkster's good spirits, I ask him: “Did you get another cat?”

As Kinky readers know, his cat is an important character in all his novels. But his sixth book,
Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola
, contains a moving epilogue in tribute to Cuddles, who died in January 1993 at age fourteen.

It's immediately evident that Kinky doesn't want to talk about Cuddles. He says he had three cats and still has two of them, plus two dogs, at Echo Hill, the family ranch and children's camp near Medina, Texas, where he grew up and where he lives now.

“The cats are wonderful cats,” Kinky says. “The dogs are wonderful dogs. But Cuddles…Cuddles was the first cat I ever had. She's the one who lived with me in New York. She was my best friend. She fought the drug wars with me. She put up with me during the period that I was flying on all kinds of herbs and spices. I was halfway through
Armadillos and Old Lace
when Cuddles went to Jesus. I kept her in the book. She's in the next one, too, which will be called
God Bless John Wayne.”

Unintentionally, my question seems to have kicked us into a mood of general mourning. “I mourn the passing of the undecaffeinated era of country music,” the Kinkster says. “The cleverness has gone out of it. These young people in the business now, the thing they have in common is that they grew up on Dan Fogelberg. They hate Lefty Frizzell. They hate Hank Williams. They hate Ernest Tubb. They hate twang-twang. They're kind of savvy enough to know the good stuff by Patsy Cline and George Jones and a few others, and that's about it. That's the extent of their emotional history. Garth Brooks is a cultural mayonnaise. His fans would just as soon be wearing mouse ears at Disneyland.”

He pauses, grinning. “I'm trying to keep this light, or anything you say or I say will make us look like old geezers who are sucking sour grapes.”

Kinky will turn fifty on November 1, “just a step away from the Shalom Rest Home,” he says. He's puffing so fast and furiously on a fresh Honduran cigar that even the other folks in the smoking section are giving us the eye.

“Garth Brooks is the Anti-Hank,” he announces. “I'm sure there are millions of lost country music fans out there, waiting for me to lead them into battle against the Anti-Hank. But I'm not going to. I thank the Lord that the Texas Jewboys were not a big financial success. Otherwise, I'd be playing Disneyland with the Pips.”

I try to imagine a crowd of Disneyites in mouse hats gathered in front of the Magic Kingdom, swinging and swaying to Kinky's rendition of
They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore
.

“Being able to write these novels twenty-four years later and have some success at it,” the Kinkster continues, “is my attempt to prove that there can be a second act in America, to prove F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong about that. There
can
be a second act, and I'm living proof of it. My books are selling so well these days that I'm in danger of losing my coveted cult status.”

While Lenore is driving hell-for-breakfast toward KRLD, I ask Kinky how he decided to write mysteries. He shoots me a dark, mysterious look. “I saw a rodeo in Bandera when I was a kid. It was a very seminal experience for the Kinkster. They had an act called ‘Shoshone the Magic Pony.' It was this real old man with this horse that looked like two men dressed up in a horse suit. The horse did tricks, crossed its legs and stuff like that. At the end of the act, the old man took his outfit off, and he was a young girl. And she took the saddle and blanket off of Shoshone, and he was a real horse. That really stayed with me.

“Later I refined what it meant to me—that nothing is what it appears to be. Now, if you get a story where nothing is what it appears to be, you've got yourself a great mystery, regardless of plot. Plots are for cemeteries, as George Bernard Shaw said.”

At KRLD, he gets permission to ignore the This-Is-A-Smoke-Free-Building sign, shakes hands with talk-radio host Jody Dean, goes on the air and shouts in a falsetto squeak: “I like it here. Be kind to me, Jody.”

He sings
The Ballad of Ira Hayes
, throws out one-liners like Mardi Gras beads, tells a story about eating monkey brains in Borneo when he was in the Peace Corps—“They taste a lot like chicken-fried steak,” he says—plugs his book, and suddenly we're on our way to the Irving Public Library to tape a cable show called
Conversations
with Pam Lange.

“Is there somebody who can give me a papal dispensation to smoke in here?” the Kinkster asks.

“No way. No way,” Pam says. “Just chew. Don't inhale.”

Several children peek at the Kinkster from behind the stacks. He waves at them. “Would you like me to sing
Ol' Ben Lucas Had a Lot of Mucus?”
he asks. “Do you know that song, boys and girls?”

“No,” says a shy young girl.

“Well, it's one of Kinky's songs for children. I wrote it when I was eleven.”

He removes his hat and shows the TV camera his long, kinky hair, which he calls his “Lyle Lovett starter kit,” points out the Star of David and the star of Texas on his belt buckle, tells Pam that his new book is about “old ladies being dispatched to Jesus on their seventy-sixth birthday,” then it's back to the hotel.

The Kinkster's room is ready. He and Lenore go over his schedule for the next two days, which includes such nightmares as a 5:30 a.m. TV show in Fort Worth followed by a 7:00 a.m. flight to Austin. We make arrangements to meet again for his evening gigs at Borders Books & Music and another show at KRLD, and we leave the Kinkster to get some rest.

But when we see him again, he seems wearier than when we left him. His face is clouded in a grief newer than those that we've spent the day discussing. He has had a phone conversation of the unhappy kind, he says. A romance has soured. A sweetheart has told him goodbye. “I am semi-brokenhearted,” he says.

But the shows go on. All of them. And the Kinkster leaves everybody laughing, as usual.

Nearing midnight, we say goodbye and do the Kinkster's good-luck handshake.

He smiles wanly. “I really learned it from Mexican parking lot attendants in L.A.,” he says.

October 1994

If you're ever fortunate enough to see a whooping crane, you'll never forget it. The magnificent white birds, some of them five feet tall, seem like creatures from another world. Despite their size, they seem delicate—fragile, even—and somehow sad, as if they know how precarious their existence is in this world
.

Working on this piece gave me a new and deeper understanding of the crisis around us, and the incalculable value of the treasures we're losing to our stupidity, ignorance, and greed
.

The Long Journey

Through the telescope, sunlight turns the ripples of the stream to mirror shards almost too bright for the eye to endure. Heat rises from the water, making the air ripple, too, like a gauzy curtain in a breeze. On a sand bar in the middle of the South Saskatchewan River, nine huge white birds pace with slow deliberation. Isolated in the wavy round image of the telescope, on their sliver of sand in the middle of the broad river, they resemble priests of some lost religion, performing a ritual long forgotten by all but themselves.

“They're early this year,” Brian Johns says. “I don't know what that means. An early winter or something?”

It's late September. The wheat harvest is under way in Saskatchewan, and so is autumn. While the daily highs still range into the nineties in Texas, the leaves of the mottes of trees that dot the prairie here are already a blaze of red and gold.

And the whooping cranes have begun their annual journey from their summer home, only four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, toward their winter quarters in the warm bay waters of the Texas Gulf Coast.

The first whoopers usually don't arrive in Saskatchewan until the first of October, but this year Mr. Johns, a Canadian Wildlife Service biologist, already has spotted eighteen, these hanging out on the river, others in a few small lakes around Saskatoon.

They travel in pairs, or in family groups of three, or in bunches of five or six, like human families taking their vacations together. The largest single group ever spotted near Saskatoon was thirteen, Mr. Johns says, and the largest he has seen was eleven. So the tall white birds preening and pacing along the sand bar in the river are, as whooping cranes go, a sizable conclave.

“They leave their nesting grounds, arrive here three or four days later, spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks fattening themselves on the barley and wheat in the fields, then take off for Texas,” Mr. Johns says.

The nests they've left behind are in a huge wetland in Wood Buffalo National Park, on the border between Alberta and Canada's thinly settled Northwest Territories. The nests are widely scattered, and because of the vastness of the marshes in which they lie, the soft ground and fallen timber, the nesting ground is inaccessible to humans except by air, and so remote that no one knew where it was until a pilot discovered it by chance in 1954.

The end of their journey will be quite a different kind of place. On the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, twenty-six hundred miles south on San Antonio Bay, northeast of Corpus Christi, and the offshore islands of Matagorda and San Jose, the cranes will live much closer to each other and will be surrounded by the commotion of human activity. There, those who survive the long flight will spend the winter fishing for clams and blue crabs, watching towboats shove oil barges along the Intracoastal Waterway, and posing for birders who come by the boatload every winter, like the whoopers themselves.

Come spring, Nature always tells the cranes to return to Canada. Last year, 136 whoopers departed Aransas for their northern breeding ground. In June, Canadian Wildlife Service biologists counted thirty-five new chicks following their parents about the marshes. But by the middle of August, only thirteen were still alive.

“There's no way to know what got the rest of them,” Mr. Johns says. “The only place we can get an accurate count of the whoopers is at Aransas, where they aren't so widely scattered. Their survival is measured by the number of chicks that make it to Texas.”

If all 136 cranes who left Aransas in the spring are still alive, and if all the thirteen remaining chicks survived until migration time, 149 whooping cranes have left Canada for their long journey to Texas. How many live to arrive won't be known until mid-December, when U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Tom Stehn will take his annual census.

Except for a few in zoos and in experimental captive breeding programs, these are the only whooping cranes left in the world. They're the only ones still attempting the arduous and dangerous trek across Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wichita Falls, Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, and Austin, as their ancestors did thousands of years before such names had been given.

The books say there probably never were a lot of whooping cranes. Some authors guess that maybe two thousand were scattered in small flocks across the continent when the first Europeans reached North America. They probably ranged from the Great Salt lake in Utah to New England in those days, and down the Atlantic seaboard, and over huge swathes of Canada and Mexico.

Wildlife biologists estimate that by the 1850s and ‘60s their number had been reduced to fourteen hundred or thirteen hundred, but their breeding grounds still stretched from Alberta and Saskatchewan eastward as far as Michigan and Illinois, and many flocks still wintered along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and all along the Gulf from Florida into Mexico.

But as settlers spread across the midwestern United States and the Canadian prairies, the cranes began declining. Farmers hunted them, and drained the marshes where they bred. Museums had them killed and stuffed and placed in glass cases. Egg collectors robbed their nests. Milliners used their long white plumes to decorate ladies' hats.