Michener, James A. (180 page)

But he found it necessary to arrest hundreds of Mexicans who seemed not to fit into Texas life. They either stole things, or beat their wives, or refused to send their children to school, or ran ott with cars belonging to white men. If one had talked with Macnab during these years, he would never have heard of the countless law-abiding Hispanics. Like the Swedes of Minnesota or the

Czechs of Iowa, the Hispanics of Texas were good and bad. Mac-nab dealt only with the bad, and in this group he placed anyone of Mexican heritage who endeavored, by even the slightest move to alter any aspect of Valley life from the way he believed it had always been, and should remain. He was therefore alerted when Norman Vigil, who now lived in a spacious house far removed from the beer-distribution office, summoned him to an unscheduled meeting.

'Captain, I can see trouble, real trouble, coming at us down the road.'

'Like what?'

'This Hector Garza, used to work for my uncle, reliable sort normally, he wants to run a damned Meskin for mayor.'

'You already have a mayor, don't you?'

'Good man. Selected him myself. Used to work on one of the big citrus plantations.'

'Then why should Hector . . .?'

'He says it's time the Meskins had their own mavor.'

'Hell, how old is he?'

'You won't believe it, but he must be past seventy-five.'

'Why don't he roll over and quit makin' trouble?'

'How old are you, Captain?'

'I'm sixty-nine, but I'm not tryin' to run the Ranger office Tell him to knock it off.'

'He won't do it. I think he sees this as his last battle.'

'It will be his last if he tries to mess up this countv. Things are in good shape here. Let's keep them as they are.'

'I don't think he sees it that way. One of my men heard him speak to a f group. He told them: "The time has come to exert our numbers," or some damned nonsense like that.'

'He certainly doesn't want the office himself, does he? At his age?'

'No! He's been coaching his grandson.' 'Simon? The one who went to college up in Kansas?' 'Yep. You give one of those Meskins a book, he thinks he's Charlemagne.'

'We should of slowed Simon down years ago.' 'Once they go to college, they should never be allowed back ' And that was how the Bravo Incident, which commanded the national press for several months, began. Hector Garza in the waning years of his life, thought that if his Hispanics constituted over eighty-five percent of the Valley population, they should have some say in how the Valley was run, but once he publicly voiced

this belief, he put himself athwart the political power of Norman Vigil and the police power of Oscar Macnab.

The confrontation started on a low key, with Macnab utilizing even' political trick to keep the Hispanics off balance. Wearing his fawn-gray whipcord suit, his big hat and his boots, he appeared suddenly wherever they were proposing to hold a rally, and quietly but forcefully informed them that this was illegal without permission from the local judge. He would also dominate hearings convened by the judge and guide the decisions handed down. He was tough in breaking up political meetings, citing possible subversion or endangerment to the community, and whenever the two Garzas devised some way to neutralize his quiet tyranny, he would come up with a new trick to harass them.

He refrained from ever touching either the elder Garza or his grandson, but he did have them arrested twice, for blocking the highway, and he did see to it that they spent three nights in jail. But with the lesser Hispanics he could be extremely rough, knocking them about and threatening them with greater harm if they persisted in their attempt to elect a Mexican mayor in opposition to the perfectly good man who had been running the town, with Norman Vigil's help, for the past dozen years.

One morning, in frustration, Macnab marched in to the Hispanic political headquarters and demanded to see Hector Garza: 'What in hell are you Meskins tryin' to do?'

'We're trying to govern this town, as our numbers entitle us to do.'

'Your numbers, as you call them, have no right to trespass on the rights of those good folks who have given us good government for all the years of this century.'

'That's not good enough any more, Captain.'

'It'll be good enough if I say so. You stop this nonsense, Hector, and get back to your patio. These are things that don't concern you.'

'They concern us very much. Mr. Vigil can't run this town any longer the way he wants to.'

The meeting ended in an impasse, with Ranger Macnab, a little heavier now, handing out the orders as in decades past, and Hector Garza, a little thinner, resisting them. As Macnab left the headquarters, frustrated by this sudden emergence of a power he could not suppress, he warned: 'Hector, if you go ahead with this, vou're goin' to get hurt, bad hurt.' To him, Bravo and its resurgent Mexicans were exactly like Larkin and its rioting roughnecks: you subdued each by the application of steady force, and he was prepared to import all the force required to put down this insurgency.

But then Hector Garza sent a telegram to Washington, and a Mr. Henderson appeared in town, a tall man in a blue-serge suit. Summoning Norman Vigil and Oscar Macnab to his hotel room, he informed them: Thomas Henderson, Justice Department. I'm here to see that the civil rights of your Hispanic citizens are protected in the coming election. I'm bringing in two deputies, so you men keep your noses clean.'

The Vigils of Saldana County had been fending off Washington since 1880, and never had they allowed its representatives to penetrate the power structure of the Rio Grande. Norman assumed that he could resist them again, but Mr. Henderson sought his injunctions not in Bravo but in the federal court in Corpus Christi, and he opposed every connivance put forward by Vigil and the Rangers. Finally, in irritation because these men continued acting as if the twentieth century had never dawned, he went to see Oscar Macnab, for whom he had considerable respect: 'Captain, why does a man of your apparent good sense always side with a man like Norman Vigil?'

'Because he represents the law.'

'You ever hear of justice?'

i've noticed, sir, that whenever somebody starts talkin' about justice, everybody else runs into a lot of trouble. Law I can understand, it's specific. Norman Vigil has represented the law in this community since I can remember. Justice is something people make parades about.'

'Why do you always side with the few whites against the many Mexicans?'

'This is a white man's country, Mr. Henderson, and when you fellows in Washington forget that, you're headin' into deep trouble. We don't want that trouble down here. We seek to avoid it as long as possible.'

'You seem to classify all Mexicans as crooks and rioters?'

'In my experience, that's what most of them are.'

'Captain Macnab, it's two weeks before election. If you don't change your attitude, right now, when the election is over I'm going to hale you into federal court with a list of charges this long.'

In a dozen similar situations Mr. Henderson had been able to strike fear into the hearts of local tyrants, but he had never before tried to interfere in a Texas county filled with many Hispanics and a few determined whites. He was startled by the brazen defiance Vigil and Macnab threw at him, and when election day arrived he was unprepared for the open violence with which these two men threw back the Hispanics who wanted to vote, the repressions, the animosities, and he was shocked to find that Vigil had imported

from south of the Rio Grande more than a hundred peons who had been paid two dollars each to vote against the interests of their Hispanic cousins north of the river.

The Garza challenge lost, for Precinct 37, with more than ninety percent Hispanic voters, reported an overwhelming majority for the Vigil slate, which meant that Norman would remain patron for four more years.

Hector and his grandson vowed to resume the fight in the next election, but this was not to be, for shortly after the failed election Hector fell ill, passed into a coma, and died without regaining consciousness. From the time of his youth in the early 1900s, and during the violent years of Horace Vigil, ending with the old man's death in the 1920s, he had been a loyal foot soldier for the dictator. He had then served Norman Vigil faithfully, but in his seventies he had begun to see what a fearfully heavy price the Hispanics paid for this allegiance. He had tried to break it and had failed, but he had inspired his grandson Simon to launch an effort, and he died trusting that Simon would carry on this crusade.

In the meantime, law and order, Rio Grande style, remained in effect.

With a little money in their pockets, the Morrisons of Detroit were having an exciting time in Texas. When the big bosses in the home office discovered that Todd had been buying and selling real estate on his own without informing them, they summarily fired him. Loss of the salaried job meant that Todd had to work more diligently at his deals, but with continued advice from Gabe Klinowitz he accumulated commissions and outright deals in his own name. Also, Maggie, having obtained her own real estate license, was now selling rather effectively for a large central-city firm. She wrote to her friends in Detroit:

Each week we like it more. Todd is doing amazingly well as what the Texans call a wheeler-dealer, and with my own license 1 am becoming Madam Real Estate.

What has been most difficult to adjust to? You'd never guess! The size of the cockroaches. 1 mean, as big as sparrows and terribly aggressive. The other evening I heard Lonnie screaming in the kitchen, and there he stood with a broom. 'Mummy!' he cried. Two of them were trying to drag me outside.' I gave him a real swipe.

You would be unprepared for the noise and bustle of Houston. Where Detroit was dying, this place springs to a more abundant life each morning. Whew! Life in the fast lane! Dips and darts on the roller-

coaster! And you'd also never guess the little things that we like so much.

Beth and Lonnie both excel in school, claiming that Texas schools are about two years behind the ones they attended in Detroit I doubt this. Just a different approach.

The city is a joy, and half you kids ought to pack up right now and move down here, for this is tomorrow. I'm sure I wouldn't have advised this fifteen years ago, because the temperature in summer can be ugh! But air conditioning has remade the city, and they should erect a monument to Westinghouse or whoever invented it. A step forward in civilization.

The barbecue, about which we heard so much, has been a disappointment. Not that delicious stuff we bought on Woodward Avenue, bits of beef with that tangy sauce. Here it's great slabs of beef, well roasted I'll grant, but no sauce, no taste unless you like the smell of charred mesquite, which I don't.

What do 1 miss most? You'd never guess. The New York Times crossword puzzles. Remember how we used to wait for the one o'clock arrival of the Sunday Times, and then we'd call one another about five in the afternoon: 'Did you get 43 across? Sweet idea, eh?' It sort of made the week legitimate, a test of whether the old cranium was still functioning. Well, I doubt there's a person in Houston does that puzzle, and we're all the worse for it.

Todd was entering the most rewarding span of his life, for in Roy Bub Hooker he had discovered a man who loved the outdoors as much as he did, and after the sale of the Hooker corner was completed and Roy Bub did buy the expensive stereo for his truck, they drove about the suburbs of Houston, talking real estate, listening to country and western music, and sharing their attitudes on wildlife.

'Todd, they ain't nothin' on this earth more fun than stalkin' a brood of wild turkey. Man, them birds has radar, they can outsmart you ever' time. Only thing saves the hunter is that they are also some of the dumbest birds God ever made. They escape you, run in a circle, then double right back to where you're waitin'.'

'Best I ever experienced,' Todd said, 'was hunting whitetail deer in northern Michigan when snow was on the ground. Icicles in the trees. Brown grass crackling. And all of a sudden, whoosh, out of ia hollow darts this buck. Temptation is to shoot him in the rear, but that always loses you your buck. You cannot kill him from the rear. So you wait. He turns. Wham, in that instant you got to let

fly'

They continued to differ on turkey, which Todd had never

hunted, and whitetail, which Roy Bub scorned, but they did agree on quail, and that was how their long and intense friendship began: 'Todd, I got me these two partners, sort of. A young oilman who may be goin' places, and this dentist who loves dogs. We've been rentin' a place, week by week, and if you cared to come along . . .'

It startled Todd to learn that in Texas one leased a place to hunt, for he was familiar with Michigan and Pennsylvania: 'A man wants to hunt, say he lives in Detroit or Philadelphia, he just buys himself a gun and a license, and he can go out in the country almost anywhere and shoot his heart out. Millions of acres, thousands of deer just waiting for him.'

'That ain't the way in Texas. Someone owns ever' inch of our land, and if you trespass without payin' a prior fee, the owner'll shoot your ass off.'

'Prehistoric,' Todd said. 'Where is your place?'

'Close to Falfurrias.'

'Never heard of it. How far—fifty miles?'

'Two hundred and forty.'

'I wouldn't drive two-forty to shoot a polar bear.'

'This is Texas, son. You drive two-forty to go to a good football game . . . and some not so good.'

When Todd met the oilman and the dentist, both in their early thirties, he liked them, for they were true outdoorsmen, and like most men of that type, each had his strong preferences. 'I like to hunt on foot, without dogs,' the oilman said. 'I got me this fabulous A.Y.A. copy of a Purdy with a Beasley action . . .'

'What's that?' Todd asked.

'A Purdy is the best shotgun made. English. Sells for about eleven thousand dollars. Who can afford that?'

'You can,' Roy Bub said.

'Maybe later. But there's this amazing outfit in a little town in Spain. They make fabulous copies. Aguirre y Arranzabel. They made me a Purdy, special order, my name engraved on it and all —forty-six hundred bucks.'