Michener, James A. (188 page)

To arguments, advanced by some, that such talk represented an economic holdup and a conscious drive to steal the leadership of the United States away from New York and Boston and into the so-called Sun Belt, he replied: The leadership of this nation rests with those of us who see its future clearly and who use creatively whatever leverage God has given us. The future must lie with those parts of the nation which have our remarkable mix. Oil, brains and courage.'

He was never arrogant about his beliefs, advancing them quietly but with irresistible force. When truckdrivers employed by his

companies to move oil pasted insulting bumper stickers on their vehicles— let those bastards up there freeze —he made them scrape them off, but he did allow them to keep others that came close to representing his thoughts— Yankees out of god's country —and he positively chuckled over the brilliance of the beer advertising which proclaimed that Lone Star was the national

BEER OF TEXAS.

'We are our own nation,' he told his friends, 'and it's our duty to see that our ideas prevail throughout the friendly nation which lies to the north.' He was not speaking of Canada.

It would be a mistake to visualize Rusk as some wizened gnome, evil in purpose, huddling in his vault at night, counting his wealth. He was tall, straight, beetle-browed, good-looking, and easily able to smile when not furiously pursuing some special interest. But more than a year could pass without his being more than vaguely aware of the value of his holdings; he certainly never brooded about it. He knew it was tremendous and he intended keeping it that way, as his daring support of Pierre Soult's Texas Technologies proved. TexTek had not merely been a good idea; it had been stupendous, and under the inspired leadership of the Frenchman, had often swept the field before competitors even guessed what the company had in its long-range plans. Office-sized computers, word processors, software, superb merchandising, TexTek had pioneered them all, and in doing so, had multiplied Rusk's impulsive investment many times.

This enabled him to operate rather boldly in fields which concerned him, such as the disciplining of labor and the expulsion from public life of woolly-headed liberals like many of the Northern senators, but he never thought of himself as reactionary: 'I represent the Texas experience. The land, always the land. My grandmother had no nose, no ears, but she did have this glorious land we sit on. My grandfather, that crazy Quaker, was a dreamer who stocked their land with those great bulls from England. My father probed the land for oil. And because I was working the land with seismology, I stumbled into TexTek. We never had any nefarious designs, no special tricks. We stayed close to the land and accumulated power, which I am obligated to use sagaciously.'

But it was not the placid Sunday in the country or the startling financial news on Monday which made this week so memorable. Tuesday was Election Day, the culmination of Rusk's effort to bring this nation back to its senses, and he rose early in his frugal Fort Worth apartment and drove out to Larkin to cast his vote. He rarely used one of his Mexicans as a chauffeur, because he loved the feel of a big car eating up the superb Texas highways, and on

this exciting day, when he had lots of time, he opted for a road that was only slightly longer than the direct route through Jacks-boro. He preferred this more southerly road, for it took him through Mineral Wells, where he liked to stop at the edge of town and contemplate an enormous building that dominated the skyline: Fifty years ago it was one of the supreme hotels in America. Hollywood stars, New York bankers, everybody came here to take the waters. How many rooms? How much glory? And now a rotting shell. On three different occasions excited investors had come to him with plans for revitalizing the great spa, and always he had told them: 'It was a fine idea in its day. Well, that day has gone. Look at it standing there empty, a ghost of Texas grandeur. And look at the little motel at its feet, filled all the time. You change with the times, or the times steamroller you.'

From Mineral Wells he headed for Graham, where he controlled a dozen wells, and then on to Larkin, where the ten o'clock crowd of women voters filled the polling places. He cast his ballot in the basement of the handsome courthouse, then went to his home to make and receive telephone calls.

Six years earlier he and a handful of other Texas oilmen had quietly assembled to discuss the future of their state and their nation, in that order, and he had warned them: 'God and the American way have allowed us to accumulate tremendous power in this Republic and we would be craven if we did not apply it intelligently. That means that we must defeat communists in office, regardless of what state they operate from, and replace them with decent Americans.'

'Have we the right to interfere in other states?' a timid man from Dallas asked, and he snapped: 'When McGovern casts his South Dakota vote in the Senate against our interests, he becomes a Texas senator, and I say: "Kick him the hell out of South Dakota." We've got to protect South Dakota from its own errors.'

'You're saying that we'll enter campaigns in all the states?'

'Wherever there's a man who votes against the interests of Texas. To accomplish this cleansing of public life we must spend money . . . and I mean a great deal. We're fighting for the future of this great nation.'

In the present election he had, by various intricate devices, poured contributions into different campaigns across the country. The bulk of it went to support Ronald Reagan, a most attractive man who had often lectured to Texas business groups on thei dangers of communism, the need to muzzle our central bureaucracy and the absolute necessity of eliminating the national debt, but Rusk had also pinpointed various Democratic senators, real

crazy liberals, who had to be defeated, plus a variety of notorious congressmen who had spoken against what he called Big Oil.

All of them were to be expunged, and as the long day wore on, he spoke with various allies around the nation: 'Ranee! Looks like we might oust them all. Glorious day for the Republic!'

Before the sun had set in Texas he was assured, as he sat alone in his Larkin mansion before the two television sets, that Reagan had won, but he was startled by the ineptness of jimmy Carter in handling the situation: My God! He's conceding while the Western polls are still open! That must damage his people in tight races out there. He threw down the newspaper whose tabulations he was checking off: That poor peanut grower never had a clue. How did we ever allow him to be President?

Still the resplendent night rolled on, and during an exulting phone call to friends in Houston, he shouted: 'By damn, we showed them how to win an election. We cleaned house on the whole damned bunch.'

He did not go to bed, for he wanted to hear the final Alaska returns, and when he learned that candidates he had backed so heavily retained a slight lead, with prospects of a much larger one when the rural districts came in, he leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and reflected: A man works diligently for what he believes in, and when the fight grows hot, he'd better throw in all his reserves. What did we contribute, one way and another? Eleven million dollars, more or less. Small price to pay for the defeat of known enemies of the people. Small price to ensure good government.

Toward morning he learned that the Democrats had held on to their seat in Hawaii, but he dismissed this with a growl: 'They're all Japs, anyway. They'd bear some looking into. Maybe next time we can fix that.' Of nine Democratic incumbents that his team had targeted, seven had been defeated, and as the sun rose on Wednesday morning he told his fellow conspirators on the conference call: 'We're going to rebuild this nation to make it more like Texas.' When an oilman in Midland asked what that meant, he said: 'Religion, patriotism, the old-fashioned virtues, and willingness to stand up and fight anybody. The things that make any nation great.' His father, Fat Floyd, had voiced exactly those sentiments sixty years earlier.

But then, when Texas seemed impregnable, changes began to take place in all aspects of Texas life, subtly at first, like a wisp of harmless smoke at the edge of a prairie, then turning into a firestorm which threatened all the assumed values.

The Sherwood Cobbs, at their cotton farm west of Lubbock, were one of the first families to detect the shift. One afternoon an event occurred which seemed a replay of that day in 1892, when a former slave ran to the plantation house at Jefferson with the startling news that boll weevils had eaten away the heart of the cotton crop. That information had altered life in Texas, and now another virtual slave, brown this time instead of black, Eloy Muzquiz, the illegal Mexican field hand, came running to the Cobb kitchen with news of equal import. 'Mister Cobb! Deep Well Number Nine, no water!'

'Electricity fail?' The 1952 Chevy engines were no longer used.

'No, we tested. Plenty spark.'

'Maybe the pump's gone.' Cobb said this with a sick feeling, because for some months he had been aware that the water table upon which the Lubbock area depended had dropped toward the danger point. Could the failure of #9, a strong well, be a warning that the mighty Ogallala Aquifer was failing? He did not hazard a guess.

During the first ten years on their cotton farm in Levelland, the Sherwood Cobbs realized that they had, by some fortunate chance, stumbled upon a paradise. Of course, it had required a special aptitude for anyone to appreciate that it was a paradise, for their land was so flat that even when the slightest haze intervened, no horizon could be identified, it started level and went on forever. Also, it contained not a tree, and what locally passed for a hedgerow was apt to be six inches high and covered with dust. Distances to stores and towns were forbidding, and when the sun went seriously to work in June, the average temperature stayed above ninety, day and night, for nearly four months. In 1980 there had been twenty days, almost in succession, when it soared above one hundred.

But with air conditioning it was bearable, and during the winter months there were about a dozen inches of snow; 'white gold,' the farmers called it, because it lingered and seeped into the ground. Of course, extreme cold sometimes accompanied the snow, with the thermometer dropping to minus seventeen on one historic occasion.

Only rarely did the year's total rainfall exceed sixteen inches, but. with deep pumps working, water from the aquifer was poured out in a stream so reliable that the cotton really seemed to jump out of the ground. 'The part I appreciate,' Cobb said, 'is that you can lay the water exactly where you want it, when you want it.' He also mixed fertilizer and needed minerals in the flow, so that while he irrigated he also nourished.

'You might call it farming by computer,' he told his sons. 'We calculate what we've taken from the soil and then put it back. Same amounts. Properly handled, fields like ours could go on forever.'

The results were more than gratifying. Back east, a bale of lint to an acre; here, two bales, and of a superior quality. This area around Lubbock was the dominant producer in America and one of the best in the world. A gin like Cobb's on the road from Levelland to Shallowater produced five-hundred-pound bales of pure silver, so consistent was the quality and so assured the value Brokers in Lubbock often dominated the world's markets, for what they supplied and in what quantity determined standards and prices.

'Imagine!' Cobb exulted one night after finishing a long run with his gin. 'Finding land where there's always enough water and a boll weevil can't live.' It was a cotton grower's dream, which explained why so many of the plantation owners in East Texas had made the long leap west.

But now, as he jumped in his pickup to inspect #9, he had a suspicion that the great years might be ending, and he inspected the silent well only a few minutes before telling Muzquiz: 'Go get the Ericksons.'

When the brothers drove up to the well, Cobb clenched his teeth as they delivered the fatal news: 'Same everywhere. The Ogallala has dropped so fast . . . these dry spells . . the extra wells you fellows have put in.'

'What can I do?'

'For the present, we can chase the water.'

'Meaning?'

'Deepen all your wells.'

'How much deeper?'

'The Red Bed, on which our part of the Ogallala rests, is two hundred feet down. The wells we dug for you back in 1968 go down only one hundred feet.'

'What did they cost?'

'Thirty-five hundred dollars per well.'

'How many must I deepen?'

'Twenty,' and the estimates they placed before him showed that the cost of merely deepening an existing well was going to be more than twice the cost of one of the original five: To do the digging, fifteen hundred dollars. To install the submersible pump, five thousand. To wire for electricity and protect the system, one thousand. Total per well, seventy-five hundred. Total cost per twenty wells, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.'

'Have I any alternative?' Cobb asked, and the brothers agreed: 'None.' Then the younger added: 'Each year the aquifer drops only slightly. But the rate of fall is steady, and soon it'll fall below your present pumps. But if we go down to Red Bed, you ought to be safe for the rest of this century.'

The older brother summed it up: 'Stands to reason, Cobb, you wouldn't want to call us back to redig your wells two or three times, just to keep pace with the drop. Dig 'em once. Dig 'em right. Dig 'em deep.' So Cobb chased the aquifer downward.

Even those farms which used windmills to work their pumps, and many did, had to deepen their wells, but when the pipes were safely down, these farms had assured water, because the winds on the plains could be relied upon: 'And sometimes they can be trusted to blow the whole mill flat as a freshly plowed field.'

Weather in the Lubbock area was rugged, no doubt about it, with the blazing summers, the frigid winters and now and then a tornado to keep people attentive, but the challenges could be rewarding, and the warm social life of the area diverted attention from the hardships. The Cobbs were especially appreciative of the local university. Texas Technological College it had been called when they arrived, but with the hard practicality which governed so much of Texas life the legislature had listened to the complaint of a West Texas representative: 'Hell, ever'body calls it Texas Tech, and that's how those who love it name it. I propose that the name be officially changed to Texas Tech, and while we're about it, let's make it a full university.'