Michener, James A. (194 page)

So now Todd Morrison and Roy Bub Hooker owned a ranch on the Pedernales and half a Beechcraft airplane, but the latter awkwardness was resolved when the oilman, totally preoccupied with his holdings in Scotland, offered to sell his part of the plane at a tremendous bargain, which Todd and Roy Bub gladly accepted. When the deal was closed with this remarkably generous old friend, they saw him no more. He had leaped five steps up the social ladder.

But Morrison was generating enough income from his manifold real estate deals to permit him to absorb most of the cost of the ranch, and after an airstrip had been installed well away from the river, the private planes of many Houston real estate managers appeared at Allerkamp, and the place became known as a site where developers and their wives could enjoy a good time.

Despite this concentration on business, and Morrison was never far removed from a deal of some kind, his love for the land never diminished, and he was therefore in a receptive mood when Roy Bub came to him one weekend with a challenging proposition: 'OF buddy, I think we got ourself a gold mine here. My recommendation, we fence it in . . .'

it's already fenced in.'

i mean gameproof fence.'

These were startling words, and Todd remained silent for some

time, simply staring at the driller of septic tanks. Finally he asked, very slowly: 'You mean those fences eight and a half feet high?' And before Roy Bub could respond, he asked: 'You thinking of exotics?' Then Roy Bub said: 'I sure am. Todd, with your money and my management and my feel for animals, we could have us a ball on this ranch.'

'Do you know what gameproof fencing costs?'

'I do,' and from his wallet he produced a study of costs: 'Very best, guaranteed to hold ever'thin' but an armadillo, around nine thousand dollars a mile '

Rapidly Todd analyzed their situation: 'Ten thousand acres, divide by six hundred forty acres to the mile, that's about sixteen square miles. If it was a perfect square, which it isn't, that would be a perimeter of sixteen miles we'd have to fence. But we'd need cross fencing to break it into pastures, so add eight miles. Twenty-four miles of fencing at nine thousand a mile. Jesus, Roy Bub! That's two hundred and sixteen thousand, just for the fences, without the stock, which doesn't come cheap.'

'Todd, I got me a lead on some of the best exotics in the United States. Everybody wants to deal with me. The basic stock I can pick up for a hundred and thirty thousand, believe me.'

They sat in the evening darkness reviewing these notes, and when Karleen and Maggie came in to see if they wanted drinks, the men asked their wives to stay. 'The land isn't square,' Todd explained, 'so the fencing might be even more than we've calculated.'

'But I'll bet I can get us a lot better bargain than nine thousand a mile,' Roy Bub said.

'What do you ladies think?' Todd asked, and Maggie responded quickly: 'I believe we could swing it. So long as real estate stays up,' and Karleen said: 'Roy Bub's always liked animals. I suppose we'd want to move up here to get things organized,' and Roy Bub said: 'We sure would.'

He did manipulate a much better price than $9,000 a mile, and when the fences were erected, he fulfilled the rest of his promise, for he knew where to locate real bargains in aoudad sheep, sika deer, mouflon rams and eight American elk. He astonished Morrison by also acquiring nine ostriches and six giraffes: 'We won't allow anyone to shoot them, but they do add color to the place.'

When the animals began to arrive, often by air, Roy Bub greeted each one as if it were a member of his family, showing it personally to the large, almost free fields in which it would roam:

'Madam Eland, you never had it better in Africa than you're gonna have it right here.'

From the start it had been intended that when the exotics were well established, and this would come soon, for the Allerkamp ranch was much like the more interesting parts of South Africa from which the elands and other antelopes came, big-game hunters would be invited to come and test their skill against animals in the wild. 'Year after next,' Roy Bub said, 'when we have the lodge fixed up and my wife has hired some cooks and I've got guides, we're in business.'

They would charge substantially for the privilege of killing one of their exotics, but as the pamphlet which Roy Bub composed pointed out: 'It's a danged sight cheaper coming to Allerkamp for your eland than going to Nairobi.' Extremely practical where his own money was concerned, he established a rather high rate for the Texas hunters:

But when they were in place, with Morrison paying one bill after another for their purchase and their transportation, Roy Bub introduced a stunning addition, which he paid for out of his own pocket. One morning he called Houston with exciting news: Todd, Maggie! Fly right up. It's unique.'

When they reached the ranch they found that a large trailer had moved in with animals of some kind. 'You'll never guess,' Roy Bub cried.

The van was maneuvered to one of the smaller fields where hunting was forbidden, and when the gate was opened and men stationed so that the animals, when released, could not scamper

back toward the trailer, ramps were placed, the door swung out— and down came a quiet, noble procession. The watchers gasped, for Roy Bub had acquired from an overstocked zoo four of nature's loveliest creations: sable antelope, big creatures as large as a horse, but a soft purplish brown, a majestic way of walking and the finest horns in the animal kingdom.

When they felt themselves to be free, they sniffed the unfamiliar air, pawed at the rocky soil so like their own in South Africa, then raised their stately heads and began moving away. When they did this, the observers could see the full sweep of their horns, those tremendous lyrelike curves that started at the forehead and turned backward in an imperial arch till the tips nearly touched their flanks. Almost as if they appreciated how grand and eloquent they were, they posed at the edge of a tree cluster, then leaped in different directions and lost themselves in the woodlands of their new home.

Sometimes a whole month would pass without anyone seeing one of the sables, then a visitor would be driving aimlessly along the ranch roads and suddenly before him would appear that stately animal, purplish gold in the afternoon sun, with sweeping horns unlike any the traveler would have seen before, and he would come scrambling back to the lodge, shouting: 'What was that extraordinary creature I saw 7 ' and Roy Bub would ask: 'Sort of purple? Huge horns?' and when the man nodded, he would say proudly: 'That was one of our sables, glory of the Allerkamp.'

'What would it cost me to shoot one?'

'They ain't for shootin'.'

During the early years of the Houston crises, no real estate people escaped the adverse effects, but since Maggie Morrison had always avoided the rental business, she did not suffer immediately from the collapse of petroleum prices. Associated with one of the solid firms, she continued to specialize in finding a few inexpensive homes for Northern executives whose corporations had moved them into the Houston area: 'I sometimes wonder who's running the store up there. All the bright vice-presidents seem to be moving down here.'

She did not yet have the courage to do what her husband did so easily: put together a really big operation with outside financing from Canada or Saudi Arabia, but she was doing well and could have supported herself had she been required to do so. She had fallen into a Texas pattern of thought in which any gamble, if it had even a forty-percent chance of success, was worth the taking: 'And anyway, Todd, if it all did collapse, we could start over as

clerks in somebody's office and within six months own the place.' That she was now a complete Texan manifested itself in two ways. In her letters home to her friends in Detroit she no longer even spoke of returning:

Something in Houston catches the imagination and sets it aflame. Last week 1 found a home for one of the most famous of the astronauts out at NASA east of here. For years he'd been saying: 'One of these days I'll go back to Nebraska.' Last week he bit the bullet and will be staying here, even after retirement from the program. He has a little business going on the side.

The thing that catches you, I think, is the dynamism of the place. It's like watching some great flywheel whirring about In the first moments you marvel at its speed, and then suddenly you find yourself wanting to be a part of it, and you're sorely tempted to jump in. Well, I've jumped. Would you believe it, Pearl, I've put together a deal for three Arabs involving some of the finer houses, $14,000,000, of which I hold on to a small part. Until I close, I'll be so nervous I won't sleep.

That turned out to be a frightening one-week nightmare, which, when disposed of, she swore never to repeat. She took this oath because she had become aware that her husband frequently found himself in rather delicate positions from which he extricated himself by moves which she supposed she would not have approved had she known the details. For example, when the oilman who had been their partner shifted from the ranch on the Pedernales to the hunting lodge in Scotland, he confided: 'Maggie, I don't like to say this, but I'm very fond of you, and so is Rachel. Protect yourself. I've been in four financial deals with your husband, and damn it all, in even' case he pulled some swifty. The Lambert Development, the ranch at Falfurrias, the airplane, out at Allerkamp. He cuts corners. He gigs his friends. He's always looking for that little extra edge. And that's one of the reasons why I'm switching my hunting to Scotland.'

'Have his actions ... I mean . . . have they been . .?'

'Illegal?' He intertwined his fingers until they formed a little cathedral. 'The line is tenuous. . . shady. When you deal with big numbers you face big problems. But you must never gig your own associates.'

'Certainly he's treated Roy Bub fairly?' The fact that she asked this as a question indicated that doubt had been sown.

'Roy Bub's the best man in Texas. Everybody treats him fair. But even Roy Bub had better watch out, because some day he's

going to find he owns no part of that ranch. "So long, Roy Bub, nice to have known you." '

'I can't believe that.'

'And you better watch out, Lady Meg, or you're going to be out on your keester with the rest of us.'

He did not see her again, and to her surprise, the dentist with the big kennel ignored her too, so one day while she was surveying corner lots that might be converted into modest wraparounds, she stopped by the kennels and asked bluntly: 'Did my husband have anything to do with your pulling out of the Allerkamp deal?' and he said frankly: 'After a while, Maggie, men get fed up with dealing with your husband. Watch out.'

The second way in which Maggie indicated that Texas had captured her was the manner in which she adjusted to her daughter's strange behavior. Beth, a spectacular beauty in her late teens, had refused to attend the University of Michigan: 'The only place I want to go is UT.'

'Stop using that nonsensical phrase! If you mean Texas, say so.'

'That's certainly what I mean,' and at UT she had become chief baton twirler.

In disgust, Maggie had refused to attend any games, but one Saturday afternoon when Texas was playing SMU she chanced to see on the half-time television show a most remarkable young woman from the other university, a real genius at twirling. The SMU girl wore a skimpy costume that revealed her lovely grace and she threw the baton much higher than Maggie would have believed possible, catching it deftly, now in front, now behind.

'Extraordinary,' Maggie said. As a girl she had seen circus performers who were no better than this young artist, so she stayed by the television as her own daughter appeared for Texas, and what she saw made her catch her breath.

When the SMU band and performers left the field, the mighty Texas band swung into action, more than three hundred strong, dressed in burnt-orange. In front came the six-foot-seven drum master, followed by sixteen cheerleaders, men and women. After them came the three baton twirlers, with Beth Morrison in the middle. Behind her came the endless files of the musicians, all stepping alike, all inclining their cowboy hats in rhythm.

At the rear came a couple of dozen drummers, cymbalists, glockenspiel players and whatnots, followed by the sensation of the Texas campus: a drum so huge that three men were needed to keep it secured to its carriage and moving forward. It was taller than two men and was clubbed by a player whose arm muscles were huge; its deep, booming sound filled the stadium.

And then Beth stood forth alone, this poet manque, and with a skill that staggered Maggie, she sent first one, then two batons into the air, catching them unfailingly and creating a kind of mystic spell for this important autumn afternoon.

'Who in his right mind,' Maggie asked aloud as she switched off the television, 'would invent something like that spectacle and call it education?' But later, when she was forced to reconsider all aspects of the situation, she conceded that Mr. Sutherland, principal at Deaf Smith High, had been right when he predicted that Beth would find her life within the Texas syndrome and be very happy in it. Beth had been pledged by one of the premier sororities, the Kappas, whose senior members arranged for her to meet one of the more attractive BMOCs. Wolfgang Macnab, descendant of two famous Texas Rangers, was indeed a Big Man on Campus, for he stood well over six feet, weighed about two hundred and twenty lean pounds, and played linebacker on the Longhorn football team.

He was five years older than Beth and should have graduated before she entered the university, but in the Texas tradition he had been red-shirted in both junior high school and college—that is, held back arbitrarily so that he would be bigger and stronger when he did play. He was a bright young fellow, conspicuous among the other football giants in that he took substantial classes in which he did well. After their meeting in the Kappa lounge, he and Beth studied together for an art-appreciation seminar, in which he excelled, and before long they were being referred to as 'that ideal Texas couple.' What happened next was explained by Beth's mother in one of her periodic letters to Detroit: