Armadillos & Old Lace (21 page)

At the end of the little meeting the sheriff said there was something she wanted to show the two of us. She led us down the hall and down another corridor and stopped outside a small courtroom.

“There he is,” she said.

The little judge and I peered around the body of the sheriff and saw Willis Hoover standing in the dock. A small man who seemed nervous and somewhat overawed with the perpetual legal peregrinations he was experiencing. His hands were shaking in their cuffs and his eyes were on his shoes.

“Don’t look like a serial killer, does he?” said the sheriff.

“They never do,” I said.

“You ain’t gonna let in the Boston Strangler,” said the judge, “if he
looks
like the Boston Strangler.”

“You can stitch that one on a pillow,” I said.

A short time later Dusty and I pulled up onto I-10, set our ears back, and headed for the Alamo. It was going to be a hot day, yet I still detected a trace of residual chill from peeping in upon the human refuse that was Willis Hoover. It was even now hard to separate the little, harmless-looking man from what he had allegedly done. There must be another soul within him somewhere. Of course, he hadn’t been proven guilty yet, but that might now be just a matter of time. Circumstantial evidence from all three of our investigations pointed clearly at Hoover, who had the classic profile of someone who’d fallen through the cracks of society and in that way evaded detection. He’d run from me, he’d run from the law, he’d raised yellow roses, he’d served time for raping an older woman, and, according to the sheriff, he’d refused to profess guilt or innocence. Now that I thought back to him standing in that room, I could almost see the evil radiating outward in sympathetic ripples, yet I also felt a somewhat grudging pity for the pathetic little creature.

The Alamo was still there, of course. I’d often said that if the state of Texas were ever engulfed in nuclear attack, the only two institutions left standing would be the Alamo and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry’s hat. Of the two, the Alamo was the one I chose to always wear with pride.

With the morning burning off and the pigeons and tourists fluttering around, the sight of the Alamo caught my heart again as it nearly always did. It was a small, poignant, pockmarked little mission, standing blindly in the sunlight as if it might not survive the coming night. It was not full of itself, nor was it distinguished by the bigness that Texans often brag about, yet it was by any consensus our state’s most cherished possession. But we did not really possess the Alamo; it possessed us, as it possessed free people the world over who saw it or read its story. The Alamo was not a Texas brag, I thought. It was just the opposite. The humble heart of Texas. One of the few shrines I’d ever attended worthy of a prayer.

On the battle-scarred door is a plaque—the DRT is very big on plaques—that reads:

Be silent, friend.

Here heroes died 

To blaze a trail 

For other men.

To the right of the door is another plaque. This one reads:

QUIET

NO SMOKING

GENTLEMEN REMOVE HATS

NO PICTURES

NO REFRESHMENTS

As my friend Dr. Jim Bone says: “A lot of rules for a small company.”

I killed my cigar and took off my hat, rubbing my hair carefully so my head wouldn’t look like a Lyle Lovett starter kit. That certainly wouldn’t go over well with the Daughters.

Then I went inside.

Davy Crockett’s beaded vest has always been like a Shroud of Turin for me. I stare silently at it and its hundreds of beady little eyes stare silently back at me. The vest was worn by a true American hero—a man who died not for home, for land, for country. In truth, he was just passing through. He died because he was in the right place at the wrong time. He died with a hell of a lot of dead Mexicans lying all around him like a bloody funeral wreath. He died before he ever saw a car or a computer or a video. He wasn’t even a Texan. But he was everybody’s kind of man. In a world bereft of heroes, Davy still stands tall.

These were roughly my thoughts when I noticed another figure standing rather tall beside me. It was one of the younger DRT women who’d become somewhat agitato about the unlit cigar that I’d unconsciously placed in my mouth.

“Don’t light that,” she whispered.

“Don’t be silly,” I whispered back. “Do I look to you like a person who’d smoke a cigar in the Alamo?”

The young woman directed a hostile gaze at me and didn’t say a word.

“Do I look to you like a person who
fought
in the Alamo?” I whispered.

Moments later she was navigating me firmly back into the sunlight into the gravitational pull of an older Daughter.

“Maybe
you
can help this gentleman,” she said.

“I’m Lydia McNutt,” said the older lady matter-of-factly.

“I’m Phil Bender,” I said. “I’m a graduate student in anthropological choreography and I’d—”

“Well, I’ll be happy to tell you about the Daughters of the Republic of Texas,” she said, obviously operating on some kind of clinical recall. “The organization was founded in 1903 by Clara Driscoll to honor early Texas men and women who blazed the way before statehood, to honor Texas with various holidays, and to preserve and protect the shrine of the Alamo. You do remember when it was that Texas became a state, don’t you, Mr. Fender?”

“Uh, Bender. And I guess I’m not really too sure about—”

“Come, come, come! Surely you remember your high school history lessons. It was ten years after the Alamo, in 1846, that Texas became a state. To join our organization one must clearly establish through birth and death certificates that at least one ancestor lived in Texas before it became a part of the United States of America.”

“My field, anthropological choreography, is a very specialized one, Mrs. McButt, and we—”

“McNutt,” she said, in an oblivious, almost mindless singsong. “Lydia McNutt.”

“The field is so specialized,” I continued, “that we eschew all things of a political or patriotic nature—”

“You poor dears.”

“Yes, well. .. and my special area of interest is ‘Cotillions of the Late Thirties.’ ”

We’d talked for a while longer as Mrs. McNutt told me just a little more than I wished to know about the current situation of the Daughters. But, of some passing significance, she did reveal that in the early days the blueblood, upper-class traditions of the DRT were far more dominant and ingrained than they were today. And almost as an afterthought, she’d pointed across the street to the Menger Hotel, in which she believed resided an old disused ballroom furnished with archival materials. This, for once, was exactly what I wanted to happen.

I entered the historic old hotel with some trepidation, for as well as Richard King, the owner of the King Ranch, dying there and Oscar Wilde and O. Henry living there, it had been one of the two places on earth that I’d ever truly seen a ghost. I didn’t know it as I walked in the door, but damned if I wasn’t about to see one again.

Fortunately, my friend Ernie was manning the front desk and, it being a rather light day, he was more than happy to guide me himself to the old ballroom.

“It hasn’t been used for many years except to store things,” said Ernie. “The room’s on the second floor in the older section—not too far from where you say you saw your ghost—”

“I
did
see that ghost,” I said, as Ernie led me down an old corridor that would’ve felt right at home in
The Shining.

“Oh, you’d be surprised how many of our guests have reported seeing ghosts,” said Ernie.

“Yes,” I said, “but how many of your ghosts have reported seeing guests?”

I remembered the night quite well, actually. It’d been about ten years ago, when Ratso was down from New York on one of his famous visits to the ranch. Ratso, Dylan, and I had gone out to see Jim and Nee-sie Beal’s band, Ear Food, and I’d gotten to bed rather early without drinking alcoholic beverages. I was definitely not flying on eleven different herbs and spices when I saw the ghost. She looked like a gypsy girl or a Mexican dancer and she came to me in a state of semiconsciousness from which I leaped sideways rather quickly.

First I was sitting up in bed, then I was standing, and the vision of the girl still wouldn’t go away. She seemed to be a beautiful young person from an earlier time. She was wearing silver earrings and a belt that resembled the latent homosexual silver concho belts that the great Bill Bell of Fredericksburg had made for Willie Nelson, myself, and other Americans who unconsciously wanted to separate their bodies into two parts. I doubt if Bill Bell had been alive when the ghost’s jewelry had been made. The conchos looked like pieces of stars.

Dylan was snoring through the whole thing in the other bed and later suggested, rather insensitively, I thought, that the whole experience had probably been the result of gas. At any rate, I’d become convinced after the vision refused to disappear that Ratso, who was inhabiting the other room of our suite, had played a prank upon the Kinkster. It was the only explanation I could come up with for my having gazed into the dark eyes of this vision for over two minutes while standing on my feet fully awake thinking I was going to Jesus or Jupiter at any moment.

I had frantically followed this vision into Ratso’s room, where she finally disappeared, and I was totally prepared to upbraid Ratso for running in a girl or prostitute or whoever the hell she was while I was asleep. But Ratso himself was out like a beached flounder and his outer door was chained and doublelocked as was his custom in New York. After I’d awakened him, with some little effort, his suggestion was that I call Ghostbusters.

“Did you or the ghost say anything?” Ratso asked.

“The ghost didn’t say anything, but at one point I did.”

“What’d you say?”

“I believe it was ‘Fuck me dead.’ ”

“Couldn’t have been a real ghost,” said Ratso. “It never would’ve missed an opportunity like that.” While I’d been reliving my earlier, otherworldly experience at the Menger, Ernie had been opening a set of massive wooden doors and now he was handing me a key.

“The light switch is on the wall,” he said. “Don’t touch or move anything. Lock these doors when you’re through and bring the key back to me at the desk.”

“Fine,” I said, as I gazed into the dusty, mildly primeval darkness. “If I’m not back in about fifty years, send Richard King after me.”

Ernie left and I hit the light switch.

It looked like the Make-Believe Ballroom might’ve looked once you’d grown up and forgotten how to pretend. Dust covered the floor, sheets and tarps covered most of the furniture, and spiderwebs covered the rows of old framed photographs on the wall. The photos could’ve been right out of Violet Crabb’s dream. I liked old, dusty ballrooms as much as anybody but I did not share my friend McGovern’s devotion to them and all they once had represented. I especially did not want to see my ghost again or hear barely audible rustlings of old silk dresses as they moved gracefully across the dance floor. I just wanted to check out a crazy little notion I had and then get the hell out of there.

I didn’t know at what age young women used to “come out” in the old days. Today it was about nine. But I was betting that in those early days eighteen to twenty-one was about right for a self-respecting debutante, if that wasn’t somewhat of a contradiction in terms. So it was the late 1930s that I wanted, and I just hoped to hell I was right or a lot of dust would’ve been stirred up for nothing. Not to mention some pretty unhappy spiders.

1936. 1937. 1938 ... that was about right. I took out my Kinky Honor America Bandanna and wiped away the dust and cobwebs from the 1938 photograph on the wall. There were two rows of girls—ten in all. They wore formal white cotillion gowns and their hair had been coiffed in the latest fashions of the day. Their eyes looked into me as only the eyes of old photographs can. They were trying their damnedest to pull my soul into a better world that I wasn’t quite ready to discover yet. Not quite ready, but almost.

Their names printed along the bottom were quite familiar to me now: Virginia, Myrtle, Amaryllis, Prudence, Nellie (evidently Pat Knox’s newly discovered victim that we’d missed the first time), Octavia, and dear Gertrude (the latest victim). There were two names that I didn’t know: Hattie Blocker and Dossie Tolson. I jotted the two new names down in my notebook and then I counted all the names on the photograph again.

Something was wrong here. There were ten girls but only nine names. I looked carefully at each girl, matching her with her name. The last girl in the back row was the one whose name had been deleted. So had something else. I’d only seen the phenomenon before in early revisionist Russian photographs where certain political figures had fallen from favor. Seeing it here and now in this old attic of a ballroom sent a cold, timeless, unforgiving chill of half-remembered history through my very being.

Not only was the young girl’s name missing.

So was her face.