Texas by the Tail

friendliness.'

'Well-' Mitch hesitated.

'I suggest that you tell Mrs. Lord I've invited you to a party at my home tonight. Tell her I'll be very disappointed if you're not there.'

'Well, the fact is,' Mitch said, 'we have a little business to wind up. It could be wrapped up in no time, if we could get right down to it. But-'

'Then tell her to-No, let me talk to her.'

Mitch passed over the phone. As she took it, spoke into it almost cringingly, he added her attitude to Zearsdale's peremptory one and arrived at the only possible conclusion.

She already had her loan, or a big part of it. Made on demand notes, naturally, since Zearsdale would accept no term paper in a situation that might go sour overnight. So she was over a barrel, Gidge Lord was. She had to be nice, very very nice, or she would take a painful pecuniary paddling right on her astonishing ass.

She handed back the phone, smiling, grimacing rather; literally groveling in appeasement. Mitch winked at her, and she went to a wall safe, begun turning the combination.

'Mr. Corley…' Zearsdale said again. 'I'm sure Mrs. Lord understands the situation now.'

'I'm sure she does, too,' Mitch said. 'Thanks very much.'

'Not at all. By the way, I've got a jet over in Midland. Give you a ride home, if you like.'

'Thanks,' Mitch said, 'but I may as well use the other half of my round trip. I'll tell you what I might do, if it won't inconvenience you…'

'Yes?'

'It's a long, rough ride back to Big Spring. Why don't I check with you from there in two or three hours, so that you'll know I haven't, uh, haven't had any accidents.'

'You do that.' Zearsdale caught his meaning immediately. 'You do that, Mr. Corley.'

They hung up after a moment or two of polite nothings.

Mrs. Lord closed the safe and came back to the desk. She counted out thirty-three thousand dollars, and pushed it across to him.

'Would you like to clean up a little? I can give you some other clothes, too.'

Mitch said that sounded good to him, but his immediate need was for a drink and a cigarette. She provided them quickly, also pouring a drink for herself. Then, spoke to him nervously as he settled back in his chair.

'Maybe you'd better sort of hurry, hmm? You've got to be back in town in a few hours.'

'Oh?' Mitch took a deliberate taste of his drink. 'You think I might have trouble getting there?'

'You'll get there, all right! You'll get there if I have to carry you on my back!'

Mitch chuckled wickedly.

He wasn't inclined to pour it on anyone when they were down, but Gidge Lord wasn't just anyone. She was damned near a murderer. His. He felt entitled to needle her a bit.

'I'm a professional gambler,' he pointed out. 'I come out here alone, and face up to an army of your thugs. And I make you pay off like a slot machine. I think the experience should prove very good for you, Mrs. Lord.'

'So?' She left it at that, not saying any of the things that she might have said. That Zearsdale probably didn't know he was a gambler, that it was Zearsdale, and Zearsdale alone, who was making her behave.

She had had to take a beating. That was the fact, and to hell with the why.

'You're not even curious?' Mitch teased. 'You don't wonder why a man like Zearsdale would go to so much trouble over me?'

'No,' she said flatly, 'I'm not curious, Corley. But maybe you should be.'

24

Mitch got back into Big Spring early in the afternoon. After checking with Zearsdale, he shucked out of his borrowed duds, took a long, hot bath and re-dressed in some he had brought with him. Then he called Red, asking her to meet him when he arrived in Houston.

She sounded a little cool and strained. But that, he thought, was natural enough. He had left town without giving her a chance to object-and she would have objected to a trip as perilous as this one. Now that he was out of danger, she meant to punish him for the scare he had given her.

He would have some pretty tall explaining to do, he decided. Or maybe, since this had been such a foolishly dangerous thing to do, it was best not to try to explain. Just to say that he'd lost his temper when the checks bounced, so off he'd gone into the wild blue yonder, knowing it was crazy but doing it anyway.

Red could understand a loss of temper. Who could understand better than Red?

The fact was he was just feeling too damned good to be worried about anything.

He had dinner on the plane. The stewardess was a Dallas girl, immediately stamped as such by her smartness, her glossy sophistication. She bantered with the man seated next to Mitch, a resident of Fort Worth; no yokel by any means, but a little on the drawly side, hearty and easygoing of manner. Mitch listened to them… the voices, the attitudes, of east and west… and behind him he heard a South Texas cotton grower disputing with a North Texas wheat farmer. And he was struck as he always was (when he had time to think of such things) by the amazing amalgam, the populous paradox that was this, his native state.

Between areas, there were not only differences in accent but in language itself. A pond, for example, became a tank, biscuits were bread, cookies were cakes, afternoon was evening, carry meant escort (to carry a girl to a dance), dirty was nasty (a nasty shirt), and meat was automatically construed to mean pork, unless qualified as red meat.

There were differences in dress, too many to be noted, yet intermingling with one another in these days of rapid transportation. There were differences in outlook, from one area to another, and these positively did not intermingle. In Houston, no Negro was admitted to a white restaurant-not even if he was a foreign potentate. In Austin, there were Negroes on the faculty of the University of Texas. In one city, a minority group had absolutely no voice in municipal government. In another (El Paso, for example), the minority spoke loud, clear and effectively.

That was Texas. That was not Texas. Because it was a generalization, and you could seldom if ever generalize about Texas. In so doing, you were apt to be guilty of the very narrowness you deplored. You were in a boat not-too-distant from that of the foreign viewers of popular American films, people who knew us to be a nation of sexpots and gunslingers, stopping only long enough to get sloppy drunk as we went about the business of shooting and screwing one another.

You could still find Texans who made a brag of ignorance. They hadn't never read no book but the Bible. They hadn't never been out of the state in their lives. ('An' I ain't goin' to neither.') The fault was probably rooted far back in the history of the state, in an official attitude- -promulgated by backwoodsy legislators-which saw little reason to keep a child in school if his folks didn't, and who believed that eleven grades of school (instead of twelve) were quite enough for any youngster.