God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (37 page)

“ ‘No, a human leg bone.’ ”

Julie insisted that it must be a deer tibia and that Fran was confused.

“ ‘Well, Julie, it was wearing a boot,’ ” he said.

Julie speculated that since the walls were poured around 1917, the leg might have belonged to a U.S. cavalryman in General Pershing’s army, which was chasing Pancho Villa at the time. Perhaps the soldier got shot in the leg and it had turned gangrenous and had to be sawn off, she suggested. “They are about to bury it, but then someone remembers, hey, they’re pouring cement for the new jail today, so let’s throw the leg in there so the coyotes don’t dig it up.”

She consoled herself with this thought as Fran buried the leg, reciting some Latin he recalled as an altar boy in Rhode Island. Only later did she consider that the rest of the body might still be inside the wall.

Julie’s art is like Judd’s mainly in its obsessiveness. Sex, violence, and religion are her constant themes. Many of her human figures have three eyes or an extra nose. She mixes Mexican folk art and Japanese woodcuts with Italian Renaissance portraiture, making work that is both gorgeous and bizarre. Her art reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch’s in its singular, haunting vision. Julie now wears her hair in three asymmetrical gray braids, topped by a beret.

We had a drink on the “cloud balcony” that Julie and Fran built to watch the sky. The clouds in the high desert sail past like galleons. It’s the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen. As soon as the sun went down, Venus switched on like a searchlight.

I asked Julie what she thought of Judd’s and Irwin’s art. She placed them in the “Because I Say So” school of conceptual art, which began with Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists. “They do have a way of making you focus on the world and seeing it in a different way,” she said.

I thought about how, when we came out of the Irwin installation, the shadows of a barbed-wire fence on the sidewalk were so striking that Roberta took a picture—art being made by the noticing of it.

I think Julie feels at home in Marfa in part because of the weirdness. She told us a story that obviously delighted her. A couple of blocks away from her house, a thirty-two-year-old man, Christopher Michael Cobos, allegedly beat his wife and was attempting to run her over when family members and passersby pulled her out of the street. Juan Lara, a Marfa cop, arrived just as Cobos was fleeing in his Chevy pickup. Officer Lara turned on his siren and gave chase. Cobos suddenly stopped, threw his pickup into reverse, and rammed the police car, disabling it. Lara radioed for assistance. A state trooper took up the high-speed chase on Highway 90, which runs beside the Union Pacific railroad tracks. A train was heading west at the same time. Suddenly, Cobos veered off the highway into the pasture, aiming his truck for a spot on the tracks just ahead of the oncoming train. His timing was off; the train collided with the pickup full force and sent it flying over the top of the locomotive and landing upside down. The trooper was astounded to see that Cobos was still alive. An ambulance arrived to take the badly injured man to the hospital in Alpine, but in the middle of the ride, Cobos came to and attacked the EMS attendant. The ambulance driver radioed for assistance. Another state trooper forcibly subdued Cobos, and they got him to the hospital.

The next morning, Officer Lara and another cop drove Cobos back to Marfa to be arraigned. They took the precaution of having him in handcuffs. The county judge, Cinderela Guevara, received the Marfa maniac in her third-floor office in the lovely pink courthouse. She opened the window for some air, and Cobos leaped out, headfirst. Fortunately, recent rains softened the impact. By now, Cobos had been in a car wreck, been hit by a train, gotten in a fistfight with a state trooper, and plunged three stories out of a courthouse window. He was airlifted to a hospital in Odessa with a full menu of broken bones and damaged organs.

I later heard that his wife dropped the charges.

We all fanned out. I’m not good at finding things. It’s a skill that requires looking past the surface of normality for the little inconsistency. One of the sharp-eyed students finally discerned the petrified stump, which appeared at first to be simply a mass of shattered rock but on closer examination was revealed to be exquisitely faceted, like a cubist painting.

Suddenly one of the students cried “Hallelujah!” and we all raced over. A rancher had recently driven a bulldozer through the scrub oaks to make a road, and in the roots of the upturned trees, like giant radishes, were dinosaur bones. Once you recognized them, they seemed to be everywhere, on the hillside and in the creek bed. It was a thrilling day.

When we got to Big Bend on that trip, Langston was joined by several other distinguished paleontologists from the university who were looking for remains of the Texas pterosaur, a huge flying reptile. Langston was famous for his “eye for bone,” but we had spent a long, hot day with nothing but sunburn to show for it. We finally regrouped on a knobby hilltop. I was standing in a circle with the finest paleontologists in the state. I asked Wann to tell me again exactly what we were looking for. “Well, it looks like a rock, but it’s striated,” he said.

“Like this?” I said, picking up an object that was literally at his feet.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “That’s the knee bone of a hadrosaur.”

“Would it go with this?” I said, picking up another object that completed the rest of the knee.

I know it’s not earthshaking.

Roberta and I hiked an ancient riverbed called the Closed Canyon Trail, in the state park next to Big Bend. As it happens, this trail is the setting for the final scene of Rick Linklater’s film
Boyhood
. The lead character, Mason, has grown up and heads off to Sul Ross University in Alpine. He meets a girl. They hike the Closed Canyon, under towering stone walls that twist one way and another, so that you can never see far ahead, like life itself. You know that they are falling in love and they are leaving their childhood behind.

Roberta and I had a similar romance. We met in college, at Tulane University, in an archaeology class. I was interested in her the moment she walked in—late to class, unapologetic, wearing a purple dress with a scarf at her neck, her chestnut hair tied in a bun. Miss Murphy. That was fifty years ago.

She grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Her father was a doctor. They lived in a clapboard country house on an estuary called Dog River. She used to sit on the dock and catch brim for breakfast. Both her parents were alcoholics, and the most responsible member of the household was the maid, Rosena Lipscomb, who lived on a bean farm farther up the river. Rosena used to row to work until the alligators got too troublesome.

Roberta’s father, Dr. Murphy, was a genteel racist, like so many of his station, but Rosena was the person who really raised Roberta. It was the central contradiction of her life. The civil rights movement was just beginning. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the bus boycott in 1955, and thrusting a young pastor in that city, Martin Luther King Jr., into leadership. Many of the signal events in the movement—the Freedom Riders, the March on Montgomery, the Birmingham church bombing, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma—took place in Alabama, and formed a backdrop for Roberta’s childhood.

She went to Murphy High School, named after her grandfather who had been superintendent of schools. In 1963, she was an Azalea Trail Maid, which got her photograph on the front page of the Mobile newspapers twice that year. The first picture was a group shot with Governor George Wallace, who is clearly flirting with her. The second was on November 22, in the afternoon paper. The headline says “Pres. Kennedy Is Shot,” with a brief story—six paragraphs—but the photo is of Roberta and another Azalea Maid who are said to be vying to be queen of the festival. It’s the much longer article.

We were married in Athens, Greece, where Roberta had studied during a year abroad, and we lived our first years together in Cairo, where we taught at the American University. There were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Egypt at the time, so we were thrown in among an eccentric group of expats—about the only Americans in the entire country—teaching adolescents only a few years younger than we were. Those first two years of marriage in Cairo were some of the most pleasant days in our lifetime together, except for the absence of air-conditioning.

We spent the next decade looking for home. For six months, we lived in a little A-frame lake house in Quitman, Texas, about two hours east of Dallas, that my parents owned. We grew vegetables; Roberta made cobblers out of the blackberries on the fence line; I caught bass and catfish in the lake. This was during the Euell Gibbons craze. Roberta had read his book
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
, which exalted the pleasure of foraging for food, and she loved to prowl through the pastures for various weeds, some of which were poisonous if eaten in the wrong season. She always told me they were dandelions. In the evening we’d eat on the deck and watch the sunset as flying squirrels soared between the pin oaks. They’re nocturnal and terribly timid. It’s said that if you corner one, it will die of fright.

I was writing about my experiences in Egypt, in what I expected would be my first article for
The New Yorker
. I styled it “Letter from Cairo.” The day I finished it, I walked out to the road, raised the red flag on the Rural Free Delivery mailbox, and sent the manuscript off, along with my dreams of instant acclaim. Somehow, the manuscript went from the mailbox in East Texas to editor William Shawn’s office in Manhattan, and back again, in what seemed like a single day. There was a card enclosed, the first of many I would receive from various magazines, politely rejecting the article I’d spent months writing. At the bottom, in a neat hand, was a single word: “Sorry.”

We lived briefly in Durham, North Carolina, where Roberta worked in the Duke library, sorting books in Greek and Latin (she was a classics major), then for a couple of years in Nashville, where I wrote for
The Race Relations Reporter
and Roberta worked as a bookseller; and then seven long years in Atlanta, where I freelanced and she sold books. We never felt that we had landed and wondered if there was any place that was somehow right for us.

I suppose many people live in places they’re not especially attached to, or that they actively hate. Marriages are like that as well. There’s a high level of discontent even in enduring relationships, together with long periods of stagnation and moments of shocking intimacy. You acquire a private library of memories. Arguments are born that last for the rest of your lives among the touchstones of joy and revelation. The commonalities draw you together or suffocate you.

And then children come.

Gordon was born in 1976. He weighed more than ten pounds and was delivered by cesarean section. After all the Lamaze classes, I was crestfallen to be ushered out of the delivery room, leaving Roberta alone at the supreme moment of our lives. I remember when my father arrived to see the new baby, and we stood in front of the nursery window, looking at the little creatures with blue or pink bows in their hair. Gordon was the biggest baby in the hospital, I boasted. My father remarked that his first child was also big. I took some pride in knowing that my baby was bigger than his, even though his baby was me.

We bought our first house in Atlanta, which had been built by the people who owned the brick company. We rented out the top floor while we renovated the bottom. The two of us hung new ceilings and rewired the place. We put in a garden, and I learned how to can. Gordon helped me make tortilla pizzas while Roberta got a master’s degree in early childhood education.

When I got a job offer from
Texas Monthly,
we were both ready to leave Atlanta. Within weeks after we moved to Austin, Roberta declared that she never wanted to live anywhere else. We had arrived in a community of writers and artists with lots of young children; we had a sense that we were finally onto something. Roberta and I bought another duplex. At last I had a steady job. Roberta began teaching kindergarten. Life was affordable, if a little provincial. Still, I was restless.

Our second child, Caroline, was born a year after we moved to Austin. Because Roberta had already had one child delivered by C-section, the protocol was that the next one would have to be as well. Our new obstetrician had a more relaxed policy, and she let me remain in the delivery room. There was a surgical tent set up across Roberta’s belly so we couldn’t see the bloody business below. I was holding Roberta’s hand when the doctor asked, “Larry, would you like to see Roberta’s liver?”

I certainly would.

I went around the tent and stared at the long gash in Roberta’s abdomen, and the organs that lay inside. Caroline was there, as yet unborn. I felt a shiver of mortality at the same moment that life was entering the world—a life that shuffled together our genes and those of our ancestors into something unique, something that only we could have made.