FOURTEEN

Unless you’ve lived through an oil boom you can’t begin to appreciate either the swiftness with which it unfolds or the speed at which fortunes are made. When the Daisy Bradford Number 3 well in Rusk County ushered in the great East Texas Field in October of 1930, the population of the village of Kilgore shot up from seven hundred to ten thousand in just two weeks. The Donner Basin discovery wasn’t far behind it in drawing people to town. In the weeks after the Smith strike every train that pulled into the depot carried roughnecks and roustabouts and their families. They also came in cars and trucks and by wagon, and a few even came on foot. Tent cities sprang up overnight at the edges of town, and the dives of Buckshot Row began to thrive once again as legions of whores and pimps and gamblers swept in behind the workmen and promoters. The rumble of engines was constant as trucks hauling drilling rigs and equipment rattled through the streets at all hours of the day and night.

There was money to be made everywhere. A hamburger that brought a quarter the day Della and I hit town now went for a buck, and a five-dollar room in a cheap tourist court rented for fifty if you were lucky enough to find one. The Weilbach was booked solid by oilmen who paid by the month and paid ahead of time. One wealthy operator named Simon Van Horn hauled out his checkbook and leased the Presidential Suite for a year in advance, and a couple of other men made similar arrangements for smaller suites. An enterprising young capitalist bought five acres of mesquite jungle on the south edge of town, bulldozed away the undergrowth and installed thirty-five shabby, road-worn travel trailers which he advertised to let at fifty dollars a week. They were all rented by nightfall of the day he put up his sign.

The municipal utilities couldn’t keep pace with the influx of people, and twice the city reservoir ran completely dry. Drinking water had to be trucked in from Midland and Odessa, and at the worst of the shortage a gallon of distilled water sold for five dollars. I bought a half dozen five-gallon jerry cans, and several times had to buy water at two dollars a gallon from a sharp old farmer south of town who had a natural artesian spring on his property. During the worst of the shortage Della and I had to make do with spit baths for a week, and I was grateful that our house had air conditioning or we wouldn’t have been able to stand our own stench. Membership in the YMCA skyrocketed as droves of people joined so they could use the pool to bathe under the pretext of swimming. The city hired a civil engineer to deal with the problems, and after a week of calculations he told the council that at the rate the population was growing they would need five new deep wells if the town was to survive.

Crime rates soared. Knifings and shootings became an everyday occurrence. A second red-light and honky-tonk district sprang up, this one outside the city limit on the west side of town. It was thrown together in less than a month with sheet iron and green pine lumber in a ten-acre dry wash where an old Basque herdsman had once kept livestock. Soon it became known as Nanny Goat Gully, and for a while it had the highest crime rate of any area its size in the country. But few people really cared because the money was rolling it. At last the disorder reached such a point that Manlow Rhodes led a delegation of concerned citizens to Austin to ask the governor for help. Specifically, they wanted a declaration of martial law. There was ample precedent for such an action. In 1922 Gov. Pat Neff had imposed martial law in Sweetwater when an earlier oil boom destroyed civil order in that town. Similarly, Gov. Ross Sterling had sent the National Guard into the East Texas Field in 1932. But unfortunately the present governor was neither Neff nor Sterling. Instead he was a plump, handsome glad-hander named Buford Halbert Jester. Called Beautiful Buford with the Marcelled Hair, he was an intelligent but weak man who wanted nothing more than to attend testimonial dinners and bask in the love of the people while he bedded every young Capitol secretary who could be wheedled out of her panties by his golden-throated voice. When the delegation arrived at his office, he listened patiently to their complaints, all the while nodding in sympathy, his noble brow creased in a frown of manly concern. Afterward, he read a lengthy prepared statement to them and the assembled press. When its convoluted syntax was unraveled, it was found to contain little more than the assurance that the governor was in favor of virtue and against sin. Martial law was not forthcoming.

A week later Col. Homer Garrison sent Bob Crowder and ten other Texas Rangers into town on his own initiative. They arrived just after sunset one hot evening on the Texas & Pacific Thunderbolt, their rifles on their shoulders and their horses in a special car attached to the rear of the train. Within an hour they were patrolling Buckshot Row and Nanny Goat Gully. Their methods were often ruthless, but as Crowder later told the press, they hadn’t been sent to town to organize a debating society. Crime rates fell as the worst of the hoods and thugs who’d seeped into the community fled before they had occasion to clash with Crowder and his men. Still, in the first two weeks they arrested more than sixty individuals who were wanted in Texas and other states for serious felonies, and that number included a handful of murderers. The Rangers’ efforts were hampered by the fact that without a declaration of martial law they had to cooperate with local law enforcement, and local law enforcement meant a sheriff’s department headed by Will Scoggins, a man fully as corrupt as the elements he was paid to control. But I was not without a friend even in that savage land, and that friend was named Ollie Marne.

*   *   *

I played again at the Weilbach that weekend, but the man I’d come to town to see wasn’t there that time either. Near midnight Saturday evening I felt that I had come to know Wilburn Rasco well enough to make a friendly inquiry. “Say, what about this Robillard that people keep telling me about?” I asked.

He gave me a sharp glance. “Do you know Clifton?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’ve heard around town that he’s one of the big players in this game.”

“Aren’t you taking enough off me to satisfy you?”

“Hah!” I answered with a rueful smile. “I seem to be down about a thousand to you right now. Actually, I’d hoped that Robillard might prove to be easier pickings. I’ve been told that he’s quite a gambler.”

“He is, and he’s a fair hand at the poker table. But I think his business dealings have kept him busy the last few weeks.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He teamed up with a fellow from Fillmore, and the two of them have been wheeling and dealing in oil leases since this strike began.”

“Is that so?” I asked. “And just who is this gentleman from Fillmore?”

“Name’s Simon Van Horn. Ever heard of him?”

I shook my head and changed the subject. I’d told the truth; I’d never heard of Van Horn, but I planned to find out about him as soon as I could.

*   *   *

Wednesday came and I took Marne to Dallas and gave him a look into a whole new world. After my run-in with Scoggins, I thought it better that we not be seen openly together in town, so we arranged to meet early that morning at a crossroads store on the north side of the county. Marne left his car there and we drove the rest of the way in my Lincoln. A wave of postwar idealism had swept through the country, and Dallas was in the middle of one of its periodic reform binges. The previous year a young combat veteran named Steve Guthrie had been elected sheriff on a platform that pledged to run all the hoods out of town. He was doing a fair job of living up to that promise. The Italian crime syndicates had never really gotten a strong foothold in Texas because the powers that be, who never wanted them here in the first place, allowed the local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers free rein when dealing with out-of-state thugs. Their efforts were matched by the ferocity with which such homegrown mobsters as Herbert Noble and Benny Benion defended their territories. These two men had been at war with each other over the control of organized gambling in Dallas since 1938, but now Guthrie was putting considerable pressure on both operations. Illegal casinos had been raided and closed, and the state’s liquor laws were being rigidly enforced. But Dallas is Dallas, and I gave the reformers about eighteen more months before the citizenry grew weary of this overabundance of virtue and returned things to normal.

We pulled into town at lunchtime, and soon we were feasting on rare prime beef in the dining room of the Adolphus Hotel. After our meal I took him to the offices of Fletcher & Reese on the twelfth floor of the Magnolia Building. I could tell it was his first visit to a premier big-city law firm. I watched his eyes run over the polished mahogany walls and the rich Oriental carpets, and before long an exquisitely clad secretary ushered us into the office of one of the senior partners, Elwood Fletcher himself. Fletcher had done some work for Bill Donovan during the war, and he and I were well acquainted. A little taller and heavier that Manlow Rhodes, he was cut from the same Calvinist cloth and projected the same air of fastidious competence.

“Mr. Marne,” he said to Ollie, “as you’ve been told, we will sign a contract to represent you in this matter. And even though this gentleman here is paying our fee, we will be your attorneys of record for this transaction. Would that be acceptable?”

That’s when Ollie Marne impressed me the second time with his common sense and instinctive good manners. He shook his head. “If it’s all the same to you Mr. Fletcher, I’d just as soon not put you to the trouble of making out no contract. If you say you’re lookin’ out for my interests that’s all I need.”

“Very good,” Fletcher said, obviously pleased. “The matter is in order. It’s that simple. The title is as sound as any title can be.”

He went on to explain to Ollie what exactly he would be getting for his “ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration,” as the deed read.

“What does this ‘ten dollars’ business mean?” he asked.

“This transaction is being handled as a sale. That way all parties can avoid the problem of a gift tax.”

Ollie Marne understood avoiding both problems and taxes. He quickly skimmed over the mineral deed, then reached for his wallet. “Then I guess I owe this guy ten bucks, don’t I?” he asked with a grin.

I signed the instrument as agent for Deltex Petroleum and took Ollie’s ten with a wink. When we left the attorney’s office I drove one street over and a few blocks down and pulled up in front of Neiman Marcus. “Come on,” I said to Ollie.

“What are we doing here?” he asked as I steered him through the front door.

“Your wife didn’t get to come today, so you’re going to buy her something nice,” I told him.

Loyal this man might be, but smart he was not. “Hey, that’s a good idea,” he replied and headed toward the women’s hats.

I grabbed him by the arm and pushed him into the lingerie department. “Buy her something really fine,” I said. “If you’re short on cash, I’ll lend you whatever you need.”

I figured that he must have had trouble stopping once he got started, because he reappeared thirty minutes later laden with boxes. We stopped at a bookstore a few doors down and I bought his little girl a dozen Nancy Drew books. “You’re sure she’s never read any Nancy Drew?” I asked.

“Hey, I know what my kid reads!”

We whisked along in silence until we were several miles out of Dallas. Then Marne said, “Listen, I really feel bad about that run-in you had with the sheriff. I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

“I know you didn’t, Ollie. Forget about it.”

We fell back into silence. A few miles down the road he pulled his wallet from his pocket and extracted a photograph. “My wife, Dixie,” he said, handing me the photo.

Much to my surprise she was a fine-looking auburn-haired woman dressed in a halter top and a pair of white shorts. She had a sweet face, long dancer’s legs and a full figure. I gave the photo a careful examination and then handed it back. “Ollie, my good man … you did well for yourself,” I said.

“I bet you never expected to see a lug like me with a woman like her, did you?”

“No, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t.”

“I’m going to tell you something that don’t nobody in town but me and Dixie and Will Scoggins know. Dixie was a hooker when I first met her.”

I shrugged. “We’ve all got skeletons in our closets, Ollie.”

“She was twenty-two years old and working in that house down at La Grange. She wanted to get out of that kind of life real bad, and I was crazy about her. She didn’t love me at the time and I knew it, but I think she does now. Our little girl was born three years later, and nobody could have been a better momma to a kid than Dixie has been to her. She’s a fool about that child, and I guess I am too. Dixie’s a good woman, but the fact remains that she was a whore, and Will Scoggins won’t never let me forget it.”

“It sounds to me like she just had a wild youth,” I said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “It happens to a lot of girls. Scoggins is the real whore. He’s dropped his pants time and again to hold on to his office, and you and I both know it.”

“Thanks for saying that,” he replied. “I guess you’re a pretty good guy after all.”

“Yes, I am,” I replied. “But I’m no saint, and I’m buying insurance with you today. You need to remember that.”

He nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a fishing cork. “I know, and when the time comes I plan to do my best to come through for you.”

I reached over and clasped him on the shoulder. “Ollie, the other day Manlow Rhodes said something nice about you. He told me that you are as decent a man as circumstances in town will let you be.”

“Really?” he asked in a surprised voice.

“Yes, and coming from him it’s quite a compliment.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Don’t worry. We’re the good guys this time around. Maybe not always, but this time we are. I promise you that.”

“Oh no,” he said. “The good guys are just clowns and I want to go out a winner.” I glanced over and there was a look of mild sadness in his hard little eyes. “I may not be very smart,” he said, “but I’ve seen enough to know that.”