MY TERM AT PEN ended in June 1991. I was never happier than when the great airplane took off, to deposit me, soon, in West Texas, where I was expecting to have a relaxed summer. Woody and Fran were still finding last-minute things to do to the big house, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Then I would take my time emptying books from the ranch house into the big house, a carful at a time.
It didn’t turn out that way. My son, James, had issued his acclaimed first album, Too Long in the Wasteland , the year before but had later run into political problems with his second album. Having risen higher with one record than anyone might have expected, he was under some pressure to follow up that success with another album just as good.
My summer of relaxation turned out to be nearer the worst of times than it was to the best. My mother was crazy, my sisters variously stressed. In the bust that followed the oil boom my brother’s welding business diminished to such an extent that he decided to go back to school and get a doctorate in English studies, which, in time, he did.
While at PEN I had managed to scratch out a short and simple little novel about Calamity Jane, called Buffalo Girls , which later was made into a truly bizarre movie.
While trying to think of something to write I decided to indulge my passion for sequels and launched into a fourth volume of the Terms of Endearment tetralogy, this one to be called The Evening Star . The writing went well right up until the day I had a heart attack. It was a small cardiac event, as such things go, and might have occurred several days, or even a week or more, before it was discovered.
The story of my heart attack and its consequences are related fully in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen ; it need not be reprised here. Eventually either myself or my ghost or some combination of the two produced more than twenty more books, most of them novels but some of them nonfiction.
There was, for example, a short biography of Crazy Horse, and a similarly short study of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.
Then I edited a book of short fiction about the American West, 1950 to the present, and called Still Wild . I became interested in hundred-victim massacres in the Old West and produced a study of them called Oh What a Slaughter .
Then wanderlust seized me—we are in the Nineties now. First I ran the American Interstate highways for a while, producing a book called Roads . But the continent couldn’t hold me. I flew over to Tahiti, one of the loveliest places on earth, and took a freighter to the distant Marquesas, returning to Archer City a few hours before my mother died, which was more or less as I had expected.
Finally, where nonfiction went, I gathered up the various pieces I had done, under Barbara Epstein’s guidance, and published them as Sacagawea’s Nickname .
All this plus the post-surgical screenwriting I did with my screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana; before we knew it we had done twelve scripts, and were soon to have the luck of a lifetime when we obtained the rights to Annie Proulx’s great short story “Brokeback Mountain,” which won us each a screenwriting Oscar.