In a Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry

Author:Larry McMurtry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

WHEN I CLEARED CUSTOMS, a simple process on that border, it was 1:30 P.M. and eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in the shade of the customs shed. All Texas lay before me—literally. I picked up Highway 281 right where it begins and drove west, through La Paloma, Los Indios, Santa Maria. Teams of braceros were at work in the green cabbage fields. I drove all the way up the Valley to Rio Grande City, a dusty little town that has been the scene of several celebrated border battles, some of them quite recent. Then I turned back to McAllen and drove north through the orchard country. The Valley’s charm is only fully evident in the evening, when dusk touches the orchards and the white sky becomes a deep liquid blue. As the day waned I passed Captain King’s ranch again and saw scattered bunches of Santa Gertrudis cattle, their red coats shining in the late sunlight.

I stopped for the night in Alice. All afternoon I had been in that part of the state where life is cheapest, particularly Mexican life. No part of the state has a bloodier history or, indeed, a bloodier potential. Should the laborers of the Valley ever acquire a militant leader, one smart enough to avoid arrest or assassination, the border country might again be as dangerous as it was a century ago.

In Alice, things were peaceful, if not quiet. The teenagers seemed to be using the car-horns to exchange messages in code. I dropped in at a hillbilly dance-hall, but it was virtually empty. In the Mexican part of town, crowds of kids were about, drinking orange soda pop in front of tiny corner grocery stores. When I was a very small boy my father took me with him on a cattle-buying trip to a ranch in the all-but-impenetrable brush country near Alice. I could not understand how the vaqueros could find cattle in such a tangle of mesquite. My fancy motel was a far cry from the old boomer’s hotel we had stayed in on that trip, a hostelry where the bedbugs were many times more numerous than the guests.

At one point on that trip it had been necessary for my father to leave me in the car, out in the middle of a vast, brushy pasture, while he went off on horseback with the owner of the ranch. While I waited apprehensively for his return, four greasy and mirthful Mexican cowboys filtered out of the brush as if by magic and loped up to the car. They were as delighted to see me as I was appalled to see them: they dismounted and crowded around the car, talking in rapid Spanish. At that time I knew little enough English, and only one poor phrase of Tex-Mex: “No sabe.” I told them no sabe several times while they tried to tempt me out of the car with offers of ropes, spurs, and food. Unfortunately, all they had in their saddlebags were a few mountain oysters (calves’ testicles) that had been lightly scorched in a branding fire several days before.

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