The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (29 page)

I hit the brake and pulled onto the shoulder, cut the ignition, got out, and stood very still beside the car and listened.

The only sound was the ticking of the engine cooling. I wanted to get away from even that, so I walked into the desert, making my way carefully through the creosote bushes and the cactuses, trying not to kick the sharp white stones.

Fifty yards from the highway, I stopped beside a huge and very old mesquite. Its lacy leaves were moving even though I could feel no breeze. In the distance, a single locust whirred the only sound in the flat, chalky land.

As far as I could see, on the land and in the vast, bright sky, clear to the horizon, I was the only creature. I felt absolutely alone and absolutely free, standing in the bright, empty, silent space.

I drove on to Big Spring or Colorado City or whatever the next town was and got a room and slept soundly for many hours, for I was back in West Texas at last.

To those who don't know or understand it, West Texas is a hot, dry, empty vastness, a kind of purgatory, or even hell. But for those who love it—who welcome aloneness and silence—it's the home of the soul, a place that could give birth to religions, as the hot, dry, empty Middle East did long ago.

Exactly where it begins depends on whom you ask. A practical, modem boundary is Interstate 35, which splits the state from the Red River to the Rio Grande, linking Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, San Antonio, and Laredo. Fifty-nine percent of Texas lies west of that highway and its cities, but only 9 percent of its water and 12 percent of its people. To those who live east of the road, that dryness and emptiness are the very definition of West Texas.

Others mark the boundary in other ways. Fort Worth says the West begins there, and, psychologically, there's some truth to the claim. “Cowtown,” as the city still is called, stands on the eastern edge of the cattle kingdom and the cowboy culture, that fragment of Texas that has been so glorified in fiction and film that most of the world thinks it's the only Texas there is. But Fort Worth has water and trees, and there are no tumbleweeds bouncing along dusty streets, as so many foreigners come hoping to find.

Some say West Texas—indeed, the whole American West—begins a few miles farther along, at the 98th meridian, the invisible border between the half of the country that gets more than 30 inches of rainfall a year and the half that gets less, which is the West. But there are trees here, too, and running streams and pretty, man-made lakes, and quite a number of people.

All these boundaries are too far east for me. In my mind, true West Texas begins at the eastern border of the Panhandle. If you extend that line straight down the map to the Rio Grande, the hunk of Texas on the left is West Texas. Here are few trees, no lakes, little green grass, and not many people. Here is where the weak among our ancestors died, and the strong won the land by such brutal toil and bloody conflict that they became as flinty and unyielding as the land itself. Here is where you begin to feel the space and the silence.

Even so, the parts of West Texas aren't much alike. The plains of the Panhandle—closer to Kansas than to most of Texas—are so flat that there's no land to see, only sky. This was the land of the buffalo and the Comanche, and of pioneer wives who were driven crazy by the constant wind.

Its space is so huge that strangers sometimes fear they're about to drop off the edge of the world. And the sky—the only scenery there is—may be empty as a bright, upside-down bowl or roiling with clouds, dark and terrifying full of lightning and tornadoes.

South of the plains, West Texas becomes rolling prairie, and barren basins that were ancient sea beds, and great plateaus covered with mesquite and greasewood and cactus. It's a land of sheep and goats and oil wells and almost nothing else, all the way to the Rio Grande.

And beyond the bitter Pecos, in that broad arm that juts between the two Mexicos, West Texas is a land of rugged mountains that rise to 8,000 feet, where highland grasses and pinon pines grow high above the scorching desert floor.

Here, in the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend, the harshest and most magnificent region of all Texas, is where the Apaches once held sway, where the border between Texas and Mexico always has been a figment of the Anglos' imagination, where God is said to have dumped his left-over materials after he created the rest of the world.

The Trans-Pecos is almost as empty of people now as it was then, on the day God rested, except in its extreme tip. Where the Rio Grande has cut a pass through the mountains, El Paso—West Texas' only real city—lies, closer in both distance and attitude to Albuquerque and Tucson—and to Juarez across the river—than to its Texan sisters back east along Interstate 35.

Varied as West Texas is, its space and light and silence make all its children kin, and different from other Texans.

Once I was in Wink, a bleak little oil town in the midst of one of the ancient sea beds—a place as different from my mountain home as you're likely to find, yet only 100 miles away. I was visiting with a woman who had lived in Wink all her life. We were talking about Roy Orbison, the rock star, who had grown up in Wink and had left, and about the woman herself, who had grown up with Roy and had remained.

“There's not any place else where I really want to be,” she said, squinting into the bright, barren landscape. “And I can't stand trees for very long. They get in the way of the sky.”

I nodded. I knew.

September 1992