Generations and Other True Stories (20 page)

On the other hand, he says, his former best friend “wrote me a letter saying I'm no better than Hitler, a child molester, an abortionist, or a murderer, then signed the letter, ‘Your friend in Christ.' ”

And at his grandfather's funeral, when Mr. Davis tried to shake hands with his uncle, a retired Assemblies of God missionary, “the man turned away,” he says. “It's sad that the first twenty-one years of my life…it's like somebody has put a wall down, and the people I knew during that time won't even speak to me, when they used to be my family. I've felt more compassion from the people that the church has cast out than I have from people who think they're Christians.”

For a while after his congregation shunned him, Mr. Davis visited a number of “mainstream” Protestant churches and a gay church in Dallas, hoping to find another congregation in which to worship. But, accustomed to the emotional fervor of Pentecostal worship, he found the services too cold and formal. “Besides, it doesn't appeal to me to go to a church that wouldn't want me there if they knew who I was,” he says. “I've come to feel like there is no place for a homosexual in a regular church today. They're structured for families and for people who are looking to get married and start families.”

As for the gay church, “It's extremely liberal,” he says. “I couldn't be comfortable in a situation like that, either. I think I'll have a private relationship with God and just leave it at that.”

He pauses. “I prayed to God, ‘You know my heart, and you know how I've struggled.' In the Bible it says if you pray and pray and pray and there's no answer, you need to wait awhile. And that's where I am now, just sitting on the sideline, waiting…. ”

He pauses again. “Deep down,” he says, “I don't think I could ever be anything but Pentecostal.”

November 1993

If Robert James Waller's name is mentioned in future histories of American literature, it's likely to be as one of the worst novelists ever to touch a keyboard—and one of the most successful, financially. The critics don't like him at all. But at this writing, his first novel
, The Bridges of Madison County,
has been on
The New York Times
best-seller list for 142 weeks
.

He has published two more novels since. They're even worse than the first, the critics say, but not as successful
.

When I heard that he had moved to my home country in the Trans-Pecos of Texas, I couldn't resist an inquiry
.

The ‘Last Cowboy' of Brewster County

This fellow walks into the Parsons Real Estate office in Alpine and says, “I want to buy a big ranch. Maybe a thousand acres.”

Flop Parsons regards him with a sad blue eye. “Wellsir,” he says. “Around here, a thousand acres is little.”

The fellow looks like just a cowboy, says Flop's wife and business partner, Joy. “Of course, we don't know who he is.”

He says he already has a place in mind. He has read about it in
The Alpine Avalanche
. He has flown over it in an airplane. He asks if he can drive out and have a look at it. Flop tells him sure, go ahead.

This was about a year ago, Flop says. A few months later, the fellow buys his thousand acres from Dr. John Pate, a local physician. The new owner and his wife haul in a Toyota full of gear from Iowa, and Brewster County acquires its most famous resident.

“He don't want people to know exactly where he's at, if you don't mind,” Flop says. “He tries to keep a little privacy as best he can.”

If privacy is what's craved, few places can provide it in larger supply than Brewster County, whose boundaries embrace more than six thousand square miles of rugged mountains and desert on the southern edge of Far West Texas, just a short wade across the Rio Grande from the equally harsh barrens of Chihuahua and Coahuila. It's a country where humans are scarce, and almost every form of plant and animal life scratches, bites, or stings, and “No Trespassing” signs mean what they say.

So Robert James Waller can be as alone as he wants to be.

“Most people in town have never met him,” says Jean Hardy, proprietor of Books Plus. “They've never seen him. They just know he's here. He's just a presence.” And no, he isn't available for interviews, his New York publicist has declared. Not now. Not ever. At least not before his third novel,
Border Music
, is in the stores.

If the name Robert James Waller doesn't ring a bell, you probably haven't looked at
The New York Times
best-seller list for more than two years, and you aren't among the 6 million-plus people who have bought a copy of
The Bridges of Madison County
. Nor one of the additional millions who have borrowed dog-eared copies from friends or libraries.

Mr. Waller wrote it. He's the creator of middle-aged-but-studly traveling photographer Robert Kinkaid and middle-aged-and-bored-but-still-sexy Iowa farm wife Francesca Johnson, who enjoy a torrid four-day love affair while farm husband and kids are away at the state fair, then spend the remainder of their years in unrequited longing for each other.

The story is a three-hanky paean to that apparently rare being, the sensitive-but-virile American male, of whom so many women are said to dream so hopelessly. And who can blame them? This is what goes through Mr. Kincaid's head when he stops at the Johnson farm to ask directions and claps eyes on Francesca for the first time:

“She was about five feet six, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere he traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That's why he found most young women unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.”

Mrs. Johnson, on the other hand, sees Mr. Kinkaid as “a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet.”

Like most first novels,
The Bridges of Madison County
was published without fanfare. But Oprah Winfrey read it and raved about it on her TV show. Thousands of her viewers went out and bought it, and word-of-mouth—the most valuable kind of publicity, publishers say—spread the book's fame like the proverbial wildfire.

It also changed the life of the surprised University of Northern Iowa business professor who had written it in the course of a few days, his daughter says, for the amusement of family and friends.

The book's astounding success—and the more modest success of Mr. Waller's second novel,
Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend
—has made the author a millionaire and a celebrity. The more than six million copies of
Bridges
that have been sold so far are all in hardcover. The sure-to-be-lucrative paperback edition is still to come, and soon the little book will become a major motion picture starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep as the bucolic lovers.

“He did it for fun,” says Rachael Waller-Young, the only child of Robert and his wife, Georgia. “He had this idea, and he wrote it. The original manuscript has a note he wrote on it: ‘This is something I did just for fun.' We have that in a lock box now.”

Ms. Waller-Young moved to Brewster County from Brooklyn soon after her parents. She and her husband, Vincent Young, of the Bronx, were married last August in the Wallers' back yard, with Hallie Stillwell, the legendary ninety-four-year-old rancher, chili cookoff judge, and justice of the peace, performing the ceremony. The newly-weds live on a 350-acre spread that Ms. Waller-Young's parents bought for them.

An outgoing, energetic, quick-to-laugh fancier of dogs and horses, Ms. Waller-Young has become a favorite neighbor in her part of the county. “Everybody likes Rachael,” Joy Parsons says. “How could you not?”

The daughter, twenty-seven years old, is still amazed at her father's success. “I can't believe he wrote the best-selling novel in history,” she says. “My dad?”

But the published reports that the author and his wife had to abandon their home in rural Iowa because too many tourists were crowding up to their door for autographs and snapshots just aren't true, Ms. Waller-Young says.

“He enjoys his fans,” she says. “He's a very personal guy. But a writer has to have privacy to do his work. He wanted what he called ‘an artist's retreat,' a place where he and my mom could go and get away. They wanted a place that was warm. My mom's tired of Iowa winters. They were looking around the South. They've gone there a lot. My mother has really embraced Mexico. She goes there every year. But my dad has always loved West Texas and everything about West Texas. To see him here is to see the little boy in him. Here he has everything he dreamed about when he was little. He has always been a cowboy. He couldn't show it so much where he was, but there has always been that cowboy inside him. And it fits. I look at him with that Stetson on, and it's just killer. He wore a black tux and a Stetson at my wedding. He looked so cool.”

The snapshots of the man in the black Stetson that Ms. Waller-Young displays on her coffee table are the spitting image of Robert Kinkaid, the studly photographer, who calls himself “one of the last cowboys” in Mr. Waller's novel. Like Mr. Kinkaid, Mr. Waller also shoots pictures, plays the guitar—as well as the banjo, the saxophone, the flute and the mandolin—and sings.

“Kinkaid
is
Dad in lots of ways,” Ms. Waller-Young says. “I read the book and went, ‘This is my mom and dad.' But in a different lifetime, know what I mean? Not in this lifetime, because none of the things in the book really happened. The description of Francesca is my mother exactly. She's stunning. Everybody thinks she's my dad's second marriage. She doesn't look like a woman in her fifties, I tell you.”

Her parents aren't at home right now, Ms. Waller-Young says. They're off somewhere on a “swamp crawl.”

“Destination unknown,” she says. “Even I don't know where they are. They do this a couple of times a year at least. They call them ‘swamp crawls' because the first time they did one they went down through like Florida and Louisiana, through swamps,” she says. “They don't make any plans. They reach an intersection and flip a coin to decide which way they should go. Dad finds some of his characters that way. That's also how they found Alpine.”

When the Wallers bought their ranch, Flop Parsons says, their plan was to live part of the year in Brewster County and part on their Iowa farm. But when they began extensive remodeling and expansion of the ranch house and drew up plans for a huge art studio for Mrs. Waller's pottery- and jewelry-making, they began to think differently.

“He told me he was going home to Iowa for a few days,” Flop says. “But later he said that while he was on the road, something happened. It suddenly hit him: ‘Naw. I'm not
going
home; I'm
leaving
home. I'm just going to Iowa to get some stuff to bring
back
home.' ”

And the rumors that floated out of Far West Texas that the newly arrived famous author was putting on airs—wearing leather pants and gold chains, driving around in a Mercedes and acting stuck-up—just aren't true, they say in Alpine.

“No, no, no, that was Tommy Lee Jones, when he was out here filming
The Good Old Boys
,” says Barbara Kellim, manager of Ocotillo Enterprises, which sells, according to its sign, “Books and Rocks, Crafts Supplies and a Little Bit of Music.”

“Robert and Georgia are down-to-earth, neat people,” she says. “This town is pretty funny. If you want to be isolated, you can be isolated. If you want to be popular, you can be popular. You can be your own person.”

Indeed, Brewster Countians say, the Wallers have fitted themselves so neatly into their loose-knit community that they're not using nearly all the privacy they have at their disposal.

“They love country and Western music,” says Joy Parsons. “They go to all the dances.”

“He came to the Fourth of July celebration at Camp Peña Colorado, down near Marathon,” says Jean Hardy, “and sang some songs and played on the guitar. He has a real sweet voice.”

“He doesn't want people to see him as a celebrity,” says Mindy Young, who works at
The Alpine Avalanche
. “And, really, not many do. They fit in pretty well about here. Especially his wife. She loves to gossip.”

“He hangs out with the cowboys at the Crystal Bar,” says Rachael Waller-Young. “He's just a good old boy.”

“He fits in real good,” says Flop Parsons. “He likes beer.”

November 1994

If any topic of conversation can dissolve into argument faster than politics or religion, it's UFOs—whether they're real, what they are and where they come from. And there's no place in the country—possibly the world—where UFOs are a hotter topic than in Roswell, New Mexico, because in 1947 a UFO either did or didn't crash near there
.

In 1993, Congressman Steven Schiff of Albuquerque sicced the General Accounting Office—the investigative arm of Congress—on the Pentagon in an attempt to find out what really happened in the high desert on that dark and stormy night nearly fifty years ago
.

As of this writing, in February 1995, Mr. Schiff still hasn't received his answer
.

The Incident at Roswell

On the morning of July 3, 1947, Mac Brazel and Dee Proctor saddled their horses and rode into the wide nowhere of Lincoln County, New Mexico. Mr. Brazel was the foreman of the scrubby high-desert sheep ranch upon which they rode. Like ranchers in all times and places, he was alert to the weather, and earlier, in the black wee hours of this day, while a ferocious thunderstorm was slashing across his land, he had heard a roar that didn't sound like thunder. Maybe lightning had struck a windmill. Maybe some of his sheep—not the smartest of nature's creatures—had managed to drown themselves in a flash-flooded arroyo. Now that the sun was up, he had better take a look. Anyway, he wanted to see which parts of the range had received the welcome moisture.