The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (6 page)

Freddy, on the other hand, is a wad of nerves wrapped in a bundle of emotion. Every shot to him is exquisite pain or ecstasy. He rants, groans, paces, punches at the air with his fists.

They win the match easily in two games. While most matches in the tournament are requiring two to three hours to complete, Billy and Freddy are finished in an hour and 20 minutes. That afternoon, they win their second match as easily.

The day's third match—the quarter-final round—isn't so easy. Chuck Nooris of Portland, Ore., and A.Z. Turnbolt of San Jose, Calif., win the first game, 15-8.

Freddy's face flushes. He moans, he rails. The second game becomes a tedious war of attrition. Two hours and 15 minutes after it began, Billy and Freddy win, 15-13, then win the third one quickly, 15-8, at 12:30 a.m.

Freddy dashes to the wall where the brackets are posted, to see who their opponents will be in the semifinal round. Billy doesn't bother. “You have to beat them all to win,” he says. “It don't matter to me what order they come in.”

The semifinal round is to begin at 8 a.m. the next day. At 7:30, Billy breakfasts on M&Ms and jogs around an island of cars in the parking lot with Freddy. Then they go inside and demolish their opponents in an hour.

Their next match—the final match of the winners' bracket—is to begin at 6 p.m., against Darrol Nelson and Jim Allis, the $2,800 Calcutta auction babies. To kill the daylight hours, Billy wanders downstairs to the card room for a game of poker.

Darrol and Jim are as good as Billy said. They begin the match with a 6-0 lead. They're very serious, very calm. They play the board like they own it. They win, 15-6.

Billy and Freddy manage to win the second, 15-14, but their shooting is erratic, and Freddy is a basket case, screaming and shaking his fists in the air. They lose the final game, 15-3.

They've clinched third place. But to win the championship, they now must beat the winners of the losers' bracket, then beat Darrol and Jim in two matches. They must do it all right now.

“They're saying you're over the hill,” someone says to Billy. “Are you?”

“I tell you how you can find out,” Billy replies. “Go find somebody that'll play me a game for $500.”

The best of the losers—Glen Davidson of Oklahoma City and Sparky Sparkman of San Diego—demolish them, 15-2, in their first game. But Billy and Freddy win two, 15-10 and 15-14.

They've clinched second place. Their two matches against Darrol and Jim are the only matches in the tournament still to be played. A couple of dozen spectators—all that's left of the crowd—are gathered at one table now.

Billy and Freddy win the first game, 15-13.

“I've been trying to explain Billy Mays to my friend here,” says a man sitting directly behind Billy, “but I can't. There's no way to explain a Billy Mays. He's the kind of guy you love to hate. He's nothing but a hustler, but if there was a shuffleboard hall of fame, he'd be the first one in it.”

Billy and Freddy win the second game—and the match—15-12.

“I'll guarantee we'll win the next match,” Billy mutters to a friend. “Jim's getting drunk and Darrol's struggling.”

Billy and Freddy win the first game, 15-11, and rack up a 4-1 lead in the second.

“Put them out of their misery, Billy!” Freddy shouts.

“Billy Mays has returned!” yells someone in the crowd.

But Darrol and Jim recover and win, 15-14.

At 1:25 a.m. the last game of the tournament begins. The players have been on their feet for almost eight hours without a break. The crowd has dwindled to the hard core, and most of them are drunk.

But Billy seems as fresh as if he were beginning. His movements are silken. His words to Freddy are calming. His shots are sharp and exact.

Finally, at 2:04 a.m., Freddy scores a three-point shot and wins the game, 15-10. He falls to the floor and kicks the air like a dying rabbit.

Billy and Freddy split the $3,105 first-place doubles prize money. Freddy wraps Billy in a hug. “I love you, you old son of a bitch,” he says. They shake hands and say goodbye.

Billy also had bought part of himself in the $18,000 Calcutta auction pot. His share of the winnings is $2,785. After the stack of bills is counted into his hand, he announces that this has been his last tournament. “Tournaments are getting to be too much hassle,” he says. “I'm getting too old for it. Let somebody else have it.”

The people laugh. “Sure, Billy, sure,” somebody says.

He sleeps until noon, then begins the long drive home.

March 1990

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HORNY TOADS GONE?

One day I was visiting with my friend Robert Hart, a photo editor at the
Dallas Morning News.
I don't remember why, but we got to talking about horny toads, and soon realized that neither of us had seen one around Dallas in a long, long time. “I think you ought to find out why and write a story about it,” Robert said. So I did
.

H
E WAS SITTING AT THE JUNCTION WHERE ONE OF THE ANT HIGHWAYS
entered the huge ant metropolis in our back yard. He was still as a stone and could have been mistaken for one, or for a dead cactus or a lump of rotten fence post.

But his beady eyes were watching the ants move along their highway, struggling under their loads of grass seed and bits of leaf. Every now and then his tongue would flick and one of the ants would disappear into his mouth. It happened so quickly that the other ants didn't seem to notice. They didn't even know he was there.

I wondered how he chose which ants he would flick. Why would he let a dozen or more pass by unharmed and then lash down like Fate upon the next? I wondered if the ants stung him on their way down his gullet.

I wondered, then I shot him with my BB gun.

He flipped onto his back, his short legs wiggled for a moment, and he died. I picked him up. Despite the thornlike horns on his head and back, his skin was incredibly soft. Especially the white skin of his belly. It was smoother than silk, and beautiful.

I held him, examined him. Then, not knowing what else to do with a dead horny toad, I threw him down.

I'm not proud of the memory. I'm not proud to say I killed many a horny toad in my time. It was something boys did in that place in those days. And horny toads were such an ordinary part of our landscape, more common than mockingbirds or armadillos or road runners or most other creatures that we associate with the Texas landscape. They were almost as common as the ants.

We didn't always shoot them. They were easy to chase down and grab, and a number of interesting things could be done with them. You could put a horned toad in your shirt pocket and release him in the classroom during study hall. You could stroke his soft belly and induce a hypnotic state that would freeze him like a statue. We called this “putting him to sleep.”

Once in a blue moon you could provoke him into squirting blood from his eyes. People don't believe horny toads do this unless they've seen it. It sounds too much like the tales that old men told little boys and little boys passed on to little girls to make them wrinkle their noses and say, “Ooooo!” We tried many times to make this happen.

Then one day we angered or scared a horny toad enough, and it did. Two streams of blood, thin as threads, shot out of his eyes. It unnerved us, for we had been told that if horny toad blood hits your own eyes, you go blind. Years later I read that this actually had happened to a few people, and that they weren't permanently blinded, but their eyes stung and were inflamed for a while.

No one knows for sure why horny toads spew blood from their eyes, but in Mexico it's one of the reasons they're regarded as sacred: When they cry, they weep tears of blood.

I kept my pet horny toads in a shoe box. Whenever I thought of it, I would capture 10 or 12 ants and release them into the box for my prisoners to eat. I didn't know that a horny toad eats about 100 ants a day. Sometimes if one of my prisoners began to look peaked, I would let him go. But it's hard to tell how a horny toad is feeling, so most of them died. I'm not proud of the memory.

But I've learned lately that my friends and I weren't the deadliest enemies that the Texas horned lizard, as it's properly called
—Phrynosoma cornutum
to the scientists—has had to cope with. I'm happy to say that horny toads still thrive in our small West Texas town, as they thrived for more than 4 million years over nearly all of Texas. I've seen them out there in the Trans-Pecos, soaking up the morning sun, still zapping travelers on the ant highways.

But when did you last see one in Dallas, or anywhere east of Interstate 35 and north of Interstate 10?

“They used to be common all around here,” said Dr. John Campbell, who teaches biology at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Up until the early ‘80s people used to bring them in all the time for identification. But they have really just disappeared.”

Ken Seleske, curator of education at the Fort Worth Zoo, used to have a colony of four or five horny toads in his backyard watermelon patch. “I had a red harvester ant bed in my yard that I babied and took care of as a food source for them,” he said, “and I kept cats out of my yard. The horned lizards were there for years. Then they mysteriously went belly up and died on me.”

He told me about a neighbor: “When his children were little, 25 or 30 years ago, they kept seeing horned lizards in their yard, and they wondered whether they were seeing the same ones over and over or whether there were just lots of them. One day they decided that every time they saw one they would put it in their sandbox and count them at the end of the day. They collected over 80, just in the yard, in one day. But they're gone. Today you couldn't find one in the whole neighborhood.”

I called Jim Hoggard, a friend in Wichita Falls, which is west of the I-35 corridor, to see how the horny toads were doing up there. “When we moved into our house in 1976, we had horny toads in our yard,” he said. “I remember trying to interest my daughter into bending down close enough to one to see it squirt blood. She wouldn't do it. She didn't believe me. But I haven't seen one around here in at least 10 years.”

I called my brother in Cisco, 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Last time I walked across his pasture, about 12 years ago, horny toads scurried like cockroaches.

“Seen any horny toads lately?” I asked.

Dick's a banker. I had called him at work. There was a long silence. “No,” he finally said.

Cisco, by the way, is in Eastland County, where an embalmed horny toad in a velvet-lined casket is on display in the lobby of the courthouse. Dick said he would call me next time he saw a horny toad. I haven't heard from him.

And I'm not likely to, the experts tell me. The chances of a horny toad surviving in this part of Texas these days are none. “They can't survive in parking lots,” Dr. Campbell said. “They can't breed on concrete.” And two other enemies harry the horny toad even more implacably than the real estate developers: the South American fire ant and the North Texas lawn lover.

“Fire ants attack and kill animals as large as a white-tail deer fawn,” Mr. Seleske said. “A little horned lizard coming out of an egg is easy prey for them.”

The fire ants also are wiping out the red harvester ants that are the horny toad's food supply. And if a horny toad escapes the fire ants and starvation, he's almost certain to be killed, along with the harvester ants and every other kind of bug life, by the folks who are out spraying poisonous chemicals on their Bermuda.

That's what Mr. Seleske thinks happened to the little guys who used to hang around his watermelon patch. “The people who live around me are into heavy chemical use on their lawns. The horned lizards probably got into some Amdro or something in a neighbor's yard.”

So the humble Texas horned lizard, the thorny little companion and plaything of my childhood, is listed by the state as a “threatened species.” I asked Andrew Price, a Texas Parks and Wildlife zoologist, what that means.

“There's worry about the future of the species in the state,” he said. “It means it's against the law to kill one or to capture one and take it out of the wild. It means that, in the rare event that somebody sees a horned lizard, they should leave it alone.”

As I said, I'm not proud of the memory.

July 1991

THE DEATH OF AUSTIN SQUATTY

John Jenkins was a brilliant scholar of Texas history and books about Texas history. And he was an internationally known dealer in rare books of all kinds, and an author and publisher of some note. But he also was one of those outlandish characters that only Texas among the states seems capable of producing, and when I read a brief wire service account of his death, I immediately asked the
Dallas Morning News
state editor, Donnis Baggett, if I could go to Bastrop. Almost everything that ever had happened to John Jenkins had been extraordinary. I was sure that his death was extraordinary, too. As of this writing, in October 1992, no arrest has been made in the case
.

L
AS
V
EGAS
REMEMBERS
J
OHN
H
OLMES
J
ENKINS
III
AS
A
HIGH-STAKES
player, a regular on the poker tournament circuit and a $100,000 winner in the Amarillo Slim tournament just two months ago.

But in Texas, where Mr. Jenkins was famous for his brilliant historical scholarship and passion for rare books, he faced financial ruin, Bastrop County Sheriff Con Keirsey said.

“They were jerking the rug out from under him,” Sheriff Keirsey said. “One bank in Austin has a judgment against him for $600,000. His business property is being foreclosed on. The IRS was about to audit him. He owed a Las Vegas casino $20,000. He has other gambling debts. His whole world is crashing.”

Mr. Jenkins, 49, also carried between $2 and $4 million in life insurance, the sheriff said. “The family's attorney said the two-year exclusion period on suicide was past. The family said most of the insurance was to satisfy lenders, banks and so forth.”