(TEXAS, 4/22/06)

The next morning, instead of taking I-10 west across Texas, I took the less-direct but more scenic Highway 90, stretching from Houston through the southern Texas desert.  The terrain was desolate and rocky, sometimes flat, sometimes immense and mountainous, giant hedges of earth colored like brown sugar.  Birds that looked like vultures coasted in large, calm circles against a sky darkening with black, churning thunderclouds.  Had anyone ever climbed these mountains, I wondered?  And who laid those abandoned railroad tracks running alongside the highway, piece by piece?  How heroic an act, I thought, and for what?

Every so often I’d pass through a tiny town where people painted their rooftops like the Texas flag and men said “Howdy” when entering a general store.  Women had beehive haircuts and painted their faces with bright makeup.  Others towns, however, were nothing more than shells, remnants of what seemed like a disturbingly recent past, with hollow modern-looking gas stations that still had their prices posted, closed diners that looked like they could have been open just days before.  The houses weren’t crumbling.  Just empty.  It all eerily betrayed evidence of a recent desertion, as if everyone all left at once. 

——-

I stopped in Del Rio , found a cheap motel, and bought a large, five-dollar pizza at Little Caesar’s to consume in my room for dinner.  I could hear music coming from a nightclub next door.  Having already visited, out of some odd sense of obligation, the rustic but deserted downtown of Del Rio at twilight, halfheartedly studying its derelict and eerie points of interest…

… I wanted now more than ever to join the happy commotion next door and see what else I could make of this border town.  I’d been too afraid in the past to leave my room.  Now, at the end of the tour, it was finally time.  I walked over and stood on the wooden planked porch outside the door, still deciding whether or not to enter.  Then I saw a bulky figure running toward me through the dusty parking lot.  It was a man with long blonde hair, sweating through his tank top and wearing purple shorts that looked like swimming trunks.  He wasn’t slowing down.  Then he leapt onto the porch and sat on a bench next to the door with a thud, looking up at me grinning, his hair matted and strewn across his face.  “Did I miss anything?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.  ”I haven’t been inside yet.”

“I see,” he nodded, gazing ahead now, catching his breath.  “I’m Randy.”

He guided me inside and, after a couple pitchers of beer, we became fast friends.  He did most of the talking, though, and I mainly watched the couples line dancing to country music.  “I used to play pro golf,” Randy confessed.  “But now I’ve stopped all that to drink.”  He laughed and then paused, studying me.  “You look like the kind of guy who likes to smoke a lot of weed.  You have any weed?”

“Huh?  No.”

“I don’t believe you.  You don’t smoke weed?”

“I don’t have weed.”  

He leaned forward and started to whisper.  “I can show you a place where the trees are so high, man… they’re to the fucking ceiling.”  He raised both arms.

“I can’t,” I said.  “Besides, my motel is right across the way.”  I nodded my head toward the wall.

“You’re really not carrying?  Ecstasy?  Coke?”  I shook my head, but Randy seemed lost in reverie.  ”…trees to the fucking ceiling, man,” he repeated.  ”Why else would I give up golf?” 

“Drinking, I thought.”

He smirked.  “You’re in Del Rio, man.  It’s basically Mexico.  Del Rio is a gray area.  People can get away with shit here because there’s no law.  It ain’t really the States.  It ain’t really Mexico.  There are no real rules.”  Then he excused himself to the restroom for the second time in fifteen minutes, and as the door closed behind him a young man with slick black hair left his two friends at a nearby table and approached me.

“You better watch your friend,” he said.

“Why?”  I tried to sound affable and nonchalant, but was beginning to feel hot. 

“You just better watch him is all I’m saying.” 

“I’m not from here.  I don’t even know hi—”

“I don’t care if you’re not from here esé.  Your friend keeps looking over this direction.”

Oh my god, I thought.  He just said ‘esé.’  This is really bad.  Where the fuck am I? (You’re in Del Rio, man…) Get me out of here.  “He’s looking at you?” I asked, trembling.

“No, man.  At my wife, man.  At my girl.”  He was getting more agitated now. 

“I’m sorry.  Okay, I’ll tell him,” I said, hoping that Randy wasn’t about to come back from the bathroom to interrupt our little pow wow.

“No, no… don’t tell him anything.  You guys are gonna’ go, ‘cause I don’t want nothing bad to happen, you feel me?”  His eyes were fixed on me as he backed away to his table.

 Randy was still in the bathroom.  I got up and ran out the door, across the parking lot, and didn’t stop until I was back in my motel room.  I left him there.  Such was my state of courage at the end of a fifty-state tour.