The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories Page 5

  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.

  LAS VEGAS REMEMBERS JOHN HOLMES JENKINS 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.”

  Whether any of this is the reason Mr. Jenkins was found floating in the Colorado River on April 16 with a bullet through his brain remains anybody’s guess. Sheriff Keirsey thinks maybe it is. Mr. Jenkins’ widow, his teenage son and his colleagues in the rare-book business think it isn’t. Bastrop County Justice of the Peace Bill Henderson has issued a ruling supporting the family’s opinion.

  Based on his analysis of the path of the fatal bullet and the fact that no death weapon or suicide note was found, Judge Henderson ruled the shooting a homicide.

  “Given the lack of evidence at the scene that it was a suicide, I had no alternative,” he said.

  But Sheriff Keirsey calls the ruling “misinformed.”

  “The angle of the bullet is completely compatible with suicide,” he said. “We know the trajectory of the bullet. It’s measurable. It’s physics. But due to the lack of a weapon, I can’t really argue with Judge Henderson. He almost has to call it a homicide.”

  Johnny Jenkins, as his friends called him, was one of the best-known dealers in rare books and rare historical documents in the United States. He was one of the foremost experts on Texas history—particularly the period of the Revolution and the Republic—and had edited a 10-volume work titled Papers of the Texas Revolution. He had written several books, including Basic Texas Books, considered an outstanding reference work on Texana, and an autobiographical account titled Audubon and Other Capers. His company, the Jenkins Co., had published more than 300 books, most of them concerning Texas and Southwestern history.

  He also was one of those flamboyant, more-vivid-than-life characters that often come to people’s minds when they think of the word “Texan.” He embellished his 5-foot-6, 160-pound frame with a 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, smoked big cigars, loved a good story, drank bourbon and played poker. Like “Amarillo Slim” Preston and “Texas Dolly” Brunson, he had been given a nickname in Las Vegas. The players called him “Austin Squatty.”

  “He was in action all the time,” said Jim Albrecht, manager of the card room at Binion’s Horseshoe, one of 23 Nevada casinos where Mr. Jenkins held lines of credit.

  “He did a lot of wheeling and dealing, and he came out pretty good a lot of times,” Mr. Albrecht said. “If he had money problems, he kept it very well concealed.”

  The Rev. Kenneth Kesselus, the Episcopal priest in Bastrop and the dead man’s cousin, agrees that Mr. Jenkins loved the game and was good at it.

  “Texas boys have grown up for 150 years playing poker. Poker is one of our sports,” Mr. Kesselus said. “And for John, it was a sport. It was an adventure. His whole life was an adventure.”

  Friends also speak of his “genius,” his photographic memory and his lifelong, passionate interest in Texas history. Mr. Kesselus had been collaborating with Mr. Jenkins in the research and writing of a biography of Gen. Edward Burleson, an ancestor of theirs who was one of the commanders of the Texas Army during the Revolution and who later served as vice president of the Texas Republic.

  Mr. Jenkins had worked on the project off and on for more than 30 years. “Burleson was John’s boyhood hero, rather than Roy Rogers or somebody the rest of us would have had,” Mr. Kesselus said.

  On that fateful Sunday, Mr. Kesselus said, his cousin set out in search of the abandoned graveyard where James Burleson—the father of the general—was buried. Later that afternoon, the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department received a call from a fisherman about a gold Mercedes-Benz that apparently had been abandoned near a public boat ramp under the bridge that crosses the Colorado River on FM969, about six miles west of Bastrop.

  “When the deputy, Jim Burnett, went down there and was looking at it, a couple of guys and a lady were there fishing,” Chief Deputy Lee Conner said. “One of the guys cast his line and snagged his hook on the dead man’s shirt.”

  The body was in the river, only about 20 feet from the car. Mr. Jenkins’ clothing was entangled with the branches of a broken willow lying in the water, near the bank. A large-caliber bullet had entered his head from behind the right ear and had exited through the left temple, blowing away a portion of the brain and skull.

  Sheriff Keirsey insists that he hasn’t dismissed the possibility of murder. Thorough searches of the river bottom with a powerful magnet and a metal detector have failed to find the weapon used to kill Mr. Jenkins. But, the sheriff says, the death scene troubles him.

  “All our physical facts do not indicate a second party was there,” he said. “Jenkins’ billfold was found right beside the car. It was void of the driver’s license and credit cards and any cash, but the other papers were all still neatly in place. There were no indications of a hasty search-through like the common thieves normally do. Jenkins’ gold Rolex watch was missing, but the car wasn’t ransacked or rifled through.

  “There was no ground disruption, no evidence of struggle, no sign that the body had been dragged to the water.”

  What bothers the sheriff most is the nature of the shooting itself.

  “The Travis County medical examiner says the type of wound and the trajectory of the bullet are compatible with self-infliction,” he said. “The gun was firmly pressed to the flesh. … If a second party was involved, he probably would have been shot from some distance. The bullet would have followed a different trajectory. There would have been some ground disturbance, some sign of a struggle or a dragging of the body.

  “Matter from the head exploding would have been splattered on something,’’ he said. “We didn’t find a speck or drop of anything.”

  Sheriff Keirsey speculates that Mr. Jenkins was standing in the river when the shot was fired. “I think he was three or four feet out into the water, maybe waist-deep,” he said. “If somebody else did it, he went into the water with Jenkins and waded back out. But there was no sign of anybody coming out of the water.”

  The weakness in the suicide scenario is the absence of the death weapon. A sweep of that area of the Colorado River with a powerful magnet soon after the body was found turned up the keys to the Mercedes, but no gun. Last weekend, divers spent six hours combing the river with an underwater metal detector. They turned up a pocket watch, several pieces of Reed and Barton silver flatware, three golf clubs, a plastic bag full of bullets and even a Rolex watch, but no gun. The Rolex didn’t belong to Mr. Jenkins.

  “There are lots of us in Bastrop County and Austin who would like to know why the sheriff hasn’t dismissed suicide as a possible cause of death,” Mr. Kesselus said. “He was out there looking for the grave of James Burleson, and somebody killed him.”

  But Sheriff Keirsey said two acquaintances of Mr. Jenkins’ had told officers that Mr. Jenkins occasionally discussed—in a hypothetical way—the possibility of a person committing suicide and making it look like murder. When an article mentioning Mr. Jenkins’ suicide comments was published in the Austin American-Statesman last week, the sheriff’s department received several calls from the public suggesting how such a suicide might be committed.

  “The favorite method they’ve come up with,” Deputy Conner said, “is you punch a few holes in a plastic Coke bottle and tie it to the gun. You wade into the river and shoot yourself. The gun drops into the water. The Coke bottle keeps it afloat while it drifts downstream. Then, when the bottle fills with water, the gun drops to the bottom, maybe half a mile from the scene.”

  Some of Mr. Jenkins’ acquaintances dismiss as “absurd” the idea that he would commit suicide as a way out of his financial difficulties.

  “I guess that’s the only word for it,” said Kevin MacDonnell, an Austin rare-book dealer who used to work for Mr. Jenkins. “Such a thing was against John’s very nature. The most remarkable character
istic about him was his ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat, to overcome adversity, to find ways around problems.”

  The public became aware of Mr. Jenkins’ intelligence while he was still young. When he was 14, he discovered the memoirs of an ancestor, John Holland Jenkins, who at age 13 had served in the Texas revolutionary army. His reminiscences of early Texas had been published piecemeal in the weekly Bastrop Advertiser during the 1880s. The young Jenkins edited them into a continuous narrative, added footnotes and an appendix, and took his manuscript to J. Frank Dobie, the potentate of Texas letters.

  Mr. Dobie not only read the book and recommended its publication by the University of Texas Press, but he also provided the foreword, in which he wrote, “Many a Ph.D. thesis shows less scholarship and less intelligence than Johnny’s editorial work and is not nearly so interesting.”

  The young author titled the book Recollections of Early Texas, and he received the first published copy on the day he graduated from high school in Beaumont. Later that year, when he entered the University of Texas at Austin, the book was assigned to him in his history class as a collateral text.

  Mr. Jenkins always claimed that it was Mr. Dobie—and UT-Austin President Harry Ransom and historian Walter Prescott Webb—who encouraged him to go into the rare-book business.

  In 1975, he pushed ahead in that business in a big way—by buying the famous Eberstadt Collection of Western Americana for $2.7 million. At the time, it was the largest single purchase of rare books ever made. Mr. Jenkins sold it, piece by piece, for more than $10 million and established himself as a major player in the rarefied world of rare-book dealing and collecting.

  During the 1970s and early ‘80s, Texas was enjoying an immense economic boom and—largely through Mr. Jenkins’ efforts—a growing number of Texas millionaires began investing in rare Texas books and documents, driving their value upward. Mr. Jenkins was acknowledged to be the top expert in the field.