Real Texans

“There are things you’ll never understand about this state or about being a Texan,” Michael said.

He was wrong, of course. I’d moved here from Michigan decades ago, and my carpetbagging made me as Texan as him. But I knew who he was talking about. He meant the kind whose seven-year-old cheeks and forehead were smeared with the blood of the first deer he killed on the family ranch as an old man with thick whiskey breath said some incantation in atrocious Latin as he swayed over the boy. This also probably happened to Michael: his mother sent him and his brother out to shoot doves, and she talked reverentially about her brothers going out to hunt and her father and his brothers before them, and about the dishes she would make out of the meat in the afternoon. But when the boys returned hours later sweaty and grimy, with dozens of doves stuffed in an ancient leather bag, they found her passed out drunk on the toilet. And at one time or other, when Michael was a prepubescent, his parents and aunts and uncles must have encouraged him, through a series of blinks, silences, glances, and small smiles, to touch his first cousin inappropriately. And the secrets he was so good at keeping — about the crimes that were the wellhead of the family fortune, about the rapes and drunken rages that left puddles of blood soaking into hard wood floors. I’d never heard a word about them even though I’d known Michael for 20 years, had spent weekends at his family ranch in South Texas. I guessed, too, that Michael had a handgun with a long silver barrel under the driver’s seat of his Range Rover, a sidearm too beautifully made to ever be fired.

This I knew for a fact: like most Texans of his caste, he was sent out East for his schooling and then out West to start his career, and he came home to run things.

But not to rule, as in the old days — and that’s what made Michael flush with anger, push his plate of gnocchi to the middle of the table, and accuse me of being unable to understand Texas or Texans.

I’d delivered a message from the lieutenant governor, who like me had come from somewhere else and didn’t have a family to brag about. Ambition, debts of various kinds, and a desire to overcome brought us to Texas.

“The lieutenant governor knows you’re still moving ahead with plans for the office tower even though as a friend he advised you that the market wasn’t quite right for the project, to maybe build it somewhere else. Since indirectness is your ancestral language, you must have gotten the message. Going ahead and bringing in more investors and signing design contracts means you’re being willful. So now the lieutenant governor wants to be very clear — you are a mandarin and it’s time to stop what you’re doing.”

I can’t describe the joy I felt as he pushed away his plate.