E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-6678-2776-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
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II An Eighty Percent Man The streets were uncomfortable in the rundown neighborhood of Alice south of the San Diego highway. Hard winter rain potholes crunched dust in July, too many pickup trucks with full beds taking shortcuts. It was this kind of thing that Bill Mason covered on his radio show on KBKI-AM. About what people were doing in that corner of Texas, or what they weren’t doing and should be. Traffic safety, meatpacking cleanliness, vacant lots, public works contracts, how the Mexicans were treated. Bill just talked and talked, because Alice needed plenty of attention. Around sixteen thousand people, mostly Mexican extraction, lived in this hub of Jim Wells County, parked between Laredo and Corpus Christi. Oil was discovered around those parts in 1931 and herds of cattle moseyed among black Eiffel Tower pumps in a landscape of cracking clay soil, mesquite and toasted grassland. Flat, flat, flat fanning out forever. Alice was a place where most people’s bank accounts, if they had one, were as dry-crinkled as the crusty dirt out back. The county’s high school graduation rates usually wandered below fifteen percent. Main Street went on straight to both horizons, lined with inexpensive black sedans parked at Bright’s Market, Karl’s Shoes and the Rialto movie house, which would close in the 1980s but remain standing another thirty years adapted for other business or simply left a ghost. On the last Friday in July of ’49 Bill was out to see for himself the extent of asphalt degradation that somebody or other in the county commissioners’ office should have taken care of. While he was out there, he’d also make some stops to pick up account copy and ad revenue for the station. At fifty-one, he was program director and that entailed doing everything a rural radio station required short of repairing the transmitter. At around ten, Avelino Saenz, thirty-five, was at the Tex-Mex Depot, a small station for a local railroad line. Saenz, a father of four, was a lanky war vet attending night school classes. Saenz was talking to a part-time telegraph operator at the Depot, Luis Salas, who was also a part-time sheriff’s deputy and thus might have some pull in nudging a city inspector to look at Avelino’s friend’s plumbing. Mason stopped in to say hello to Salas, and then departed for the morning’s pothole surveillance with Saenz, who came in handy as a translator with the mostly Mexican population. They cruised slowly back toward town and cut through a shabby neighborhood to the highway as Bill took a right off Beam Station Road onto San Felipe Street. This red pickup truck comes at them from around the corner off what’s now called Apple Street. Across from a tavern called the West Side Patio, the truck straddles the center and comes almost parallel to the sedan. The driver motions out the window for Mason to stop his car, so he does. A guy gets out of the truck and lumbers over with some of his two hundred, sixty pounds rolling over his belt and yells, “Are you Bill Mason?” Mason says, “Yes, I am,” and then leans back from the open window with his hands out over his face, toward the passenger Saenz. The big guy shouts at Saenz to get out of the way and the passenger does a half-fall out his door. Avelino hears Bill say something like “Wait a minute,” and the truck driver fires a gun at Bill. Saenz runs across the street to the doorway of the bar. Mason gets out of the sedan, leaving a loafer behind, and crawls under the front end of the pickup, seeking a barrier to further attack, the wind and the sense knocked out of him. The shooter is standing there, cursing to himself, a .45 automatic in his right hand and his left hand messing with it. Mason drags himself out from under the other side, stumbles across the road, red-splotting the hard dirt, calling for help a few times, and he gets a long forty or fifty yards away to the loading dock at the Alice Pipe and Supply Company and passes out. The driver gets into the red truck yelling about Mason being an SOB and takes off. A fellow at the pipe outfit comes out with a customer and shields the crawling man’s body from the sun with a folding chair. The owner, Joe Gleason, calls the cops and then notifies Moyer’s Mortuary. A car from Moyer’s rolls up after awhile and hauls Bill to the hospital. Thirty minutes later he expires on the table from a “profuse internal hemorrhage.” No autopsy necessary. Meanwhile, the guy with the gun drives across town, over the industrial railroad lines that split the Mexican section from the white one, to a police station on Adams and Main a block over from the Rialto. It’s quiet there at eleven-thirty on a Friday morning. He goes in the side door and uses a key for another door, then another key and shuts himself into a jail cell. Easy for him. Sam Smithwick is a deputy sheriff. Seems the day before on his fifteen-minute show, Mason had fingered Smithwick as the owner of Rancho Alegro. This was a one-story, dressed-up windowless dump with a windmill out back, four miles west of downtown and four blocks outside the city limits, turned into a dime-a-dance joint with a long mahogany bar to accommodate the young Latin men in splashy vests with money to spend and ranch workers with less. To entertain them were Mexican girls who lavishly displayed their talents for dancing and cheap erotic appeal. Mason thought there was prostitution and said so on the air, and the liquor violations were already famous. Not a classy place, but out there classy wasn’t the point. Mason complained, too, that the sheriff, Hubert Sain, permitted “the ingress of fifty girls to take from the men of Alice... money which should go to the families of these men.” A snide remark about venereal disease was thrown in. That was typical of Mason’s direct approach. He’d been a real pain the past couple of months on KBKI in the role of voice of the people, the ones being stepped on by George Parr, the “Duke of Duval,” boss of adjacent Duval County, commander (following his father, the state senator Archer Parr) of assorted shenanigans around this King Ranch territory where the empowered profited from oil and cattle, from cheap labor, shakedowns and kickbacks, enforced by pistoleros like Sam and the worst of them, the violent Luis Salas, the telegraph operator known as “Indio.” So Smithwick got all bent out of shape and shot Bill in the chest, then turned himself in because running rarely pans out. The deputy’s gun and badge were locked in a desk that afternoon when the district attorney charged him with murder with malice aforethought. A planned killing. Friday afternoon the papers in Alice and Galveston flashed out the first copy on the crime across the Associated Press wire, and the next morning major urban papers coast to coast ran it. AP reporter William Barnard filed story after story for days, and there were plenty of angles. The New York Times ran the AP text on Saturday at the bottom of the first page, headed “Crusading Air Commentator Slain; Texas Deputy Sheriff Surrenders.” In a font usually reserved for World Series wins or World War surrenders, the Chicago Daily Tribune blared “Deputy Kills Air Crusader.” In Bill’s onetime hometown of Akron, Ohio, the Beacon Journal ran a pair of five-inch front-page photos – Bill in a business portrait and the slouching deputy wearing a ridiculous racket of a tie that barely reached his third shirt button. Every Texas paper followed the story for weeks. Bill had a mother all his life. He had a father for a few years. Then another one. His mother, Clara Valenta Olmstead, one of a family of eleven, was born in 1876 in East Bethel, a small Minnesota town, and she would die at age eighty-three in another, Saint Peter. Her ancestors were among the first twelve immigrants to populate Hartford, Connecticut, before 1640. The family took its name from a moated house in Bumpstead-Helion in Cambridgeshire during the time of Edward II. Clara met William Lovejoy Heywood, almost twenty years her senior, in Minneapolis and with him raised three children: Bill, who came along in 1897, followed by Katherine Ellen and Elden. They lived in a two-story box house that still stands on Colfax Avenue, a half mile from the Mississippi River. As soon as the third kid was born, the stern Heywood took off. In those days it was not too problematic to walk out of State A and set up shop in State B and start meeting unknowing women, friends and business contacts without threat of revelation. William recreated himself as a civic leader in New Buffalo, Michigan, started up with a new girl in 1905 and produced two more daughters. In Heywood’s eventual obituary, his three kids with Clara went unmentioned. When the census taker knocked on her door in 1900, Clara told him she was a widow. Perhaps she said that to everyone after the divorce to cut back on the fallen-woman-with-kids embarrassment, and explain her move to a small place (a woman sure didn’t get the house in a settlement back then). Clara supported the family as a seamstress. Love did find her again, with some economic and cultural security, in Burton Bailey Mason, a Michigan native two years older. B.B. adopted the children and the couple produced a fourth, Marian Eileen, in 1911. At North High School, firstborn Bill was the sports-card kid, baseball, basketball, football in striped jersey and leather pants, chin up, nose in the air, a full head of hair brushed up and back,...
