Williams frowned. The field did not make sense to him. “What makes this well so good?” Williams asked.
“Chuck Alcorn – he’s the man who figured out how it to make it work – is one lucky sonuvabitch,” Schneider said. “This field’s probably got one good well, and he’s found it. Made him a rich man, too. Well, maybe not rich, but he hasn’t been worrying about his next meal for some time.”
Walter Schneider laughed again. He felt a close and sometimes reverent kinship with the well, too. He kept it pumping, rain or shine, and it kept right on producing, night or day. The City of Giddings No. 1 had not made him a rich man either, but, on payday, it certainly helped ease the pain.
“What’s the chance of a man buying up a little lease acreage around here?” Williams asked.
“There’s plenty of it available.”
“Cheap?”
The grin on Schneider’s face broadened. “I doubt if it would cost you a lot,” he said. “I just hope you’ve got a lot of money.”
“Why?”
“The chalk’s gonna take ever last bit of it,” he said.
Chapter 4
Max Williams had always felt a strong kinship with the great open stretches of unspoiled land that bore few footprints and even fewer traces of civilization. That was an integral part of his West Texas birthright.
He had grown to manhood in the Humble Oil Camp of Avoca, Texas, his face blistered by the sand that dust devils, whirling dervishes, and windstorms raked across the empty, troubled wastelands far below the Caprock. It had been a great time for the oil business, and hard-working families attached their hopes and daily livelihood to a company town that was destined to survive only as long as the pump jacks continued to pull great amounts of crude out of the ground. For a time the Williams family lived in Guthrie where the high school occupied one room, and Max’s sister single-handedly formed the entire fifth grade. No restrooms. No running water. No cafeteria. No gym. Williams always said that if his family had remained in Guthrie, he would probably have been a roper. Two years later, the family moved back to Avoca, a town too small even to field a six-man football team.
Williams would never forget the small community where drifters were treated as neighbors and neighbors like family. Avoca was nestled back amidst a rough-hewn, hard-rock, and mesquite-thorn landscape of scarred beauty and enduring serenity. It was, he said, a place where common decency and honesty prevailed, where neighbors stuck together whether times were tough or prosperous, where a man’s full worth was judged by his character, not by how much money he had or didn’t have in the bank.
Max Williams had something of an idyllic childhood. Hard work. Few problems. Didn’t have a lot of money, but neither did any other family in the camp or the town. When you don’t know anybody who’s rich, you don’t have any idea who might be poor. During his thirteenth year, however, the carefree world as he had known it suddenly crumbled around him. His father Claude died after a struggle with cancer, and the pleasantries of childhood scattered with the winds across the prairie. His father had been the family anchor, a good man who never bowed nor bent under the weight of hard work, and now he was gone.
The boy, who would become a man long before his allotted time, stood alone in the backyard of his home wearing a T-shirt, faded jeans, and the best $12.95 cowboy boots that money could buy. There was a scarred, leather basketball in his hand, an old hoop hanging ten feet above him, and, even though his heart was breaking, he refused to shed a tear because he had never seen his father cry. As a melancholy sun dropped below the treetops, with a hot wind stinging his face, his jaws clenched and his eyes unflinching, Max Williams shot basket after basket, soft one-handed jump shots, hour after hour, until darkness tumbled down around his shoulders and night brought an uneasy chill but no relief and little comfort. It was a dark and apprehensive time for the Williams family.
His mother Willie Mae, proud, stubborn, and undaunted, took the life insurance money and completed her education, becoming a teacher. His older sister Theresa had always been his best friend, his confidante, and she became his rock when he needed one. She, probably more than anyone, understood the grief boiling down inside him, the grief he kept to himself when his only outlet was hard work, either on a basketball court or in the oilfield. By age fifteen, Williams was working for farmers during the summer break, and three years later, while waiting on college, he took a job for Humble Oil and Refining Company to help ease the financial burdens shouldered by his mother.
Basketball, however, always basketball, became his salvation and his road out of a lonely town. Randy Galloway wrote in his Dallas Morning News column: Back in the mid-fifties, there was this great basketball player named Max who lived so far out in the West Texas bush that he thought Sweetwater was Dallas. Avoca, forty miles north of Abilene as the tumbleweed blows, was his home court. The town’s population was, and is, 150. But for some strange reason, Avoca was once a breeding ground for hoop heads. With the smallest enrollment of any UIL school in the state (only twelve in Max’s senior class, including nine boys), this dot on the map was known throughout West Texas as a giant killer. The Mustangs took on the big boys in San Angelo, Abilene, and Fort Worth Poly and drummed them. And this Max, he was something. The son of a widowed schoolteacher, he handled the ball like a transfer student from a New York playground. It was Showtime when Max hit the floor – passes came from behind his back and over the bus. He appeared to prefer dribbling between his legs, and he had that weird one-handed jump shot in an era when the two-handed set was still the only way to put it up.
Max Williams was the first Texas high-school player to ever be chosen All-State for three consecutive years. He ended his high school career as the all-time leading scorer in Texas schoolboy history, racking up 3,360 points. He led the Avoca Mustangs to a state championship, was voted the Most Valuable Player in the 1956 High School All-Star Game, and became the only Texan to make high school All-American his senior year. There were several occasions when he scored as many as fifty or sixty points in a game, and sometime the long-range bomber personally outscored the other team. Just Max, the ball, and nothing but net.
The Avoca post office had difficulty handling the mail that came pouring in with college scholarship offers from one end of the country to the other. He was, in the eyes of America’s great basketball coaches, a wanted man. Max Williams, however, was a good Methodist. That good Methodist University in Dallas, SMU, was coached by Doc Hayes, and Hayes had a well-deserved reputation for building a national basketball power in a conference better known for its football teams. Williams politely told the rest of the coaches, including Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, “Thanks, I’m honored that you wrote me, but no thanks.” He had been a Mustang in high school, so he might as well go ahead and play his college ball for the Mustangs as well. Doc Hayes finally made it official by heading down the long, straight-shot road to Avoca and buying Williams a steak dinner. The deal was sealed, medium rare.
On a basketball court, he was a sleight-of-hand magician Here you see the ball. Now you don’t. Moves as unpredictable as a whirling dervish dancing across the prairie lands around his home. He became the biggest gate draw in the Southwest Conference, the point guard, the deadly assassin, who every coach feared. Couldn’t guard him. Could not stop him. If SMU beat you, it was Max Williams coming down the lane with dagger in his hand. He brought a little razzle and a lot of dazzle to a game that had traditionally relied more on hard-nosed, eyeball-to-eyeball, elbow-in-the-gut defense.
Doc Hayes, his own coach simply said, “If he were six foot, ten, he’d hit the rafters every time he jumped. He is the most unusual player I ever
