the town was famed as “the city of windmills,” a lovely thing to be. Like others born here before 1900, Camp Ezell had the sense of having created the place, piece by piece. He treasured it. He had seen the urban world. It held no more secrets for him. But he did miss the San Francisco Symphony.
Camp had decided that all necessary geography was here, that this was his garden. Evidently, Vail Ennis felt the same, which is one possible basis for the implausible bond that formed between two men who shared not a single personality trait. The other thing they had in common was their work. Each had attained his dream job. Vail had wanted to be sheriff of Bee County since his brawling days of the early 1930s, when he had run up against Alfred Allee. Camp had dreamed of being editor of this newspaper since he was a boy.
While the sheriff was the most visible presence in the county, Camp stayed in the background, seen only in the small photograph that ran with his column, “Glancing Around.” In this small universe, each had a role. It seemed that Vail’s job was to lead the parade. Camp’s job was to watch it go by. And write about it. The sheriff was always good for a news item.
“Vail was always a big shot,” recalled Elias Chapa. “But after the article in Time, he went around with a kind of aura, like a movie star. People would follow him to listen to his stories.”
The sheriff’s favorite stage was the sidewalk in front of the American Café, on Main Street. There he would hold court for groups of men coming in and out of their coffee breaks, talking rapidly, gesturing, reenacting the violent events. At any place, at any time, Vail was the dominant presence. Recalling the scene in front of the American Café, men would comment on the sheriff’s posture, one of readiness, menace. Krueger, later the resident Texas Ranger, saw the sheriff’s arms as being almost apelike, giving an impression of physical strength that made him seem much bigger than he was. Whether he was born with them or acquired them building oil rigs, Vail had unusually broad shoulders and huge hands. All of him—the hawklike nose, the pale eyes, the set mouth that smiled only in friendly company—seemed part of the posture. The Time photograph captured it: Vail in full-length pose, leaning slightly to his left, his gun hand loose on his right hip; the sheriff wore black boots, black pants, and a crisp white shirt with a dark tie, a white Stetson. I am your guardian—or your fate.
He was as pale as a normal white man could be. He was taut and wiry, like spring steel. With boots, he might have been six feet tall. He weighed around 170, not nearly as much as his younger brother, Darwin, who had come with him to the oil fields those many years before.
“Vail told the story about the Pettus gunfight a hunnerd times,” said L. D. Hunter, the sheriff’s hunting partner. “He liked to tell about that big fella, the station attendant. He weighed about three hunnerd pounds and he tried to crawl under the desk when the shootin started. The man said, ‘Vail, I’m shot . . . shot pretty bad.’ ‘Where are you shot?’ ‘In the butt.’ Well, that just tickled old Vail—he told that story all the time. ‘Get your ass in the Green Hornet.’ He wadnt even just barely scratched. I bet he told that story many a time. Ooo did he ever.”
The Pettus event magnified the sheriff’s image, not just his toughness but his many skills. People marveled at them. Vail taught himself photography. He made his own bullets. He was an expert dog trainer. He could hold a stack of silver dollars in one hand and interchange the coins: top to bottom, bottom to top. He was, no doubt, the most skilled driver the county had ever seen. Everyone identified him with the green metallic Hudson Hornet he was known to drive at 120 miles an hour. The car was one of the most important things in his life. The Hornet had an L-head Super Six engine with a 262-cubic-inch displacement and 124 horsepower, the most powerful car on the market. The step-down model had a unibody construction with floorboards below the frame. It hugged the ground, bullet-like, on the highway.
The single, stark anomaly in his larger-than-life presence was his speech: the thin, nasal voice the Time writer called lisping. If not a lisp, it was a high-pitched twang, and he talked so rapidly, never stopping, that it was hard to tell just what it was about that voice that made it so odd.
“He couldn’t say Mexican,” Elias Chapa said. “He wanted to say Meskin, which is what most Anglos said, but he couldn’t say that, either. He said Meckin. That’s how he pronounced it—Meckin. We all started callin each other Meckins.”
Meckins.
Hispanic wasn’t in use at the time. Beeville’s 1931 city directory (published by a company in Missouri) sorted the 5,413 residents this way:
White American: 3,560
English Speaking Mexican: 1,336
Non-English speaking Mexican: 270
Colored: 247
In the South Texas brush country the social order seemed as natural as the weather.
Later generations might wonder how their grandparents had lived through the blistering summers with no air-conditioning. But farm and ranch folks did not question the weather. It came with the place. So did the social weather.
Ethnic was an unknown term. Jewish families might be counted on the fingers of one hand; Saltzmann and Gold were lumped in with “Anglos” along with Jardina, Matocha, Rossi, Malek, Marecek, Rudeloff, Spiekerman, Koester, Gregorcyk—names easily sorted in the Northeast but indistinguishable here. Perhaps a quarter of the Anglos were, in fact, Anglo; as many or more of them were Irish. Bee County’s black community was old enough to be respected and small enough not to be resented. (Family names like Easterling, Canada, and Langley went back nearly as far as Wilson, Fuller, and Pettus.) This meant things came down to two ethnic groups, the Mexicans and the Anglos, and since the Anglos didn’t consider themselves as ethnic, that left one.
The lightning rod in this societal weather was the sheriff himself. There were those who said he was biased against Latinos. It was common knowledge that Vail made more arrests in the bars on the west side than the east side. Such arrests came as often as not with bloody heads. The counterargument was the west-side bars were where the fights took place. It was said—and believed—that a downtown pharmacist stayed open late on Saturday nights to dispense first aid for knife wounds suffered along the Line, a row of bars one block over from Washington Street, the unofficial border between the east and west sides.
For traditional Texans, Vail was a law-and-order sheriff, pure and simple, who treated everyone equally (he would pistol-whip you whatever your race, religion, or politics). Men who knew how Vail roughed up Junior Graham, the rowdiest of the local hell-raisers, shook their heads at the suggestion that the sheriff went easy on Anglo boys. During the ouster hearings, three times as many Anglos as Mexicans were cited among the complainants against the sheriff. That list included more than one U.S. Navy officer but didn’t include Junior Graham, nor Dudley Dougherty, the son of the county’s richest family, also arrested, nor the mayor of Beeville, also arrested (for a traffic violation). Vail’s confrontation with a wealthy farmer was already folklore. A Mexican farmhand walked eight miles into town to tell the sheriff that the farmer overcharged him for supplies and rent then deducted the charges from his wages, leaving him with nothing. This was not illegal. There was no recourse, unless you lived in Bee County. A visit from Vail corrected the situation.
There was little tolerance for crime of any kind, but zero when it came to women.
“Vail protected mistreated wives,” Richard Rudeloff recalled. “And most of them were from the west side. The wife would come to see him, tell him: ‘My husband won’t give any money to his family. He spends it all in the beer joint.’ Vail would know which bar to find him in. ‘How much money you got, Pedro? Show me.’ Vail would take it and give it to the wife.”
After all, it was in response
