Whose Thirst Gets Remembered

The bar was in Abilene, or close enough to it — one of those places on a farm-to-market road that exists because a man poured a concrete slab fifty years ago and someone else put a roof over it. The sign said COLD BEER and that was the whole pitch. Inside it smelled like Fabuloso and fryer grease and the particular staleness of air conditioning fighting a losing war against August in West Texas. I had arrived early and taken a booth in the back corner, under a mounted deer head whose glass eyes had the resigned expression of something that knew exactly how this was going to end.

Philipp Meyer came in first. He was wearing a button-down with the sleeves rolled, looking like he’d driven from somewhere and was already thinking about the drive back. He ordered a Shiner and sat across from me and said nothing for about thirty seconds, which I would learn was his way of beginning — he let a silence establish itself before he broke it, like he wanted you to know he was comfortable with the quiet and you should be too.

“I’ve been thinking about the aquifer,” he said.

I told him I had too. We were supposed to be talking about a story — a contemporary Texas story about a dying rancher and a water-rights dispute and the Comanche claim underneath both — and I’d been reading about the Ogallala and the Edwards and the smaller perched aquifers of the Permian Basin, where the water sits in a lens above the bedrock like something the earth is trying to hide.

“The water is the wrong way in,” Meyer said. “Or it’s the right way in, but not the way you think.”

Before I could ask what he meant, Larry McMurtry arrived, and the room changed. Not dramatically — it wasn’t that kind of entrance. He came in the way you come into a place you’ve been a hundred times even if you haven’t, the way a man who has spent sixty years writing about Texas walks into a Texas bar, which is to say with the absolute confidence of someone who knows that whatever story this place thinks it’s telling, he’s already told it better. He ordered iced tea, which he did not explain and I did not ask about.

“You were saying something about aquifers,” McMurtry said to Meyer, settling into the booth. “I heard you from the parking lot.”

“I was saying the water is a misdirection. If you write a story about water rights, you’ve written a legal story. A procedural. The water has to be the thing underneath the thing.”

McMurtry stirred his tea with his finger, pulled it out, dried it on his jeans. “The water is never the thing, Philipp. The water is what people fight about when they can’t say what they’re actually fighting about.”

“Which is?”

“Whether they deserve to be where they are.”

I wrote that down. McMurtry noticed and gave me a look that suggested he did not think much of people who wrote things down during conversations — that the things worth keeping should survive without notation, and if they didn’t, they weren’t worth keeping.

“The rancher,” I said, trying to steer us toward something concrete. “I keep seeing an old man on a porch. Seventies. His body is failing. The land is failing. There’s a drought. His wife is dead.”

“Of course his wife is dead,” McMurtry said. “She has to be dead. Because the only thing that keeps a man on dying land is a woman, and if she’s gone, the land becomes the woman. The land becomes the thing he can’t leave because leaving it would be admitting she’s gone.”

“That’s sentimental,” Meyer said.

“It is. It’s also true. Those aren’t opposites, whatever you think.”

Meyer took a long pull from his beer. “The danger with this kind of character — the old rancher, the last of his line, the man who can’t let go — is that he becomes an elegy for himself. You write him as the dying West and suddenly you’re mourning something that doesn’t deserve mourning. The ranching West was built on theft and violence. Three generations of Dunns or whoever, and every generation compounded the original crime. You can feel for the old man — I think you should feel for him — but you can’t let the reader forget that his grandfather took this land from someone.”

“I’m not suggesting you let them forget.”

“I know you’re not. But your instinct, Larry — and I say this with respect — your instinct is to love these people first and judge them second. And that’s beautiful in Lonesome Dove. Gus and Call are magnificent because you love them and the love makes their failures visible in a way that judgment alone wouldn’t. But we’re writing about now. About contemporary Texas. And in contemporary Texas, the love has become a kind of permission. People love the rancher mythos so much that they’ve made it a license to ignore the bodies underneath the foundation.”

McMurtry didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the deer head on the wall, then back at Meyer, then at me, as if calculating which of us was worth the effort of a full response. He chose Meyer.

“You’re right about the danger. But your correction goes too far. If I write the rancher as nothing but complicity, if every sentence is an indictment, I’ve written a thesis, not a person. The man has to be allowed to grieve. The grief has to be real, not qualified. When his wife dies, that’s a real death. When the land dries up, that’s a real loss. The reader should feel both of those things without an asterisk.”

“I’m not saying put an asterisk on his grief.”

“You’re saying make sure the grief comes with historical context.”

“Yes.”

“Same thing.”

They looked at each other. I was beginning to understand that this disagreement was not one that would be resolved tonight or possibly ever. It was the fundamental tension of writing about the American West: how to love the people without loving the project that made them, how to grieve the individual loss without endorsing the collective myth. McMurtry wanted to let the grief breathe. Meyer wanted to make sure the grief carried its own weight. I thought they were both right, which I said, and which earned me a look from each of them that suggested being right about both sides was the same as being wrong about everything.

“The Comanche lawyer,” I said. “She’s the one I keep coming back to.”

“Because she’s convenient,” McMurtry said, and I felt the sting of it. “She walks in and represents three hundred years of counter-narrative. She’s your corrective lens.”

“She’s not — I don’t want her to be a corrective lens. I want her to be a person.”

“Then don’t give her a speech about history. Don’t have her explain to the old man what his grandfather did. He knows. She knows he knows. The interesting thing is what happens after both of them know and neither of them says it.”

Meyer leaned forward. “That’s good. That’s the scene. Two people in a kitchen, both of them carrying a history that is also a crime, and neither of them mentions the crime because the crime is the room they’re sitting in. It’s the house, the lease, the aquifer. The crime is geography.”

“The crime is always geography,” McMurtry said. “In the West, all sin is real estate.”

I asked about the son — the estranged one, the oil field engineer, the man who left the ranch and made money and comes back to find his father dying and the land disputed. McMurtry had opinions about sons.

“The son is the most dangerous character in any Western. He can become the voice of progress. He can become the man who sees clearly what his father can’t. If you write him that way — the modern man who understands the Comanche claim, who has perspective his father lacks — you’ve written a Hallmark movie with better prose.”

“So what does the son do?”

“The son is confused. The son loves his father and is furious at his father and is terrified of becoming his father. The son left the ranch because the ranch was killing him, and then he went to work in oil, which is just ranching with different tools and the same violence. He hasn’t figured that out yet. He may never figure it out. That’s his value — he’s the character who doesn’t understand, and his not-understanding is honest in a way that understanding would be false.”

Meyer agreed with this, which seemed to bother him slightly, as if he preferred the friction. “The son is also the one who’ll sell the land after the old man dies. That’s the real story. Not the water-rights claim, not the Comanche lawsuit — those are the present tense. The future tense is the son signing a deed. And whoever buys it will drill it or develop it or turn it into something that makes the ranching look like stewardship by comparison.”

“Will we get to the future tense?” I asked.

“No,” Meyer said. “We stay in the present. But the reader has to feel the future pressing against the edge of the story like weather on the other side of a ridge. They should feel that this moment — the old man on the porch, the lawyer in the kitchen, the son not knowing what to do — is the last moment before something changes irreversibly, and nobody in the story is able to name what that thing is.”

McMurtry finished his tea. “You know what I keep thinking about? Bettie.”

“The dead wife?”

“She’ll need a different name, but yes. The dead wife. Her catalogs stacked by the chair. Her mug on the counter. There’s a worn path in the linoleum — stove to table to sink — and nobody remembers whose feet made it. Hers, her mother-in-law’s, doesn’t matter. The path is there. That triangle in the floor describes an entire life that the story will never enter. It’s the most important character in the piece and she’s already dead when it starts.”

I felt something shift when he said that. The worn triangle in the linoleum. It was an image so specific and so quietly devastating that I knew it would anchor the story. Meyer felt it too — I could see it in his face, the way a writer looks when someone else has handed them a gift.

“The kitchen is the center,” I said. “Not the porch, not the land. The kitchen. That’s where the rancher receives the lawyer. That’s where the claim gets laid out. Because the kitchen is the space where the wife’s absence is most physical, and the Comanche claim is also about absence — the absence of the people who were there first, papered over with deeds and fences and worn linoleum.”

“Don’t connect those too neatly,” Meyer said. “The wife’s death and the Comanche displacement are not the same kind of absence. One is personal grief. The other is genocide. If you draw a parallel between them, you’re equating a man’s loss of his wife with a nation’s loss of its homeland, and that equation is obscene.”

“I’m not equating them. I’m saying they inhabit the same space.”

“Same space, different gravity. Make sure the reader feels the difference.”

McMurtry shook his head slowly. “Philipp, you’re doing the thing again. You’re so worried about the politics of the image that you’re strangling the image in its crib. The worn linoleum and the Comanche claim don’t need to be equated or distinguished. They just need to be in the same room. The reader will do the rest. Trust the reader.”

“I don’t trust the reader.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why your books are so exhausting and so good.”

There was something like affection in that, buried under several layers of professional assessment. Meyer almost smiled.

I asked about violence. The story felt like it needed a moment of violence — not the historical violence of settlement, but something present, something sudden.

“Someone shoots out a hotel window,” McMurtry said, so quickly it was clear he’d been thinking about it before I asked. “A local man who’s heard about the Comanche claim. He’s drunk, he’s got a rifle, he shoots up the lawyer’s hotel room. Nobody’s hurt. The lawyer is at the Dairy Queen eating a Blizzard when it happens.”

“That’s almost funny,” I said.

“It is funny. It’s also attempted murder. The humor and the horror of the contemporary West is that they’re the same gesture. A man tries to kill a woman over a water claim and she finds out while eating ice cream. That’s Texas. That’s the whole state in one image.”

Meyer’s objection was immediate: “The shooting can’t be comic relief. If you play it for irony, you’re doing the thing literary fiction does with violence in red states — treating it as local color. Some colorful yokel with a rifle. That’s condescension dressed as realism.”

“I didn’t say comic relief. I said the woman’s response is funny. She’s funny because she’s survived this before. Not this exact thing, but this kind of thing. The humor is her armor. It’s three hundred years of armor.”

“Her mother told her to be careful,” I said, thinking out loud. “She called her mother before the trip. Her mother said people in Texas shoot people over everything. She said that’s a myth. Her mother said tell that to the people they shot.”

McMurtry pointed at me. “That. That’s the voice. The mother’s voice. Use it.”

We sat with that for a while. The bar was filling up — it was Friday now, apparently, and people were coming in from wherever people come from in this part of Texas, which is mostly from work that didn’t go well. A man in a welding cap fed the jukebox and it played something by George Strait, which McMurtry acknowledged with a small nod, the way you acknowledge a neighbor across a fence.

“I want to talk about the ending,” Meyer said. “Or rather, I want to talk about not having one.”

“Every story has an ending.”

“Every story stops. Not every story ends. This one should stop. The old man should be on the porch. The survey is happening or it’s already happened. The cattle are looking at clouds that won’t produce rain. He’s sitting there. He’s maybe thinking about the grinding stone the cultural monitor found — a mano, something Comanche, older than his family’s claim by centuries. He held it. It fit his hand.”

“And he put it back,” McMurtry said.

“He put it back. He said it wasn’t his.”

“That’s the moment.”

“That’s the moment. But we don’t underline it. We don’t have him think about the symbolism. He just puts it back and walks to the porch and the story stops.”

“Not quite,” McMurtry said. “The story doesn’t stop. The land goes on. The last line should be the land. Not the man. The land was there before him and it’ll be there after him and it doesn’t care who’s standing on it. That’s not nihilism. That’s just West Texas.”

I wanted to argue for something warmer — some hint that the conversation between the old man and the lawyer had opened a door, however small. But I looked at Meyer and I looked at McMurtry and I understood that they were both telling me the same thing in their different ways: the land is not a metaphor. The land is the land. It does not redeem anyone. It does not forgive anyone. It endures, and endurance is not the same as hope, and if you mistake one for the other you will write a lie and call it a Western.

McMurtry stood up to leave. He looked tired, or not tired exactly — finished, in the way that a man who has written thirty novels about this country is finished with conversations about it even as he keeps having them.

“One more thing,” he said. “The Dairy Queen.”

“What about it?”

“Make sure it’s a real Dairy Queen. Not a metaphor for the decline of small-town America. Not a symbol of corporate homogeneity encroaching on the authentic West. Just a Dairy Queen. A woman eating chicken strips because she’s hungry and the chicken strips are there. You can trust the Dairy Queen to carry its own weight.”

He left. Meyer stayed for another beer. We talked about other things — about Texas, about the Permian Basin, about what happens to a landscape when you take everything out of it and put nothing back. But I was already thinking about the story. About the worn triangle in the linoleum. About the man on the porch and the woman at the Dairy Queen and the grinding stone sitting in the red dirt, warm from the sun, shaped by a hand that was gone. About how a story about water is never about water. About how a story about land is always about the people who aren’t on it anymore.

Meyer finished his beer and set the bottle down carefully, the way you set down something that might break.

“The hardest part,” he said, “will be the apology.”

“What apology?”

“The old man is going to apologize. Not for what he did — he didn’t do anything, not directly. For the part of it that made it possible. For benefiting from it. It’s going to sound like nothing — like an old man being polite — but it has to be the heaviest sentence in the story. Because nobody ever apologizes for that. And when someone does, the person receiving it has to figure out what to do with something that’s simultaneously too little and more than she’s ever been offered.”

He was right. I knew it the way you know a load-bearing wall when you see one — not because someone told you, but because everything above it depends on it staying exactly where it is.

I sat in the booth after Meyer left. The jukebox had gone quiet. The bartender was wiping down the bar with a rag that looked like it had been wiping down bars since the Eisenhower administration. Outside, the sky was doing the thing it does in West Texas at dusk — turning the color of something between fire and blood, painting the parking lot and the highway and the flat empty country in a light that made everything look like a memory of itself.

I thought about the story. I thought about who gets to grieve on stolen land. I didn’t have an answer. I had a kitchen, a porch, a Dairy Queen, a grinding stone, and two writers who’d spent the evening arguing about whether love or honesty comes first, which is the only argument worth having, and which has no answer, which is why it’s worth having.