The bartender gave Garner of bottle of Lone Star beer, which he then toasted with everybody within reach. Lone Star was a departure from the normally upscale beers on tap at the Casa del Norte, but this was a Texan's right of passage. Toasting with Lone Star was a subliminal acceptance into the local community. Garner knew this well and tried hard not to make a face as he chugged the cold, watery beer with a slightly bitter aftertaste. People were patting him on the back, shaking his hand and sharing in the reveling of the moment as though each and every one of them had been in that cold dark river with him. But Garner had already forgotten the traumas of the flood. He had even forgotten the name of the spongy Mexican American, even though they were photographed shaking hands and their names appeared together on the front page in large type. Garner had gone from the darkness of the river to the spotlight of attention and he was feeling pretty good about himself. Of course, the only reason that Garner was in the spotlight was because he was stupid enough to try to drive through a low water crossing. But that was all a distant memory. And the intensity of the present was more than enough distraction.
As the crowd returned to their own conversations, Garner took a stool at the bar and reached for a menu.
"That was an amazing thing that you did," observed a man who was standing next to him at the bar. "I admire a man of fortitude and character," he continued.
Garner looked at the man as he sat back down with the menu in his hand. It was one of the oddest looking characters he had ever seen. The man was not more that five feet four inches tall and was wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat that barely brought him up to average height. Around his neck was a string tie with a large turquoise and silver clasp and jutting out of his cuffless pants were an impressive looking pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. His suit looked like he had borrowed it from his older brother and one of the collar points on his shirt was pointing off into never-never land. Planted in the middle of his face was a large square nose that the rest of his face seemed to hide behind, and in the shade of this enormous protuberance was the sparsest moustache that Garner had ever seen. He didn't know whether to run, laugh, or ignore the man completely.
"Shorty Wilcox is the name," the man reported as he offered his hand with commanding dignity. "I know your name from the newspaper. Mind if I buy you a beer?"
With great trepidation, Garner took the man's hand. "Sure, why not?" Garner replied.
Shorty took Garner's hand in a vice grip handshake and pumped Garner's arm till he felt like a slot machine. He was actually afraid that quarters might come flying out of his mouth, if this odd little man did not release his hand soon.
"Hey bartender," Shorty bellowed without even looking in the bartender's direction. "Bring us a couple more Lone Stars."
Garner cringed at the idea of having to down another Lone Star, but he needed to exploit the moment. And at the same time, he felt like he was coming under the spell of this odd but confident and strangely charismatic little man.
"Do you work around here?" Garner began, still trying to get his bearings.
"Sure do," the little man replied. "I'm an attorney. I spend a lot of time at the Bexar County courthouse."
As soon as the man said 'attorney', Garner's ears perked up and he focused his attention. He had been planning on making friends with a local attorney for use later. Even if Shorty wasn't the ideal lawyer, even he certainly had friends. And one of those friends might be just the one that Garner needed.
"I was just getting ready to order some dinner," Garner reported, "would you like to join me."
"Don't mind if I do," Shorty replied and proceeded to hoist himself up on the adjacent barstool.
The special that night was black bean burritos with feta cheese and wild rice. It didn't sit very well with Garner's Taco Belle tastes, but at least it didn't have any of that horrible green stuff with it.
Over the next few hours, Garner and Shorty downed more than their share of Lone Star beers. Garner was amazed that he was actually getting to like both the beer and this odd little man.
"The reason I'm a good lawyer," Shorty was saying, "is that I got nothing to loose."
Garner nodded, sipped his beer and let the little man continue.
"These other lawyers," he said waving his hand around vaguely at the rest of the crowd, "are concerned with their careers and their status in the professional community. They want to be partners or judges or even politicians someday. So the way they represent their clients is often affected by their personal goals. I will never fit in this professional community, so my only goal is to do the best job I possibly can for my client."
Garner's interest was increasing. He didn't find Shorty's professional commitment all that appealing, but he could very much relate to his always being on the outside. In a funny way, he felt that the two of them had a lot in common despite the obvious differences. He sipped his beer again and let Shorty continue.
Shorty was born on a dirt farm in the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio under the most inauspicious circumstances one could possibly imagine. He was the eighth of eight children, three of whom had died of neglect before their first birthday. His father never held a regular job. On those rare occasions when he did manage to earn a few dollars either as a day laborer or selling rattlesnake skins, he would spend his money on some cheap liquor and disappear into the hills for a few days. This was perfectly O.K. with the rest of the family. Having the old man around when he was on a binge meant that somebody was likely to get beaten or killed or both.
Shorty's mother made a few dollars selling fresh eggs from a roadside stand at the end of their dirt driveway. But most of the family's money came from a check they received each month from the Bexar County Office of Social Welfare.
When Shorty's mother was in her seventh month with him, two of his brothers were in the field in back of their wooden shack playing with blasting caps they had stolen from a construction trailer. They liked to set a blasting cap up against a rock and then wait for an animal such as a rabbit to come by. They would shoot the blasting cap, which would cause a small explosion and blow the rabbit or other small animal into a thousand pieces. While Shorty's two brothers were waiting for a small animal to wonder by their trap, they heard a noise behind them - the familiar noise of a diamondback rattlesnake. The younger of the two turned, saw the snake and fired without thinking. The bullet caught the snake, but went on to strike the box of blasting caps just past it. The resulting explosion killed the two brothers and rocked the wooden shack.
Hearing the explosion, Shorty's mother ran out to the field to find the lifeless bodies of her two oldest sons. She ran back to the shack and tripped on a loose board on the wooden steps. She came down hard on the porch. Her fall wasn't hard enough to break any bones, but it was enough of a jar to tear the placental wall and cause her to start bleeding internally. Unaware the she was even hurt, she picked herself up and ran through the house and down the long dirt driveway to the highway where she could flag down some help. About an hour later, a Texas Ranger drove by and saw her lying unconscious next to the wobbly table that she used for her roadside egg stand. The Ranger called for an ambulance and Shorty was born two and a half months early on the way to the Bexar County Hospital. He survived the ordeal, but his mother did not.
Nobody came to claim Shorty from the Bexar County hospital. So the Office of Social Welfare kept him there for a couple of months until he was considered viable and then turned him over to St. Mary's Orphanage. St. Mary's Orphanage was a convent style nunnery on a pleasant hilly piece of land overlooking the slightly wooded valley where Garner had challenged the low water crossing.
It looked as though the bunkhouse at St. Mary's was going to be Shorty's home indefinitely. At the time when Shorty was born, San Antonio was still a fairly small town. Nearly everybody in town new that Shorty was kin to those lowlifes who had a dirt farm on the northwest side of town. Nobody wanted to risk adoption because of two lingering fears. First, they were concerned that Shorty's kin might decide one day to come and get him. And second, they assumed that Shorty would eventually turn out just like his folks and nobody wanted to take on that kind of burden. They were probably right on both counts, but two events would occur that would save Shorty from his destiny.
It was a hot spring just before Shorty's sixth birthday. His father had gone up into the hills for a binge the way he had hundreds of time before. But his eyes were getting weak with age and too much liquor so he found that he was unable to shoot anything for dinner. He stumbled back to the wooden shack to get a can of beans when he found his two boys (the third had simply disappeared a couple of years ago) passed out from their own binge and not a thing to eat anywhere. There were canned beans in the cupboard, but he only thought to look on the stove and the counter. Not finding anything, he went into a drunken rage and beat the two boys with anything he could get his hands on until they ran away and disappeared into the hills. Then he polished off a half-pint of rye whiskey that he found on the table, and passed out in the middle of the kitchen floor.
The brothers, now well into their teens, convinced each other that they were not going to put up with this treatment any longer, and they devised a plan to get back at the old man for all the times he had beaten them.
While the old man was passed out, they went into the outhouse behind the shack and removed the wooden seat. They sawed halfway through the seat in two places and then set it back in place. Next, they went into the house and started cooking a pot of beans with lots of extra pork fat. The old man woke up a couple of hours later, having forgotten all that had just occurred, and was pleased to see that the boys had taken the initiative to cook him some dinner. He poured liberal amounts of catsup on his beans and wolfed them down hungrily. In less than a hour later he dashed out the back door on his way to the outhouse. The boys looked at each other, smiled and went to the back door to listen. There was a loud crack followed by a loud scream.
"I guess that'll learn him," said one.
"I guess so," agreed the other.
But the moment wasn't savored for very long. The boys had not thought their plan all the way through and within an hour they began to realize the seriousness of their dilemma.
"Ain't no way he can get out of there," said one.
"Nope," the other agreed. "Either we help him out or we just let him die there."
"If we help him out, he's gonna kill us," the one observed.
"Then we're just gonna have to let him die there," the other concluded.
It was an unusually hot spring. By midday it was a hundred degrees in the shade and over a hundred and ten in the sun. But the small breezeless outhouse acted like an oven, bringing the temperature in the pit below to nearly a hundred and twenty degrees. The stench was beyond anything that a normal person could possibly imagine and breathing the hot wretched air was enough to drive a person mad.
The brothers sat quietly in the shack for several hours listening to the mad howling coming from the outhouse. Occasionally they would look at each other, each searching the face of the other for a possible way out of the dilemma they had created for themselves. Finally, there was silence.
"Do you think he's dead yet?" one asked cautiously.
"I don't know," the other replied. "He's been quite for ten or fifteen minutes."
"Do you think we should look?"
"Naw, let's give him another fifteen or twenty minutes."
Eventually they got up their courage and went out back to check. The door creaked as they opened it slowly and a string of obscenities came out of the pit.
"You boys did this on purpose," he screamed. "Now you get me outta here so I can beat the life out of both of you."
"That's the problem," said one, his nervousness almost choking him. "If we help you out, you're gonna beat us."
After long recriminations and negotiations, the old man agreed that in return for helping him out of the outhouse pit, he would not beat the two boys. They tied a rope to a tree on one end and threw the other end down into the pit. When the old man pulled himself up, he ran right past the boys and down to the pond where he dove in with all his clothes on.
"I guess he's gonna keep his word and not beat us," one said as they turned to go back into the house. A few minutes later the old man came through the back door soaking wet with his shotgun in his hand.
"I said I wouldn't beat you," he proclaimed. "I didn't say I wouldn't kill you."
With that he discharged one barrel at point blank range into the belly of each of the boys. The shot gun was loaded with bird shot rather than buck shot so it took the boys an agonizing three days to die. The old man was never seen again.
A month later, Shorty was adopted by Ralph Wilcox, a prominent San Antonio attorney who did not believe that people's lives were determined by their genes. Shorty began first grade the following fall with all the benefits that money and social position could provide. He went to private schools until he was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin for college. He followed that with law school at Baylor. He returned to San Antonio, passed the bar and began practicing law. Still, no matter what he did in his life, he still looked like a dirt farmer dressed up in fancy clothes.
"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," Shorty would often say. Then he would add, "but most sows got no use for a silk purse anyway." It was never completely clear to anybody what he meant by that, but this feisty little man was not one that anybody else would want to challenge.
When the bill came, Shorty picked it up and then looked at Garner. "Sorry, Partner," he began. "I'm afraid you're going to have to spot me a few dollars." There was a brief silence as Garner shifted in his chair. "You see," Shorty continued, "I'm a little short tonight." With that he guffawed over his own joke and then slapped enough money on the bar to cover both of them plus a generous tip. "It's a pleasure talking to you. Be sure and let me know if you ever need a good lawyer."
"I certainly will," Garner replied. And he certainly meant it.
