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