Shrake’s Progress
Bud Shrake has written sports stories, screenplays, and novels. He’s hobnobbed with the rich and famous, raised some hell, and searched his soul. Now he has crowned a colorful 49-year career with The Borderland.
MORE THAN A MONTH has passed and Bud Shrake is still grumbling about the Austin time line that appeared in the American-Statesman on the eve of the millennium. “Their chronology starts in 1839, when the first land was bought, then jumps to 1847,” Bud says incredulously, fiddling with the medals of Saint Jude and Saint Christopher and the silver arrowhead that he always wears on a chain around his neck. Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, was a gift from his first wife, Joyce. Screenwriter-producer Bill Wittliff, a longtime friend, gave him the arrowhead. Bud bought the Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, in the early sixties in Rome, on a long journey to a place that had no name. A telephone rings in another part of the house, but Bud ignores it and continues to rant about the offending time line. “Look at all the great drama that took place in between! The city was built and the capital of the Republic of Texas moved here from Houston. In 1846, after Texas became a state, there was a big ceremony at the Capitol where they raised the U.S. flag and lowered the Texas flag. Anson Jones was the president then, and Sam Houston was made a U.S. senator. But none of that appeared in the local paper. They seem to think Austin’s history started when they built Palmer Auditorium.”
We are sitting in the family room of Bud’s house in West Lake Hills at a long oak table cluttered with manuscripts, screenplays, magazines, photographs, and golf clubs, all presided over by a huge gray cat named Merlin and a fierce black dog named Feeney. Six feet six, with a genius-level IQ, a highly developed sense of humor, and a personality that can be calculatingly cold and aloof or uncommonly generous and affectionate, sometimes simultaneously, Bud has always been a larger-than-life character. In the words of the Kris Kristofferson song, a poet, a prophet, a preacher — and a problem when he’s stoned. In the early sixties writer Joe David Brown (Stars in My Crown, Paper Moon) told Bud that he must move to New York. “You’re so tall everyone will remember your name,” Brown said. He also advised that every writer should marry a psychiatric nurse. Instead, Bud married a Shakespearean scholar and a Long Island debutante trophy wife, both now long gone from his life.
Since 1978 he has lived alone in this rambling hillside cottage whose uncatalogued decor of the rare, the eccentric, and the bizarre makes it look like a psychedelic secondhand store. A huge painting of a fierce Sonny Liston, which was once a Sports Illustrated cover, glares from one wall. On the screen of a giant television set a golf tournament in Sri Lanka or some other improbable place unfolds silently. Carefully positioned on end tables and in the spare recesses of bookcases are photographs of his children and grandchildren, and one of Joyce, taken when she was about nineteen. Over the years rooms have been added or changed according to Bud’s needs of the moment. An enclosed second deck that was built as his office — it looks exactly like a press box — is now the office of his longtime assistant, Jodi Gent, who helps run Bud’s corporation, East Pole, and like the cat, the dog, and the mementos is a fixture in the house.
When the phone continues to ring, he walks to his present office to answer it and I tag along. It’s a guy from the New York Times, researching an obit for Tom Landry. While Bud talks, my eyes move around this small, dark space that used to be a guest room, stopping at a sign that says “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug — Mark Twain.” Near it is a thirty-year-old photograph of the two of us, Bud wearing a fez and me in a World War I doughboy helmet. Bud and I have been close and fast friends since 1956, when we were rival police reporters in Fort Worth, and have shared adventures and sometimes apartments between marriages. In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our apartment just north of downtown Dallas was a regular stop for denizens of the late night, including nightclub owner Jack Ruby and his star stripper, Jada.
The walls of Bud’s office are layered with posters, book jackets, old newspaper headlines — “Richards Elected Governor” — and photographs of Austin landmarks like the late, lamented Armadillo World Headquarters and of old pals like Dan Jenkins, Darrell Royal, Willie Nelson, and Don Meredith. A number of watercolors by Blackie Sherrod, the peerless sports editor, as well as one of Bud’s own oil paintings, hang about, and there is a small altar with the Virgin of Guadalupe and a Buddha. Messages and slogans are taped to the frame of his word processor: “The future ain’t what it used to be,” “Stay Zen,” “Keep typing,” “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” When he hangs up, I ask what he told the guy. “I told him that Landry always took the time to answer my questions, no matter how stupid they were.”
The carelessly edited time line in the American-Statesman had put him in a foul mood and I knew why. I had just finished reading an advance copy of Bud’s latest novel, The Borderland, a rip-roaring adventure that will be published by Hyperion this month. It takes place in the settlement of Austin in the nine months from January through September 1839, when Congress Avenue was little more than a spring-fed creek, Indians camped along Shoal Creek, and the Colorado River at flood stage was more than a mile wide. The Republic of Texas was three years old and in desperate shape. Mirabeau Lamar and his War Party knew that by moving the capital to Austin they were inviting war with the Comanche, whose territory began at the Colorado and spread hundreds of miles through the Hill Country and beyond. War was precisely Lamar’s intent. He believed that the Republic’s rightful border was Santa Fe, or maybe the Pacific Ocean. The only way to open up all those millions of acres to speculation was by drawing the Comanche into a war. The Borderland ends with the bloody massacre of Indians at Plum Creek, near Lockhart.
The real reason Bud was pissed was that it had taken him twenty years to appreciate the drama. He had started working on this book in 1979, after he quit Sports Illustrated. It took him years to write and research the novel, which was called “Plum Creek” in the original draft, and it took some moron editor fifteen minutes to reject it, with the terse observation, “Nobody wants to read about Texas.” Not long after that, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and James Michener’s Texas became best-sellers. Frustrated and burned out, Bud dumped the manuscript in the bottom of a trunk and forgot it, or tried to. The only person who continued to believe in the book was his friend Wittliff, who was in the process of creating the magnificent television version of Lonesome Dove. From time to time Wittliff would ask Bud when he planned to finish “Plum Creek,” and Bud would tell him, “Never!”
Then one night in the early summer of 1996, the story began to rewrite itself. Bud was sitting on his balcony, looking across the Colorado to Austin, lamenting the scars and follies of a generation of developers and their monuments to greed and ego. In the days of the Comancheria (Comanche territory), he reminded himself, a chief might have sat in this same location, looking southwest toward Barton Creek, the Comanche’s Palm Springs. In 1839 he would have seen hundreds of white people pouring into his valley with mule carts, lumber, and building tools. What would he have thought?
A few weeks later, vacationing with Dan and June Jenkins at a golf club in North Carolina, Bud wrote what is now the book’s opening scene. Four Comanche chiefs sit around a twig fire in a cave on the west bank of the Colorado, looking across the river at “the shapes of a stockade fence and rooftops, the newest outrage by the invaders,” discussing the inevitable battle.
“The Borderland is a real reach,” says Wittliff, who read every successive draft. “He took some wonderful chances — and delivered.” Ann Richards, another old friend, who has been “going steady” with Bud since 1989, remembers that he was writing on his laptop when they were vacationing in Jamaica during Christmas, 1998. She asked him what was happening in the story and he told her, “Today a guy and his sister camped and there was a rifle shot. I don’t know who fired it or why.” A few days later he wrote a scene in which Lamar’s troops massacre a settlement of peaceful Cherokees.
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