January 2001
A Prince of a Fellow
Chapter One
"The Prince Appears"
I am a frizzy-haired, washed-out princess looking for a prince. Some ordinary prince on a limping horse, to carry me off to his leaking, rented castle, to share his beans and salt pork and lie beside him in his bed. No one special; after all, I am nothing fancy. At thirty I have never established residence with a man, and those I have rubbed bellies with have been no better than I was willing to settle for. Concerned as I am with reality, I don't get my hopes too high; just a third son of a minor king.
Which search is the reason I had this morning in my radio station still another prospect, this one a writer down from Connecticut, here on a grant at the historic J. Frank Dobie Ranch. Which meant that for shelter he got an old farmhouse and for inspiration a field, a creek, and a view of the neighbor's cows.
I love to interview writers, as they are not fettered by facts. Thrusting characters and parrying plots spin from their fingers onto the yellow pad as slickly as spider webs. Silently inside their heads herds thunder and doors slam with a reverberation that we in the world of sound can only envy. Each time I coax a writer to open his vocal cords on my show I expect sudden magic; expect verbal rabbits snatched from the top hat of his subconscious.
Of course, I am habitually disappointed. Last year's Dobie Fellow, hungrily surfacing from under Los Angeles' thick sky, had spent six months staring through the barbwire fence at the milling livestock, his vocabulary locked in constipation. On the air, so full of his oneness with the land and its manure, he had had the opposite problem. I purposely omitted mention of his work in progress, lest it never progress.
I had high hopes that this year's visiting writer would be better. For one thing he possessed the irresistibly German name of Gruene Albrech; for another, his brooding voice, accepting my invitation to appear on my interview show, had suggested a prodigal son come home to confront an archetypal father—to kill or to forgive him (depending on the size of the Dobie grant).
Now, considering him through the pane of glass, he didn't look as I expected. He was not brooding at all; in fact, he seemed eager as a kid on his first day of school all decked out in new clothes, which he was—board-stiff jeans, creased Western pearl-snapped shirt, hand-tooled glossy leather boots. Even, sticking from his back pocket, a red bandana with the price tag still on it.
Right off I could see he was no German. Looking closer at his wide face whose skin stretched across high cheekbones tight as a drum, I decided he must be Slavic. His deep almost golden tan gave him a general yellow wash that appeared to color even the whites of his eyes and his teeth, and darkened to copper his bow-shaped mouth. In the manner of symmetrical faces, his chin was cleft in the center, Czech, there was no question.
That charade was all right with me; I was used to that. Things are seldom what they seem. None of us are as we present ourselves.
The old men in this fenced-in town in Central Texas, named for Prince Solms, the nobleman who brought their ancestors from the old country inland from the coast to this rolling edge of a ring of weathered hills, purport to live in a German-speaking hamlet.
In fact, they dream of a remembered past; today they make up less than half the town. Beer-bellied, polka-dancing Mexicans, heirs of the original land-grant holders, now outnumber the beer-bellied, polka-dancing German descendants of the prince's immigrants. Nor is this the lush verdant farmland they claim to their grandsons, hoping to keep them close at hand; only the thinnest veneer of grass and scrubby shrubs cover the rocky soil of this insular place whose factions shut themselves off from their neighbors as surely as its rivers cut apart its three hills.
We aren't what we claim either, here on my beloved Mole in the Tunnel. Our very show pretends one thing as it delivers another. KPAC, a remote broadcast station, sells itself as Pasture Radio, down home sound brought to you from the land of the Aberdeen Angus and Poland Chinas. Actually, although we pipe our audience the picking sounds of country and western's finest, we sit ten miles out of town on a rise so that we can beam our advertisers to the Porsche drivers and politicians in both San Antonio and Austin. We are no more authentically rural than Neiman-Marcus custom-cut bluejeans.
Otto, my sidekick, who gives the news and weather in heavy German accent, is really a forty-five-year-old Mexican, with Pancho Villa mustache, who works afternoons (out of his lederhosen and into his stiff black suit) as the cemetery sexton.
Nor am I, Avery Krause, the cowgirl my faded jeans and blue work shirts would imply. I am, rather, as my mama is, a Swede sitting like a burr in the saddle of a large German family. A corn on the sole of the old grandfather's foot.
For twenty years in the coal-burning state, as Papa in his German way called the black, gutted mountains of eastern Kentucky, Mama and I were mistaken for any other Appalachian towheads. Which angered Papa into deep silences over his journals and ledgers. I so like the other schoolgirls with blue eyes pale as watercolor—all of us blanched, bleached, with peaked faces—made faint impression on the eye. We were Polaroid shots not yet developed. Now, come back here last year to bury Papa and replant ourselves, Mama and I are set apart from the Germans we married or were born into by our near-white curls, our wide thighs, even our sweet Swedish smiles.
If my appearance was the same in Kentucky, so was my manner of dealing with the world. I was a drama teacher, which, if you think about it, is not too different from what I'm doing now. In both settings I present illusions as real. In both theater and radio the audience is let in on the hoax; together we share the thrill of belief suspended. Here, by consent, coconut shells pound into horses hoofs and squeaking doors signal mysterious entries and ominous departures. There, small white faces grew bold with greasepaint and eager hands slew dragons with broom handles.
So it was fine with me if today's prince was after all a golden impostor, faking his German birthright; I too make my living by delusion.
As I stared at his large dark head and wide palms which seemed designed to compensate for lack of height, he flashed a hesitant grin of greeting.
Wanting to get the feel of him before we went on the air, I put on the easy sounds of Willie Nelson's "Remember Me" and left the control booth to Otto, who was assembling the good tidings of local news and the usual bad tidings of local weather.
"Good morning, I'm Avery Krause. We talked on the phone."
"I'm here early." Gruene Albrech rose, short in the leg as I had perceived.
I shook his firm hand, deciding that the touch was worth coming out for. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"If it's no trouble. I left in a hurry. It looked farther on the map. I thought it would take me longer to get here."
"You were good to drive out at eight o'clock in the morning."
"I've never been on radio."
Which must explain the scrubbed look. People always forget we on radio see only with our movie-making minds.
"We're very informal," I tried to put him at his ease. "I'll ask a few questions, play some music. We'll let the listeners call in their comments. They like to feel they're taking part in the show."
