Reversal of Fortune
Forty-two residents of the struggling cotton-farming town of Roby band together to enter the lottery. They buy 430 tickets. Then—on the eve of Thanksgiving, no less—they hit the jackpot, winning $46 million. You might expect a happy ending. Not even close.
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LANCE LIVES IN A TIDY double-wide on the northeastern edge of town, along a rutted dirt road that leads off of the courthouse square. From his house, the furrowed cotton fields around Roby stretch out toward the ghost towns that dot the rest of the county—Hobbs, Longworth, Pleasant Valley, Stamper, Pleger, and Palava, to name a few. The land is stark and treeless and flat, and when color fades from the landscape during drought time, the view is bleak, except for the wide blue sky above. At night, the only sound that can be heard from Lance's living room is the wind blowing in off the prairie. Most evenings, he fills in the silences by having his best friend, Opie Nazworth, over for supper. A redheaded cotton ginner with a big, roaring laugh, Opie grills pork ribs and tells wild stories about his days as a sailor and staves off that lonely feeling Lance gets a little while longer. It was a discussion with Opie eight years ago that led Lance to make his first foray into local politics. "I was running my mouth off, sitting on the couch, drinking beer one night," Lance remembered. "And I said, 'Why do I have to drive fifty miles to Abilene to buy a pair of pants?' I was mad Roby was dying and that we were just sitting around, waiting for it to die. I said, 'Maybe I should run for mayor.' And Opie said, 'Well, why don't you?'"
Cecil King, who owned the bank in town, had been mayor of Roby for thirty years. As his challenger, Lance was a long shot. Lance was young, inexperienced, and not from a prominent family; his father, like his father before him, had poured concrete, not farmed cotton. "Lance is a dreamer, and if you want to try and save a town like Roby, you have to dream," Richard Spencer observed. "Cecil is a banker; he's practical. Lance wanted to give everyone some hope." Lance entered the race four months after winning the lottery and drafted a simple platform: pave Roby's remaining dirt roads, keep taxes low, obtain alternative sources of water, and aggressively try to bring businesses to town. Campaigns in Roby are a perfunctory affair, without debates or door-to-door politicking, but wherever Lance went that spring he talked to anyone who would listen about his plans for Roby. On Election Day that May, he cast his ballot and then went fishing, preferring to calm his nerves than to sit at the gin waiting for returns. When the results were in, he had lost by two votes: 9698. "Wynelle and I felt terrible, because we had every intention of voting for Lance, and then we forgot it was Election Day," said Bob Terry. "We cost him the race!"
The defeat was humbling, but Lance had more urgent problems weighing on him. "My ex-wife tried to reconcile with me after I won the lottery," he explained. "She said she wanted to get back together and work it out. Deep down, I think I knew it wasn't going to work, but I felt like we should try." During their three-year marriage, he had raised her daughter, who was born during their courtship, as his own. "I'd always wanted a family, and I loved that little girl," he said. "We tried to patch things up that Christmas, and January, and February. Finally I realized it wasn't going to work." Divorce proceedings resumed, and Lance saw his stepdaughter, who lived thirty miles away with his wife, less and less often. Then came the news that broke him. "The Monday after the election, my ex-wife made the accusation that I had molested my stepdaughter," he said. "Mom heard in a beauty shop in Anson that they were filing charges against me. She came by the house and told me. The grand jury met the next week, and the indictment came in June. I'd rather be accused of murder—of a triple murder—than a thing like that."
In Roby, the unofficial verdict was handed down swiftly. "People didn't believe Lance did it," said Bob Terry, echoing the comments of many town residents. "They thought he was being railroaded for his money." In a town where everyone has known one another since birth and the most intimate details of their personal lives are common knowledge, residents found the allegations hard to believe. "If I thought he'd done it, I'd have been the first one with my hand on the rope," said Opie, who grew up across the street from Lance. "But I know this man." A medical exam suggested that the three-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted, but no physical evidence was ever found that connected Lance to any crime. The indictment against him was dismissed at a hearing in the spring of 1998, after state district court judge Weldon Kirk interviewed the little girl and found her not competent to testify.
Lance's ex-wife never increased her monetary demands in the divorce proceedings after the abuse charges were made and settled for less than half the community property in their divorce, but the perception in Roby exists to this day that Lance's legal troubles befell him because he won the lottery. He was forced to take a cash buyout to pay his bills, running through a substantial amount of his winnings fighting the abuse charges. But it was not the money he cared about. "It's an accusation that will never go away," he told me. "People will always wonder, in the back of their minds, if it's true. I have to live with that every day." The stress of that year had been enormous, he said: "I nearly drank myself to death over this. I became a hermit after I was indicted, and I never left the house, except when I had to go to work or drive to Austin to talk to a high-powered shrink so he could see what kind of pervert I was." The pain he feels is twofold, since he will likely never see the girl he raised as his daughter again. "I haven't seen my stepdaughter since the day those charges were dismissed," he said. "My attorney told me not to show any emotion when the judge dismissed the charges, just to walk out of the courtroom. No good-byes."
Roby showed its support in an unusual way. Cecil King had decided a few weeks earlier that he was ready to retire, and the mayor pro tem, Rex Beauchamp, felt that Lance was better suited to the job. With the blessing of the city council, Beauchamp called Lance a few hours after the charges against him were dismissed and asked him to become Roby's next mayor. He was sworn in that week, and in the past two elections, he has run unopposed. "You just can't find people like this anywhere else," Lance said. "During that whole ordeal, people would stop me and say, 'Boy, are you all right? If you need anything, you just call me.' I must've heard that a hundred times. I know I was on every prayer list there was. People brought food to my house and checked up on me every day. A friend I grew up with quit a $20-an-hour job in San Angelo so he could stay with me for a while and make sure I'd be all right. Hell, that's good people."
ONE MORNING IN JUNE, as the sun was breaking over the cotton fields, Lance drove the four blocks from his house to the gin, as he does every weekday morning—a minute-long drive that spans half the town. He started working at the gin the day after he graduated from high school, nineteen years ago, and every morning for the first ten years he worked there he swore would be his last. Then, like so many things, he became accustomed to it. As he turned onto Highway 180, he looked down the length of road, toward the courthouse square, and saw that the town was empty. He parked his pickup outside the gin and pushed open the break room door, which was unlocked. Diesel and fertilizer prices were written on a chalkboard inside, and a plastic American flag was tacked to the wall. Lance made a pot of coffee and turned on the TV, folding a copy of the Abilene Reporter-News to the crossword. A few minutes later, an old man in a white straw hat walked through the door.
"Morning, Junior," Lance said, glancing up for a moment.
"How you doing?" the farmer said with a nod.
"All right."
They sat in silence, sipping coffee from white Styrofoam cups as the morning news played softly on the TV. Lance stared at his crossword, which was still full of empty white squares, and frowned. The two men sat and said nothing. Outside, there was no movement on the highway; even the birds were quiet. After a while, the farmer rose to go.
"Y'all have a good day now," the farmer called out over his shoulder before the screen door slammed behind him.
Eight years later, the lottery hasn't brought any miracles to Roby. Lance has done what he can as mayor, earning Roby $1 million in state and federal grant money, but its tax base continues to shrink each year, and its sales tax revenue, with just two stores in town, is virtually nil. Even the town's last grocery store has closed. Roby's oil revenues have played out, its landscape is too flat for wind power, and its political clout is too small to lobby for a waste dump. Some of the most pressing issues Lance must grapple with as mayor, like vacant houses and stray dogs, are the portents of a place that is emptying out. Farmers' sons are taking jobs as prison guards in Snyder and Lamesa rather than working the land—or simply leaving Roby for good.
On my last night in town, Lance and Opie threw a few rib-eye steaks on the grill and sat in Lance's living room, holding forth on Roby's virtues and the progress of Gene Shipp, the man who had been stung by bees more than two hundred times. "You know what makes this town so great?" Lance said. "Thousands of dollars have been donated to the bank for his medical bills. His kids are eating well. And when he gets out of the hospital, he's gonna be fed, his house will be clean, and his bills will be paid."
"Don't go telling everybody how great this little town is, or they'll all want to move here," Opie said.
"We could stand to have some new friends," Lance pointed out with a grin. "I've heard all your stories."
"Hell," Opie said, cracking open another beer. "I guess you're right about that."
Lance stepped outside to check on the rib eyes and turn them over on the grill. Before heading back inside, he glanced up at the sky and leaned against his pickup for a moment, sucking in his breath. "Look at that sunset," he said, taking in the view. "What more do you need than this?" He shook his head. "I've never really been anywhere in the world—I haven't traveled like Opie has—but I've never loved a place as much. Goddam, it's just so nice to be home."
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