Fixin' to Leave Round Rock

      I should have consulted with someone local before I went back to Round Rock, Texas, a few years ago, eager to show it to my wife, a North Carolinian who always looked skeptical when I would tell her some crazy story about the place.

      It had been a town half asleep when I lived there, but with a certain kind of charm, if small Texas towns with a seed, feed and farm implements store, a Tex-Mex cafe and a dance hall with beer and barbeque are your idea of charming.

     The eponymous rock appears to have plopped down in the middle of Brushy Creek, just off the main street where the town's traffic light ruled for decades. (When Dell Computer muscled its way into town, it multiplied the population as well as the number of traffic lights, and jump-started Round Rock's place in the digital age).

      The Round Rock is said to have marked the low-water crossing of the Chisholm Trail when cattle and cowboys mosied from San Antonio to Abilene in the years before trains and diesel trucks. The Rock pokes its flat top just enough above the water to have marked a safe place for cows and wagons to cross. It's maybe large enough to hold a standard size pickup truck without a trailer.  

      Since Austin metastasized around the town, the Rock appears to have shrunk even further. The town itself might have disappeared altogether if not for the fortuitous arrival of The Express, a minor league baseball team owned in part by Nolan Ryan, the Hall of Famer from Texas, nicknamed the "Ryan Express." 

      During my three-year stay there a dear old friend made the trip to Texas for a visit. I made a big deal out of taking him to see the Rock. His reaction: “Now I’ve seen all the great sites to see in the United States: the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls and the Round Rock.” 

      I had no business being in Texas in the first place. I had a B.A. in biology and a Rhode Island teaching license which made me way less than a teacher but at least I was employable. So, after college I followed a girl to Austin to hunt for a teaching job. Turns out a lot of folks had the same idea, so naturally all the Austin school district positions had been filled by the time I got around to sending in my sorry excuse of a resume and a mostly blank application.  

      Austin's HR folks probably got a good laugh out of it, but just about 15 miles down a two-lane Texas highway in Round Rock a low-level employment clerk, desperate to fill a science teaching position one week before school opened, sent me an application with a cover letter all but offering me a position at Elgin High School.

      Protocol required an interview with the principal and assistant principal, so soon I was driving my old International pickup past field after field of soybeans and feed corn. The assistant principal was honest regarding the racial dynamics in the town. He told me there had been a recent school board election. Early on election day some keen-eyed election official noticed most of the voters were brown or black. Word got out fast, sending a ripple of panic through the town. V-8 and diesel pickup truck engines roared to life as white voters hauled ass from every trailer home and shotgun shack for miles around to the nearest polling place.

      Talk about your white flight. You would have thought they were giving out free tins of smokeless tobacco at the Wag-A-Bag. By the end of the day the tide had been turned, and the Elgin Independent School District Board of Education remained safely in white hands.

      Having just realized I was applying for a job in an antebellum town, what level of false confidence kept me from firing up my own pickup engine and leaving Elgin in its 19th century white-as-lace past? Let's just cut to the chase: it ended badly, but entirely predictably.

      Four months into my career, the Board of Education voted to terminate my contract, noting for the record that I was not free-swinging enough with the wooden paddle every other teacher kept on their desk as their go-to method of enforcing discipline. Off the record, I was described as overly lenient toward the students of color, but of course that's not even close to how they phrased it.

      I needed a road trip; a railroad trip. Bought an Amtrak ticket from Texas to my childhood home in Virginia, two yellow legal pads and some pencils to write the story of my brief teaching career. I surprised and confused my parents when I called to say I'd be home in a few days.

      I did not have time to make the return trip to Texas by train because my good friends back there had arranged a job interview provided I could get back in less than two days. Reluctantly I booked a flight from Virginia to Texas where I would work and rethink a career path in education. Then the University of North Carolina offered me a spot in their special education degree and licensure program—and a way out of Texas.

      As the calendar slipped toward fall and my first graduate school semester just a couple of weeks away, only two major tasks remained before I would be on the road heading back east. First, I had to sell my old truck since I had acquired a slightly newer old truck that would be my ride to Carolina. I placed an ad in the paper. Two days before I needed to pull away from Round Rock, a guy responded to the ad and asked if he could come "right now." He only had one question: "Does she run?" 

      Within an hour he and his car-mechanic friend named Derail were in my driveway. I gave the guy the key, and he cranked her up. Derail raised the engine cover and pressed his ear to the manifold. He grabbed something I couldn't see on the bottom of the engine. He checked the oil on the dipstick, and pulling a hammer from somewhere, he whopped each tire a couple of times. The guy walked over to where I was watching all this and said "Derail says to take it" and he handed me a fistful of cash. "That about cover it?"

      "Sure," I said. "Let me go inside and get the title for you."   

      "Don't need no title. We're just gonna run it up to the Oklahoma borderline and leave it there while we head north. You want a beer?"

       He got in the passenger seat, handed Derail a beer, and they tore out of there, leaving me with a crazy amount of cash, a beer and only one more item on my get-away to-do list: pack the U-Haul trailer. 

      Honestly, I'm not at all sure why I needed a trailer. I owned about as much at age 26 as I did when I left college: a stereo system, a guitar, boxes of books, my tools, t-shirts, underwear and socks. Lots of socks. Not a stick of furniture. And nothing in the way of kitchen stuff. What did I need a trailer for? 

      Well, whatever. The thing got packed in less than a day and was ready to roll, but it was getting late, so I decided to begin the journey the next morning. And I'm glad I did, because otherwise I would have missed my last visit from Rudy. 

      During my final year in Round Rock, Rudy Bohac would drive his Chevy pickup out there each day after work. He would pull up next to the water pump we shared; he for the cattle he ran on the 100 acres of pasture, and I for drinking, bathing and laundry in the house my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and I rented from the owner of the 100-acre ranch.   

      Rudy always had a cold six pack of Schlitz on the wide front seat. He would crack one for each of us, then take off his grimy, goofy, red and white polka-dot ball cap and we'd sit on the tailgate of his pickup sipping Schlitz (say that three times fast) and trying to make conversation, which was not easy since all we really had to talk about was the damn pump.

        It typically went something like this. Rudy speaks first:

       "Hey, Dave. Y'all gettin' enough pressure up to the house?"

       "I reckon." 

       "Well, I was thinkin' 'bout changin' up them bushin's."

       "OK, Rudy. You the pump man." 

       "You still got them wrenches I give ya?"

       "’Course I do."  

       "Well would you mind fetchin' 'em?"    

       "No problem. Don't drink up all the beer."  

       This went on for the better part of a year until my last day. I guess with all the pump-business we had to cover I had neglected to tell Rudy about my plans. He rolled up, took a long look at my U-Haul trailer, took off his cap, and asked: 

      “Where you goin', Dave?"

      "North Carolina."

      "Whatcha gonna do up there?"

       "Graduate school. I'm going to get a master's degree in special education." 

       "No shit. I got my doctorate in biochemistry." 

       It turned out that Rudy was DOCTOR Rudy Bohac director of the Forensic Lab at the Austin City Police Department.

       When I had recovered my mental clarity, I asked Rudy what all that involved. I'll end this with his reply, which I have often quoted when I wanted to make an especially sociolinguistic point.

      "Well, they call me to testify in court on the evidence against a defendant. What's hard about that is explaining something complicated to simple people so they can understand it."