Texas: Leaving Archer City
By Charlotte Rains Dixon

I may be the only tourist to have visited Archer City, Texas without setting foot inside novelist Larry McMurtry’s fabled bookstores. Booked Up covers four locations, three of them unmanned. (If you want to buy books, you carry your purchases up the street to the Mother Ship.) McMurtry recently announced he’d keep the stores open, though he’d been flirting with the idea of closing them for lack of business, which is easy to see why if ever you’ve visited Archer City.

The time/temperature reader board on the bank building on Center Street reads 102 at three o’clock on the July afternoon I am departing Archer City. Leaving Archer City, a hot, dusty, and, for the most part, deserted Texas town a couple hours outside Dallas, is not as easy as you might think because for some odd reason the place casts a spell.

I am visiting the town to speak to the students in my friend George’s three-week writing class. We are billeted at the Spur Hotel, 18 students, George and I; and the night I visit George gives up his room on the main floor to me, and bunks with one of the students. It is not a big hotel, though at three stories it is the tallest building in town, and most of the time it is filled with special parties, like this one. A group of scrapbookers were slated to arrive after we left, and afterwards hunters would arrive in droves.

Besides these special parties, the main people to come to Archer City are those in search of book nirvana. Rumor has it that busloads of bibliophiles make the pilgrimage each year from faraway lands, but I have never seen them. I've been busy partaking of Archer City’s other delights. There’s Pat’s Café, directly across from the Spur, where the patrons and employees have never met a piece of white bread or a cigarette they didn’t like. Next-door is the public library where one afternoon we watched children receive certificates for the number of books they had read. Most of them had only managed to muster numbers below ten, as this is not a town where book reading is encouraged, except by the librarian, and McMurtry’s bookstores.

On my first day, after a few class sessions, one of the students requests an audience to discuss his story, and George suggests I sit in. We walk past the Royal Theater, featured in the movie The Last Picture Show, part of it a burned-out shell, part of it restored and host to a thriving dinner theater, turn left at the corner, and head down a couple blocks to the American Legion Hall, the only place in town where you can get a drink.

The bar is a small room at the end of a cavernous wood-floored hall, and all of the stools are filled with locals, most of them in oversized cowboy hats. They turn to stare as George and I walk in.

“You folks from the IRS?” one of them speaks in a slow, Texas drawl.

We take a table beneath a blaring TV, and a generously buxom woman with stringy black hair and a face the color of a dusty field comes to take our order. The men order beer (a buck a can) but I dither.

“Do you have red wine?”

“Got a box of white out back, hon, but it ain’t cold. I can put an ice cube in it for you.”

George hits me on the arm and says, “She’ll have a Margarita.” Apparently there is no place in Texas where you can’t get a Margarita. It costs $2.50, salt on the rim and all, and it’s not a bad pour.

Later that night we go backroading. This consists of everyone piling into a SUV and driving slowly along the back roads. I keep asking when the exciting part happens, but alas, this is it. The journey is the destination. Apparently it was a tad more thrilling when the students went out with the mayor and assorted residents of the town in a caravan, running over snakes and shooting at bobcats along the way. That, I am told, is called backroadin', with no 'g' on the end, in honor of the more traditional Texas nature of the experience.

I hear murmuring in the front seat, George and the driver conferring, and it sounds somewhat ominous. But there are more stars in the sky than I’ve seen in years, and the crickets are noisily chirping in the warm night air. I hang my head out the window as the car bumps along the rutted road. A couple turns and a few minutes later and we’re back on the main highway, quite by accident George later tells me, as he and the driver thought we were lost on the back roads.

The Dairy Queen at the end of town is shuttered, as is everything else, though back at the hotel the rest of the students are still congregated on the front porch. It's 2 AM, and I’m ready for bed. As I head to my room, George tells me he found a tarantula in his room a few nights ago, and the rest of the (short) night I spend wakefully lifting the sheet in search of bugs and other creatures every half hour or so.

The next morning I’m sitting on the front porch of the Spur Hotel, really just a wide spot on the sidewalk, drinking coffee and watching the temperature rise on the reader board down the street. An ancient Ford sedan, covered in dirt and with all the windows rolled down, pulls up to the hotel; and a gray-haired woman, lean and sturdy as a fence post, gets out.

She asks me if one of the employees of the hotel is in. Since I haven't seen anybody who is officially connected to the place since I arrived, I say no; but tell her to go in and investigate for herself. She does so, and returns, apparently without success. We chat for a minute, and I inquire about her life. Her husband is a local historian of limited repute.

“History is his vocation, running cattle is his avocation,” she says and goes on to inform me she’s a native of the place. “It’s just a little old town, honey; but if you’ve lived here all your life, you love it.”

Indeed. I can’t even begin to fathom what a life lived entirely within the confines of Archer City might be like, but I’m fascinated by my brief glimpse into it. “You’re not going to want to leave,” George had said as we drove into town. Looking around at the deserted sidewalks and the trucks roaring down Center Street, I didn’t believe him. But now, as I get in the car to go, I have to admit that he’s partially right. I have no idea why, but I really don’t want to leave Archer City. If I ever make it back here, maybe I’ll get to see what all this talk of McMulty's is about.

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