A Stranger In Texas

With writer’s love,

One (#ulink_e673f31a-f646-54fd-aa3d-e6c2960780fd)

While Texas has been occupied by Europeans for the past five hundred years, it’s been relatively recently that the northerners have been called Winter TEX-ANS. They had been known as Snow Birds, like the regular birds who fly south to get away from winter. The humans’ labeling was changed to Winter TEX-ANS when the druggies gave a new meaning to the word “snowbird.”

Winter TEXANS are welcomed wholeheartedly. They are lured to stay. And Sea View was one such place that lured them.

Sea View’s big hotel was called The Horizon. The town was north of Corpus Christi on the TEXAS coast. Sea View wasn’t on many of the maps.

The hotel had been built with wild expectations when the seacoast boom began long ago. Somehow that spot above Corpus had been lost to the general tourist bunch and bypassed for Padre Island by the college kids.

Even the main coastal highways had gone around Sea View. The town fathers hadn’t had the clout nor the money to get the highway to bend their way. The road builders placidly said it was illegal to go through the environmentally protected sand dunes with another road. Keeping the sand from shifting was another nuisance.

Why were all those problems listed for Sea View and not for Padre Island? At Padre, there was a four-lane highway down the center of that sand bar. No one ever knew the reason Sea View couldn’t just have a two-la-ner split from the main highway with a good direction sign.

Of course, there was already a road to the town of Sea View. It was a local two-laner that meandered along the path of least resistance. The highway people said that was sufficient.

With The Horizon Hotel and the elegant hospital, everybody in Sea View had predicted, “Just watch. As soon as we’ve had a flock of guests here, the word will spread. We’ll be swamped with tourists. We’ll get that highway split here.”

The natives had been disgruntled, until they saw how the non-TEXANS had lighted on Padre like pushy buzzards. By then, most of the citizens were glad this hadn’t happened to their own town.

Well, not everybody was glad. There were the sitters on the square who speculated what their land would have brought them and how they would then be living. There were guffaws over that—they’d just be sitting gossiping somewheres else. The whole, entire debate was just more wasted time.

However, through the years The Horizon Hotel had gradually gathered a following of very nice people who came especially in winter for the pleasure of just being on the coast and breathing the clean Gulf breeze that tumbled their hair. And they went out on boats or stood in the surf to fish or they played in or walked along the sand, collecting shells under the TEXAS winter sun.

Sea View native Jessica Channing was, by then, twenty-nine years old. In another year, she’d be an old maid. She was redheaded and green-eyed, and she didn’t give one hootin’ hot damn about getting married.

Her sister and brother were both married and had enough children to distract the parents from their youngest, unwed child.

Jessica had observed too many failed marriages. She didn’t need that kind of problem. She lived as she wanted, spent as she wanted and ate when she wanted, what she wanted. Her brother told her she was getting staid and persimmonish.

She agreed.

Jessica was the accountant at the Horizon Hotel. Her life was neat and orderly. She knew everyone in town. That wasn’t difficult. She knew all the secrets… and those secrets she knew, she never mentioned.

She was tall enough and well made. Her complexion was the ivory of real redheads, and her green eyes were gorgeous, deep, seeing into souls.

Jessica made people straighten up and quit gossiping. There was just something about her that shivered them a little. Maybe it wasn’t them so much as it was their consciences. Jessica never gossiped, but they did. She made them feel as if she was better than they.

Being a paragon was something of a burden. Jessica did understand her position. She was not only good with balancing books and straightening out tangles in thinking, but she was also breathtakingly beautiful.

That’s always a burden for a woman. Any smart woman knows being beautiful causes all sorts of problems with other women. Men, too, are a real nuisance, but women are leery of beautiful women. They avoid including them.

What woman wants that kind of competition?

While a man always wants the best woman possible, he rarely knows what to do with one. He is inclined to either worship her—and always be underfoot—or he ignores her to prove he’s not her slave. But men are competitive. They do try. They are a real exasperation.

The town of Sea View not only had the remarkable hotel that functioned nicely, but they had that hospital. It was the only one in the whole area. It had been built on the same exuberant wave ride as the hotel. It was as popular as the hotel!

The staff was superior. They were lured by the sea, the beaches, the golf course, the small townness and the gossip. It was as if all those outsiders belonged. And the staff was always amazed over how distant were the homes of those who were brought there to be healed, or rearranged or fixed.

People did amazing things. They fell down stairs, crashed gliders, survived plane wrecks and whatever else people found to half kill themselves. It is always appalling when people are harmed on a highway, or worse on a byway.

This is a civilized and crammed country. But even now, there are those places that are very, very isolated.

And things do happen.

There were still tales of who and why various patients had been brought to Sea View. They came to the hotel called The Horizon. And some needed that unusual hospital soberly named Medical Center.

A good many of the people so introduced into the area, via the hospital, came back to vacation at The Horizon.

It was called so because, looking on beyond, that was about all you could see.

But like the rest of TEXAS, the view to the Gulf of Mexico was always unique, with the changing of the sky’s colors and the winds. There were the cloud formations and the moving seawater. Far out were the big ships. Closer by were the fishing boats.

Wherever one looked, it was always different. It took a peculiar person to be bored at Sea View.

In the town, the seafood served was simply remarkable. And there was always the Mexican food. Even so, more discreet foods were available to any picky appetites.

To walk off the excellent foods, there was the golf course, and there was the beach. There were the shells to gather.

The shell necklaces were easy to string. A sea worm liked the muscle in the tiny shells. The hole it bored to get to the muscle was perfect for the shells to carry a string. Everything contributes to everything else. Even us.

When Zachary Thomas’s car was hit by a speeding pickup coming around a dune on the wrong side of the road, it happened in the middle of nowhere. The truck driver had not buckled his seat belt and was killed instantly. A good way for him to avoid the whole, ensuing mess.

But Hannah Thomas was killed as quickly. Even knowing she had to be dead, it seemed to her husband Zachary that he could feel her pulse.

Was it her pulse that hammered, or only his own?

His cellular phone had been smashed. Tears leaked from his eyes without his knowing; he wept in appalled frustration.

His twelve-year-old son Michael’s heart still beat, but he was totally out of it. He was so limp and helpless.

There had been no habitation along the road. Zach quickly climbed a sand dune and looked—at more sand dunes.

He wasn’t sure which way to go for help. He could not leave his family. He went back to them. He stood in the roadway and urged God to send help to his helpless ones.

It seemed to take much longer than it actually did.

Finally a car screeched its brakes as it came around the bend and found the crunched truck, the car…and the bodies.

It was Sea View’s Paul Butler who swung open his car door and got out. His quick eyes recognized that the driver of the truck was gone from this land of the living. Then the newly arrived Paul looked at the stunned man standing by the other car. “You okay?”

“We need help. Can you get—”

“I got a CB. You oughta have one.”

Zack explained, “My phone was smashed.”