Editor's note: "Billy Graham at the Sun Bowl" is from a series of short stories in Baker H. Morrow's book, McKelligon Canyon, featuring connected tales that take place in southern New Mexico and El Paso in the early '70's.
Billy Graham came to El Paso in the fall once, in fine clear yellow early October, and masses of people wanted to see him. Billy Graham at the Sun Bowl.
I went in a bus with a bunch of other kids to listen to him. He was going to preach in the evening, so that left a whole day to walk through the streets of Juarez. There were old guys begging on corners, crackling roast chicken restaurants, lime vendors, a pall of diesel smoke over the whole town. It was dusty. Since we were kids we talked about the Juarez warnings we’d had from our parents: Don’t drink the water, Don’t eat the food, Watch your wallet.
The Mexicans hadn’t heard those stories. We went into Sanborn’s Cafeteria a little warily after we got thirsty enough and watched citizen after citizen eating beans and rice, drinking coffee, laughing with friends and munching pan dulce. It didn’t look so bad. I had a Coke with ice, a couple of plantains off a short green tray, and some tacos. A couple of my friends reluctantly sipped Seven Ups. Risks of Juarez.
In the 16th of September market there were mariachis, green parrots in light wooden cages, shiny sloppy brown belts, awful velvet paintings. Tiny women and their children were sitting on grain bags talking to each other. There were stalls with cases full of Taxco silver, plaited bullwhips, bright blankets, glistening pots.
Three things would catch the American kid’s eye: firecrackers, switchblade knives, and stall masters or mistresses haggling over prices. No price was cast in iron if you were plucky enough to use your wits and your tongue.
“Take this ring for forty pesos, for instance,” this guy said to me. “Taxco silver. You can give it to this girl here.
“I’ll look at these purses,” said the girl with me, whose name was Deanna. The other kids of our mob had scattered off throughout the market.
The ring was mother-of-pearl and less-than-sterling silver, crowned in a knob with an extra drop of metal. It was good-looking but cheap, maybe rhodium-plated, two tines spot-joined at its bottom with the seam showing. Bad bevelling. A perfect curio.
“Would you rather have a knife?” said the guy. Then he brought out a brown bag from behind a long glass case. “Have a peanut. You got lots of time to decide. Lady, you want a peanut?”
We stood around munching for a couple of minutes and admiring the ring man’s leather goods. He had bracelets, too, and brass masks, candleholders, onyx chess sets.
“Look, ese, I can give you that ring for thirty pesos, you’re an all right guy. How about it? You from Texas?”
“No,” I said.
“No Texas or no ring?”
“I’m not from Texas and I’ll give you twenty for the ring.” I said it quickly and in Spanish but I was so embarrassed talking about the price that I could feel my temples getting hot. There were clerestory windows at the top of the walls above the stall and as I looked away from him and up at them two pigeons flew by, one with something yellow in his mouth.
The guy was smiling and eating peanuts, shells and all, and watching Deanna. He was thin, with a pot belly that made a polite oval down toward the last three buttons of his white shirt.
“No, I don’t want any more,” she said, when he pushed the sack toward her again.
“Can I ask you something?” I said to him.
“Sure.”
“Listen, where can we find the bus station?”
“Which one?”
“One with a bus to central Mexico.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Uh, Zacatecas. Guanajuato. Morelia.”
“Well, that would be Transportes Chihuahuenses,” he said. He told us how to get there and it wasn’t too far away.
“How about twenty-five for that anillo ring?” he said.
I was looking at the girl just then. “Okay.” I handed over the pesos. “Thanks.”
“Sure. She could use that purse there, too, you know.”
We found the station after looking for a while. There was a smoky yellow building with oily windows and stacks of cardboard boxes with people’s clothes and merchandise in them. The buses fumed with pulsating engines out a side door, orange and lime peels in watery potholes beside them, a dentist’s ad for cheap plates smeared across the garage wall near the roofline.
Sure enough, the names were there in the destination windows above the front windshields: Chihuahua, Torreon, Zacatecas, Cd. de Mexico.
Zacatecas: Spaniards in armor plate and rust-specked iron helmets bullying Indians into pulling silver out of dingy holes chopped in the earth with picks and short-handled dull shovels. Spaniards eaten alive with their aching for silver and gold.
Already inside the buses were gruff-looking men in green-tinted glasses chewing gum, old women with pinched eyes and black scarves, chubby kids with burr haircuts and runny noses. Mocosos. There was a quiet, shy, young couple, the young husband wearing a fine new hat from Uruapan with a purple tassel hanging from the back. Everybody set to leave for a deeper Mexico away from the border.
For some reason somebody picked the Paso del Norte Hotel in El Paso for supper. The dining room was packed with kids, all chewing and talking fast to finish in time for Billy. I was curious to watch other people and myself eating chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and sauerkraut in a hotel a mile from Mexico. Nobody talked about Billy. The kids were too interested in firecrackers, switchblades, and drinking lemonade from pushcarts in dusty streets. They had walked around all day hearing clanking tortilla oven belts and staring at dusty palm trees behind wrought iron fences. Mexico was a bubble-gummer’s dream of what the Old West must have been like.
Sitting in the Sun Bowl listening to Billy wasn’t too bad, either. It was hard to be enthusiastic about his subject but not too hard to like him. He was a strong speaker, full of passion, and enthusiastic about being alive. He seemed to be a real preacher, too: if you poked into him I thought you would strike something solid. Besides, Deanna was certainly good to look at next to you when Billy had his off-moments.
Just a little to the south was Juarez and then the real Mexico tugging at you across the river. I wanted to be on one of those Transportes Chihuahuenses buses headed off to the interior through the smoky night.
I sat there and listened to Billy and wished I was a Mexican. Billy might even have wanted that, too, during the times he wished he weren’t Billy Graham. At the very least he would have understood the thing—Mexico pulling at you like a kind of tropical magnet, Billy being the kind of man he was.
(Image credits: Juarez street by Andy Eick, Billy Graham by Richard Bromley.)
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