I was walking my yellow bicycle to the end of the driveway when, from a cloud of tawny dust, there emerged a sleek Ford Mustang like a chariot from the heavens. Such a luxurious pony car was better suited for flat highway cruising than there in the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert. On the early morning of September 20, 1973, I was beholding such a staged arrangement of manufactured wealth against the Trans-Pecos West that, for a moment, I was convinced this was all a television advertisement and cameramen were hidden behind the cacti.
The Mustang wheels decelerated, pulling up to the curbside, until I was peering straight through the rolled-down passenger window.
The driver had long, layered brown hair, wore an outdated Hawaiian shirt, and had a silver spoon hanging in his mouth which he pulled out and jabbed in my direction. “I reckon you’re Jackie’s little sis. You remember me? I bummed ‘round your house a lot. Gave Jackie his first taste of tequila. One sip had him knocked out. I threw Jackie in an ice cold bath, sobered him up, otherwise your momma would’ve lost her lid.”
I stared dumbly at the stranger whose roguish presence was nowhere outstanding in my childhood memories. At the time, at least.
“Say, sis, where’s Jackie?”
“Getting ready for school.”
“Oh yeah, school.” He winked knowingly at me, raised his wristwatch, swore, then laid on the horn.
My hands flew to cover my ears, abandoning the handlebars, and my bicycle fell on its side.
Jackie came rushing out of the house, his feet shoved into unlaced Keds, belt undone, flailing his arms in distress. “Dammit Keith, you’re gonna wake up my folks!”
“We gotta hit the road ‘fore all of America’s on the highway.”
I whipped toward Jackie. “You’re cutting?”
“Cousin’s holdin’ the staff door open till seven,” Keith reminded.
“I’m telling!”
“Man, she better not whine the whole eight hours.”
“I’m not a whiner.”
“Will both of you just—” Jackie fisted his sandy curls, overwhelmed, then picked up my toppled bicycle. I followed him as he guided it back into the garage. “We’re not going to school today because we’re going to see Billie in Houston.” He didn’t seem to want to tell me anything more.
“Billie?”
“You’ll like her.”
The only Billie I knew of was in my sixth grade class, Billie Miller Jr., who once folded chewing gum in my hair on school picture day and descended from a long patriline of wife-beating Billies. I tried to envision my classmate with a feminine face, but the features felt too androgynous and off-putting.
“Is she your girlfriend?”
Jackie chuckled as he leaned the bicycle on its kickstand. “I wish.”
Eleven was a liberating age because I had no hesitancy. My world was folk rock and grasslands, it was as large as Jackie, and I never questioned those bounds. As I child I felt a soldier-like loyalty towards him, one that would lead me off a cliff’s edge, into cactus spines or, as it so happened, into the backseat of a Ford Mustang barreling through an American frontier. I propped my chin on the window ledge and watched as my hometown and its abandoned airfield flattened into sprawling dirt. The sun was hanging over the Davis Mountains and cast all of Marfa into a buttery light. A herd of pronghorn grazed in the distance, but the Mustang outran them.
Jackie was fiddling with the radio knobs but all we heard was static. Only when he smacked the stereo did Frank McGee on NBC broadcasting start blasting. I plugged my ears. Keith promptly changed the station to the Eagles because, as he then declared, three people are forbidden in his Mustang: journalists, Richard Nixon, and any of his momma’s ex-boyfriends. Keith was only nineteen but he regarded himself as a real political pundit. With a pint of almond butterscotch ice cream between his legs, he harped on for miles about Watergate, the Chilean coup d’état, and how the United States’ embrace of realpolitik would yadda, yadda, yadda.
Jackie was antsy. He shifted in his seat to quiet his gurgling stomach. “My liver is about to eat my kidney.”
“Have some ice cream—though, you’re better off drinking it.”
“That’s nasty, man.”
“Jackie?” I nudged the back of his seat.
“It’s a refreshing gulp of sweet milk.” Keith rounded a curve. “Don’t be so prissy.”
“I’m not drinking your saliva.”
“Jackie?” This time, a forceful kick.
“If we were on a deserted island, would you drink a carton of salt water or almond butterscotch slush?”
“I’m not entertaining your stupid—”
“Jackie!” I lifted both feet and slammed them into his seat, shoving him into the hot dashboard.
“Dammit, Jane! What?”
I leaned over the center console and gestured through the windshield at the approaching American flag whipping on a tall pole, below which was an unassuming clapboard diner on an otherwise undeveloped plot of land. Inside the establishment was a gallery of taxidermy protruding from every wall and corner, but the main attraction was the three elk heads mounted above a long cowboy horse ranch mural. The animals’ mouths were gaping, preserved in a bugle, and we briskly ate beneath them, splitting steak on a bun and a Spanish omelet with three Cokes. The white-smocked dishwashers and cooks had emerged from the kitchen and were huddled around the bar counter, watching an ABC sports telecast.
“I think Billie Jean,” answered Rafer Johnson.
All that could be seen of the reporter was the microphone he held up.“You do?”
“Yeah, yeah. She’s, uh, she plays, uh, a very aggressive game. She’s very fast and she, uh, she plays, as some people say, very much like a man.”
One of the workers from the bunch sought me out with an owlish turn of the head, upon which a stained toque sat lopsided. “Little lady, you play like a man?”
His comment sounded like a compliment to me, but it aroused profanities and hysterics from Jackie. The kitchen staff assumed a defensive formation like geese in flight. From their standoff, I gauged there was an implicit answer to the worker’s question, one I wasn’t old enough to take offense at. Sensing a potential bar brawl, Keith ushered us all out of the diner, our food still half-eaten on the table. While Keith topped off the Mustang’s gasoline tank, Jackie hurtled stones at an ice machine, denting and scratching its white paint. We merged back onto Interstate 10. Nobody spoke. The dead grass patches and shrubbery whisked away in streaks. With a stuffed belly and wind combing my hair, I became drowsy. Lingering at the threshold of consciousness is where I dreamt of racing eighteen-wheeler pronghorns on limestone roadcuts, white-tailed deer quenching their thirst in oil-spill rivers, and Great Blue Herons at an impeachment proceeding in Washington.
I was roused awake by Jackie hauling me out of the backseat and exhaust fumes from thousands of cars bumper-to-bumper in a tremendous Houston parking lot. Masses of Americans were migrating forward, towards something behind me, and when I followed their awestruck gazes, I beheld it too: a silvery spacecraft docked on earth. The eighth wonder of the world. While the attendees corralled in a long line that funneled through the astrodome’s entrance, the three of us snuck in through a backdoor. Were it not for the rodeo in the winding service corridors—shirtless men in the gilded garb of Egyptian slaves, dollish marching bands, parade floats, giant lollipops, and a squealing male chauvinist piglet—we would have been spotted and thrown out.
As we scaled an emergency stairwell, passing Sugar Daddy merchandise and colorful feathers, the structure trembled. My initial thought was a tornado but when we emerged from the fifth floor landing, I was overwhelmed by an onslaught of merging human sounds. Only when I stepped out onto the bleachers, under the intense glare of stadium light, did I perceive a world beyond Marfa. Thirty-thousand spectators swarmed like ants on a hill. There was so much wildlife there, so little distinction between the sexes. Vociferous men and women quarreled and placed surreptitious bets. It was a tremendous event.
On the green turf below, an empress was being carried out on a litter chair by four stripped men. Applause erupted from the bleachers. Keith and Jackie leapt out of their seats and whistled like they were calling the horses home.
“Here comes Billie Jean King!” the courtside commentator announced. “And she’s got the fans here tonight.”
Billie was a small white figure bobbing in a sea of reporters and cameramen. I feared they would trample her but, instead, they orbited her. She parted a path for herself. Billie’s arresting presence distracted me from her theatrical opponent, Bobby Riggs, a tired old man on a rickshaw tugged by women.
There was a tacit spotlight on my sex that evening. Every woman felt it. Many men dreaded it. Billie embodied an advocacy for women I wouldn’t fully cherish until I abandoned Marfa after high school graduation to study mammal migrations at Boston University where I bobbed in a similarly oppressive East Coast sea of male entitlement. My eleven-year-old mind didn’t grasp that the victor would earn more than $100,000; that their winnings were beyond financial; that when Bobby sent a volley into the net and Billie tossed her racket into the air, she won, but so did millions of American women, myself included.
Lola Horowitz takes the Nassau Weekly to a historically significant tennis match, but I’m confused. The first time I heard about tennis was Challengers. Where’s the other guy? When do they…?