The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories by Bryan Woolley Page A

me.”
    He told me about a neighbor: “When his children were little, 25 or 30 years ago, they kept seeing horned lizards in their yard, and they wondered whether they were seeing the same ones over and over or whether there were just lots of them. One day they decided that every time they saw one they would put it in their sandbox and count them at the end of the day. They collected over 80, just in the yard, in one day. But they’re gone. Today you couldn’t find one in the whole neighborhood.”
    I called Jim Hoggard, a friend in Wichita Falls, which is west of the I-35 corridor, to see how the horny toads were doing up there. “When we moved into our house in 1976, we had horny toads in our yard,” he said. “I remember trying to interest my daughter into bending down close enough to one to see it squirt blood. She wouldn’t do it. She didn’t believe me. But I haven’t seen one around here in at least 10 years.”
    I called my brother in Cisco, 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Last time I walked across his pasture, about 12 years ago, horny toads scurried like cockroaches.
    â€œSeen any horny toads lately?” I asked.
    Dick’s a banker. I had called him at work. There was a long silence. “No,” he finally said.
    Cisco, by the way, is in Eastland County, where an embalmed horny toad in a velvet-lined casket is on display in the lobby of the courthouse. Dick said he would call me next time he saw a horny toad. I haven’t heard from him.
    And I’m not likely to, the experts tell me. The chances of a horny toad surviving in this part of Texas these days are none. “They can’t survive in parking lots,” Dr. Campbell said. “They can’t breed on concrete.” And two other enemies harry the horny toad even more implacably than the real estate developers: the South American fire ant and the North Texas lawn lover.
    â€œFire ants attack and kill animals as large as a white-tail deer fawn,” Mr. Seleske said. “A little horned lizard coming out of an egg is easy prey for them.”
    The fire ants also are wiping out the red harvester ants that are the horny toad’s food supply. And if a horny toad escapes the fire ants and starvation, he’s almost certain to be killed, along with the harvester ants and every other kind of bug life, by the folks who are out spraying poisonous chemicals on their Bermuda.
    That’s what Mr. Seleske thinks happened to the little guys who used to hang around his watermelon patch. “The people who live around me are into heavy chemical use on their lawns. The horned lizards probably got into some Amdro or something in a neighbor’s yard.”
    So the humble Texas horned lizard, the thorny little companion and plaything of my childhood, is listed by the state as a “threatened species.” I asked Andrew Price, a Texas Parks and Wildlife zoologist, what that means.
    â€œThere’s worry about the future of the species in the state,” he said. “It means it’s against the law to kill one or to capture one and take it out of the wild. It means that, in the rare event that somebody sees a horned lizard, they should leave it alone.”
    As I said, I’m not proud of the memory.
    July 1991

THE DEATH OF AUSTIN SQUATTY
    John Jenkins was a brilliant scholar of Texas history and books about Texas history. And he was an internationally known dealer in rare books of all kinds, and an author and publisher of some note. But he also was one of those outlandish characters that only Texas among the states seems capable of producing, and when I read a brief wire service account of his death, I immediately asked the Dallas Morning News state editor, Donnis Baggett, if I could go to Bastrop. Almost everything that ever had happened to John Jenkins had been extraordinary. I was sure that his death was extraordinary, too. As of this writing, in October 1992, no arrest has been