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Texas Classic: Grab a cold one and read an excerpt from 'Bonney's Place,' by Leon Hale

bonney's place leon hale
bonney's place leon hale

Honoring great Lone Star writers

About this excerpt

Leon Hale wrote what is, without question, the best novel ever written about an East Texas beer joint.

Hale was born in Stephenville in 1921 but was raised in nine different West Texas towns. His college career was interrupted by three years of service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He graduated from Texas Tech with a degree in journalism in 1946. He worked in a variety of journalism-related jobs before becoming the Houston Post's roving Texas columnist in 1956, a position he held for more than 25 years. In 1983, he became a columnist for the Houston Chronicle, and, at age 93, he continues to contribute to the paper.

In 1972, he published his first novel, Bonney's Place. Over the past four decades, the novel — about a man's quest to find his missing inheritance, a quest that leads him to a beer joint and its habitués and its proprietor, Bonney — has enjoyed a cult following. The movie rights have been bought and sold six times while four screenplays have been written, but no movie has been made; at present, the rights are owned by the estate of Last Picture Show actor Ben Johnson.

The following excerpt profiles the proprietor of Bonney’s Place in his natural element. Leon Hale won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Lon Tinkle Award in 2000.

W.K. Stratton

Six men came clodding in. Men who’d done a day’s work. Dirty men, dressed mostly in khaki pants and shirts that showed big arcs of sweat and salt below the armpits. They took their hats off and plopped down in the chairs at the long table nearest the bar and leaned back and spraddled their legs and heaved long sighs. Tired men, anywhere from 21 to 55, with snow-white, sweat-bleached foreheads and red, rusty-tan faces where their hats didn’t protect them from the sun.

Behind the bar Bonney’s hands and arms were moving in that fluid style, doing four things at once. He was pulling quarts of beer, and nobody had placed an order. Six, eight more men came in, shouting, cursing, laughing. Bonney made the rounds, bamming the quarts on the bare tables, flipping paper cups off his forearm where he carried them, balanced.

“Hey, Bonney,” a skinny fellow yelled, while five more hands from the sawmill entered, “I hear Millie’s come back. How much she chargin’ now?” And it brought an explosion of laughter.

“Haven’t seen her,” Bonney said, grinning and moving fast. “Me and Turnip been out in the barn all afternoon. We been havin’ pups again.” More laughter.

“Hey, Bonney, you don’t happen to have a beer back there been on ice, have you, and might be a little cool?”

“Hell, no. Drink it warm or go into town where it’ll cost you a nickel more. Any of you guys got any money?”

“Not a red damn cent,” said a young man standing near the door. But he dug in his pocket, fed a quarter into the jukebox, and then some cowboy was singing about going home to Montana with the volume at the top peg, and after that the place was filled with a roaring, a buzzing, a noise made only by working men temporarily energized by alcohol poured into empty stomachs.

I sat on a stool at the west end of the bar, next to the vase of flowers, and watched. Must have been 35 or 40 men in the place now and Bonney hadn’t yet taken an order. He knew what every one of them wanted. So they were all regulars. Once he glanced my way as he made the turn around the far end of the bar and next trip he set a cold can of beer in front of me, without a word, but he did it in a way that said it was on the house. It was a premium beer. Or out-of-state beer, as they call it in Texas, to distinguish it from local and cheaper brands. I supposed it was Bonney’s way of favoring a newcomer, assuming a guy wearing a business suit would drink better beer than the sawmill men. I didn’t have the chance to tell him. I don’t care for beer, local, premium, or imported. But he’d already popped the can so I found a plastic cup and nursed the beer down.

A woman in black slacks came in (I guessed her at 38) with a long-legged young girl wearing shorts. They both had sharp noses and I put them down as mother and daughter. They sat on stools at the east end of the bar. Bonney stopped in front of them, smiled at the woman and said, “Hello, Charlotte. Hear anything new at the beauty shop?”

“I haven’t been to the beauty shop,” Charlotte said.

"Well, you look like you've been to the beauty shop." That just melted Charlotte. She looked at Bonney the way a woman looks at a man when she'd like to hug his neck. I remembered the big fellow Henry's remark about Bonney patting the women. Yes, he would be good with the ladies, all right.

Not that he was Hollywood handsome. He had this narrow face that should have had delicate features, but instead his nose was a little broad and his eyes were too small and his chin too long. Yet when he grinned, a transformation took place. His face became an entirely different proposition from what it was when solemn and composed. His grin made things happen. I’ve known guys like that. Well, women too, who when they smile they seem to throw a mellow spotlight on the person they’re smiling at, and it’s impossible not to smile back, I noticed the young girl there at the bar. She watched Bonney work with a certain softness in her eyes, the same as her mother did, and she couldn’t have been past 15.

“You need a haircut, Bonney,” the young girl said. He rubbed his hand over his scalp and down the back of his neck and nodded and kept moving. The girl was right. His short brown hair was creeping down his neck and crowding his ears at the sides but I’d have bet a buck that haircuts weren’t important to him. Here he was serving his customers and he was dressed in gray jeans and tennis shoes without socks and a T-shirt that looked as if it had been worn two days.

I watched him reach up and jerk a cord hanging from a light fixture over the serving window. It was a short cord and I wouldn’t have thought he could reach it without straining. But he had these extra long arms that you didn’t notice ordinarily because they were forever moving, seldom down at his sides.

A young fellow with a blond mustache slipped onto the stool beside me. Bonney had gone to the tables and Turnip materialized from somewhere in back to wait on the bar.

“Gimme a Pearl,” the young man said.

Turnip set the bottle of beer before him but before it had time to make a ring on the bar, Bonney was back. He reached over Turnip’s shoulder, grabbed the bottle and said to the boy, “No beer for you, little buddy. Come back in a couple of years.”

“Aw, Bonney, I been buyin’ beer now for a whole year.”

“Not in here, you haven’t. Look, you see this man here?” He jerked a thumb at me. “This man’s with Liquor Control, just sittin’ here, waitin’ for me to sell beer to somebody that don’t shave yet.”

The boy looked at me. “He don’t know how old I am.”

“But I do. Now how about a red soda pop?”

The boy was embarrassed now but wouldn’t back down. “It ain’t right, Bonney. How come I can be old enough to be in the Guard, and stand a chance goin’ to Vietnam and get my gut shot, and I can’t come in and buy one lousy beer?”

Bonney faked a sigh. “Look, I’m gonna do you a favor.” He reached under the bar and came up with an old campaign poster which one Ray L. Mertz had used in a race for the State Legislature. “You see this guy? He’s your representative in Austin. Now you go home and get you a pencil and paper and sit down and write to him. Here’s his address, zip code and everything. You tell Ray Mertz, ‘Bonney don’t make the liquor laws, but you do, and I want you to pass me a bill says I can buy a beer at age nineteen.’ Now that’s the only thing you can do about it, and you might as well tell the same thing to all those other fuzzy-cheeks you’ve been runnin’ with.”

The boy said, “I can buy beer in Farley.”

“Then go to Farley.”

The boy growled, the deepest he could manage, and walked out.

“Hodamighty, Turnip,” Bonney said, “I swear I believe you’d set a beer in front of a wet baby. Now get on the stick, dammit, or I’m gonna run your tail back out yonder and put you to diggin’ postholes again.”

Turnip didn’t giggle or grin.

Bonney looked up at the clock. “Buck? Oh, Buck!”

“Ho!” came an answer from one of the tables.

“You better drag it out of here. It’s nearly six o’clock. I don’t want your old lady on my back again.”

“Right. Thanks, Bonney.” The man stood, drained a beer bottle and headed for the door.

“Hey, Buck,” called a rancher-dressed, middle-aged fellow at the pool table. “Eat you a little peanut butter and tell ’er you been to a Sunday school picnic.” There was scattered laughter.

"Look who's singin' that tune," Bonney said, razzing the cowman. "When his preacher wandered in here last week, Howard there was over by the window with a beer in his hand and tried to hide it in the hip pocket of them tight britches of his and spilled it all over the seat of his pants. I had to tell the preacher Howard's got kidney trouble and shows up with wet pants that way, all the time." The house exploded with laughter and Howard grinned and turned a little redder beneath his sun-scorched face.

When Bonney scored a simple victory like that and made the house laugh, he’d stand still a few seconds, which I’d already decided was a rare thing for him. He’d spread his feet a little and put his hands in his back pockets and stretch to his full height. I suppose he was just savoring the accomplishment, until the laughter subsided. Then he’d be off and running again. But in the few seconds he stood still, I pegged him to be six feet or better. He was generally slender and trim except for the slight stomach bulge under his T-shirt that most men develop in their middle 30s. Well, middle 30s is what I figured, although I seldom waste any time trying to guess the ages of men the way I do women. It doesn’t seem as important and isn’t near as interesting a hobby, anyway.

A yellow school bus stopped out front. It was empty except for the driver. Black lettering on its side read, FARLEY INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT. The driver came in, looking a bit out of place because he wore dark slacks and a pale blue shirt with a necktie, loose and flapping. I figured him for a young teacher, doubling as a school-bus driver. That’s not uncommon in Texas, where schoolteachers are always moonlighting.

Bonney came out from behind the bar to greet the driver. “Hey, Hank.” He looked at the bus as if he expected somebody else to get out of it.

“They’re not with me, Bonney,” the young man said. “That’s what I came in to tell you.”

“What happened?”

“They took off, about the middle of the morning. Mr. Acheson told me they went out for recess and just kept walking. I looked for them on the road, but didn’t see any sign. I talked with Edna Hamlin, she has both of ’em in her remedial reading class, and she said they just won’t respond. Said they just sit there and stare at her when she speaks to them. I don’t know, Bonney. It looks like a pretty long shot to me. They’re just Flynns, you know. We’ve never kept a Flynn in that school more than two weeks since it was built.”

“Yeah.” Bonney had the saddest expression on his face, like somebody had died.

“I suppose they’re all right. I expect you’d find them back up the creek somewhere.”

“Oh, they’re all right,” Bonney said, his face still solemn. “They’ve spent more nights off in the woods than under a roof. Listen, Hank, thanks. Thanks for stoppin’ by. I think I know about where they are. They don’t come in tomorrow, I’ll go take a look. And you might watch for ’em at the bus stop, say about Monday morning. I’ll send the little bastards again if I can catch ’em.”

Hank looked doubtful. “I don’t know, Bonney. I don’t know whether they’ll go or not.”

"They'll go. Question is will they stay. But it's worth a try."

The young man nodded and walked out. “I’ll look for them Monday.”

Bonney came back to the bar, slower than I’d seen him move all afternoon.

From Bonney's Place, by Leon Hale, published by Winedale Publishing.

About this series

Texas Classics is a summerlong series of excerpts from winners of the Lon Tinkle Award, given by the Texas Institute of Letters for a distinguished career in letters associated with Texas. The series is being edited by former TIL president W.K. "Kip" Stratton and is a joint project of The Dallas Morning News, the TIL (a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to stimulate interest in Texas letters and to recognize distinctive literary achievement) and the University of North Texas' Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

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