As far as Beeville was concerned, Vail had come full-grown to the sheriff’s office. So large did he fill the role of sheriff that it seemed that people had always known him. They felt they knew what kind of man he was. Look him in the eye. Shake his hand.
Allee had come to Beeville to serve as deputy under Sheriff J. B. Arnold. He was the sheriff’s enforcer in those years when the Depression and the oil boom ran side by side. Roughnecks and rig builders hit the Beeville bars on Saturday night, looking to see who and what they could break. Allee didn’t deal gently with brawlers, the worst of whom were the Ennis brothers, Darwin and Vail.
Where did they come from originally?
L. D. Hunter knew:
East Texas. I believe it was Nacogdoches. You know they brought in that oil field out in Dinero. They went to work out there. That’s what brought em down here. Oil field. Vail was a rig builder. His brother was a rig builder. And both of em as rough as two bastards could get. They had a fight up on a drilling rig. One of em was workin up on a derrick and the other one was down on the floor. They got in an argument. Ol Vail told Darwin I’m gonna come up there and whip your ass. And Darbo said no I’m gonna come down and whip your ass. They met halfway and they just fought till they give out. Hung on and fought.
Rig builders were the paratroopers among oil field workers. During the week Vail and Darbo fought with the McCumber boys out on the rigs; on the weekends they came into Beeville looking for whatever trouble was available. Allee said he was the one who told Vail Ennis he should go into law enforcement. Allee told the story often that week at the American Café, and men laughed.
“I told him, ‘You know more about hell-raisers than anybody. You might as well be on the side of the law.’”
Vail’s reputation as a tough hombre was well established by 1944, when first he ran for sheriff. Tales of the incredible fistfights had been told and retold. During that first election, some people were already concerned that his temperament was too violent for the job, making the vote count close. Vail didn’t know he’d won until the last box, no. 20, reported at 2:30 a.m. He won by eighty-one votes.
The scene at the American Café was a Celtic wake with stories of hunting and cars. But the conversations couldn’t shy away from the issue that loomed over the sheriff and the town. No Bee County sheriff before Vail Ennis had killed anybody. Vail had now killed seven men. He was still a deputy when he shot the first one, a mean drunk who knocked him down outside a beer joint. There was no question it was self-defense. The second was a big sailor, a black man, who jumped him at the jail. Then there were the Rodriguez brothers.
The talk always came back to the Rodriguez killings. Two years before, in a shootout west of town, Vail had shot down the three Rodriguez brothers—Felix, Domingo, and Antonio, all highly respected farmers. Some people said it was a shooting, not a shootout. They said the Rodriguez boys hadn’t fired a gun.
But even before Vail Ennis went on trial for the murder of Felix Rodriguez, he’d been controversial. Two years earlier, leading citizens had done everything in their power to get rid of the sheriff, including twenty-one who signed a petition to oust Vail Ennis from his office.
The men who fired on the sheriff at Pettus were not respected farmers. Pat Hines and William Raymond Pittman, both thirty-four, had spent much of their adult lives behind bars. Hines, the big fellow with the .38, had served a term in the Oklahoma State Reformatory as a juvenile and later did ten years in prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, for armed robbery. Pittman had been arrested twenty-three times, had spent three years in a New Mexico prison, three more in Huntsville.
Even as the sheriff lay on what might be his deathbed, the First Baptist Church of Beeville prepared to give William Pittman a proper funeral. Six men from the congregation volunteered as pallbearers. Pitt-man was the smaller man who had been sitting by th e window of the Mercury station wagon, the first one out of the car, the one with the tattoo of Laraine and the severed heart on his arm. Pittman’s father, son, and two sisters came to Beeville for the funeral. They came from far away: Odessa. Fort Worth. Pampa. Oak Creek, Colorado. Laraine didn’t come. Hines’s body was shipped by train to Oklahoma to be claimed by his mother.
The deathwatch ended at three thirty Thursday afternoon, when the Beeville Bee-Picayune was delivered to Turner’s newsstand and people read the banner headline.
Sheriff Ennis Narrowly Escapes Death in Gun Battle Monday
The newspaper article gave details of the shooting at Pettus and identified the two dead men as Pittman and Hines, both thirty-four years old, both criminals who had spent their adult lives in and out of prison.
It confirmed that Hines’s gun was a .38.
It confirmed that a worker at the station had driven the sheriff from Pettus to the Beeville hospital.
It confirmed that Houston Pruett, the station manager, had sustained a flesh wound in the back and had been in the car coming back to Beeville. It quoted Pruett: “Seventeen shots . . . as fast as I could count em . . .”
A few days later, Time magazine published the article. It covered an entire page under the heading:
Texas
I am hellbent to keep Beeville cleaned up so a lady can go up the street day or night. I never take but one shot.
Both statements have lisped from the pale, thin lips of Bee County’s Sheriff Robert Vail Ennis. And both statements have been roughly true. Day or night a lady could sashay unmenaced up Beeville’s streets, past the cream stuccoed Kohler Hotel, the Bluebonnet Café, and the two-story buff brick jail where Sheriff Ennis lives with his wife and daughter and keeps evildoers under lock & key.The roughness in the second statement has been more apparent. In the past four years in Beeville (pop. 7,000), a South Texas oil and cattle town, Sheriff Ennis has killed seven people with his .44 Colt revolver and his .45 sub-machine gun—not all, however, with one shot.
. . .
Deliberate Reloading. Last week he almost met his equal—but not quite. He went to the town of Pettus on a tip that two bum-check suspects might be going that way. They were. Vail got them in front of Houston Prewet’s filling station, handcuffed them and pushed them into the station office while he made a phone call. One of them whipped a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster and put four slugs in Vail. That was his mistake. Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from its hip holster; he pumped six shots at the manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead . . .
Turner’s newsstand sold its usual hundred-copy shipment in two hours. Another 150 went fast. George Turner ordered 128 more.
2
Johnny Barnhart bought his copy of Time at the University of Texas Co-op. He took it with him around the campus, showing it to everyone he knew, students and professors. Then he took it to the Kappa Alpha house and read it aloud to his fraternity brothers. Johnny had been listening to jokes about his hometown (“Is it between A-ville and C-ville?”) since his freshman year in Austin. Now Time magazine had answered any remaining questions about Beeville’s centrality to the universe. Pleased to have the attention of the house, he told stories of his personal relationship with the now-famous lawman: “I used to sit with him in his living room. There were picture frames all over the walls, but no pictures. They were all marksmanship awards. He won every pistol-shooting competition in Texas.”
Johnny had been performing for audiences since he won a junior declamation competition when he was eleven years old. Recently, he had been the head cheerleader for the Texas Longhorns. It pleased him to have become the Kappa Alpha’s resident authority on the Old West. The truth was that he had been in that living room because he had taken Vail Ennis’s niece, Carvis Uzzell,