Camp Ezell was a local boy who had gone off to see the world. If Melville made his Harvard from a ship, Camp made his with a linotype machine. When he finished as much schoolwork (eight grades) as the town provided in 1910, he went to work for George H. Atkins at the Bee-Picayune as a printer’s devil. Having mastered the linotype, he sailed away, off to Brownsville, then Memphis, then Philadelphia, patiently working his way toward cities with better symphony orchestras, patiently learning how to write news stories. He was working for the San Francisco Examiner when Mr. Atkins tracked him down in 1944 and offered him the editor’s job. The publisher celebrated his return with a big headline: Camp Ezell Comes Home.
Camp was forty-nine and Vail forty-two when they both began their new jobs in January of 1945. Six months later, Camp covered the shootout at the Rodriguez ranch, and after that Vail’s murder trial in Victoria, and after that, the drawn-out legal maneuverings involved in the ouster suit. Then the bitter election of 1946. And now the shootout at Pettus.
The contrast between the two men was too great to qualify. The sheriff was the most violent man in the county. The editor was soft-spoken, so benign that folks in Bee County might have thought him a Buddhist if they had known what that meant. Vail was a man’s man, a hunter. Camp was a lover of classical music and opera. Vail was all action, speeding in a metallic green blur from one end of the county to the other. Camp was reflection. In fact, during his first five years back in Beeville, Camp didn’t own a car. He made the same walk (an even mile) he had made when he was sixteen, from the old Ezell home to the newspaper office. Coming home from San Francisco, it had to be like walking around an old movie set, familiar from dozens of movies he’d had seen before, a redefinition of the precincts of his imagination.
The original town of Beeville had been laid out in 1859 on the curve of the Poesta Creek. Block number one, the Evergreen Cemetery, was situated on a hill on the town’s northeastern corner. The original town site covered roughly a square mile—the same as the original site of Houston. In fact, if you hold the plat of old Houston in one hand and that of old Beeville in another and slap them together, they are very nearly duplicates: fifty-six odd blocks next to bending streams of water. The Buffalo Bayou, bounding Houston to the north, flowed past the city’s western shoulder and meandered toward the northeast. The Poesta Creek formed the western and southern boundaries of Beeville, winding toward the southeast. Old Beeville had six streets running west to east, twelve south to north. Old Houston had seven streets south–north, twelve west–east. Houston had no streets named for a U.S. president (not even Jackson), but Beeville had ten (Monroe, Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Buchanan, Adams, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore), all but one of the north–south streets. Houston honored the Texas heroes Smith, Travis, Austin, and Lamar. Beeville took Crockett and Bowie. Only Ben Milam had a street in both towns. Camp could remember when Beeville was called the “city of homes” because almost all its houses were situated on large and spacious lots with well-tended orange, lemon, date palm, rose palmetto, cape jasmine, and clematis that made its residential section beautiful to see, “with fences well repaired and hedges carefully trimmed, the whole is a constant delight to the eye.” At the turn of the century, the town was famed as “the city of windmills,” a lovely thing to be. Like others born here before 1900, Camp Ezell had the sense of having created the place, piece by piece. He treasured it. He had seen the urban world. It held no more secrets for him. But he did miss the San Francisco Symphony.
Camp had decided that all necessary geography was here, that this was his garden. Evidently, Vail Ennis felt the same, which is one possible basis for the implausible bond that formed between two men who shared not a single personality trait. The other thing they had in common was their work. Each had attained his dream job. Vail had wanted to be sheriff of Bee County since his brawling days of the early 1930s, when he had run up against Alfred Allee. Camp had dreamed of being editor of this newspaper since he was a boy.
While the sheriff was the most visible presence in the county, Camp stayed in the background, seen only in the small photograph that ran with his column, “Glancing Around.” In this small universe, each had a role. It seemed that Vail’s job was to lead the parade. Camp’s job was to watch it go by. And write about it. The sheriff was always good for a news item.
“Vail was always a big shot,” recalled Elias Chapa. “But after the article in Time, he went around with a kind of aura, like a movie star. People would follow him to listen to his stories.”
The sheriff’s favorite stage was the sidewalk in front of the American Café, on Main Street. There he would hold court for groups of men coming in and out of their coffee breaks, talking rapidly, gesturing, reenacting the violent events. At any place, at any time, Vail was the dominant presence. Recalling the scene in front of the American Café, men would comment on the sheriff’s posture, one of readiness, menace. Krueger, later the resident Texas Ranger, saw the sheriff’s arms as being almost apelike, giving an impression of physical strength that made him seem much bigger than he was. Whether he was born with them or acquired them building oil rigs, Vail had unusually broad shoulders and huge hands. All of him—the hawklike nose, the pale eyes, the set mouth that smiled only in friendly company—seemed part of the posture. The Time photograph captured it: Vail in full-length pose, leaning slightly to his left, his gun hand loose on his right hip; the sheriff wore black boots, black pants, and a crisp white shirt with a dark tie, a white Stetson. I am your guardian—or your fate.
He was as pale as a normal white man could be. He was taut and wiry, like spring steel. With boots, he might have been six feet tall. He weighed around 170, not nearly as much as his younger brother, Darwin, who had come with him to the oil fields those many years before.
“Vail told the story about the Pettus gunfight a hunnerd times,” said L. D. Hunter, the sheriff’s hunting partner. “He liked to tell about that big fella, the station attendant. He weighed about three hunnerd pounds and he tried to crawl under the desk when the shootin started. The man said, ‘Vail, I’m shot . . . shot pretty bad.’ ‘Where are you shot?’ ‘In the butt.’ Well, that just tickled old Vail—he told that story all the time. ‘Get your ass in the Green Hornet.’ He wadnt even just barely scratched. I bet he told that story many a time. Ooo did he ever.”
The Pettus event magnified the sheriff’s image, not just his toughness but his many skills. People marveled at them. Vail taught himself photography. He made his own bullets. He was an expert dog trainer. He could hold a stack of silver dollars in one hand and interchange the coins: top to bottom, bottom to top. He was, no doubt, the most skilled driver the county had ever seen. Everyone identified him with the green metallic Hudson Hornet he was known to drive at 120 miles an hour. The car was one of the most important things in his life. The Hornet had an L-head Super Six engine with a 262-cubic-inch displacement and 124 horsepower, the most powerful car on the market. The step-down model had a unibody construction with floorboards below the frame. It hugged the ground, bullet-like, on the highway.
The single,