In Texas: Easygoing on the Border

By John Borrell

The dusty, unpaved road outside the Lajitas Trading Post is not exactly the best surface for shuffling through a slow waltz or high-stepping to the beat of La Bamba. But when the crush of couples on the polished concrete floor of the store's veranda became too great on a recent Friday night, a score or more of folks took to dancing in the street anyway. Scuffed cowboy boots and battered sneakers kicked up dust and occasionally sent crushed aluminum beer / cans skittering across the gravel surface. The excited yelps of dancers wafted off into the desert toward arid mountain ranges swathed in the pale light of a distant moon, keeping silent watch over the U.S.-Mexican border.

"There is always a good crowd here, and they are fun to play for," says Tommy Hancock, whose Supernatural Family Band, a group composed of himself, his wife, two daughters and son, kept everyone, indoors and out, light on their feet. It was a good crowd of about 100 people, and also a very mixed one. Ranch hands wearing jeans and checked shirts kicked up their heels with schoolteachers dressed in white blouses. A few middle-class retiree couples from Wisconsin and Iowa staying at a nearby recreational-vehicle park danced cheek to cheek when there was a slow number. Then there were Mexicans in wide- brim hats and shy girls with dark eyes and red lipstick. John Klingemann, the Brewster County deputy sheriff, leaned quietly, arms folded, against a parked pickup truck in the street near the frolicking dancers. "Reckon a third of the folks here are from across the river," he offered. "They'll all go home again afterwards."

Home is Mexico, the reason why the single-story trading post was built here, on high ground a respectful 200 yards from the Rio Grande in the Big Bend National Park area of Texas, sometime around the turn of the century. The border is still the major reason for the trading post's existence. There are no U.S. or Mexican customs and immigration stations within 50 miles, and tradition has allowed for free movement across the border. "Occasionally the border patrol will cruise by," remarks Christine Gutierrez, who works at the trading post but lives across the river. "They seldom bother anyone."

The Lajitas Trading Post is the best-stocked store for miles around, and also a kind of social peg tethering the two sides of the frontier. Evening soirees are held three or four times a year. "People on the other side come from 25 miles away over a rough road to a dance like this," says Bill Ivey, 32, who runs the store. Ivey grew up behind the trading post, where his father was the storekeeper. At the time, he recalls, Lajitas had an official population of just seven, four of whom were Iveys. Now a Houston company has developed a clapboard tourist town around an old cavalry post nearby, and the population of Lajitas is about 100. "Back then, all my friends lived across the river," says Ivey, a bachelor, who lives behind the shop. "Now I've got ^ a few over here as well." He has turned his kitchen into an office because, as he puts it, "I don't get to eat here real often."

Ivey's Mexican customers cross over to the U.S. in a battered aluminum rowboat that plies the 60-ft.-wide river about half a mile upstream from the store. Usually they have more serious business in mind than dancing and drinking. Inside the frontier store's 2-ft.-thick adobe walls is an eclectic array of goods. There are Mexican angarillas (packsaddle baskets) hanging from the ceiling, along with kerosene lamps, ropes, horse tack and garden tools. In old-fashioned glass display cases there is everything from catfish bait to needles, thread and several kinds of spurs. On tall shelves behind the sales counter there are nuts and bolts and most of the tools you'd need to repair a car or build a house. "There is a lot to choose from here, and the prices are good," says Arturo Rivas Rodriquez, who has driven some 25 miles from the Mexican town of San Carlos to buy bait and go fishing for catfish in the Rio Grande. "We can't get a lot of these things."

The growing number of U.S. tourists in the border area has boosted Ivey's business, forcing him to stock items like cat litter and disposable diapers. But the store owner reckons that more than 50% of his trade still comes from across the Rio Grande. Ivey offers lines of credit to many of his Mexican customers and finds that they are pretty good at squaring up at month's end. "As good as Americans anyway," he observes. "The bad debts are fairly evenly spread on both sides of the river."

Ivey can no longer buy beaver and other animal pelts from Mexico (across- the-border trading in such furs is banned), but trade moves both ways at Lajitas. Each year the storekeeper buys about 50 tons of candelilla, a wax derived from the candelilla plant, a spindly desert plant, and used in the manufacture of cosmetics. The honey-colored substance is gathered by small- scale Mexican harvesters who make a precarious living from the harsh Chihuahuan desert. By Mexican law, the candelilla harvesters are supposed to sell all of their wax to a government agency, but prices are higher and payments are quicker at Lajitas, prompting many to cross the river and get rid of their crop sub rosa. Ivey carefully checks each bag of the stuff as it is offered for sale behind the store. "Sometimes they mix in water-absorbing ash to increase the weight," he explains as he rejects one of a dozen sacks in a recent consignment.

The candelilla trade is declining, and if it fades away entirely, some of the legitimacy of the trading-post appellation will disappear too. If there is no two-way trade across the border -- candelilla in one direction, groceries in the other -- Lajitas will no longer be a trading post. It will just be a store. Ivey has no control over that, but he is striving to maintain as much of the frontier atmosphere as he can. Strings of chili peppers hang by the post's front door, along with an aging advertisement for horse liniment that promises, "Also good for jackasses and mules." Inside, a wood-burning stove occupies a corner next to a table and three rickety chairs, where customers often drink beer or play dominoes. There is a pool table on the veranda where locals test their skills; on an old wooden bench against the wall is a fading admonition in Spanish: FAVOR, DE NO ESCUPIR EN EL PISO (Please, no spitting on the floor).

Outside is one of the post's main tourist attractions: Clay Henry, a beer- drinking goat whose pen abuts the shaded porch. A boozer of 14 years' standing, Clay Henry picks up an opened can or bottle in his mouth and downs the contents in seconds. "He has drunk as much as 24 cans in a single day," says Linda Garcia, a clerk at the post. CLAY HENRY FOR MAYOR, reads a sign on the fridge that holds the beer.

Bullet holes pockmark the inside and outside walls of the post and liberally ventilate the veranda's tin roof. Some local folks insist that much of the damage was caused around 1916, when Pancho Villa's men rode in for supplies during the Mexican Revolution, though there is in fact no proof that Villa or any of his men actually visited the store. Ivey is amused by the idea. "I don't know about all the bullet holes," he says, "but I do know that the roof was ventilated a few years ago at a dance. A feller felt so happy and contented about the way things were going that he pulled out a pistol and fired off a few rounds."

There was no shooting this night. The dance ended promptly at midnight. The crowd, inspired by Deputy Sheriff Klingemann's quiet presence, downed the last of some 700 cans of beer sold during the evening and melted away peaceably. Shouting erupted upstream when the returning Mexicans found that their boatman had tied up the rowboat on the far side of the river and gone to bed. The problem was resolved when a young man rolled up his trousers and waded across to bring the boat back to the U.S. side. By 1:30 a.m. there were no human sounds at Lajitas, only the quiet gurgle of the Rio Grande under the moonlight, dividing two nations, undisturbed.