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the boom was on and then get as far away from as
possible with the inevitable setting in of the bust. If a man or
woman wasn't making money, there wasn't much reason to stay.
    Hub Heap, who came out here in 1939 and later started a
successful oil field supply company, remembered well the single
event that embodied his early days in Odessa. It was a torrent
of sand, looking like a rain cloud, that came in from the northwest and turned the place so dark in the afternoon light that
the street lamps suddenly started glowing. Nothing escaped the
hideousness of that sand. It crept in everywhere, underneath
the rafters, inside the walls, like an endless army of tiny ants,
covering him, suffocating him, pushing down into his lungs,
blinding his eyes, and that night he had no choice but to sleep
with a wet towel over his face just so he could breathe.
    Odessa also became tough and quick-fisted, filled with men who hardly needed a high school diploma, much less a college
one, to become roughnecks and tool pushers on an oil rig. They
spent a lot of time in trucks traveling to remote corners of the
earth to put in a string of drill pipe, and when they went home
to Odessa to unwind they did not believe in leisurely drinking
or witty repartee. More often than not, they did not believe
in conversation, their dispositions reflecting the rough, atonal
quality of the land, which after the droughts consisted mostly
of the gnarled limbs of low-lying mesquite bushes. Outside of
the oil business, the weather (which almost never changed), and
high school football, there wasn't a hell of 'a lot to talk about.

    J. D. Cone, when he came here from Oklahoma in 1948 to
become a family practitioner, went on house calls with a thirtyeight pistol stuck into his belt after the sheriff told him it was
always a good idea to he armed in case someone got a little
ornery or disagreed with the diagnosis. Right after he arrived,
he went with a friend to the notorious Ace of Clubs. Everything
was fine until mid-evening, Cone remembers, when it was time
for the nightly revue and beer bottles started flying through the
air. No one except Cone thought much about it. It did reinforce for him his initial impression of Odessa, when all he could
see as he drove into town the first time was the red cast of the
clouds from a winter storm. At night there was the equally eerie
sight of the gas flares, huge fissures of fire corning from the oil
rigs where natural gas, an unwanted burden back then, was
being burned off.
    "This must not be planet earth," Cone told his partner. "This
must be hell."
    But it wasn't. It was just Odessa.
    During the next boom period in the seventies and eighties,
Odessa made a telltale leap into the twentieth century. A
branch of the University of Texas was built and a new suburban-style mall opened, but the hearty, hair-trigger temperament of the place still remained intact. Differences of opinion
were still sometimes settled by vengeful retribution, resulting in the kinds of brutal, visceral crimes that were supposed to
take place in cities of several million, not in one of barely over
a hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, most of these grisly killings occurred during the height of the boom, when money and
madness overran much of the town.

    In 1982, the thirty-seven murders that took place inside
Ector County gave Odessa the distinction of having the highest
murder rate in the country. Most agreed that was a pretty high
number, but mention of gun control was as popular as a suggestion to change the Ten Commandments.
    A year later, Odessa made national news again when someone
made the fateful mistake of accusing an escaped convict from
Alabama named Leamon Ray Price of cheating in a high-stakes
poker game. Price, apparently insulted by such a charge, went
to the bathroom and then came out shooting with his thirtyeight. He barricaded himself behind a bookcase while the players he was trying to kill hid