He’s seventy-six. The math does not work. I have stopped asking.
He’s a Texas handyman. He has alibis for assassinations he was never suspected of. He has opinions on the back roads Bonnie Parker took out of Pilot Point.
He claims to have personally cleaned a piece of grit out of Orville Wright’s pocket watch on a beach in 1903. He claims to have sat across a steakhouse from Babe Ruth in 1932. He claims to have taught Muhammad Ali a thing about leverage in Kinshasa. He claims he was nowhere near Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 — he was quail hunting.
He has a giant dog named Mac who eats three McDonald’s Double Cheeseburgers a day. He drinks Coca‑Cola from glass bottles. He goes on a Princess cruise twice a year. He cusses, vehemently and creatively, at telemarketers.
The math does not work. The geography does not work. None of it, on close inspection, holds up.
I do not care.
Quail is seventy-six years old. This is a verifiable fact. I have seen his driver’s license. I have seen the photograph on his driver’s license, in which he appears mildly annoyed, as if the DMV camera had also been a spam call.
And yet.
Over the years that I have known Quail, he has, with a straight face and a glass-bottle Coca-Cola in his hand, claimed personal involvement in events ranging from the founding of the Republic of Texas to the calling of Babe Ruth’s shot in 1932 to the moon landing — which he watched on TV, but only because he had “already seen the rehearsal.” He has alibis for assassinations he was never suspected of. He has opinions on the back roads Bonnie Parker took out of Pilot Point.
I have stopped arguing.
On the morning of November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three, according to Quail, he had a five-minute conversation with a Secret Service agent in a parking garage in downtown Dallas. The agent was concerned about the limousine. Quail looked at the limousine. Quail told the agent the limousine was fine.
Quail was not, by his own account, anywhere near Dealey Plaza when the rest of the day happened. He was, by his own account, quail hunting. He has, he will tell you, an alibi.
He will also tell you he has thought about that five-minute conversation every day for sixty-three years.
The rest of Chapter One — and the eighteen chapters that follow — is in the book.
Buy on Amazon“I told ’em the limo was fine. I told ’em twice. They was gonna believe a Texas handyman or they wasn’t, and that day they was.”
Quail was nowhere near Dealey Plaza when it happened. He was quail hunting. He has an alibi.
“I looked at that boat and I said no sir. They told me she was unsinkable. That is exactly when I knew.”
Quail had a ticket on the Titanic. He didn’t board. He says he had a feeling.
“He was pointin’ at me. Or at the woman next to me. I have been arguin’ with myself about which one for ninety-three years.”
Babe Ruth’s Called Shot has never been satisfactorily explained. Quail says it was him. Or Dorothy.
“Cold as a witch’s mailbox. Wilbur was about ready to throw the whole goddamn thing in the ocean. Orville was the funny one.”
According to Quail, the Wright Brothers’ first flight was almost called off because of a bicycle chain.
“I tried to sell him Cornbread. He passed. He bought Traveller. Cornbread broke a leg in a gopher hole three days later. Lee made the right call.”
In the summer of 1863, Quail attempted to sell General Robert E. Lee a horse. Lee declined.
“I did not teach Ali the rope-a-dope. What I done was set on a stool in his corner and tell him a thing about leverage I had learned from a fella in Lubbock.”
Quail never told a soul about the Kinshasa conversation for fifty years.
“I have cried four times as a grown man. One of ’em was hearin’ Tight Fittin’ Jeans on the radio for the first time. I do not know why.”
Quail handed Conway Twitty a piece of notebook paper with a title on it. Conway took it from there.
“I did not win the Battle of San Jacinto. Sam Houston won the Battle of San Jacinto. I just told him a thing about the wind.”
Eighteen minutes. According to Quail, the eighteen minutes were the result of a five-minute conversation.
“The boy could tell a lie. I have proof. I was the one with the hatchet.”
According to Quail, young George Washington took the fall for him.
“One bull don’t make a herd. I told Jerry that. He nodded. With Jerry it is hard to tell who he’s nodding at.”
The Herschel Walker trade. According to Quail, Jerry mostly took notes.
“I did not write tear down this wall. Peggy Noonan wrote tear down this wall. What I done was tell Reagan a man saying somethin’ big has got to mean it in his chest, not just his mouth.”
According to Quail, the line was Peggy Noonan’s. The delivery was his.
“Coach Brooks did not need my advice. He had it covered. What he needed, that mornin’, was a fella to tell him you got it covered.”
The Miracle on Ice. According to Quail, his only contribution was telling Coach Brooks he had it covered.
“I did not tell Dr. King about no dream. Dr. King had the dream his whole life. What I done was eat his pie and listen.”
The night before the March on Washington. According to Quail, he barely said a word.
“I asked the boy what if you spun. He laughed. He said all right, mister, I will think about the spin. The boy was the boy.”
A twelve-year-old Tony Hawk in the keyhole pool at Del Mar. Quail was there to fix the lights.
“She said mister, you are cute. Then she drove off. About eleven minutes later I heard the gunshots.”
Bonnie Parker, lost outside a Pilot Point bank. Quail told her which back road did not have a sheriff on it.
“The water heater don’t care who owns it. The job is the same. The fella is incidental. I have got cards in wallets all over this state.”
Nolan Ryan called Quail at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Quail drove forty minutes with Mac in the passenger seat.
“A quiet kind of friend is the best kind. He don’t fill the silence. He sits in it with you.”
Some chapters in this book are loud. This is not one of them.
“He said I am called Duke. I said yes sir. He said I been Duke for seventy-one years. Don’t anybody call me Marion. I said I would not call you Marion. He said I know you would not.”
Four months before he died, John Wayne sat at a bar in El Paso. Quail had just fixed the walk-in cooler.
“The exaggeration is the love letter. The truth is that Quail walks into my gym every morning, walks for fifteen minutes, talks to me for forty-five minutes, and walks out.”
The last chapter. The truth about how Boyd knows Quail.
Mac is a real dog. The cheeseburgers are real cheeseburgers. The wrappers stay on the counter until the next day so Quail remembers what Mac ate.
The rest, as the author has tried to explain, is complicated.
“He comes into my gym twice a day. He walks for fifteen minutes. He talks for forty-five.”
Boyd Myers lives in a small town in North Texas. He is an Air Force veteran, an Ironman triathlete, and a regional manager for a chain of gyms — which is how he came to know Quail.
He has been listening to him, and writing some of it down, for longer than is strictly reasonable. All Hail Quail is his first book.
The Mostly True Adventures of an Honest Texas Handyman. Nineteen chapters. By Boyd Myers.
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