You can ask Willie anything, good or bad, and he'll respond with that sagebrush laugh and a flash of those muddy-river eyes. The night in 1970 when he dashed into the flaming eaves of a burning house to rescue a pile of pot? ''A guitar and the pot,'' he gently corrects me. The night when he walked out of a Nashville bar and stretched his bones in the middle of a busy road? ''I was pretty drunk, but I do remember it,'' he says. ''It was one of those Russian roulette things, you know? You really didn't give a damn, and yet you did. Just before the truck woulda hit me, I'd have said, 'Why did I do that?'''
I ask whether it's true that the first of Willie's four wives tied him up and beat him purple as punishment for a drunken binge. Willie not only verifies the story, he muses over the method of bondage. ''I think there were sheets stitched together, and then jump ropes to secure them,'' he says. ''Then she packed all of my clothes and left. So when I finally got out of the sheet, all my clothes were gone.''
The father of seven (and grandfather of seven more) waves toward a beautiful woman sitting toward the back of the bus. ''This is Lana, my daughter,'' he says. ''Her mother was the one in that story you asked about.''
''I might've been 4 or 5,'' says Lana, now 44. ''She left us in the car waiting while she hit him with the broom. And she came runnin' out and threw the broom on the porch and jumped in the car.''
And...how did you feel?
''Well, I hated to see Daddy get beat up with a broom!'' she laughs whimsically. ''But if my husband came home drunk, I might do the same thing.'' ''And,'' Pop chimes in, ''if he'd done it on more than one occasion.''
Willie gave up booze years ago — ''To me, alcohol is not positive,'' he says — but he's been smoking weed since 1953, when a fiddle player in Fort Worth first passed him a joint. ''It wasn't a big deal back in the early days in Fort Worth,'' Willie insists. ''Most of the law enforcement agents were smokin' pot. They'd bust other people, get the pot, and we'd sit around and smoke it. They realized it was a bad law, but they were makin' the best of it.''
Texas troopers may be a bit more zealous these days, but whenever there's a head-on collision between Willie and various statutes and ordinances, it seems like Willie's the one who comes out unscathed. Four years ago he was arrested when police found him and a joint cuddling in the backseat of a Mercedes; pretty soon the charges were dropped. ''There was no cause to give me any problems there that night, because I wasn't botherin' nobody,'' Willie explains. ''When it's foggy and you're tired, you pull over and go to sleep. You shouldn't be harassed by the police department.'' Eight years ago the IRS saddled him with a massive burden of back taxes — $32 million — but Willie struck a deal with the feds to whittle down the debt, paid off the rest, and moved on.
It's been that way since Abbott, the lean Texas town where he baled hay and picked cotton as a kid. ''We had no law in Abbott. There was nothing illegal,'' he recalls as the Honeysuckle Rose II rolls through the strip malls and cheeseburger troughs of the New West. ''I've kind of brought Abbott with me.''
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