(This story was published Friday in "The Texas Observer")

This is the most vivid memory I have from my time in Midland. I am a teenager, my nose pressed flat to the glass to better see a display case at the Midland County Historical Museum. The case and the museum are in the county library's dark basement. Yet the object of my fascination, six plaster of Paris death masks, glow enticingly with an aura of violence and decay. Even then, as an Old West enthusiast, I know all about the desperados whose features supposedly formed the masks: Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Bill Dalton, Butch Cassidy, Clay Allison and Bob Ford "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse [James] in his grave."

Those masks have haunted my dreams since the mid-60s, so much so that I recently returned to stare at them again. The masks, I discovered, are exactly the same, and yet everything is different.