The Phone Call

Between the phone calls and the lies, we learned Candy Barr wasn’t just Dallas legend—she was ours.

Next week, Taylor Swift will drop her twelfth studio album, Life of a Showgirl. This week, I'd like to share a brief excerpt from Psalm of Lies, my novel-in-progress. What follows is a novel stitched from scraps of memory, rumor, and lies handed down like family heirlooms.

I was only four when Bubba got the call that rocked his world. It would take years to fit the truth together like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle poured on shag carpet.

The story, as far as all us kids can figure, goes like this:

We were in the backyard for Bubba’s twelfth birthday when the black phone with the long cord started ringing on the kitchen wall. The wooden screen door slapped as Mama ran to pick up.

Doodlebug remembers that Mama’s voice got tense, and everyone, even Daddy, who was usually oblivious to Mama’s conversations, leaned in to listen.

Then this happened:

“Bubba, the call’s for you,” Mama yelled through the door. “It’s your real mother.”

Everyone went still. Daddy stopped flipping burgers, panic rising in his face.

Bubba listened, not understanding a word. The woman told him she visited him as a baby at Grandma’s, that trouble was brewing back then, that she’d danced with him in her belly, that she wanted to know if he was all right. He hung up in silence, tears sliding down. That call splintered everything he knew about himself. Mama had always been his, right?

No.

Nor had Daddy always been Charlie and Annie’s.

It was years before the truth trickled out, and even now it’s murky. Our parents were skilled liars. They kept what they knew about Bubba, Charlie, and Annie the way you press a letter into a Bible and close the cover. Even their own families didn’t know. Mama took it to the grave. Daddy got old and forgot he was protecting it.

And beneath all that silence, another story kept half-whispering. A love triangle between Mama, Daddy, and one of the most infamous showgirls in Texas, Candy Barr.

I’m not sure who met whom first. I do know it all happened sometime between 1952 and 1956.

Daddy came back from Korea in ‘51 harder and stronger than ever. Whatever he’d seen there, he took it out on some chump at night during Golden Gloves matches at the Sportatorium on Industrial Boulevard. That’s where Dallas Teamsters boss James Holdman—and others—first laid eyes on him. In his later years, Daddy said he could feel them watching.

Holdman, long and lean, ever a cigarette dangling from his lip, approached. “How you fixed for money?”

Daddy raised his eyes, meeting Holdman’s stare. He knew the face.

He had seen him around. Dallas felt small after dark. Men spilled out of the Theater Lounge on Main and the Colony Club on Commerce, some drifting over from Jack Ruby’s Vegas Club—the Carousel wouldn’t open until 1960—and they walked the few blocks toward the Sportatorium, past diners with greasy windows and beer joints clinging to South Industrial. Neon hummed. Gravel popped under shoes. The air tasted like smoke and spilled malt liquor.

“Why don’t you come on down to the club, and we’ll talk?”

That night marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Daddy and Holdman. It was also the first night Daddy laid eyes on Candy—the original Texas showgirl archetype. Her pull wasn’t just the shimmy of her dances but the whole western shtick: platinum hair under a cowgirl hat, boots stomping time, toy pistols flashing as if playthings could kill.

She was more than a burlesque dancer; she was the ‘it girl’, the headliner of downtown Dallas nightlife. Her draw was a combination of youth and beauty. The stag film Smart Alec, filmed when she was barely sixteen, gave her the kind of notoriety celebrities now pay paparazzi to fake.

Her life wasn’t easy. She came from poverty, ran off as a young teenager; her pretty face and stacked body were her only currency. Like many runaway girls at the time, she was drawn to what the city offered—fast money, the kind that slid across a table in cash and didn’t ask questions. She was looking, too, for men who could shield her from the ones who hadn’t.

Enter Daddy, with hard eyes and an easy smile. Once the Teamsters claimed him, he was the man who made problems forget your name. Daddy always said the union kept a table at the Vegas Club, and Candy had a permanent seat.

My uncle, who had been a Dallas County Sheriff’s deputy in the fifties and sixties, told stories about how no one messed with Daddy. Not even the cops. He ran in the toughest circles, was known for keeping his mouth shut, and could handle situations that arose quietly and efficiently with his fists. Dallas had its share of organized crime headlines back then, and Daddy walked the edge of every one.

In fact, Daddy was so trusted that Holdman handpicked him to chauffeur a Dallas billionaire. Years later, Daddy still shook his head at the memory—the richest man in the world climbing into his limo with a lunch kit just like his.

Like Candy, Mama was a runaway. She dropped out of school before her eighth-grade year, had been in and out of orphanages, and was, for a time, put in juvie for getting pregnant at age fifteen. She married three men, but divorced only once. No one knows what happened to the first husband, the man who gave Annie and Charlie their first last name.

One thing I know: she loved Daddy.

They met through one of my uncles when she was still a young teen. I’ve held the letters and snapshots he mailed from Korea. He was barely fifteen when Grandma shaved some years off the tail end of his birthdate in the family Bible so the Navy would take him.

But love didn’t keep the lines straight. The lines crossed in the dark—Mama, Daddy, and Candy. After that, no one could untangle who belonged to whom.

We will never know the bargain struck on that line–what deal with the devil Mama made.

It all started with a phone call.

Mama claimed the hospital called her, saying a newborn baby boy had been abandoned with nothing but a note bearing Daddy’s name and number.

It wasn’t true.

As best family lore can tell, a baby boy was left, somewhere, with Daddy’s name and number pinned to his blanket. That detail surfaced after Mama died, when Daddy, in his old age, started remembering the past like he’d never tried to hide it.

My aunt remembered Candy visiting Bubba as a baby at Grandma’s house. She said she liked to bake for them in the kitchen. And she could sing and liven up a room. She told funny stories about what happened at the clubs where she danced. She talked about Jack Ruby, because they all knew him personally; his antics amused them. She said there were photos of the three of them–Candy, Daddy, and Bubba–but they were long gone or tucked in someone’s attic by now.

My aunt believed Bubba was Candy’s baby, but thought the father might have been a drummer from the Vegas Club. Bubba grew up to look like Daddy and had the same walk. Later, a DNA test proved he was my half-brother.

That “hospital call” Mama talked about? It didn’t come from the hospital. The call Mama got came two years later—from Daddy. By then, Mama was married to another man and had a two-year-old daughter.

We will never know the bargain struck on that line—what deal Mama made with the devil. She left her husband and baby daughter, took Charlie and Annie, and moved in with Daddy. They married three years later.

She raised Bubba as her own—until his twelfth birthday, when he received a call from his mother that shook our family tree.

At night, when Daddy was in bed without her, or hadn’t come home at all, Mama would sit with a beer and cry. Doodlebug heard it too—the low mumble through the tears: “She’s more beautiful than Marilyn.” Maybe that was Mama’s way of reckoning with the truth she carried—that Daddy loved her, but his mind kept straying to Candy.

Between phone calls, we had a good life.

After the last one, the ground gave way like Mama’s mind. She was the heroine of the story—until she wasn’t.

—Carol

Author’s note: This work is autofiction. It draws on family lore, memory, and imagination. Certain names, details, and timelines have been altered or combined.

© 2025 Carol Countryman. All rights reserved.
This piece is part of Psalm of Lies and the ongoing series Tales from East Texas.
Please share the link, not the text. Reprints, excerpts, or readings by permission only: carolcountryman@gmail.com.