That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  But the one he was close to above all others was his younger sister, Opal, with whom he’d enjoyed a particular relationship throughout adolescence, begun on a sultry Sunday afternoon when he was fourteen and Opal twelve. They had been playing hide-and-seek with visiting cousins, big shock-headed bullies neither of them liked. They had burrowed into the hay in the barn loft. The need for silence and secrecy, the closeness of each other’s body, the gloom of the loft shot through with sparkles of light from roof holes, were conducive to half-playful physical exploration which continued in many places over the next year, from the front room coat closet to the family sedan which Hugh was allowed to drive in certain circumstances. One of those circumstances was as his sister’s escort to dances, for Opal was not allowed to go on dates. Instead, the Dough paterfamilias decreed, Hugh would drive his sister to and from the dance. Once there she could meet her partner for the evening while Hugh could team up with his girlfriend.

  One warm September evening when Opal was thirteen and Hugh fifteen, he had driven them to the dance. He was enamored of a tall girl with long red hair, Ruhama Bustard, recently arrived in the panhandle from Click County, Missouri. He danced six times running with Ruhama, who allowed him to rub against her, then, as he begged her to come out into the parking lot, twirled away with Archie Ipworth. Aching and abandoned he sought out Opal, who was dancing with a classmate whose face was so pustulated it appeared iridescent from a distance.

  “Hey, you want a go? Get the hell out a here? I’m havin a hell of a lousy time.”

  “O.K.,” she said and turned to the boy. “See you in school Monday.” He nodded and slouched away.

  In the sedan he told her what the problem was, how the red-haired girl had excited him to a frenzy and left him with an ache that ran from his knees to his shoulders.

  “I mean, it’s terrible,” he said. “She give me bad Cupid’s cramps.” He groaned theatrically. “Whyn’t you just let me put it in? I mean, it’s not much more than we already done.”

  “O.K.,” she said and he pulled into the cemetery where they got in the backseat and began an activity that finished up nearly every dance they attended for the next five years, including the dance that followed Opal’s wedding, the bridegroom an elderly rancher named Richard Head, too drunk on cheap champagne to notice his bride’s absence from the festivities. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the Dough family gathered en masse at the old homestead, it was Hugh and Opal who volunteered to go to the store and get the ice cream or ginger ale or extension cord that was needed.

  The sheriff’s father, T. Scott Dough, had been a cook at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville for many years, back in the days when it was called Uncle Bud’s Place, his job to prepare the final dinners for men on death row. When he died at sixty-six it was the sheriff who had to sort through the clothes in the closet, the Sunday trousers with bagged knees as though keeping a place for the dead legs. In a box of brittle papers he found four or five old German postcards, hand-tinted, showing women leaning into or against motorcars of the 1930s, their seamed and clocked stockings wrinkled sadly at the back of the knee and ankle, their feet in T-strap shoes of dull leather. Their skirts were rucked up to disclose utilitarian garters and sweaty, bunched cotton panties. From the gaping leg openings buttocks swelled, muscular and hard. One in particular he disliked. It showed a bare-bottomed woman, left foot up on a running board, the right on the ground in a patch of grass. The woman’s posture and the angle of the camera made the left buttock alarmingly huge while the right, pulled flat by the extended leg, seemed atrophied. How anyone could take pleasure in asymmetry was beyond him, yet the repellent image fixed itself in his mind and rose unbidden at awkward times.

  People had always asked the sheriff’s father about the condemned men, what were the nature of their crimes, what they said and did. The old man would say, “Don’t know damn thing bout any of it cept what they want for their last meal. Thought when I first come in the job it was goin a be fancy stuff, but no. Country boy don’t know a thing about food. The most a them ask for cheeseburger with double meat and fry. Sometime you get one steak and Worcestershire. But mostly it’s your hamburger. They don’t think steak. Nigger boy got better idea. They ask like fry chicken, peach cobbler and cob corn, your barbecue back rib, salmon croquette. A lot a the nigger, special your Muslin, refuse a last meal. They rather fast. Another one ask wild game—guess he thought we goin out and make a javelina hunt for him. He get cheeseburger. Had my way he would a had road kill. Lot a enchilada and taco. They ask beer and wine but they don’t get it. They ask cigarette and cigar. No. They don’t get no bubble gum neither. This one that kill his girlfriend want six scramble egg, fifteen piece bacon, grit and seven piece toast. He eat ever bite and lick the plate. What was comin don’t affect his appetite. And how about two jalapeño and raw carrot for the last meal? But I tell you what—hardly a one ask for chicken-fry steak. What you make a that?”

  In the bottom of the box was a chef’s toque, stained and crushed. That’s what his father’s life had come down to, yellowed girlie pix and a flat hat. He intended to take care something of that nature did not happen to him.

  For a while he collected sheriff memorabilia. He had a collar worn by one of Sheriff Andre Jackson Spradling’s hounds. He had an axe that the escaped convict Jason Shrub used to bludgeon his way out of the Comanche County jail, and a photograph of the gun that a desperate prisoner snatched from Sheriff C. F. Stubblefield and then used to shoot the sheriff’s tongue. He had one of Buck Lane’s florid neckties and a pack of greasy cards from a Borger gambling den raid. He had a windmill weight in the shape of a star. He had a set of brass knuckles used by a deputy sheriff from Bryant, Oklahoma. There was a heavy chain used to lock prisoners to trees from the days before the Woolybucket jail was built.

  Hugh Dough was reelected term after term. He did not, as some sheriffs, rely on easy banter and warmth to disarm, but had developed a mean, piercing stare and a reputation for being a trigger-happy marksman. The credulous believed in vast acreages for paradise and inferno, one aloft, the other down the devil’s adit in the hot rocks, both unfenced open range. But the sheriff knew that the properties had been long ago broken up and that frayed patches of heaven and hell lay all over Texas. Most rural crimes, he believed, happened in vehicles at the Dairy Queen and at roadside rest areas, the latter having social uses that might surprise the highway landscape planners. Then there were the lowlives who stole drip gas from the pipeline, and every town had its set of wife beaters. To track the former he listened for sounds of engine knock in local cars, a side effect of drip gas use.

  He was a good customer of the state crime lab and, with their help, had once solved an ugly crime in which a naked and severely bruised young ranch hand was discovered dead at the foot of a remote windmill. There were scores of circular marks on the victim’s skin, and on a wild hunch Hugh Dough asked the crime lab to compare them with the decorative conchas on the ranch owner’s handmade chaps. They matched.

  There were notches on his gun handle. He had black belts and diplomas in esoteric martial arts; in his hands a stick was a lethal weapon. In Woolybucket County he presided over certain legal rites, heard confessions, arbitrated disputes, observed the community, knew when a family was in difficulties, and he guided the errant back onto the path, sometimes forcibly.

  Hugh Dough disliked politics and it galled him to run for office. For many years he had run against Tully Nelson, a six-four bully who, after his last defeat, moved thirty miles to sparsely populated Slickfork County where he was handily elected, and hence a rival sheriff. Hugh Dough also disliked teenage punks, and thought the best deterrent for a young hoodlum—the younger the better—was a night or two in the county clink. He had once locked up the state’s attorney’s bespectacled nine-year-old son, whom he caught throwing rocks at a dog chained to its doghouse.

  “How’d you like it, then, was you chained up and some four-eyed little bastard come along and start peggin rocks
at you? Believe I’ll have to educate you.” And he handcuffed the kid to a bicycle rack in front of the courthouse, snatched off the kid’s glasses and put them on his own blinking eyes, saying, “Now let’s us pretend I’m you and you’re that poor dog,” picked up a small stone and hurled it. It caught the kid on the upper arm and set off shrieks and blubbering that brought heads to the windows. A few more stones and the kid was hysterical.

  “Guess I will have to lock you up until you quiet down,” he said and dragged the bellowing child into the jail, kicked him into a cell. Of course he paid for it later, as the state’s attorney was a formidable enemy.

  “Ain’t that the squeeze of it?” said the sheriff on the phone to his sister Opal.

  “At least you got the satisfaction,” she said, and in the panhandle satisfaction of grievances counted for something.

  Perhaps the most irritating of his duties, aside from chasing down old ladies’ reports of strangers on the highway, was keeping a balance in the ongoing feud between Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister, two ranchers of opposing personalities and ranch philosophies and styles. What puzzled Sheriff Hugh Dough was their lack of kin recognition, for the Slauters and the Keisters had intermingled generations back when both clans lived in Arkansas. Old Daniel Slauter had married Zubie Keister in 1833, and although she was only the first of his five wives, she bore him five of the thirty-two children he claimed to have fathered, and a marked Keister look—long ringy neck, circled eyes, spider fingers and bad teeth—had entered the Slauter genes. Later more Slauter-Keister crossings further marred the stock.

  Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister had loathed each other since grade school (which old-timers called “cowboy college” in their sarcastic voices) when Keister, the product of an intensely religious upbringing, a 4-H leader and a Junior Texas Ranger, overheard Advance Slauter, muscular lout extraordinaire, say that he was screwing both his younger sisters and anybody who wanted a piece of the action should show up at the family ranch at six A.M. with a quarter in hand and tap on Ad’s window for admittance. Hugh Dough had sniggered knowingly, later inspired to do his own homework, but Francis Scott Keister was outraged on behalf of pure girlhood. A terrific fight followed, broken up by the principal. Both boys refused to say what had started it. In fact, Ad Slauter was entirely puzzled by the attack. So the feud began and had persisted over thirty years, each man coming by turn into the sheriff’s office to report the latest atrocity. Sheriff Hugh Dough would hear the complainant out and take notes, file them in the two voluminous dossiers of increasingly sophisticated criminal misdemeanor. The assaults were mostly rock-throwing and name-calling until high school when both wangled broke-down old hoopys to drive. Now buckets of paint were thrown, tires shot out, windshields broken. When Francis Scott Keister went to the Wichita Falls stock show with the 4-H group he bought a custom-designed bumper sticker that read I AM A PIECE OF SHIT and pasted it on the back of Slauter’s car. Ad Slauter responded, on the family vacation trip to Padre Island, by visiting the marina store where he stole three aerosol cans of expandable flotation foam and he used them to fill the engine compartment of Keister’s vehicle. He signed Keister up for subscriptions to gay pornographic magazines (“Bill me later”). Keister released black widow spiders on Slauter’s windowsill. Slauter poured sixteen gallons of used crankcase oil on Keister’s front porch.

  As grown men both Francis Scott Keister and Advance Slauter ran cow-calf cattle operations but there were few similarities beyond the fact that both men’s cows were quadrupeds. Francis Scott Keister was a scientific rancher, methodical, correct, progressive. He had been born in Woolybucket and was belligerent and aggressive about being a “panhandle native,” loathed all outsiders.

  Keister lived with his wife, Tazzy, and only child, fourteen-year-old Frank, a lanky boy with wing-nut ears and broom-handle neck. He often told him to go help his mother in the kitchen as he was no help with machinery or cows. Their house was large, of the style called “rancho deluxe,” the only building on the ranch not made entirely of metal. His corrals and catch pens were of enameled steel in pleasing colors. The machine shop and calving barn were heated and well-lighted, freshly painted every year. His handsome Santa Gertrudis cattle displayed rich mahogany coats and backs as level as the ground they trod. Ninety-four percent of his cows dropped a calf every spring. He kept meticulous breeding records on complicated computer charts. The heifers were artificially inseminated with semen from champion bulls, turned out on newly sprouted winter wheat in the spring, carefully moved from pasture to pasture during the summer. Keister supplemented the grass with soy meal, beet pulp, molasses, sorghum and sweet-corn stover, corn, cottonseed hulls, beet tops, cannery waste, anhydrous ammonia, poultry packer by-products (including feathers), peanut meal, meat meal, bonemeal, lint from the family clothes dryer. To this smorgasbord he added a battery of growth stimulants including antibiotics and the pharmaceuticals Bovatec and Rumensin, as well as the implants Compudose, Finaplix, Ralgro, Steer-oid and Synovex-S. At eighteen months his big steers were ready for market and he received the highest prices for them.

  Ad Slauter, in contrast, lived in a dwelling constructed around an old bunkhouse dating back to the 1890s, part of a massive ranch that had belonged to a disappointed Scottish consortium. He had added slapdash additions and wings to accommodate his large family of ten girls. He was an advocate of arcane home remedies. When five-year-old Mazie, playing hide-and-seek, chose a bull nettle patch in which to hide and emerged shrieking and clutching at her calves, he urinated on the burning welts, telling her it would take the sting out, until his wife came at him with a broom. Turpentine and cold coffee was, he said, good for a fever, and drunks could be made sober if they ate sweet potatoes.

  The Slauter ranch was shabby and run-down, with sagging fences and potholed roads. He ranched as his father had, letting his mixed-breed cows, mostly picked up at the cattle auctions in Beaver, Oklahoma, take care of their own sex lives. Cows preferred to nurse their calves for six or seven months, not become pregnant as rapidly as possible, and Slauter thought they knew what they were doing. They wandered where they would and were half-wild by the time of fall roundup. He bought small, young bulls every five or six years for a few hundred dollars. Only fifty-five percent of his cows produced a calf each year. Because they ate only pasture grass supplemented by baled hay in winter, they took a long time to put on enough weight for market, twenty-eight to thirty months. Curiously enough the two men’s ledgers balanced out at almost the same figures, for Keister’s operation was costly and his heifer mortality rate high as the champion bull semen made painfully large calves.

  Hugh Dough dreaded to see either of the combatants pull up in front of the courthouse, but especially disliked Francis Scott Keister, whom he regarded as a rigid straight arrow who made too much of things that didn’t concern him.

  The sheriff’s office had five dispatchers. They were all big, placid, middle-aged women, and not one of them understood how to separate the inconsequential from the urgent. Myrna Greiner did not hesitate to call at three A.M.

  “Sheriff, I thought you ought a know we got a report that a black panther is tryin to break into Minnie Dubbs’s kitchen. She can hear it a-growlin and a-scratchin at the door.”

  “How does she know it’s a black panther? Did she see it?”

  “She says she can tell by the noise it’s makin. Plus she looked out that little side window in her pantry and she could see it in the moonlight standin up on its hind legs and scratchin away.”

  “Call her back and tell her that if it’s still on the prod at daylight I’ll come out there and arrest it. Tell her to put some cotton in her ears and go to sleep. Tell her to take a bath first. My granny used to say that if you don’t take a bath the panthers will get you in the night.”

  But to the dispatchers all calls were of equal weight, for if you read the papers it was as logical to believe that a panther would slink out of New Mexico and make its way to Minnie Dubb
s’s house in Woolybucket as it was to fear that the creaking noise down below was an escaped convict bent on robbery, car theft and murder. Just such a terrifying fate had overwhelmed deaf old Mr. Gridiron, a retired rancher kidnapped from his bed in 1973, driven away in his own truck and murdered beside the road across the Oklahoma line.

  The sheriff’s great victory against Tully Nelson, his onetime political opponent, had occurred a few years earlier at 8:30 on a moonless June night as he was cruising the back roads. A call for backup help came from Texas Fish and Game.

  “Sheriff Hugh, we got a tip-off that a gang of poachers is working the Stink Creek area tonight. Can you meet us there ten o’clock?”

  He was a mile from the bridge when the call came, pulled over and doused his lights, glassed the fields with his powerful night binoculars and immediately picked up parking lights at the side of the road near the bridge. He counted four lights—two vehicles. He turned around, circled south, east, north and west on farm roads, making a four-mile loop in order to come up behind the vehicles, drove the last half mile slowly with his lights out (for he had good night vision and knew every inch of this road), stopped a quarter mile from the bridge and crept up to the parked vehicles on foot. Just off the road at the bridge stood two empty sheriff’s cruisers, parking lights on. On the doors he saw a star and the words SLICKFORK COUNTY SHERIFF. The trunk of one vehicle gaped wide.