That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  It did not take long to see that there was also rivalry and mutual disparagement between the two panhandles, though Oklahoma naming a part of itself Texas County (“Saddle Bronc Capital of the World”) might seem a kind of homage, along with such place names as Texhoma, and the joking reference to the Texas panhandle as “Baja Oklahoma.” But Texans sneered at the poor Oklahoma roads, described their northern neighbors as obstructionist, larcenous and at the mercy of politicians on the take.

  “In Oklahoma everthing was and is Standard Awl,” said Froggy Dibden at the Old Dog. That narrow strip of what was once public land belonging to no state or territory, that pointing finger of No Man’s Land, remained isolated, ignored by the main body of the state. Up in Guymon a waitress told Bob of a time when, after driving east through their state for a hundred miles, she and her husband came upon a sign that said WELCOME TO OKLAHOMA. Now and then an Oklahoman remarked that the Texas handle was smirched with excess pride and the show-off manners of the undeservedly wealthy. Bob Dollar gathered from the talk at the grain elevator that some ill feeling was residual from the 1880s, when Oklahoma ranchers strung barbwire along the Texas line to stop trail drives coming through with their fevered and tick-infested cattle. The Texas men cut the wire and went north and that was that. And there had been the long-running animosity over which state—Texas or Oklahoma—owned Greer County, a quarrel that still colored discourse as a few drops of ink in a jar of water imparts a blue tinge. Panhandle people had long memories.

  “Even if the local kids don’t want a stay here there’s a galore a people retire to the panhandle from the cities,” LaVon started, slicing coffee cake, “from Houston and Dallas just a get away from the lights. They can’t sleep at night with those lights. They come from all over. Maybe they rather go to the hill country down around Austin but they can’t afford the property prices. There’s people in this town has moved in pretty recent and they are resented. Yes, you’re in back porch country now, Mr. Dollar. We’re like a family out here. Everbody knows everbody and has for a long time. What we got here that don’t exist in the big cities is a sense a community.” For LaVon, like Bob, believed in the idea of harmonious rurality, where outlying farmers and ranchers and the people of the small town were linked not only through living in a common geographical region but through kind-intentioned and neighborly interests. The way she called him “Mr. Dollar” made him uncomfortable, as though a silver-haired man stood behind him. Bob Dollar wondered aloud if the retirees were also attracted to the panhandle as a place to act out lives gilded with antique cattle-day romance.

  “You could say that,” said LaVon. “They appreciate the sense a history.”

  The more he nodded the more she told him about Woolybucket. Freda Beautyrooms, she said, was a leading light and the president of the Historical Society, though in 1994 a newcomer, Betty Sue Wilpin, who had moved from Houston to Woolybucket with her husband, Parch Wilpin, made a run to take over the society. She inaugurated an annual ice-cream social, featuring homemade ice creams of unusual flavors—mango, persimmon, pumpkin-cherry, cinnamon drop. Parch made all the frozen confections himself in the three ice-cream freezers he had bought for the occasion, for the Wilpins had money. The social was a great success and on the strength of that Betty Sue pushed for the society’s presidency, promising historical programs and activities that would “wake up Woolybucket.” She was overwhelmingly defeated and Freda Beautyrooms elected for the seventeenth straight year. Both Wilpins, smarting from this social slap, resigned from the society and concentrated on restoring the old stone house they had bought, once the Lazy A ranch house though the 12,000-acre spread was reduced to 150 acres, the rest long since given over to small ranches and farms.

  “Parch Wilpin got so he had a have a crushed oyster shell driveway and he drove pretty near every weekend down to the Gulf to get the shell. When he got the driveway finished he started in tryin a find somebody could restore the stain-glass window in that house; it was a steer with the Lazy A brand above. A course they don’t own the brand—that was sold to Bob Haywood over on the Tin Can donkey’s years ago. Trouble with these retirement people comin in is they all want a change things to how it was where they come from. They want that National Public Radio. They want organic grocery stores. They want the Houston Chronicle delivered to their doorstep. They want likker stores. They want restaurants.” She gave the last word a tone that equated it with “leper colonies.”

  She sighed mournfully. “And, a course, not everbody born here has got their act together either. The frontier character means not givin up on anything after it fails.” Only repeated failures, from bankruptcy to death, put a true panhandle resident down, she said. Bob had only to look as far as the example of Jerky Baum to see this stubborn persistence.

  “Jerky run cows for twenty years, same as his dad and graindad. Their ranch—the Tit Hat, after a Canadian Mountie hat—was all run down, overgrazed and dusty. The Baums never spent a penny on nothin. They made do and made do without. It got so finally there was nothin a do but declare bankruptcy and go look for some kind a job. And then, just before that happened, they found awl in his south pasture and the money begin a come in like a fire hose squirtin. Over thirteen thousand dollars a day ever day. Jerky Baum went crazy. Part of it was he hadn’t never had any money at all to spend and now he was drownin in it. They built a great big stone house like a castle with tennis courts and a moat and a swimmin pool in a glass house. He bought a jet plane and hired a pilot, though he didn’t have anyplace he wanted a go. Built a runway or two for the plane. Then he fell into the hands a certain men who got him a try Thoroughbred racin. He built stables and a trainin track, hired grooms and trainers, bought expensive horseflesh which never won. But now he got places a go—the racetracks—and he went: Santa Anita, Harbor Park, Keeneland, Saratoga. But his horses never won. ‘Give it some time,’ the horse men said. ‘You’re still new at the game. Give it some time.’

  “Then the awl begin to slack off and the money dropped. Jerky Baum behaved like it would start up again same as before. But it didn’t. Keep up all them stables and big staff all of a sudden he had a borrow money. Jerky tells his wife, ‘It’s like a drought. It’ll break sooner or later.’ But it never did and the bank took the jet and the mansion and most a the ranch land and Jerky and his family moved into one a the trainers’ houses. It was pretty cramped and tight after the castle. He finally realized that the awl had run out. That’s how awl is—it runs out.”

  “What happened to him then?” said Bob.

  “Oh, he’s around. Works at the grain elevator, weighs the trucks and all. You probly seen him.”

  Bob changed the subject. “I wondered about the radio. How come you don’t have good music on the radio down here? All I can get is Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh and the worst kind of canned Nashville mush. And hymns.”

  “Well, what is it you want, Bob Dollar?”

  “Uh. Some jazz? News? Classical music? Car Talk? Latino songs? NPR?”

  LaVon Fronk snorted. “There’s some tryin a raise money, get that NPR. That’s not what folks here want. That liberal NPR stuff—there’s only about six people in the panhandle wants a listen to that Commie stuff. And hymns suit us good.”

  “Then how about fiddle tunes and Texas music? Some of the best music in America came out of this part of the country. Woody Guthrie and Bob Wills and Buddy Holly and Jimmie Dale Gilmore—God, there’s a hundred of them. And fiddle tunes. But I don’t hear any of them on the damn radio.”

  “You just don’t understand our ways. Here’s what you got a understand about the panhandle—people here work hard, they’re honest, they hold a high moral conduct and the most a them are Christians. At the same time, there’s men talks hot and mean and will hurt anybody gits in their way. There’s backbitin women with tongues like knives. In fact, about the only thing draws folks together these days is a funeral or a tornado. It ain’t perfect, specially since the hog farms come in. I don’t know if you noticed, Mr
. Dollar, but we got us a condition here that might go against luxury houses. I mean them old hog farms. Anymore, you can hear fiddle tunes at the dances and clubs. You can hear that music on back porches and in livin rooms. You can hear the Panhandle Syrup Boys. You can hear the Old Mobeetie Bone Pickers. Them old fiddles squallin like bobcats. You can hear it live because it never quit here. Go over to Lipscomb some Satday night. They got a dance platform there and Frankie McWhorter and them plays. He used a be with Bob Wills. They are good. There’s plenty a Texas music. It’s still here. You don’t need the radio to hear it neither.”

  “You can hear hymns in church, too, so why clutter up the airwaves with them?”

  “We grew up with hymns. That’s part a our lives. It’s like the air we breathe!” And she began to sing in a robust voice, “I COME to the garden alooooone…”

  “What is the Barbwire Festival?” said Bob, for barbwire sounded exceedingly nonfestive to him and he wanted to stop LaVon’s singing. He wanted to get her back on track with information about panhandle denizens.

  “That,” she said, “is Woolybucket’s day of glory. It’s the biggest thing we got. End a June.”

  In the years 1904 to 1928, she said, the Panhandle Wire Company in Woolybucket had turned out hundreds of thousands of miles of barbwire, with the highest-grossing years linked to military sales during World War I. The factory had employed many local men and some women and when it failed the Depression came early to Woolybucket.

  “So it’s a way a bringin back those days when everbody had a job and business was hummin. First the parade, then the pork rib barbecue. The fire department volunteers are in charge a the barbecue and Cy Frease does the cookin. Then there’s the quilt raffle, election results a the Barbwire King and Queen. And usually some kind a show for the kids. And night there’s a street dance. A course there’s plenty brings beer, which they are not supposed to as Woolybucket is dry, but they do and that miserable sheriff we got won’t do a dang thing to stop it.”

  “See you later,” said Bob, standing up, but LaVon kept on talking so he sat down again.

  “There’s other newcomers in town. There’s that Frank Owsley and his so-called roommate Teddy Paxson moved here from Dallas in 1996 and bought the old Cowboy Rose district two schoolhouse. They fixed it up as a glassworks studio and a house. They got a truck garden out there and they talk about openin a gourmet restaurant, just what the Wilpins would love to see. Their city friends come up on the weekend and the poor things have to work out in the hot sun in the garden or pack glass in the studio all day.”

  “I guess I got to go,” said Bob. He went out to the dusty Saturn. Even with the door closed he could hear LaVon, who had started singing again: “Aaaaaaaaaaand, He WALKS with me…And He TALKS with me…”

  In his first weeks in Woolybucket Bob Dollar discovered that if the terrain was level and flat, the characters of the people were not, for eccentricities were valued and cultivated, as long as they were not too peculiar. Crusty old ranchers who worked an embroidery hoop, or a pair of alcoholic septuagenarian twin sisters, or the man who was building a full-size locomotive in his garage, the rancher who constructed a half-size replica of Stonehenge, Mrs. Splawn who inherited her husband’s Dee-Tex metal detector and could be seen on road verges seeking coins and engagement rings thrown away by spiteful and hotheaded Texas girls, were not only tolerated but admired. But dark skin color, strange accent or manifestations of homosexuality and blatant liberalism were unbearable.

  Bob Dollar made the mistake of telling LaVon he was interested in everything about the place—not only the land but the people, cattle, wheat, horses, railroads, oil and gas, water, even—he laughed falsely—hogs.

  “I know people don’t like hog farms, but they seem to be part of this place,” he said.

  “There’s actually plenty want the hog farms. Especially some politicians. They got them up near Follett. My goodness, they requested them, they courted the hog corporations. And, a course, you are interested in girls. Let’s not forget your search for that Texas girlfriend.” LaVon put a cough drop in her mouth and said the panhandle was the most complicated part of North America, the last piece of Texas to be settled. “Light soil, drought, bad wind, terrible heat, tornadoes and blue northers. And you never can tell which one is comin next. It’s a weather place.” She implied that the remote and level land, tempestuous blasts, tornadoes drilling down from super cells and the peculiar configuration of the territory worked with the wind to blow away the human chaff, leaving the heavy kernels. It was defeat to give up and pull out. It took sticking qualities—humor, doggedness, strength—to stay.

  “Most people here has stayed for generations,” she said, naming a dozen families, including her own, “starting with all those big ranches. It was the shiftless ones who left. Most people stick even tighter when the goin gets tough. In the dust bowl days the government told a lot of the farmers to go on to California. Or down to Arizona and pick cotton. The tough ones stayed. Look here,” she said, opening a sideboard drawer and withdrawing a tiny black book.

  Bob Dollar took the book in his hand. It was a miniature Bible.

  “That Bible has been carried by the men a the Fronk family in seven wars. The Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korea War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. They all but one come back alive and that Bible is why.” She put the Bible away. “It was lost on the Yalu River in 1950 where my husband’s uncle Ditmar got killed. Some other soldier found it on the ground and it had the name Fronk and Woolybucket, Texas, in it—and that feller mailed it to us, just the name and the town, and it got to us.

  “The cattle drives up to Montana and Wyoming went through here too. This was the original cow and cowboy country and it still is the most cow of anywhere. So people here are pretty rugged. This country was made for cows, once they got rid a the buffaloes. To live here it sure helps if you are half cow and half mesquite and all crazy.” She jerked her thumb at the bookcase in the hall, packed with Texas histories and accounts of early days.

  “You get in them books and you’ll pretty soon learn something,” she said.

  He had seen for himself that right-thinking ways were supported by billows of gossip and a constant and surveillant picking at those who showed the slightest tendency to slip off the trodden path unless they fell into the category of Colorful Panhandle Characters. And work was the great leveler, work and the land, the twin assets of all rural people.

  He took one of her books from the shelf, opened to pages describing a ranch leap-year party in 1884, the women dressed as men, the men dressed as women. The writer glossed over the women’s attire but went into some detail for the men:

  C. W. Pool, a pumpkin colored blonde, wore overskirt ecru denims, with corsage of lemon color cretonns, low neck and full sleeves. Ornaments were roller skates and plain gold. Very becoming.

  Ed Miller was attired in a short walking suit of lemon-colored delaine, muscled like a grasshopper. Ornaments, cloves and lemon peel. Modest, but fascinating.

  W. Strange, lovely fawn blonde. Costume, wine colored three-ply, all wool filling tartan with waist and hose to match. Ornaments, raw cotton and kiln-dried sawdust. Modest and graceful, as well as susceptible.

  Bob was mildly shocked. Somehow, cross-dressing was not what he associated with old-time cattlemen.

  He made a morning habit of dropping in, first at the grain elevator where there were usually four or five farmers who drank coffee and talked with Wayne Etter, the manager, about grain prices, value-added products, cursed the government and Canadian imports. Jerky Baum was the grimy little man who did most of the dirty work at the elevator and Bob tried, and failed, to imagine him as an oil magnate with a private jet and racing stables. Etter told him one day that a train had run right through a grain elevator in Marmaduke, over near Texline, and the thought was enough to send Bob to the Black Dog, a mile from a railroad track. This was the rarest café in the panhandle, if not all T
exas, for it served good food, nearly as good, he thought, as must have been the fine fat doe eaten under the cottonwoods in 1845, a meal Lieutenant Abert had described with relish.

  10

  OLD DOG

  Cy Frease had a great forward mouth, muscular and mobile, that stretched open to his back molars or, when pursed, thrust outward like a volcano cone. His face was blue with whiskers and he was built like a gin bottle with hard, square shoulders. He had cowboyed for the Quarter Moon, a big spread owned by a Chicago family who came down once a year, but in the late eighties he tired of what he called “the pukiest shit-fire-and-save-the-matches goddamn grub this side a the devil’s table,” said if he couldn’t cook better than that he’d drown himself in his grandma’s chamber pot, drew his pay, picked up his saddle and walked. He disappeared from the country for a few years, then, one day, was seen again coming down the steps of the Woolybucket County Bank, unchanged except for a new silver belly hat. When he got through shaking hands and saying hello to old acquaintances, he took a key from his pocket and held it up.

  “See that? Goin a change some things.” He looked around with his glass-colored eyes and would say no more, but at noon his truck (the same ratty old 1976 Chevy he’d driven away in) was parked in front of what had been Itty Bitty Petal & Posy, bankrupt and closed for two years. Now the doors and windows gaped and dust flew from them. Passersby could hear the roar of a vacuum cleaner followed by the splash of water.