That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  “He’s hosin down the walls. There’s enough dirt come off to start a garden,” said Big Warren, a serious wheat farmer with ornamental tufts of hair on his cheeks and chin.

  Rumor ran. He was going to install a coin launderette; a suntan parlor; a saddlemaker’s shop. A truck from Dumas Lumber unloaded two-by-fours, pine boards, then a carpenter from Higgins showed up one morning and began hammering and sawing but grinned and refused to answer questions. The curious put their heads in the door and saw that the space had been divided into four rooms, two very small ones at the side, one long and narrow across the back. The front room, looking onto the street, was large with a high ceiling. A truck from a Wichita Falls company, Texas Salvage, pulled up. Big Warren said Texas Salvage should rightfully be called Tornado Leftovers. Two pimpled youths unloaded stamped tin ceiling panels popular at the turn of the century, and a massive but grimy oak bar carved with figures of horsemen driving cattle. Obvious, said the gossips; the place was going to be a private club where people could bring their bottles and drink, for Woolybucket was a dry county and there were no public bars.

  But a week later, the oak bar scraped down and fine-sanded golden, the club rumor died. Another truck arrived, this one from Tulsa: USED RESTAURANT EQUIPMENT—EVERYTHING FOR THE TRADE. From it came an ancient and huge gas range, a ten-foot-high stainless steel dishwasher.

  “That dishwasher come out of a prison,” said Charles Grapewine, who knew. “I’ll say he’s gettin up a café. Them little rooms at the side is the men’s and the ladies’.”

  Cy Frease himself scrounged the panhandle for certain indispensable items: cast-iron pots, a homemade grill fashioned from two steam-cleaned fifty-five-gallon drums (found in the weeds behind the crumbling ruins of one of the LX bunkhouses). He set up the grill in the alley behind the kitchen. He went to auctions and the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Amarillo for his china and silver, covered the tables with Mexican oilcloth purchased in Cactus, fabulous designs in peacock blue and scarlet, mustard and magenta. At the back of the dining room four long tables were joined end to end. Finally he washed the windows, put up a sign, OLD DOG, with a painting of his mutt, and was in business for one meal a day, at high noon.

  In the early mornings Cy did local ranch work, filling in for no-shows or making an extra hand at roundup time or in haying season, always arriving at the Old Dog around ten to fire up the grill and get the potatoes on. By 2:30 the crockery was all in the prison dishwasher and he was back at cow work. In the evenings he set his bread dough to rise, peeled the potatoes for the next day, washed lettuces and trimmed vegetables homegrown in local gardens, grabbed a few hours of sleep. Every other Saturday he drove down to Austin to shop at Whole Foods.

  “Cowboys deserve to eat wholesome too,” he said, opening himself to criticism (not long in coming) that he was a health food nut and probably a left-wing liberal if not a Communist.

  He had a steady clientele of older men because he included on the menu eight or ten favorites from Depression days when they had been boys and their tastes set: vinegar pie, cocoa gravy over biscuits, fried salt pork and, for the old cowboys, son-of-a-bitch stew. For the earlier generation of saddle bums he occasionally made the supreme cowboy dessert, cherry Jell-O containing ginger ale and cut-up marshmallows, cut into small gleaming cubes, garnished with a whack of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. In a place where men spent much time outdoors in heat, dust and gritty wind, Jell-O was esteemed.

  He wasn’t interested in gaufrette potatoes, but in hominy grits; he cared not for zabaglione but cherished rhubarb pie and sweet potato tart. The world contained many kinds of protein but he reduced them to grilled meat, local favorites and catfish. Once a month he did an entire spit-roasted sirloin or massive pans of barbecued ribs. Occasionally, when the mood was right, he made bierox, spicy ground beef cakes encased in dough. He kept a jar of whangy watermelon honey on hand and used it liberally.

  All of the older men had memories of strange childhood meals. “Oh, we was poor,” said Methiel Huff. “Seems like at the end a the month all we had a eat was beans and more beans. Red-letter day when we got a little salt pork to perk them up. Mother used a keep the salt pork in a crock, lid on it and a big stone on the lid, but someway Dad’s old hound dog pushed the stone off and got in there and eat ever bit of it up. Ma said then the only thing we had to flavor the beans was windmill grease. That old relief truck would come around and we’d get rice, beans, prunes and powdered milk.”

  Bud Hank leaned back in his chair. “Them windmill beans make me think a Shut Up Now Syrup, specialty a my daddy. He was short-tempered and didn’t like to hear us kids—seven boys, two girls—horsin around and he’d say, ‘Shut up NOW,’ and if we didn’t pipe down, why he’d get out the bottle of Shut Up Now Syrup. It was his own recipe, nasty stuff, boiled up out a green persimmons and a little sugar to thicken it, but it would pucker you up so hard your mouth would ache and your stomach would clench up like a fist. God! I can taste it yet!”

  Dixie Goodloe then remembered the bottom of the culinary barrel in his Depression childhood.

  “We was so poor there wasn’t nothin to eat pretty often, and I mean nothin. There was a time my daddy out a sheer desperation shot and skinned a coyote and we et coyote soup. And I guarantee you we wasn’t the only ones.”

  “How was it?”

  “At the time it was the most goddamn delicious thing I ever et.”

  At the Old Dog everything was set out on the long tables, with the soup at the right and the pies at the left. Customers came in, got their own silverware and plate, loaded up. Every rancher and farmer, oil rig worker, cowboy, truck driver within driving distance showed up for the big noon dinner, too many men for women to feel comfortable. It became something of a men’s club, the men almost interchangeable, most past their fifties, all in grimy jeans and cowboy hats—felt in winter, straw in summer. Cy’s dog slept under the tables among the manure-scented boots. Now and then Cy set him out a saucer of coffee with cream, saying, “See if that’ll keep you awake.”

  The old lawyer from down the street, F. B. Weicks, was Cy’s first customer and thereafter came in punctually at noon every day. He wore a white cowboy hat canted back, an ancient blue suit, shiny with wear. His eyes showed enormous through round plastic-lensed eyeglasses he bought at the dime store in Pampa. He had a soft, pendulous nose that resembled a penis, and every day Cy handed a special plate to him containing a large potato stuffed with creamed tuna fish. He never spoke to anyone, sat in the corner eating his potato and drinking two lime Dr Peppers. He always left a quarter tip and saluted Cy from the front door before he stepped back into his lawyer’s life.

  Within a week of the Old Dog’s opening, graffiti began to show up on the men’s room walls. The first read: Okies, the rock candy in the urinals is not for you. But over the months more appeared:

  JESUS IS COMING!

  (and in a different hand) We’ll git him agin.

  Toilet paper compliments of Texas sand and gravel.

  The Old Dog became Bob Dollar’s hangout, and here he learned from men sprawled and akimbo, like abandoned machinery, that a center-pivot irrigation system could cost as much as $100,000 per quarter section; that the region was too cold for cotton, but grew staggering amounts of wheat, milo, sorghum, alfalfa, corn and soybeans for domestic and overseas markets and to feed the hundreds of thousands of feedlot cattle and bunkered hogs that gave the panhandle its distinctive odor. “The stink of money,” said Harvey Dimple, an independent hog farmer inexorably shoved to the wall by the big factory farms. Bob, who had introduced himself as a land scout for luxury house development sites, was quiet, taking it all in, but keeping his ears tuned for indications that someone wanted to sell out. The talkers were glad for a fresh and attentive audience.

  “Yes sir, them farmers learned how to make the panhandle say ‘money’ stead a ‘grass,’ and that’s when they started a call it the Golden Spread. That drew the big boys, you bet. They smelled money all
the way from New York and Japan.”

  “That’s right,” said Mark Farwell, hollow-faced and narrow-shouldered, greasy hair flopping over his eyes, who made a good living supplying the estrogen market with urine from his pregnant mares. “Right here is the richest farmland on earth, long as we got the water.”

  There were two elderly local men, both named Bill Williams, which people got around by calling them by their mane colors—Buckskin Bill for his cream-gold hair and dark beard, and Sorrel Bill for his reddish brown head, armpit and crotch. Now Buckskin spoke.

  “Hell, we ain’t like California where they got central irrigation and water co-ops. Your Texas farmer is an independent son of bee and does everthing on his own—wells, pumps, ditches, pipes, labor. The Ogallala? It can’t win over this drought and the heavy drawdown. Sonny, when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  A lanky, grey-haired man, all elbows and shanks, came in, got a cup of tea and sat at the end of the table, nodded at Grapewine.

  “Bob, this here is Ace Crouch—keeps the windmills runnin. Ace, Bob here is lookin to buy land for developin fancy retirement estates.”

  The windmiller gave Bob a searching look as though he saw through that. Bob blushed and kept his head down.

  “You’re the feller stayin at LaVon’s place? The one got an appetite for all her windies?” He picked up his cup and swallowed almost all the tea in it.

  “Yes sir. She tells some good stories.” Everyone in the Old Dog, he thought, ate and drank as though ravenous and thirst-scorched.

  “She ought a with all them diaries and letters she’s got out a folks. God save Woolybucket if that house catches afire. You stay out there very long, you won’t be able a wear no earmuffs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why, she’ll talk the ears right off a your head. The most can’t take it.”

  But Bob thought that Ace himself was a strong contender for the talk championship.

  All around him, in the broad variety of regional talk, he heard snatches of conversation about panhandle life and arcane jobs, worries about foot-and-mouth disease leaping the Atlantic and destroying Texas beef. He shuddered when the talk turned to farm and ranch accidents—fractures, lacerations, concussions, deathly falls, maimings and fatalities. Every man, young and old, who ate at the Old Dog had scars to show.

  Rope Butt, an ancient cowboy in for a fast cup of coffee, turned to the tables and snapped, “Jesus jumpin jackstraws, don’t none a you got any work to do? Just set around gassin all the time. If you don’t, I do,” and he hitched up his jeans and left. Bob felt a twinge of guilt. Was all of this listening getting him closer to men who wanted to sell out?

  Fragmented conversations again blew by like trash in the wind. Again the talk turned back to drought and, inevitably, to the Great Depression when the sandstorms raked the panhandle. Ace Crouch looked at Bob. The old man emanated a kind of authority.

  “Irrigation with Ogallala water saved everthing, proved that if you toughed it out you’d get your just reward. What nobody seen at first was how it would backfire, open the door to this agribusiness and corporate farmin.”

  “They say we live in a global economy,” said Bob, echoing Ribeye Cluke.

  “Yes, they say that. But some a the big corporate boys was homegrown like the Hitches up in Guymon. They got giant hog farms a go with their cattle feedlots. They got right into the money like ducks into water. So, some say”—and he drilled Bob with his pale old eyes—“that the Ogallala and technology—pumps, telephones, good roads, radios, computers and telvision, all that stuff—made the panhandle a Garden a Eden. But that same technology has kept us from adjustin to the bedrock true nature a this place and that’s somethin will catch up to us one a these days. The water is playin out. The people built their lives on awl money expected it would last forever too. The awl is pretty much gone. And they told us the Ogallala would last forever. Now the Ogallala is finishin up.”

  “One thing’s sure,” said Charles Grapewine. “The people descended from those tough old settlers are sellin out and goin off to Dallas.”

  “Things change,” said Bob. “Isn’t it like a law of nature that nothing stays the same? And what about the Indians? They were here before those settlers.”

  Ace snorted. “They were, but they didn’t live here. They were nomadic. They’d come into the panhandle, hunt for a few days. Mostly they used hereabouts as a buffer zone between tribes. No, the first people tried a live here was those old farmers and ranchers. The pioneers. Now one man with the right machines can do it all—except pay for the machinery. Machines do everthing but suck eggs.”

  A man Bob heard called Jim Skin beelined for the food table, helped himself to two ham steaks, piled on the pineapple rings. His face resembled the face of a snake, sleek and smooth, round-chinned and thrust forward in searching extension, the wide mouth seemingly closed on a smile. Small ears tight to his head seemed no ears, and his short, fine hair was mashed flat by a cap emblazoned Murphy Family Farms.

  “Goddamn, I like pineapple,” he said to the man across the table who was staring with disbelief at the yellow circles. “Good. Hey, I was watchin the tee-vee last night, they had a special on astronomy, the things they can see with that Hobble telescope. Wagh. Wagh. Wagh.”

  “You believe that stuff? That’s all made up on a computer. It ain’t real.”

  “You hear the Fronk kid got kicked out a Texas A and M?”

  “I thought I seen him last week pumpin around on that dumb bike. How come?”

  “It’s one a your more bizarre things. And I don’t know no details. I heard they caught him down in the bull barn there at the university. They got those champion breeders there? Well, he was shovin a piece a pipe up a bull’s ass. And that’s all I know about it. Wagh!” He cut a pineapple ring into small trapezoids, ate the pieces rapidly. The snake jaws opened and the pineapple disappeared.

  “Jesus gosh amighty!”

  “Yeah. Ask me, they should a put him in a pasture with the bull. Wagh! Take care a the problem.” He ran his finger along the side of his tongue. “Goddamn. Now I got canker sores from that pineapple. Does it ever time to me.”

  “Well, I tell you what caused it. She put that kid out in the day care from day one. Jase was runnin the ranch alone and she was workin for that irrigation magazine, havin herself a career, and the kid was dumped in day care.”

  “I wouldn’t blame it on that. The kid was always a little wild. And he got in with that bad Christian crowd, that born-again bunch used a come inta town and stand up in back a the pickup and preach and holler. Real excitable people. Wagh! They did drugs.”

  “Well, he sure did. Drugs and the rest of it.”

  “You ever see them tattoos he got? Wagh! Wagh!”

  “Why the heck don’t you get you some cough syrup? And quit eatin pineapple if it makes your tongue swell up.”

  “This your panhandle hog farm cough. I been workin over at Murphy Farms haulin waste. It’s occupational. But I got laid off last week so it’s gettin better.” Jim Skin got up and headed back toward the food, bypassing the pineapple rings and helping himself to soothing macaroni and cheese.

  Ace Crouch turned his bitter old eyes on Bob.

  “A bad cough goes with a corporate hog farm, Mr. Dollar. And those waste ponds that Jim Skin has been dumpin into pollute the water table and are surely leakin into the Ogallala.”

  Bob, thinking of the Global Pork Rind brochures, said, “I read that the lagoons are lined with nonporous plastic and that they are emptied out and the manure is spread on the fields to improve the fertility of the soil.”

  The old man laughed without amusement. “Sonny, there is no liner known a mankind that will not leak. And the manure on the fields, why there is so much of it I’m frightened. A little bit a manure is one thing, but when it’s a foot deep year after year the excess nitrogen has to go somewhere. And if you think the lagoons and exhaust fans make a stink, wait until you get a whiff of a field fresh spread wit
h hog poop. The ammonia will burn your eyes out a your head. Your hair will fall out. They could make the stink better by coverin over the waste ponds or aeratin, but that costs money. Cheaper to just let it sit there. And the state don’t care.”

  “But hog farms make jobs for local people. I mean, this is a region where there aren’t many jobs, so that’s something. Helping the economy and all? Mr. Skin there had a job from them.”

  “Why Bob, you are innocent a the facts a life. One hog farm site makes a very few jobs at minimum wage. They run three shifts but everthing’s automated and computer controlled. The corporations don’t buy locally. They buy bulk supplies in the world market, truck it in. Good business. The hog farms come in, they look like they’re bringin money into the region so some a the locals just lap it up. Give them tax breaks. Then, where there was eight thousand pigs all of a sudden there is fifty thousand. They polluted Tulsa’s water supply. They poisoned the rivers in North Carolina. They run wild in Oklahoma until very recent when Oklahoma begin to lay out some rules. That’s when they commenced a come down here into the Texas panhandle. What a you think hog farms do to a rural panhandle community?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bob, thinking the old windmiller must have been brooding over these hog farm arguments for years. Privately he resolved to visit a hog farm and see for himself what was so awful.

  Jim Skin was back at the table with his plate of macaroni. He had been unable to resist the pineapple and a ring of the fruit crowned his pasta. “Uh-oh. Ace’s off and runnin again,” he said to Bob. “He’s on the hog farms.”

  And it was true. Ace’s eyes were gleaming as those of a wolf closing in on its prey. His voice rose. “Hog farms create uninhabitable zones just as sure as if land mines was planted there. Does a corporation have any kind a right come into the panhandle and wreck it for the people rooted there?”