That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  “The drummer answers him back. ‘Mr. Skieret, I appreciate your sentiments, but the days of free grass are in jeopardy. Many American farmers wish to work this rich Texas land, but they fear the ravages of uncontained cattle who trample crops as they will. This fencing, the most excellent in the world, all steel and miles of it, is the answer for them. It protects their labors from stray cows, sir, and increasingly cattle roaming unchecked on the plains are regarded as nuisance animals. This remarkable wire fence can contain the most unruly critters. This barb fence is making Texas a farmer’s paradise.’

  “‘I don’t like to call a man a liar, but I doubt this hatband war can hold two sheep, sure enough not crazy longhorns. And never in aitch can’t make Texas a paradise.’

  “The salesman drinks the rest a his sarsaparilla.

  “‘Willin to put it to the test, sir? If you will supply the longhorns and make an interestin wager, we’ll see by demonstration how well the war holds.’

  “Jake Steddy tries to warn Skieret. ‘Don’t take that wager,’ he says. ‘He’ll win, he’ll win over you good and hard.’

  “But Skieret can’t be told nothin and he takes the bet. They arrange to set up the barbwar corral out on Skieret’s place and then drive some cattle in.

  “Says the salesman, ‘If they break through, it’s my fifty to you and I’ll take my war elsewhere, to where men are reasonable. If they don’t break through, you pay me fifty and buy a boxcar of war. I’ll learn your men how to set the posts and string the war tighter than a fiddle string. But it’ll take me two days a build a barbwar corral for this test.’

  “Even with help it took three days set the posts and string eight strands of war, stretchin it tight with a wagon wheel. The two hands Skieret supplied were dirty old codgers; neither one see fifty again. They worked at it, spittin tobacco and gruntin, makin remarks about the war which cut their hands pretty bad. One a the reels slid off the back of the wagon and ripped the old feller’s boot from top to heel.

  “‘You’ll sing its praises one day,’ says the salesman. ‘It’s the cowhand’s friend.’”

  LaVon stopped talking and began to straighten up the alignment of the sideboard.

  After a minute Bob asked, “Did the barbwire salesman win the bet?” for it seemed to him that once again LaVon was going to leave the story high and dry.

  “Um-hm,” she said, arranging the boxes on her worktable. He thought nothing more was coming but after another long silence she continued.

  “Where they had the test was empty ground except a braked windmill and a empty stock tank. See, that was Skieret’s trick.

  “On the day people ride out from town, gather a safe distance away from that war corral, which looked mighty flimsy to them. The old cowboys ride off, and come back a hour later hard-drivin a big bunch a nasty-tempered longhorns. Mr. Skieret is with them. He wasn’t takin chances, had kept those old cows away from water for two days until they got ugly. After the cows is in the war corral, Skieret goes over to the windmill, real casual-like, and releases the brake. The water begin a pump out into the tank, and a course them cows smelled it.

  “Them thirsty critters can’t see much of anything between them and the rest a Texas, so they charge the war, jump back from the sharp barbs, rush again until the blood run down. After about fifteen minutes they mill and stand there with their sides heavin, and they don’t move, even when the salesman hurrahs and slaps his hat, prods them with a long stick. Skieret shouts and screams but in the end he has to pay up.”

  Bob, enchanted by LaVon’s windy, said, “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me about your grandfather’s scarred back, now, would you?”

  “Someday,” said LaVon enigmatically. “And thanks for your help.”

  Bob got in the Saturn and drove to the pay phone outside the Woolybucket post office. A telephone company truck was parked beside it, a middle-aged telephone employee turning the inside bolts on the floor.

  “Are you fixing the phone?” asked Bob Dollar.

  “Fixin? We are removin it. Phone company’s pullin out all the pay phones in the panhandle. Maintenance costs too much. Use your cell phone.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Better get one. These babies are gone. There’s one we ain’t pulled out yet over at the café, if you got a make a call.”

  “You can’t take that one out. Must be fifty people a day call on that phone.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me. I don’t give the orders.” He deftly blew his nose on the ground near Bob Dollar’s foot, turned back to his work.

  At the Old Dog he put in his call.

  “Hey, Uncle Tam. They’re pulling out the pay phones down here. I got to get one of those lousy cell phones.”

  “They’re talking about taking them out here, too. Call it ‘progress.’ Glad to hear your voice. It sure is lonesome here by myself. Anyway, what’s cooking down in Texas?”

  “Chicken-fried steak. Not too much else. I sat through this old lady quilting bee. But Uncle Tam, you should have seen the Art Plastic pins and necklaces these old ladies were wearing. Fantastic stuff.” He described Freda Beautyrooms’ brooch and heard his uncle’s breath quicken.

  “Old ladies? Can you make them an offer and buy these things? You know, say five bucks? Old ladies always need a little money for pills and slippers and stuff.”

  “I don’t know. I can try, but don’t hold your breath. These are real sharp old gals. Most of them are well off. These are panhandle ladies. They live to be a hundred fifty years old and smarter and richer every year.”

  “Well, make them an offer. Go as high as twenty. If you have to. Try, anyway. Maybe I should come down there myself?”

  “No. It’s complicated enough. These are real suspicious people. I been reported to the sheriff five or six times for running on the road. It’s like nobody does that down here. It’s like if they didn’t do it in the old days they don’t do it now. I’m in a time warp zone.”

  “Bob, do you remember how to tell whether something is Bakelite? There’s a lot of celluloid and acrylic that looks like it.”

  “It’s the smell, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Bob. Good for you. But you have to be quick. Rub the piece very hard and fast with your finger and then, real quick, smell it. Bakelite’s got that funny musty smell. That’s the phenol. Another way is to hold it under hot running water for about thirty seconds and then smell it. Or dip it into boiling water. And it makes a certain sound, too, if you tap it against another piece, a kind of miniature dull thud, but recognizing that only comes with practice. The other plastics and celluloid make a higher clacking. It takes practice.”

  “Uh, listen, Uncle Tam, are you still in touch with Bromo?”

  “Yeah. We talk pretty often.” His tone was guarded.

  “Next time please ask him if he knows of any more books like the ones he sent me. That Abert report is pretty interesting but I’m halfway through with it now. I don’t know, all that stuff, Bent’s Fort and the old Santa Fe Trail gets me going.”

  “Well, sure, I’ll ask him. When are you coming up for a weekend?”

  “Pretty soon, actually. I got to pick up some different clothes. It’s hot down here and getting hotter. And I’d like to see you and catch up on the news. Orlando still around?”

  “There’s not that much news. And I haven’t seen your big friend since he showed up here right after you left. I suppose he’s around somewhere. But not so I can see him. It would be good if you came up for the weekend pretty soon. I can show you about the Bakelite.”

  18

  JUST A FEW QUESTIONS

  On a windy April morning Sheriff Hugh Dough was not pleased to look out the window and see Francis Scott Keister’s truck and horse trailer pull up. He wondered if the horse’s tail had grown back in after the military cut Slauter had inflicted on the animal. He listened to Keister’s cowboy boots on the stairs; taking them two at a time, an indication he was smarting over something.

  “G
ood day, Mr. Keister.” Keister’s watch had many dials and hands and the sheriff tried to count them.

  “Yeah. Listen, what do you know about that guy’s stayin at LaVon Fronk’s place? He’s around everwhere but it ain’t too clear what he is doin here.” His voice dripped with contempt. “He’s from Colorado. City boy from Denver. He hangs out at the grain elevator and he helps Cy Frease a little at the café when it gets busy. Cy claims he’s workin for him. Part-time. But the guy says he’s workin for a luxury home developer, lookin for land with a nice view and some water. You ever hear such crap?”

  “Well, maybe he is.”

  “Yeah, and maybe he’s a government man too, lookin into anything—land prices, lifestyles, water use study. Who the hell knows? Not me, but I’d like to. Can you find out who he is and what he is doin down here? Name is Bob Dollar. He’s drivin a late-model Saturn. I wrote down the license plate number. Goddamn, I’m a Texas native, I was born right here in the panhandle, right in Woolybucket. Us native panhandle Texans don’t whine and bitch about wind and dust and hard times—we just get through it. We work hard. We’re good neighbors. We raise our kids in clean air. We got a healthy appreciation for the outdoors. We pray and strive to remain here forever. We are Christians. We are bound to the panhandle like in a marriage. It’s like for sicker or poorer, richer or healthier, better or best. Livin here makes us tough, hard and strong. The women are tough too, the ones can stick it out, anyway. This is horse and cow country and ever dollar you squeeze out a the place, by God you’ve earned it. This jerk came in here and starts snoopin around. Let him haul his sorry ass back to Denver. Let him pack up and git on the road.”

  “I’ll make a few inquiries.” Five dials and seven hands.

  “O.K., see what you can find out and maybe I’ll vote for you next election. You don’t find out, won’t nobody vote for you.”

  Bob Dollar was driving north and south, east and west, exploring back roads with a stack of maps on the seat beside him, looking for run-down properties, which he would check on at the county land records office. When he found a promising site he sought out the owner and brought the conversation around to selling and buying acreage without ever saying the words “hog farm” or “Global Pork Rind.”

  One late afternoon he was under the brow of the caprock hiking along a trail of orange dust so fine it seemed a kind of defiant liquid, climbing a slight incline through shrubs and violet-colored cacti like spiny cow tongues. In the undergrowth cardinals turned leaves and scratched up fallen twigs. Above him rose a landscape of red baguettes headed by the grey crust of stone, the great caprock layer, a section of the limestone escarpment that wavers diagonally across the Texas panhandle, intersecting with the Canadian River to make a huge crooked X. To the north and west were the dry high plains, the treeless Llano Estacado, and to the south and southeast the moister southern plains of ordinary Texas. He squinted his eyes at the landscape, trying to imagine a sea of hog farms.

  The trail crossed a sinuous stream again and again, water a few inches deep braiding thinly over gravel the color of tangerine peel. The cliffs were streaked with chalky raptor excrement. On a projecting knob flattened and heeled like a human foot, wild rock doves clustered. A cloud came, unloaded hail and rain; the river rose, the steep, eroded trail ran with red water and in the encroaching twilight the butt end of a mule deer looked fleetingly like the face and muzzle of a wolf. As Bob Dollar left and headed back to Woolybucket a ringneck pheasant burst out of the grass and flew low across the road.

  He was on the edge of Woolybucket by sunset and running east on a caliche road colored by low sun to the blond of raw sugar with deep blue undertones in the shadows. He knew this property belonged to a cantankerous woman in Lubbock who, when he drove down and talked to her, behaved as though he had made an assault on her honor. He was startled when a siren went off behind him and the sheriff’s lights flashed. He couldn’t think why he was being pulled over and kept on driving for another half mile. But there was no one else on the road and in the rearview mirror he could see the sheriff gesturing and pointing to the side of the road. Fearing sagebrush stobs he pulled over gingerly.

  “Let me see your registration,” said the sheriff, silently counting Bob’s fingers, then his own by twitching each one. “No, not your license. The registration.”

  As he handed the paper over it dawned on Bob Dollar that the registration was undoubtedly in the name of Global Pork Rind. He had been found out.

  The sheriff was silent for a long minute, then he said, “You’d better come down to the office and see me sometime tomorrow. We need a have a little talk.” He counted the seconds—five—before Bob said, “All right.”

  Bob Dollar stopped at the Busted Star for water.

  “You know,” said LaVon, who heard the door slam and came out of the dining room to shovel extra sugar in her coffee, “I been meanin a tell you. The real interestin one of the Crouches is not Tater, but his brother, Ace. Ace Crouch is a windmill man, sold em, put em up, fixed em. That was in the old days before they got the deep pumps and the irrigation. Now he mostly fixes the old ones. Ace lives in Cowboy Rose. He quarreled with old man Crouch and walked off the ranch at an early age, and that’s how come Tater got in the saddle. By rights the place should a gone to Ace, but his daddy left him a deck a cards and a pile a sucker rod. He tried a git the will broke but it didn’t do no good. Their daddy was real destructive to boys and if he taken against you, you’d never please him. He was a old man when Ace and Tater was born and he never did understand boys. He had went to work on the Panama Canal way, way back. He was a dynamite man, handled the dynamite. He told it that there was so many accidents human flesh flew through the air like birds. You go on the cemetery road north of Cowboy Rose and there’s a little old stone buildin there? That was Ace’s windmill shop when he was partners with the Dutchman. Before they had their big place in Amarilla. Ace lives up in Cowboy Rose to this day. His mean old daddy is in the cemetery here in Woolybucket. My husband worked for him when he was a boy. Ace, I mean, not the daddy. Ace and the Dutchman. Ace’s wife would like to sell off their place. She would like to move to California. She’ll probly have to wait until Ace passes before that comes to happen. Their granddaughter was at the quiltin day last week back. You might remember her. She was the pregnant one. Dawn. Her mother, Phyllis, was there too, and I have to say she was as bad as Dawn when she was young. Ace and Vollie has had a cross to bear. Ace was a important person around here. His daddy was big in the Klan back in the twenties. They say he was the Exalted Cyclops.” She saw the expression of distaste on Bob’s face.

  “Now Bob, you come down here from Denver and you do not understand this place. Probly you never will, seein you wasn’t brought up here. In them days the Klan was not a bunch of crazy supremacists but decent men who was strong Christians, very patriotic and chivalrous. They more or less watched over communities and promoted Christian morals. It’s true they didn’t care for Nigroes, but no more than they didn’t care for Catholics and Jews. And that wasn’t the point, anyway. They wanted to see people behave decent. The women a the Ku Klux Klan was strong on community morals. And they had to be!

  “But the KKK set out to improve. They’d get the men to build onto them two-room shacks so they could separate out the boys and girls. They talked a the mothers. The girls that was in trouble, why they carried them over to Amarilla to the Unwed Mothers’ Home. They kept their eyes open and they could tell if a girl was that way before she knew it herself. At Christmas they packed up baskets a food for poor families, called it a present from ‘Santa Klaus.’ No, you won’t hear me say nothin bad about the Klan. It was a community organization dedicated to decent Christian behavior. I tell you, everbody wanted a join. I personally think the panhandle is a better place because a them.”

  There was the sound of footsteps on the porch and a tall youth, thick blond hair in a ponytail, came in. He was wearing magenta tights and a black jersey, worn cycling shoes. A gold chain glinte
d at his neck. His face was thin and narrow, tanned, and where not stubbled, gleaming with the oily exudate of sweat. There were raw scrapes down his right leg and arm, beaded with tiny drops of blood. He looked intensely angry.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” said LaVon.

  “Look,” he said, opening the refrigerator and tearing the leg off a cold chicken, “I am tired, I’m dirty, I’m hot, I’m hungry, and I hurt because some son of a bitch run me off the road, so I’m in no mood for sarcastic little gibes. Got any beer?” he said, turning around and spotting Bob. “Who the hell is he?”

  “No beer. Coolbroth, this here is Bob Dollar; Bob, this is my son Coolbroth. He skolps. It was him carved them figures out by the bunkhouse. He turns up ever now and then. Cool, Bob is rentin the bunkhouse. You will have to sleep in graindaddy’s room.”

  Coolbroth Fronk turned and looked at Bob Dollar. There passed between them a cold and immediate animosity.

  19

  THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE

  Dutifully Bob went to the sheriff’s office in Woolybucket the next morning. There was no receptionist, only Dispatcher Christine Logevall putting green polish on her toenails with painful effort, as her spare tire and arthritis kept her from bending close to her feet. She did not look up when Bob came in, and after hesitating he knocked on the frosted glass door labeled SHERIFF.

  “Yep,” said a noncommittal voice and Bob pushed the door open.

  He had never been in a sheriff’s office before but quickly grasped that it was an uncomfortable place unless you were the lawful inhabitant or his deputy. The walls were the dull pistachio green beloved of small municipalities. An aged dog collar held down a stack of papers whose corners were riffled by the sheriff’s electric fan. Despite the fan the room was stuffy and stale. There were bars on the only window. An axe hung on the wall and a flowery necktie dangled from the coatrack. On the wall behind the desk Bob saw a photograph of the sheriff embracing a trophy the size of a teenager and, below it, in a shadowbox, a pair of oversized handcuffs with explanatory lettering saying that these had been custom-made for Jack “Big Wrist” Derrida. Two hulking computers from the 1980s, black with grime, buzzed on the sheriff’s desk, and in the corner a table bore a printer, a dinosaur fax machine and an electric coffee pot from Sears. The telephone also was a relic from the past, the plain black 1949 Bell 500, a rotary dial instrument with the loud drill of a movie telephone where the heroine lets it ring four times before answering.