That Old Ace in the Hole (13 page)

“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 with 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?”

“Ace, they’re here and you can’t get rid a them. People got a right a run businesses.” Jim Skin cut a wedge from the pineapple and winked at Bob.

“Up to a point. It is a matter a what Brother Mesquite calls ‘moral geography.’ In the old days you had no hog factory farms. Maybe fifty, sixty farmers and ranchers raisin a few pigs the traditional way. Each one a them families bought local. The kids went to school local. People got together for dances and dinners, they banked local and the money enriched the region.”

“Don’t hogs on small farms stink?” asked Bob, feeling he was scoring a point.

The old man cut him down with a hard look. “Sure, but they are spread out and they are in the open air. The smell is nothin compared a closin in a massive number of animals. You drive past a herd a cattle grazin in a pasture. There’s no smell. You drive past a feedlot—it stinks. With the hog farms, we are talkin a large number a confined animals. There’s the health factor. My brother Tater lives downwind from a hog farm and he gets sick from it. The Shattles live real close and Shattle’s in the hospital. Look at Jim Skin coughin his lungs out.”

“Amen.
Wagh! Wagh!
” said Jim Skin.

“Headaches, sore throat, dizziness. Them hogs are pumped full a antibiotics and growth hormones. Eat that pork and it gets in
you
. Bacteria and viruses adapt to the antibiotics so the day is comin when if we get sick the antibiotics can’t help.”

“Hell, Ace,” said Jim Skin, “don’t think a the hogs as animals—they are ‘pork units’ like corn or wood. That’s what they told us when I worked there.” The remainder of the pineapple ring lay untouched at the side of his plate.

“Jim Skin, I despise that idea. What do your own eyes show you? Pigs are livin creatures, not corn or wood. Frankly, it turns my stomach the inhuman way corporate hogs are raised.”

“They’re just pigs, aren’t they? I mean, they
are
animals?” Bob ventured in a tone as though he were making a joke, ready to laugh.

Ace ignored the joke but homed in on the question. “Pigs
are
animals, yes, but they are also intelligent and they like fresh air and the scenery, they make nests and frolic and take good care a their babies. But these—just cooped up to breed and breed, no nice dirt or weeds, no friends. Pigs are gregarious animals but not in them damn hog bunkers. Makes me sick.” And the old man got up and went into the bathroom.

There were days when there was a big rush on and Cy was swearing his way through platters that emptied as fast as he could fill them. Bob, who had always helped Uncle Tam with household chores, couldn’t stand watching the man whirl and scrape, got up and cleared the tables, loaded the prison dishwasher.

In a quiet moment Cy got him aside. He looked at Bob. “Preciate the help. You give me a hand, you eat free.”

So Bob hustled dishes and turned the steaks on the grill, always rushing back to his chair to hear more about farm and ranch troubles, hoping for leads on landowners ready to sell out. Things got lively when Ace Crouch was on hand to rail against corporate agribusiness and hog farms, and Bob listened to his rants with guilty excitement (what if he were found out?). Charles Grapewine complained against the fates and mistakes of the ancestors and Bob hated to miss any of his impassioned remarks.

“People first come into this country after the big outfits bust up,” said Grapewine, who farmed 15,000 acres of wheat and sorghum, “and they believed that old sayin, ‘Rain follas the plow.’ Feller made that up broke a damn many hearts and backs. Rain don’t folla no plow.”

“That’s right,” said Buckskin Bill, sucking at his coffee mug.

Grapewine went on. “Work? My God, you wouldn’t believe how hard them old grandaddies worked. And most a them buckled at the knee. Think about what they had a do just a git a crop started. Had a bresh out the fields, catclaw, mesquite and the most a this was handwork, week after week. After the bresh they had a root plow and rake. Hitch up the horses to a plow that had a deep-cuttin blade would slice through them bresh roots.”

Buckskin Bill, who had done his childhood time on the farm added, “Keep sharpenin that plow blade, too.”

“That’s right, Buckskin. After you got
that
done you hitch the horses up to a heavy rake that would yank the roots out. Then you’d git out there with the kids and the old woman and pile the roots and bresh into big heaps, let it dry. The best part was firin the bresh pile. Then you got a level off the field with a heavy blade, smooth out the lumps and hollows. Finally you’re ready to plow and harrow. And you’d use a real heavy breakin plow that turned it over at least a foot and as big a harrow as the horses could pull.”

“Don’t forget, if you was goin a irrigate you had a make the ditches.”

“Yes. And after that, if you wasn’t dead, it was easy—plantin, irrigatin where you could, weed-pullin, cultivatin, worryin about grasshoppers, hail, drought, flood, prairie fire. People today can’t work like that. Those old boys, their whole lives was crisis. There’s never been nothin else here but ranch or plow.”

Buckskin Bill reminded them of oil, the boom-and-bust days when a ranch kid could hire on as a weevil or roustabout, work his way up to tool dresser and eventually driller, could see the world, or at least the part of it that lay over the Permian Basin, moving along from rag town to rag town with the drifters and cardsharps and whores.

Charles Grapewine preferred to skip past oil. “Today we are
still
in crisis. There’s counties in the panhandle where they’ve had a go back to dry farmin. We got maybe twenty-five more years on these farms and then it’s gone. Last year my alfalfa made four inches. That’s all. I’m tellin you, it’s over.”

Bob’s attentive posture attracted some notice.

“By mercy God, Grapewine, you’ll shoot your mouth off to anybody, won’t you?” asked a lean scrag Bob had only heard addressed as Francis.

“Hell, I wasn’t sayin nothin that ain’t common enough to read in the paper.”

“Well, let him
read
it in the paper then.” And the man picked up a copy of the
Amarillo Daily
and tossed it on the table in front of Bob, jostling his cup so the coffee slopped out. He stood ready for a response, grimy, limber, with long hard muscles. “You don’t know who he is. You don’t know if you’re blabbin to some government man or one of them hog scouts, do you? Or somebody holdin paper on a man in this room?”

Cy Frease had been watching from under his now-greasy hat, the pearl-grey darkened by sweat and sauce to an organic brown, the panhandle equivalent to a chef’s starched toque.

“Francis,” he said. “You want a job warshin dishes and clearin tables?”

“Rather eat hot cow shit.” The rancher glared.

“Then leave Bob alone. He’s workin part-time for me and I told him he ought a get to know folks eat here. I lose him from you talkin ugly and you will take his place.”

“I hope you don’t regret hirin him,” said the rancher, tilting his hat back. He walked to the food tables where Cy stood with a pan of hot biscuits, took one, jammed it into the whipped cream and swallowed it whole.