That Old Ace in the Hole (20 page)

“Hot,” he said in a conversational tone. “Sweaty.”

But sweat was what she liked about him, and the smell, strong, stinky, salty, tobacco, horse, dirty hair. Ace often came home hot and dirty but he put out a more acrid body odor, smells of chain and metal, grease and brackish water. Ruby Loving was different.

Then he winked, stepped back, got in his truck and drove off.

Three months later she saw him again. She was in Borger with Ace, shopping, and there he was, wearing a new black felt hat with a braided leather band, coming out of a bar with another cowboy. Instantly her body flushed with electric shock, heat followed by slow somnolence. She watched the man with him turn into a barbershop. Ruby stepped along until he came to the pharmacy. A few minutes later he was back on the street holding a blue sack, the kind the druggist used for prescriptions. She wondered what he had bought—if he was sick or had a headache, or if the bag contained something intimate like rubbers. He walked down the street toward her. She looked hard at him, opened her mouth to say something when their eyes met, but he did not notice her and walked quickly past.

She was sitting in the car when Ace came out of the hardware store.

“What a you say, let’s eat at Greune’s roadhouse, have some a that chile.”

“All right.”

And there he was again, hat pushed back like Casey Tibbs, sitting at the counter drinking ice water and waiting for his food, a plate of chicken-fried steak with white gravy.

“Hey Ruby,” said Ace. “How’s it goin?”

“Ace! Goin good. Pretty much.”

“Member my wife, Vollie? Opened the gate for her when we was puttin in the mills at your father-in-law’s place?”

“How do,” he said, raising his hand and index finger as though they had never met, a denial of her bold hand that hot day months earlier.

“Come on over and eat with us,” said Ace, shifting his chair. “You still singin?”

“Yeah. There’s a new group started up, the Texas Coffee Cowboys. Some a the old Line Rider boys from Dalhart.”

He brought his plate, the ice water, a cup of coffee, spilling the coffee and slopping gravy. He was there. She thought she would faint sitting across from him, unable to eat, watching his red hands, warts on the fingers, dent the white bread, mop it through the gravy. He hardly looked at her, talking to Ace about water and mills. At the end Ace said, “Hear you guys are startin a family, that right?”

“Well, looks like it. Bound a happen, I spose.”

It was years before she pulled out of the feeling, scared, maybe love, or whatever it was for him. If she took a plum from a tree after fog or rain, beaded with droplets moisture, she thought of him, thought of that hot sweaty Texas time.

In 1942 Ace and Vollie’s only child, Phyllis, was born, a handful from the start, a wild, headstrong girl with a heart-shaped face and a tiny, squeaky voice. By the time she was six she could sing all the words to four songs—“You Are My Sunshine,” “Barbecue Bob,” “The Panhandle Shuffle,” “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).” Every Saturday night after supper Vollie made a big bowl of popcorn and they listened to
The Hit Parade
in the dark, in summer out on the porch, in winter in the parents’ bedroom, lying on their big bed, Ace warning Phyllis to watch out for stray popcorn, complaining that he was tired of getting up in the morning with hull dents all over his body. On the porch Ace and Vollie, drawn back in memory to the weekend dance halls, would sometimes get up and dance a little on the creaking boards, sun-dried and warped, while Phyllis would hang on to their legs and dance with them, singing the lyrics she knew.

“I guess you are goin a be a singer when you grow up,” said Ace.

“Yep. And you can come with me and lift me up on the stage,” said Phyllis.

“Why, I’d be proud a do that,” said Ace, but when she was seventeen Phyllis ran off to Tulsa, hoping to get a job singing with some band or other.

Phyllis, nineteen years old and sitting on the edge of a thin mattress, face white as lard, trembling hands, suffering from a near-fatal hangover. The man hauled his jeans up, fastened an ornate buckle, having a little trouble with it as the catch was bent.

“You seein me at my worst,” she said.

“Doubt it.” He had some experience of women at their worst. He reached under the sheet, felt for something.

“Listen. I got a ask you something. Did you—”

“Naw. You was too drunk. Be like fuckin a corpse.” He was pulling his boots on over bare feet. He took a comb from his shirt pocket, ran it through his tangled hair, took his hat off the lampshade, put it gently on his head, tilted it over his eyes.

“You did. It’s wet down there.”

“Naw.” He limped to the door, took up the guitar case that leaned against the dead heater. “See you.”

The door closed softly and she heard him going down the wooden stairs. She got up, head banging with old drink, looked down into the dirt parking strip. He emerged below, foreshortened. She supposed he would hitch back into town. The motel was on the west end of everything, a place of last resort. He was walking fast and she saw the wink of metal in his hand. He went straight to the dented-fender Mercury, got in. A torrent of blue smoke came from the muffler. She struggled with the window.

“That’s my car! You bastard, that’s my car!”

He was on the highway, heading north toward Oklahoma, and she still hadn’t got the window open.

She sat on the edge of the bed again, wondering if she should call the police. In the end she called Ace.

“Dad. I got all kinds a problems. Now don’t ask me questions about any of it, but I am in the Oak Leaf Motel in Lubbock. I guess it’s time I come home if you and Ma will have me. I done some stupid stuff. I’m flat broke, too. Looks like I was robbed. And my car is gone. What? It’s stole.”

There would be more phone calls over the years and Ace always came to bring her back home to Vollie and the child, Dawn. He thought to himself, remembering Vollie’s sister Maxine, that getting in the family way ran in the Eckenstein blood. Though Vollie had never produced another kid.

T
he late April morning panted in record-breaking heat. Bob stepped out of the bunkhouse into a glowing haze like a sauna fitted with an amber bulb. The paint tomcat, banished from the ranch house by LaVon after he knocked the tarantula boxes off the table, allowing the evil Tonya—still at large—to escape, lay on his side panting. Bob opened the Saturn’s door. Already the steering wheel was too hot to hold. He should have put the windshield screen in place the night before. Gripping the wheel with the feed cap he’d gotten at the grain elevator, he drove first to town to pick up the mail, then to LaVon’s house to help with her furniture moving.

A letter from Ribeye Cluke lay on the seat beside him. He thought he would wait until the end of the day to read it.

On Tuesday afternoons the Round Robin Baptist Bible Quilt Circle gathered at the house of one of the quilters. It was LaVon’s turn after many months, and all day Monday she cooked and baked treats and made ice cubes, had enlisted Bob’s help in moving boxes of papers and photographs intended for the
Rural Compendium
out of the living room, followed by all the furniture.

“Are you all from the same church?” asked Bob.

“Almost everbody, but not a hunderd percent. The most is members a the Sweet Loam Babtist, but there’s some from different ones. Rella Nooncaster’s Gospel a Grace, and Mrs. Stinchcomb is a pillar a the Freewill Babtists, and Freda Beautyrooms is a Methodist, though she don’t hardly go except to Babtist gatherins.”

In the emptied room they set up an enormous worktable made from two painted sheets of exterior plywood on sawhorses. He carried folding chairs down from the attic, four at a time, thinking to himself that what comes down must go back up. The roof timbers creaked and snapped as the heat built and he believed that LaVon could bake a cake up there. In the kitchen he got a glass of water from the refrigerator, sweet, cold Ogallala water pumped by the windmill. It was so cold it made his temples ache, a beautiful chilliness as the heat swelled up outside. The day’s heat pounded like blood pulsing through veins, struck down from sky tinted like a windshield, darker at the top, and embedded in it the malevolent grilling sun.

The refreshments would be served on the shady porch, said LaVon, for it was forecast to cool off in late afternoon, and, if Bob truly wanted to hear about Woolybucket folks, he could stick around, help set out the food and iced tea. (LaVon was, she said, fixing to serve limeade sherbet floats, canned oysters and cold rice salad, recipes from her 1955
Esquire Party Book
.)

“You’ll hear more about the old days and what made the town work than if you lived in Woolybucket for fifty years. We started the quilt circle in 1978 with five women. There’s twenty now. We meet for three hours each week. That’s sixty hours a week times fifty weeks—we don’t meet Christmas or Easter weeks—equals more than three thousand work hours in each quilt. You can’t put a value on them. The first one was the Garden of Eden and you wouldn’t believe how beautiful that quilt was. It only stayed in Woolybucket for a little while. It was raffled off—they are all raffled off—to raise money for a new roof for the church and by the strangest stroke Father Christopher, the priest at the Harmonica Catholic Church up in Popeye, Oklahoma, won it. Then he gave it to some folks I won’t name who didn’t hardly have any blankets and it deep winter. Well, wouldn’t you know, they turned right around and sold it for fifty dollars, I heard they bought cigarettes and beer with the money. The quilt ended up in Dallas at some art gallery and there was a picture of it on the cover of a fancy art magazine. I had a copy somewhere, but I couldn’t find it now if you jabbed me with a cattle prod.”

“I wouldn’t dream of that,” murmured Bob.

“At first they were raffled off at the New Year’s time, right on New Year’s Eve. That used a be the
big
holiday in Woolybucket County. The German people always made a big thing a New Year’s. But now it’s just when we get it finished. This one we’re workin on has to be done by June. They’re rafflin it at the Barbwire Festival. If I do say so myself, the quilts are beautiful. We’re lucky to have women in this community that sew with the evenest, tiniest stitches you can imagine, almost invisible, and silk thread which comes finer. That reminds me, I better get the silk thread box out a the back room. Well, here’s that magazine I didn’t think I’d find,
Art in America,
funny name for a magazine. I’ll be back in a minute.” She disappeared into the small rooms at the back of the house.

He looked at the quilt pictured on the magazine cover. Even he could see it was a fabulous work of stitchery, embroidery and appliqué. In the center of the Garden stood a magnificent apple tree loaded with shining satin apples, and twined in its branches was an oversize diamondback rattler with a tongue of tiny black beads that seemed to flicker. In the cocoa-colored soil grew Mexican hat, Tahoka daisy and rabbitbrush, with purple groundcherry creeping around two knobby boulders. Adam was naked except for cowboy boots and a hat, which he held in front of his crotch. He was stitched all over with black curly hair. Eve, chatting gaily with the snake, her back to the viewer, showed long pink buttocks. She was wearing a charm bracelet, each charm sharply detailed, and Bob could make out a dangling state of Texas. An apple core lay on the ground.

“Adam seems pretty hairy,” Bob called to LaVon, who was in the next room.

“Yes, he was modeled on Cy Frease, runs the Old Dog now but back then he was just a local cowboy. I don’t know who brought it up to make Adam hairy, but it seemed a be the right thing to do. And Cy, why he’s the hairiest man in the county. Why I won’t eat there. You don’t want a find one a them hairs in your gravy.”

LaVon returned, shaking a wooden box. “Then the
second
quilt Doll McJunkin won, he’s the one delivers mail, and he sold it for a thousand dollars to the Texas Christian Museum in Wichita Falls. I believe it was Jonah and the Whale. I remember the whale’s little bitty eye like a watermelon seed. It was some old jet button Freda Beautyrooms found in her sewing box. They used a make really beautiful buttons in the old days. I can see why people collect them. The whale was divin and it filled up the whole quilt. All you could see a Jonah was his legs stickin out of the leviathan’s mouth. And there was his empty boat at the top a the water. There’s been other church groups, especially the Missionary Babtists, started up tryin a make quilts like these, but they haven’t got the know-how. They haven’t got the feel. You wouldn’t
walk
on one a their quilts compared a ours.”

“What subject are you all working on this year?” asked Bob.

“This year it’s Cain killin Abel. Wait’ll you see it.”

At one o’clock sharp the first truck, an elderly grey Ford from the late 1940s, arrived. Two white-haired women headed for the front door, carrying cross-stitched sewing bags with wooden handles. The driver took a long time to descend from the truck and helped herself along with a cane. They all wore flowery, shin-length dresses, and when the wind swept the skirts forward they seemed Botticelli’s
Three Graces
(panhandle-style) grown old.

They had just finished exclaiming over LaVon’s new cobalt blue fleur-de-lys trivet when two more trucks pulled in, each disgorging several women. The male drivers moved the trucks near a corral and got out to stand together and lean on the rails. One lighted a cigarette. Within fifteen minutes the house was full of women, almost all of them elderly or middle-aged, though there was one beautiful girl with black hair who looked to be barely twenty. She was heavily pregnant, so swollen and clumsy Bob feared an obstetric emergency. LaVon introduced her as Dawn Crouch, the granddaughter of Ace Crouch, the windmill man, and said that she had made her grandparents Ace and Vollie a fine quilt in the windmill blades pattern.

“Yeah, and I put a lightning-streak border in it,” said the girl. Bob noticed she was not wearing a wedding ring. As fast as the older women were introduced he forgot their names, except for Freda Beautyrooms, a short woman with heavy bowlegs whom Bob guessed to be seventy until the old lady crowed she was “ninety-three years young.” She gripped a black leather case the size of a box for child’s shoes.

“Well, I see Archbell isn’t here again,” she said in a savage voice, lowering herself onto a chair.

“That’s right,” said LaVon. “She’s been havin a lot a difficulty the last few months. She forgets, she’s unsteady, and her temper’s none too good.”

“She’s old and she’s crotchety. She was never the brightest bulb in the socket anyway. Remember the year her son and daughter-in-law gave her that nice pink electric blanket and she sat there workin away for hours, until she pulled out all the wires? Didn’t have a clue.” She opened her case revealing hundreds of needles in graduated sizes, thimbles, scissors like cranes’ bills.

“She never snapped back from those burns. When her gas stove blowed up? Just melted the nylons right onto her poor legs.”

“Why
I’d
never wear them pantyhose.” She handed her chosen needle to LaVon for threading, saying her eyes were too old to find the needle’s eye.

The women arranged the sections of the Cain and Abel quilt on the table. The ground was a great tawny pasture dotted with mesquite and Spanish bayonet. In the distance there was a corral and a figure bending over a branding fire. In the foreground, a burly farmer, his face contorted with rage, stood over a recumbent shepherd, preparing to smash his face (which resembled that of James Dean) with a huge rock. Three blue-eyed sheep looked on. Blows had already been struck and copious blood stained the ground. The killer’s blue overalls were spattered with red satin gore.

LaVon explained to Bob. “We had quite a discussion about whether a put Cain and Abel in those stripy robes and sandals you always see in Bible pictures, but in the end we voted a go with the way people around here dress. To make it more real-like.”

“Drive the message home,” said Rella Nooncaster, a sallow woman as thin as a chopstick, her white hair in a spiky butch cut. She spoke in a whiny slur without moving her upper lip. The bottom lip twisted and curled prodigiously.

Another woman, middle-aged, with crimped brown hair like auto upholstery stuffing, came in.

“Here is Mrs. Lengthy Boles. Mrs. Boles is our artist, Bob,” said LaVon. “She draws out the quilt designs. She went to art school. And she makes gorgeous whitework quilts and art. That picture a Jesus in the kitchen made out a corn and seeds? That’s one a hers.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Boles to Bob. “Crop art. It’s called crop art. Mostly religious pictures or family scenes or local landmarks—I done the bank, the school with the schoolbuses all corn, but instead a paint I use seeds, all kind a seeds, the bounty a God’s hand. I got over three hunderd kinds a seeds that I use. Some are wild. I like the plum pits for belt buckles.” She unrolled a quilt section that showed a half-finished cactus in bloom, quickly threaded a needle she plucked from her dress collar and, after a fuss to find the right color silk, began working on the fleshy leaves.

On the main panel the fallen sheep man, Abel, wore jeans and a plaid shirt with pearl buttons. His dented cowboy hat lay on the stained ground near several broken teeth. Nearby a Border collie snarled at Cain.

“Abel looks something like James Dean,” said Bob.

“Didn’t you see
East of Eden
?” said Dawn Crouch. “I embroidered that face and I
wanted
it to look like James Dean.
East of Eden
was based on the Abel and Cain story. We studied it in English class. When I was in school.” She smiled at Bob in a way that made him uneasy, then turned back to working up a sheep, the effect of curly wool achieved through French knots.

“I didn’t see it,” said Bob, thinking suddenly of
Rat Women
and the films he had seen with Orlando—
Mudhoney
,
It’s Alive!
,
Psych-Out
,
The Tingler
and
Sin in the Suburbs
.

The women worked at separate pieces to be added to the scene.

“These mesquite leaves are the worst things to sew,” said the sallow woman. “Would have been easier to embroider them.”

“Oh Rella, remember the deer antlers when we did Noah’s Ark? Now
those
were terrible.” Mrs. Stinchcomb, grey and self-effacing, spoke as though pleading.

“Yes, they were. I’ll say it, they were worse than mesquite leaves. But there’s so many a these I might go blind before I get done.”

“Well, I wonder if it’s goin a storm, it’s so hot out there,” said Jane Ratt, a hefty woman with yellow hair scooped by side combs into a froth atop her head. “Rella, let me borrow your little scissors. I left mine at Hattie’s last week.” She cut a trailing thread.

“I think it might. It’s got that feeling. I can feel that old ache in my pelvis.”

“Tornado weather.”

“Knock on wood.”

Jane Ratt glanced out the window, saw her grandson Billy tear open a package of potato chips and pour them into his mouth. It was his twenty-second birthday and she was still smarting from his rejection of her little gift.

She had asked around to discover where to get one of the metal fish she saw fastened to so many fishermen’s cars; that would make a nice present. At the garage they told her the only place that carried them was over in Woodward at the Christian Superstore. It seemed an odd place for fishing supplies, but she had driven over, found the store, found the fish, purchased it and had it gift wrapped. The store wrapping paper was printed with tiny crosses. She had given it to him that morning.