That Old Ace in the Hole (27 page)

“Howdy, Bob,” said the monk-cowboy turning to him. “Brother Mesquite from the Triple Cross. You’re doin a good job here.” And to Cy he said, “I’ll ask who wants a get a early start on the day. Brother Sammy’s up before light and he’d enjoy to ride his bike more than he does. And he’s good in the kitchen. Makes a mean pizza.”

He carried his plate back to Ace Crouch and they began to talk again. Bob got a cup of coffee, sat at the next table and listened.

Jim Skin came in, plastered with grease. “Hey there, Ace, Brother Mesquite. Cy, what’s good today?”

“Ham steaks with gravy, mashed taters, new green peas, rhubarb fool.”

“Nothin with pineapple?”

“Matter of fact there is. Pineapple on the ham steaks, and pineapple-tapioca puddin. Only made a little bit. Right there on the end. Most people prefers rhubarb.”

“It’s O.K. But pineapple is so goddamn good it ought a be against the law. For everbody but me.”

He brought his plate to Bob’s table.

“How you doin?” he said. “I’m Jim Bob Bill Skin. Just call me Jim.” He had a bad neck, long, as though stretched, and thick, with an Adam’s apple as large as his knee. Dark hairs grew unevenly on it in whorls and clusters, disappearing into a chest mat like moldy black hay.

“Bob Dollar. Doing good. How about yourself?”

“Good as a pig in a waller. You try this pineapple puddin? It is
good
.” He was eating the pudding first as though it might get away.

“I’m not crazy about pineapple. Rather have the rhubarb stuff.”

“Rhubarb fool.
Wagh!
My mother used a make it. If us kids managed a steal a couple stalks from some old biddy’s garden. I know who you are. You’re stayin out a LaVon’s, right?”

“Yeah. In the old bunkhouse.”

“Well, you can answer me something. I heard she keeps tarantulas and scorpeens for pets. That right?”

“Tarantulas, yes. But she’s only got one now. The cat knocked the other one’s cage over and it got away. No scorpions far as I know.”

“Holy Jeez. So it’s loose somewheres? The tarantula?
Wagh!
”

“Seems like it. Somewhere in the house. I walk real slow whenever I go in and keep my eyes open. It’s the bad one got loose. Big grey bugger with a design on its back.”

“What she ought a do is get in one a them termite guys and gas it to death,” said Jim Skin, coughing,
“Wagh! Wagh!”

“She doesn’t want to kill it. She wants to find it. She says it’s a very valuable animal.”

“Come on! Who’d pay good—
Wagh!
—money for a fuckin spider?”

“LaVon, I guess. Now I got a question for you.”

“What?”

“Somebody told me to ask you about your daddy—said he was quite a local character.”

“He was. And not exactly local.
Wagh!
See, I don’t come from here, and neither did my deddy. I was born up in Guymon, Guymon Oklahoma. My deddy was from Struggle. That’s Oklahoma too, west a Guymon. Actually he was born in Arizona. His folks went down there pickin cotton in the dirty thirties. In Oklahoma they was tenement farmers growin cotton in Custer County, not in the panhandle, but the whole system collapsed and they went to pickin cotton in Arizona.
Wagh!
Thirty-seven out a forty families pulled out a the Oklahoma panhandle them days. It was worse there than down here in Texas. But he
is
known all over, Texas and Oklahoma, parts a Colorado, New Mexico.
Wagh! Wagh!
”

“Why was he so famous?”

“Partly it’s because he got married so much. Fourteen times. And all fourteen a them slipped away from him. He couldn’t hold a woman. He could get em but he couldn’t hold em.”

“I guess that’s true for a lot of people,” said Bob.

“He had a little word or two for each one a them, like a little song. Here’s what he’d say: ‘Harriet was a deep-water storm, blowed out all my—
Wagh!
—sails; Calvina was a Texas mule trade; Josie was jinglebobs and blue honey; red-headed gal was paradise lost; that old horseface Brigitte belonged in a corral, but she didn’t like mine; Jean was all cob and catalog; Lucy reminded me of a—
Wagh!
—camel’s ass; and old Susie, she was moonlight and a whiskey bottle on a white rock.’ He’d just reel that off. That was my—
Wagh!
—mama, old Susie. And she did like to drink before she got religion and spent all her time in prior. But from all these women only three squallin kids made it into the world, me and my half-sister; we used to call her Little Girl with Her Hair All Hangin Down, just ‘Little’ for short. And my brother Hoit. He died when he was around nine or ten. Was supposed a bring a pitchfork to deddy down in the hayfield, but he sort a got to runnin, pushin the pitchfork along on the path in front a him, and it cotched a tine in a bunch a grass roots and as he was movin pretty fast the handle jammed into his gut real hard. Ruptured his gut. He bleeded a death inside before they could get help. Doctor said that even if he’d been right there with all his instruments laid out there wasn’t nothin he could a done. Oh my God, we was dirt-poor. Here I am, forty-six years old and have yet to own my first bicycle. My sister’s in the entertainment binness in Vegas. When my deddy died they buried him in—
Wagh!
—Struggle. He is buried in the lightbulb cemetery—
Wagh!
—up there where a man’s worth is spelled out by the watts a the lightbulbs set in the ground around the grave. Know what old Susie picked for him? Three burned-out refrigerator bulbs. She said he didn’t deserve no more.
Wagh! Wagh! Wagh!
I always felt bad about that. I always told myself I’d go up there and put in bigger bulbs for him. Hoit’s buried up there too.”

“What was the other thing your father was famous for?”

“
Wagh!
His dick. That’s how he got all the women. He had a dick like a stallion. That’s how come he’s so good known. Some guy thought he was heavy built would come up and say, ‘I hear you got a big one. Ten bucks says I’n beat you.’ And then they’d lay the money out, and other guys would bet and then they’d unzip. My deddy always won.
Wagh!
It was never even close. By rights I should a inherited some a that, but it didn’t work that way. All I got was the average.
Wagh!
Don’t seem fair.”

“I’d like to see that graveyard,” said Bob.

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth, it’s known a some as a nigger graveyard. My deddy wasn’t no nigger but he had Indan blood and Indan kin in that—
Wagh!
—boneyard and that’s where he wanted a be laid. There is whites in there too. But nowadays it got to be known as the nigger lightbulb cemetery. But if you’d like—
Wagh!
—to see it, I would admire to drive you up there. Get me some fresh lightbulbs for his—
Wagh!
—grave.”

“O.K. When you want to do it?”

“Sattaday? I could—
Wagh!
—do it then.”

“Well, I guess I could too. What time you want to meet?”

“Say nine
A.M
. right here.”

They shook on it.

“Wagh
!”

“By the way,” said Bob casually, “when’s the cockfight?”

“Tonight, ain’t it?” said Jim Skin. “At Flores’s barn in Wasp, just over the Oklahoma line. It’s behind the old Esso gas station. Why, you goin?”

“I might.”

He drove slowly through the back streets of Woolybucket, many of them unpaved, the traffic kicking up enough dust to keep vacuum cleaners humming. There were many vacant lots in town, some of them places to store old machinery and vehicles, others garden plots where residents worked on their tomatoes and string beans in the cool of the evenings. A few people still kept horses and it was not unusual to see them riding slowly around town, to the post office (where the old hitching rail was still handy) or the feed store. A bald man everyone called Red was the local expert on animal diseases and the complaints of large stock, and many of the riders stopped by his front yard for advice.

The asparagus days were upon them. LaVon had been busy pickling slender stalks and freezing the stouter ones. Everyone had special asparagus recipes—stir-fried beef with asparagus, cream of asparagus soup, asparagus strudel, asparagus and noodles. LaVon had insisted he try her Salade de Saint-Jacques, a knot of defrosted scallops heaped in the center of a plate and radiating from this hub fourteen asparagus spears, atop each a thread-thin raw enoki mushroom. The sauce, composed of equal parts of horseradish, gin, tomato paste and whipped cream, took his breath away.

“It’s unique, LaVon,” he said, and she nodded, pleased.

After the dishes were in the washer Bob drove over on the floury back roads to Cowboy Rose. There was a tiny bakery there and on Wednesday—cookie day—they had vanilla-pecan wafers, for which Bob had developed a strong affection. The bakery was strategically located across the street from the elementary school and if he didn’t get there before three o’clock there would be no cookies left.

Cowboy Rose looked as though a certain amount of wind had swept through it, for trash was scattered and there were twigs and branches in the road near the highway picnic pull-off. The sky was shaved clean except for a stubble of pale clouds on the horizon.

He came out of the bakery with his warm sack of cookies and drove to the tiny park with its shade trees, where he planned to enjoy the first half dozen. He found an empty bench near the playground, swept the fallen leaves and twigs from it and, while he ate cookies, watched two or three preschoolers play, their mothers sitting on the concrete curbing around the sandpit. An older girl, certainly old enough to be in school, perhaps the fifth grade, was twirling around a maypole affair, clutching a leather strap attached to a nylon cord. Each time she swung herself off the ground for a spin she cried, “Wheee!” in a high, put-on voice. He was instantly, with the speed of a slammed door, transported to some swing in his childhood, a tire swing tied to the branch of a shady tree and himself swinging and saying “Wheee!” in exactly the same way, saying it, not out of glee, but because it was what you said when you swung around, and remembered himself alone and marked for solitude, beneath his feet the oval of hard dirt where the grass was worn away, feeling sick from the motion of the swing but still saying “Wheee!” as though he were having fun, although there was no one to see nor hear him. He could smell the tree and the tire with its little slosh of water from the last time it had rained, and a very bad feeling of desolation, of aching loneliness, flooded through him and into the taste of the cookies, which he knew he would never like again.

Instead of going back to the Busted Star he went along to Wasp, looking for the cockfight. On the way he found a barbecued-rib counter at the back of a grocery store and brought the smoky red meat with him to Wasp, a hamlet so small there was nothing there but the ancient Esso station in a state of collapse. In a muddy field half a mile beyond stood a galvanized metal building surrounded by broken machinery and parked pickup trucks. Some of the trucks he had often seen parked near the Old Dog.

An enormously fat woman in a magenta pantsuit sat in a director’s chair at the door. She took ten dollars from him and stamped his hand with a purple circle that enclosed the word “member.” The light was dim inside. The underside of the galvanized roof had been sprayed with some lumpy plastic insulation and thousands of feathers stuck to it. The seats were tiered bleachers and there were only about fifty people in them, many of them very large men in overalls but also twenty or so short, slender Mexican and Vietnamese men in T-shirts and jeans. They had wide jaws and soft throats, round eyes like black spots and small mustaches barely larger than the wings of a moth. Everyone was smoking. The smell of smoke, feathers, hot birds and sweating humans was palpable. The atmosphere was hot and odorous. He sat next to a four-hundred-pound farmer in a plaid shirt limp from many washings.

Below lay a rectangular pit with two smaller fenced areas at each end. A sign on the wall announced that this was a
PRIVATE CLUB
. Another sign read
NO GAMBLING
, but Bob saw fistfuls of money changing hands.

“Where do all these folks come from?” asked Bob, looking around, for Wasp lay in a singularly unpopulated region.

“Hell,” said the fat man beside him, “from all over. And I mean
all over
! Dodge City, Garden City, Amarilla, Texhoma, they even come from Denver and Lubbock, from Wichita and Oklahoma City.” As they spoke more people came in and Bob could hear roosters crowing. The fat man introduced himself as Byrd Surby, said he was an insurance agent from Fort Supply and had just started raising fighting cocks himself. “It’s poplar all over the country, not just Oklahoma where it’s legal, but places where it ain’t legal. California is a tough state for cockfightin. Will Rogers introduced the sport to Hollywood. But things got tough when William Randolph Hearst, who tried somethin funny, was barred from competition. And out a spite he went to the legislators and pushed through the toughest laws in the country.

“That’s Stick Flores,” he continued, pointing out a tall man with close-cropped hair and a long, creased beeswax face, his lips the color of genitals, broad yellow hands with curved nails, climbing into the announcer’s cage. A teenage boy entered the pit and began marking opposing lines in the dirt with a plastic ketchup bottle of flour.