That Old Ace in the Hole (33 page)

“‘Brown Paper Pete,’ says the bartender.

“‘That is a unusual name,’ says the cowboy.

“‘Tell you what,’ says the bartender. ‘Call him that because he wears a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper trousers, brown paper boots.’

“‘Dang!’ says the cowboy. ‘That’s weird. What are they hangin him for?’

“‘Rustlin,’ says the bartender.”

Brother Mesquite groaned and Bob laughed. Cy looked at Bob.

“You know, Bob, Brother Mesquite here is about the best damn heeler in the panhandle.”

Bob, who thought a heeler was a type of hound dog, nodded and kept his mouth shut.

“Best heeler I or anybody ever seen. He’s just a ropin son of a gun. Fast? Oh yes.”

Brother Mesquite, who had blushed a terrible purple, got up.

“I’m goin,” he said, jamming his hat on. “The joke was bad enough, but this’s worse.”

“Modest, too,” said Cy. “Can’t stand a be praised a his face.”

Outside, in the street, a dusty beige sedan drove slowly past, the driver staring at the Old Dog.

“That,” said Cy, “is Tazzy Keister and I bet she is lookin for Francis Scott and that girl.”

B
ob had been thinking off and on about going up to Denver for a weekend to see Uncle Tam and perhaps a real estate developer, but the latest letter from Ribeye Cluke made the trip a necessity.

Resenting the peremptory tone of the letter, Bob thought that on the way north he would treat himself to a few hours’ vacation. If he left Thursday that would give him time to visit the quarry and get up to Denver by nightfall, spend two days with Uncle Tam and then tackle Ribeye Cluke. He would detour a little and visit the Alibates flint quarries, for he had seen a few of the multicolored arrowheads at the Tornado & Ball Point Pen Museum in Cowboy Rose, and was curious about the place, especially as Lieutenant Abert, without knowing what use the Indians made of the flint, had written on September 11, 1845, “Our last day’s travel led us over a plain strewed with agates, colored with stripes of rose and blue, and with colors resulting from their admixture. They were coarse and of little value, but so numerous that we gave the place the name of Agate bluffs.”

The night before he packed up all his belongings, not sure he would be coming back. There was a real chance Ribeye Cluke would fire him. When he told that to LaVon she reminded him in a mock-scolding voice that the Barbwire Festival was coming up in late June and he just had to be there, fired or not.

In truth he wanted to go but said only, “We’ll see.”

Lying in bed in the bunkhouse for perhaps the last time, listening to coyote harmony, he worked out a plan to explain the benefits of a real estate sideline for GPR. If Global Pork Rind had a real estate division, he would say, he could scout for hog farms and development properties at the same time. He imagined Ribeye Cluke and the unknown Mr. Ragsdale slapping their foreheads and crying, “Great Scott! What a totally brilliant idea!” He also imagined Ribeye saying, “You’re fired!”

In the morning as he came onto the porch with his suitcase his eye caught for the fiftieth time the shadowy shape in the shoulder-high grass of the fallow pasture. It was probably a shrub or particularly heavy clump of grass, he told himself, but maybe a weird anthill or another of the moldering carved figures that stood behind the bunkhouse. It was now or never to find out what it was. He set down the suitcase, climbed over the barbwire fence and walked slowly forward, listening for warning rattles, hoping all the silent snakes lived in California. In the field he passed a few metal stakes that had once carried barbwire, a fence that had divided the pasture. As he came closer to the shape he could see it was something other than a bush.

He parted the last stalks of grass and looked on the bizarre sight of an entire deer skeleton impaled on a metal fence stake, the head missing, the stake straight through the center of the chest. The curved ribs were cold grey with hard shreds of flesh on them. Dried sinew still held the bones together. At first he thought it must be the remnants of some ghastly ritual, but after staring at it from all sides he decided that it was the evidence of a freak accident, that the deer, bounding through the tall grass, had not seen the concealed metal stake and had, by pure bad luck, come down full force on it, impaled and killed, to hang like a grisly scarecrow until weather separated the bones and beetles chewed them to dust. Shaken and a little queasy, he went back to the porch, took up his suitcase, got in the Saturn and drove away.

But he could not get the skeleton out of his thoughts. He imagined himself the deer bounding through the tall grass. Maybe it was night, the first shot of moonlight paling the sky, metallizing the grass stems and seed heads. In such a glinting world how easy not to see the lethal spear in the tall stalks, and then the violent, piercing shock, a few seconds of instinctive jerking while the moon dims and goes out for good. Or maybe he is running in panic, chased by dogs, great leaping bounds that carry him high in the air, twenty feet and more in each spring, well able to clear the spike if it had been seen, but, bad luck, crashing down on it full force, there to hang, impaled, dying slowly while the dogs tore at him, to rot and shrivel under the morning sun.

At the National Monument office in Fritch he asked for directions to the quarries.

“You have to go with a guide. There’s a group going at noon,” said the tall brunette behind the counter. “You can go with them. Cal Wollner’s leading it. You all meet down by the ranger station in half an hour.”

Bob looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven, and he had planned to be back on the road by 11:30. He would not be able to reach Denver before midnight if he also stopped at Autograph Rock near Boise City and went on to Bent’s Fort in homage to Lieutenant Abert. Perhaps he would save the rock and the fort for the return trip—if there was a return trip.

The tour guide, Cal Wollner, came in and said, “Everbody ready? Wear your hat, it’s hot out there. Don’t want any sunstrokes.”

It was a fair crowd that followed Wollner up the steep path. Every few hundred feet they escaped the burning sun under roofed, open-air shelters populated by overbearing yellowjackets where Wollner talked about the Indian groups, settlements, trade, migration, war. Lake Meredith lay below, deep blue. “Any questions?”

“I wonder,” said Bob, “if the name Alibates is the Indian word for flint?”

Wollner smiled. “Nope. Name of a old cowboy who owned the property back in the nineteenth century. Allie, Mr. Allie Bates.” But he could not tell Bob who the flint quarry Indians were.

At the top they saw dozens of small pits where the Indians had broken out the valuable flint. There were many small pieces lying on the ground, purple, white, pale blue, some mottled, others striped. Bob saw a beautiful piece of reddish purple diagonally striped with dusky blue. He wanted it very badly and when the guide went on ahead with the group following, he stooped down and pretended to tie his shoe, seized the piece and put it in his pocket. It was warm and greasy to the touch. In a few minutes he took it out and dropped it on the ground, caught Wollner’s eye watching him. Wollner nodded.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, unsmiling.

On the way down, the guide stopped to point out the obvious.

“There’s Lake Meredith,” he said. The dull blue sheet of water was corrugated with ridges like speed bumps.

“It’s so
big,
” said one of the women.

“Yes. And that’s only the top of it,” said Wollner. “When they built the dam and she filled up, everbody in Amarilla and Borger come rushin down with their new boats a try her out. It was a nightmare. Most a them, livin here in the panhandle, never seen more water than a stock tank could hold and they had no idea how the wind could work up the old H
₂
O. They capsized, tipped over, swamped, drowned, smashed into each other. A deadly water circus.”

From Stinnet Bob drove north, crossed the state line and, making his way through Guymon’s confusing streets looking for 64 north and west, managed to get on 54 south heading for Goodwell. By the time he corrected his mistake he had crossed the dry Beaver River and was on a dirt road in an oil and gas field, surrounded by nodding jack pumps. The arid bed of the Beaver River depressed him. He knew it had once been a lively major stream called the North Canadian, with a sheltered valley that attracted ranchers and settlers. But early in the twentieth century the herd law that said ranchers must fence in their animals closed the open range, and the confined cattle trampled the grassy verges of the river as they congregated to drink. The banks of the Beaver began to erode and sand washed down into the bed. Within the decade the Beaver was dying and finally stopped flowing except in heavy rains, leaving a gentle dip in the landscape marking its old course, as though a large finger had traced over the prairie, its last trickles of water impounded as the Optima Game Refuge at the side of a highway.

He came out on 64 and turned left toward Boise City. Just outside the town stood an elderly Indian with his clothes and belongings in a maroon Neiman Marcus sack. Although he had not stuck out his thumb Bob knew he was hitchhiking and stopped for him.

“I’m going to Denver. Where you headed?”

“Trinidad. My daughter lives in Trinidad. Colorado.”

“Well, that’s on the way. Hop in.”

The old boy, he thought, was as able to hop as he was to fly. Slowly and awkwardly he creaked into the seat, held his sack on his lap. Bob pulled out onto the highway.

“So you are going to visit your daughter.”

“Not visit. Move in with her.”

There was a long silence during which Bob saw himself sitting on Uncle Tam’s doorstep.

“Where are you from?”

“Oklahoma.”

Bob tried to keep irritation out of his voice. “Well, I guessed that. Pick you up in Oklahoma, Oklahoma is the Indian state, that’s what I guessed. What tribe?” Hoping that somehow the man was a Cheyenne and he could talk a little about Lieutenant Abert. But there was no answer and when he glanced over he saw the old man’s eyes were closed, though he doubted he was asleep. Bob, somewhat annoyed, as he had expected conversation in return for the ride, drove on, the telephone poles striking across the plain near the road, the wires rising and falling in long swoops. He was in sand sage and dune country, among the wild plums and skunkbrush and occasional clumps of bluestem. There was no traffic and the country gave him a lonely feeling of dust and burned ground. The dry bed of the Beaver, slowly filling in, depressed him. It was impossible not to think of blowing dust gradually covering everything, the fine dirt settling in layers, the thickening layers compacting and hardening and still the wind carrying more every day, every year, filling footprints and ditches and arid streambeds, drifting over rocks, covering the bones of dinosaurs, the houses of men, the trails and roads, building up inch by inch, foot by foot, millennium after millennium, the multiple pasts of the scarred landscape gone and forgotten.

Mile by mile they moved into mesa country and the sandy land shrubs gave way to piñon pine, juniper and hackberry, to cholla and scrub oak. He was in the short grass country now and sure the old Indian was feigning sleep.

Just outside Trinidad the old man straightened up and peered out the window.

“Most there, ain’t we?”

“Yeah,” said Bob shortly, still sore that he’d had to drive in lonely silence for hours.

“I’m movin in with my daughter,” said the old boy.

“You said that. When I picked you up. Nice you got family.”

“She got a good job, nurse job. Her and her husband make a lot. Big house. I can have my own room, my own bathroom. They got no kids.”

“You’ll be company for each other,” said Bob. Unless, he thought, you fall asleep at the dinner table or during the evening television, in which case you’ll be no company at all.

“My son-in-law is learnin the medicine ways. I will teach him.”

“What’s that—‘medicine ways’?”

“Ceremonies, dances,” the man said vaguely, gesturing toward the horizon.

Suddenly he sat up and peered west beyond the streaming fences.

“Next exit,” he said. “About a mile west.”

Dutifully Bob turned off the interstate and got on Route 12. They moved west, but after a mile the old man said nothing.

“Coming up pretty soon?” asked Bob.

“Yes, pretty soon,” the man said.

Bob drove. After another mile or two he increased his speed and was soon flying along at sixty-five, the miles gliding under the tires. The old man studied the landscape and said nothing.

“How much farther is it?” asked Bob. “I thought it was only a mile off the throughway. I’ve got to get to Denver, you know.”