That Old Ace in the Hole (10 page)

He stopped at the ranch house nearly every day to fill a jerry can with water. The bunkhouse still showed signs of horse-oriented male occupancy—spur gouges on the porch steps, dark spots on the floor from ancient tobacco splats, and on the outhouse seat a dark brown stain. One morning, turning off her Dust Devil vacuum cleaner, LaVon said that that stain probably came from a well-known foreman of the 1940s, Rope Butt, who had suffered from a bleeding ulcer and later cured himself with coffee enemas.

“Wally Ooly, the druggist, told him a try that. Rope seen it all,” she continued. “In his lifetime he seen the panhandle shift from horseback roundup days and a lonesome bed on the prairie to a pickup truck with a CD player and a cell phone.”

Bob marveled that the pioneers and first settlers had strung out their panhandle towns in such a relatively straight line and at such measured distances from each other.

“I suppose that’s because they were thinking the railroad would come along someday.”

LaVon snorted. “Forget that pioneer and first-settler stuff,” she said. “They didn’t have much to do with town locations. It was
all
the rayroads. The rayroad corporations said where the towns was goin a go and that’s where they went. Nothin a do with pioneers. It was all corporate goals and money and business. Then they sold lots and hoped it would all work out. The rayroads didn’t care about the towns—they was after the long-term wheat and cattle freight charges. They had plans for the whole region, the whole state—the whole country—and they run things. What the rayroads done is break things up. Used a be a special kind of panhandle region here from Dodge City to Mobeetie to Old Tascosa, all tied together by the trails. I agree there was
some
towns away from the rayroad that people started, like Cowboy Rose, but most a them was out in the boondocks and they wasn’t worth much. Funny, now it’s those little places that people like. A course Cowboy Rose got the spur track in later but it never started out as a rayroad town. Rayroad towns was strictly about money—business street, depot, bank, couple a merchants. Not much else. It was a different place then. But everthing changes.”

Although Bob was sorry to lose his idea of the pioneers bravely setting up in the wilderness, the railroad theory explained why so many towns looked like the last one and the next one. It was that way all over the west, he thought to himself, and said so to LaVon.

“Um,” she said. “Who do you think settled the west? No,
not
pioneers. Business! First the traders like the Bents and St. Vrain, then the army posts a protect the traders and wagon trains, then the rayroads. It’s all about business in this country. Has been from day one.”

“LaVon,” he said, “whereabouts would I buy a lamp? Something for camping would be good, you know, one of those propane lamps. If I want to read at night it’s impossible.”

“You
could
get a can of kerosene when you go downtown and I’ll give you one a my kerosene lamps. Save you a few dollars. What we use when the electric goes out. I’ll dig one out today and clean it up for you. You get the kerosene.”

He bought the kerosene at the Drag On Crossroads Store between Woolybucket and Cowboy Rose, watched attentively while LaVon showed him how to light the lamp, trim the wick, daily wash the chimney. It was a success and he stayed up late reading on into the lieutenant’s survey, the lamp casting its dim yellow light on the pages. It was slow going for the print was small and close-set and the only map was execrable—extremely small and devoid of any detail. He kept consulting his Western States road map, but, as its maker had dispensed with the smaller rivers and their tributaries, it was nearly as useless as the miniature map.

He read that the Bents had built a subsidiary fort in the Texas panhandle, “Adobe Fort,” and he wondered if it were the same as the famous ruin, Adobe Walls, scene of the battle that followed the mutilation of poor Dave Dudley, a battle that marked the point where the U.S. government determined on the willful and wholesale extinction of the region’s Indians. Bob promised himself his own trip of exploration. The Bents, he thought, had certainly dominated the country in their time, powerful traders. Maybe LaVon was right: business interests had wedged the west open.

And now, in his reading, Lieutenant Abert was weeks out of Bent’s Fort on his survey, down the Arkansas a few miles to where it joined the Purgatoire. At an early camp, after feasting on tender venison, they took sightings to determine their position; it was the only correct observation the expedition made, the persistent error later laid to a faulty chronometer.

He itched to see the lieutenant’s sketches of the country, which were not included in this edition of the expedition. (A few years later, in the Denver Public Library, he saw an original copy of Lieutenant Abert’s
Report
. And there at the back were the illustrations he had once longed to see, beautifully colored, and this, said the librarian, was probably done by Abert’s own hand. Bob let his finger rest on a page that Lieutenant Abert himself had touched—a transcendental contact that never failed to thrill him.)

On Sunday afternoon, clear and breezy, the few clouds in the shapes of cowboy mustaches, Bob felt he should have a harmonica and play it sitting on the porch with his chair tilted back and his feet on the rail. He wrote instead to Mr. Cluke.

Later Bob Dollar remembered the bunkhouse at night, the yellow glow of kerosene light, the red blanket on the swaybacked bed, the steerhide rug on the floor, stripped from some old speckled and purplish longhorn, the floor littered with the furry bodies of moths attracted to the lamp. Outside a flock of wild turkeys scratched and gobbled, flying up at sunset to sit in the cottonwood branches that hung over the bunkhouse. He had parked under the tree only once, dismayed to find the Saturn streaked with turkey excreta in the morning. A small colony of prairie dogs flourished near the cabin and he knew that where there were prairie dogs there were rattlesnakes, sometimes sharing the same burrow.

The violent sunsets came on slowly, faded to clear yellow, dimmed blue until the water lily moon floated up. And somehow, after listening to LaVon’s stories, it all mixed in with Lieutenant Abert’s explorations, the slangy old days of the XIT, the Frying Pan, the Matador.

Bob Dollar began to see that the two panhandles once had been part of a single region where the curtain had risen on many stages. Here the Indians had lived nomadic hunting lives; traders opened routes to Santa Fe and Taos to sell calico and took peltry from the Indians in exchange for manufactured goods; army scouts came to map the terrain and tangled with the Indians; buffalo hunters shot and skinned for the eastern trade. As the great herds disappeared, ranchers brought in cattle to run the free and open range and the sons of settlers became cowboys. Mule team freighters carried in lumber and fence posts, kettles and flour, wire fencing. The flood of people came with the railroads, small farmers who believed that drought and wind could be overcome by hard work and the plow. Finally came oilmen and flimflam tricksters, government men to tell the farmers what they were doing wrong. Now corporate agriculturists like Global Pork Rind had moved in.

The states of Texas and Oklahoma stacked like dirty pots in the sink, their handles touching. The same obelisks of sunlight fell on both sides of the state line, both shared out the same cold cuts of wind. Both lay in country of metallic light, tarnished brass clouds. LaVon told him there was much cancer in both panhandles, and multiple sclerosis, which she believed was somehow connected with owning little dogs. She mentioned the cancer centers as Perryton (benzene from the oil fields), Panhandle (nuclear weapons disassembly) and Pampa (a large chemical plant).

Slowly Bob began to think that Texas was the unnamed place lurking behind the song line “And the sky is not cloudy all day,” for often the panhandle skies
were
cloudy day after day with pot-metal overcast. Occasionally the clouds drew apart a little to reveal blue wash. He could imagine that in a drought the farmers’ gorge would rise at the sight of such clouds, low enough to prod with a stick but yielding no rain.

There was something, he thought, about projecting territory that worried: a pot handle can come off if the rivets fail, can bend or break under blows and weight. The Oklahoma panhandle was shaped like a finger pointing west. The Texas panhandle attached to the state like the neck of a bottle. It was the northern territory, unlike the rest of Texas, geometric, bony and high and hard-rocked, cut across by the Cañadian (in his mind he replaced Lieutenant Abert’s lost tilde). It was a place defined by its position atop the caprock. As a lone tree attracts lightning, the panhandles drew end-of-the-world thunder, grass fires, blue northers, yellow dust storms and a yearly parade of dirty tornadoes. At night, the light out and limbs composed for sleep, no one could know with certainty that he or she would awaken in the morning or be carried into the sky with whirling metal and smashed wood. So there was an underlying sense of unease to panhandle life. If LaVon’s stories were true, he thought, people had developed a counterpoint humor and a gift for narrative, sharpened accounts that launched ordinary life into mythic clouds of hyperbole.

It did not take long to see that there was also rivalry and mutual disparagement between the two panhandles, though Oklahoma naming a part of itself Texas County (“Saddle Bronc Capital of the World”) might seem a kind of homage, along with such place names as Texhoma, and the joking reference to the Texas panhandle as “Baja Oklahoma.” But Texans sneered at the poor Oklahoma roads, described their northern neighbors as obstructionist, larcenous and at the mercy of politicians on the take.

“In Oklahoma everthing was and is Standard Awl,” said Froggy Dibden at the Old Dog. That narrow strip of what was once public land belonging to no state or territory, that pointing finger of No Man’s Land, remained isolated, ignored by the main body of the state. Up in Guymon a waitress told Bob of a time when, after driving east through their state for a hundred miles, she and her husband came upon a sign that said
WELCOME TO OKLAHOMA
. Now and then an Oklahoman remarked that the Texas handle was smirched with excess pride and the show-off manners of the undeservedly wealthy. Bob Dollar gathered from the talk at the grain elevator that some ill feeling was residual from the 1880s, when Oklahoma ranchers strung barbwire along the Texas line to stop trail drives coming through with their fevered and tick-infested cattle. The Texas men cut the wire and went north and that was that. And there had been the long-running animosity over which state—Texas or Oklahoma—owned Greer County, a quarrel that still colored discourse as a few drops of ink in a jar of water imparts a blue tinge. Panhandle people had long memories.