That Old Ace in the Hole (14 page)

“You cook so good it’s a wonder lightnin don’t shoot out a your ass.” Outside he got into a fenderless truck hauling a saddled horse in an open trailer and drove off.

“One a these days,” said Jim Skin, belching pineapple fumes, “
Wagh!
Somebody is goin a whack him a good one right between the horns.”

“Who is he?” asked Bob.

“Hah!” said Grapewine hotly. “Francis Scott Keister, a bullheaded rancher who got all the answers. Born in Woolybucket and never left home but knows about everthing. You don’t want a get on his bad side. I got a be goin.” He scraped his chair legs across the floor and left.

“There’s many a farmer and rancher,” Ace said softly to Bob, “who will tell you how much they love the land, but then they sell out to the hog farms, or you go look at their sweetheart place and what you see is overgrazed and overcropped, live water dried up, weedy and poor. You’d pass out did you know what kind a government subsidies them birds was pullin down.”

Buckskin Bill nodded. He took a breath and said to Bob, “Our ranch got pretty run-down. What was left of it passed to me back a few years.”

Jim Skin nudged Bob and said, “He’s headin up to it, boy—goin a tell you how come they call him ‘Buffalo Bill.’” He sniggered.

Buckskin Bill lowered his voice. “I let that ranch set there. I don’t know what I was expectin, but the damn place stayed the same, full a weeds, maybe the grass grew a little taller. When my great-grain-daddy come here from Alabama he wrote to the folks back home what a rich grass place he’d found. Bluestem to his belt buckle, grama and buffalo grass. What made the land so good? I didn’t know, so I talked a Walt Sunbale, he was a real good aggie agent we had here, told me he wasn’t sure but he thought it was the buffs—buffalo. He says people think they was the same as cows, but there was a lot different about them. Their whole style was different and they evolved with the grasslands, so they must a been doin something that matched up pretty good. Just their whole style was different.”

Bob waited to hear more but a BMW convertible pulled up outside the Old Dog and the driver, a good-looking dark-haired woman, honked and pointed up at the sky when she saw old Bill.

“There’s my waf,” said Buckskin Bill, getting up. “Fixin a rain. I expect I’ll see you again around here?”

“Right,” said Bob, trying not to goggle at the sultry and beautiful brunette in the convertible, about fifty years younger than her aged husband. The sky was a deep and dirty yellow. A peal of thunder shook the Old Dog. The convertible top slowly began to rise.

The minute Old William was out the door Jim Skin sidled over and sat in his chair. “What’d you think a her? Some peach, right?”

“Right,” said Bob. “A little bit younger than he is?”

“Just a little bit! I notice he didn’t tell you how they tapped into the natural gas on his old ranch about six year ago. He’s one a the well-offest men in Woolybucket County, now, him that used a work at the carbon-black plant. That’s how come he got a lovely young waf and that car. That’s how come he can run buffaloes on that ranch, because he don’t have to worry about the bottom line. He’s like Ted Turner that way. He ain’t pore like me. All’s I got is a little bit a dried-up land in Oklahoma.”

“You ever think about selling it?” asked Bob.

“That’s the only thing I
do
think about. That and gittin laid.”

A rattle of hail spattered the front window.

F
or the first few weeks every morning Bob Dollar ran for forty-five minutes along the ranch road and out to Farm Highway C, a long caliche road that rose up a hill with a single tree near the crest, then past the oldest cemetery in the county. On the caliche roads he sometimes felt he was running in tinted face powder, boxes of silky dust in blush, dawn and moonglow, in peachy sunset light, at midday chalk white pulver coating the grasses at road margins, and on rainy days the color an earlier century called ashes of roses.

Many times he noticed twists of flattened baling wire on the road, crushed into curious whorls and loops. What, he thought, if the whirlwind came in the night and this was his last memory, twisted baling wire?

He enjoyed mornings at the log bunkhouse almost as much as the slow evenings. The long porch faced east and there he brought his cup of coffee, made on the small camp stove he had bought, watched the Busted Star horses, the tired colts spread out in the grass like throw rugs. The legs of the running horses twinkled like spinning coins. Even the dust they raised sparkled so that he thought of them as ever moving in clouds and splinters of reflected light. A few of them were known for dodging through half-open gates and drifting toward parts unknown, sometimes seven miles west to the small spread of Rope Butt, now in his nineties yet agile. LaVon told him he ought to go over and talk with Rope.

“These days he’s raisin fightin cocks. He runs fights in a old airplane hangar over the Oklahoma line. It’s legal there, what you’d call ‘a custom of the country.’”

In fact Bob had seen and heard Rope Butt at the Old Dog snapping out the merits of sweater grays and bluefaces, of green leg hatches, Kelsos and battle crosses, of gaffs and knives and the depredations of great horned owls in his cranky old voice. He had seen the cuts on the old man’s hands and, driving the back roads, came across his strange garden of upturned plastic barrels arranged in long rows, each with its tethered fighting cock. From a distance these chicken huts in orderly rows resembled a cemetery.

Sometime in that week he decided he would go to a cockfight if the opportunity came along, but only after he had explored a hog farm for himself and found someone who wanted to sell out. On his mental list he kept the names of Sorrel Bill and Jim Skin. He wrote to Ribeye Cluke.

In the
Rural Compendium
LaVon devoted many pages to what she called “customs of the country”; tipping over outhouses while someone was inside, killing snakes, saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” before bed on the last night of the month, spying on neighbors. Bob Dollar, who was frequently reported to Sheriff Hugh Dough as a suspicious stranger, learned the hard way that many people watched the highway through their front room curtains and were not slow to call the law and tell what they suspected. There were activities in the panhandles that needed reporting: jogging, odd clothing, unusual vehicles, out-of-state license plates, dark skin, children unattended or quarreling, loose dogs, large house cats (invariably reported as “panthers”), people with flat tires or engine trouble who might be escaped convict decoys. Yet dead cows lay sometimes for weeks in the ditches waiting for the rendering truck.

LaVon did not share Bob’s enthusiasm for Cowboy Rose. She told him that in the 1890s Cowboy Rose and Woolybucket had tussled over which would be the county seat. Cowboy Rose won the vote, then cancelled its legitimacy by stealing the courthouse papers from Woolybucket in the dead of night before the official proclamation. The vote was cooked as well. An aged ferryman, French John Bullyer, had voted forty-one times, once in his own name, forty times more masquerading as sons of himself, a parade of Bills and Toms and Bucks and, when his powers of invention failed, whatever his eye fell on as it roved around his cabin, a catalog of never-ending amusement to the region. An anonymous jokester ordered a tombstone with the forty names cut on it, stolen decades later by a touring professor of American history from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire:

Here lieth the Great Clan of Bullyer,
All were keenly interested in local politics.

Abraham, Abner, Barney, Bill, Shiloh, Ormy, Wake Up, Rabbit Eyes, Acme,
Plate, Matches, Spurleg, Buck, Dishpan, Dutch Oven, Teacup, Whisky,
Chauncey, Caleb, Digger, Fantod, Garry Owen, Hercules, Ichabod, King James,
Keg, Dram, Money, Stump, Nine, Prince, Quill, Robert, Bob, Buck, Tom,
Calendar, Candle, Fido, Zeke, Buck and Dutch Oven, Jr.
April 4, 1887–April 7, 1887.

One morning, the sky filled with fresh blue and not a breath yet drawn from it, Bob Dollar put his head in the door and called to LaVon but she did not answer.

“Getting some water, LaVon,” he said to the silence and entered the kitchen, letting the screen door bang a little. When the container was half-full LaVon’s truck pulled up and she came in carrying a large carton, headed to the dining room, which she had turned into an office. She dropped the carton, which sounded like it was packed with concrete blocks, reentered the kitchen, laid a small photograph on the table, went for the coffee pot.

“
My
lucky day,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Got my hands on Tater Crouch’s scrapbooks. Tater is old now, and it is a miracle he ever give these things up to me. But only for a week. I got to work through them and get them back to him next Friday. Guess he figured he was safe to live that much longer. He’s a cranky old feller. You look at him now, crippled up, limpin around, face like a dried mushroom and all them sad lines, then look at this photograph here his sister snapped in 1931 when he took over the ranch, twenty years old and a real good worker, a wonderful hand with stock.” She looked at the picture, a small black-and-white square with wide white margins and toothed edges.

“Just a big, fresh-faced boy, and he sure looked good. Broad shoulders, good muscle on him, kind a lean and rangy. See how his mouth’s hangin open a little like he was gettin ready to say somethin or laugh? Ever picture a him I seen it’s the same. Even his kid pictures showed that. His mouth still hangs open but there hasn’t been a tooth a his own in there since he was thirty and now he don’t wear the dentures. But see how neat he parted his hair on the left, straight as a stick and slung over his forehead white above the hat line. Big ears but flat from his mother taping them down when he was a baby. They used a do that, tape baby’s ears flat so they wouldn’t stick out. Done it with my own boy. He looks good in his white shirt and fresh-ironed jeans and his best boots greased up, don’t he? Too bad them jeans was high-waters and tight. Twenty years old and I believe he was still growin. Tight enough so’s you can see everthing he had over on the left. They say a man will generally keep his goods on the side he parts his hair, balance out his handedness, I guess. Tater is right-handed but I bet you could wrap him in see-through plastic now and not see a thing. It shrivels up pretty good when they get old. He’s the one you want to ask about the freight team.”

“What freight team?”

“That photograph I showed you. You wanted a know how the feller managed a drive it.”

“Oh yeah. LaVon, on the way over this morning there was a grey horse on the ranch road. I couldn’t see the brand. Suppose it’s one of yours, but I don’t think I saw it before. Maybe you bought some new horses and this is one?”

“Grey? Certain not one a ours. My graindad, like most a the old cowboys, said that light-colored horses attract lightning, wouldn’t have one on the place. Kind of a tradition. I half believe it myself. There was a family down at the crossroads about six years ago, come up from Houston, he was in awl in some way, three kids, bought each kid a horse and one of them horses was a real light grey, one a sorrel and the other a bay. Wouldn’t you know it, a storm rolled in, lightnin like flies on sugar, and sure enough, one of them horses was hit and it was the grey one. So I don’t know, maybe there’s somethin to the old sayin. I wonder if birds is ever hit by lightnin. There’s some will fly around in a storm like they don’t care. That horse could be from Sanderson’s place down the road. I’ll call them up and see. Anyway, I bet you know Tater’s graindaughter, Donna Crouch—she works in the office at the grain elevator.”

“Big tall lady with a blond ponytail?”

“No, that one’s Lou Ann Bemis. Her and her husband run the Java Jive Café in Waka on weekends. Donna is real short, red hair parted in the middle, wears big round glasses, never says a word.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, LaVon.”

“Have a good day now, Bob.”

The next morning began with gritty, stinking wind that increased in velocity and abrasiveness. Bob came into the kitchen banging his water jug against his leg. LaVon was rummaging through the photographs.

“Pour us out some coffee, Bob, will you? Thanks.” She held up a studio portrait of a young curly-headed blond boy who could not have been more than fifteen. He was togged out in cowboy rig that fit too comfortably to have been studio props.

“No idea who this boy is. Looks a little bit like you, curly hair, big baby blues. Tater said he’d writ down who everbody was on the backs of the pictures, but I find he missed quite a few. And I can’t hardly read his writin. Done my best to work through these but some a them are complete mysteries. So. I’m goin over there to the Bar Owl tomorrow and set down with him and talk him through the ones I don’t know. If I can get him loose of the telvision. You can come along, you want. He was the real thing, you know, a good solid rancher who knew cows and men. And still does. He’s got stories and stories if we can get him goin.” She held up another photograph showing a group of men and horses standing around a fresh grave mound. White ink letters spelled out “A Cowboy Funral.” She looked at the back.

“Not a
clue
who was gettin buried. Oh! Here’s one you’ll like. It’s the main street a Cowboy Rose around 1911.”

She handed Bob a brown photograph showing a few false-front mercantile buildings, a blacksmith shop under a shady tree with the smith bent over a horse’s hoof, a grassy track that was the main street extending east into the distant plain. He recognized two of the buildings; they still stood, the blacksmith’s shop and the tiny bank.

He spent the evening with Lieutenant Abert, using his Texas road map to puzzle out the locations of the Bents’ panhandle trading posts, for the notes told him the trader brothers had built something called “the Adobe Fort” on the Canadian around 1840, and, in the spring of 1844 put up another trading post a few miles distant. Even with the big gazetteer,
The Roads of Texas,
he could not locate the marker streams, Bosque Grande Creek and Red Deer Creek. He supposed the map was not detailed enough or that the streams had been renamed. Later, from LaVon, he learned what he suspected, that this “adobe fort,” after the Bents abandoned it, was the famous Adobe Walls, the scene of a battle in 1874 between a war party of several hundred Comanches, Kiowas and Cheyennes (including the young Quanah Parker), led by the Comanche warrior Coyote Droppings (who claimed his medicine made him and those with him immune to bullets), and twenty-eight sharpshooter buffalo-hide hunters. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 forbade white men the right to hunt south of the Arkansas River, but white men did as they pleased. The same treaty forbade the Indians from raiding panhandle settlements, but the Indians continued to swoop down on homesteads. On this fine spring morning the Indians made a classic dawn attack. But the buffalo hunters had been awakened at two in the morning by the snap of the breaking ridgepole. They had repaired the pole and, sparked with coffee, decided to stay up and get an early start on the day. When the cry of “Indians!” came, they were awake and alert. They held off the Indians for three days. After a number of the attacking men fell, the main Indian body retreated to the ridges above Adobe Walls where they rode back and forth out of rifle range. On the third day the plainsman Billy Dixon snapped off a shot at one of the distant riders with his .50 Sharps rifle. The Indian fell dead from his horse and soon after the demoralized attackers, who had believed their strong medicine protected them from bullets, left. It was the beginning of the end, and a year later the panhandle had been ethnically cleansed of its native people. Billy Dixon’s long shot became a pillar of western myth.