That Old Ace in the Hole (15 page)

They drove to the Bar Owl over miles of pale caliche road, LaVon’s scarred Chevy pickup raising milky dust that hung in the air, a translucent scrim that dimmed the road behind. It was a blinko day, clouds skipping across the sky. A windmill in the distance flashed a new blade with every revolution. When Bob remarked on it she said owls broke the blades by flying into them, and that the panhandle was thick with owls, and that Pee-Wee Fischer, who raised falcons, shot them whenever he could. Bob saw again what beautiful country it was when he looked past the clutter of tanks and pumps, colored by yellow light so thin and clear it slipped off the sky in huge slabs and in narrow straw-colored pipes glancing off flying birds, windshields and plate glass, throwing winks from cars and trucks. And it was crazy country too, some of the flattest terrain on earth, tractor-chewed and rectangled, rugged breaks and plunging canyons, sinister clouds too big to see in one look, rusty rivers, bone white roads and red grass—the oddly named bluestem. The wind had died down and LaVon gestured at an unmoving windmill in a heavily grazed pasture. Against the sky it looked like a combination of tripod and meat grinder. Half a dozen small birds sat slant-legged on the edges of the blades, and as a little breeze came up again the blades began to turn, the birds slid a few inches down the blade edges and flew.

“In the days when the big ranches started sellin off land,” she said, “it was dry, dry country. The XIT had hundreds a windmills and full-time hands to tend to them. And when the nesters come in, without windmills they couldn’t of made it. Not a one. Of course they didn’t make it anyway. They didn’t have a blessed clue to what was under them. I mean the Ogallala. All that water they didn’t even know was there. In those days if you wanted a be a rancher you had a have live runnin water or a hand-dug well, somehow pump it out a the ground. If you had stock and kids you
had
a have hundreds a gallons a day. It was all shallow wells and windmills until pretty much in the 1960s. Well do I remember. I grew up in the windmill days. They was the only thing made the west possible to live in.”

Bob said, “What did your husband do? Was he a rancher?”

“Not at first. He got into land sales. He was panhandle born and raised and heard the stories how Mr. Borger done the job back in the 1920s—soon as they found awl Mr. Borger bought up a couple hundred acres a land and laid it out in lots, fifteen hundred dollars a piece, called it a town site. Named the streets. When Mr. Fronk got in the land sales I did quite a bit a that. That’s a job I liked. No Main Street or them First, Second and Thirds for me—I’d go for colorful names like Red Hot Poker and Bramble Lane and Messican Hat. In one day Mr. Borger took in over a hundred thousand dollars. So Mr. Fronk was inspired and he got into that kind a thing. Course there’s nothin new in that. It’s how all these towns was laid out—somebody, usually the railroad headquarters, decided where they was goin a have a town and then they sent in their surveyors to plat the lots or they used a land agent and then they sold them. There was good money in it. Mr. Fronk wasn’t a railroad man but he was friends with many an awl man and when somebody brought in a well he was right there, buyin land. He platted it himself. There’s a few towns in the panhandle he started—Auger, Gusherton, Rich and Seaview.”

“Seaview?” asked Bob.

“He thought it sounded good, and if somebody said somethin, he’d turn it on them and say it was a sea of grass or enough oil underground to make a sea. To make it sweeter he sold lumber, too. Two years after we was married there was plenty to buy this ranch. In a way, Bob, you remind me of Mr. Fronk.”

“How so?” asked Bob.

“Because you both believe in what you are doin. Mr. Fronk would get real excited about the new towns. He wanted them to do good. It’s like you and these luxury home sites.”

Bob held the box of photographs on his lap and looked at them again on the way over. The photograph of Tater Crouch as a young man seemed familiar and somehow comic, though he did not know why. Then it came to him that Tater’s too-small jeans, ending well above the ankles, were the same high-water length as those worn by Jacques Tati in the Mr. Hulot films, Uncle Tam’s favorites.

The entrance to the Bar Owl was a loose plank bridge over Two Year Creek. LaVon pointed out the old bunkhouse, a small, pitched-roof, board-and-batten building with a lean-to on the east side. The doors were gone, the shingle roof holed, chimney attenuated, window glass shot out. The gaping doorway showed bales of hay, darkened by weather and mold, stacked to the ceiling. A tilted cross, all that remained of a clothesline support, stood in the mesquite. On the ground in front of the building in a little patch of grass, the head and blades of a windmill lay facedown. In the brown distance another stood, but the blades did not turn and the stock tank at its foot sparkled with bullet holes. The land rose and fell, not flat enough for irrigated agriculture, the thin grass heavily punctuated with mesquite, showing lenses of bare sandy ground like rents in cat-clawed fabric.

A hawk sat on an electric pole and LaVon told him that one had started a grass fire when its wings touched two wires and it fell dead and blazing into the dry grass below.

“Tater tried to sue the electric company but he didn’t get very far.”

They passed a tractor dragging a bush hog through the mesquite, a spray of twigs and dust flaring behind it. The driver raised one hand as they drew abreast. In another mile LaVon pointed out the original ranch headquarters, a matched pair of narrow sandstone houses facing one another and joined by a high stone wall that enclosed a kind of patio with two or three shade trees. LaVon said that a hundred years ago old man Crouch, Tater’s grandfather, had taken the plan from the design stamped on the bags of Arbuckle coffee beans. The twin houses had been abandoned in 1974, the Crouches shifting into a characterless prefab ranchburger with contemporary plumbing and heat, an attached three-car garage.

As they pulled up in the yard LaVon said, “Now don’t say a word about Mrs. Crouch. She passed last year in terrible pain. She needed to go on but Tater could hardly bear it. And before that he lost his only boy. He was a bull rider and a big Braymer named Grannyknot got him down and mashed him.”

A heavily made-up woman of late middle age opened the door.

“Hello, Louise,” said LaVon, and from the way the woman answered, “Come on in, Miz Fronk,” Bob guessed she was the housekeeper. The interior of this house, which might have been lifted from any sunbelt suburb, was as dull as its exterior, seven-foot ceilings coated with an off-scale rough finish embedded with sparkling plastic chips, in the hall a brown carpet with a pressed-down track to the kitchen. The living room walls were ranged around with tables, each stacked with tottering cliffs of account books, tally books, ledgers and maps, newspapers, for, LaVon had said on the ride over, Tater Crouch was roughing out a history of the Bar Owl which some grandniece, enrolled in a creative writing course at Southwest Texas U, would smooth into prose during the summer.

He thought it was the ugliest room he had ever seen. The walls were papered with a design of giant red hummingbirds. Against the wallpaper hung small sets of antlers, hardly more than spikehorns. The curtains clashed with the print upholstery, the plaid table runner, the patterned rug, as though every surface had had a digitized pattern applied to it. There were two benches upholstered in white plastic. Enormous lamps with frilled orange shades stood on side tables.

Tater Crouch sat in a wheelchair near the south window where he could watch the driveway.

“Tater! Here’s LaVon! LaVon’s here! Tater!” the housekeeper shouted.

“Well,
I
know it. I seen her drive in, didn’t I?”

The old man turned his deflated-football face toward them, the nose almost flat, the white hair cropped, the short white face whiskers like the fur of a laboratory rat. The eyes were standard, red-rimmed Texas blue. He began to cough and spit into a handkerchief.

Bob was shocked. He had carried the image of the twenty-year-old man in his too-small jeans to this house and was now confronted with sixty years of change. He could see nothing of the young, clear-eyed man in this old wreck. He would not let old age happen to him.

“Well, Tater,” said LaVon. “I hope you don’t got the flu. You sound bad.”

“Hell, it ain’t the flu. It’s that damn pig farm over on Coppedge Road. They turn them fans on, sucks out the ammonia and sulfide and if the wind is right, like it was this mornin, we almost die of it. It just plays smash with us. They say it gives you pneumonia and artharitis. They say it’ll turn your eyes yeller.”

The housekeeper, nodding agreement, wheeled his chair to one of the tables, moved the papers on it and cleared a space for LaVon to spread out the photographs.

“Tater, those hog farms are a crime. But I don’t know what we can do about them. Anyway, I’ve brought Bob Dollar with me. He’s visitin Woolybucket and stayin in the Star bunkhouse. Thought he’d like to meet you. And, like I said on the telephone, I got these mystery photographs. Appears you missed puttin the names on one or two. Do you recollect who is this boy?” LaVon held out the studio portrait of the young blond boy in the black hat. “There is not a name on the back.”

“Why, that’s young Fanny. ‘Muddy Fan’ we called him after he got bucked off and landed in a waller and come up mud hat to boot heel. He was the best-liked boy there ever was on our place. Five hard men, dirty and rough, at the funeral and ever one of them made tears for that boy. We won’t see his likes again, not theirs neither. It was a sad thing.”

“Is this it?” said LaVon, pulling out the cowboy funeral photograph.

“Yes, it is. Oh, how we hated to bury that boy. That’s me over there on the left. I had my head down so’s the photographer wouldn’t catch me bawlin like a calf. I weren’t much older’n Fanny. Could a been me dead.” He gave a crackling laugh like a dead bush in a drag, twigs snapping. “Cowboyin was hard in them days. The young guys today don’t know nothin about it. Take your brandin crew, twenty, twenty-five men—the wagon boss, cook, couple a ropers, wrangler, eight or ten flankers a throw them down and hold, couple men to work the irons, a knife man, a vaccinator, a dehorner, a guy to paint the stumps and cuts, and your guys holdin the herd. You’d get at it before light and keep at it until dark and then sleep on the ground until you started again. It would be dark when you got up and the wrangler had to lay down on the ground and skylight the horses. We’d always brand after Fourth a July. Forty-five dollars a month for that.”

“And who was this Fanny that everbody thought so high of?”

“He was just a kid, drifted in from somewhere, I don’t recollect where, but he was a pure-dee wonder with horses, just the finest kind a rider. Fanny the Wrangler. Wasn’t nobody better. Limber as a piece a raw bacon. Good enough he could a been a contest hand. Cheerful, good-natured, give you the shirt off his back. And smart. He thought hisself out from a problem, didn’t just bull through. Worked for my deddy two year before the Reaper cut him down.”

“So he wasn’t kin to folks hereabouts?”

“Naw. Missouri or Montana or someplace with the letter M on the front, could a been Maine or Minnesota. I think it
was
Minnesota, him bein so white-headed and pale-complexioned. He’d be a old man now like me if he’d lived, but I remember him like I seen him ten minute ago. I can see him noddin his head to one side and twistin his tongue around his teeth like he did. He had bad teeth and we had to pull a few for him.”

“Was that what did him in, bad teeth? I know there
was
boys died from bad teeth.”

“There was, but he wasn’t one. He died for love of a little bitty pigtail girl, seven year old. Red Poarch was one died from bad teeth, head swole up like a watermelon. Now, there’s a death I wouldn’t wish even on the worst pig farm man.”

The old man stirred the photographs, held one of a severe woman for a moment, dropped it dismissively and took up the portrait of Fanny again.

“There was a dance. We
had
dances in them days, went from supper to breakfast. This one was in the schoolhouse at Cowboy Rose, when it
was
a schoolhouse, not like now, all fixed up into a house for two funny boys and the kids sent on a bus to a far-off school, and it was a box supper. After World War Two the box suppers stopped. They got in the movie show in Woolybucket and the diner and that’s what people wanted a do, step out and get entertained. It was the women wanted it. Anyway, that dance. Didn’t get much work out a none a us that day, we was so busy scrubbin and smoothin and brushin our hats and puttin grease on our boots. Quite a rough road a Cowboy Rose and everbody a-horseback set off after noon dinner a get there in time to bid on the supper boxes. Some drove in a automobile, though there wasn’t so many of them around here and most of us stuck to the horse. One or two rode a tractor over. You know how that box supper game goes—the girls make a fancy dish and put it in a fancy box and the men bid on the box and whoever wins a box with a high bid gets to set with the lady that made it. Somehow or other ever cowboy always knew what his favorite gal’s wrap-up was to be—flary paper with a flar in the knot, wood crate with strawr packed around some pots a keep somethin hot, pink paper and jingle bells and all manner of foofaraw getups. Some reason, Fanny come in late after all the others, and they’d already started the bids. He’s climbin up the steps when this little shirttail girl hardly reaches his belt buckle comes out carryin a bowl and the tears runnin down her freckles like rain.