That Old Ace in the Hole (17 page)

“Your dad needs a talk with Mr. Slike about the money arrangements, first,” said Rope Butt, feeling sorry for the kid, who was clearly crazy to get gone from home that minute.

It was deep-sleep night, the bunkhouse rattled with snores and stinking of cowboy bean farts when Rope was awakened by the sound of the door sighing on its hinges, a few stumbling steps, something eased down to the floor—the squeak of leather indicated a saddle—and a tired sigh. Somebody had come in and was going to sleep on the floor. He couldn’t think who it was—Habakuk van Melkebeek, the only one missing, was out in some pasture with his bedroll and chain tongs. Then a new thought came to him; the windmiller might have taken a fall and dragged himself in for medical attention.

“Habakuk?” Rope said softly, “that you?”

“It’s me, Ace. Ace Crouch.”

“God sake,” said Rope, sitting up and fumbling for the light string.

The kid was a wreck, his nose swollen to twice its earlier size, his lip split, both eyes black and a gash in his forehead that would leave a white scar.

“Your dad do that?” said Rope.

The kid nodded. “He did, but I got the best of it. I got out a there and he ain’t goin a bother me no more. Any money I earn, it’s mine.”

“Good,” said Rope Butt. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“I wanted to but don’t think I did. I hit him on the head with the shovel and it made a sound like hittin a kettle and he fell down. He was cussin and half up again when I took off.”

“Glad a hear that,” said Rope Butt. “They come down hard on kids that send their daddies to the happy huntin grounds. I’ll take you out to Habakuk in the mornin. He’s out with one a them damn old windmills. You got a bedroll?”

“No,” said the kid.

“You lousy? You got lice?”

“
No
. We was poor but we wasn’t dirty.”

“Well, now you’re in a place where you will be poor
and
dirty. Long as you ain’t lousy, you are welcome a take my old bedroll. I got a new one couple months ago. Never throw anything out. Old one’s kind a thin but it’s comin on good weather so you won’t freeze. Payday, you’n go into Woolybucket and get you a new one and a tarp.”

“Thanks,” said the kid. And that was that.

In the morning Rope took him on out to the canyon pasture and they found van Melkebeek, attired as usual in clean striped overalls and ironed white shirt, wrestling with a stuck cylinder valve. How he managed to iron his shirts out on the prairie no one could figure, and there had been long bunkhouse discussions on the possibilities, ranging from helpful nearby widow women to an ironing board and sadiron among the windmill gear in the truck. Habakuk was glad to see young Ace, and said, as though the boy had been working with him for years, “Hallo, Ace.
Ik ben Habakuk van Melkebeek.
We do some work. I think you are
een goede werker, ja
? Lot of work in a windmill job, lot of digging. Big deep holes she don’t fall over. Anyway, this well right here, she was never cased and now she got
een
hole in her water column. And so we pull it. Good you come.”

“How the hell you keep so neat, Habakuk?” said Rope, looking at the white shirt. By God, he thought, it
does
look ironed. He looked around the camp, not trashy with discarded sardine tins and bottles like most, but rigorously tidy, not a scrap of junk in sight. A spare windmill vane, weighted down with stones, was laid out on two packing boxes to serve as a table. Habakuk’s bedroll was stowed in the truck cab and he had dug a fire pit and lined it with stones. A bubbling coffee pot sat over the hot coals.

“Water. Always around water, so put soap and water in bucket, put dirty clothes in bucket, drive around, like a washing machine, get all clean. Easy. Dutch people like clean.
Waar of niet waar?
”

“You got a sadiron out here too?”

“
Ja,
sure. Shoe polish, razor. O.K., now, Mr. Ace, we got work to do. I got a checklist for every mill, says what’s wrong. We are fixing mills one by one.” He looked at the kid. “Payday you buy a new skirt.”

“Skirt?”

“
Ja,
skirt.” And he plucked at his shirtsleeve.

“Shirt,” said Ace. “Mr. Melkebeek, that’s a
shirt
. Girls wear skirts.” And he sketched an imaginary skirt around his knees and twirled. Rope Butt got the sudden good feeling that the kid had a disposition to make everybody his friend. It must have gone against the grain to whack his old daddy with a shovel.

Habakuk laughed. “Anyway,
een overhemd
. Shirt, skirt. You get what you like.”

Habakuk’s checklist was formidable, drawn from his early weeks of inspection, which included checking a tower’s girts and braces, its bolts; examining the wheel from rivets to hub; noting helmet bullet holes; inspecting every part of the furling device, the vane and tailbone; cautiously testing the strength of the wood platform and looking underneath for wasp and bee nests. The oil collector, the gears, the pitmen arms, plugs and cotter pins called for close scrutiny. He was thorough.

He started young Ace out lashing blades in place with green rawhide strips.

“When they are dry
zo hard als staal.
Need a hacksaw to cut.”

Young Ace learned neatness from Habakuk along with windmill repair. He was a quiet, solid kid who worked like an ant and as time went along his shoulders broadened and his muscle thickened with all the digging, climbing, hauling and lifting and Habakuk’s savory cooking, for in addition to the clean white shirts and finicky insistence on windmill record keeping, Habakuk van Melkebeek had a taste for Indonesian curries and
sambals,
whose esoteric ingredients came to him in a large box each month. And always, at the end of every meal, he looked sternly at Ace and said,
“Wij zullen afwassen,”
and handed him a clean dishtowel.

While they did the dishes Habakuk lectured on windmills.

“Mr. Rancher does not like a high tower—he is afraid he has to climb up on it. But the higher the better. Turbulence near the ground, breaks up the windmill. If a mill is near a building it got to be high. Make it high. Never put a mill in a canyon. Bad downdrafts.”

Two years after Ace Crouch started at the Cutaway Mr. Slike took on his younger brother, Tater, as a horse wrangler. At first Tater tried windmilling with Ace and Habakuk, but he was not impressed with the slender stream of water that issued from the pipe of a well they had sweated on for days.

“Hell, I can piss fastern that thing can throw out.”

“But you can’t do it for so long,” said Habakuk and knew that Ace’s brother would not make a windmill man. He sent him to Slike.

Ace and Tater didn’t see much of each other except on weekends when it fell right that they went into town together. Ace had taken Tater to Murphy’s Dance & Saloon Hall where, at age fourteen, Tater experienced for himself what he’d only seen bulls and cows perform. Habakuk van Melkebeek never went to town, preferring to wash and mend and iron his clothes, read his Dutch newspapers and add up long columns of figures.

Once, back at the bunkhouse, where he rarely slept, “How come you git so spruced up, Hab?” asked Ercel Dullet, shuffling cards like a dog scratching an itch. “You plannin on gettin married? I ain’t seen you with no lady, so sure it must be a whore you got in mind, right?”

“Hell,” said Hawk Cream, “he don’t never go to the whorehouse, so how could he even meet one? Hab, what a you do to git relief? You just put a little windmill grease on it and jerk off?”

They laughed, but Habakuk laughed too, and said mildly, “I don’t want no wife. I seen all I want about wifes.”

It was not much fun to tease someone who laughed and stayed mild.

“Ace, we got to put a good concrete apron around the tanks,” said Habakuk one day. “Cow hoofs can’t wear down in this sandy dirt and they get too long. Mr. Slike is worried. They come for water, walk on rough concrete, does their hoof good.” So they spent months pouring concrete.

There had been a second helper for a few months, Glen Corngay, but he couldn’t stand the intensity of work, he did not like curries, and he thought he knew a great deal about the world, windmills included. The end came in a freak accident.

The wind had been blowing for days, a sand-laden wind that hissed against the big steel windmills and dulled the paint on the truck, ground the glass of the windshield. There was sand in their bedrolls, sand in the food that crunched between the teeth and at the bottom of their coffee cups tiny lunettes of sand. They pulled up to a large steel mill Habakuk and Ace had put in the year before. The flow had been weak from the beginning and Habakuk wanted to see how much it was pumping. Corngay was the first out of the truck and he walked toward the mill.

“Corngay,” said Habakuk softly, “do not touch the mill, wind blows too much sand on it. No good. Static electricity.”

But Corngay, shooting him a scornful look as if to say he wasn’t cowed by wind, sand or any metal tower, reached for the handle of the winch that worked the pull-out wire. His fingers never touched it. The electric charge built up in the mill by days of sand friction leaped the space and hurled him into the cactus.

Habakuk laughed immoderately. “
Hij heeft een klap van de moelen gehad.
He’s had a
klap
from the mill.” To him each windmill had a distinct personality and it was clear that this one was ill-disposed toward the disrespectful.

But then they were one down, for when he could stand up again, Corngay quit, staggering across the landscape toward the dusty ranch road where he might catch a ride.

Although Habakuk never made a wrong move, Ace made quite a few and had his own accidents. He learned that the worst place to recover from a hangover is atop a windmill in blazing heat. But nothing happened as awful as the dismal end of a rancher miller on the ZZ Ranch up in Wireline on the Oklahoma border.

The rancher, Archie Frass, took shortcuts when he could. He had found some used pipe and jury-rigged a tower by sticking sections into wet concrete and welding cross-members for a base, spot-welding minimal points to hold the forty-foot tower together, not bothering to construct a proper base section, nor putting up guy wires nor checking to see if the tower was level. The pipe sections were hollow and Archie did not think to cap them. Rainwater gradually got in and, because of the concrete pad, the pipe legs could not drain. In the winter, hard freezes weakened and even burst some pipe sections. The tower developed a slight list to the southeast. After several years the windmill head wore out and had to be replaced. Frass and his unwilling son tried to haul up the new wind generator using a gin pole and pulley system, but neglected to run the gin cable to a pulley at the base of the tower, fastening it instead to Frass’s truck with the son as driver, Frass on the tower as top man. As the cable came off the gin pole the son drove the truck forward and Frass, expecting the generator to rise up to him, shouted “Whoa!” in horrified amazement when the tower buckled, the rusted and weakened pipe legs folding. Frass, the windmill, the gin pole, the truck, the wind generator and the son all came together in a tangle of flesh and steel pipe red with blood.

“He done everything wrong,” said Habakuk van Melkebeek with the satisfaction of a man who does everything right. “Comes to anchor your legs in concrete I’ll show you a little trick. You got to be sure the tower is level before you fasten it down.”

He went to the truck and got his coyote-shooting rifle. Ace, wondering, watched Habakuk rest the rifle on the truck hood and take aim at the tower, squinting through the scope.

“Your cross-strut got to line up with the horizontal crosshair, and the pump rod got to line up with the vertical. It’s a quick way you can tell if the tower is level.”

In 1938, after five years of working the Cutaway windmills, Habakuk made Ace Crouch a business proposition. They both sat on upturned fruit boxes drinking cocoa, Ace’s specialty, for he made it with double-condensed milk and white sugar and topped each cup with a marshmallow. When the marshmallows became stale and stiff, Ace threw them into the bunkhouse stove or the campfire, where they charred into a graphite-colored mass like coal clinkers.

“Goed,”
said Habakuk, sucking the sweet froth off the top. “Ace, I had ideas since I started working for the Cutaway. Mr. Slike is a good man and I get along with him O.K., but since I come on this ranch I want my own business, not work for nobody. I thought first I come to this country and I go back again, but I change my mind. I like the panhandle. I like Texas where it’s flat. I like flat. Another thing, the water table she sinks beneath us. I come here the wells was twenty, thirty feet deep. Now we got to set pipe deeper and some wells down to eighty, a hundred feet. Windmill can’t lift water that deep so we got to put in a pump. Water table is dropping. Remember that number forty-three in the north pasture? One hundred twenty-two feet. I bet you we’ll go deeper. And it’s all over the panhandle—now everybody has to go way down for the water. My idea is get off the Cutaway and make a business that does well-drilling, puts up the mills and does repairs. Work for myself. I save my money a long time now and I got enough for a good drill rig.”