That Old Ace in the Hole (2 page)

“Well, what did they do to make a living,” Bob asked, hoping for a clue to his own direction. All he was sure about was that he hadn’t been important enough to take along. He taught himself not to care that he was so uninteresting that his parents dropped him on a doorstep and never bothered to write or call. “I mean, what was my dad, an engineer, or a computer guy or what?”

“Well, your mother painted neckties. You know the one I’ve got of the
Titanic
sinking? That’s one of hers. I would say that’s my dearest possession. It’ll be yours someday, Bob. As for your dad, that’s a little hard to say. He was always taking tests to see what he should do with his life—aptitude tests. Don’t get me wrong. He was a nice guy, a really nice guy, but a little unfocused. He never could settle on anything. He had about a hundred jobs before they went to Alaska. And there something happened to them that I’m sure they couldn’t help. We don’t know what. I spent a fortune in phone calls. Your uncle Xylo went out there for two months and turned up absolutely nothing except the name of that pilot. Put ads in the papers. Nobody knew anything, not the police, not our family, not a single person in Alaska ever heard of them. So I’d say you had bad luck with your folks disappearing, losing the chance to get raised in Alaska—instead getting brought up by a crazy unrich uncle with a junk shop.” He arched his back and twisted his head, fidgeted with a loose thread on the cuff of his knit shirt. “I suppose the only thing I’d like to impress on you, Bob, is a sense of responsibility. Viola never had it, and for sure Adam didn’t. If you take on a project then, dammit, see it through to the end. Let your word mean something. It just about broke my heart to see the way you’d run to the mailbox every day expecting to find a letter from Alaska. Adam and Viola were not what I’d call responsible.”

“It was lucky in a way,” said Bob. The lucky part was Uncle Tam. He read stories to Bob every night, asked his opinion on the weather, on the doneness of boiled corn, foraged through the junk shop detritus for things that might interest. Bob Dollar couldn’t imagine what his life would have been like in the household of Uncle Xylo whose wife, Siobhan, was an impassioned clog dancer and who ran an astrology business out of their front living room in Pickens, Nebraska. She had a neon sign over the front door with a beckoning hand under the words “Psychic Readings.”

“I guess it wasn’t easy bringing up somebody else’s kid,” he mumbled. The bedtime reading had welded him to Uncle Tam and to stories. From the first night in the little apartment when Uncle Tam had turned a page and said the words “Part One: The Old Buccaneer,” Bob had become a sucker for stories told. He slid into imaginary worlds, passive, listening, his mouth agape, a hard listener for whatever tale unfolded.

“Ah, you were an easy kid. Except for the library fines. You were always a nice kid, you always pitched in and helped. I never had to worry about phone calls from the cops, drugs, stolen cars, minimart holdups. The only headache you gave me was when you started hanging around with that heavy guy, Orlando the Freak. He was a wrong one. I’m not surprised he ended up in the pen. I’m thankful you’re not there with him.”

“It’s not like he committed armed robbery or something. It was only computer hacking.”

“Yeah? If you think diverting all the operating funds of the Colorado U.S. Forest Service to a Nevada bordello was ‘just computer hacking,’ I have news for you.” He stretched and fiddled with his cuff, looked at his watch. “It’s almost eleven. I’ve got to get back to the shop.”

In the early years Bob often felt he was in fragments, in many small parts that did not join, an internal sack of wood chips. One chip was that old life with his parents, another the years with Uncle Tam and Wayne “Bromo” Redpoll, then just Uncle Tam. Another part was Orlando and Fever and weird movies, then the lightbulb time and Mrs. Giddins asking him to massage her feet and her fury when he drew back, gagging, from the stink of clammy nylon. It was true that Bob had always pitched in and helped with dishes and cooking and house chores, largely because he was so ashamed of Uncle Tam’s withering poverty which somehow seemed less if everything was clean and squared up. He would rearrange the books in the bookcases by size and color and Bromo Redpoll, his uncle’s business partner, would say, “Don’t be such an old lady.”

Uncle Tam doted on Bob Dollar but had little to offer as proof of affection beyond solicitous attention and gifts of relatively choice treasures from the thrift shop, including the recent brown oxfords.

“Bob! These look like your size, ten double E. Try em on. In a bag of stuff from some Cherry Creek fat cat. Probably the maid dropped them off.”

“They’re great. Now all I need is a sports coat.” In fact the shoes looked odd with Bob’s jeans and T-shirt.

“We got no sports coats you’d be caught dead in, but there is a real nice car coat, suede with shearling lining. Like new, and almost your size. Car coats are kind of old-fashioned now, but it could be useful. You never know. The thing is, it’s a kind of—kind of a tan. Come back in the shop and have a look-see.”

The car coat was tight across the shoulders and the sleeves somewhat short, but there was no denying, despite the lemony color of a bad dye lot, that it was a well-made garment. He lived in dread that on the street someday the previous owner would recognize the coat and make scathing remarks. It had happened twice in school, once when he wore an argyle sweater, once with a knitted cap, the name
CHARLES
spelled out on the cuff. He had tried to ink the letters out with a marker but they showed plainly enough. Eventually a large black beret with cigarette burn holes turned up and he wore it for years, telling himself some Frenchman had visited Denver and abandoned it there.

“Now, Bob,” said Mr. Cluke, slapping his cheeks with a manly heather aftershave lotion, “you cannot go down to Texas wearing brown oxfords. Take my word for it. I’ve spent enough time down there to know a pair of brown oxfords can set you back with those people. Despite oilmen trigged out in suits, and wealthy wheat growers with diamond rings, the figure of respect in Texas is still the cattleman and the cattleman wants to look like a cowboy. It wouldn’t hurt for you to get a pair of dress slacks and some long-sleeved shirts. But for sure you have got to get yourself a decent pair of cowboy boots and wear them. You don’t need to wear the hat or western shirts, but you got to wear the boots.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob, seeing the logic of it.

“And Bob, here’s a list of the qualities that I want you to look for—on the q.t.—in that country. Look for your smaller cow outfits and farms, not the great big ones or the ranches with four hundred oil wells. Look for areas where everybody is grey-headed. Older. People that age just want to live quiet and not get involved in a cause or fight city hall. That’s the kind of population we want. Find out the names of local people who run things—bankers, church folks—get on their good side. Keep your eyes and ears open for farmers whose kids went off to school and those kids are not coming back unless somebody puts a gun to their heads. Read the obits for rural property owners who just died and their offspring are thinking ‘show me the money’ so they can get back to Kansas City or Key West or other fleshpots of their choice.

“And here’s another thing. You will have to have a cover story because you can’t go down there and say you’re scouting for Global Pork Rind. Some people would be openly hostile. You will be there off and on for several months at a time, so you will have to think up a story to explain your presence. The fellow we had before told people he was a reporter for a national magazine working on a panhandle story—that was supposed to let him get into every kind of corner and let him ask pertinent questions. You know what ‘pertinent’ means, don’t you?”

“Yes sir. Pertaining to, or related in some way to a topic.”

“Very good, I imagine you did well in school. That fellow I mentioned thought it had something to do with hair implants. Anyway, he thought that was a good cover story and expected doors to open to him like butter.”

“What magazine did that fellow say he was working for, sir? Doing the profile for?”

“Well, he did not pick
Texas Monthly,
thinking the local populace might have heard of it. And of course it would have been folly to name
Cockfight Weekly
or
Ranch News
. I believe he said
Vogue
. He thought he would be safe with that one in the panhandle.”

“And it didn’t work for him?”

“No, no. It didn’t.” Ribeye Cluke’s little finger swept a speck of shaving cream from his earlobe. “You will have to think of something else. I would stay away from the magazine idea, myself. But you’ll think of something. Now, Bob, it’s perfectly fine to stay in a motel for a few days until you get your bearings, but your best bet is to rent a room with someone in the area. Find some old lady or elderly couple with plenty of relatives. That way you’ll get a beeline on what’s happening. You’ll get the lowdown. Now you just scour the properties north of the”—he consulted the map on the wall—“the Canadian River. Scour them good! Whenever you find a property that looks right and the owner is willing, you let me know and I’ll send our Money Offer Person down. We’ve set up a subsidiary company to buy the parcels and then deed them over to Global. The residents do not know a hog farm is coming in until the bulldozers start constructing the waste lagoon. Later, when you’ve gained experience, when you’ve proved your value to Global Pork Rind, you can act as your own Money Offer Person, though generally we like to send a woman, mention a sum to the oldsters right on the spot. There’s an advantage to that. Another thing, don’t stay in one place, after a month or so switch to another town. And so forth. That fellow I mentioned? He picked Mobeetie, so if I were you that’s not where I’d go. He made people suspicious. He got into trouble.

“Lucille here has made up a packet of maps and brochures, county profiles for you, and there’s your corporate credit card—and you bet there’s a limit on it, Bob. We need your signature on this card. Here you go then and I’ll just wish you good luck. Report back to me by mail every week. And I don’t mean that damn e-mail. I won’t touch that. Get a post office box. Write to me at home and I’ll respond from same so your postmaster down there doesn’t see Global Pork Rind on the envelope and start putting five and five together. I’ll see that the company newsletters are sent to you in a plain brown wrapper. Can’t be too careful. Use a pay phone if there is an emergency.”

“Yes sir.”

“And remember, the thing that’s
really
important is that—that we—that we do what we do.”

Bob left with the feeling that Ribeye Cluke was somehow deceiving him.

That night he took his uncle Tam to a celebratory dinner at a famous Inuit-Japanese-Irish steak house where they poured melted Jersey butter from quart pitchers, where the baked potatoes, decorated with tiny umbrellas, were the size of footballs and the steaks so thick they could only be cut with samurai swords. His uncle winced at the menu prices, then overpraised the food, a sure sign he was homesick for Chickee’s place down the block from his shop where he could enjoy a plate of fried gizzards or catfish hot pot. But it seemed his thoughts had gone in a different direction, for out on the sidewalk he belched and said, “I’ve been thinking of getting into vegetables. Becoming a vegetarian. Meat’s too damn expensive. Oh. Wait a minute. Before I forget. Wayne sent you something. And there’s a little thing from me.” His uncle thrust two flat parcels at Bob. “Don’t open them until you get there,” he said.

“Bromo! I didn’t even know you were in touch with him anymore.”

“Yeah. I am. We are. Whatever.”

A
t the time Bob’s parents had dropped him off on the doorstep, Uncle Tam had had a roommate, Wayne Redpoll, with glary eyes and a rubbery mug, his features arranged around a nose so beaked that it made his eyes unmemorable. His brown hair was crinkled and violent, springing with energy. In the mornings before ten o’clock when the shop opened, he lounged around without a shirt doing crossword puzzles, tapping the pencil against his discolored teeth. His chest was strange, the nipples almost under his armpits. He was not good at the puzzles, too impatient for them, and after a few minutes would go his own way, filling in the blanks with any old word, right or wrong. Bob disliked him mildly and it was partly to vanquish him at crosswords that he began to study
The Child’s Illustrated Dictionary
which Uncle Tam had fished out of a box and handed to him, saying, “Happy congratulations on this great Wednesday morning.” By the time he was twelve he could do the Tuesday
New York Times
puzzle with a pen in less than twenty minutes, but Thursday and Friday took many hours with pencil as the clues were sly and presumed knowledge of cultural events in the dim past. All kinds of words streamed through his mind—ocelot, strabismus, plat du jour, archipelago, bemusement, vapor, mesa, sitar, boutique. Wayne tried to counter Bob’s skill by dredging up odd crossword information and explaining it to him as though that were the point of the puzzles: that crosswords had been invented in 1913 by a Liverpool newspaperman, that in 1924 they became a national craze. He generally pooh-poohed the
New York Times
puzzles, which, he said, were child’s play—a meaningful look at Bob—compared to the evil puzzles of the British, particularly those with cryptic clues constructed by the old masters, Torquemada, Ximenes and Azed. But this persiflage did him no good. He did not have the knack and Bob did.

Wayne Redpoll had come by the nickname “Bromo” after a night of heavy drinking not long after Bob Dollar arrived on the doorstep. He moaned with a hangover, drank black coffee to restore balance, said, “Goddamn, I’m going for a walk to clear my head,” ended at Chickee’s place down the street where he ordered a Bromo-Seltzer to settle his queasy gut. He swallowed the gassy mixture and within seconds puked on the counter.

He had a habit of holding his words behind his teeth, only letting them escape through the narrowest possible opening of his jaws, which gave his conversation a constricted sibilance. He had many dislikes. He hated the “drink milk” campaign that showed celebrities holding empty glasses of milk, their upper lips white with the stuff as though they drank like tapirs. Hijackers aside, he loathed flying, especially the attendants’ merry commands to pull down the window shades so other passengers could watch grade-Z American movies. He refused to lower his shade, saying that the only pleasure in flying was the chance to look at the landscape from thirty-five thousand feet. Once he had been put off the plane in Kansas City for daring to argue about it. Tam had driven hundreds of miles to pick him up and listened all the way back to Bromo’s rant about the horrible streets he had walked through while waiting. Phrases offered to the grief-stricken, such as “time heals all wounds” and “the day will come when you reach closure” irritated him, and there were times when he sat silent, seeming half-buried in some sediment of sorrow.

“Closure? When someone beloved dies there is no ‘closure.’”

He disliked television programs featuring tornado chasers squealing “Big one! Big one!” and despised the rat-infested warrens of the Internet, riddled with misinformation and chicanery. He did not like old foreign movies where, when people parted, one stood in the middle of the road and waved. He thought people with cell phones should be immolated along with those who overcooked pasta. Calendars, especially the scenic types with their glowing views of a world without telephone lines, rusting cars or burger stands, enraged him, but he despised the kittens, motorcycles, famous women and jazz musicians of the special-interest calendars as well.

“Why not photographs of feral cats? Why not diseases?” he said furiously. Wal-Mart trucks on the highway received his curses and perfumed women in elevators invited his acid comment that they smelled of animal musk glands. For years he had been writing an essay entitled “This Land Is NOT Your Land.”

Even though they did not get along, Bromo had opened a charge account for Bob at the local bookshop where he was allowed to buy one book every two weeks. Bob’s longing for the books had overcome his dislike of any obligation to Bromo.

When donation boxes came to the shop’s doorstep he offered scathing criticism of the contents. Once a strange garment arrived in a box stamped
OUTDOOR GRILL DELUXE
. It was an enormous vest made of an unidentified fur, coarse, long and brownish grey. It smelled of old smoke and mothballs.

“A beast!” cried Bromo in mock horror, backing away from it. “Good God, that’s something from the sixties, some mountain commune garment. Feel in the pockets, Tam, see if there’s any drugs.”

The pockets were empty. Bromo disliked the vest, which reminded him of paisley skirts, peace signs, girls doctoring their children with coltsfoot and yarrow; he was particularly irked at being unable to identify the fur. At last he could stand it no longer, wrapped the vest up, took it to the Denver Natural History Museum.

“Pass the macaroni, Bob,” said Uncle Tam that evening. Then, to Bromo, “Aren’t you going to tell us what they said at the museum?”

“You really want to know?”

“Of course I want to know. It’s a very unusual fur.”

Bromo snorted. “You can say that again. It’s also highly illegal. It is grizzly bear fur.”

“Oh no,” said Uncle Tam who was an ardent environmentalist with lifetime subscriptions to
Audubon, High Country News, Mother Nature, Wildlife of the Rockies
and
Colorado Wildlife
.

There followed a long discussion—argument—about what to do with “the Beast,” as Bromo persisted in calling it. In the end it got a spotlighted solo place on a table with a sign reading
UNIQUE BEAR-SKIN VEST
and a price tag of $200.

The two men were housemates and business partners and, Bob wondered a few years later, if perhaps not something more, for there was in their relationship an odd intimacy that went beyond household or business matters. Yet he had never seen any affectionate glances or touching between them. Each man had his own bedroom at opposite ends of the upstairs hall. But neither did they ever bring women to the house. It was a poor bachelor establishment (though tidy and well-dusted), for the partners made very little money. In the end Bob decided that the sexual gears of both men (and perhaps his own) were engaged in neutral, except for one peculiar and inexplicable memory of Bromo Redpoll in Santa Fe sitting on the hotel shoeshine throne for the third time in one day, an expression on his face that nine-year-old Bob could only characterize as “adult,” while a Mexican boy snapped his rag over a glossy wingtip. When Bob was older he grasped the sexual content of that expression and he had a word for it—concupiscence—for he had seen it on his own face, though not in longing for a shoeshine boy, but for the sluts of Front Range High, as distant to him as calendar photographs. He imagined himself with a sultry, curly-headed, dimpled girl, but it had not worked out that way. Bob was not tall but by some stroke of genetic luck he was well-proportioned with smooth musculature, a hard little ass and boxy shoulders. As Bob matured, the unbidden thought had come to Tam that the boy was, as Wayne might say, “a casserole.”

There were no dimpled girls with curly hair at Front Range High and in his junior year he had been picked out by a big, unclean girl with a muddy complexion, Marisa Berdstraw, who wore lipstick of a dark red color that made her teeth glow beaver yellow. She had quickly inveigled him into a sexual servitude with all the declarations and trappings of professed love but none of the reality. This meant going steady, studying together, a Friday or Saturday night movie, a sex grapple on Sunday mornings when her parents, both with mottled, rough faces, were at church. He did what she said and she had a pattern of events and behavior worked out in her mind. She would call up in the evening.

“What ya doin?”

“Studying for a social studies test.”

“I got a test too. In Diagonals. But I’m not studyin for it. It’s more like a quiz.”

Diagonals was an experimental course that darted tangentially from subject to subject as classroom discussion ranged. It had started off as a geology unit, veered to Esperanto, slid to the court of Louis XVI, on to the Whiskey Rebellion, the Oklahoma land rush, then to fractals, to oil tanker construction and, most recently, to mathematical calculation with an abacus.

“Only three more days till Sunday,” she said archly.

“Yeah.”

“Are you glad?”

“Glad about what? That there’s three more days?”

“That it’s
only
three more days.”

“Sure.”

But he wasn’t that glad. The encounters in her gritty sheets, awash in her strong body odors, left him restless and disappointed. He wanted a few things to be different. But Marisa did have a hearty laugh and a certain sense of humor, though based on pain and accident. He had only once brought her to the apartment. She made it clear that she thought the apartment a cramped hole and Uncle Tam something of an idiot, nice but quite dumb.

“He’s vague, you know? Not with it, is he?”

It was neither sorrow nor relief that he felt when she told him they had to break up.

“I’m not going with you anymore,” she said. “There’s another guy.”

Soon enough he learned the other guy was Kevin Alk, a nearsighted math freak with an acned face and greasy hair that held the tracks of his comb.

“Good luck,” he said politely, but privately his thought was that Marisa and Kevin Alk deserved each other. As for himself, Marisa’s interest in him and then her lack of interest pointed up how unimportant he was to her. Only Uncle Tam counted some value in him, but what that value was Bob didn’t know. Nothing more than kinship he supposed and maybe a sense of obligation to his lost sister.

The apartment had a particular smell, an effluvium that came up from the shop below—dust-choked carving, musty upholstery, the bitter out-gas of celluloid and Bakelite, the maritime odor of ancient fish glue. The stairway up from the shop was narrow and crooked, the walls papered with some odd 1940s pattern of yellow trellis hung with red teapots. Upstairs, at the midpoint of the hall’s length, hung engravings and pictures that had come in with loads of junk and taken Uncle Tam’s fancy. One showed fifty great rivers of the earth arranged as dangling strings and graded as to length, and the opposing corner illustrated a crush of mountain peaks, lined up from the smallest to the greatest, giving the impression of a fabulous and terrific range that existed nowhere in reality. Yet for years Bob believed that in some distant land hundreds of inverted ice-cream cone mountains gave way to an immeasurable plain cut by fifty rivers running parallel to each other.

“It’s not a real place,” said Bromo Redpoll. “You dunce. It’s only for the sake of comparison.”

The shop dealt in a wide variety of American junk but its specialty was plastic, and their mutual interest in resin and polymer objects joined the two men as twinned cherries on the stem. Uncle Tam could talk plastic manufacturing for hours, and had signed up for a course in chemistry the better to understand the complex processes.

There was a room in the shop—the best room—where nothing was for sale to the ordinary customer. A sign on the door said

ART PLASTIC

By Appointment Only

“One day,” Uncle Tam said, “probably not in our lifetime, but maybe in yours, Bob, people will collect plastic objects from the twentieth century as art, like now they are going after wooden grain cradles and windmill weights. This will be worth a fortune,” he said, waving grandly at the shelves and cases of Lucite bracelets, acrylic vases, Bakelite radios, polyethylene water pitchers. On floor pedestals, as if sculptures, stood plastic washing-machine agitators, black and white. The partners’ scavenging hunts ranged from outlying yard sales to periodic rakes through the shops of Antique Row on Broadway where they foraged for baby rattles, ancient billiard balls, even celluloid bibs from nuns’ old-style habits.

Within specialties there are often subsets of rarer specialties, and so it was with Bromo Redpoll and Tam Bapp. Bromo had collected a dozen phenol parasol handles with fancy metal bands. Tam sought out the British urea resin from the 1920s known as Beetleware—the forerunner of melamine. Silicone, polyurethane, epoxy were what they wanted but never would they buy anything for more than a few dollars. A side specialty was Bakelite jewelry from the 1920s. When Uncle Tam discovered, in the bottom of an old box of magazines, a Bakelite catalog from early in the century, both considered it a great find.

There were dozens of dolls and toys in the Art Plastic room but Bob preferred the Cleopatra Manicure Box to any of them, a striking red-and-black Art Deco box packed inside with plastic-handled files and emery boards and a few bottles of nail varnish dried to black powder. He pretended Cleopatra had actually owned it and the vials of dark dust were poisons.

The highlight of the week came on Sunday evenings when the
Antiques Roadshow
aired. Uncle Tam locked the shop at 4:30, even when customers stood beseechingly at the door as he hung up the Closed sign. The partners’ devotion to the program was extreme and they had evolved certain rituals. The coffee table was cleared of magazines and bills that had accumulated during the week. Their notebooks and pens were set out. The drinks, according to season and affordable ingredients, were to be made in the jazz-age silver penguin shaker—drinks containing coconut milk were esteemed, but coconut milk was expensive and it usually came down to a six-pack of Bud split between them. The food was peanut butter sandwiches, or carrot sticks and cheap cheese, or, if they were flush, buffalo wings or cardboard containers of tripe stew from Chickee’s place.