That Old Ace in the Hole
“Ace, they’re here and you can’t get rid a them. People got a right a run businesses.” Jim Skin cut a wedge from the pineapple and winked at Bob.
“Up to a point. It is a matter a what Brother Mesquite calls ‘moral geography.’ In the old days you had no hog factory farms. Maybe fifty, sixty farmers and ranchers raisin a few pigs the traditional way. Each one a them families bought local. The kids went to school local. People got together for dances and dinners, they banked local and the money enriched the region.”
“Don’t hogs on small farms stink?” asked Bob, feeling he was scoring a point.
The old man cut him down with a hard look. “Sure, but they are spread out and they are in the open air. The smell is nothin compared a closin in a massive number of animals. You drive past a herd a cattle grazin in a pasture. There’s no smell. You drive past a feedlot—it stinks. With the hog farms, we are talkin a large number a confined animals. There’s the health factor. My brother Tater lives downwind from a hog farm and he gets sick from it. The Shattles live real close and Shattle’s in the hospital. Look at Jim Skin coughin his lungs out.”
“Amen. Wagh! Wagh!” said Jim Skin.
“Headaches, sore throat, dizziness. Them hogs are pumped full a antibiotics and growth hormones. Eat that pork and it gets in you. Bacteria and viruses adapt to the antibiotics so the day is comin when if we get sick the antibiotics can’t help.”
“Hell, Ace,” said Jim Skin, “don’t think a the hogs as animals—they are ‘pork units’ like corn or wood. That’s what they told us when I worked there.” The remainder of the pineapple ring lay untouched at the side of his plate.
“Jim Skin, I despise that idea. What do your own eyes show you? Pigs are livin creatures, not corn or wood. Frankly, it turns my stomach the inhuman way corporate hogs are raised.”
“They’re just pigs, aren’t they? I mean, they are animals?” Bob ventured in a tone as though he were making a joke, ready to laugh.
Ace ignored the joke but homed in on the question. “Pigs are animals, yes, but they are also intelligent and they like fresh air and the scenery, they make nests and frolic and take good care a their babies. But these—just cooped up to breed and breed, no nice dirt or weeds, no friends. Pigs are gregarious animals but not in them damn hog bunkers. Makes me sick.” And the old man got up and went into the bathroom.
There were days when there was a big rush on and Cy was swearing his way through platters that emptied as fast as he could fill them. Bob, who had always helped Uncle Tam with household chores, couldn’t stand watching the man whirl and scrape, got up and cleared the tables, loaded the prison dishwasher.
In a quiet moment Cy got him aside. He looked at Bob. “Preciate the help. You give me a hand, you eat free.”
So Bob hustled dishes and turned the steaks on the grill, always rushing back to his chair to hear more about farm and ranch troubles, hoping for leads on landowners ready to sell out. Things got lively when Ace Crouch was on hand to rail against corporate agribusiness and hog farms, and Bob listened to his rants with guilty excitement (what if he were found out?). Charles Grapewine complained against the fates and mistakes of the ancestors and Bob hated to miss any of his impassioned remarks.
“People first come into this country after the big outfits bust up,” said Grapewine, who farmed 15,000 acres of wheat and sorghum, “and they believed that old sayin, ‘Rain follas the plow.’ Feller made that up broke a damn many hearts and backs. Rain don’t folla no plow.”
“That’s right,” said Buckskin Bill, sucking at his coffee mug.
Grapewine went on. “Work? My God, you wouldn’t believe how hard them old grandaddies worked. And most a them buckled at the knee. Think about what they had a do just a git a crop started. Had a bresh out the fields, catclaw, mesquite and the most a this was handwork, week after week. After the bresh they had a root plow and rake. Hitch up the horses to a plow that had a deep-cuttin blade would slice through them bresh roots.”
Buckskin Bill, who had done his childhood time on the farm added, “Keep sharpenin that plow blade, too.”
“That’s right, Buckskin. After you got that done you hitch the horses up to a heavy rake that would yank the roots out. Then you’d git out there with the kids and the old woman and pile the roots and bresh into big heaps, let it dry. The best part was firin the bresh pile. Then you got a level off the field with a heavy blade, smooth out the lumps and hollows. Finally you’re ready to plow and harrow. And you’d use a real heavy breakin plow that turned it over at least a foot and as big a harrow as the horses could pull.”
“Don’t forget, if you was goin a irrigate you had a make the ditches.”
“Yes. And after that, if you wasn’t dead, it was easy—plantin, irrigatin where you could, weed-pullin, cultivatin, worryin about grasshoppers, hail, drought, flood, prairie fire. People today can’t work like that. Those old boys, their whole lives was crisis. There’s never been nothin else here but ranch or plow.”
Buckskin Bill reminded them of oil, the boom-and-bust days when a ranch kid could hire on as a weevil or roustabout, work his way up to tool dresser and eventually driller, could see the world, or at least the part of it that lay over the Permian Basin, moving along from rag town to rag town with the drifters and cardsharps and whores.
Charles Grapewine preferred to skip past oil. “Today we are still in crisis. There’s counties in the panhandle where they’ve had a go back to dry farmin. We got maybe twenty-five more years on these farms and then it’s gone. Last year my alfalfa made four inches. That’s all. I’m tellin you, it’s over.”
Bob’s attentive posture attracted some notice.
“By mercy God, Grapewine, you’ll shoot your mouth off to anybody, won’t you?” asked a lean scrag Bob had only heard addressed as Francis.
“Hell, I wasn’t sayin nothin that ain’t common enough to read in the paper.”
“Well, let him read it in the paper then.” And the man picked up a copy of the Amarillo Daily and tossed it on the table in front of Bob, jostling his cup so the coffee slopped out. He stood ready for a response, grimy, limber, with long hard muscles. “You don’t know who he is. You don’t know if you’re blabbin to some government man or one of them hog scouts, do you? Or somebody holdin paper on a man in this room?”
Cy Frease had been watching from under his now-greasy hat, the pearl-grey darkened by sweat and sauce to an organic brown, the panhandle equivalent to a chef’s starched toque.
“Francis,” he said. “You want a job warshin dishes and clearin tables?”
“Rather eat hot cow shit.” The rancher glared.
“Then leave Bob alone. He’s workin part-time for me and I told him he ought a get to know folks eat here. I lose him from you talkin ugly and you will take his place.”
“I hope you don’t regret hirin him,” said the rancher, tilting his hat back. He walked to the food tables where Cy stood with a pan of hot biscuits, took one, jammed it into the whipped cream and swallowed it whole.
“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.”
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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.
11
TATER CROUCH
For 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.
Dear Sir.
I realize I have not come up with any solid prospects yet, but have been feeling my way. I have been spending quite a lot of time in the local café trying to get a line on which ranchers are having difficulties and might be ready to sell. Most of them are having difficulties, pecuniary and matrimonial (a deteriorating relationship seems just as much a reason to sell out as anything else), but they are stubborn about holding on to the land. I have a few in mind who might be amenable to parting with their acreage. My landlady, Mrs. Fronk, has been very helpful filling in the backgrounds of local people. She is garrulous to a fault but a mine of information. She told me about one fellow who was very rich a few years ago with oil income but subsequently lost his place through excessive spending and now works at the local grain elevator. But the bank seized his ranch. Do you think I should talk to local banks about foreclosed properties?
It has been difficult to catch the rhythm of the place. At first I could not tell if it was the shift of the seasons driving the agricultural community, or the market fluctuations of beef and pork, or what. Every ranch and every town has acres of exhausted machinery. I think that saving this junk is linked to the frugal German habit of holding on to things that might come in handy someday. The derelict machines strike me as private museums of past agricultural work. There are many kinds of vehicles here—gravity boxes, folding drills, feedyard scrapers, livestock haulers, grain trucks, hot oil units, lined frac trucks, acid trucks, rig workover trucks, and everyone drives silver pickups or white vans. It wouldn’t surprise me if the diverse work character of the trucks reflects the regional inclination to multiple jobs. Many people hold down two or three jobs. Specialization does not seem to be the panhandle norm.
I have become aware that it would deepen my understanding of the pork-raising industry if I could tour one of Global Pork Rind’s hog farms. There is so much talk against them here that I feel I should be able to refute their arguments but as I have never been inside one I have no basis of fact. Can you arrange such a tour for me?
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 Bul
lyer, 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.